Writer and journalist, Amah-Rose Abrams: This architectural project, for me, really exemplifies her diversity as an artist. While Sophie Taeuber-Arp has this wonderful playfulness within her practice, there is also this very disciplined side to her, where she's really explored relationships of color and shape.
Curator, Anne Umland: Taeuber-Arp made this axonometric drawing for one of the rooms that she designed for the Aubette entertainment complex in Strasbourg. An axonometric plan or drawing has many different points of view incorporated into it. It's as though we were looking up at the ceiling. And you can see four columns and then two of the walls.
What we're looking at is how she decided to break up and articulate the room’s various surfaces by introducing these very dynamic gridded patterns. And metallic leaf is another way that she animated the space—the surfaces reflect light and movement.
The building itself was constructed in the 18th century. And so the contrast of when you stepped in as a visitor in 1928, when this all opened to the public must just have been astonishing. Somebody compared it later to the Sistine Chapel of modernism. Unfortunately, that modernity proved to be very unpopular with the citizens of Strasbourg, and not many years after the Aubette was launched in such a spirit of optimism and utopian hope, many of the elements were painted over.