Real-time Grill Bar Occupation: Archiving Instrument

The project explores the unregarded function of the classic Danish grill bar, currently disappearing due to processes of gentrification. Despite its unassuming appearance, the grill bar is a vital place for social interaction and coexistence on an informal basis.Its architecture, often referred to as ‘non-design’, is in fact a precise composition of spatial situations and artefacts, which have functions besides their utilitarian one; through events in real-time and depositions over time it articulates relationships, remembers and creates a sense of collective being.

The project is a two-fold spatial prosthesis linked up through 3G network: one inhabits the grill bar in Aarhus, another the exhibition. At the grill bar the prosthesis frames and measures the occupation of the grill bar.Through printed-out receipts it develops the latent relations between people, stages encounters and re-introduces the space to its users. In Milan the installation stages the occupation in real-time, offering a framed and re-composed view of this seemingly banal space through a strictly curated set of elements.Real Time Grill bar Occupation is part of the research project, ‘Architectural Probes of the Infraordinary’, conducted at the Aarhus School of Architecture.

Engaging Through Architecture:
“Real time Grill Bar Occupation wants to engage with the audience and questions the role of the architect (and architecture itself) in relation to the social dimension of the city – more specifically the seemingly banal function of the typical Danish grill bar as a vital place of social co-existence and informal interaction”.