Search results for ""Axel Menges""

Text in English & German. Francesco di Giorgio Martini's fortress complexes, created at the end of the Quattrocento, continue to look experimental and highly speculative half a millennium later by their semiotic character. They represent an extreme of European architectural history, occupying a position where architecture and sculpture cannot be sharply distinguished any longer. The alien-looking creations represented in this book have their origins in a particular historic situation: the emergence of firearms in the 14th century and their spread in the 15th century had shifted the balance of warfare in favour of the attacking side, against which the defensive structure had not yet found a remedy. Enter Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439 to 1502) at this point, a native of Siena and one of the Quattrocento's highly versatile artists. He worked mainly in Federico da Montefeltro's Urbino, and left behind a body of work that included painting -- the three famous prospects of ideal cities in Berlin, Baltimore and Urbino are attributed to him -- sculpture -- primarily his imposing reliefs -- and architecture -- here he was definitely the outstanding figure between Alberti and Bramante. His achievements as an engineer are equally impressive, and his elaborate designs for machines strongly influenced those of Leonardo da Vinci. He was a true Renaissance uomo universale, though, despite of his voluminous and influential theoretical work, less in the sense of a humanist homme de lettres than as an all-round artist. Francesco's sacred and secular structures are classicist and austere in nature, yet his fortress structures look as if, moving beyond all functional concerns, he is exploiting the newness of the task, the lack of any tried and tested technical solutions and the removal of all typological boundaries to give his architectonic fantasies free rein, resulting in an apotheosis of the new, the unfamiliar and the alien. This book is an attempt to understand the strangely grandiose semiotic character of these structures. In doing so, it poses the question of what strategies can be used when seeking a shape for buildings for which there is no precedent.

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Cities are often seen as symbols of order: the existence of city walls, fortified gates, palaces, temples, roads, pavements, highways, public institutions, city centers and residential areas is interpreted as indicating the existence of a central authority that plans and controls the city. On the other hand, the very same cities are also seen as symbols of chaos, disorder and spontaneous growth. The little winding streets and alleys, the mixture of physical structures, styles and human activities have often given the impression that cities, like forests, and other natural entities are organic structures - strange, natural artefacts. Tokyo is a good example for this dual nature of cities. When you first encounter it, you get the impression of chaos: old buildings with one or two storeys next to 30-, 40- or 50-storey skyscrapers; pedestrians, cars, trains moving in all directions, each with its own trajectory and so on. But then you realise that this seemingly chaotic structure provides a context for perfectly ordered human activities: trains leave and arrive as timetabled, their doors open at the exact points that are marked with yellow lines on the platforms, every morning after midnight fishermen bring their catch to Tokyo's big fish market, auctions are held, and by six o'clock in the morning this huge amount of sea food has already been distributed among thousands of restaurants all over the city. And if you look deeper you learn that the chaotic face of Tokyo is the pre-condition for its ordered and organised life. Complexity theory or self-organisation theory are umbrella terms for a set of theories that study the interplay between chaos and order. Originating in the sciences, these theories have been applied to the study of cities in the last three decades. They show that as in natural systems, in the artificial systems that we call cities, chaos and order do not stand in opposition to each other. Rather, they coexist in an ongoing interplay of circular causality: chaos is the precondition for new urban orders to emerge and then to reproduce themselves, whereas order and organisation set the boundaries within which chaotic structures and behaviours can take place.

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NOMINATED FOR THE RIBA INTERNATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2007. In this book Nili Portugali, presents her particular interpretation of the holistic-phenomenological worldview in theory and in practice, a worldview which stands in recent years at the forefront of the scientific discourse, and is tightly related to Buddhist philosophy. The purpose of architecture is first and foremost to create a human environment for human beings. The real challenge of current architectural practice is to make the best use of the potential inherent in our modern technological age. Yet, modern society has lost the value of man and thus created a feeling of alienation between man and the environment. Contemporary architecture sought to dissociate itself from the world of emotions and connect the design process to the world of ideas, thus creating a rational relation between building and man, devoid of any emotion. Portugali argues that in order to change the feeling of the environment and create places and buildings we really feel at home' and want to live in, what is needed is not a change of style or fashion, but a transformation of the mechanistic worldview underlying current thought and approaches. Based on Christopher Alexander's basic assumption that behind human architecture there are universal and eternal codes common to us all as human beings, and that there is absolute truth underlying beauty and comfort, Portugali demonstrates how this approach, as well as her unique planning process stemming from it (based on the way things actually exist already on site) generates that common spiritual experience people undergo in buildings endowed with soul, no matter where or from what culture they come from. That she demonstrates through a variety of her buildings and projects (with over 600 color illustrations and drawings), in relation to the physical, cultural and social reality of the place they were planned and built on, an Israeli reality which reflects a unique interface between the orient and the west, a cultural interface she personally represents. The book is valuable to architects, artists, scientists, philosophers and anyone who cares about the quality and beauty of the environment we live in.

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Text in English & Italian. Ivano Gianola is one of the founding members of the so-called Ticino School. Like the other significant figures of this legendary school he is primarily concerned with urban-development and architectonic quality of building in the Canton of Ticino. The extensive uvre that has sprung from this concern has produced a plethora of intuitively designed, distinctive buildings. After more than ten years of planning and building, Gianola's most extensive project and at the same time the largest project of the Canton of Ticino to date is now open to the public. The new Cultural and Art Centre of Lugano is located directly on the shore of Lake Lugano. The spacious and spatially differentiated new building is an architectonic hybrid that combines a museum for contemporary art, a convention centre, various restaurants and cafés as well as a theatre under one roofscape. The theatre is not only equipped as an optimal venue for operas and theatrical performances, but can also be used as a concert hall or convention auditorium. Moreover the urban configuration of the new complex functions as a most convincing contemporary gateway to the largest city in Ticino. This Opus volume tries to decipher not only the obvious and hidden urban-planning aspects of this major project but also its multilayered formal esthetic and haptic connotations. Thereby the book pays tribute to a high point of contemporary Ticino architecture and to Ivano Gianola's late masterpiece.

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A house is a representation of the idea of the world, of life, of existence. For the Cologne architect Oswald Mathias Ungers (19262007), owner of a famous collection of books on architecture, who also repeatedly addressed the theoretical aspects of building, the construction of his own house, in 1958/59, was more than a private adventure. For him it meant a chance to gain spatial experience and explore what was possible. It was a laboratory, a little universe, a piece of world. In the course of his life, Ungers built himself and his family no less than three houses, two in the Cologne suburb of Müngersdorf, one in the Eifel highlands. Even the first house, to which this richly illustrated volume is dedicated, caused an international sensation; it was considered to be an important example of so-called Brutalism. It showed "everything I knew how to do at the time", Ungers wrote regarding the building. He wanted a house that enveloped and sheltered, he wanted metamorphosis and transformation; architecture that was autonomous but at the same time respected the genius loci. At the time, architects preferred to build their private homes as freestanding bungalows in the countryside. Ungers, on the other hand, settled in a place where there were traces of the Roman past and purchased a plot of land adjacent to an already existing row of terraced houses. Three decades later, Ungers expanded the cataract of forms of his first home by adding a geometrically strict cube, intended to house his library. The shock aesthetics of the early work had evolved into the rigorous abstractness of his late work. This building too one of a kind, and in interplay with its predecessor became a manifesto. It corresponded to the idea of a house as a small town and the town as a large house, an idea that has run through European architectural history since Alberti. In spite of all their differences, the two contrasting formats make common cause. They show a world full of contradictions, illusions and realities that reflects the entire spectrum of the image of architecture, from the fiction to the reality of the function. Today the house and the library are the seat of the UAA, the Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft, and open to the public. The architectural historian Wolfgang Pehnt often visited Ungers. The author of an authoritative book about the architecture of Expressionism, he profited by Ungers' collection of material back in the years when Ungers was still interested in Expressionism. Thus he is familiar with the house in its details and has witnessed its modifications. As portrayed by him, the history of the origins of the house gives access to the impressive uvre of a great German architect.

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Text in German & English. When the stadium for a "Workers Olympiad" -- one of the most beautiful complexes in Europe, as the daily press put it -- was opened in 1931 on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Republic of Austria on the Prater site in Vienna, Otto Ernst Schweizer, the architect, was suddenly catapulted into the ranks of internationally acclaimed architects. The stadium, which can seat 60,000, was built as an amphitheatre on the model of its ancient predecessors, in particular the Colosseum in Rome, which Schweizer had studied intensively; the Viennese stadium seen as a reinterpretation of the enormous Roman structure on the basis of the constancy of things that were valid, which was one of the basic premises of his architecture. Otto Ernst Schweizer, born in 1890, and thus of the same generation as Le Corbusier, Hans Scharoun, Erich Mendelsohn and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, had attracted attention even as a young architect with some outstanding competition entries, and was acclaimed for his planetarium on the periphery of the old town in Nuremberg and for the stands and the two cafés of the stadium complex there. He had left municipal service as an Oberbaurat to dedicate himself to planning and realizing the Milchhof in Nuremberg and also the stadium in Vienna. For thirty years he worked as one of the great teachers and researchers in the architecture faculty of the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe. He built -- after a long break forced upon him by National Socialist culture policy -- the II. Kollegiengebäude for Freiburg University. This was his last building, and once again Schweizer's approach to form and function was concentrated in it, almost as the quintessence of a rich creative life. And what remains of the stadium, this most beautiful complex in Europe, as has been said? The landscape around it has been wrecked and allowed to fray into randomness and Schweizer's reflecting lake in front of the arena has been filled in. The arena itself has been enlarged by almost double its appropriate cubature and its height increased, so generally it has changed to such an extent that the original is unrecognisable; hence this book.

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Test in English & German. The town hall in Bremen with its associated Roland statue in the market square in front of the building make up a UNESCO World Heritage site and thus count as outstanding examples of architectural and cultural history. The Bremen town hall is an ideal image of this building type that is so important for European and Western history. It is almost a textbook example of the medieval and early modern town hall. The building dates from 1405 to 1410 and has not been fundamentally altered since. The only exception is that it was carefully continued between 1595 and 1614, when it acquired an extended figurative façade decoration based on the forms of the Weser Renaissance that were current at the time. This underlined the Hanseatic city's claims to immediacy as a free imperial city. The figurative decoration is almost encyclopaedic in its scope, showing the period's striving for humanistic education in the form of iconography with a wide-ranging political and religious spectrum of allegorical themes. The old town hall has remained almost untouched to the present day. In the late 19th century, when the city administration had acquired greater responsibilities, and thus needed more space, an extension was finally added at the back of the building, which Munich architect Gabriel von Seidl sensitively subordinated to the existing structure. The particular importance of the town hall in Bremen is based on the fact that it is extremely ambitious in architectural terms, and at the same time symbolises the republican and municipal structures of European cities. The Free Hanseatic City of Bremen is the oldest European city republic, and has retained its independence until today as a Land in its own right in the German Federal Republic. This self-confidence is expressed through the resources of architecture and the pictorial programme. As the best-preserved example for this particular building type in Germany the town hall in Bremen has also a unique significance as a historical monument.

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At the dawn of the 20th century, Bruno Paul (1874-1968) stood like a colossus astride the landscape of an emerging Modernism. As an illustrator, architect and educator his influence was unequalled. Arguably the most important German designer of his generation, his work was ubiquitous in the technical and professional publications of his day. For five decades, Paul's reputation was unparalleled among progressive German artists. As a young man he was a member of the Munich avant-garde responsible for the creation of the Jugendstil. As a designer of furniture and interiors, he achieved a commercial success unmatched by his illustrious contemporaries. In the light of his professional accomplishments, he was the most influential German architect of his generation, a figure of international significance. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Adolf Meyer and Kem Weber were among his students, and their work developed from the practices of his atelier. Indeed, as director of the Vereinigte Staatsschulen für freie und angewandte Kunst in Berlin he presided over an institution that rivaled the Bauhaus as a centre of progressive instruction in the arts. Despite the renown he enjoyed at the height of his career, Paul's name has been largely absent from the standard histories of the modern movement. Indeed, this book is the first comprehensive study of his life and work. Nevertheless, Paul's story embodies a significant facet of the history of 20th-century design: the development of Modernism in Central Europe and its coalescence from the influences of Jugendstil, Elementarism, Classicism, Expressionism and Functionalism. Paul played a prominent role in this coalescence, and he deserves a place of honour in the history of the modern movement. Yet his biography also encompasses a less familiar, but no less significant, aspect of the history of modern design. It is the story of a pragmatic Modernism that occupied a middle ground between avant-garde experimentation and conservative professional practice, a Modernism that was timeless, practical and principled. It was this pragmatic Modernism that won the patronage of the middle classes and established progressive design as an accepted alternative, and eventually as the preferred alternative to the period styles. Moreover Paul's pragmatic Modernism, and its underlying principles, remain as relevant today as when they were first conceived.

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TEXT IN GERMAN. The fairy-tales by the Brothers Grimm presented in this book were selected and illustrated by the artist Dorothee Menzel, who lives with the German scholar Carl Wege in a little village near Bremen. The artist's pictures seem to restore the unity of man and nature. The charm of the numerous colour illustrations makes it possible for both children and adults to relate to the world of folk poetry in a new way.

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Text in English and German. Ullmann has explored Venice photographically for more than twenty years. This book shows the famous city from a very individual point of view, not emphasising the tourist highlights, but investigating the 'essence' of Venice in a number of impressive photographs.

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Text in English and German. Architects in Europe, the Far East, the U.S., and Australia illustrate that a positive sense of space is more dependent on light and sun, air and warmth than on a defined minimum number of square feet.

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Text in German. Specialist literature on Schinkel has grown enormously since the 200th anniversary of his birth in 1981. But so far questions about the basis of his education and training remain unanswered. No one seems to have seen that Schinkel -- who is often called a classical or a Romantic architect -- was actually a son of the late Enlightenment. This is supported by his teachers' lesson notes (presented here for the first time), the educational periodicals of his period, private letters, exhibition catalogues and also treatises by avant-garde architectural theorists, who also have their say. It was a time of great elation, Kant's cry of 'sapere aude', have the courage to use your own reason, was the motto of this crucial epoch in the history of ideas. Schinkel's father, an unorthodox cleric, fought for the principles of the Enlightenment, and so did the teachers at the two progressive 'model schools' that Schinkel attended. For the first time, these schools brought children from all walks of life together under the same roof -- unheard of in those days. Friedrich Gedike, a leading Enlightenment teacher and the headmaster of Schinkel's grammar school Zum Grauen Kloster, not only tried to impart universal modern knowledge to his pupils, but also to educate them as citizens and servants of the state, with strong characters, and who could cope with life. The state was not just increasingly concerned with schooling, which had been dominated by the Church until that time, but also with education as a whole. The art academy, exhibitions and art as practised were to promote general enlightenment. To a certain extent this also applied to architecture. Friedrich Gilly, Schinkel's fervently revered master, even spoke of an architectural renaissance. The brightest minds of this period -- Schinkel met several of them -- were utterly convinced that the influence of science, culture and the fine arts was powerful enough to refine human nature and to sow peace and concord among nations. And so it is not surprising that the young Schinkel came to Fichte's philosophy at an early stage. Fichte defined the concept of virtue as the good will, which prevailed without exception, to "promote the purposes of humankind to the utmost of one's strength, and to promote them especially in the state, as it instructs". This became Schinkel's life's work.

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Goebbels' film programme, his propaganda strategies, the planning of perfidious anti-Semitic feature films and suggestive war newsreels are reflected in these pages, and so is Hitler's influence and the way in which famous film stars coo-operated with the Nazi leadership.

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In 1840 Sir Thomas Mitchell, Surveyor General of the British Crown, chose a rocky promontory on Sydney harbour for his home. He built a cottage in the style of Gothic Revival, popularised in England by Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin and documented in popular copy books shipped with his baggage from his home country. The house perfectly expresses the imaginative dislocation of European culture into the romantic wilderness. Whether they came out of duty, like Mitchell, or in the hope of opportunity, the European immigrants viewed Australia as a "terra nullius", as an empty land, a vacant space waiting to receive a model of Christian civilisation. It took a century to realise that the dream did not comfortably fit the continent. The story of Australian architecture might be said to parallel the endeavours of Australians to adapt and reconcile themselves with their home and neighbours. It is the story of 200 years of coming to terms with the land: of adaptation, insight and making do. Early settlers were poorly provisioned, profoundly ignorant of the land and richly prejudiced towards its peoples. They pursued many paths over many terrains. From the moist temperate region of Tasmania with heavy Palladian villas to the monsoonal north with open, lightweight stilt houses, the continent has induced most different regional building styles. The buildings included within this guide extend from the first examples of Australian architecture by convict architect Francis Greenway to the works by today's rising generation. It covers not only buildings by such famous architects as Walter Burley Griffin, Harry Seidler, Jørn Utzon, John Andrews, Philip Cox and Glenn Murcutt, but also many high-quality works by less known exponents of the profession. Photographs by the renowned Max Dupain and the present proprietor of his firm, Eric Sierins, including many especially commissioned for this book, support the text. Contributing authors have supplied material where vital local knowledge is essential.

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Hans Dieter Schaal is already something of a cultural institution in Germany. Trained as an architect, he always operates outside the "main stream", designing and realizing stage sets, sculptures, cemeteries, parks, squares, spatial installations or book projects, which are often trendsetting in their own field. In the last ten years Schaal has established a focal point that seems to be the sum of all his themes: exhibition architecture. He has provided expansive installations for the broadest possible range of exhibition subjects in such high-volume buildings as the Martin-Gropius-Bau or the Zeughaus in Berlin, the Haus der Geschichte in Bonn, the Kunstvereinsgebäude in Stuttgart, the Deutsches Postmuseum or the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome. His work was never mere exhibition design in these cases. Instead of this he was always concerned to tell spatial stories about the exhibits or their historical background. Of course he was able to draw on his experience in stage-set design here. Admittedly Schaal would not be Schaal, if he were not to use the whole stock of ideas from his decades of lateral thinking or his insatiable search for archetypes and images. On occasions this has meant that Schaal's exhibitions were ad-mired simply of their spatial sensations. It was only the very few people who were prepared to analyse the extraordinarily extensive and complex work more profoundly who found a carefully established subliminal relationship network of selected motifs running through all his exhibition installations like a central theme. Sometimes they come from his own early work, sometimes from literary or cinematic finds, then again from psychological-philosophical footnotes or even private obsessions. Such image particles constitute a thought-edifice perhaps comparable only with Aby Warburg's legendary picture archive which breaks right through the bounds of traditional exhibition architecture. Frank R. Werner has been director of the Institut für Architektur-geschichte und Architekturtheorie at the Bergische Universität in Wuppertal since 1993. He studied painting, architecture and architectural history at the Kunstakademie in Mainz, the Technische Hochschule in Hanover and Stuttgart University.

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Text in English and German. Early in the 20th century, Robert Bosch, the founder of the Stuttgart electrical business, built a large villa on the hills east of the city. It was half Palladian, half in the reform style of the period before the First World War. The building was to meet the head of the company's need for prestige, and to provide a private refuge thanks to the pleasant qualities of its large park and open position. The foundation of the same name is now housed in the Villa Bosch, but the space available has not been adequate for some time. As the company also needed rooms for seminars and other events, a decision was taken to build new accommodation next to the villa. Seven well-known teams took part in a restricted competition, including Tadao Ando, Richard Meier and Richard Rogers. The commission went to Peter Kulka, based in Cologne and Dresden. He found a convincing solution to the problem of leaving the dominance of the old building untouched and at the same time making the foundation's new accommodation attractive in its own right. He came up with a second 'villa' slightly below the first one, precise in its volume and minimalist in its resources. The building responds impressively to the challenges of the topography, the landscape around it and its neighbouring building. Kulka's work combines transparency with physical presence, structural austerity with poetry. This villa suburbana represents a milestone in his career. Kulka, born in 1937, was a pupil of Selman Selmanagic and worked with Hermann Henselmann, Hans Scharoun and in various partnerships before setting up his own practice in 1979. He has been seen as a member of the German architectural avant-garde since his Dresden parliament building (1991-94).

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Known as the 'Big Eye' the Oita Stadium is one of the chosen venues for the next World Cup in 2002. It will be reused for the second stage of the Japan Inter-Prefectural Athletic Competition in 2008 after the World Cup, continuing to grow in the future to become a large-scale all-purpose sports park for Oita. The whole site covers an area of 225 ha and has several facilities outside the main football stadium. These include general fitness, training and lodging centres, a botanical pool, two multipurpose athletic fields, two rugby and soccer practise pitches, a softball field, tennis courts and other game areas. The main stadium features an open track for athletic events as well as the football pitch. It can also be used year-round for public events aided by its retractable roof. For soccer matches, spectator seats are placed right up to the edge of the pitch to bring them close to the action. To change over for track events a retractable seating system was developed. The stadium sits elegantly on its site, enhanced by the gentle curves of its spherical design. The choice of the sphere, Kurokawa says, is 'an expression of abstract symbolism'. This spherical shape also enables the retractable portion to move along its curved surface. The use of Teflon membrane panels with 25 percent light permeability obviates the need for artificial lighting during daylight hours. In order for the pitch to get proper exposure to sunlight the elliptical roof opening runs along the north-south axis. A main arch with perpendicular horizontal sub-members follows the elliptical shape of the roof opening. Between the roof and the spectator seating below the surrounding mountains can be seen from a slender ventilation clearstorey set just below the roof line. This slit of space is designed to create a feeling of openness inside the stadium. Since the original design, an idea emerged for a moving camera to be located on the main beam to deliver special dynamic images for television audiences around the world.

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Text in English and German. The Neues Haus, the new building for the Munchner Kammerspiele, is not a big building in any sense. The plot of land not far from Maximilian-strasse, whose greatest advantage is its proximity to Richard Riemerschmied's Schauspielhaus, is only about 1000 m2 in area. The most important quality of the design is in fact that it accepts the modesty of its role. The new building subordinates itself to the main Kammerspiele building, and manages without lavish foyers and extensive prestigious areas. The Neues Haus is a servant building, a place where work is done. A hasty passer-by would see the building simply as a white cube, reticent and introverted. Given the serene mastery of the brief and the architectural resources, one is almost inclined to call it a work of Peichl's old age, combining his love of clear volumes with a sovereign grasp of technical requirements. Like the silvery-sparkling ORF studios, the ground radio station in Styria and the liner-like phosphate elimination plant in Berlin before it, the Neues Haus is also crammed full of technology. It contains three stages, and two of them can be used at the same time. The largest playing area is elaborately equipped with gallery and under-stage; it is therefore intended as the main rehearsal area in future. The two large auditoriums are stacked one above the other like shoe-boxes and form a massive hollow core surrounded by all the service functions. The interior is dominated by a plainness that oscillates between poverty and asceticism. The corridors and foyers are narrow, the stairs simple, the interval areas positively sparse. The only opulent feature is the splendid technical equipment. Peichl's handwriting can be seen in the treatment of the details and his ingenious practice of self-quotation. Many of the motifs are reminiscent of earlier projects, and of course the typical portholes, spiral staircases and railings made of steel hawsers crop up again, all Peichl's usual maritime metaphors. In this way he has produced a building whose cool elegance reveals scarcely anything of its inner values.

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Text in English and German. Otto Steidle acquired international recognition for his extraordinary early residential buildings in Munich and for exemplary solutions for school and office buildings. His office and residential complex for Wacker-Chemie in Munich is a lively accent on a particularly conspicuous site in architecturally conservative Munich. Individually balanced buildings are arranged along the block perimeter in Prinzregentenstrasse, the most important east-west axis in the inner city, diagonally opposite the Haus der Kunst, and in Bruderstrasse, which leads to Lehel, a traditional residential area. Steidle has not packed the different functions in layers one above the other, as is usual in commercial projects of this kind, but has separated them clearly from each other. The office building on the noisy carriageway of Prinzregentenstrasse takes the curve to the narrow side street in an elegant sweep, with the glass skin suspended in front of the corner giving the building an almost Mendelsohn-like verve. The series of residential buildings in Bruderstrasse is given a different quality by Berlin painter Erich Wiesner's strong colours and the projecting and recessed facades. And as here too the normal Munich scale is considerably exceeded -- the three residential towers placed diagonally to the courtyard rise eight storeys high -- there is a surprising amount of room for publicly accessible gardens inside the block, designed by landscape architects Latz + Partner, and also scope for revealing the torrential Stadtmuhlbach in a spectacular fashion, which used to be covered, but now shoots directly past one of the windows of the sunken cafeteria and then under the entrance hall of the office building, before playing at waterfalls as it gushes into the Englischer Garten at the other side of the road. Thus Prinzregentenstrasse, as a mile of museum and government buildings, and the Lehel residential area have acquired an architectural attraction of elemental impact in the shape of the Wacker building.

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Air pollution resulting from high energy consumption is a major factor threatening our environment. Heating buildings accounts for about 40 per cent of germany's total energy consumption. Current heat insulation regulations for buildings aimed at reducing energy consumption have become considerably more stringent. However, grweater heat insulation and energy saving necessarily restrict the exchange of air between outside and inside the building deteriorates and CO2 and other pollutant contents increase. For this reason, when planning the district headquarters for the Berufsgenossenschaft Gesundheitsdienst und Wohlfahrtspflege (Proffesional Association for Health and Welfare) in Dresden the aim was to produce an economical, environment-friendly building with a high proportion of solar heating and workplaces designed ergonomically and with an eye to health requirements.

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Text in English and Italian. In a letter from London, dated 9 November 1815, Antonio Canova wrote: "...Here I am in London, dear and best friend, a wonderful city...I have seen the marbles arriving from Greece. Of the basreliefs we had some ideas from engravings, but of the full colossal figures, in which an artist can display his whole power and science, we have known nothing...The figures of Phidias are all real and living flesh, that is to say are beautiful nature itself." With his admiring words for the famous Elgin Marbles Canova, one of the last great artists embodying the grandiose heritage of the classical world, gave at the same time an appropriate description of his own artistic aims. It was his half-brother who decided to assemble most of Canova's plaster originals and to place them in a museum he had built in the garden of his brother's home in Possagno, a small village north of Venice, where the artist saw the light of day on 1 November 1757. This basilica-like building erected in 1836 now holds the great majority of Canova's compositions.To commemorate the bicentenary of his birth, the Venetian authorities decided to have an extension added to the overcrowded basilica, and they commissioned the Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa for this delicate task. Scarpa composed a small, but highly articulated building that is in a strong contrast to the Neo-Classical, monumental basilica. The subtly designed sequence of spaces is unique even among Scarpa's so many extraordinary museum interiors as the architect was here in the rare position to compose the spaces as well as the placings of the exhibits. The placing of the sources of natural light which infuses the plaster surfaces with the softness of real life is in itself a rare achievement and it took an equally rare photographer to record such symphonies in white in all their magic.

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An architect, philosopher, and teacher who had a crucial effect on modern architecture.

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The third volume of Erdmut Bramkes catalogue raisonné is devoted to "art in architecture" and temporary works in public spaces. It complements the two volumes already published with the presentations of paintings and works on paper. This makes the artists work accessible to the public in its entirety. The richly illustrated catalogue presents the artists competition entries from 1974 to 2002 in chronological order. The reconstruction of more than 20 realised and unrealised projects on the basis of unpublished material and personal notes from the artists estate provide an insight into her working methods and allow a detailed view of the process of creating the works. Both the sketches and designs and the executed works show an incredible joy for experimenting and variability in the use of materials, ranging from painted metal sheets, holes drilled in wood and stone to tiles, fabrics, canvas, graffiti, glass and paving stones. Embedded in the discourse on "art in architecture" and its genesis in the 20th century, Bramkes works are presented in the context of the design process. Characteristic of her interventions in public space is her sensitiveness to the surrounding space which does not see her work as an addition to the existing architecture, but rather uses the architectural space to evoke quiet, contemplative moments through intense colour experiences or to make the space experienceable. The "Bramke system" manifests itself even with the early, expansive work for the University of Constance. The form-giving element is a variable order structure. The arrangement of the same elements with slight changes and nuances, but following the same laws in rows, condense into a structure and become a vibrating lineament. Even 50 years after its completion, the work is considered as a successful example of how "art in archi- tecture" can have integrative and functional qualities without losing its artistic value. Between this first major work for the University of Constance from 1974 to 1976 and the expansive work for the central library of the University of Tubingen at the end of her life constants in the "Bramke system" become apparent. At the same time, the overall view clearly shows the development of an artist who helped to shape her ambience in a grand gesture. Susanne Grötz, born 1961 in Koblenz, studied art history and German and Italian literature in Marburg and Pisa. She has been working on the estate of Erdmut Bramke for many years. The author lives and works in Stuttgart and Italy as a freelance exhibition curator and tour guide.

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In his note to the edition of Neue Landschafts-architektur/New Landscape Architecture published 1994 in England as Landscape as Inspiration, Geoffrey Jellicoe compares my drawing considerations with the works of Paul Klee. What at first sounds a bit highfalutin is correct insofar as I do not move exclusively in the banal everyday and functional space in everything I draw, design and realize, but always reflect second and third surrealities as well. Art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible", how Paul Klee formulated the process. Every viewer and reader could rightly ask the question: What do such expressions of art have to do with every-day architecture? I think: a great deal. And that is because all architectural problems and their solutions are multi-layered. Just like pure works of art. Every building summarizes and redefines its architectural, urban, village and landscape surroundings. Intentionally or unintentionally, exaggerated or restrained, each building can look like a meteorite or bomb strike, an inconspicuous remark or a beautification attack. I am interested in the past, the present and the future of an urban or landscape site. My view wants to integrate archaeological working methods just as much as functional fulfilments and imaginative-surreal, sometimes utopian efflorescence. I would never go so far as to formulate: Architecture is the necessary, and art is the unnecessary. Of course, every artist-architect who embarks on this complicated-complex path will have difficulties with the banal, seemingly superficial everyday reality in nature, the landscape and the city. It is therefore not surprising that I have only been able to realize a few architectural and visual productions and that, in the course of the last decades, I have been increasingly pushed into the areas of stage design and other design areas. At the moment, thanks to the ecological movement, hardly anyone is interested in the connection between art and architecture. More important are sustainability and zeroenergy houses in which the windows can hardly be opened. Could it be that building culture, indeed the whole of culture, will soon sink into green primeval forests and huge wetland biotopes? Or will foreign, warlike peoples destroy or occupy our cities and landscapes and cultivate them anew?

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Text in English & German. An ode to light sings the way of the wandering light, which comes from the universe and is born from the union of night and light. Wandering, it lingers for a short time in each place it visits, wandering around it, going from door to door and leaving its gift of light behind. It overcomes boundaries, falls in love, is angry, shows the future and laughs. It visits places of humiliation, powerlessness and hopelessness, and gives them a home, courage and protection. The wandering light tries to understand each place it visits and shows itself to them in different guises: as a shimmering cube, a folded labyrinth of light, as a pulsating vibration in rainbow colours, as a diamond light floating above the horizon, gently humming the music of the night. It dissolves boundaries, unites continents in the air, transforms what is fear, is here and there at the same time, lifts up the reality of time. At the end of its wanderings around the earth, it moves on into space, but not before leaving behind its scent, like the scent of time and its omnipresence. Beijing, Agra, Barcelona, New York, Gerona, Ankara and Zaatari are the places it encounters on its journey. The movements, frozen for a moment, allow us to sense its vibrations and its pulse on its way around the earth.

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If someone asked me: what is the film about, I would have to say: It is really about the essence of human life! I find it incredibly beautiful! It is really a moving experience ... I think it is obviously art built and master full ..." (Prof. Howard Davis, University of Oregon, on my film and the alley she whitewashed in light blue.) At a time of existential threat to the physical and human environment we live in, architect and film maker Nili Portugali takes the readers through a poetic essay and a spectacular photo gallery, extracted from her awarded new film, into a deeply intimate journey of memories in the Galilean holy "Kabbala" city of Tsefat. A childhood journey that unfolds gradually from her present holistic / Buddhist / phenomenological point of view to a discovery of profound universal insights of what is the secret of all those timeless places endowed with beauty and soul where one feels "at home"? And what is that "one pure art of making" that creates them? At any culture at any place and at any time.

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Current design of apartment buildings is facing challenges of philosophy and form. Past approaches no longer sustain new demands and require innovative thinking. The need for a new outlook is propelled by fundamental changes that touch upon environmental, economic, cultural and social aspects that led to the writing of this book. The depletion of non-renewable natural resources and climate change are a few of the environmental challenges that prompted designers to reconsider conceptual approaches in favour of ones that promote a better suitability between buildings and their environments. Concepts that minimize the buildings carbon footprint, passive solar gain, net-zero structures and water harvesting system are some of the contemporary strategies that architects and builders are integrating into their thought processes and design. Increasing costs of material, labour, land and infrastructure have posed economic challenges with affordability being paramount among them. The need to do with less brings about concepts that include adaptable dwellings, and smaller-sized yet quality-designed housing. Social challenges are also drawing attention. As the 'baby-boom' generation plans now for retirement, housing an elderly population will take priority. Walkable communities, aging in place, live-work residences, and multigenerational living are some of the concepts considered. The book offers information on contemporary design concepts and illustrates them with plans and photographs of outstanding international examples.

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Text in German. Erdmut Bramke, who was born in 1940 in Kiel and died in 2002 in Stuttgart, is one of the few 20th-century artists whose work consistently expressed a purely painterly position. She worked only with colour and structures. The use of acrylic colours enabled her to create unique colour constellations. Her unusual palate of colours and novel shades of colour were a constant surprise. In her stylistic idiom she emphasised flowing lines, interspersed colour shadowing with linear structures and experimented with images produced by dip-ping the image body in colour and also by using different materials. Her works are represented in many public and private collections, including the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, the Ulmer Museum, the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the Bundeskunsthalle, also in Bonn, and the Kunsthalle Kiel. Erdmut Bramke studied painting from 1961 to 1967 at the academies in Berlin and Stuttgart. Her teachers were Heinz Trökes and K R H Sonderborg. Repeated study periods in France and Italy took her creative work into constantly new directions. Particularly important for her artistic development was the time she spent as a stipendiary fellow at the Villa Massimo in Rome in 1979/80 and at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 1986. The present catalogue raisonné of the artists freelance work was commissioned by the Freunde der Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, as prescribed by the terms of the bequest of Erdmut Bramke her artistic design of buildings will follow in a later volume. Volume one is devoted to the paintings. It is introduced by essays of six people in her circle who focus on Bramkes importance for painting in the latter half of the 20th century. Volume two presents the sizable uvre of her works on paper, which must be accorded equal weight in the artists work. Reprinted in both volumes are contemporary texts from catalogues, newspaper articles and talks by Reinhard Döhl, Eugen Gomringer, Karin von Maur and others that show how the artists work was received during her lifetime. Until her retirement, Ulrike Gauß was the head of the Graphische Sammlung of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Susanne Grötz is a freelance art historian and exhibition curator, Carolin Jörg teaches artistic design at the Hochschule Augsburg.

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The juxtapositions of Zaha Hadid's architectural models and drawings and Judith Turner's photographs of the architect's buildings in this volume reveal that Hadid and Turner are complicit. There is a clear agreement of sensibilities. Each understands the other. Hadid does not design with complete geometries in stable con-figurations, but designs instead with incomplete or distorted geometries that are dynamic and visually unstable. Turner does the same in her photographs, cropping before a form completes itself in a frame that leaves the rest of the form suggested outside the frame. Hadid's work is abstract a permutation of Modernism's trifecta of point, line and plane. Turner's photography, too, is abstract so that Turner's photographs of Hadid's buildings compound the abstraction, arguably intensifying the three-dimension-al abstraction by compressing it into two. Hadid's neutral palette of materials, especially concrete, takes on value in Turner's graphic compositions of black, white and gray, counterintuitively giving neutrality subtle intensity. Hadid structures her designs dynamically with diagonal lines and oblique planes playing with and against each other in three-dimensional fields. Likewise Turner works on the diagonal, always positioning herself obliquely to buildings, shooting glancingly rather than frontally: her diagonal position further dynamizes Hadid's already energized diagonals. Often Turner doubles down on the diagonality by cranking the camera's lens off its up-down axis to heighten the architectural dynamism. Turning her photographic angle lofts Hadid's already anti-gravitational architectural system off the ground. Judith Turner resides in New York where she began taking photographs in 1972. She has had solo exhibitions in various cities in the United States, Europe, South America, Israel, and Japan. Turner has been awarded several grants and fellowships. She received an Honor Award from The American Institute of Architects in 1994 and a Stars of Design Award in Photography from The Design Center of New York in 2007.

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In recent decades, Carlo Scarpa's relevance has been steadily on the rise. At a time when architects have to use existing city and building structures as a point of departure for their work, his oeuvre remains a source of inspiration. Buildings such as the Castelvecchio in Verona show us that architecture is capable of communicating its own history, has meaning, and develops a contemporary dynamic of its own. Scarpa's layered architecture makes visible the process of becoming and the time-related sedimentation of material and meanings. It is especially at points of transition and interface that layering becomes a narrative element that elucidates the tectonic qualities of the building. Overlaying includes leaving a record of how an object came into being -- either by means of the sediments of its history or through the intervention of the architect. In this book Anne-Catrin Schultz presents her research about the phenomenon of layering in Carlo Scarpa's architecture. Layering describes the physical composition of layers defining space as well as the parallel presence of cultural referrals and formal associations imbedded in the physical layers. Scarpa's work is an embodiment of multidimensional layering and, at the same time, a focal point for architectural movements of his time that have stratification as their theme. In most buildings, the principle of layering may be regarded as something that is part of the nature of building. Functional conditions call for planes, elements, or "layers" to provide the supporting structure, and others to protect from rain, cold or the heat of the sun. However, architectonic layering goes beyond merely fulfilling technical requirements -- the principle of layering may be used as a formative method that allows elements of different origins to be combined into a non-hierarchical whole. Layering exists in a realm of complexity and implies a capacity of being interpreted that goes beyond itself and creates references to the world at large. The first part of the book examines Scarpa's fields of influence and intellectual roots and puts them in perspective with former theories and their interpretation of architecture as layered, for example Gottfried Semper's theory of clothing. The second part displays an analysis of three major projects, Castelvecchio and Banca Popolare in Verona and the Querini Foundation in Venice.

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Konstantin Melnikov (18901974) is unquestionably one of the outstanding architects of the 20th century in spite of the fact that he fell silent early, leaving behind only limited work that was insufficiently publicized, and restricted almost exclusively to Moscow, the city of his birth in which he spent nearly his entire life and which did not appreciate him. He was raised in humble circumstances, but enjoyed an excellent education. Beginning in the mid-1920s, after the turmoil that followed the war, revolution and civil war, his career soared at almost meteoric speed as he took the lead in the young Soviet architecture movement with completely autonomous, highly artistic buildings that were free from dogmatism of any kind. Even more rapid than his rise to fame was his downfall: Treated with general hostility, he was unable to defend himself against the accusation of formalism when Stalin put an end to architectural ventures and experiments around the mid-1930s. He was expelled from the architects' association and was banned from practicing as an architect for the remaining four decades of his life. In the late 1920s, at the peak of his career, he had the opportunity to build a house for himself and his family in Moscow, in which he was then able to live until the end of his life. This house, a memorable symbiosis of almost peasant-like simplicity and extreme radicalness, is one of the most impressive, surprising and probably most enigmatic works produced by 20th-century architecture. Its simplicity is only outward; in reality this is a highly complex work which links together the elements of architecture explicitly and inextricably, which takes a clear and completely autonomous stand and which, in a way that little else has done, raises the question as to the nature of genuinely architectonic thinking. In essayistic form the book attempts to follow the paths laid out in the architect's work from the perspective of an architect.

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As building materials and technologies advance, architects are creating new kinds of urban environments. Among the innovations showcased in this book that are contributing to new architectural forms are parametric modelling enabled by computer-aided technology, environmentally friendly building skins, and HOPSCAs -- a hybrid building type -- that can house hotels, offices, parking, shopping, a convention centre, and apartments under one roof. The 'dream' buildings in this book reflect a changing architectural and cultural environment, and the processes that turn these concepts from vision to reality will open a new chapter in architectural history. Many of the architects represented here are addressing themes of developments in structural and material technologies that will allow infinite possibilities in form. Within the new urban landscape of greater scale and complexity, architects must either find appropriate 'new textures' or construct new rules. One imaginative process demonstrated here is the merging of nature and architecture -- sometimes accomplished through the use of natural forms, and at other times through materials and levels of energy consumption. A related new process, bionics -- the application of biological principles to the design of architectural systems -- has been used to streamline buildings and simulate nature. Yet another process at work today reflects a continuity with Modernism in architecture in which simple forms as well as traditional materials and construction methods cannot disguise the elegance of their conceptual rigor. This choice leads to two contrasting ways to adapt: to 'exceed' or to 'retreat'. Most of the featured projects in this book embody the method of 'exceeding'. With this approach, architects use height and context to create new urban spectacles. The contrasting strategy is to "retreat" by creating introverted projects that interject a built form of silence and tranquillity into the noise and chaos of the city. We also include examples of comprehensive projects that attempt to reply to the urban question and suggest a future era of 'the monumental building as city'. These immense projects can cover several city blocks in which architects strive to find levels of balance between city and street. By examining the thought processes behind these bold and innovative designs we can formulate some essential questions: how does technology bridge the boundaries between different countries and cultures? Will our cities come to resemble those in science fiction movies? Will the notion of 'form follows environment' be the natural successor to 'form follows function'? Although we can't answer these questions at present, we hope that merely asking them might provide insights that will shape our views and spur creativity. Not for sale in China & Korea.

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Text in English and German. Spanish museum architecture has experienced a marked upturn since the 1990s, helping even small towns off the tourist beaten track to acquire extraordinary museum buildings. This is expressed most visibly without a shadow of a doubt in Frank O Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. But there are not just the international stars who have contributed to this success. Spanish architects in particular have designed unique museums that have changed the look of whole towns. One example is the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León in León in Castille, built by the Madrid architects Mansilla + Tuñon. Rafael Moneo, who recently completed the annexe for the Museo del Prado in Madrid is still the undisputed leading figure in Spanish architecture, but in the meantime architects like Mansilla + Tuñon, who trained under Moneo, are attracting attention internationally as well as in Spain, and so are young talents who have just left architecture school and are successfully designing museums. Spanish architects use a wide variety of formal languages. And yet there are some characteristics that apply to them all: they have never been interested in the games Postmodernism plays; many of them value reinterpreting regional building traditions in a modern way; they are also sensitive to special features of the existing topography. Kenneth Frampton said in this context that Spanish architecture essentially runs counter to the globalisation tendencies that are increasingly reducing architectural form to a comfortable aesthetic product. The present book, which is also suitable as a museum guide, shows that this tendency is particularly conspicuous in the new museums. It confirms the world-class nature of Spanish architecture, recorded from Rafael Moneo's early Museo de Arte Romano in Mérida to Herzog and de Meuron's new Calixa Forum art gallery in Madrid.

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Oscar Wilde was born in 1854 in Dublin, the son of a physician and writer; his mother wrote poems and was an authority on Celtic folklore. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and later at Magdalen College, Oxford. As a student, already an enthusiastic follower of Walter Pater, he began to lead a life completely shaped by aesthetic premises. Typical of this attitude is Pater's statement: 'To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.' In 1884, after a lecture tour in Canada and the United States, where he caused a sensation as a dandy who had 'nothing to declare but his genius ', Wilde married the daughter of a prominent Irish barrister. At the same time, the marriage marked the beginning of a peak creative period for him. During this time, in addition to his fairytale collections The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1892) and numerous poems and plays, he also wrote his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), whose hero's life rises above all morality and ends in the morass of a sinful existence, anticipating the author's own fate. Wilde's most successful works, in his lifetime, were his plays. Among them, Salome (1891) occupies a special place because of the congenial illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley. Wilde's homoerotic relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas caused him to be sued by the young man's father, resulting in a two-year prison sentence. A social pariah, he tried with little success to begin a new career as a writer in France after he had served his sentence. On 30 November 1900, he died, completely impoverished, in Paris. The two collections of fairy tales do not go back to folktales that have come down to us anonymously, but belong to the genre of 'literary fairy tales', which, as the creation of a particular writer, represent a separate literary genre with a long tradition that goes back to antiquity.

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The name Margarethe von Trotta, the famous German directon, has been synonymous with high-quality conema for over 20 years.

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Featuring text in English and German, this book talks about building in a historical context, looking at the questions: does the new have to live in the shadow of the old? Or is the architect allowed to make his own self-confident mark? Schneider and Michael Schumacher have answered this question.

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Text in English and German. Peter Hübner began his career as an orthopaedic shoemaker and moved on to cabinet-making before studying architecture. In the 1960s he became a successful designer of prefabricated buildings and sanitary units. This expertise gained him a chair in building construction at the University of Stuttgart where, in collaboration with fellow professor Peter Sulzer, he undertook a series of experiments that changed the course of his architecture. It began with an elaboration of the Walter Segal building method, but culminated in a student hostel designed, built and lived-in by architectural students at Stuttgart University's Vaihingen campus. Using student labour and superfluous or recycled materials it was very cheap, but it also reflected the capabilities and aspirations of its owners in a surprising and potent way, imbuing them with confidence. Hübner was struck by the importance of building as a social process, and understood that the mechanised construction he had earlier been involved in had largely taken the soul out of it. As word about the Vaihingen project got about, Hübner received requests for more cheap self-help buildings and discovered a new professional role as facilitator and ringmaster. Unable to predict how these improvised buildings would turn out, he yielded up the aesthetic control of the designer-despot in favour of experiencing the pleasure of human relationships as a project unfolds. Most new buildings are received by their users with comparative indifference, but the self-help projects engender passionate commitment, and it continues long after they are finished. People identify with the spaces they helped to determine, and naturally appropriate them. As a producer of such anarchic work, it is perhaps surprising to discover that Hübner has also long been at the forefront of CAD, but this is a natural development of systematisation, for if computers can calculate all the variants and irregularities, we need no longer conform to Ford's production line. Hübner uses three-dimensional programmes which connect design directly with production. His work also responds to ecological concerns, not only through the use of recycled and low-energy materials and in avoiding toxicity, but also in passive energy collection. All these issues are explored in the book.

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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.

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This book examines the application of the principle of layering in architecture, its mechanics, possible application and meaning. Layering is widely used in the discussions of the 20th and 21st centuries architecture but rarely defined or examined. Layering bridges the tectonics of structure and skin, offers a system for the creation of different architectural spaces over time and functions as a design principle without hierarchy. Three types of layering are identified: a chronological sedimentation of planes materializing changes over time (temporal layering), the additive sequence of spaces (spatial layering), and the stratification of individual planes (material layering). Like a palimpsest, historic cities frequently reveal temporal layering and aspects of change over time, a condition familiar to archaeologists who study layer upon layer of remnants of civilisation, including architectural remains and urban organization. In historic cities, one can read at least the most recent layers to determine a physical chronology of the city's history; contemporary architects add strata of the 21st century. Cities are composed of several layers, offering a complex understanding of time in which a view of the present includes also the perception of the past. At a building scale, layers can be part of the spatial composition, multiple elements of walls, the skin, the structure or decorative and narrative elements. Just as the position and order of geological strata contain information related to their age, formation, and origin, the position and form of architectural layers come with information about their function, intellectual scope, and provenance. The possible elements of such an architectural strategy include materials, light, water, and color as well as associations, memories, and analogies embedded in the layers or in the voids between them. Material layering is based on a perceived separation of spatial enclosures into floor, wall, and ceiling or roof elements and combinations thereof. Individual elements may consist of multiple planes fulfilling a series of specific functions. The architectural enclosure can represent the physical wrapper of a building and might transport the structure's narrative, tectonic information, cultural expression, the architect's design intent, and other topics that might be embedded.

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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.

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Text in English & German. In the years after 1933 several hundred architects were forced to emigrate from Germany by the National Socialist dictatorship. Between seventy and eighty of them went to Great Britain -- in part, prominent representatives of Modernism like Walter Gropius, Erich Mendelsohn, Erwin Gutkind, Arthur Korn and Marcel Breuer, but also less well known architects who had adopted very divergent positions. They found the architectural scene in Great Britain to be surprisingly conservative. Only a small circle of architects, clients and specialist journalists was open to modern design and construction methods and stylistic idioms. A few emigrants very quickly and successfully managed to gain a foothold in an environment that was for the most part unfamiliar to them, while for others exile meant a serious break in their career. Just a few months after his arrival in Great Britain, Erich Mendelsohn, together with Serge Chermayeff, won the prestigious competition for the De La Warr Pavilion in the southern English seaside resort of Bexhill (1933-35). The leisure centre is one of the most important examples of classic Modernism on the British Isles. Impington Village College (1936-39), which Walter Gropius designed in partnership with E. Maxwell Fry, also received a great deal of attention and had an impact on the development of British architecture. Furthermore, the spectrum of projects tackled by the emigrants ranged from houses to traffic structures and industrial buildings to buildings for Jewish communities and designs for exhibitions and shops. During this period German architects also left their mark in Great Britain as university lecturers, scientists and publicists. The book offers an overview of the topic and presents select buildings in detail. Moreover, hitherto largely unpublished documents from the estate of Walter Gropius provide a direct insight in-to his life and work in British exile.

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First published in 1989 by Rizzoli International Publications, Inc. The fundamental significance of the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart for the history of early modern architecture should not be underestimated. Almost all the influential architects of the 20th century built their proposed solutions in response to the theme "a home for modern city dwellers" on the beautifully located slope on the north side of Stuttgart. The choice of architects and the fact that a project of this type could be implemented at all so few years after World War I and the inflation, is one of the outstanding characteristics of this building exhibition". The German Werkbund is aware, and points out most emphatically that so important a task can only be successful and have a major impact if it is not only carried out in a technically flawless manner but also creates trend-setting architectonic solutions. The Werkbund therefore recommends to the city of Stuttgart that leading architects be commissioned with planning the exhibition and thus assuming a leading role in the construction of modern housing both in Germany and abroad. This memorandum, dated January 1926, concludes with the following appeal: It is now up to the municipal council whether this event, so crucial for the promotion of our housing, will be able to take place in Stuttgart in 1927. An interesting situation thus arose: members of the municipal council had to decide on the merits of this pioneering project. The majority voted for it. The result: 25 yes votes, 11 no votes and 6 abstentions. How did this project ever come to Stuttgart, anyway? What made it possible was a favourable constellation of both personnel and chronological circumstances. Gustaf Stotz must be regarded as the project's initiator. It was he who managed to fire up the enthusiasm of the leadership of the German Werkbund and of the city about the project. It is also thanks to him that Mies van der Rohe undertook to be its artistic director. Mies and many of the architects of the Weissenhofsiedlung were relatively young and not established. They had a fine reputation in avantgarde circles, but hardly outside them. Moreover, in the German Werkbund the entire project was regarded as not really important -- a sort of practice piece for a "world building exhibition" that would take place in Berlin in 1930.

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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.

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Text in German & English. 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. In this respect, Rob Krier, born in 1938 in Grevenmacher, Luxembourg, is indeed the proverbial exception that proves the rule. Besides his actual profession, which demands his daily attention, Krier has for years also made a vocation of his love of art, one which he nurtures parallel to his work. Fine art could 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 and move them to thoughtful reflection. In the works of Mies van der Rohe it is not rare that one finds naturalistic figures from, for example, Aristide Maillol or Wilhelm Lehmbruck -- as an anthropomorphic contrast to the strict geometry of the architecture, notes Rob Krier in the comments on his journal. If one is already aware of the realisation of his masterful architectural accomplishments through projects such as Potsdam-Kirchsteigfeld (1991 to 1997), De Resident in The Hague (1993-2001), Noorderhof in Amsterdam (1994-99), Veste Brandevoort near Helmond (since 1995), Citadel Broekpolder near Beverwijk (2000-04), or the Cité Judiciaire in Luxembourg (1992-2008) -- be assured, Krier's artistic skills are in no way inferior to his architectural work. Quite the contrary: as a sculptor and illustrator, too, Rob Krier brings together extraordinarily musical qualities and incorporates them into his work: his bronze The Jumper was erected in Montpellier in 2004, the Cowering Woman ten years earlier on Berlin's Friedrichstraße, the four metre-high duo Bosch i Alsina and Papasseit on Moll de la Fusta in Barcelona in 1992.

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2019 Edition. Although Berlins history encompasses more than eight hundred years and its beginnings reach back as far as the twelfth century, its present-day urban image is essentially characterized by structures and building measures from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Four "modern" development phases, whose respective qualities were vastly unalike, played a determining role in this image: during the second half of the nineteenth century, against the backdrop of industrialization, Berlins rise from a comprehensible Prussian capital and residence to an expanding metropolis of the German Empire; the 1920 consolidation of the city with the surrounding ninety-three townships, rural communities and properties to form "Greater Berlin"; following the destruction of World War II, working "back to back" politically, territorially, and regarding the look of Berlins divided, urban structure until 1990; and from the reunification to the present-day, the ongoing structural and spatial connections as well as architectural refinements required for Berlins role as capital of the new Federal Republic. The contents of this architectural guide vividly stand out against the backdrop of Berlins recent history a course of events as multifaceted as it was, in part, excessive, up until today. This publication deliberately focuses on the citys last one hundred years when, generation by generation, Berlin daringly and almost obsessively rediscovered itself architecturally. The selected examples not only convey a visually impressive and representative longitudinal progression, but also in which form the most provocative of social movements, changes and breaks presented themselves in the architecture of the city. With texts and images, the book presents 466 architectural works built from 1907 to the present day. The authors choices support the greater intention to present what can now be deemed contemporary, typical, and exemplary about every period of Berlins diverse, irregular, and amazingly rich architectural history. That the examples offered here blatantly declare themselves products of the "modern age" and "Neues Bauen" permits them to be understood as a "manifesto in images" which consolidates to a twentieth-century architectural collage, whose quality and wide range grant it an unquestionable uniqueness. Rolf Rave is an architect practising in Berlin together with his wife Roosje. He comes from a family of architects and art historians; his father, Paul Ortwin Rave, director of the Berlin Nationalgalerie until 1950 and director of the Berlin Kunstbibliothek from 1950 to 1961, was the editor of Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Lebenswerk from 1939 until his death in 1962.

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Text in German. What runs through our minds when somebody says the names of the following cities: Rome, Venice, Warsaw, Singapore, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Lisbon, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Vienna, Paris, Tartu, Tallinn, New York, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Barcelona, Geneva, Brussels, London? Each name's aura of associations is so powerful that no-one will be able to give an answer that applies for everybody. When asked this question, almost everyone's answer will be triggered by their own biography, by any personal experience of the city in question they might have. One person might remember a dishonest taxi driver who drove them from the airport into the city. Another might remember a successful or unsuccessful business deal, while yet another might remember a terrible or excellent hotel, a project that he or she completed in that city or people met there. Some people will have met the love of their lives there -- or quarrelled with them for the final time. Some will have spent their honeymoons there, while other will have been divorced there. Some of those asked will certainly have had a bad accident in one city or the other, or been robbed there. They might say any of the following things: "It's a beautiful city!", "It's one of the ugliest and most dangerous cities I've ever been to!", "You see nothing but rubbish and chaos in that city!", "You can forget the passage of time in that city -- it's so wonderfully old-fashioned that it makes me cry!", "This city is so lively and colourful and loud that it was where I finally found out what life can be like!", "That city is so sensible, neat and well-controlled that it made me even more introverted and depressed than I am usually!", "You should only judge a city by its dogs!", "A good city for shopping!" Although the houses, alleys, streets and city squares really do exist, every city is created mostly from stories, beliefs, prejudices, clichés, scraps of knowledge, observations, personal experiences, first-hand or second-hand impressions, dreams, hopes and fears. The architect Hans Dieter Schaal, who has designed scenery for almost every major theatre and opera house in the world, often spent many days in the same city. He began to research the cities, to get the feel of them and to travel them on foot like a wanderer. Alongside these subjective impressions, the author presents plenty of facts, making this book an accurate picture of an age dominated by cities.

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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.

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Heinz Tesar's architecture is associated with holistic ideas, and is 'value-conservative' in this sense. But at the same time, this architecture relates to its time, is modern, frank and open to consensus in a subjective dialectic between connection and isolation. However, this holistic concept is not concerned with hierarchical orders, but with relative weighting in a denomination process. Tesar is someone who names things, a 'baptist' who makes his objects that have acquired form individual and thus unmistakable.

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