Check out this crazy project we found headed by Armin Blasbichler with 21 students from the School of Design and Crafts at the University of Innsbruck. The task challenged the students (known as Blasbichlers Twentyone) to analyze a local bank and exploit the bank’s weaknesses by planning a robbery. According to Blasbichler, planning this robbery builds upon key aspects of an architectural mind such as the ability to constantly re-imagine and re-think. In a broader scope, the project questions the value of this kind of immaterial architecture to see whether “architecture itself of any monetary value.”
In an interview from We Make Money Not Art more about the project is revealed.
In an interview with We Make Money Not Art, Blasbichler explained that ,”Architecture is much more than designing a building, it’s about the making of the imagination. In this sense architecture is more related to the arts and the financial sector than one might think. Banking and architecture are of a kin.”
The project was cleared by the University under certain restrictions, yet we love the mastermind’s response to worried architecture students on the possibility of doing something illegal, “Any time you put to the test your own imagination of things with the prevailing parameters of the real, things become potentially illegal. Architecture is always illegal.”