Warburg Models, Warburg-Haus, Hamburg
Warburg Models: Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge at the Warburg-Haus, Hamburg is the second exhibition in a sequence of three editions, beginning with Warburg Models at Blaker, Guttormgaards Arkiv, outside Oslo in May 2021 and ending with Warburg Models: Institutes and Archives, at the Architectural Association, London (18 January– 7 March 2024).
Each model in the exhibition presents an architectural project that was seminal for the intellectual development of Aby Warburg himself, for the individuals who curated his legacy (particularly Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing), and for the conceptualisation of Warburg’s famous library. The models are constructed at 1:75 scale and perform as monochrome sculptures suggesting the centrality of colour to the systems of orientation and organization that were developed for the library. Fulfilling Warburg’s desire to create a library in which individual books could be relocated into differing constellations depending on changing lines of research interest, Saxl and Bing adopted a system of categories, identified by single letters, matched by fourteen colours spread across the palette from burnt umber to near white and from sangria to aquamarine. In their flexible cataloguing system each volume in the Warburg collection, regardless of provenance, carried colour strips on its spine, allowing its potential allocation to a complex series of thematic constellations. The Warburg Models each take one of these colours as a datum, producing hyper-detailed descriptions, from building structure and architectural detail to chairs and book lamps, in various materials sprayed with a single hue.
Staged in the hallway and in the iconic Lese- und Vortragssaal at the Warburg-Haus, the models are displayed on plinths inspired by Warburg and Saxl’s exhibition designs. Cloth-covered panels hang within the curved wall of bookshelves that surrounds the elliptical reading room, showing archival material pertaining to this Warburgian architecture, a reinscription of the system originally used to display Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne.
Warburg Models: Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge is the result of an AHO Architectural graduate seminar run during 2020 and 2021, taught by Tim Anstey and Mari Lending.
