The maquette that Campbell is working from is a giant storage unit simulacrum, where a series of boxes come to life with their uses, which are meant to be flexible but still rational.
Campbell’s house, entitled “0-100” in reference to both the myriad applications of measurements and the extremes of emotional and energetic commitment, draws inspirations from poetic sources. Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Sherril Jaffe’s Scars Make Your Body More Interesting, Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and The Cure’s Wild Mood Swings are credited as her compass-makers.
Conceived as a large open space where interior and exterior boundaries are blurred; doors open into beds, vegetation enters and exists through openings – and where the hard perfections of exact measurements; a wall of tools, a table that measures everything; collapse into a coterie of beds where softness reigns supreme: this no-tech house glorifies sensuality and all that is handmade. It also offers the promise of companionship – even “dinner parties with sleepovers for 40 friends”. Minimalist but very inviting, not a free-love throwback but a futuristic contrapposto to digital nativism, Das Haus by Louise Campbell is a visionary oasis of body-conscious pragmatism-meets-pleasure.
Das Haus will be erected in the middle of Pure Village in Hall 2.2 at imm Cologne in January 2014.
