Medium Total, 1970-1973
GÜNTHER DOMENIG/ EILFRIED HUTH
© Photo: Eilfried Huth, 2022
In “Medium Total”, Domenig and Huth picked up on another trend within the architectural discourse of the time but pushed it to the extreme. The Medium Total is a completely self-contained system that surrounds the suprahominids, the new form of man. The slimy yellow
mass replaces built structures and is permeated by an “immaterial network of electronic system automation” that can react to everything. Gradually, the suprahominids could even colonize the Moon and Mars. It was a response to a question that remains urgent today: what will happen when our natural resources are exhausted? “Medium Total” and subsequently “Floraskin” are among the few purely theoretical architectural projects by Domenig and Huth. “Medium Total” is pure function, but without concrete form. It symbolizes a biomorphic, autonomous structure, crisscrossed by sensory channels and technical infrastructure in the style of works by the artist Walter Pichler in the 1960s.
It is the architects’ most artificial work, also in terms of the degree of abstraction, and at the same time a utopian construct in an effort to eliminate the boundaries between art and society.
“Medium Total” is, against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and resulting protests, an attempt to harmonize the relationship between man and nature.