Search results for ""author axel"
Edition Axel Menges The New Europe 1933–1945: German Thought Patterns About Europe
The term Europe has not always been understood in the same way. Depending on the period and influenced by the dominant interpreting elites at the time, it was always different features that were emphasised, "new" traditions that were discovered and created, and different values -- specific to the period -- that were claimed as European. Europe is a construct. That is as true today as in the period before 1945. This monograph focuses on 'Sachbücher' (non-fiction books), travelogues and literary-political writings by eight authors who played a key role in the discourse on Europe in the Third Reich and also partly in the early German Federal Republic. One of them is Walter Kiaulehn. In World War II, in the periodical Signal, Kiaulehn draws up a European family tree of a somewhat different, totalitarian kind -- naturally excluding semi-Asiatic Russia as well as England, a refugee from Europe. England has "swum off" in the direction of the USA. For Ernst Wilhelm Eschmann, Great Britain and France belong to the "margins of Europe" anyway, while the central powers, Germany and Italy, constitute the actual core of the continent. Europe evolves from the centre, and it is characteristically medial, balanced, mediating between tradition and progress. It is the others who are radical and have no appreciation for the middle course: the Americans with their skyscraper fantasies and the Bolsheviks with their anti-cultural tabula-rasa mentality. The New Europe", on the other hand, is the continent where in accordance with a golden mean that has developed historically, a moderate Modernism takes shape. An instance of this is the New Bari, the "favourite city of Fascism" that Gustav R. Hocke visits in 1937 and in which, instead of giant high-rises, he encounters much smaller, six-storey buildings along the new waterfront promenade. The term The New Europe became generally accepted in Germany during the 1930s, and by the beginning of World War II it was an integral part of the German discourse on Europe. Last but not least, this book would like to encourage the reader to critically question the provisionally last 'great narrative' of the Occident -- the narrative according to which Europe evolved from liberal humanist traditions and, based on democratic values, gradually came to have its present form in several intermediate stages beginning in classical antiquity.
£26.91
Edition Axel Menges New Military Museums
Museum architecture has blossomed over the past few decades. Art museums lead the way in terms of new buildings by superstar architects such as Frank Gehry, Herzog and de Meuron, Jean Nouvel, and Renzo Piano, among many more. Those facilities have received public and professional recognition through media attention and design awards. But other museum typologies exist, one such being for buildings that showcase military history and artifacts. All too often, one thinks of these as unsophisticated in their design and amateurish or antiquated in their exhibitions. Nowadays, nothingcan be further from the truth. This volume examines more than thirty of them internationally that were constructed over the past two decades and more. The museums are featured in individual entries and lavish color photography. Some were designed by internationally renowned architects such as Norman Foster, Daniel Libeskind, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, and Robert A.M. Stern, but many more are the products of creative, accomplished designers. Beyond the architecture of these museums, exhibition and installation designs by noted specialist firms such as Ralph Appelbaum Associates, Koosmann.dejong, and Gallagher & Associates, among others, have raised the bar in terms of immersive experiences for their visitors. New military museums presented within the book are examined within the context of the history of war memorials and military museums, the latter being a less well researched subject. In the end, military museums relate back to antique sculptural commemorationsof victorious campaigns and martial leaders, collections and displays of war trophies, and the search to find useful architectural memorials, the latter especially so after the World Wars of the twentieth century. Architectural historian John Zukowsky has an earned doctorate from Binghamton University. While curator of architecture for The Art Institute of Chicago (19782004), he organized a number of award-winning exhibitions accompanied by major books. After that, he held executive positions within military-related museums such as the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum and the Pritzker Military Museum and Library. Since 2012 he has authored several books about architecture and design, including Why on Earth Would Anyone Build That (2015), Building Chicago: The Architectural Masterworks (2016), and Architecture Inside Out: Understanding How Buildings Work (2018).
£32.31
Edition Axel Menges Otto Ernst Schweizer, Kollegienebaude II, Universitat Freiburg
Text in English & German. With the Kollegiengebäude II (college building II) of the University of Freiburg dedicated in 1961 the architect Otto Ernst Schweizer had achieved a masterpiece. Being built in the modern design idiom, it nevertheless took Freiburg's tradition into account and gave a new quality of life to the university and the urban development of the inner city quarters. On the whole it was a significant stimulus to university construction. Thanks to the neutral expression of the building, its compact overall for m and its "elastic structural system" (there is maximum flexibility in room layout without touching the bearing skeleton), and together with the laconically simple floor plan it became a prototype solution for smooth functioning. It is an open architecture, free of any suffocating pathos, with wide open spaces, human scale in size and proportions and in ideal accordance with academic freedom for research, instruction and learning. Schweizer, born in 1890 and deceased in 1965, professor of urban construction at the Technical University of Karlsruhe is one of the ground-breaking architects of the 20th century. In the late 1920s he gained international renognition and relevance with his buildings in Nuremburg, among them the stadium grounds and the Milchhof, as well as the Prater-Stadion in Vienna. During the 1930s, when he was not allowed to build, he studied fundamental questions of architecture and urbanism. After the Second World War he used his insights to make recommendations for the reconstruction of destroyed cities like Gießen, Karlsruhe, Mannheim or Stuttgart. In his last project, the Kollegiengebäude II we find the quintessence of a rich creative life, convincingly demonstrating Schweizer's high demands on architectural form and function. Immo Boyken is professor emeritus of building history and theory of architecture in Konstanz. His special interest is the architecture of the late 19th and the 20th century. He was a principal contributor to the monograph on Egon Eiermann, author ed the monograph on Otto Ernst Schweizer and lately wrote about Heinz Tesar's church in the Donau City in Vienna (Opus 42), the chancellery of the German embassy in Washington by Egon Eiermann (Opus 54), the Milchhof in Nuremburg by Otto Ernst Schweizer (Opus 59), the Prater-Stadion in Vienna (Opus 75) also by Schweizer, and the German Pavilions at the World Exhibition 1958 in Brussels by Sep Ruf and Egon Eiermann (Opus 62).
£26.10
Edition Axel Menges Gunter Rambow Posters: Plakate / Posters
Text in English and German. Gunter Rambow (b.1938) is one of the most prominent designers in the area of visual communication and cultural advertising. He produced numerous photo books and outstanding posters at the Rambow & Lienemeyer graphic design studio (1961-86), and is now carrying on his work at the Rambow, van de Sand studio. Particularly with his posters for the Schauspiel Frankfurt under the direction of Peter Palitzsch, Rambow succeeded in creating symbols for theatre's claim to political involvement and effectively introducing them into the urban environment. From 1974 to 2003 Gunter Rambow taught at the Universität Kassel and the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe as a professor of visual communication. In 2007, the Museum für Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt is following the example of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Shanghai Art Museum and many other institutions and dedicating a major solo exhibition to his work. The show is an encounter between more than one hundred posters by Gunter Rambow -- dating from 1962 to the present -- and Richard Meier's museum architecture. The publication appearing in conjunction with this exhibition documents the dialogue between Rambow's poster art and Meier's museum building. Authors Eva Linhart, Anita Kühnel and Volker Fischer acquaint readers with Rambow's poster oeuvre -- far beyond the limited number on exhibit -- and his aesthetic strategies. Not only is light shed on the latter from the art-historical perspective, but a sense is conveyed of Rambow's innovative achievement in using the medium of the poster to create unmistakable corporate designs for a spectrum of widely differing institutions. The catalogue moreover provides an analytical appraisal of Rambow's ability to trigger insights about the environment and human relationships in those who view his posters.
£35.10
Axel and Ash Swept Away by Wanderlust
£22.99
Edition Axel Menges Schulz und Schulz, Propsteikirche St. Trinitatis Leipzig: Opus 83, 1.
Text in English & German. Three places mark the chequered history of the provost church of St Trinitatis Leipzig. Not far from the site of the present new building was the historic church built in 1847 that was largely destroyed in World War Two. It took almost three decades for this church finally to be replaced in 1982. At the insistence of the East-German authorities, however, this building had to be erected in a suburb. Because of its inconvenient location and also because the building had structural damage from the very beginning, the congregation decided in 2008 to take a chance on a new start in the city centre. The third church of St Trinitatis, consecrated in 2015, is the largest Catholic church to be built in East Germany since the political turnover of 1989/90. The new church is located not only in the centre of town, but at a place that could not be more prominent: facing the large complex of the Neues Rathaus. In 2009 a competition held for the new church building with the adjacent parish centre was won by the Leipzig architects Ansgar and Benedikt Schulz. Their clever use of the triangular site particularly impressed the selection committee; at the same time, with the compact body of the church on the east and the tower on the west, they created two striking urban landmarks. Between the tower and the church is the spacious courtyard, which is open on two sides towards the surrounding area, emphasising the congregations programmatic 'openness'. The complex owes its homogenous appearance to the fact that all parts of the buildings are clad with local porphyry, an igneous rock that shimmers in delicate shades of red. While outwardly the church looks quite hermetic, the interior, with an inside height of 14.5 m, surprises the visitor by its vibrant luminosity. The decisive factor here is the skylight on the east side at a height of 22 m. From a source that is invisible to the worshippers, zenith light falls on the entire back wall behind the altar. In its disposition the church interior follows the decisions of the Second Vatican Council: separation between the priests space and the congregations space is abolished, the high altar is replaced by a peoples altar, and the faithful gather of the believers in communio around the liturgical centre. In addition to his main activity as an architecture publicist Wolf-gang Jean Stock was head of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für christ-liche Kunst and its gallery in Munich for nine years. Considering his rigorous artistic attitude, instinctively reminiscent of the work of Hilla and Bernd Becher, there is a certain consistency about the fact that the photographer Stefan Müller congenially creates images of the buildings of Owald Mathias Ungers, Max Dudler, Kleihues + Kleihues or Schulz und Schulz.
£26.10
Edition Axel Menges Espace de l'Art Concret, Mouans-Sartoux: Opus 58
Text in French and English. Mouans-Sartoux, a small community near Cannes, has become a Mecca for concrete art. Since 1990 two collectors from Switzerland, Sybil Albers and the artist Gottfried Honegger, have been working to establish the Espace de l'Art Concret (EAC). Neither a museum nor a municipal gallery, this institution is located in the Château de Mouans and in two new buildings in its large park. The first of the two new buildings was a studio designed by Marc Barani from Nice for children who come here to paint and to develop their aesthetic senses. Barani began work in 1990 with the extension to the cemetery of Saint Pancrace in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. The way he located the cemetery in the local landscape and his use of original vegetable and mineral materials immediately brought him to international notice. In 2000 Albers and Honegger decided to donate their collections to the French state, on the understanding that it would finance a building to house the nearly 500 works of art. A competition was launched and was won by the Zurich architects Annette Gigon and Mike Guyer. The building, which opened its doors in 2004, stands on a steeply sloping wooded terrain. As one enters the park, one sees its yellowish-green hues through the branches of the trees. The monochrome colour unifies the five levels of the building that give no clue as to what it contains. While the outside of the building looks artificial, independent, sculptural, its interior is set up in accordance with Honegger's special instructions. He wanted the building that was to house his collection to be distinct from the official and sterile museums that are often laid out on the gallery model, passageways for contemplation, internal streets with overhead lighting. Honegger prefers an interior that is like a private home rather than a public institution. The domestic framework of the rooms must reflect a principle dear to the heart of the donors: that the works are to be lived with. Honegger takes an overall view of our material environment and emphasises that for him the distinction between fine arts and applied arts has no meaning, because "an unapplied art would have no purpose and would be bound to be insignificant and disappear".
£21.60
Edition Axel Menges Metropolis: A Cinematic Laboratory for Modern Architecture
Text in English and German. What links film and architecture? Above all it is 'Metropolis', the film that Fritz Lang made in the Babelsberg studios in 1925/26. Its extravagance created enormous financial difficulties for Ufa, the biggest German film concern, but it had a brilliant premiere in Berlin in January 1927, went on to enjoy unparalleled success world-wide -- and then came to symbolise (film) architectural design for the future. 'Metropolis', internationally renowned as a major piece of German film culture, represents film art in the Weimar Republic in an artistically unique and yet unusually popular way, but it also contains one of the first fully-formulated 20th-century city fantasies. Fritz Lang, stimulated by a journey to New York, had his architect Erich Kettelhut build a city of the future in the Babelsberg Studios outside Berlin, which, as a vision, went far beyond the real skyscraper silhouette. Luis Bunuel wrote the following about 'Metropolis' as early as 1927: Henceforth and for ever more the scenic designer has been replaced by the architect. The cinema will serve as a faithful interpreter of the architect's boldest dreams. The Tower of Babel from 'Metropolis' has been a piece of urban fantasy that has inspired architects of every colour right down to the present day. American urban visions in films of the 80s and 90s, like for instance the cult film 'Blade Runner', would be inconceivable without Lang's 'Metropolis'. Now as then the Metropolis designs are considered to be highly-developed examples of a Modernist laboratory for film and architecture. All the surviving scenic architectural designs, over 200 working, factory and set photographs as well as numerous other documents, including the film architect's hitherto unpublished memoirs and working reports had been placed at the authors' disposal. In addition, other photographs from the Cinematheque Francaise and a bundle of over 300 hitherto unpublished photographs from the estate of a German emigrant to Australia have been included.
£41.40
Edition Axel Menges Real and Fake in Architecture: Close to the Original, Far from Authenticity?
The condition of "fake" and "real" in architecture is rarely publicly discussed nor has it encountered broad journalistic or scholarly attention. This book explores the realm of truth, authenticity and fakery in architecture, providing a timely collection of analytical essays and projects. Photographers, writers and architects share their understanding and speculations about a broad range of spaces and concepts all searching for common ground between real and imagined, function and story. The authors challenge our perception of "authenticity " through the examination of built and simulated environments, architectural fiction, theatric illusions and mannerist trickery. They examine the notion that the principle of Sullivans "form follows function" contains a paradox caused by the ambiguity and complexity of architectural expression. Buildings are perceived through an individuals personal experiences while also being interpreted along broader cultural values. The works shown reveal that under scrutiny, any built environment harbors both, reveals moments of truth, deception and ambiguity all of it partially in the eye of the beholder.The diverse contributions shed light on unexpected identities in architecture inviting criticalthought about our built environment analog and digital. The goal of this publication goes beyond unmasking deception in architecture, it aims at unfolding time-lines and revealing the layerednature of people and places. The images and essays reveal our contemporary condition and let collective and individual narratives unfold, a range of truths in themselves. Expanding from the discussion about truthful materiality and tectonics, this book provides an understanding ofreal, authentic, and fake in urbanism and architecture. Anne-Catrin Schultz studied architecture inStuttgart and Florence. Following post-doctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technoloyin Boston, she worked for several years with Turnbull Griffin Haesloop and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in San Francisco. While developing her own practice, she has taught at the University of California in Berkeley, the California College of the Arts and the Academy of Arts University in San Francisco. In 2013 she joined the Department of Architecture at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston.
£53.91
Edition Axel Menges Moderne, Postmoderne und nun Barock?: Entwick- lungslinien der Architektur des 20. Jahrhunderts
"This book is an attempt at architectural criticism" that is how Robert Venturi opened the discussion on Post-Modernism in architecture in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecturea generation ago. And this was a typical beginning. Criticism of the Modern movement by architects like Le Corbusier Mies van der Rohe and to extent Frank Lloyd Wright as well that had preceded it was central to Post-Modernism. Soon the architectural historians joined in with the architects, particularly Charles Jencks in the English-speaking world and Heinrich Klotz in Germany. Here too Post-Modern-ism was the start, with three fundamental critical points about Modernism: fundamental emptiness of its architecture, its lack of relation to its surroundings and its overemphasis of functionalism against decoration. And so, even if one does not use pamphlets like Tom Wolfe's or Jencks' early work as a yardstick, the image of the buildings by what are still the best-known architects of our century is strongly overshadowed. The truth is that the International Style reflects the basic forces that architecture can express extraordinarily impressively and al-ways with decided interplay, and thus also with a pronounced unity of effect; and additionally it develops these formal values especially intensively from content. Traditionally such things are called classical. What followed this, the whole spectrum of styles from late Modernism via High-Tech and Deconstructivism to Post-Modernism is all a reaction to the unity of the International Style: either one point in terms of form or content is taken out, exaggerated and thus made into its opposite, or such a point is consciously negated. Until now this phenomenon has been known as Mannerism to art historians. What is characteristic of Baroque as the period after High Renaissance Classicism and Mannerism is less clear; in any case, entirely positive aspects of both found their way into Baroque, and undoubtedly the latter is closer to High Re-naissance Classicism in spirit than to Mannerism. Cannot similar things be seen in the last bare decade of architectural develop-ment? The foundations for this book were laid during a good year's re-search at the University of California in Berkeley. The author now holds a chair at the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg.
£28.80
Edition Axel Menges Figures: A Pictorial Journal. 1954-1971
Text in English & German. The architect is at all times also an artist. How otherwise would he be able to tame the three-dimensionality of space and subdue the urges of physics and structural mechanics with the creations of his fantasy? This creativity is however mostly restricted purely to its own field. Rob Krier is an exception. Since the beginning of his career in construction, he has always seen his love of art as a vocation -- one which he nurtures parallel to his work. Fine art should stand in dialogue with architecture and it is Krier's ambition to have iconographic themes brought into the latter, so that they might speak equally to both the occupants of a building and to bystanders, moving them to thoughtful reflection. In his Pictorial Journal 19541971, Rob Krier describes how his twin passion for fine art and architecture emerged. Born into a household of gifted artists and craftsmen, he came into contact with art and architecture as a very young boy and took his own first steps in painting and sculpture in his early years. His enthusiasm for the architecture of Rome cemented his determination to become an architect. Krier tells of his grammar-school years in Echternach and his university studies in Munich in words just as enthralling as his first taste of professional life with Oswald Mathias Ungers and Frei Otto. His autobiographical notes are accompanied by numerous sketches, drawings and sculptures, which were produced during this period and in which the author's multifaceted experiences find artistic manifestation. Born and raised in Luxembourg, Krier moved to Vienna after having studied in Munich and worked for Oswald Mathias Ungers and Frei Otto. After teaching posts in Stuttgart and Lausanne, he was a professor at the Technische Universität in Vienna from 1976 to 1998 and, in 1986, held a guest professorship at Yale University in New Haven, Mass. Krier has developed urban-design concepts for Stuttgart, Vienna, Berlin, Amiens, Montpellier, Leeds, Gothenburg, Lodz, Amsterdam, Den Haag and many other cities. Projects with which he was first able to translate his vision of a spatial concept, such as Rauchstrasse in Berlin, Breitenfurterstrasse in Vienna or Ritterstrasse with Schinkelplatz in Berlin, repeatedly found their place in international publications.
£53.10
Edition Axel Menges Martha Schwartz Partners: Landscape Art and Urbanism
Situated at the intersection of public realm, urban design and site specific art, Martha Schwartz Partners has over 35 years of experience designing and implementing installations, gardens, civic plazas, parks, institutional landscapes, corporate headquarters, master plans, and urban regeneration projects. MSP works with city leaders, planners and builders at a strategic level so as to advocate for the inclusion of the public landscape as a means to achieve environmental, economic and social sustainability. With offices in London, New York and Shanghai, the practice is engaged in projects and consultation around the globe and has to date worked on projects in over 20 countries and five continents. This monograph is the first publication to document 55 built projects and a selection of master plans by this internationally acclaimed practice.
£53.10
Edition Axel Menges Rhine Bridges
Text in English & German. Manfred Sack, in an essay about bridges: The Latin word relegere' means to connect. The assumption is that this is the basis of the word religion. The chief priest in Rome was the pontifex maximus, the highest builder of bridges between man and god, between this world and the other world'. The Germanic tribes saw the bridge in the rainbow physically before them, it was their road of light to Valhalla. For those who are disheartened, drugs are the bridge of escape into other, very illusory, worlds of experience. Tradition builds bridges from yesterday to tomorrow. There are so many bridges: music, a letter, the sounds of a radio, phone conversations, light signals, Morse signals, calls. The building of bridges is thus not only a physical process, but a spiritual and emotional event, a longing felt by the soul. No wonder that those who design and calculate bridges, who build them and therefore take risks, at least subconsciously sense some of the extrasensory significance of their sensory activity. And this is all the more true when we are talking about the bridges across the Rhine, the most important European river, which is wreathed in myths and legends and has inspired poetry and music like no other. Until the 19th century it was crossed almost exclusively by means of ferries. With the onset of industrialisation, more and more goods had to be transported increasingly rapidly. Today, over 250 bridges cross the river. They too now shape the unsurpassed diversity of the Rhine landscape. Since 1987, Riehle has photographed some 150 Rhine bridges from the river's headwaters in Switzerland to the Rhine's delta in the Netherlands. The most interesting 100 bridges are published in this book.
£64.80
Edition Axel Menges Prussian Gardens
The Prussian gardens in Berlin, Potsdam and elsewhere in Brandenburg: for the first time, texts and photographs present an overall view of all the gardens and parks created under the Hohenzollerns over a period of more than three centuries. Only the cross-genre collaborative effort of garden designers, gardeners, architects, scenographers, sculptors, painters, and creative rulers, the most prominent of whom were Frederick II and Frederick William IV, made it possible "to turn the environs of Berlin and Potsdam step by step into a garden", as Frederick William IV put it in 1840. Figures such as David Garmatter, Friedrich Christian Glume, Siméon Godeau, Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, Peter Joseph Lenné, Antoine Pesne, Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, Georg Potente, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the Sello brothers, and Antoine Watteau -- picked from a whole cornucopia of names -- indicate the spectrum of artistic forces that created the Prussian garden realm. Impatient with his royal client, who had once again cut his funding, Lenné alluded to the high standard of princely landscape art: "Your Majesty still does not understand how ingenious my idea is". The present volume is an attempt to examine the "ingeniousness of the idea" specifically inherent in the gardens of the Hohenzollerns in Prussia.
£16.90
Edition Axel Menges Wilhelm Hauff, Three Fairy Tales
Text in English & German. "Poverty is the greatest plague, wealth is the highest good", Goethe wrote in his ballad "The Treasure Seeker". Over the course of the poem, however, it becomes apparent that this is a mistaken conclusion. The search for riches, fame and power often brings with it greed, inhumanity and violence, as Wilhelm Hauff shows us in this book of fairytales. The best known of these is The Cold Heart, in which the wish for a better life leads Peter Munk the charcoal-burner to seek the help of the spirits of the Black Forest. The first spirit he encounters is the kindly glass manikin, who makes him the owner of a glassworks, but, as he never wished for the necessary understanding, he cannot give the running of his glassworks the attention it deserves. He becomes idle, fails miserably and falls victim to Hollander Michael, the evil spirit, who demands Peter's heart in return for helping him and gives him a stone in return. With a heart of stone, Peter loses all his social competence, and is filled with avarice, which, however, does not prevent him from pursuing his new profession as a businessman and money-lender. Rather, it helps him to succeed. But when he kills his wife for showing kindness to a destitute man, he finally comes to his senses, with the assistance of the glass manikin, who helps him to recover his original heart. And so everything turns out for the best. Peter Munk becomes a charcoal-burner again, and lives humbly but happily with his mother and his wife, restored to life by the glass manikin, for the rest of his days. The Cave of Steenfoll has a less happy outcome. In this story, greed becomes an obsession and even a madness that finally leads to the death of William Falcon. Having found the long-sought treasure -- a little chest full of gold pieces -- he is still not satisfied, and he dives into the sea a second time, never to emerge again. The fairytale of Said's Adventures is the opposite of the other two. The hero, a man under the protection of a good fairy, embarks on a dangerous journey. The hero encounters greed and avarice everywhere during his adventures, but they have no place in his own character. He is a skilful fighter, but always guided by compassion. Finally, he is rewarded with wealth, good fortune and contentment.
£25.20
Edition Axel Menges Castles of the Weser Renaissance
Text in English & German. In the area along the Weser, there was a great deal of building activity between the Reformation and the Thirty Years War which was helped along by economic prosperity. Little affected later by war or modernisation, high quality Renaissance castles, aristocratic estates, town halls and civic architecture have survived here in exceptional density. This facet of Central European Renaissance architecture started to be appreciated in the early 20th century. This led to the concept of the Weser Renaissance, oriented above all towards formal and regional history, and still popular today, like a kind of brand. The present volume offers a representative selection of the region's castles and palaces for the first time, dealing with both princely residences and seats of the nobility. Architecture and court culture are placed in a European context that goes beyond older approaches based on the stylistic history and shows that forms demonstrating princely prestige have qualities in common well outside the region. Michael Bischoff's introductory text provides an overview of Renaissance architecture in the Weser area. Uwe Albrecht and Julian Jachmann explain the terminology and function of princely architecture. Heiner Borggrefe analyses early Renaissance architectural ornamentation, G Ulrich Großmann covers the topic after the mid-16th century. Thomas Fusenig writes on the arts and sciences at the courts. Rolf Schönlau discusses aspects of building materials in terms of economic history. Hillert Ibbeken deals with the sandstone that is most frequently used from a geological point of view. The descriptive catalogue is by Katja Schoene and Michael Bischoff.
£31.41
Edition Axel Menges Gypsy Architecture: Houses of the Roma in Eastern Europe
The fact that there is Gypsy architecture may surprise quite a few people, for Gypsies are regarded as nomads who roam through the world and settle now here, now there, never stay long in one place, and consider everything that normal citizens find important to be an unreasonable restriction of their freedom. Nevertheless, in southeastern Europe, there exists a remarkable architecture created by Gypsies. It seems to have been created from a dream: Unreal, abstruse, and colourful, it is a composition of all the architectural styles of this world. Uninfluenced by any deeper knowledge of architectural culture, each family head chose the style, size and finishings on the basis of his own personal tastes or memories of travels, houses and things seen in other countries. The result has been the creation of bizarre and fantastic jumbles of buildings that it is hard to classify in terms of western stylistic features. Very often the houses are the result of enormous jigsaw puzzles created from an assembly of images or photographs of various different buildings, and their execution precisely follows these crazy guidelines, perhaps because they are incomprehensible to those carrying out the project. Otherwise, how could one possibly explain Indian-style roofs crowning neoclassical buildings, mansard roofs on structures of improbable style, Frenchified Chinese pagodas, heterogeneous assemblies of diverse and contrasting elements. The structures, the villas gradually soften their bizarre and fantastic imagery the closer they are built to European countries. Undoubtedly, the cultural influence of neighbouring countries already immersed in the culture and lifestyle of Europe has helped to 'contaminate' the owners and bring their dwellings, the expression of their wishes, more into line with the ruling culture. What, however, remains staggering is the quality of the execution of the complex decorations, of the architectural elements and buildings that are very often contrasting, of widely differing façades surmounted by steepling roofs of no practical use whose only function is to represent, through their lack of proportion and absolute needlessness, the financial and social power of the family. Besides pieces of sculpture that are undoubtedly ritual and symbolic and originating from Indian culture, suns with spiny rays, various forms of pinnacle, geometrical moons, zoomorphic decorations, the tops of the roofs bear metalwork inscriptions giving the date of building and the name of the family or that of the wife, symbolising a desire for display and the proclamation of ownership.
£45.86
Edition Axel Menges Energy Designs for Tomorrow: Energy Design feur Morgen
Text in English & German. The challenges facing the 21st century are staggering: rapidly increasing population, mounting social instability due to global imbalances of wealth and welfare, resource scarcity and resulting conflicts related to their exploitation and distribution, and certainly the ongoing distress of the environment as a whole. Such severe conditions, including climate change, continue to become greater in number, complexity, and clarity, even though most of them had already been introduced as areas of concern in the 1970s and 1980s. Part I of the book describes potential strategies that will play an essential role in curbing carbon emissions, reducing -- or replacing -- fossil fuel usage. To better understand the current global energy industry, the book is unique in showing energy consumption data across the globe in comparable units, and it explains how fossil fuels could be replaced by renewable energy resources. Part II explains how the necessary significant reductions in energy consumption can be achieved by alternative means at reasonable cost for power generation to be maintained. A great number of projects are described in the book as case studies that fulfil the variety of international energy codes. Part III addresses the technological possibilities for energy savings and resource-sensitive solutions related to buildings. Here, the potential of building-integrated solar systems, wind-power generation, rain-water harvesting, and the use of geothermal energy, as well as their implementation in the architecture are presented in detail. On the one hand, the book presents the background for a broader understanding of the medium-range and long-range changes in our energy landscape, and on the other it provides the basis for avenues required to enable us to design strategies based on local conditions and individual geographical locations. Over the past 20 years, Klaus Daniels and the engineers of his engineering consultancy HL Technik have published four volumes of seminal work related to this subject, and their work is continuously being updated. In this series, the new book is an attempt to illustrate how modern architecture needs to be adaptive to energy conditions and how design and technology can be blended successfully.
£62.10
Edition Axel Menges Dear Diary / Liebes Tagebuch
Text in English and German. The narrowest building in Cologne is the office of the advertising agency rendel & spitz. Once a year, during the 'Passagen', the offsite- programme of the international furniture fair in Cologne, the office is turned into an exhibition space: It serves as a stage for an installation of a chosen designer. In 2005 there was no exhibition. The accompanying book to the exhibition that never took place contained only empty pages. Just as in previous years, the book was sent out to designers, architects, artists, journalists and friends. One of the recipients then asked rendel & spitz whether he was supposed to fill the empty pages and sent the book back. An idea was born: each recipient was asked to lend his (used) book for the 2006 exhibition 'Dear Diary / Liebes Tagebuch'. The result is a collection of private notes, sketches, photographs, collages, and objects. The accompanying book shows a synopsis of the contributions, which in some cases are very personal. In addition to the book, there is a CD-ROM with the complete contents of each book that was contributed.
£12.90
Edition Axel Menges Expanding the Gap / Das Weite Suchen
Text in English and German. As in 2001, during the 2002 Cologne International Furniture Fair three internationally known designers squeezed themselves into the town's best known building between buildings. There they presented their ideas on the subject of 'expanding the gap'. From Tokyo came the idea of expanding the exhibition space with an installation to make it snow. Designer Tokujin Yoshioka had 18 kilos of down whirled up by fans at the end of the room to create an everlasting blizzard, and the largest snowball of the year. -- In order to burst through the austere geometry of the exhibition building, projections from lava lamps from the London-based designer Ross Lovegrove covered the greater part of the interior. The coloured, gently moving bubbles created in these lamps by heat caused the sharp contours and hard black and white contrasts of the ceilings and walls to melt and flow. -- Greg Lynn from Los Angeles installed an over-dimensioned, organic sculpture on one of the side walls. It reached out well into the room, and so the visitors were obliged to squeeze past it and search on the other side for space.
£12.90
Edition Axel Menges Karl Friedrich Schinkel: The Architectural Work Today
This comprehensively illustrated book records and assembles material on over 150 buildings by Karl Schinkel, Germany's most important 19th century architect.
£61.20
Edition Axel Menges Ada Karmi-Melamede and Ram Karmi, Supreme Court of Israel, Jerusalem: Opus 71
Intent on realising her late husband's vision, Dorothy de Rothschild first offered to provide funding for a new building housing the Supreme Court of Israel in the 1960s. In 1983 the offer was seriously considered and accepted. Renowned architects from Israel and from all over the world entered into a two-stage competition in 1986. Ada Karmi-Melamede and Ram Karmi, siblings their own architecture practices, were asked to compete as a team. Their contribution stood out clearly against the other entries. Instead of proposing a formal and monumental scheme, the Karmis came up with a coherent site-specific building which roots itself into the land, continues the stone language of Jerusalem, and relates to its unique vibrant light. Pure geometrical volumes are arranged to form a balanced composition and complex whole. A careful equilibrium is created between the gravity of local stone-masonry walls and the immaterial play of light and shadow in the voids and volumes of the structure. The Supreme Court acts as part of a larger civic urban ensemble and forms a gateway to Government Hill offering a pedestrian walkway to the Knesset. While referred to as a single building, in reality the Supreme Court building is an ensemble applying urban principles to the interior, thus producing public spaces throughout. Half architecture, half landscape architecture, the building is deeply anchored in its site and reaches out further than its own walls. Four main functions are manifested in four distinct geometric volumes organised by two cardinal axes. These axes separate the four main program elements: the library, the judges' chambers, the courtrooms and the parking area. The allocation of the various volumes within the building allows for a sequence of in-between spaces which are used for circulation, for the penetration of natural light and for the transition between the public and private domains. Paul Goldberger stated in The New York Times in 1995 that "the sharpness of the Mediterranean architectural tradition and the dignity of law are here married with remarkable grace.
£26.10
Edition Axel Menges Johannes Peter Holzinger, Haus in Bad Nauheim: Opus 53
Text in English and German. In the summer 1978, the cover of the magazine Bauwelt showed a photograph of an unusual building. It was tersely introduced to readers as a 'private house with office in Bad Nauheim', but it was immediately obvious that this was a built manifesto. What appeared was a strictly symmetrically articulated, steeply rising façade, emanating dignity and composure. It also seemed able to manage without windows, which further enhanced its austere elegance. And then there were the strikingly slender, sharp-angled wall elements, which seemed captivatingly graceful, or even delicate and fragile -- as though folded from paper. The fact is that, long before Gilles Deleuze had cast his spell on a new generation of aesthetically ambitious architects, Johannes Peter Hölzinger was putting his folding skills into practice as a matter of course.
£21.60
Edition Axel Menges Klaus Kinold. Architectural Photographs: Photographs of Architecture
Text in English & German. The work of Klaus Kinold, born 1939 in Essen, is part of a tradition of photography, and particularly of architectural photography. Architecture was one of the most important themes even of early photography -- not least because it stood still. Initially this was an important characteristic, since exposure times were long. Thus began the affinity of photography with the documentary. Reality and representation were supposed to correspond. Quoting a statement by Roland Barthes, Kinold has referred to the still "mysterious bonus of confidence given to the documentary". At a time when digital photographic and processing techniques make all sorts of manipulation possible, the now rare quality of reliability is assigned to this attitude. It was self-evident for Kinold to explore the period whose very name included the term objectivity -- the New Objectivity (in German: Neue Sachlichkeit). The work of colleagues such as Werner Mantz, Hugo Schmölz, Arthur Köster and above all Albert Renger-Patzsch combined useful information and contemporary artistic expression. Walter Peterhans, photographer at the Bauhaus, called it the "magic of precision". At the same time, Kinold did not let himself be confused by the special effects indulged in by some modernist artists. His photographs indicate the structure of the surfaces of a building, the spatial depth and the details concealed in its shadowed sections, the proportions in which they present themselves to the user. The accuracy of observation, the precision in detail, the translation of three-dimensional objects into a convincingly construed image are among the virtues of the architectural photographer Klaus Kinold. What takes precedence in his work is not the moment at which a thing suddenly reveals its essence, a lucky coincidence, but rather the condition that is considered to be essential, set also by the right photographic standpoint. For Kinold, who owed a great deal to his teacher Egon Eiermann at the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe, including in his capacity as a photographer, logic, purity and clarity went without saying. Accordingly, predominant in his work, we find photographs of buildings by architects whom he could expect to have such qualities: classic Modernists like Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and contemporaries like Alvar Aalto, Hans Döllgast, Herman Hertzberger, Louis Kahn, Karljosef Schattner, Rudolf Schwarz, Alvaro Siza. Architectural historian Wolfgang Pehnt, born 1931, has often reaped the benefits of insights gained from Kinolds photographic art. Pehnt has published monographs about German architecture since 1900 and about Expressionist architecture, but he has also written about numerous individual uvres. He formerly taught at the Ruhruniversität Bochum.
£35.91
Edition Axel Menges Figures: A Project in St. Petersburg 2010-2012
The architect is at all times also an artist. How otherwise would he be able to tame the three-dimensionality of space and subdue the urges of physics and structural mechanics with the creations of his fantasy? This creativity is however mostly restricted purely to its own field. Rob Krier is an exception. For years, he has seen his love of art as a vocation -- one which he nurtures parallel to his work in construction. Fine art should stand in dialogue with architecture and it is Krier's ambition to have iconographic themes brought into the latter, so that they might speak equally to both the occupants of a building and to bystanders, moving them to thoughtful reflection. In his contribution to the European Embankment project in St Petersburg, Krier recently demonstrated the power of architecture and fine art to cross-fertilise. The architects in charge of the urban development of this district are Sergei Tchoban and Evgeny Gerasimov. Krier designed the façade for a 132-metres long building on the Newa riverbank one that looks across the water onto the rear façade of the Hermitage. The vibrancy of the architecture is enhanced by its sculptural ornamentation based on the Balzac theme, 'The Human Comedy'. In this regard, Krier modelled over 50 figures in white clay, as well as around 65 linear metres of reliefs. The short poems that comment on the sculptures also centre on the theme of mankind and its interrelationships in society.
£53.10
Edition Axel Menges Second Look: Hitchcock: The Birds; Edwards: The Party; Scott: Blade Runner; Ruzowitzky: Anatomy; Scott: Gladiator
Text in English & German. Like literary texts, films often tell stories on multiple levels. Ridley Scott made an ironic reference to this when he called his legendary science-fiction film Blade Runner a "700-layer cake". These buried structures are created in two ways: by elements that resonate throughout the film itself and by references to other films, texts, myths, paintings, historical events etc. that are adapted in a specific way by the director, the scriptwriter and the production team. The heroine in Hitchcock's film The Birds, for instance, is a modern Aphrodite / Venus. Just as Venus, born from the sea foam, was carried to land on a seashell, Melanie is carried across Bodega Bay in a boat that is not much bigger than Venus' vessel in Botticelli's painting. Melanie's name is another reference to Aphrodite, who was also known as Melaina, "the black one". In the fist scene of the film, in which she enters the pet shop where she later gets to know Mitch and buys the love birds, Melanie is also dressed in black. The Venus-like Melanie is felt to be a threat by others within their world, and especially by more conventional women. One of them screams at her hysterically: "I think you're evil! Evil!". This creates a particular connection between love and horror in the film. The classical Aphrodite also had a dark side -- her union with Ares produced not only Harmonia, but also Deimos and Phobos: "dread" and "fear". Detecting hidden references is only the first step in creating an analysis; the next step is to elucidate the function of the reference within the film. For instance, what does it mean that Hitchcock's heroine is attacked by birds, whereas Venus was depicted accompanied by a dove? And why does Melanie, our "Venus", wear furs? Kirsch's investigations of this and other questions open up new perspectives on a number of films, with extensive illustrations allowing the reader to follow these in detail. The book invites us to take a second look at The Birds, Blake Edwards' The Party, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Gladiator and Stefan Ruzowitzky's Anatomy. Konrad Kirsch is a PhD in literature and an enthusiastic viewer of films. He has published texts on Georg Büchner, Elias Canetti, Robert Walser, Franz Kafka and William Shakespeare. Most recently, his article on Heinrich von Kleist was published in the Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie.
£40.41
Edition Axel Menges Robert-Bosch-Krankenhaus, Stuttgart: Opus 68
In 1940, manufacturer Robert Bosch (1861-1942) opened the first hospital to bear his name. He was interested in promoting public welfare as well as his highly successful business activities. Since 1964, 92 per cent of Robert Bosch GmbH has belonged to the Robert Bosch Foundation, whose dividends benefit education, science, understanding among nations and health care. So in 1973 it became possible to open a new hospital complex in Stuttgart. There has been continual extension and improvement of the existing stock by Arcass Frei Architekten, and in recent years the geriatric rehabilitation clinic and the very stimulating chapel have been added, both by Günter Leonhardt, and also the entrance building by Joachim Schürmann & Partner.
£35.10
Edition Axel Menges Steidle + Partner, Alfred-Wegener-Institut, Bremerhaven: Alfred-Wegener-Institut Bremerhaven
Text in English and German. The building for the Alfred-Wegener-Institut für Polar- und Meeresforschung is near the city centre by the commercial harbour. What is striking is the unusual façade: a pattern is made with glazed tiles in white, grey and black, seeming more regular than it actually is.
£22.41
Edition Axel Menges Reinhard Gieselmann: In Search of Style
Text in English and German. The extensive built work of the 1925 born Reinhard Gieselmann, focussing on housing and church architecture, is characterised by powerfully three-dimensional buildings, dramatic spatial effects, sophisticated handling of light and explicit material effects.
£44.10
Edition Axel Menges Die Tektonik der Hellenen: Kontext und Wirkung der Architekturtheorie von Karl Bötticher
TEXT IN GERMAN. Tectonics is back on the agenda for contemporary architectural discussion. Up to now tectonics tended to be associated with the language of neo-Classical architecture, which seemed to have faded out because of the triumph of Modernism, but now the dogmas of Modernism are being questioned, interest is reviving in architecture using tectonic design principles. So DIE TEKTONIK DER HELLENEN, Bötticher's main work published in 1844-52, does not just provide a theory of tectonic form that is still estimable today, it also contains a theory about the central problem of the 19th century, that of taking over the stylistic forms of past epochs.
£32.40
Edition Axel Menges Jean-Yves Barrier: Architect and Urbanist
Text in French & English. Even though his viaducts for the TGV Atlantic line and several innovative projects rapidly brought him national recognition, Jean-Yves Barrier, who set up his own practice in Tours in 1990, managed to avoid involvement in fashions and trends. Whether he is dealing with homes, public facilities, offices, industrial buildings or shop design, Barrier approaches each project with a fresh eye, and tries to come up with a powerful idea that is then expressed spontaneously in his sketches. His initial insight is developed in very precise studies, bringing an architectural approach to the technical details. The originality of his buildings is inevitably associated with the renewal of form, a great variety of subjects and blending materials in a way that exploits the value of each to optimise the construction as a whole. Even though he was one of the first to realise a solar building (1978), an automated house (1990) and a low-energy apartment block (2001), these technical innovations are not his chief concern. The essential feature for Barrier is the correctness of the response applied to the programme and to the context, with consistent respect for the users. He combines generosity in his human contacts with rigour in conception and realisation. In all his exchanges with contractors, engineers, workmen and users, his taste for dialogue promotes a climate of confidence that enables every project to find its own distinctive quality.
£44.10
Edition Axel Menges Built or Unbuilt: Architects Present Their Favorite Projects
Text in English and German. Personal favourite projects selected by architects of international distinction are presented in a book for the first time. Projects that were devised and realised, but also some that were never built. Speakers in the 'Architecture Today' lecture series that has taken place for the last twenty years at Tübingen University were asked to contribute. Invitations went to 'established' master builders, provocative young developers of new forms and technologies or significant representatives of regional architecture: a promenade architectural ranges from coolly functional to free artistic design, from architecture that feels committed to the Bauhaus aesthetic to deconstructive design. The idea for this book came from the 20th anniversary of the lecture series. The result is an exciting catalogue of very different projects from the last three decades, like museums, buildings related to science and education and to music and theatre, offices and homes, government and religious buildings, right down to the architects' own houses. The scale ranges from mega-projects for whole cities in Asia to a subtle design for a lift in Salzburg or two thoughtful architectural visions expressed in a 'Tower of Dreams' or just in an exhibition. These are all projects that attach considerable significance to their inventors. A clear majority of the choice of architects lit upon realised projects originating in competitions, direct contracts or a problem the architects set themselves. The choice of projects that stayed on paper arouses even more curiosity -- buildings that did not win first prize in a competition, but still have a great deal to tell about the wealth of ideas, context and philosophy in contemporary architecture, presented in this publication because their designers definitely wanted to make their mark. A variety of answers were heard to the question of why a certain project was chosen. The fact is that ultimately favourite projects are the ones that represent philosophy and design ideals, as well a the knowledge and skill of the architects and teams in a particular way. But above all they were projects that moved the architects.
£35.91
Edition Axel Menges Androgynos--The Male-Female in Art and Architecture: The Male-female in Art and Architecture
This book deals with elemental basic architectural questions: the age-old subject of antithesis and thesis, unity and duality, contrast and harmony.
£41.40
Edition Axel Menges Alfredo Arribas. Seat-Pavilion, Wolfsburg: Opus 44 Series
Text in English and Spanish. In 2000 the Autostadt, a show park for the Volkswagen group and its subsidiaries from Seat via Audi to Bentley and Lamborghini, opened in Wolfsburg. Alfredo Arribas designed the Seat Pavilion, and has brought off the brilliant trick of making an essentially reticent building into the focal point of the Autostadt. The structure is like a snail shell, forbidding and closed with the exception of a band of windows that seems to rise directly out of the surface of the lake on the Autostadt site. The irregular curve of the ground plan is reminiscent of a leaf or other forms borrowed from nature. Access is via two elegant ramps floating over the water and the site and thrusting straight into the centre of the pavilion: a homage to the old master, Le Corbusier. And then inside we are confronted with a surprise-packed exhibition landscape: a dazzling synthesis of acoustic and visual impressions that cast their spell over visitors as they walk round. Alfredo Arribas was a provocative newcomer on the architectural scene in Barcelona in the late eighties and is now an international success. He was probably predestined for this job like no other architect. He showed a highly personal flair for presenting spaces and goods from the outset, attracting early attention with his designs for discotheques and bars like the enormous Louie Vega (1988) discotheque, or the Torres de Avila (1990). The expressive tower for the Marugame Hirai Museum (1993) is also part of this creative phase, where forms did not necessarily have to be justified by functional logic. But Arribas' architecture changed into its business suit for the very next commissions. For example, even bankers in their pin-stripe suits feel perfectly at home in the cafeteria he designed for Norman Foster's Commerzbank headquarters in Frankfurt. Arribas is working on two large projects at present: a family entertainment centre in Bari and the Cite des Musiques Vivantes in Montlucon.
£21.60
Edition Axel Menges Heinz Tesar, Sammlung Essl, Klosterneuberg, Austria: Opus 38
Text in English and German. Heinz Tesar's buildings occupy a very particular place on the Austrian architectural scene, which is anyway populated by a lot of individualists. There is a great deal of creative imagination at work here, which always operates outside the scope of modern routine. The town of Klosterneuburg, north of Vienna, has become something like an artistic home for Tesar. The Schomerhaus, an office building whose huge oval central hall leaves convention far behind, and the Protestant church, which has a rounded floor plan like a tear-drop, were now followed by the impressive museum he has built here to house 4000 objects from the private Essl collection, which includes the most important collection of Austrian art after 1945. The floor plan is based on a triangle. Above a storage floor that runs the whole length of the building three individually shaped architectural entities are grouped around a green courtyard. The elaborately orchestrated section of the building on the short leg of the triangle accommodates the entrance foyer, staircase, library, offices and a flat.The long side of the triangle contains the hall for temporary exhibitions extending over two storeys; on the lower floor it is glazed on the courtyard side, and in the upper storey it is lit partly from the side and partly from the skylights in the slightly undulating roof. The hypotenuse is made up of a sequence of parallel galleries; they are topped by lanterns, which admit a great deal of daylight. Finally, Tesar gives the cubic building an organic touch with a curved flourish at the tip of the triangle. Following Gehry and Zumthor, who have recently made important contributions to the theme of art museums, Tesar is now offering a variant that responds very physically to its surroundings, creating individual spaces with a variety of light.
£21.60
Edition Axel Menges Stefan Heiliger Design: A Retro-perspective
Text in German and English. Stefan Heiliger is one of the most prominent product designers in Europe, known for his -- often mechanically assisted -- recliners, easy chairs and couches. He has designed strategic ergonomic, social and comfort transitions between 'sitting-lying' and 'lying-sitting' more than almost any other designer. In his work diverse influences come together: first, familial heritage, his father Bernhard Heiliger's sculptural sensibilities; second, experiences gained during his studies at the famous Ulm School of Design, and during his time with Wilhelm Wagenfeld; and, last but not least, professional experience as a designer for Daimler-Benz in Stuttgart. The formal vocabularies that Heiliger uses in his recliners, easy chairs and couches have an inner relationship with his sports-car and coupé designs. The saucy radii, parables, hyperbolas and circular segments, the rhomboids, tetrahedrons and bevelled ovals witness a trust in the emotional, even erotic power of curvatures that may stem from automobile design. Also, the metaphors of frozen speed, which invariably characterise Heiliger's functional chairs, justify the term 'boldismo'. It seems evident that Heiliger is as much an emotional functionalist as he is a sculpturally thinking pragmatist. Heiliger, who has also passed down his talent and experience to students as a design professor for almost three decades, has compiled a decidedly contemporary vocabulary with new forms of spectacular body shells for the subject area 'comfort seating'. Today, he provides interior design products for the biomorphic 'blob architecture' in a congenial way without any fixation on axial orientations or rectangularities. The present publication document and interprets Stefan Heiliger's uvre and places it into a historical design context.
£35.10
Edition Axel Menges Regenbogen-Blitze / Rainbow Lightnings
Text in English & German. Since beyond time, rainbow lightning has been exploring space, leaping from star to star and forming light beings and crystals of light on our planet, just as they do there. They bubble, flame, flare, flash, weave a web of light, attract, condense, become space that inspires and into which one can enter. Become figurines, cubes, gurgling sky discs, flying labyrinths -- cathedrals of light! Vibrating, stretching time, laughing, refreshing, exploding like dreams in buds of light, timeless and passing away. The rainbow flashes are particularly attracted to cities. There they magically sparkle pink-red, jasmine-yellow-gold, flower-blue and breathe new life into them. Beauty is their goal. If their light were sound, what sweet melody! What overflowing happiness rained down! What sound of light-worlds! The journey of the rainbow lightning travels to Mongolia, Belize, Rome, Kathmandu, Guilin, Norway, Dubai and Japan. Frozen for a moment, the bubbling lightning and light crystals suggest their vibrations as they travel around the earth and into space.
£28.80
Edition Axel Menges Jean-Yves Barrier: Architect, Designer, Artist / Architecte, Designer, Artiste
After the first volume was published in 2009 under the title Jean-Yves Barrier. Architect and Urbanist / Architecte et Urbaniste, which documented 25 years of his architectural practice, this second volume is dedicated to architectural and artistic projects since the mid- 2000s. While the first volume focused on architectural and urbanistic projects, this second volume presents not only 25 new architectural projects of Barrier, but also a completely different facet of his work: the relationship between architecture and art. In this context, 'folding' becomes a fundamental concept that can be applied from design objects to art installations in public spaces and architecture. This new volume also shows once again the astonishing variety of architectural typologies that Barrier deals with in his current oeuvre. Whether it concerns residential buildings, collective housing, public facilities, urban design or functional buildings (such as supermarkets, an employment office or an engineering structure), Barrier never adopts a repetitive or doctrinaire attitude, but develops new solutions for each project, which can be found in his ideal 'lexicon of constants'. This is particularly true for the permanent search for urban coherence for the most varied interventions: in city centres, in derelict industrial zones or in diffuse peri-urban spaces. Contemporary garden cities, condensed and compact assemblies, collages or the interweaving with what exists represent possibilities for Barrier to requalify and redevelop forgotten or abandoned urban situations with contemporary architecture. This is accompanied by the search to create urban signs and new networks in urban space, with the attempt to perpetuate the existing layers of the city. But it is not only the city that serves him as an architectural projection screen, but also and in particular the manifold interplay between art, design and architecture, which is expressed in a specific method, an edifice of thoughts, which allows him to achieve a creative coherence on these various levels of scale and thus simultaneously connects different disciplines with each other.
£53.91
Edition Axel Menges Peter Hubner, Evangelische Gesamtschule Gelsenkirchen-Bismarck: Kinder Bauen Iher Schule / Children Make Their School
Text in German. When the synod of the Westphalian Evangelical Church made the decision to build the school in about 20 years ago, this was accompanied by a large number of hopes and desires that - formulated as a commission - were expressed in the foundation stone document that was walled up when building started in 1997. It runs like this: "The Evangelical Church of Westphalia, by establishing the comprehensive school in a district with particular need for renewal would like to set a sign of hope and help to prepare young people to deal with the urgent problems of our day. For this reason the school's educational work will focus on the following three points: the school should be a meeting-place, making it possible for young people coming from various nations and practicing different religions to live together peacefully; the school is to be an ecological place of learning, and enable young people to look after the creation that has been entrusted to mankind; and the school should open up to the district in which it is sited, and become a cultural centre. "The architects conceived the school as a little town, with the key aims of achieving diversity, sophistication and responsibility taken on by the users themselves. Hence the individual sections were all planned independently by colleagues of Peter Hubner and his plus+ bauplanung practice, with active participation by all the pupils involved. As the building was for a new foundation, it was possible to involve a whole year consisting of 130 pupils in planning and designing their own teaching area throughout the six-year building phase. Each year has a housing group, and each of the five classes has its own house inside it. Each house has its own entrance, its own cloakroom with toilets attached, a large gallery, a terrace and a garden. The book shows the entire process from developing the educational programme via the competition, planning and realisation including the participation processes to the everyday running of the school. It is a must for anyone interested in new educational concepts.
£30.60
Edition Axel Menges Klaus R Uhlig
Text in English & German. Klaus R Uhlig, born in 1932 in Altenburg near Leipzig, is at first and foremost a painter of people. His upright figures, with a strong vertical emphasis and often depicted in groups, represent the emerging XXL generation. With his "Structurels", Uhlig created a painting style that combines classical realistic with modern abstract painting. Linking and overlapping numerous individual pictures to form a composite creates configurations that can be interpreted in many ways. Gil E Stein shows other aspects of his output in this publication. This includes works such as Das letzte Blatt der Welt or 9-11, which was actual-ly painted in 2001, and the group of pictures called "Arborel". The most striking feature of Uhlig's pictures is the positive impact they make. One contributing factor here is that a clear working philosophy lies behind their creation. Uhlig's work is intended to show "that our life and our social associations are wonderful because the things that connect us are wonderful and mysterious". He uses very many graphic and painting techniques to achieve this, including decalomania. The colour range of his work is defined by the Bauhaus colour theory. Uhlig's colourism and structurelism emerged on the basis of a classical training in art and architecture, moving through the stages of stonemason, Dipl.-Ing., Master of Arts, government building officer and Dr.-Ing. His professors in Weimar included Otto Herbig, who was close to Die Brücke, in Berlin the architect Hans Scharoun and the sculptor Erich F Reuter, and at Harvard University Le Corbusier when present at seminars. Here Uhlig also met Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. After teaching at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, Uhlig worked as a town planner in various German cities. He devised zoning maps for Göttingen, Heidelberg and finally for Cologne, where he worked as Stadtbaudirektor for many years. Uhlig lives in Cologne as a free-lance artist. Solo exhibitions have been devoted to his work in Europe and China, in cities including Berlin, Bologna, Brussels, Dresden, Hangshou, Leipzig, Cologne, Paris and Weimar. His work is to be found in state museum, public buildings and in institutional and private collections.
£44.10
Edition Axel Menges Plusminus 20/40 Latitude: Sustainable Building Design in Tropical and Subtropical Regions
Important examples of realised objects show the interplay of use of nature resources, and the building technology that is added on. Natural ventilation, passive and active use of solar energy, use of rainwater and the energy potential of the soil are key issues. The use of photothermic and photoelectric solar technologies is presented in detail, along with use of the potential for drawing energy from the soil.
£41.85
Edition Axel Menges Hilmer & Sattler: Buildings and Projects
Architects who believe that designs should be based on past architecture.
£46.80
Edition Axel Menges Landscape Architecture / Landschaftsarchitektur
If there is a plateau that continuously unites Hans Dieter Schaals numerous artistic fields of activity, a kind of fundamental level, then it is surely that of landscape architecture. Landscape motifs are as convincingly present in his stage sets as they are in his installations, his exhibition architectures, his texts, and, naturally, also his park and garden designs. Schaal has been on the track of the fascination of landscapes since the 1960s. For him, encountering the parterre or 'carpet patterns' of the baroque Herrenhäuser Gärten in Hannover was a key experience. This was followed by an intensive study of the early landscape gardens of Great Britain, the park complexes of the Romantics and the Enlightenment in Weimar, Wörlitz, and Muskau, and by studies of the garden-art ideas and philosophical implications that underpinned each of them. As a twice-over 'artist-in-residence' at the Villa Massimo in Rome, Schaal was also able to absorb the whole cosmos of Italian garden and park planning, from the Renaissance to the present day. In 1978 Schaal published his first book, Wege und Wegräume (Paths and Passages), today considered a classic. Wege und Wegräume has become required reading and an artistic leitmotif for generations of landscape designers and architects. In 1994, a further key work appeared, entitled Neue Landschaftsarchitektur/New Landscape Architecture. It proved to be among the late-20th centurys most comprehensive studies of the topic of 'landscape' in the wider sense. Above all, it prompts an existential subjective excursus into all those spheres that are inscribed into landscape beyond the professional mainstream. Schaal was subsequently able to build a large number of spectacular 'follies' and installations in gardens and parks. From 1998 to 2014 he was finally able to actually realise a whole city park, complete with artistic installations: the Wielandpark in Biberach. The complex architectonic and artistic layout of this park embodies, as it were, the distilled essence of decades of working with the bridle paths at the boundaries of landscape. Frank R. Werner studied painting, architecture and architectural history in Mainz, Hanover and Stuttgart. From 1990 to 1994 he was professor of history and theory of architecture at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart, from 1994 until his retirement in 2011 he was director of the Institut für Architekturgeschichte und Architekturtheorie at the Bergische Universität in Wuppertal. Peter C. Horn studied architecture in Munich. After working for several years in his original profession in South America, he runs a studio for architectural photography in Stuttgart since 1985.
£29.61
Edition Axel Menges Finding Form: Towards an Architecture of the Minimal
2019 Edition "Primeval architecture is an architecture of necessity. Nothing is there to excess, no matter whether stone, clay, reeds or wood, animal skins or hair are used. It is minimal. It can be very beautiful even amidst poverty and is good in the ethical sense. Good architecture seems to be more important than beautiful architecture. Beautiful architecture is not necessarily good. Only buildings that are at the same time ethically good and aesthetically beautiful are worth preserving. We have too many buildings that have become useless and yet we still need new buildings, from pole to pole, in the cold and in the heat. Mans present areas of settlement are the new ecological system in which technology is indispensable, even in hot and cold areas. ... Our age requires buildings that are lighter, more energy-saving, more mobile and more adaptable, in brief more natural, without disregarding the need for safety and security. This logically leads to the further development of light constructions, to the building of tents, shells, awnings and air-supported membranes. It also leads to a new mobility and changeability. A new understanding of nature is forming under one aspect of high performance form (also called classical form), which unites aesthetic and ethical viewpoints. Tomorrows architecture will again be minimal architecture, an architecture of the self-education and self-optimization processes suggested by human beings." (Frei Otto and Bodo Rasch in their foreword of this book) In 1992 the Bavarian branch of the Deutscher Werkbund awarded its first prize to Frei Otto, undoubtedly the most successful and many-sided protagonist of modern light construction, and with it a request to nominate a meritorious person to whom the prize could be passed on, and to design a joint exhibition with that person. Frei Otto chose his pupil Bodo Rasch, who had realized Ottos theories particularly in other cultures. The publication produced on this occasion provides information about scientific fundamentals and the working methods the two architects developed from these, which are characterized by "finding" not by "making". This is supposed to produce buildings that could not be more beautiful and can scarcely be improved in terms of materials and loadbearing capacity.
£39.90
Edition Axel Menges The Story of the Beautiful Lau
Text in English & German. The beautiful Lau, the heroine of Eduard Mörike's story, is only half a water spirit -- her mother was a human woman, and her father was a water nix of royal blood. She has thin webs between her toes, but apart from this she is not externally different to a human being. Because she cannot laugh and can bear only dead children, her husband, the Donaunix, sends her to the Blautopf lake. Before she can be permitted to return, she must laugh five times. The Blautopf is located in Blaubeuren, and is the source of the river Blau. It is a "pot spring", and connected to a cave system that was first studied in the 1950s. One of the great caverns discovered by explorers -- the so-called "Mörike-Dom" -- is 25 m wide, 30 m high and 125 m long. The spring waters are deep blue in colour, and change from turquoise blue to dark blue as the light shifts -- on overcast days, the water actually appears to be almost black. During Germany's Romantic period, the Blautopf gave rise to all kinds of speculations and stories, and Mörike, one of the most prominent exponents of Swabia's group of Romantic poets, who spent a night in Blaubeuren during a journey in 1840, took his inspiration from this striking place.
£16.80
Edition Axel Menges Screening
Text in English & German. Photographs of a huge building site, taken by night, show a bewildering world of machines, boards, cables and scaffolding, seemingly in total chaos and with mud and puddles everywhere. The viewer's gaze enters dim underworlds that look like a modern equivalent of Piranesi's Carceri. Behind clearly structured, transparent façades we can see office workers, politicians, hotel guests and laboratory staff. We can see what they are doing and how they interact with one another. Both everyday work and private business are on public display. The figures' various social roles are revealed by their body language, clothing and attributes. In contrast to the kind of voyeuristic view through a window we see in Alfred Hitchcock's famous film Rear Window (1954), the glass façade freely reveals what the classic perforated façade hides. Like the propaganda images turned out by totalitarian systems, the vastness of advertising spaces turns our usual sense of proportions on its head. Monumentally large, usually female human figures dwarf houses and people. They look down on the city's inhabitants from above. No passerby can evade their gaze or their attractions. Taken together, the photographs in this book represent a visual commentary on our present day lifestyle. All the pictures were taken in the centre of Berlin -- but the same scenes can be seen all over the world. The buildings are just as interchangeable as the monumental images of sex and consumerism. Stefan Koppelkamm's photographs are accompanied by selected monologues from Roland Schimmelpfennig's drama Push Up 1--3, which give the "ideal inhabitants" of this world a voice. These are people who fully subscribe to the images of success and beauty taken from adverts and from the media.
£30.60
Edition Axel Menges Fritz Leonhardt 1909-1999: The Art of Engineering Design
Text in English & German. Fritz Leonhardt would have been 100 years old in 2009. The Südwestdeutsches Archiv für Architektur und Ingenieurbau (saai) at the University of Karlsruhe is presenting the first full retrospective of this famous structural engineer's work, which holds his exten-sive estate. Leonhardt studied at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart and then travelled in the USA. He made his professional début with the German autobahn, for which he designed the Rodenkirchen suspension bridge in 1938-41. Leonhardt supported Herrmann Giesler's plans for the "capital of the movement" with a domed structure for the new main station in Munich, a project that was never realised. In the post-war period he worked mainly on reinforced and pre-stressed concrete structures. He combined pioneering structural innovations with a high standard of creative design. The television tower in Stuttgart, which he designed in 1953/54, is a good example of this. It has had countless successors all over the world. Leonhardt made important technical innovations in bridge-building in particular. He and his colleagues worked on the Düsseldorf family of bridges from the 1950s to the 1970s, diagonal cable bridges with an aesthetic shaping the urban landscape, and the Leonhardt, Andrä und Partner practice founded by him created wide-span bridges all over the world based on these models. Leonhardt was involved as a structural engineer on the first post-war high-rise buildings in Germany. He worked with the architects concerned on the cable-net structures for the German Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal World's Fair, and for the roofs of the 1972 Munich Olympics buildings. The interplay between science and practice was crucial to Leonhardt. With texts by Hans-Peter Andrä, Wolfgang Eilzer, Holger Svens-son and Thomas Wickbold, Ursula Baus, Norbert Becker, Dirk Bühler, Hans-Wolf Reinhardt and Christoph Gehlen, Theresia Gürtler Berger, Gerhard Kabierske, Joachim Kleinmanns, Karl-Eugen Kurrer, Alfred Pauser, Eberhard Pelke, Jörg Peter, Klaus Jan Philipp, Jörg Schlaich, Dietrich W. Schmidt, Werner Sobek, Elisabeth Spieker, Christiane Weber and Friedmar Voormann, Fritz Weller, and Fritz Wenzel.
£62.10
Edition Axel Menges Norman Foster: Commerzbank, Frankfurt am Main (Opus 21): Universitat Ulm
Norman Foster, one of the most consistent advocates of architec- ture based on modern technology, achieved a world-wide reputa- tion with the headquarters for the Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation in Hong Kong, Stansted Airport in London, Century Tower in Tokyo and his telecommunications tower in Barcelona. His most important projects in Germany are the conversion of the Reichstag building in Berlin and the new Commerzbank headquar- ters in Frankfurt am Main.
£24.30