Underground – The Spectacle of the Invisible exhibition

The Design Museum in Zurich presents an exhibition focusing on underground spaces: underground stations, big tunnels, underground cinemas and nightclubs: artificial spaces which are "invisible" on the surface where we spend many hours of our lives.
The exhibition looks at the reasons for building underground: security, necessity, longer-lasting constructions, but also "places of utopia and freedom", as they are seen in "underground" and independent culture.
The exhibition naturally has a special focus on the design of underground spaces, which may be very different from one another but all share the absence of a façade, of an external appearance. This is the reason for the great importance of graphic supports that make "the invisible" visible. One prestigious example is the London Underground map, which while it does not accurately represent the geographic position of places or the distances between them, offered great benefits right away, and turned out to be so practical and easy to use that it influenced the graphics used to represent public transport networks in other cities and became an icon of the city of London.

(Agnese Bifulco)

Title: Underground – The Spectacle of the Invisible
Dates: 4 July to 28 September 2014
Location: Museum of Design, Zurich, Switzerland
Images courtesy of Museum of Design Zurich

www.museum-gestaltung.ch

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