Search results for ""Author Axel"

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".

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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.

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

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

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Latvian-born architect Gunnar Birkerts belongs to the second wave of modernists who arrived in the United States from abroad, a group that includes Kevin Roche and Cesar Pelli among others. Educated at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart, Birkerts worked first with Eero Saarinen in his now-legendary office in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and later was chief designer for Minoru Yamasaki. At that time both Saarinen and Yamasaki were developing their distinctive architectural signatures and building their international renown. Subsequently Birkerts established his own practice, evolving a design process and a philosophy with its own original profile. His approach does not seek a "right style for the job" in the manner of Saarinen. From the first, Birkerts' work was tied to a program as well as a particular context -- a place -- to the extent that it became expressive of the surrounding landscape and accommodating to the existing vernacular. Birkerts' designs, from the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis to the Corning Museum of Glass to the Houston Arts Museum and recently the Latvian National Library, shows him exploring with ever greater resource and inventiveness the expressive possibilities of symbol and metaphor. Form, he believes, expresses function, and does so with its own rich, meaningful vocabulary. Birkerts uses visual metaphors to link program, client, and landscape in a resonant solution. His methodology of using metaphor -- meaning -- as a first principle, as a generator of design concept, is unusual in the profession, but it is vitally connected to his Latvian heritage and his family background as the son of a folklorist and writer. This heritage is given a new turn here, for the biographical text of the book has been written by his son, Sven Birkerts, who is a noted literary critic and author of the influential book The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. He has also written a memoir, My Sky Blue Trades which describes at some length his coming of age struggles with his architect father. Now, years later, Sven brings his cultural perspectives as well as his family insights to bear, offering a unique portrait of a life and career. History and description are enlivened throughout by observations and reflections on the career -- the destiny -- of this master of the expressive concept. The book is richly illustrated and complemented by descriptive assessments of the projects by Martin Schwartz, who is an architect and writer and who teaches at Lawrence Technical University in Southfield, Michigan.

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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.

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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.

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"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.

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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.

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During the 1960s Italy's museum sector witnessed a fertile period of renewal. A generation of architects, working in partnership with the directors of museums, set about transforming into exhibition spaces a number of ancient monumental complexes located in the historic centres of some of the most important Italian cities. Among these was the brilliant and solitary Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa (19061978) who revitalised the discipline of museography by sagaciously combining it with restoration. His lucid intervention at Verona's Museo di Castelvecchio is emblematic of this approach: the medieval castle, the museum of ancient art, and modern architecture all harmoniously coexisting in a monument located at the heart of a city designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The far-sighted choice of Scarpa was owed to the then director of the museum, Licisco Magagnato, who tenaciously argued the case for the appointment of an architect specialising in this field to work on the city's principal museum of ancient art. The renovation work, which continued for more than a decade, took place in various phases (19581964, 1967 and 19681974) but in accordance with a remarkably consistent and coherent plan. In his work on Castelvecchio, carried out at a significant point in his career, Scarpa attained a remarkable balance between different aesthetic elements that is particularly evident in the sculpture gallery, where the renovations harmonise with the power of the 14th-century Veronese sculptures exhibited in this section of the museum. One of the most striking details is the location of the equestrian statue of Cangrande I della Scala. For the presentation of this work the architect conceived a backdrop of great poetry, drawing the visitor's attention to its historical stratifications and simultaneously creating an exemplary essay in modern architecture. This museum is the most perfectly resolved of Scarpa's works in terms of the complexity and coherence of its design, and today remains "outrageously" well preserved. It is therefore unsurprising that a photographer-artist such as Richard Bryant should have been attracted by the extraordinary compositional, spatial and luminous harmony of Castelvecchio. The book is introduced by an essay by Alba Di Lieto, the architect appointed to Verona City Council's Direzione Musei d'Arte e Monumenti, a scholar of Scarpa's drawings, and the author of monographs on his work. She describes the architect's renovation and locates it in the context of Italy's architectural panorama. She also offers insights into the cataloguing of Scarpa's graphic output in the context of the overall conservation of his work. The essay is followed by a brief history of the castle by Paola Marini, who was the director of Verona's civic museum network for 22 years. The essay is followed by a brief history of the castle by Paola Marini, who was the director of Verona's civic museum network for 22 years. In December 2015 she has taken on a new role as director of the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice the first of Scarpa's museum projects in 1949. Valeria Carullo writes in her postscript about her experience by assisting Richard Bryant in photographing the castle. She is curator of The Robert Elwall Photographs Collection in the RIBA British Architectural Library. Richard Bryant is one of the best-known architectural photographers, working all over the world. He and Hélène Binet are the only photographers with an honorary fellowship of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

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

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Text in English & German. The German Chancellor's former residential and reception building in Bonn is one of the German post-war period's most significant high-profile buildings. The "Kanzlerbungalow" was built 1963/64. The idea was Ludwig Erhard's, and it was planned by Munich architect Sep Ruf. Along with the buildings by Hans Schwippert, Egon Eiermann and Günter Behnisch, it is among the most outstanding architectural reminders of Bonn's time as the Federal Republic's capital. Situated in the park of Palais Schaumberg close to the Rhine's banks, the building could not be seen by the general public and therefore remained comparatively unknown. The Kanzlerbungalow combines its function of representing the state with that of a home. It shows classical modern influences -- primarily that of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe -- extending to the contemporary Californian "Case Study Houses". The building speaks volumes about the early Federal Republic's sense of its own identity. The question of how the still young democracy should represent itself in its architecture after the years of National Socialism found its answer with a design that combined the need for an appropriate setting for a high public function with an explicit desire to make use of the tools created by the International Style, rather than resort to outmoded formal gestures which had additionally been politically discredited by recent history. The reaction to Sep Ruf's building reflects the often undecided attitude to questions of appropriate state representation of the time. Much praised by architectural experts, the Kanzlerbungalow did not appeal to a number of Erhard's successors. It did however have a not insignificant influence on West German architects in particular, in spite of its very specialised function. It is presently undergoing extensive renovations, and is to be used for exhibitions and other purposes from 2009 onwards.

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Even though he had made a name for himself in the 1930s with his Berlin single-family homes, Eiermann later on found it difficult to accept commissions for this building type when, during the period of the 'economic miracle', he was approached by numerous people interested to get a design by him. Only the Hardenberg House in Baden-Baden satisfied him, but above all his own house, which he also built in Baden-Baden in 195962. This house in particular, built after his success with the German Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels Worlds Fair and at the same time as the Berlin Gedächtniskirche and the German Embassy in Washington, was to become one of the main works of his post-war creative output. As a builder in his own right, he was able here to uncompromisingly realise his ideal image of living for himself and his family in architecture. Eiermann himself tried to explain the house, which only crystallised in a longer planning genesis, primarily from the functional side: main house and annexe, the latter for garage, studio and guest apartment, the elongated main house in bulkhead construction under a flat sloping roof. In fact, the house is convincing in its sophisticated functionality. But it does not stop there. The complex group of buildings on a steep hillside site with its stagelike terraces, the staged interplay of views from the inside to the outside and, at night, also from the outside to the inside, is an extremely artificial structure even from its basic disposition. The Eiermanntypical façade, with its exterior walkway and white linkage as well as the corrugated Eternit roof provide a ponderous contrast. Together with echoes of traditional Japanese houses and gardens, but above all with the adoption of motifs from sailing- ship building give this house an unmistakable character. Since 2020, the house has new owners, on whose behalf the Stuttgart architects 'no where' (Henning Volpp and Karl Amann) have undertaken an extremely careful renovation. Eiermann's estate, which is kept at saai, the Archive for Architecture and Engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), provided the historical drawings and photographs for this volume. The photographs were primarily taken by Horstheinz Neuendorff, an architectural photographer who was on friendly terms with the architect. Since the early sixties, Neuendorff had been commissioned by Eiermann to capture his new buildings in black-and-white photographs of a high artistic standard. Color photographs of the current condition were newly made by Olaf Becker from Munich. Gerhard Kabierske is an art historian specialising in architectural history and monument preservation. 19932020 he worked at the saai in Karlsruhe where he was responsible, among other things, for the Eiermann archive.

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

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

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

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

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

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Text in English & German. The central Mosque of the Turkish-Islamic Union in Köln-Ehrenfeld has given us one of the most vigorously discussed German building projects of the past 10 years. With this spectacular domed structure, Paul Böhm, the youngest son of Pritzker Prize-winner Gottfried Böhm and grandchild of Dominikus Böhm, has successfully introduced the Osman mosque typus into the modern age. The dome and minaret provide the Turkish / Islamic community with visual identification points. At the same time, this shell-construction structure is broken up into individual segments in a manner that opens it up to both the neighbourhood and the world. Containing conference halls, rooms for community use, a bazaar, a library and a museum, the complex is intended to convey to the surrounding area a message of retained ties to the historical country of origin coupled with acceptance and integration into the new homeland, and a willingness to engage in dialogue. Up to now the mosque represents the high point of the architectural career of Paul Böhm, who was born in 1959 and who is teaching at the Fachhochschule Köln. His work encompasses a multitude of exciting projects and realised buildings, including cultural buildings, university buildings, administration buildings and residential buildings. It is, perhaps, unsurprising that an architect who comes from a family of church builders should have added an impressive religious structure to uvre. St. Theodor in Köln-Vingst is a central-plan building that possesses a coherent atmosphere suited to contemplation whilst, at the same time, opening itself to a part of the city that suffers from social problems. Figures who have played a significant role in Paul Böhm's professional development include Tadao Ando, the master of velvet-smooth concrete, Oswald Mathias Ungers, the great lover of geometry, and Peter Zumthor, the essentialist of his generation. Like these three figures, the architects who Böhm worked with prior to founding his own firm in 2001, all espoused very different philosophies of architecture: Otto Steidle, Anton Schweighofer, Richard Meier . Paul Böhm does, of course, also owe a debt to the traditions of the family of architects that he comes from -- a tradition that he continues in his own individual way.

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The aim of the study is to analyse and describe in detail one of the most important trends in architecture in the 19th and 20th centuries: the evolution leading from the closed, hermetic spaces of the early cultures and the Middle Ages to the "open space" and transparency of the 19th and 20th/21st centuries. Historically, the focus is on the "diaphanous" space of the Gothic cathedral, the opening of the late-Baroque dome towards the sky, the transparency of exhibition halls and hothouses in the 19th century, and the glass dreams of the early 20th century. The steel-and-glass technology of the past one hundred years has permitted even more transparency, openness, and dematerialisation on a scale never seen before. It is notable -- to quote just one aspect of the study -- that many modern glass buildings have been compared to a "crystal". This is the material with which we associate concepts such as purity, transparency, and order. We have thus also found a symbol for clarity and translucency in architecture. One key objective of the study is to demonstrate that this trend has been driven by no means only by a functionalist, pragmatic, or physical motivation but that, as in past epochs, the "opening up" of architecture reflects elementary desires of humankind: these are, first of all, psychological, aesthetic and artistic desires, the wish to overcome gravity as far as possible and, last but not least, the liberation of architecture and the attempt to resolve the heteronomy of "indoors" and "outdoors". Many statements have suggested that this touches even on the borders of the irrational and the metaphysical. The study should therefore also contribute to a fresh debate on the boundaries of architecture and, most importantly, should serve as a plea to allow architecture to remain open, free, light, and transparent even in the future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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For over 350 years Parisians have designed and preserved phenomenal public outdoor spaces. In this book Jacqueline Widmar Stewart follows the fine-spun threads of the parklands tapestry in greater Paris. Identification of various hallmarks of premiere park-building eras imbues individual parks with multi-dimensional qualities and allows readers to experience these grand green places in the way Parisians do. Multiple layers of elements and themes are woven into the fabric of French parks. Reaching back as far as its Roman heritage, vestiges of the history of Paris are apparent in virtually all its parks, regardless of size. Even the balanced distribution of green spaces throughout the city reflects a major 19th-century city-planning epoch and is still carried forward in current park development. A number of French parks and gardens from the 17th century initially belonged to royal estates but now welcome public visits -- it should be noted that the Tuileries first opened its gates to the public in 1667. Thoughtfully designed and meticulously tailored to needs of the time, others have covered unsightly urban blight with splendor, and have converted industrial sites to recreational usage while maintaining cultural ties with the past. Many marvels beckon all who enter Paris' magical spheres: a several-kilometer-long landscaped promenade above busy streets; a modern garden suspended above a major train station; the Parc de la Villette with its grand red architectural curiosities of form and motion; a midisland allée in the Seine; newly created marshlands now home to mallard ducklings; clouds of fragrance from rose-descendants of Josephine Bonaparte's original collection; not one, but two gardens of the quintessential sculptor, Auguste Rodin.

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

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

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

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

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

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