Ben Willikens

Auditorium: Das All, 1990

Willikens’s compositional and formal analyses of the spatial lines in Leonardo’s Milan Last Supper and Raphael’s School of Athens lead to his tripartite murals for the Daimler auditorium in Möhringen, Stuttgart, which are 14 respectively 20 meters long. Der Raum des Erfinders [The inventor’s room] transforms Leonardo’s frugal concept of space into a modernist ‘thinking space’ for an inventor, of the kind familiar to Baden-Württemberg in the figure of Swabian scholars from Kepler to Daimler. But then the mural called Die Dynamik der Idee [The dynamic of the idea] expands real space visually into a staggered spatial quality, flooded with light and graded symmetrically into an open distance. Das All [The universe], with its upward-striving cubes and cuboids, is in the tradition of Baroque ceiling painting. On the walls, architectural motifs from various centuries are synthesized to create a ‘filled vacuum’. Users of this auditorium at the Daimler site Stuttgart-Möhringen are offered a space for the free exchange of thought, effectively any ideology removed, rooted in Western culture and yet at the same time rising above it in a visionary fashion.