Search results for ""Author Axel"
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 Oswald Matthias Ungers, Haus Belvederestraße 60, Köln-Müngersdorf: Haus Belvederestrabe 60, Koln-Mungersdorf
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.
£26.91
Edition Axel Menges Erdmut Bramke, Werkverzeichnis. Bd. 3: Kunst am Bau
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.
£35.91
Edition Axel Menges Debordered Space: Indeterminacy within the Visual Perception of Space
Text in English and German. This monograph describes the construction of reality through the cognitive subject, and, associated with this, potential ways for producing space. The book studies methods for exposing, through indeterminacy, the definition of space to a larger field of possibility within personal interpretation, and thus virtually de-bordering space. Against a historical background of past attempts to de-border space visually, new possible ways of indeterminately defining space through the modulation of light are shown. The analysis of various modulation phenomena is illustrated with references to works of art, and the phenomena are studied with a view to integrating them in the actual production of space. The modulation of light has the potential of creating diffuse and ambivalent characteristics on space-defining surfaces. This fuzziness offers an opportunity for a freer interpretation of spatial definition and thus also for de-bordering space due to the process of perception. New materials and technologies can be used to create spatial worlds that open up genuine, hitherto unknown realms of cognition and experience. Based on multilayered, ambiguous spatial situations, according to the author, new open spaces of perception are possible and thus an expansion of human consciousness as well with respect to the world around us.
£32.40
Axel and Ash My Bucketlist
£22.99
Edition Axel Menges Gunter Rambow Posters: Plakate / Posters
Text in English and German. Gunter Rambow (b.1938) is one of the most prominent designers in the area of visual communication and cultural advertising. He produced numerous photo books and outstanding posters at the Rambow & Lienemeyer graphic design studio (1961-86), and is now carrying on his work at the Rambow, van de Sand studio. Particularly with his posters for the Schauspiel Frankfurt under the direction of Peter Palitzsch, Rambow succeeded in creating symbols for theatre's claim to political involvement and effectively introducing them into the urban environment. From 1974 to 2003 Gunter Rambow taught at the Universität Kassel and the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe as a professor of visual communication. In 2007, the Museum für Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt is following the example of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Shanghai Art Museum and many other institutions and dedicating a major solo exhibition to his work. The show is an encounter between more than one hundred posters by Gunter Rambow -- dating from 1962 to the present -- and Richard Meier's museum architecture. The publication appearing in conjunction with this exhibition documents the dialogue between Rambow's poster art and Meier's museum building. Authors Eva Linhart, Anita Kühnel and Volker Fischer acquaint readers with Rambow's poster oeuvre -- far beyond the limited number on exhibit -- and his aesthetic strategies. Not only is light shed on the latter from the art-historical perspective, but a sense is conveyed of Rambow's innovative achievement in using the medium of the poster to create unmistakable corporate designs for a spectrum of widely differing institutions. The catalogue moreover provides an analytical appraisal of Rambow's ability to trigger insights about the environment and human relationships in those who view his posters.
£35.10
Axel and Ash Swept Away by Wanderlust
£22.99
Edition Axel Menges Metropolis: A Cinematic Laboratory for Modern Architecture
Text in English and German. What links film and architecture? Above all it is 'Metropolis', the film that Fritz Lang made in the Babelsberg studios in 1925/26. Its extravagance created enormous financial difficulties for Ufa, the biggest German film concern, but it had a brilliant premiere in Berlin in January 1927, went on to enjoy unparalleled success world-wide -- and then came to symbolise (film) architectural design for the future. 'Metropolis', internationally renowned as a major piece of German film culture, represents film art in the Weimar Republic in an artistically unique and yet unusually popular way, but it also contains one of the first fully-formulated 20th-century city fantasies. Fritz Lang, stimulated by a journey to New York, had his architect Erich Kettelhut build a city of the future in the Babelsberg Studios outside Berlin, which, as a vision, went far beyond the real skyscraper silhouette. Luis Bunuel wrote the following about 'Metropolis' as early as 1927: Henceforth and for ever more the scenic designer has been replaced by the architect. The cinema will serve as a faithful interpreter of the architect's boldest dreams. The Tower of Babel from 'Metropolis' has been a piece of urban fantasy that has inspired architects of every colour right down to the present day. American urban visions in films of the 80s and 90s, like for instance the cult film 'Blade Runner', would be inconceivable without Lang's 'Metropolis'. Now as then the Metropolis designs are considered to be highly-developed examples of a Modernist laboratory for film and architecture. All the surviving scenic architectural designs, over 200 working, factory and set photographs as well as numerous other documents, including the film architect's hitherto unpublished memoirs and working reports had been placed at the authors' disposal. In addition, other photographs from the Cinematheque Francaise and a bundle of over 300 hitherto unpublished photographs from the estate of a German emigrant to Australia have been included.
£41.40
Edition Axel Menges Espace de l'Art Concret, Mouans-Sartoux: Opus 58
Text in French and English. Mouans-Sartoux, a small community near Cannes, has become a Mecca for concrete art. Since 1990 two collectors from Switzerland, Sybil Albers and the artist Gottfried Honegger, have been working to establish the Espace de l'Art Concret (EAC). Neither a museum nor a municipal gallery, this institution is located in the Château de Mouans and in two new buildings in its large park. The first of the two new buildings was a studio designed by Marc Barani from Nice for children who come here to paint and to develop their aesthetic senses. Barani began work in 1990 with the extension to the cemetery of Saint Pancrace in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. The way he located the cemetery in the local landscape and his use of original vegetable and mineral materials immediately brought him to international notice. In 2000 Albers and Honegger decided to donate their collections to the French state, on the understanding that it would finance a building to house the nearly 500 works of art. A competition was launched and was won by the Zurich architects Annette Gigon and Mike Guyer. The building, which opened its doors in 2004, stands on a steeply sloping wooded terrain. As one enters the park, one sees its yellowish-green hues through the branches of the trees. The monochrome colour unifies the five levels of the building that give no clue as to what it contains. While the outside of the building looks artificial, independent, sculptural, its interior is set up in accordance with Honegger's special instructions. He wanted the building that was to house his collection to be distinct from the official and sterile museums that are often laid out on the gallery model, passageways for contemplation, internal streets with overhead lighting. Honegger prefers an interior that is like a private home rather than a public institution. The domestic framework of the rooms must reflect a principle dear to the heart of the donors: that the works are to be lived with. Honegger takes an overall view of our material environment and emphasises that for him the distinction between fine arts and applied arts has no meaning, because "an unapplied art would have no purpose and would be bound to be insignificant and disappear".
£21.60
Edition Axel Menges Real and Fake in Architecture: Close to the Original, Far from Authenticity?
The condition of "fake" and "real" in architecture is rarely publicly discussed nor has it encountered broad journalistic or scholarly attention. This book explores the realm of truth, authenticity and fakery in architecture, providing a timely collection of analytical essays and projects. Photographers, writers and architects share their understanding and speculations about a broad range of spaces and concepts all searching for common ground between real and imagined, function and story. The authors challenge our perception of "authenticity " through the examination of built and simulated environments, architectural fiction, theatric illusions and mannerist trickery. They examine the notion that the principle of Sullivans "form follows function" contains a paradox caused by the ambiguity and complexity of architectural expression. Buildings are perceived through an individuals personal experiences while also being interpreted along broader cultural values. The works shown reveal that under scrutiny, any built environment harbors both, reveals moments of truth, deception and ambiguity all of it partially in the eye of the beholder.The diverse contributions shed light on unexpected identities in architecture inviting criticalthought about our built environment analog and digital. The goal of this publication goes beyond unmasking deception in architecture, it aims at unfolding time-lines and revealing the layerednature of people and places. The images and essays reveal our contemporary condition and let collective and individual narratives unfold, a range of truths in themselves. Expanding from the discussion about truthful materiality and tectonics, this book provides an understanding ofreal, authentic, and fake in urbanism and architecture. Anne-Catrin Schultz studied architecture inStuttgart and Florence. Following post-doctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technoloyin Boston, she worked for several years with Turnbull Griffin Haesloop and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in San Francisco. While developing her own practice, she has taught at the University of California in Berkeley, the California College of the Arts and the Academy of Arts University in San Francisco. In 2013 she joined the Department of Architecture at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston.
£53.91
Edition Axel Menges Moderne, Postmoderne und nun Barock?: Entwick- lungslinien der Architektur des 20. Jahrhunderts
"This book is an attempt at architectural criticism" that is how Robert Venturi opened the discussion on Post-Modernism in architecture in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecturea generation ago. And this was a typical beginning. Criticism of the Modern movement by architects like Le Corbusier Mies van der Rohe and to extent Frank Lloyd Wright as well that had preceded it was central to Post-Modernism. Soon the architectural historians joined in with the architects, particularly Charles Jencks in the English-speaking world and Heinrich Klotz in Germany. Here too Post-Modern-ism was the start, with three fundamental critical points about Modernism: fundamental emptiness of its architecture, its lack of relation to its surroundings and its overemphasis of functionalism against decoration. And so, even if one does not use pamphlets like Tom Wolfe's or Jencks' early work as a yardstick, the image of the buildings by what are still the best-known architects of our century is strongly overshadowed. The truth is that the International Style reflects the basic forces that architecture can express extraordinarily impressively and al-ways with decided interplay, and thus also with a pronounced unity of effect; and additionally it develops these formal values especially intensively from content. Traditionally such things are called classical. What followed this, the whole spectrum of styles from late Modernism via High-Tech and Deconstructivism to Post-Modernism is all a reaction to the unity of the International Style: either one point in terms of form or content is taken out, exaggerated and thus made into its opposite, or such a point is consciously negated. Until now this phenomenon has been known as Mannerism to art historians. What is characteristic of Baroque as the period after High Renaissance Classicism and Mannerism is less clear; in any case, entirely positive aspects of both found their way into Baroque, and undoubtedly the latter is closer to High Re-naissance Classicism in spirit than to Mannerism. Cannot similar things be seen in the last bare decade of architectural develop-ment? The foundations for this book were laid during a good year's re-search at the University of California in Berkeley. The author now holds a chair at the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg.
£28.80
Edition Axel Menges Figures: A Pictorial Journal. 1954-1971
Text in English & German. The architect is at all times also an artist. How otherwise would he be able to tame the three-dimensionality of space and subdue the urges of physics and structural mechanics with the creations of his fantasy? This creativity is however mostly restricted purely to its own field. Rob Krier is an exception. Since the beginning of his career in construction, he has always seen his love of art as a vocation -- one which he nurtures parallel to his work. Fine art should stand in dialogue with architecture and it is Krier's ambition to have iconographic themes brought into the latter, so that they might speak equally to both the occupants of a building and to bystanders, moving them to thoughtful reflection. In his Pictorial Journal 19541971, Rob Krier describes how his twin passion for fine art and architecture emerged. Born into a household of gifted artists and craftsmen, he came into contact with art and architecture as a very young boy and took his own first steps in painting and sculpture in his early years. His enthusiasm for the architecture of Rome cemented his determination to become an architect. Krier tells of his grammar-school years in Echternach and his university studies in Munich in words just as enthralling as his first taste of professional life with Oswald Mathias Ungers and Frei Otto. His autobiographical notes are accompanied by numerous sketches, drawings and sculptures, which were produced during this period and in which the author's multifaceted experiences find artistic manifestation. Born and raised in Luxembourg, Krier moved to Vienna after having studied in Munich and worked for Oswald Mathias Ungers and Frei Otto. After teaching posts in Stuttgart and Lausanne, he was a professor at the Technische Universität in Vienna from 1976 to 1998 and, in 1986, held a guest professorship at Yale University in New Haven, Mass. Krier has developed urban-design concepts for Stuttgart, Vienna, Berlin, Amiens, Montpellier, Leeds, Gothenburg, Lodz, Amsterdam, Den Haag and many other cities. Projects with which he was first able to translate his vision of a spatial concept, such as Rauchstrasse in Berlin, Breitenfurterstrasse in Vienna or Ritterstrasse with Schinkelplatz in Berlin, repeatedly found their place in international publications.
£53.10
Edition Axel Menges Hascher Jehle Architektur: Kunstmuseum Stuttgart
Text in English and German. The prize-winning design, of which all can be seen from the outside is a glass cube making an impact over a distance and defining the urban situation, solved the enormous space problem of a collection of contemporary art including 15000 works.
£28.80
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.
£44.96
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 Johannes Peter Holzinger: Psychodynamic Spatial Structures
Text in English & German. Johannes Peter Hölzinger studied architecture at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main from 1954 to 1957. After a residency fellowship at the Deutsche Akademie Villa Massimo in Rome he founded a "planning association for new forms of the environment" in 1965 together with Zero artist Hermann Goepfert, who has since died. One of the most successful results of his work with Goepfert was a new design for the Schloßpark in Karlsruhe on the occasion of the Bundesgartenschau in 1967, which won a major German architectural prize, the Hugo-Häring-Preis. From 1991 until his retirement in 2002 Hölzinger directed the art and public-space course at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Nuremberg. Individualistic and oppositional in comparison to other post-World War II architectural achievements, the design of Hölzinger's buildings is very distinctive. The playful elements of Postmodernism are as alien to his work as the functionalism of New Building. Because of his association with Hermann Goepfert, Hölzinger is much more closely connected with the art scene of his time. The integration of art and architecture is a unique feature of his buildings. If we try to assign a category to this "object architecture" (a term he coined himself), we will find less overlap with architecture than with fine art. From the very beginning Hölzinger saw architecture as an artistic discipline. Light kinetics offered him important new perspectives. Lighting design and the resulting colour changes of white walls play a vital role in his work.
£62.10
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 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 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 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 Towards an Ecology of Tectonics: The Need for Rethinking Construction in Architecture
The global resources situation and the climate crisis are amongst the biggest challenges faced by mankind today. In the years to come, these issues will no doubt have an influence on societal evolution, on urban and rural land development, and how we define our cultural identities. These and related issues will be reflected in the world of architecture. In recent years many countries with high energy consumption have made the energy-related requirements for buildings more stringent; the new rules apply to the resources used for construction as well as to those used in the operation of buildings. In the future, these new requirements will have a major impact on the design of buildings. It will not be sufficient merely to increase the insulation thickness or to make the building envelope more airtight. Solutions of this type have an adverse impact on the architectural design, on the construction practices, on the indoor environment and on options for making buildings flexible so that they can be adapted for diverse uses over time. Equally important in terms of its impact on architectural quality is the challenge posed by the continuous growth of industrialisation. The move from craft-based construction methods to computer-controlled production processes now used in industrialised manufacturing has resulted in strict standards, established at design level, being imposed on the process as it takes place on the building site, creating an "assembly architecture" that no longer depends on the locally available materials, on local cultural traditions or on the specific physical context. In this book, ideas, design principles and practices that relate to tectonics in architecture are explored, and a series of themes are discussed in relation to various concepts of ecology. Ecology is, in this case, defined in its widest sense, which includes the cycling of resources, systems of social organisation and the environmental context. Tectonics a concept with a long tradition in architecture and architectural theory is comparable to ecology. It relates to the de-sign and assembly of structural elements, and implies a holistic approach to materials, to construction technology and to the design of structures. It is more than merely an instrumental strategy: it extends into the poetic, which elevates it to the status of a cultural practice. This book is part of a research project conducted by leading academics associated with the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture, the Aarhus School of Architecture and the Danish Building Research Institute. With contributions from a wider network of academic experts and from practicing architects, it provides the first comprehensive representation of contemporary tectonic thought and practices in architecture.
£53.10
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 Sit in China: An Excursion through 500 Years of the Culture of Sitting
Text in English & German. The way we sit simultaneously defines privileges, social status, power, and taboos. Parallel to the presentation of China as the guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2009, the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt presents a panorama of Chinese sitting culture through a period of five centuries. Exclusive, noble Ming chairs stand side by side with chairs of the 18th and 19th century used by the middle class of that time. Limited sitting sculptures by renowned artist designers such as Shao Fan, Freeman Lau, Kenneth Cobonpue, XYZ-Design and Ji Liwei, who is also in charge of the interior design of the Chinese pavilion at the book fair, are confronted with the bourgeois sofas and sitting of the Chinese middle class of today. The "Bastard Chairs" of migrant workers and the homeless, day-to-day seats improvised out of pure need and made of trash and leftover materials, are commented in the sitting contexts of celebrities: emperors and courtesans, politicians and pop stars, athletes and students of product design show how sitting was done formerly and is done today. It ranges from a man of letters from the Ming era to the Qianglong emperor on the throne to Mao and Nixon in characteristic armchairs in Mao's best room. The most famous contemporary Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, will also be represented with an excerpt of his grandiose chair performance at the Dokumenta XII. Of course, product piracy, which -- as the typical Chinese dipping figure "Shanzhai" -- has mean-while adopted characteristics that define society, is also dealt with.
£32.40
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
Axel and Ash Life's a Roadtrip
£22.99
Edition Axel Menges The Imaginary Orient: Exotic Buildings of the 18th and 19th Centuries in Europe
In the 18th century the idea of the landscape garden, which had originated in England, spread all over Europe. The geometry of the Baroque park was abandoned in favour of a 'natural' design. At the same time the garden became "The land of illusion": Chinese pagodas, Egyptian tombs, and Turkish mosques, along with Gothic stables and Greek and Roman temples, formed a miniature world in which distance mingled with the past. The keen interest in a fairy-tale China, which was manifested not only in the gardens but also in the chinoiseries of the Rococo, abated in the 19th century. The increasing expansion of the European colonial powers was reflected in new exotic fashions. While in England it was primarily the conquest of the Indian subcontinent that captured the imagination, for France the occupation of Algiers triggered an Orient-inspired fashion that spread from Paris to encompass the entire Continent, and found its expression in paintings, novels, operas, and buildings. This 'Orient', which could not be clearly defined geographically, was characterised by Islamic culture: It extended around the Mediterranean Sea from Constantinople to Granada. There, it was the Alhambra that fascinated writers and architects. The Islamic styles seemed especially appropriate for "buildings of a secular and cheerful character". In contrast to ancient Egyptian building forms, which, being severe and monumental, were preferably used for cemetery buildings, prisons or libraries, they promised earthly sensuous pleasures. The promise of happiness associated with an Orient staged by architectural means was intended to guarantee the commercial success of coffee houses and music halls, amusement parks, and steam baths. But even extravagant summer residences and middle-class villas were often built in faux-Oriental styles: In Brighton, the Prince Regent George (George IV after 1820) built himself an Indian palace; in Bad Cannstatt near Stuttgart, a 'Moorish' refuge was erected for Württemberg's King Wilhelm I; and the French town of Tourcoing was the site of the Palais du Congo, a bombastic villa in the Indian Moghul style that belonged to a wealthy perfume and soap manufacturer.
£53.91
Edition Axel Menges Architectural Composition
Rob Krier is a unique voice in today's architectural discourse through his commitment to developing a relevant and pragmatic theory of architecture based on his own experience and observations of architectural practice and opposed to the easy, abstract theorising so common in contemporary architectural writing. Together with his brother Leon, he has perfected a form of presentation in which the potency of his thinking finds its perfect counterpoint in detailed drawings and sketches which argue his case visually through the power of example. Following the success of his widely acclaimed "Urban Space", a work which looked at the problems of our cities from a historical, theoretical and practical standpoint, Krier now applies his particular, highly influential mode of didactic criticism to contemporary architecture in continuing search for fundamental architectural truths. Architectural Composition is both a theoretical and visual analysis which clearly illustrates the creative process which informs Krier's vision and praxis. The culmination of a lifetime's thought and experience by one of Europe's most important architectural theorists, it is without doubt a major achievement and is a standard work of reference for both students and practising architects. The book, published for the first time in 1988 by Academy Editions in London, has been supported by funds from the Fond zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung der Republik Österreich, and it was carried out at Krier's former Institut für Gestaltungslehre at the Technische Universität in Vienna.
£53.10
Edition Axel Menges Fossil Design: Signs of Petrified Life
Text in German & English. Fossils are the petrified remains of former living organisms. Their systematics and their former living conditions are studied and described in palaeontology. In contrast to this, this book attempts to show the character of these life forms as signs and to pursue the question of whether fossils and representations of fossils can be considered "beautiful". For this reason, the pictures' sequence is not based on a palaeontological system of classification, but instead progresses from realistic representations of, for instance, a coral's body in its entirety through ever smaller sectors of the image and details divorced from context to almost abstract images. In an introductory text, Hillert Ibbeken explains the concept and the methodology of the work. The ambiguous expression "design" is used deliberately -- not in the sense of a purposive undertaking by a creating subject, but in the sense of nature making a mark, guided by mutation and selection. Katja Schoene writes about fossils' reception in the early modern age. The plants and animals enclosed in stone appeared too fantastical for anyone to consider them as anything other than "freaks of nature" (lusus naturae). Explanations of their origin were as multifarious as their different manifestations. "Rudolf zur Lippe deals with the forms of petrified life in relation to philosophical perspectives, pursuing the question of what "beauty" means and indicating, among other things, that the expression "beauty" cannot be unequivocally defined; that, for instance, different cultures may have entirely different ideals of beauty. The illustrated section is followed by a glossary by Helmut Keupp with a synopsis of life's development on Earth and a table of the Earth's history. Hillert Ibbeken was professor of geology at the Freie Universität Berlin. He has had a lifelong interest in photography.
£41.40
Edition Axel Menges Waro Kishi: Buildings and Projects
Waro Kishi first caught the attention of the architectural world with his house in Nipponbashi, en elegant townhouse in an Osaka district full of stores marketing electric and electronic goods. Like a slender volume of poetry in a shelf otherwise crowded with how-to books, it is a work of remarkable lightness and transparency, four storeys high, 13 m deep, but only 2.5 m wide. The award-winning house, which has a steel-frame structure, is economically constructed of readily available materials such as cement boards, yet it is put together with enormous care. The austerity makes the high-ceilinged dining room, a dramatic eerie on the top floor, seem that much more luxurious. Kishi was educated at Kyoto University and opened his own office in Kyoto in 1981. Many of his buildings are located in the Kansai region, which, besides Kyoto, includes Osaka, Kobe and Nara. Kansai offers a working environment for architects that is very different from the one in Tokyo, where almost anything is permitted. It has an older history and, arguably, a more complex urban fabric that requires the observation of certain rules. A narrow frontage such as the one in Nipponbashi is commonplace in heavily built-up districts. The discipline that is demanded of someone working under such difficult conditions has helped to nurture Kishi's work. Born in 1950, Kishi belongs to the generation of Japanese architects that emerged after Tadao Ando. Although he has acknowledged the influence of the Oska architect, Kishi has a very different sensibility. His buildings are more delicate and subtle, and his designs are less driven by form. A self-described contrarian, who preferred the works of architects such as Marcel Breuer and Richard Neutra when many others were embracing Post-Modernism, he refuses in today's changed climate to be labelled a Modernist or Miesian.
£44.10
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 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 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.
£21.60
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.
£26.10
Axel and Ash Life's a Roadtrip: Luxe White Cover
£22.99
Edition Axel Menges Schinkel's Look towards India
Text in German & English. Schinkel's Look towards India discusses a subject to which little attention has been paid to date: Schinkel's interest in Indian architecture and culture. This interest was first aroused by the English traveller to India William Hodges, who proposed the thesis that Greek and Indian architecture were of equal value. Later, the English landscape painters Thomas and William Daniell were to become even more important for Schinkel. Oriental Scenery, the book that described their travels, left its mark on Europe's image of India for decades and inspired longing for that country, which was considered almost magical. The cultural elite of Prussia were also caught up in this fascination. At the royal court of Prussia, Lalla Rookh, based on Thomas Moore's romance, was celebrated in 1821 as an oriental festival. In 1822 the Indian-themed pageant Nurmahalwas performed at the opera. For both productions Schinkel created enchantingly beautiful stage sets. His interest in exotic architecture was lifelong. The sketches he based on the work of the Daniells were preliminary studies for a huge round panorama that was to show the buildings of various periods and nations in their particular setting. His unrealised project for the summer palace Orianda on the Crimea, at the geographical interface of eastern and western culture, was Schinkel's convincing and timeless memorial to his dream of the unity of world cultures. The style of the exterior is classical, while that of the interior is Indian and Islamic. The work is character-ized by the hall of caryatids that lies in front of the building, with a view of the Black Sea, and the museum of Caucasian antiquities, its counterpart in the interior of the palace. Schinkel found the idea for the museum in Oriental Scenery, in the drawings of the legendary 1000-Pillar Hall in Madurai, in southern India, which the Daniells had toured full of admiration and included in their book.
£24.21
Edition Axel Menges Learning from Hollywood: Architecture and Film
Text in English & German. Hollywood is not only the secret world capital of dreams and the fictions of the subconscious, but also the capital of architecture. Hollywood is the Rome and the Versailles of the 20th and 21st centuries. A new awareness of space spanning the entire world was created here. These backgrounds, stage sets and filmic spaces are indelibly fixed in every spectator's mind. It may be in the cinema that the first time you saw the desert, the Rocky Mountain cliffs, Greenland's glacier mountains and California's sandy beaches. You saw here the Western saloons and Al Capone's dark rooms, the poor Mexicans' huts and the Kennedys' penthouse apartments; you saw here also the jazz clubs of New Orleans and the dream houses in Los Angeles. There was and is scarcely a corner of the earth that the Hollywood film has not dreamed its way into. Every cinema-goer in the world sees the same plot, the same images, the same faces, the same rooms, buildings, towns and streets. Film's power to bring people together can scarcely be overestimated. Film architecture is world architecture. All other architecture -- your own town, your own street, your own house, your own flat -- remains small and parochial in the face of this, restricted to affecting a very tiny sphere. The architecture of the future will develop in the field of tension between these two aspects -- small and parochial, large and spanning the entire world. The real architecture of houses and cities could be enriched in its language by including film architecture, and real architecture could be jolted out of its banality by including the studio world. Films and their images can teach us that the architecture of houses, streets and towns is not just a problem of order, function and economic viability, but that psychology, atmosphere and images are being built here as well.
£16.90
Edition Axel Menges Global Museum: Global Museum
All the world's knowledge is stored and collected here. The place serves as an assembly point and information centre and is all things in one: laboratory, workshop, building site, university, theatre, opera house and museum. The shape of the building should be like a sphere with a silver-grey surface gleaming in the sunlight. It stands in a shallow pool of water. Broad walkways lead to the entrance. Extensive gardens in gentle geometric patterns invite visitors to rest, play, chat and look.
£44.91
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.
£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 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 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 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.
£26.91
Edition Axel Menges Peter Hubner, Evangelische Gesamtschule Gelsenkirchen-Bismarck: Kinder Bauen Iher Schule / Children Make Their School
Text in German. When the synod of the Westphalian Evangelical Church made the decision to build the school in about 20 years ago, this was accompanied by a large number of hopes and desires that - formulated as a commission - were expressed in the foundation stone document that was walled up when building started in 1997. It runs like this: "The Evangelical Church of Westphalia, by establishing the comprehensive school in a district with particular need for renewal would like to set a sign of hope and help to prepare young people to deal with the urgent problems of our day. For this reason the school's educational work will focus on the following three points: the school should be a meeting-place, making it possible for young people coming from various nations and practicing different religions to live together peacefully; the school is to be an ecological place of learning, and enable young people to look after the creation that has been entrusted to mankind; and the school should open up to the district in which it is sited, and become a cultural centre. "The architects conceived the school as a little town, with the key aims of achieving diversity, sophistication and responsibility taken on by the users themselves. Hence the individual sections were all planned independently by colleagues of Peter Hubner and his plus+ bauplanung practice, with active participation by all the pupils involved. As the building was for a new foundation, it was possible to involve a whole year consisting of 130 pupils in planning and designing their own teaching area throughout the six-year building phase. Each year has a housing group, and each of the five classes has its own house inside it. Each house has its own entrance, its own cloakroom with toilets attached, a large gallery, a terrace and a garden. The book shows the entire process from developing the educational programme via the competition, planning and realisation including the participation processes to the everyday running of the school. It is a must for anyone interested in new educational concepts.
£30.60
Edition Axel Menges Landscape Architecture / Landschaftsarchitektur
If there is a plateau that continuously unites Hans Dieter Schaals numerous artistic fields of activity, a kind of fundamental level, then it is surely that of landscape architecture. Landscape motifs are as convincingly present in his stage sets as they are in his installations, his exhibition architectures, his texts, and, naturally, also his park and garden designs. Schaal has been on the track of the fascination of landscapes since the 1960s. For him, encountering the parterre or 'carpet patterns' of the baroque Herrenhäuser Gärten in Hannover was a key experience. This was followed by an intensive study of the early landscape gardens of Great Britain, the park complexes of the Romantics and the Enlightenment in Weimar, Wörlitz, and Muskau, and by studies of the garden-art ideas and philosophical implications that underpinned each of them. As a twice-over 'artist-in-residence' at the Villa Massimo in Rome, Schaal was also able to absorb the whole cosmos of Italian garden and park planning, from the Renaissance to the present day. In 1978 Schaal published his first book, Wege und Wegräume (Paths and Passages), today considered a classic. Wege und Wegräume has become required reading and an artistic leitmotif for generations of landscape designers and architects. In 1994, a further key work appeared, entitled Neue Landschaftsarchitektur/New Landscape Architecture. It proved to be among the late-20th centurys most comprehensive studies of the topic of 'landscape' in the wider sense. Above all, it prompts an existential subjective excursus into all those spheres that are inscribed into landscape beyond the professional mainstream. Schaal was subsequently able to build a large number of spectacular 'follies' and installations in gardens and parks. From 1998 to 2014 he was finally able to actually realise a whole city park, complete with artistic installations: the Wielandpark in Biberach. The complex architectonic and artistic layout of this park embodies, as it were, the distilled essence of decades of working with the bridle paths at the boundaries of landscape. Frank R. Werner studied painting, architecture and architectural history in Mainz, Hanover and Stuttgart. From 1990 to 1994 he was professor of history and theory of architecture at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart, from 1994 until his retirement in 2011 he was director of the Institut für Architekturgeschichte und Architekturtheorie at the Bergische Universität in Wuppertal. Peter C. Horn studied architecture in Munich. After working for several years in his original profession in South America, he runs a studio for architectural photography in Stuttgart since 1985.
£29.61
Edition Axel Menges Finding Form: Towards an Architecture of the Minimal
2019 Edition "Primeval architecture is an architecture of necessity. Nothing is there to excess, no matter whether stone, clay, reeds or wood, animal skins or hair are used. It is minimal. It can be very beautiful even amidst poverty and is good in the ethical sense. Good architecture seems to be more important than beautiful architecture. Beautiful architecture is not necessarily good. Only buildings that are at the same time ethically good and aesthetically beautiful are worth preserving. We have too many buildings that have become useless and yet we still need new buildings, from pole to pole, in the cold and in the heat. Mans present areas of settlement are the new ecological system in which technology is indispensable, even in hot and cold areas. ... Our age requires buildings that are lighter, more energy-saving, more mobile and more adaptable, in brief more natural, without disregarding the need for safety and security. This logically leads to the further development of light constructions, to the building of tents, shells, awnings and air-supported membranes. It also leads to a new mobility and changeability. A new understanding of nature is forming under one aspect of high performance form (also called classical form), which unites aesthetic and ethical viewpoints. Tomorrows architecture will again be minimal architecture, an architecture of the self-education and self-optimization processes suggested by human beings." (Frei Otto and Bodo Rasch in their foreword of this book) In 1992 the Bavarian branch of the Deutscher Werkbund awarded its first prize to Frei Otto, undoubtedly the most successful and many-sided protagonist of modern light construction, and with it a request to nominate a meritorious person to whom the prize could be passed on, and to design a joint exhibition with that person. Frei Otto chose his pupil Bodo Rasch, who had realized Ottos theories particularly in other cultures. The publication produced on this occasion provides information about scientific fundamentals and the working methods the two architects developed from these, which are characterized by "finding" not by "making". This is supposed to produce buildings that could not be more beautiful and can scarcely be improved in terms of materials and loadbearing capacity.
£39.90
Edition Axel Menges The Story of the Beautiful Lau
Text in English & German. The beautiful Lau, the heroine of Eduard Mörike's story, is only half a water spirit -- her mother was a human woman, and her father was a water nix of royal blood. She has thin webs between her toes, but apart from this she is not externally different to a human being. Because she cannot laugh and can bear only dead children, her husband, the Donaunix, sends her to the Blautopf lake. Before she can be permitted to return, she must laugh five times. The Blautopf is located in Blaubeuren, and is the source of the river Blau. It is a "pot spring", and connected to a cave system that was first studied in the 1950s. One of the great caverns discovered by explorers -- the so-called "Mörike-Dom" -- is 25 m wide, 30 m high and 125 m long. The spring waters are deep blue in colour, and change from turquoise blue to dark blue as the light shifts -- on overcast days, the water actually appears to be almost black. During Germany's Romantic period, the Blautopf gave rise to all kinds of speculations and stories, and Mörike, one of the most prominent exponents of Swabia's group of Romantic poets, who spent a night in Blaubeuren during a journey in 1840, took his inspiration from this striking place.
£16.80