Hannover Merzbau (1923)
Part of my attraction to the work is that it could not survive, and now only exists in relatively few murky black and white photographs that I peer into in an attempt to reconstruct it in my mind. In 1943 it was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid.
Fortunately in 1933 Wilhelm Redemann had taken three black and white photographs of the Merzbau’s main room.
Now we are living through a time of immeasurable destruction of art and artifacts in Iraq, Syria, Africa and elsewhere. The Million Image Database is a project that is in the process of capturing millions of 3D images of threatened objects throughout conflict zones in the Middle East and Africa. In addition to providing research material these scans will be used to replicate the objects in full scale using 3-D printing techniques.
