Rhythms and reflections

Life represented in architecture by the artist Andreas Horlitz.

Credit: ANDREAS HORLITZ

It is a hollow steel column, lit from inside by neon tubes. The neon light shines through cut-out horizontal bars, which climb like the asymmetric rungs of a ladder up its dramatic 25-metre length. It stands in the atrium of the 1997 Gerling building in Düsseldorf, rising through all of its six storeys. At night its beam can be seen through the building's glass walls.

As part of the German movement known as Kunst am Bau — art within architecture — which is currently enjoying a renaissance, the column was designed by the Munich-based artist Andreas Horlitz.

Horlitz is perhaps the first to apply scientific motifs to Kunst am Bau. In this case, his motif is circadian rhythms. The column's horizontal bars represent seven years in the life of Alexander Borbély, a Swiss sleep researcher who has been recording his daily activity patterns since 1982 using a monitor strapped permanently to his wrist.

Each round of the column represents 48 hours. The open bars are times of low activity — sleep. The vertical shifting of the bars represents Borbély's trips to the United States and to Japan. The column could thus be seen as a monument to Borbély's life.

But Horlitz does not see his work in personal terms. Life's fundamental rhythms, like life's fundamental building-blocks, can be generalized, he says. He turned to circadian rhythms a few years ago, when a chance meeting with a circadian scientist in Munich's fashionable Schumann's American Bar introduced him to one of science's fashionable themes. Before that, he had spent many years working with the patterns of the biotechnologist's classical sequencing gels. In these gels, DNA fragments are separated along four tracks, one for each of DNA's constituent nucleotides, to determine gene sequence, and each fragment is seen as a spot.

DNA is a well-rehearsed theme in art. But Horlitz's approach, in which the spots are typically represented as mirroring overlaid on sand-blasted glass, has originality in that it plays on ideas of self-image. Horlitz is intrigued by the fact that individual variations in the human genome are so small, and sees his mirrored representations of a single sample of DNA as being universal. In his work, the mirroring reflects back the viewer's face while at the same time depicting a different type of self-portrait.

Horlitz does not accept commissions from biotechnology companies, which would use his ideas decoratively to represent their products. He wants his work — the representation of life at its most fundamental levels — to be part of the physical structures within which ordinary life is played out. Panels of his part-mirrored, translucent 'DNA' glass have been incorporated into the internal walls of a commercial building — Uniplan International — in Kerpen. Gerling is an insurance company.