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FACIEM No. 8, Sears Tower
von Claesson Koivisto Rune,
Stockholm

www.claessonkoivistorune.se

“Architecture is not art and art is not architecture. Yet it is pos-

sible to find art in architecture and architecture in art,” say the

architects Mårten Claesson, Eero Koivisto and Ola Rune from
Stockholm. With their twelve-part graphic series FACIEM, they

now work exactly at this interface of art and architecture. They

themselves describe the work as a “search for the essence of the

grid” and refer to the connection between the art of minimalism

and modern architecture. As a starting point for their project,

the three architects chose twelve famous 20th-century skyscrap-

ers - including the United Nations Secretariat Building in New

York by Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer from 1951, the Sears

Tower in Chicago, completed in 1974 by Skidmore, Owings and

Merrill, as well as Dominique Perrault’s new building for the

National Library of France in Paris dating from 1996.

In a second step, the selected buildings were reduced to their

façades respectively to façade details and graphically repro-

duced. Each image consists of hundreds of detailed layers,

which were created, joined and superimposed in Adobe

Photoshop. Three employees were occupied with this task for

one year. In the process, details were repeatedly modified, ele-

ments were removed or added - such as curtains, shading ele-

ments or reflections. “We didn't have any drawings of the origi-

nal high-rises, we just took over the proportions and added new

things to them,” Claesson, Koivisto and Rune explain the work-
ing process.

During the Designart Festival in Tokyo at the end of October, the

signed and framed series was publicly exhibited for the first

time. In this AIT issue, we present three of the twelve works.