Search results for ""edition axel menges""
Edition Axel Menges Opus 86: SSP AG, RWTH Aachen, Fakultät für Maschinenwesen
From the 1960s to the 1980s, new university buildings were regarded as real showcase projects in Germany. With their help, it was hoped to catch up with the international building scene again after the severe destruction of the Second World War. However, deficiencies in the technical execution and also in the subsequent building maintenance often led to the fact that in the course of the years serious structural problems appeared more and more frequently in the former showcase projects, which in some cases even led to the demolition of former demonstrative projects. This opus volume presents such an aging university ensemble on the old campus of the RWTH Aachen, which could not only be saved, but also embodies a renaissance of high-quality urban development and sustainable architecture. This balancing act is thanks to the architects and engineers of the renowned SSP AG from Bochum. First of all, they used the building task to significantly reorganise the old campus area in terms of urban development and to uncover lost urban references. In a next step, they demolished a dilapidated multi-storey car park and built the new technical centre, the Technikum on its foundations. In doing so, they followed the highest construction standards and sustainability strategies down to the smallest detail. However, the architects were able to retain the neighbouring, defective high-rise building of the so-called Sammelbau of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. They stripped the high-rise down to its bare supporting structure and then refurbished it to the highest technical and ecological standards, just like the Technikum. In times when terms such as sustainability or building ecology are being used in an almost inflationary manner, the project presented here is a real model, because it not only speaks of high standards, but has in fact implemented the highest standards and because it has given the concept of re-use (ie: the recycling of old, dilapidated building substance, a sensuously appealing structural form and a long-term new utility).
£26.91
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 Opus 82: Bodensee-Wasserversorgung, Sipplingen
Autumn 1958 marked the launching of the Bodensee-Wasserversorgung (Lake Constance water supply), an infrastructure project whose largest part is underground, hidden from view. Even in the first phase of the project, 2160 litres of water per second were taken from Lake Constance at a depth of roughly 60 m, treated on Sipplinger Berg and transported over hundreds of kilometres of pipeline through the Swabian Alb to the greater Stuttgart area. What is remarkable about this project, however, is not only the technological challenge of a combination of the lake-water treatment and the overland water pipeline, but particularly the special quality of the design of the visible parts of the waterworks, a result of the collaboration of engineers, architects, landscape designers and artists. Hermann Blomeier, who had settled in Constance in 1932 after graduating from the Bauhaus Dessau under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, was commissioned with implementing the Sipplingen pumping station following a competition and, with functionally and transparently designed buildings, created a counterpoint to the expressive landscape of Lake Constance that was as restrained as it was confident. The treatment plants on Sipplinger Berg, built by a team comprising Blomeier and the architect and academic Günter Wilhelm, from the 'Quelltopf' (source pot) and the filter basins to the clean-water reservoir, exactly meet functional requirements and at the same time impressively illustrate the technical processes. The long distance travelled by the water is accompanied by seemingly subordinate buildings designed by architect Wolf Irion, subtly integrated in the landscape as a kind of wayside chapels, housing the pipe-rupture safety devices and line valves. The high quality of the design is evident not only in the buildings, but also in the work of landscape architect Walter Rossow and of visual artists Hans-Dieter Bohnet, Martin Matschinsky and Brigitte Matschinksy-Denninghof. Andreas Schwarting is professor of architectural history and architecture theory at the Hochschule Konstanz. His research has focussed particularly on 20th-century architecture, its reception and historiography, and on specific issues of conservation and maintenance. His publications include the monograph on Walter Gropius Dessau-Törten estate, and he was instrumental in the publication of the Stiftung Wüstenrot on the preservation of contemporary buildings. He was appointed by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) to monitor the UNESCO world-heritage sites of the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau.
£26.91
Edition Axel Menges Fritz Barth: Cannstatter Straße 84, Fellbach
Text in English & German. Heroic 20th-century Modernism saw the private home as a place to first test out utopian theories -- a place for free play and experimentation where new approaches could be put into action, on a small scale but no less radical. Here, where architecture and life are most closely interwoven, Frank Lloyd Wright, Gerrit Rietveld, Le Corbusier and even Konstantin Melnikov found the suitable space to give their visionary concepts a plastic reality. The house built by the architect Fritz Barth for his own use in his home town of Fellbach places itself in an ironic, possibly melancholic distance from this kind of heroic pathos, but still has this tradition as its background. So it is considered by his builder as an experiment to determine the state of architecture at the start of the 21st century -- not to apply whatever offers itself to expand the architectonic repertoire (an approach that Barth considers to be a questionable, increasingly rhetoricised form of a somewhat naïve belief in the future), but to find out what possibilities are still open to architecture and how far architecture still permits a concept of 'dwelling' in the sense the word was used by Heidegger. The result is not a backward-looking homeliness, but a structure that, as a commitment to architecture in and of itself, stands his ground like few others in its time and place. This is not least because its complexity its multi-layered, opulent fabric of allusions, references and quotations, only reveals itself gradually and with close observation behind a simple appearance targeted on the immediacy of experience and architecture. Despite the somewhat polemical intentions of its builder and inhabitant, the house is not experienced as an ideological manifesto in bricks and mortar. It is and here lies its radicality, devoted to the immediate experience of 'dwelling' in so far as it does not allow, as Thomas Hettche writes in his essay, any distinction between surface and function, life and experience.
£46.24
Edition Axel Menges Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, International Terminal, San Francisco International Airport: Opus 64
At the time San Francisco International Airport opened as Mills Field Municipal Airport of San Francisco in 1927, most of the San Francisco Peninsula was pastureland. Over the years, new terminals and hangars were built to satisfy the demand of increased air traffic. Beginning with a small administration building of residential character including horizontal wood siding and red cedar shingles, the airport advanced to the larger San Francisco Airport Administration Building. After continuous growth, in 2000 the airport was reorganised and expanded into the vast, structurally iconic new International Terminal. The new building acts as a gateway between land and air, offering a recognisable image to arriving and leaving passengers. It is organised over five levels, making it America's first mid-rise terminal. It receives multiple modes of transportation -- linking cars, busses, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system and the internal light-rail system. According to Craig Hartman, design architect with SOM, the terminal is "founded upon the qualities of light and lightness". He says of the new roof: "We conceived of it as a floating, sheltering plane and as a symbol." The building's position above several lanes of traffic required a 380-foot long span between the central columns -- essentially the building is a bridge. Thus the building itself is in a state of lift-off, offering the first step into the air for departure or a transition space for arrival before the traveller really gets back to the ground. The terminal is built on friction-pendulum base insulators that allow it to swing in the event of an earthquake. The roof trusses' shape evokes many possible associations, the rolling Bay Area hills, the wings of airplanes, a bird in flight -- all images not unusual inspirations for airport designs, though in this case especially elegantly achieved.
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Edition Axel Menges Gerber Architekten, Messe Karlsruhe: Opus 57
Text in English and German. Despite their usually very large volumes, works by Eckhard Gerber's Dortmund practice are structurally light and transparent, precise in their detail, and make an unmistakable impact on the urban space. Presenting the new exhibition centre in Karlsruhe, this Opus volume is devoted to a building complex with all the self-confidence of a city-within-a-city. Admittedly visitors are not aware of that until they have passed a breath-taking exhibition loggia whose daring roof, protruding powerfully along the whole length of the building, attracts attention even from a distance. The basic concept, tailored to the urban landscape, the functional ground-plan arrangement, the unusually subtle use of structures and materials for a large building of this kind, and not least the high design quality of all structural parts will certainly mean a high level of acceptance and a long future for the Neue Messe in Karlsruhe.
£22.41
Edition Axel Menges Hollywood: Recent Developments
In many years of collaboration a research group with scholars from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the United States has looked into the most recent developments of Hollywood and its movie productions of the 1990s and the first years of the new century. Technical and distributional questions of the film market played as important a part as those of transnationalisation and new digital technologies. Interdependences between computer games and movies are scrutinised and then, of course, focal points of thematic developments. They reach from remakes and blockbusters to Steven Soderbergh and the works of other independent filmmakers, from science fiction via old and new myths to questions of gender research. Hollywood's treatment of the most important political event and trauma of the new century, the terrorist attack of 11 September 2001 on the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center in war, action, science fiction and disaster movies is dealt with and also the new wave of documentary films (Michael Moore and others). The Pentagon's influence on the film industry has also to be seen in this context. A major focus of this book is dedicated to the interdisciplinary co-operation between film research, art history and architecture. The present study closes with articles about Hollywood and Las Vegas, American cinema architecture and the role of architecture in recent Hollywood movies.
£43.20
Edition Axel Menges Karl Freidrich Schinkel: Das Architektonische Work Heute/The Architectural Work Today
Text in German. There is a copious and wide-ranging body of literature on Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Germany's most important 19th-century architect. But there is not a single work that records and assembles material on buildings by Schinkel that are still standing today, one hundred and sixty years after his death, after two world wars and major political upheavals. This volume is intended to fill the gap by providing the fullest possible compilation. It is surprising how many buildings by Schinkel still exist. There are over 170 of them in 112 different places, 62 in Germany and 49 in Poland and Russia, with Berlin and Potsdam each counting as a single location. The picture is very varied as far as the individual buildings are concerned. The churches make up the greatest number: about 86 of them are still standing. Then come 34 museums, theatres, guardhouses, schools and similar buildings, 18 palaces, castles and manor houses, 12 memorials, 12 tombs, 6 interiors and 4 fonts. A glance at a map of the former state of Prussia shows clearly that the buildings are not distributed evenly. In the west, the Rhineland and Westphalia, there were and are relatively few buildings by Schinkel. There is a decided cluster, the first regional concentration, in the present Saxony-Anhalt, between Magdeburg and Weimar. Further to the east come major accumulations in Berlin and Potsdam, and then the Oderbruch in the east of Brandenburg as another cluster. There are also concentrations of buildings by Schinkel in the Posen area as well as in West and East Prussia. Pomerania and Silesia have far fewer. Heinz Schonemann provides an introductory essay about Schinkel in his day, Helmut Borsch-Supan has contributed accounts of the way in which Schinkel's legacy is being handled today. The catalogue texts are by Martina Abri, Elke Blauert, Eva Borsch-Supan, Bernd Evers, Hillert Ibbeken and Heinz Schonemann.
£61.20
Edition Axel Menges Synthese des Arts: The Combination of Architecture and Art in Government Buildings on the Hardthohe in Bonn
Text in English and German. Linking art and architecture is one of the great Utopias of our century. Art has been released from its traditional bonds and sees itself faced with a world that has made systems independent to the extent that a link between art and building based on the idea of unity is no longer admissible. The collapse of our 'world into pieces' also typifies that situation of the arts looking for new orders. Now artist-architect Johannes Peter Holzinger, in co-operation with artists Eberhard Fiebig, Ottmar Horl/Formalhaut, Leonardo Mosso, Norbert Muller-Everling, Ansgar Nierhoff and Andreas Sobeck, working on the government buildings on the Hardthohe in Bonn, has succeeded in creating 'an avant-garde landmark that shows in the interplay of the arts that the avant-garde can also work positively in a team', as Dieter Ronte, director of the Stadtisches Kunstmuseum Bonn, put it in a contribution to this book. Holzinger links heterogeneous artistic positions in attempting an order of the different. The art in the outer areas of the complex mediates between the surroundings and the buildings. The visual signing system leads further into the centres, which are the same shape, of the existing administrative buildings, and creates some thing that is unmistakable there. The special structures designed by Holzinger, an intermediate form of architecture and landscape developed from the relief, include the earth itself, and in the casino architecture and art combine to form an indissoluble unit.
£21.60
Edition Axel Menges Ivano Gianola: Buildings and Projects
Text in English and Italian. Ivano Gianola is one of the most important exponents of the so-called Ticino School. This developed in the early 1970s as a loose association of architects who thought in related ways. At the time, their ambition was to set radical alternatives of a powerfully symbolic nature against the increasing destruction of the environment by new building in Ticino. What made Gianola's buildings different from others of the Ticino School from the outset was the subtle way they were bound into their context, and their precise craftsmanship. The latter meant that building after building, especially in terms of interior finish and the coherence of all the details, became real total works of art. So it is hardly surprising that Gianola created the most beautiful living spaces in Ticino, in the best Artsand-Crafts tradition. This craft precision, combined with high formal and aesthetic values, was probably also crucial to the fact that in the 1990s Gianola was commissioned to design a series of public and private buildings abroad. Thus his conversions and new buildings for the Bayerische Vereinsbank in Schäfflerhof in Munich made a major contribution to the new concept for the well-known Fünf Höfe site. But Gianola's greatest success so far was winning an international competition for redesigning the extensive site around the ruins of the former 'Palace' luxury hotel in Lugano. Here a theatre seating over 1 200 people, a modern art museum, housing and offices, a municipal park and a new section of the lakeside promenade will be created over the next five years. This is the biggest project that the Canton of Ticino has ever awarded, and it will have found an appropriate architect. This first publication of the complete works of Gianola gives the latest of the leading protagonists of the Ticino School a monograph of his own.
£53.91
Edition Axel Menges Biomorphic Architecture: Human and Animal Forms in Architecture
Text in English and German. Mankind needs to relate to inanimate matter as well. Manking 'animates' stones, mountains, rivers, yes even the world and the cosmos so that it can communicate with them. There is quite clearly a need to initiate individual contact also with architecture, with our surroundings. This is easier if we can also recognise certain characteristics of our own bodies in the constructed bodies of the built environment. We can go well beyond the common phenomenon of corporeality to find countless analogies between buildings and human beings, thus demonstrating a first step towards an anthropomorphy of architecture. These statements become clearer if a column is interpreted as an anthropomorphic element. If certain features in facades are reminiscent of a pair of eyes, then architectural physiognomy helps us to a dialogue: the building is looking at us, in the direct sense of the word. In the world of Christian symbolism the church -- spatially and theologically -- is constantly compared with the body of Christ, and thus becomes an image of a man-god. The church is the 'mysterious body of Christ', and all parts of the building become metaphors of Christ and his congregation.The 'organic' architecture of the 20th century in its three-dimensional and sculptural manifestations constantly addresses the corporeality of biological creatures. In very recent times we are surprised how often the metaphor of man and architecture occurs: in the work of Ricardo Porro, Imre Makovecz, Santiago Calatrava, Reima Pietila and others. Zoomorphic architecture is a variant of anthropomorphic architecture. Elephants, birds, fishes, insects do not just appear in many current works of modern architecture like those of Frank O Gehry and Coop Himmelblau, they are also absurd manifestations of trivial architecture that has also to be considered in its everyday quality. If we are talking about 'expanded' architecture, then cities, the world and even the cosmos have to be included. Mankind is still moved by the transfer from man as microcosm to the universe as macrocosm.
£41.40
Edition Axel Menges Hozon: Architectual and Urban Conservation in Japan
Text in English, German and Japanese. The architecture of Japan, both historic and contemporary, has attracted architects from all over the world since the early 60s. In search of the 'Japaneseness' of place (ma), space and architecture several dissertations have been written, especially about the Japanese house and rituals, Conservation, however, was largely neglected. Only recently, with the listing of Japanese sites as Unesco World Heritage in 1994 and the Nara conference on authenticity in 1995, has the Japanese approach to conservation emerged as an intriguing issue. The practice of dismantling and reconstructing complex timber structures represents an essentially Japanese approach. Moreover, the refined documentation and structural research prior to any intervention are much admired by the international conservation community. The articles for this publication were prepared in the context of a Japanese-German co-operative programme in architectural and urban conservation in 1996-98. For the first time ever a Western publication attempts to portray the Japanese practice of repair -- hozon -- of historic structures. Detailed photographic documentations demonstrate the beauty of timber structures that are otherwise concealed by roofs and walls. It also becomes evident that an architectural object is not an entity that is defined once and for all, but an object that allows for change. Documentations of ongoing projects, with emphasis on the Fudo-do on the sacred mountain of Koyasan, explain and justify various kinds of interventions that are aimed at structural reinforcement and disaster prevention.
£46.80
Edition Axel Menges Brunnert und Partners, Flughafen Leipzig/Halle: Opus 52
Text in English and German. The new Leipzig/Halle airport has not just one, but two predecessors. One was Leipzig-Mockau airport, opened in 1923 and often still used after the Second World War in the GDR days to serve the Leipziger Messe. The other was Leipzig/Halle airport which opened in 1927 and by 1937 was already the second-largest airport in Germany. Passenger numbers had increased fourfold by 1994. A master plan was worked out for a second runway, intended for 3.5 million passengers per year. An open architectural competition followed and was won by Brunnert und Partner from Stuttgart. They won with a risky concept that ran counter to the master plan. Instead of filling the site between the two runways the architects designed a huge bridge structure spanning the railway track and integrating the car-park, the mall, the check-in hall, the access road and the transfer to the railway station. This concludes the first building phase, which begins at the existing terminal and ends beyond the railway lines. The concept of the bridge will not be complete until the second building phase, although it can already be made out quite clearly.
£25.20
Edition Axel Menges Steidle + Partner, KPMG-Gebaude, Munchen: Opus 48
Text in German. Munich is lucky. A city that is at the top of the popularity scale needs nothing more than attractive building land. There has been a great deal more of this in recent years since industry and commerce have moved off to the periphery, barracks have been closed, the goods station and the airport have been relocated and the exhibition centre has gone to the empty site in Riem that was freed up. This meant that the Theresienhohe became an urban development area as well. Trade-exhibition halls were still being built around the historic parkland, established as an exhibition park around the turn of the century, in the 1980s. In 1997, an architectural competition was looking for ideas for an "inner-city, dense mixture of use for culture, as a central, for housing and commerce". The prize-winning suggestion by Steidle + Partner became the basis for further planning. The convincing feature was the instinctive sureness with which the practice imposed scale and urban character of the surrounded quarters on to the former exhibition-centre site. The development proposal, which could be interpreted in many ways but proposed an easily remembered line, is continued in the architecture, with its sets of buildings staggered against each other. The first buildings to be completed included the KPMG head office, which emerged from a workshop procedure: the ground plan for the complex uses a meander pattern, completed at one corner by a high-rise residential building -- which means that the quarter principle of reversible residential and office use is demonstrated within a single block. A central entrance courtyard provides access to the office block, but there is access from the outside elsewhere as well, should the function ever be changed. The building rises to seven storeys, and is pleasingly disturbing because of the lively colours on its facade of glazed ceramic panels. The even staccato of the narrow windows forms a contrast with this. Both together give the architecture the appeal of a mysterious musical instrument -- certainly intended for very young, rhythmic music.
£21.60
Edition Axel Menges Steidle + Partner, Wohnquartier Freischutzstrasse, Munchen: Opus 49
Otto Steidle has devoted himself continuously to the subject of housing for over 30 years, more perhaps than almost any other architect in Germany. At first the Munich office experimented with building with prefabricated elements. This was not in the first place a response to the building industry's production requirements, but intended to give occupants maximum flexibility when equipping or modifying their homes, for example in the residential estate in Genter Strasse in Munich (1969 -- 72) or at documenta urbana in Kassel (1979 -- 82). It was from 1986 -- 92, in the Kreuzgassenviertel in the old town in Nuremberg, that Steidle first addressed the high-density inner-city housing construction that he has increasingly made his own in recent years. For the Wacker-Haus in Munich (1992 -- 96, Opus 31) and the Michaelis quarter in Hamburg (1994 -- 2001) he experimented with tower-like residential buildings developed from the traditional urban block, right down to the inner courtyard, protected from the noise.For the Freischutzstrasse residential quarter in Munich Steidle first combined the 'classical' linear block with a sequence of tower-like slender buildings -- finding an up-to-date response in this way to the challenge of combining living in green surroundings with urban structures and appropriate density. The interplay of different building types made it possible to create exciting 'urban' spaces in green surroundings; an existing biotope with a fine stand of trees thrusts deep into the estate on the open south flank. Although the estate was built in five phases, it seems to be all of a piece. This is not least due to the sensitive colour scheme devised by the Berlin artist Erich Wiesner, who has been working with Steidle + Partner for many years. The dwellings are characterized by generous living areas lit on two sides. The sizes of the dwellings can be varied by removing or adding individual spaces.
£21.60
Edition Axel Menges Ernst Gisel- Rathaus Fellbach: Opus 19
Text in English & German. Not just a winner, but a major winner. And Fellbach won it by letting Zurich architect Ernst Gisel build its new town hall. And it is just the same as winning the lottery: it takes time for it to sink in and to be really pleased. Winning also means stress, especially if the player never really believed in his luck. But why be pleased about a town hall, about a collection of official rooms, intended only to make administering the individual citizen even smoother? Can a town hall be anything at all more than a home for all the official panoply of tit-for-tat responses? It can indeed, if you make it into a piece of the town, a good piece of the town . . . Ernst Gisel's town hall for Fellbach is one of the very few buildings that make one enthuse about the town. Like Stirling's Neue Staatsgalerie it invites you to linger -- even without a reason: in the Stuttgart museum you are attracted by terraces, ramps and an open rotunda, whereas in the Fellbach building there is a sense of a strong suction that will draw the public into the inner courtyard of the complex. "A bit Italian" -- that is what Gisel himself says about the atmosphere there, and he is right. The urban quality of the new town hall corresponds with the quality of the detailed architectural solutions and the care with which Gisel devoted himself to the architectural design in the interior. Art in the building? There is that too. Gisel himself designed the fountain for the market-place façade: architecture on a small scale, a game with volumes through which the water slowly runs. In the inner courtyard, in the town-hall square, is the sculpture Überlebenskopf (survival head) by Zurich artist Otto Müller -- a sober monument that corresponds precisely with the confident but modest character of the building. The new town hall is a fairly perfect piece of architecture and urban art: reticent as a whole, monumental in detail.
£26.10
Edition Axel Menges Fundacion Cesar Manrique, Lanzarote (Opus 16)
Text in English, German and Spanish. Over the last decade the island of Lanzarote has become one of the favourite tourism destinations in the Canary Islands. However, our interest is more one of artistic than of touristic discovery, and this would be virtually unthinkable without the work of an artist who fell in love with this wonderful paradise. We refer to César Manrique (1919-1992), who was able to see and reveal to us the unique beauties arising out of the happy marriage of the four elements believed by the Greeks to form the whole of creation: air, earth, fire and water. In fact, after returning to his island in 1968 after a period spent in New York, Manrique dedicated himself passionately to realising his utopia, to renew Lanzarote out of his own sources. Among Manrique's best known works on Lanzarote are the Casa Museo del Campesino, the Jameos del Agua, the Mirador del Río, the Cactus Garden and his own house in the Taro de Tahíche. Manrique's house in Taro de Tahíche, which nowadays houses the César Manrique Foundation, can be considered as a 'work in progress' as it was built over a period of almost 25 years and was still not completed upon the artist's death. Arising out of the five interconnected volcanic bubbles of the underground storey, it has become a metaphor for the amorous meeting of man with Mother Earth, the latter being understood, to use Bruno Taut's expression, as 'a fine home for living'. The spaces on the upper floor can be virtually mistaken for the white cubic buildings dispersed throughout the island. But when we cross their thresholds, we have the unique feeling that here something was created which is really new. In fact, Manrique -- enemy in equal measure of the 'pastiche' of regionalism and the off-key International Style blind to differentiation -- sifted the vernacular with certain modern filters such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe or Le Corbusier, and at the same time he gave it such a specific stamp that the final result became indigenous and unmistakable. Simón Marchán Fiz is professor of aesthetics in Madrid. Like Marchán Fiz, Pedro Martínez de Albornoz lives in Madrid. The photographs shown in this book are the best photographic interpretation of one of Manrique's work up to now.
£24.00
Edition Axel Menges Technology-Driven Design Approaches to Utopia
Together with his colleagues and students at the University of Cyprus, Phocas challenges traditional definitions of utopia by presenting us with analytical research and clearly delineated visions of some architectural futures, which defy easy description. Some may view the architecture-diploma projects in this book skeptically as fantastical or even as frightening visions of some technologically driven future, but they are anything but fantasy. They should be appreciated as a continuing creative search for the defining of what is the meaning in our 21st-century world of "utopia" and the role of architectural technology in expressing it. This search takes us beyond the traditional notions of utopia, which have historically been illustrated as overtly romantic, whimsical images along with a plethora of mechanistic formal architectural or architectonic proposals for utopian cities or communities. Some of these utopian visions, which were realized as isolated acts during the first half of the 20th century, in as socio-economically and culturally diverse places such as the United Kingdom, suburban North America or the Indian sub-continent proved to be, once inhabited, less than utopian. In studying the student proposals, one could argue that these architectural visions are derived from an evolution of human technology and an understanding of growth and adaptability in nature. For instance, some of the projects propose new "building blocks" which can be likened to the ancient technology of making bricks and the quarrying and shaping of stone which led to the development of masonry construction and an entire new architecture. Other proposals can be likened to the self-generating growth and renewal process of plant life. Like in nature, we see in the students work proposals for structural systems that grow vertically out of constructed or natural landscapes in a symbiotic relationship with the forces of gravity, wind and sun, while mining these primal forces to enable human habitation. Others appear as in natural growth, as expandable adaptable infrastructure systems intertwined with and serving existing conditions. And yet other proposals are developed as independent systems that are more au-tonomous in their form and function.
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Edition Axel Menges Auf der Suche nach verlorenen Paradiesen
The fact that the entire history of culture and technology could represent a single, continuous expulsion of mankind from the original, paradiese state of nature was already described visionarilyin the Bible and predicted with all its positive and negative consequences. Everyone knows the story of Adam and Eve, of their 'Fall' and their 'Expulsion from Paradise'. Even as a non-Christian it is worth taking a look at the fairytale-like-mythic text of the Old Testament, although the picture and the process completely contradict our current scientific findings. One would almost be inclined to assume that the idea of a primeval paradise is innate in all human beings and that every human being with his becoming, his birth, his childhood and his adulthood experiences something like a Genesis. He is born innocent and helpless, wakes up, looks around, believes to be free, gets to know his time, his surroundings, his life. The final expulsion of every human being from life is his death. He is a sentenced to death. Despite all religious promises, man has always been aware of this fact, also of the fact that he has only this one life and that he ultimately cannot count on the hope that beyond this life there is something that could be called 'salvation', a happy return to the Garden of Eden. As the book shows with numerous, primarily European examples, the history of man is therefore full of efforts to regain here and now the lost paradise, no matter how precarious the result may be. In search of the lost paradises: a somewhat unusual history of man in his relationship to nature, followed by a description of the current state of landscape planning and garden design. In the third, concluding part of the book, the author develops new, strangely surreal and poetic concepts of the treatment of nature, inspired by literature, film, theatre and tourism.Hans Dieter Schaal, born in Ulm in 1943, is an architect, landscape architect, stage designer and exhibition designer. His works, the majority of which have been published by the Axel MengesEdition, have meanwhile reached an audience far beyond his in my homeland. The author lives and works in a village near Biberach an der Riss.
£53.91
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 CityLight
Text in English & German. The ongoing paradigm change in regard to the use of energy, its efficient usage and the consumption of resources is giving rise to new light systems and lighting appliances. This development might also lead to the use of light as a building material in its own right, comparable to traditional building materials, making it possible to create light space productions something that did not seem feasible up to now due to the high cost of energy and of light systems. The goal of this book is to develop temporary light spaces that re-interpret the existing urban environment on a seasonal basis or over a cycle of several years. As a result, the city will literally appear in a new light. Strollers in the city streets will experience their familiar environment in a new way. Illuminated planes interlacing with planes made by linear fields of light beams will create immaterial material space experiences: still lifes of light within which one can move about and light choreographies that move barely noticeably, creating still lifes in motion. Current research aims at exploring, imagining and inventing stand-alone spatial structures of light, adding on to and transforming existing spaces, creating a new spatial awareness that may enable people to experience urban space in a different way. Similar to the process of architectural design, where haptic built volumes create interspaces, the light spaces that are currently being designed make these interspaces visible and allow urban dwellers to experience unexpected spatial constellations. In addition to the presentation of light-planning examples in Paris, Shanghai, Helsinki, Mekka and Frankfurt am Main the book includes a number of essays relating to the subject, among them: "Light architecture" (Werner Oechslin), The Potemkin city (Adolf Loos), Glass architecture and letters about glass houses (Paul Scheerbart), Alpine architecture (Bruno Taut), The unvisible cities (Italo Calvino), Architecture must burn (Coop Himmelb(l)au), In search of light (Wolfgang Rang), City light. About the social power of light (Helmut Bien), Light or the loss of darkness (Manuel Cuadra), Visible and unvisible light (Andreas Danler), Light concepts for Frankfurt am Main (Michael Hootz), Light planning for cities in China (Hao Luoxi), City light. An instrument of urban planning (Roger Narboni), Light for the public space (Susanne Seitinger), Sustainable urban lighting (Mark Burton-Page), Borders, places, light (Niels Gutschow), Earth and spirit (Wolfgang Rang). With texts by Michael Batz, Niels Gutschow, Hao Luoxi, Roger Narboni, Werner Oechslin, Wolfgang Rang and others.
£61.20
Edition Axel Menges The Wings of the Crane, 50 Years of Lufthansa Design: 50 Years of Lufthansa Design
Text in English and German. The basic features of Deutsche Lufthansa's present corporate image emerged almost 45 years ago. It was created by Otl Aicher, one of the principal figures at the now legendary Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm. Another work by Aicher that spoke to the whole of Germany, as it were (and still does, in rudiments), is the 1972 corporate image for the Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen. The corporate image he created for the Olympic Games in Munich, which made an essential contribution to the ambience of the event, has also remained memorable. Since the ideas developed by Aicher and his colleagues were implemented in the early sixties, the airline has been seen world-wide as a perfect example of a consistently developed corporate image. Aicher based himself on ideas from the Deutscher Werkbund and took the company's entire inventory into consideration: "house colours, pictorial and typographic logos, typeface, graphic and typographic rules and standards, photographic style, quality of support materials, packaging, exhibition systems, architectural characteristics, forms (design) of interior furnishings and equipment, style of work and service clothes". As well as Otl Aicher, numerous other product and graphic designers, fashion designers and advertising and marketing agencies have worked for Lufthansa. They include Otto Firle, whose ideas led to the crane logo, Hartmut Esslinger and his company frog design, Priestman & Goode, Müller Romca Industriedesign, Don Wallance, Wilhelm Wagenfeld, Hans Theo Baumann, Nick Roericht, Wolfgang Karnagel, Topel & Pauser and the bhar design practice, fashion designers Uli Richter, Ursula Tautz and Werner Machnick, Jürgen Weiss, Gabriele Strehle and the Jobis company as well as the agencies Zintzmeyer & Lux, the Peter Schmidt Group, Ogilvy & Mather, Young & Rubicam, Spiess/Ermisch/Abel, Springer & Jacoby, McCann & Erickson and Fanghänel & Lohmann. An exhibition of the same name at the Museum for Applied Arts in Frankfurt deals with the same subject as the book.
£36.63
Edition Axel Menges Konstantin Melnikov and his House
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.
£30.25
Edition Axel Menges Dream Architecture: Today's Designs for Tomorrow
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.
£70.95
Edition Axel Menges New Museums in Spain: Neue Museen in Spanien
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.
£52.20
Edition Axel Menges Oscar Wilde--The Fairy Tales: The Happy Prince and Other Fairy Tales
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.
£27.40
Edition Axel Menges Margarethe Von Trotta Filmmaking as Liberation
The name Margarethe von Trotta, the famous German directon, has been synonymous with high-quality conema for over 20 years.
£37.75
Edition Axel Menges Schneider and Schumacher KMPGGebaude Leipzig Opus Opus 37 v 37
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.
£28.93
Edition Axel Menges Peter Hübner: Building as a Social Process
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.
£44.10
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 Time, Space & Material: The Mechanics of Layering in Architecture
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.
£35.82
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 German Architects in Great Britain: Planning & Building in Exile 19331945
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.
£44.10
Edition Axel Menges Weissenhofsiedlung: Experimental Housing Built for the Deutscher Werkbund, Stuttgart, 1927
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.
£62.10
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 Rob Krier-Figures: A Pictorial Journal 2000-2002
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.
£62.10
Edition Axel Menges Modern Architecture in Berlin: 466 Examples from 1900 to the Present Day
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.
£28.80
Edition Axel Menges Stadttagebücher
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.
£62.10
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 Heinz Tesar Architecture of Layers: Ten Recent Buildings
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.
£33.21
Edition Axel Menges Opus 77: Ferdinand Kramer / SSP SchurmannSpannel, Forschungszentrum BiK-F, Frankfurt am Main
Text in English & German. A whole issue of the architectural magazine Bauwelt, being published in Berlin, was dedicated to the completed building. The Institutes of Pharmacology and Food Chemistry of the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main by Ferdinand Kramer, who had also built most of the other new buildings on the campus, soon advanced to a highly appreciated master work of modern post-war architecture but later it was nearly forgotten. Many years of intensive use and neglected maintenance rendered the rehabilitation of the buildings indispensable. After a comprehensive renovation by the architects SSP Schürmann-Spannel of Bochum, the concrete structure with its striking brise-soleil elements on the south side and the lecture-hall cube detached from the main building, is not only again a convincing built monument, but also an exemplary example of a successful conversion. Where for many years students of pharmacology and food chemistry studied and experimented, 160 scientists of the Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiK-F) are researching the interaction of climate and biosphere. The book provides a detailed description of the building, which dates from 1957 and which was completely reconditioned by the office of SchürmannSpannel in the years 2009 to 2013. The pictorial section contains plans of the original and present condition as well as photographs especially made for this publication by Jörg Hempel. It is preceded by Fabian Wurm's essay, which not only discusses the building in detail, but also addresses the pressing question of converting buildings from the time after World War II.
£22.41
Edition Axel Menges Sonwik, Flensburg: Series: Opus 61
Text in English and German. Shortly after the navy had given up its Flensburg Fjord base a group of developers acquired the site which comprises 7 hectares of land and 5.5 hectares of water. The group developed an urban quarter here and called it 'Sonwik', from the north Frisian words 'Son' (sun) and 'Wik' (bay). Its principal attraction is a housing estate, unique in Germany, which consists of 20 water-houses painted in vibrant colour. They are placed in loose series on a right angle by a jetty, at the same time forming the outer framework for a large marina for 400 sailing boats and yachts. Most of the former navy buildings on the wide green promenade have now been converted for civilian use -- under the eyes of the monument-protection authorities and with great skill and sensitivity. The red brick buildings date from the first third of the 20th century, and now accommodate apartments, offices, shops, cafés and businesses related to water sports. The row of buildings is about 500m long, and is complemented, in urban development terms, by two taller buildings that at the same time mark the unmistakable entrance to this attractive site. They were designed by the Hamburg architects APB, who won the competition for them. However, the special feature are the 20 houses standing in the water, designed by the Flensburg practice of Asmussen & Partner. Each of them was built on a reinforced concrete platform placed about 2m above water level, using a two-storey timber-post structure. The owners were able to structure their own floor plans and equally -- following a canon established as a matter of principle -- the size and position of some windows. In addition to the roof terrace and private mooring 'cellar', the striking characteristic of these buildings are their colours -- red, blue, orange and yellow -- which are visible from a great distance.
£22.41
Edition Axel Menges Otto Ernst Schweizer: Milchhof Nurnberg, Opus 59
Text in English and German. Otto Ernst Schweizer (1890-1965), architect, philosopher and teacher, had a crucial effect on the path of Modern architecture. When the central dairy in Nuremberg was finished in 1931 it was the largest complex of its kind in Europe and was seen by critics as a work that deserved the rank of prototype.
£22.41
Edition Axel Menges Peter Kulka: Minimalismus und Sinnlichkeit / Minimalism and Sensuality
Text in English and German. Peter Kulka is a major German architect. His buildings in recent years have been characteristically succinct and minimalist. This started with the Sächsischer Landtag in Dresden. Since then Kulka has produced numerous works of high creative ambition. His projects regularly feature in architecture magazines, and also on the arts pages in the daily press. Following a 1996 publication, this is the second monograph on his work. The book accompanies the show of his work in the Deutsches Architektur Museum in Frankfurt am Main from late 2005 to early 2006. The exhibition is based on Kulka's archives, which contain an extensive range of first-class architectural photographs as well as project designs and visual presentations. 22 projects are presented, centred around his work over the past 15 years and leading up to the most recent projects like the rebuilding of the Schloß in his home town of Dresden. Kulka studied under Selman Selmanagic' in Weißensee, Berlin. He then worked with Hermann Henselmann in East Berlin, later moving to Hans Scharoun in West Berlin. He had his first major success in the Herzog, Köpke, Kulka, Töpper and Siepmann partnership with the design for the University of Bielefeld. In 1979 he started his own practice in Cologne, followed by a Dresden branch in 1991. Alongside the Sächsischer Landtag in Dresden, Kulka's best-known designs include the "Haus der Stille" in the Abtei Königsmünster in Meschede, the Bosch Haus Heidehof in Stuttgart, and also the new chamber music hall and the new foyer in the Konzerthaus Berlin, Karl Friedrich Schinkel's former Deutsches Schauspielhaus.
£44.10
Edition Axel Menges Ludwig Persius: The Architectural Work Today
Text in English and German. Ludwig Persius (1803-1845) was a pupil of Karl Friedrich Schinkel and his closest assistant. Very little has been published about him to date. With the aim of providing an exhaustive documentation of all his work that is still in existence, the present volume now shows Persius' architectural work in its current condition in 180 photographs, with numerous as yet unpublished exterior and interior photographs including also many detailed views. Persius' architecture was moulded by the work of Schinkel. He was his site supervisor at the Hofgärtnerhaus in Charlottenhof, adopting its style inspired by Italian domestic architecture for his numerous villas with towers, which are still characteristic features of the Potsdam cityscape. He was a master of the disposition of building volumes and of tying buildings into the landscape. About 50 buildings have survived, including early industrial structures. Persius' work is to be found almost exclusively in Potsdam. King Friedrich Wilhelm IV appointed him to the post of an "Architect to the King", a title he shared only with Friedrich August Stüler. His best-known buildings are the Friedenskirche in Potsdam, the Heilandskirche in Sacrow and the so-called Mosque by the Havel bay in Potsdam, a steam-driven pump-house in the Moorish style for the fountains in the gardens of Sanssouci and an eminent example of the romantic and exotic transfiguration of a simple functional building.
£10.90
Edition Axel Menges Heinz Tesar: Drawings: Drawings (Zeichnungen)
Text in English and German. This book presents a selection from all Tesar's creative periods and an essay introduces the background to this art and its current positioning, which not least raises theoretical questions about the relationship between pictorial art and architecture. Tesar's drawings are presented as a project that turns a vision of Modernism into reality within a manageable personal sphere. The vision conjures up, as modern creative work is condemned to becoming increasingly specialised, an alternative 'art as a life practice', but -- and this is the present level of perception -- one that can ultimately be realised only in individual art projects.
£41.40
Edition Axel Menges Karl Friedrich Schinkel--Leben und Werk: Leben und Werk
Text in German. This monograph was first published in 1980, and appears now in a third, improved edition. It is the first and to date the only book to place Schinkel's life and work in the artistic context of his day. It is devoted to his family and circle of friends, and to his universal artistic, technical and administrative activities. Arranged according to his various spheres of work, it brings together a variety of material from contemporary sources, letters, newspapers, diaries and other writing and presents Schinkel as his contemporaries saw him and in his own words. Authors featured include Bettina and Achim von Arnim, Clemens von Brentano, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Johann Gottfried Schadow, Christian Daniel Rauch, Friedrich Tieck, Carl Friedrich Zelter and many others of his friends, who followed his artistic development sympathetically and also critically. As well as his architectural designs and buildings, a fitting place is found for his publicly exhibited dioramas and the magazine critics' response to them, his oil paintings, which were much loved by the Romantics, his stage sets, which are still admired and not least his arts-and-crafts work. The chosen illustrations underline the diversity of his output. Dankwart Guratzsch wrote about the first edition in the daily paper Die Welt: "...certainly the most moving book of the Schinkel year -- as it shows the setbacks and disappointments, and the physical suffering this tough, tireless, imaginative man had to go through to keep faith in his task as an ennobler of all human circumstances. Heinz Ohff, for many years arts editor for the Berlin Tagespiegel, wrote recently that he still considered the book 'unsurpassed' in terms of its wealth of facts. And Walter Jens referred to it in a lecture as an important cultural-historical analysis".
£41.40
Edition Axel Menges Urbanismus im Industriezeitalter: Von der klassizistischen Stadt zur Garden City
Text in German. Despite the wide variety of publications about urban development, there has long been a lack of a full and coherent presentation of the way town planning has developed in our time. The present publication closes this gap in urban-development literature. It starts at the point at which the upheaval of the French Revolution and industrialisation set the course for today's urban constellations. The survey follows the narrative approach taken by Anglo-Saxon historians, and the individual sections deal with the main urban-development themes that shifted into the foreground in the 19th century: municipal revolution and urban regulations; industrial revolution and urban growth, above all in relation to the special part played by Great Britain; and the continuation of the classical urban-design ideal in France, England and Germany. Also the social-Utopian estate and urban-development models devised by Robert Owen and Charles Fourier in the early days of industrialisation; the great city re-developments (Paris, Lyon etc.), urban beautification (the Ringstrasse in Vienna) and urban expansion (London's suburban growth, the Berlin general building plan of 1862 and tenement building); paternalistic workers' housing programmes in England, France and Germany; attempts at aesthetic renewal by Camillo Sitte, Raymond Unwin and the 'City-Beautiful Movement' in the USA in the late 19th century; attempts at reform through the garden-city idea and subsequent movement. The treatment of these themes illustrates the extent to which contemporary urban situations are determined by 19th century ideas and enterprises. Thus the book provides all readers interested in urban development with an extensive set of facts and strategies. It has turned out as a compendium that aims to present and cast light on the essential features of the city as a Gesamtkunstwerk and to identify important criteria for future urban-development decisions.
£52.20