About Design Lab

In addition to its offerings as a café/bar, IF DOGS RUN FREE is a place where people have access to new ideas in art and design outside the traditional context of a gallery. The ceiling plane is reserved for artists, designers, and students of art and design to create site specific installations.

Inner Space/The Interior is a yearly course taught in the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts / dieAngewandte. The course is taught by Chieh-shu Tzou and Gregorio Lubroth, two of the co-owners of IF DOGS RUN FREE and the founders of Tzou Lubroth Architekten. The course allows art and architecture students to test atmospheric experiments as built installations using the space at Dogs as their design laboratory. The students are charged with creating a spatial intervention that remains in place for an entire year in a space that is open to the street and caters to a particular informality of urban life. This gives them a unique opportunity not only to test their ideas as a resolution of a collective design process but also as an actual public artifact in constant interaction with a transient body of people that populate the space itself or interface with its presence from the street.

As such, Dogs will undergo a revolving transformation every summer as students recalibrate the atmosphere to realize their concepts.

Current ceiling installation

Unexpected Guest

September 2024
Anzhelika Chernytska, John Franz Clayson, Anna Okhrimenko, Tam-Anh Nguyen
Supported by: Paul Hoffmann

The design for “Unexpected Guest” was modeled on an understanding of the bar as a site of tension, often fluctuating between moments of comfort and discomfort. The mechanism highlights the dynamics characteristic of a night out, incorporating the anticipatory journey to the destination and the familiar loss of individual control, toward a collective subconscious.

The shrouded objects draw inspiration from architectural reliefs of the surrounding building facades along the Gumpendorfer Straße. When the motors are activated, these familiar figures revisit bargoers, pressing themselves into the membrane of the fabric datum. A constellation of shadows descend onto the room, filling it with uncanny associations.

As night stretches on, the architecture protrudes from the ceiling, breaking the threshold, as it attempts to relate to the space. Each motor is placed across designated zones, corresponding to the emergent paths and corridors frequently visited throughout the night by guests. The spatial, material and atmospheric layering mirror the dynamism and ephemeral qualities of the interactions occurring above and below the surface.