TRANSPARENTOPAKESBUCHSTABENWANDDESIGN (TRANSPARENTOPAQUELETTERWALLDESIGN) – BIG headquarters


Architecture is also a language we read Heimo Zobernig

Artist Heimo Zobernig designed lettering that stretches along the entire inside of the façade of the 12th and 13th storeys of the BIG headquarters. Floor-to-ceiling letters, formed with dots, playfully cover the walls, windows and radiators. They give the rooms a strong, unique identity and underline the sequence of the rooms. The lettering merges with the architecture like a “word carpet”, adheres to walls and surfaces, and in so doing, almost seems to dissolve.

“In terms of meaning,” says art historian Cornelia Offergeld, “the lettering points towards the balancing act between the highest possible architectural transparency on the one hand and the materiality of the building mass on the other. By applying a written description of itself, there is a unity of content and form. So the work not only describes a paradoxical fact, but also is one; just as in our day-to-day communication, language can never be identical to the thing it designates. Heimo Zobernig probes the question of the meaning and the truth value of language – perhaps not entirely without an ironic commentary on the function of art and art producers.”