Nissen Wentzlaff Architekten, Ensemble 4, 2016. Daniel Wentzlaff, Michael Muellen, Erica Ubbiali, Daniel García Moreno. Installation view at Palazzo Mora, 2016.

Ensemble 4
In recent years, Nissen Wentzlaff Architekten have been commissioned to design versatile work environments for large numbers of people. Like in a small city, the buildings are organised as three-dimensional landscapes, offering a multitude of places for transitions, encounters, and retreat.
In the early project phases, abstract models lead to spaces, proportions, and relations. Sometimes these objects have a direct correspondence to scale and brief, often they develop their own life in the pursuit of inherent order and spatial fluidity.
Ensemble 4 finds its position among these artefacts and manifesto.
It is a sculpture, a model, a building. It is the representation of a concept that goes beyond the time and the space where is positioned. It is not a statement about the surrounding space; it is not a standalone architecture imposing itself. It does not exist. It is a most intimate thought, an inner space, private.
At first glance, only attractive endearing proportions, in entity and formation, are seen.
The space, created by an overlay of grids without hierarchy between horizontal and vertical planes, rigidity holds the parts together. Some elements are missing, creating internal expansions and contractions.
The inner liquid space is retained by the rigid grid. One is there to the existence of the other.
Space changes, intersects, opposes, rotates. The eye sees and recognises an ordered set, ready to host the variety of spaces inside it for many users and as many observers may imagine.