The installation now is here was part of the group exhibition How Soon Is Now, for which twelve Berlin-based studios of architects, designers and engineers reinterpreted the seminal exhibition This Is Tomorrow, fifty-eight years after it had opened in London’s Whitechapel Gallery. Each participant chose to respond to one of the original contributions to the 1956 show. Sauerbruch Hutton were taken with the work of Group 2 (Richard Hamilton, John McHale, John Voelcker).

Being alive is an experience, and without perception there is no being. But in times of sensory overload, not all perception results in a clear sense of existence. Sauerbruch Hutton extended John McHale’s mission to ‘underline the discrepancy between physical fact and perception of this fact’, differentiating between being and being here. Architecture has the capacity to root one’s presence in the present. The only way for architecture to be alive is in the creation of spaces that envelop and reunite us with our own existence.