Elisa Caldarola (2022), “Katharina Grosse: It Wasn’t Us”, in Bloomsbury Contemporary Aesthetics, edited by Darren Hudson Hick, London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming.

Katharina Grosse’s It Wasn’t Us was on show at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin, between 14 June, 2020 and 10 January 2021. In the main hall of this nineteenth century train station, now a museum, stood massive, abstractly sculpted, kaleidoscopically painted Styrofoam blocks; parts of the main hall floor, of the outdoor space behind the building, and of the façade of the museum’s extension were also painted kaleidoscopically. Here I shall examine three aspects of this work: its relationship with pictorial, sculptural and architectural works; its links with the Hamburger Bahnhof building; and its interactive character.

Katharina Grosse, It Wasn’t Us, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2020-2021)

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Elisa Caldarola (2021), “Architecture and sites: a lesson from the categorization of artworks”, Croatian Journal of Philosophy, forthcoming.

Several contemporary architects have designed architectural objects that are closely linked to their particular sites. An in-depth study of the relevant relationship holding between those objects and their sites is, however, missing. This paper addresses the issue, arguing that those architectural objects are akin to works of site-specific art. In section (1), I introduce the topic of the paper. In section (2), I critically analyse the debate on the categorisation of artworks as site-specific. In section (3), I apply to architecture the lesson learned from the analysis of the art debate.

Snøhetta, Oslo Opera House (2008)