Search results for ""Edition Axel Menges""

In their sculptural works, artists have always broken out of the workshop or studio and into open-air spaces. After all, the place where sculptures are best able to show their three-dimensionalquality is in an open space not enclosed by walls and ceiling, in which all flows of power and movement can have free rein. However, because public spaces offer only very limited possibilitiesfor sculpture development, sculpture parks have been developed almost everywhere in the world where invited artists can work without restrictive conditions. During his search for a place in France where he could present his large sculptures, Erich Engelbrecht discovered in 2000 the open, meadow-like land, with the château tucked into a piece of forest behind it. This open space, picturesquely framed by groups of trees, was precisely what he had imagined. And the fact that a château was waiting for its new owner at the end of this tract of land made this discovery a stroke of luck rarely experienced by anyone in general, and almost never by artists in particular. His monumental sculptures that dominate the landscape have given Erich Engelbrecht a place in the history of modern sculpture. His method of drawing images plastically in the space, and of using these drawings transformed into solid bodies to occupy whole landscapes, is unparalleled. The enigma balanced between representationality and the abstract, the multiplicity of meaning, which invites freely poetic titles, is essential to the unique charm of Erich Engelbrecht's visual work. In the park of Château des Fougis, 29 of these artworks, at once plainly revealing and mystifying, communicate with each other in such a relaxed way that visitors are prompted to think and to enjoy. One strolls through a garden of poetic artworks, through a park of beautiful riddles and silent secrets. There has been nothing comparable to this in Europe since the Mannerist gardens, conceived by poets andequipped with creatures of the imagination by inspired sculptors.

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Text in English and German. Heinz Tesar has carefully preserved the existing Bode Museum building on the Museum Island in Berlin, and provided it with highly unusual additional sections for the anticipated hordes of visitors. His work proved its extraordinary qualities even at the opening. There is scarcely anywhere else in the world where the contrasting styles arising from a museum's various building periods come together to form such an individual whole, at best comparable in its density with the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa's museum designs. The essential basis for this successful symbiosis of heterogeneous stylistic elements is the variable historical architecture that museum director Wilhelm Bode invited architect Ernst Eberhard von Ihne to develop around 1900 for the collections, which were very disparate in both style and genre. When the museum opened in 1904, the magnificent architecture still had a political message to proclaim. It was called the 'Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum' at first, and there was a definite programme behind this: invoking the name of the art-minded earlier emperor and erecting ostentatious equestrian statues of figures from Prussian history was intended as a powerful pictorial display to anchor the Prussian dynasty in German history and European culture. But as Ihne eschewed any sense of regional identification, the museum could have carried his name after the abolition of the monarchy. But it was renamed Bode-Museum after its inventor Wilhelm von Bode in the GDR years, which indicates the significance of the stylistic spaces Bode created for the development of exhibition techniques. The text in the book provides a reminder of museum's first collection, a mixed one consisting of paintings, sculpture and furniture. The pictorial section then records the present content of the restored galleries, shaped by Heinz Tesar and using objects from the sculpture collection, the Byzantine museum and the numismatic collection. Tesar carried out some architectural interventions of considerable sculptural quality in the new basement under the small dome, in other words in the rotunda where the planned underground passage from the Pergamon-Museum will come in, and in the new stairwell added as a slim section in one of the courtyards.

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Text in English and German. Albrecht Ade's 'photages', created with special light techniques, have nothing in common with the 'photocollages' or 'photomontages' of the 20th century. When artists as different as El Lissitzky, John Heartfield, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Raoul Hausmann or Hannah Höch constructed futuristically bold, surreal or satirical images from photographic materials as a response to quotations from reality cut out and then stuck into Cubist 'papiers collés' by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, they worked mainly with someone else's material, with trouvailles. In contrast, Ade uses only his own material for his combination images, and his method for mounting images, for 'editing them into each other', does not need of scissors and paste either. He cultivates the usually involuntary effect of double exposure, a hazard from the days of analogue photography. He controls the chances of pictorial superimposition and confusion, artfully and purposefully arranging his own, deliberately positioned images among and on top of each other, using a technically elaborate matching and omission process. Ade, as well as teaching at the Stuttgart Akademie der Bildenden Künste, has intensively promoted cinematic animation techniques in his years as director of the Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film, and since 1990, as founder-director of the Filmakademie in Ludwigsburg, has allowed animated film and camera arts to develop in the greatest possible breadth, in fact has helped to win the Ludwigsburg model the highest artistic respect in the film world. This all suggests how inventively and ingeniously his creative output mingles artistically creative and elaborately echnical ideas and fascinations. Photography as a creative method for fine art -- something the pioneers of photography dreamed of in the 19th century -- becomes reality in Albrecht Ade's 'photages'.

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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.

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Text in German & English. In Cologne's narrowest building, which is also one of the best known examples of modern architecture in the city, special installations have been staged during the International Furniture Fair for several years. Well-known designers are invited to implement a design on a particular topic in this unusual environment for the week's duration of the trade fair.

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A yawning gap between two 1960s buildings is not at all unusual in Cologne. A gap scarcely wide enough to park a few bicycles has been used as an office by the Rendel and Spitz Advertising Agency since 1999.

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Text in English and German. The architect and photographer Rolf Reiner Maria Borchard, who is professor of design principles at the Muthesius-Hochschule in Kiel, has chosen seven of the most beautiful gardens and photographed them during several trips, always in spring, in other words at a time when the garden architecture has not yet been overwhelmed by the vegetation, and so can make the best possible impact in the image. His trained eye for the way architecture is embedded in the landscape means that he has found striking and convincing images, steeped in the harmony of the gardens.

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Text in English and German. A yawning gap between two 1960s buildings. Not at all unusual in Cologne. A gap between two buildings, 2,56 m wide and 33 m long. Scarcely wide enough to park a few bicycles. This gap has been used as an office by the rendel & spitz advertising agency since early 1999. The architects b&k+ hooked a few concrete floors into the walls of the adjacent buildings, made sure there were stairs and a bit of infrastructure, suspended a glass facade at the front and back -- finished. To give any curious or interested parties an impression of the building, it was cleared out for a week and used by three selected European designers for a comprehensive development on the theme of 'braving the gap'. The traditional disciplines of product, furniture and lighting design were complemented with contributions addressing the other senses: music and perfume. Johanna Grawunder (Milan) devised a light installation leading from a cold area by the entrance to a warm and comfortable rest area at the end of the space. Konstantin Grcic (Munich) filled the whole volume of the space with a pink ball that fitted into it exactly.Visitors had to show that they were prepared to brave the gap by squeezing between this 'puff ball' and the wall to get to the other side of the room. They were rewarded at the end by reaching the stainless steel fireplace by Timo Salli (Helsinki). The Dusseldorf firm aerome enhanced the installation with a variety of fragrances. Finally, the Hamburg photographer Uli Mattes recorded the whole project and provided his own interpretation of the work.

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Text in English and German. Hans Dieter Schaal worked on opera with Ruth Berghaus for ten years, he also created unforgettable stage architecture for the operas of Heinz Werner Henze. Almost all the important European opera houses, for example those in Berlin, Brussels, Stuttgart, Paris, Vienna and Zurich, served as vehicles for his extraordinarily expressive artistic powers, which he used to captivate the public.

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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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Text in English and German. An urban quarter with an identity of its own has come into being by the Bavariapark in Munich. It is based on an urban-development design by Steidle+Partner and involved various architects. Otto Steidle interpreted the Munich town-planning motto 'compact -- urban -- green' by logically taking up the grid of the Westend area in the northern part of the quarter: the city is to continue to be built as a metropolis here. The 'esplanade', on a surprising large scale for this part of the city, along Ganghofer-Straße fulfils two functions: with its large office buildings flanking the block periphery it forms the urban spine of the new quarter, and at the same time creates a connection with the surrounding 1920s and 1930s housing. The architects have realised a paradox in the internal park of the Munich exhibition centre, which used to be only partly accessible: they create a sense of spaciousness by extreme compression. The point buildings, exposed on all sides, stand at the edge of the park in two rows; views through dominate the scene, with glimpses of the old trees and the three old, listed halls which are becoming the new cultural centre of Munich's west end because the transport museum is moving in.

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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 and German. The building has been totally restored for the 125th anniversary of the Museum's opening in 1876. Merz's basic idea was to reveal the various historic layers of this building.

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Test in German and English. The Embassies of the Nordic Countries in Berlin are political architecture of a particular kind, political architecture that does not assert a claim to power, but that is a self-portrait in the best sense of the word. The vision, which is already a reality on the level of architecture and design, aims to combine individual interests within a greater whole: the ancient democratic ideal that has perhaps never been expressed in a more beautiful and convincing gesture than in this combination of five countries, six buildings and six teams of architects, chosen in a European competition for the central design concept and in five national competitions for the individual buildings. It is certainly no coincidence that such convincing symbolism of joint responsibility and action is not a success due to one of the European mammoth institutions but to the comparatively small Nordic countries Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland. Perhaps it is not even a coincidence that the concept of the individual sections that form an individual whole and while doing so preserve their individual quality as well as the unity comes from a young Viennese architectural practice whose principal protagonists, the Austrian Alfred Berger and the Finn Tiina Parkkinen, think and work across boundaries. A crucial factor was the location in Berlin, because it was only here that the new buildings for all five embassies could be commissioned at once. Berger+ Parkkinen's architecture risks striking breaches of boundaries, not just between the countries involved but also between urban development and architecture, and technology and art. Urban space is an integral part of the embassy complex, to the same extent as nature. Materials and furniture indicate different cultures. And yet the composition, for all its openness and transparency, works to exact spatial sequences and precise external lines for the building, within the 226 metres long and 15 metres high band of meandering copper. The idea that the work of Alvar Aalto is being unexpectedly continued here comes involuntarily to mind.

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Text in English and German. In autumn 1997 the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) moved into the production hall of a former munitions factory in Karlsruhe, built by Stuttgart architect Philipp Jakob Manz in 1914-18. Hamburg architects Schweger plus Partner were commissioned to convert this industrial structure, over 300 m long and with 10 atria, after Rem Koolhaas' project of a new building for the ZKM immediately adjacent to the main station in Karlsruhe had been rejected in favour of refurbishing and converting the imposing old building. There is no doubt that the thinking that led to the decision to retain an industrial monument dating from the turn of the century and to bring it back to life for different purposes, rather than putting up a new building, was essentially practical in nature. And yet the result is unique, as a dialogue of a quality that could scarcely be matched anywhere in the world was initiated between the four-storey hall with it's extensive atria and its new users, the ZKM institutes, the Staatliche Hochschule fur Gestaltung and several museums -- Medienmuseum, Museum fur Neue Kunst and Stadtische Galerie.The architects were experienced in handling large industrial and office buildings, but also ambitious museum projects -- among others they designed the Wolfsburg Kunstmuseum -, and they succeeded not only in showing the historical building substance and it's spatial potential to the best advantage, and in complementing this brilliantly inside and out; but they also combined the real architectural space and the imaginative space of modern pictorial worlds in an exciting way.

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When the Forth Bridge opened on 4 March 1890, it was the longest railway bridge in the world and the first large structure made of steel. Crossing the wide Firth of Forth west of Edinburgh in Scotland, it represents one of the greatest engineering triumphs of Victorian Britain, man's victory over the intractable topography of land and water. Not surprisingly, such a vigorous rebuff of the natural order was condemned at the time by those late Victorians who resisted the march of technology, and William Morris described the Bridge as the "supremest specimen of all ugliness". In response, Benjamin Baker insisted that its beauty lay in its functional elegance. Contrasting the bridge with the only comparable structure of the period, the Eiffel Tower, he concluded: "The Eiffel Tower is a foolish piece of work, ugly, ill-proportioned and of no real use to anyone." But the beauty and fascination of the Forth Bridge lies not simply in its functional performance, but in its scale and power. Over a mile long and higher than the dome of St. Peter's in Rome, it rivals the natural phenomena that the philosophers of the 18th century identified as sources of sublime beauty. Immanuel Kant pointed to hurricanes, boundless oceans and high waterfalls as objects of sublime contemplation, "because they raise the forces of the soul above the heights of the vulgar commonplace, and discover within us a power of resistance of quite another kind, which gives us courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature". In the 19th century the awe-inspiring feats of nature were rivalled by the inventions of the engineers, and the thrill of the waterfall or the lightning flash was eclipsed by the sight of the roaring locomotive dashing across the majestic span of the Forth Bridge.

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What all these buildings have in common is that with the available material, wood, and the most modest means, places of worship, centres in the villages, were built with much feeling and love. The constructions in wood were derived in an old tradition from the dwellings and farm buildings of the peasant population. Their architecture, the typological forms probably penetrated into this seclusion as an idea. "The idea of a church as a building", brought with them by clergymen and wandering master craftsmen from the more fertile plains and the rich, large mining and trading towns.The oldest churches were built as early as in the 15th century, most of those still standing were built in the 18th and 19th centuries, and quite a few are still being built today. Many were destroyed in the two world wars, many fell victim to ethnic cleansing after 1945. Many were destroyed in the two world wars, many fell victim to ethnic cleansing after 1945, some fell into disrepair during the Soviet era, others were burnt down by lightning or short circuits, and quite a few simply gave way to the more "representative" stone churches as early as the 19th century. But a large number are still standing, consecrated, and believers gather in them. In fact, almost all of them in the various Carpathian countries are protected monuments, and many have been lovingly restored in recent times.More than the architectural-historical value, the question arises here of the aesthetic assessment of these small buildings. It is not a refined canon of forms of great architecture that can be derived and proven from the history of architecture that inspires us so much. Basically, they are not overly sophisticated constructions in terms of craftsmanship, they are safe and beautiful in their simplicity. Their aesthetic appeal, however, also includes the surface-weathered material, deformed structures, colour improvisations, recently ornamented sheet metal, inside wall paintings, altar and iconostasis furnishings derived from Renaissance and Baroque periods, but above all their location in the village, mostly isolated, often elevated, surrounded by old trees, enclosures and graves without cemetery order.

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Spread over a hill that climbs up from the plain, Himeji Castle with its white walls shimmering in the sunlight like the feathers of a fantastic bird seems to be rising into the blue sky like a great heron. This impression has given it the name "Castle of the White Heron". The castle, which has nothing martial about it, on the contrary, it is extraordinarily elegant, is undoubtedly one of Japans most impressive fortresses. It was built between 1601 and 1609, when the period of war was almost over, and was used primarily for administration and residence, with defence as a secondary role. Thus its aesthetic impact was as important when it was built as its actual purpose as a fortification. The main building in the castle is the Tenshu or Tenshu-kaku in the northem part of the complex, a wooden structure about 46 m high. Its complicated intermediate roofs make it look more like a skyscraper than a tower. Himeji Castle represents an architectural type that probably does not occur in other areas of the world. Large parts of the building were classified as "Kokuho State Treasure" as early as 1951, and others as "Important Cultural Property". The building was placed on the World Cultural Heritage list in 1993. Art historian Irmtraud Schaarschmidt-Richter specialized in classical and modern Japanese art and architecture at an early stage, as is shown by numerous publications. Her book on the Japanese garden has long been a standard work. Most recently she was involved in publications on architects Kazuo Shinohara and Toyo Ito. Photographer Mo Nishikawa, a pupil of Ken Domon, one of the most important photographers of our century, sees his work as a spiritual and intellectual contemplation of art. His photographs of the Katsura Palace, the Himeji Castle and the Ise Shrine are among the great masterpieces of contemporary photography.

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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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Text in English and German. Erich Engelbrecht (19282011) called his pictures "introspective". He remarked on this: "The introspective image inspects the arena of the soul, the field of operation of archetypes, which constitute the fundamental pattern of our behaviour." We are indebted to C.G. Jung for providing especially deep insights into the nature of archetypes. According to him, they constitute, in their totality, the collective human unconsciousness, and determine our actions. These archetypesbecome visible only in symbolic images. For Werner Haftmann such images are the works of symbol-forming artists of all times. The works of Erich Engelbrecht, whether graphics, oil pictures, gobelins, or wooden and steel figures, appear planimetric and abstract. In his steel figures, for instance, the third dimension exists only in the thickness of the steel plates. This makes his artworks akin to folk tales. In his book The European Folktale, Max Lüthi describes the style of the folk tale as "planimetric and abstract", with projecting all happenings on the level of plot. When the sister cuts her little finger off and uses it to open the door to the glass castle to free herimprisoned brothers in the folk tale The Seven Ravens, no blood flows and we hear no cry of pain.Both the folk tale and the "introspective image" tell a story and use primal images in order to do it. This mode of action of creating a coherence of meaning through a narrative of archetypalimages such as forest, cavern, or sea that rests upon primal human experience is described by C. G. Jung as an "archetypal programme ", a primal behaviour pattern that all human beings follow,regardless of race, culture, or epoch. With the introspective image, as with the folk tale, the creative process must be intuitive and meditative, an immersion in the unconscious. Erich Engelbrecht had no plan or idea for an artwork, merely an empty sheet of paper or canvas in front of him; he made himself receptive, waited, and allowed himself to be guided by the images, a process that he experienced very much as an ordeal and even as a threat to his existence. He did, however, have a sense for when his process of searching was at an end, albeit without understanding the meaning of a picture created in this way. His wife Waltraud Engelbrecht would then try to "read" these images and to derive a coherence of meaning from correspondences of form and colour.

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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 in compelling words and pictures how he came to have a twin passion for fine art and architecture and told of his grammar school years in Echternach, his studies in Munich and his first taste of professional life with Oswald Mathias Ungers and Frei Otto. In his Pictorial Journal 19541971, which covers the period of Krier's work as a lecturer and assistant to Prof. Johannes Uhl at Stuttgart University, the text is restricted to a minimum. The pictures are less colourful, more composed. The 'daily scribbles' dominate -- mainly sketches and drawings of people and animals, buildings, landscapes, objects and also fantasies. The volume is rounded off with a detailed résumé. 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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Text in English and German. The distinguished architect and Pritzker laureate Richard Meier has attracted public attention mainly with his museum and cultural buildings including the Atheneum in New Harmony, Indiana, the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the Stadthaus in Ulm and the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona. The book accompanies the exhibition of the same name at the Museum for Applied Arts in Frankfurt, which has recently been relaunched with differently conceived museum facilities and new service areas; these are addressed in detail in an appendix to the book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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2019 Edition "Primeval architecture is an architecture of necessity. Nothing is there to excess, no matter whether stone, clay, reeds or wood, animal skins or hair are used. It is minimal. It can be very beautiful even amidst poverty and is good in the ethical sense. Good architecture seems to be more important than beautiful architecture. Beautiful architecture is not necessarily good. Only buildings that are at the same time ethically good and aesthetically beautiful are worth preserving. We have too many buildings that have become useless and yet we still need new buildings, from pole to pole, in the cold and in the heat. Mans present areas of settlement are the new ecological system in which technology is indispensable, even in hot and cold areas. ... Our age requires buildings that are lighter, more energy-saving, more mobile and more adaptable, in brief more natural, without disregarding the need for safety and security. This logically leads to the further development of light constructions, to the building of tents, shells, awnings and air-supported membranes. It also leads to a new mobility and changeability. A new understanding of nature is forming under one aspect of high performance form (also called classical form), which unites aesthetic and ethical viewpoints. Tomorrows architecture will again be minimal architecture, an architecture of the self-education and self-optimization processes suggested by human beings." (Frei Otto and Bodo Rasch in their foreword of this book) In 1992 the Bavarian branch of the Deutscher Werkbund awarded its first prize to Frei Otto, undoubtedly the most successful and many-sided protagonist of modern light construction, and with it a request to nominate a meritorious person to whom the prize could be passed on, and to design a joint exhibition with that person. Frei Otto chose his pupil Bodo Rasch, who had realized Ottos theories particularly in other cultures. The publication produced on this occasion provides information about scientific fundamentals and the working methods the two architects developed from these, which are characterized by "finding" not by "making". This is supposed to produce buildings that could not be more beautiful and can scarcely be improved in terms of materials and loadbearing capacity.

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

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Text in English & German. The beautiful Lau, the heroine of Eduard Mörike's story, is only half a water spirit -- her mother was a human woman, and her father was a water nix of royal blood. She has thin webs between her toes, but apart from this she is not externally different to a human being. Because she cannot laugh and can bear only dead children, her husband, the Donaunix, sends her to the Blautopf lake. Before she can be permitted to return, she must laugh five times. The Blautopf is located in Blaubeuren, and is the source of the river Blau. It is a "pot spring", and connected to a cave system that was first studied in the 1950s. One of the great caverns discovered by explorers -- the so-called "Mörike-Dom" -- is 25 m wide, 30 m high and 125 m long. The spring waters are deep blue in colour, and change from turquoise blue to dark blue as the light shifts -- on overcast days, the water actually appears to be almost black. During Germany's Romantic period, the Blautopf gave rise to all kinds of speculations and stories, and Mörike, one of the most prominent exponents of Swabia's group of Romantic poets, who spent a night in Blaubeuren during a journey in 1840, took his inspiration from this striking place.

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

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

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Text in English & German. Photographs of a huge building site, taken by night, show a bewildering world of machines, boards, cables and scaffolding, seemingly in total chaos and with mud and puddles everywhere. The viewer's gaze enters dim underworlds that look like a modern equivalent of Piranesi's Carceri. Behind clearly structured, transparent façades we can see office workers, politicians, hotel guests and laboratory staff. We can see what they are doing and how they interact with one another. Both everyday work and private business are on public display. The figures' various social roles are revealed by their body language, clothing and attributes. In contrast to the kind of voyeuristic view through a window we see in Alfred Hitchcock's famous film Rear Window (1954), the glass façade freely reveals what the classic perforated façade hides. Like the propaganda images turned out by totalitarian systems, the vastness of advertising spaces turns our usual sense of proportions on its head. Monumentally large, usually female human figures dwarf houses and people. They look down on the city's inhabitants from above. No passerby can evade their gaze or their attractions. Taken together, the photographs in this book represent a visual commentary on our present day lifestyle. All the pictures were taken in the centre of Berlin -- but the same scenes can be seen all over the world. The buildings are just as interchangeable as the monumental images of sex and consumerism. Stefan Koppelkamm's photographs are accompanied by selected monologues from Roland Schimmelpfennig's drama Push Up 1--3, which give the "ideal inhabitants" of this world a voice. These are people who fully subscribe to the images of success and beauty taken from adverts and from the media.

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Text in German & English. The architect is at all times also an artist. How otherwise would he be able to tame the three-dimensionality of space and subdue the urges of physics and structural mechanics with the creations of his fantasy? This creativity is however mostly restricted purely to its own field. In this respect, Rob Krier, born in 1938 in Grevenmacher, Luxembourg, is indeed the proverbial exception that proves the rule. Besides his actual profession, which demands his daily attention, Krier has for years also made a vocation of his love of art, one which he nurtures parallel to his work. Fine art could stand in dialogue with architecture and it is Krier's ambition to have iconographic themes brought into the latter, so that they might speak equally to both the occupants of a building and to bystanders and move them to thoughtful reflection. In the works of Mies van der Rohe it is not rare that one finds naturalistic figures from, for example, Aristide Maillol or Wilhelm Lehmbruck -- as an anthropomorphic contrast to the strict geometry of the architecture, notes Rob Krier in the comments on his journal. If one is already aware of the realisation of his masterful architectural accomplishments through projects such as Potsdam-Kirchsteigfeld (1991 to 1997), De Resident in The Hague (1993-2001), Noorderhof in Amsterdam (1994-99), Veste Brandevoort near Helmond (since 1995), Citadel Broekpolder near Beverwijk (2000-04), or the Cité Judiciaire in Luxembourg (1992-2008) -- be assured, Krier's artistic skills are in no way inferior to his architectural work. Quite the contrary: as a sculptor and illustrator, too, Rob Krier brings together extraordinarily musical qualities and incorporates them into his work: his bronze The Jumper was erected in Montpellier in 2004, the Cowering Woman ten years earlier on Berlin's Friedrichstraße, the four metre-high duo Bosch i Alsina and Papasseit on Moll de la Fusta in Barcelona in 1992.

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

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

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Text in English & German. Fritz Leonhardt would have been 100 years old in 2009. The Südwestdeutsches Archiv für Architektur und Ingenieurbau (saai) at the University of Karlsruhe is presenting the first full retrospective of this famous structural engineer's work, which holds his exten-sive estate. Leonhardt studied at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart and then travelled in the USA. He made his professional début with the German autobahn, for which he designed the Rodenkirchen suspension bridge in 1938-41. Leonhardt supported Herrmann Giesler's plans for the "capital of the movement" with a domed structure for the new main station in Munich, a project that was never realised. In the post-war period he worked mainly on reinforced and pre-stressed concrete structures. He combined pioneering structural innovations with a high standard of creative design. The television tower in Stuttgart, which he designed in 1953/54, is a good example of this. It has had countless successors all over the world. Leonhardt made important technical innovations in bridge-building in particular. He and his colleagues worked on the Düsseldorf family of bridges from the 1950s to the 1970s, diagonal cable bridges with an aesthetic shaping the urban landscape, and the Leonhardt, Andrä und Partner practice founded by him created wide-span bridges all over the world based on these models. Leonhardt was involved as a structural engineer on the first post-war high-rise buildings in Germany. He worked with the architects concerned on the cable-net structures for the German Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal World's Fair, and for the roofs of the 1972 Munich Olympics buildings. The interplay between science and practice was crucial to Leonhardt. With texts by Hans-Peter Andrä, Wolfgang Eilzer, Holger Svens-son and Thomas Wickbold, Ursula Baus, Norbert Becker, Dirk Bühler, Hans-Wolf Reinhardt and Christoph Gehlen, Theresia Gürtler Berger, Gerhard Kabierske, Joachim Kleinmanns, Karl-Eugen Kurrer, Alfred Pauser, Eberhard Pelke, Jörg Peter, Klaus Jan Philipp, Jörg Schlaich, Dietrich W. Schmidt, Werner Sobek, Elisabeth Spieker, Christiane Weber and Friedmar Voormann, Fritz Weller, and Fritz Wenzel.

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

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Text in English & German. A whole issue of the architectural magazine Bauwelt, being published in Berlin, was dedicated to the completed building. The Institutes of Pharmacology and Food Chemistry of the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main by Ferdinand Kramer, who had also built most of the other new buildings on the campus, soon advanced to a highly appreciated master work of modern post-war architecture but later it was nearly forgotten. Many years of intensive use and neglected maintenance rendered the rehabilitation of the buildings indispensable. After a comprehensive renovation by the architects SSP Schürmann-Spannel of Bochum, the concrete structure with its striking brise-soleil elements on the south side and the lecture-hall cube detached from the main building, is not only again a convincing built monument, but also an exemplary example of a successful conversion. Where for many years students of pharmacology and food chemistry studied and experimented, 160 scientists of the Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiK-F) are researching the interaction of climate and biosphere. The book provides a detailed description of the building, which dates from 1957 and which was completely reconditioned by the office of SchürmannSpannel in the years 2009 to 2013. The pictorial section contains plans of the original and present condition as well as photographs especially made for this publication by Jörg Hempel. It is preceded by Fabian Wurm's essay, which not only discusses the building in detail, but also addresses the pressing question of converting buildings from the time after World War II.

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Text in English and German. Shortly after the navy had given up its Flensburg Fjord base a group of developers acquired the site which comprises 7 hectares of land and 5.5 hectares of water. The group developed an urban quarter here and called it 'Sonwik', from the north Frisian words 'Son' (sun) and 'Wik' (bay). Its principal attraction is a housing estate, unique in Germany, which consists of 20 water-houses painted in vibrant colour. They are placed in loose series on a right angle by a jetty, at the same time forming the outer framework for a large marina for 400 sailing boats and yachts. Most of the former navy buildings on the wide green promenade have now been converted for civilian use -- under the eyes of the monument-protection authorities and with great skill and sensitivity. The red brick buildings date from the first third of the 20th century, and now accommodate apartments, offices, shops, cafés and businesses related to water sports. The row of buildings is about 500m long, and is complemented, in urban development terms, by two taller buildings that at the same time mark the unmistakable entrance to this attractive site. They were designed by the Hamburg architects APB, who won the competition for them. However, the special feature are the 20 houses standing in the water, designed by the Flensburg practice of Asmussen & Partner. Each of them was built on a reinforced concrete platform placed about 2m above water level, using a two-storey timber-post structure. The owners were able to structure their own floor plans and equally -- following a canon established as a matter of principle -- the size and position of some windows. In addition to the roof terrace and private mooring 'cellar', the striking characteristic of these buildings are their colours -- red, blue, orange and yellow -- which are visible from a great distance.

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Text in English and German. Otto Ernst Schweizer (1890-1965), architect, philosopher and teacher, had a crucial effect on the path of Modern architecture. When the central dairy in Nuremberg was finished in 1931 it was the largest complex of its kind in Europe and was seen by critics as a work that deserved the rank of prototype.

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Text in English and German. Peter Kulka is a major German architect. His buildings in recent years have been characteristically succinct and minimalist. This started with the Sächsischer Landtag in Dresden. Since then Kulka has produced numerous works of high creative ambition. His projects regularly feature in architecture magazines, and also on the arts pages in the daily press. Following a 1996 publication, this is the second monograph on his work. The book accompanies the show of his work in the Deutsches Architektur Museum in Frankfurt am Main from late 2005 to early 2006. The exhibition is based on Kulka's archives, which contain an extensive range of first-class architectural photographs as well as project designs and visual presentations. 22 projects are presented, centred around his work over the past 15 years and leading up to the most recent projects like the rebuilding of the Schloß in his home town of Dresden. Kulka studied under Selman Selmanagic' in Weißensee, Berlin. He then worked with Hermann Henselmann in East Berlin, later moving to Hans Scharoun in West Berlin. He had his first major success in the Herzog, Köpke, Kulka, Töpper and Siepmann partnership with the design for the University of Bielefeld. In 1979 he started his own practice in Cologne, followed by a Dresden branch in 1991. Alongside the Sächsischer Landtag in Dresden, Kulka's best-known designs include the "Haus der Stille" in the Abtei Königsmünster in Meschede, the Bosch Haus Heidehof in Stuttgart, and also the new chamber music hall and the new foyer in the Konzerthaus Berlin, Karl Friedrich Schinkel's former Deutsches Schauspielhaus.

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Text in English and German. Ludwig Persius (1803-1845) was a pupil of Karl Friedrich Schinkel and his closest assistant. Very little has been published about him to date. With the aim of providing an exhaustive documentation of all his work that is still in existence, the present volume now shows Persius' architectural work in its current condition in 180 photographs, with numerous as yet unpublished exterior and interior photographs including also many detailed views. Persius' architecture was moulded by the work of Schinkel. He was his site supervisor at the Hofgärtnerhaus in Charlottenhof, adopting its style inspired by Italian domestic architecture for his numerous villas with towers, which are still characteristic features of the Potsdam cityscape. He was a master of the disposition of building volumes and of tying buildings into the landscape. About 50 buildings have survived, including early industrial structures. Persius' work is to be found almost exclusively in Potsdam. King Friedrich Wilhelm IV appointed him to the post of an "Architect to the King", a title he shared only with Friedrich August Stüler. His best-known buildings are the Friedenskirche in Potsdam, the Heilandskirche in Sacrow and the so-called Mosque by the Havel bay in Potsdam, a steam-driven pump-house in the Moorish style for the fountains in the gardens of Sanssouci and an eminent example of the romantic and exotic transfiguration of a simple functional building.

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Text in English and German. This book presents a selection from all Tesar's creative periods and an essay introduces the background to this art and its current positioning, which not least raises theoretical questions about the relationship between pictorial art and architecture. Tesar's drawings are presented as a project that turns a vision of Modernism into reality within a manageable personal sphere. The vision conjures up, as modern creative work is condemned to becoming increasingly specialised, an alternative 'art as a life practice', but -- and this is the present level of perception -- one that can ultimately be realised only in individual art projects.

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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 German. Despite the wide variety of publications about urban development, there has long been a lack of a full and coherent presentation of the way town planning has developed in our time. The present publication closes this gap in urban-development literature. It starts at the point at which the upheaval of the French Revolution and industrialisation set the course for today's urban constellations. The survey follows the narrative approach taken by Anglo-Saxon historians, and the individual sections deal with the main urban-development themes that shifted into the foreground in the 19th century: municipal revolution and urban regulations; industrial revolution and urban growth, above all in relation to the special part played by Great Britain; and the continuation of the classical urban-design ideal in France, England and Germany. Also the social-Utopian estate and urban-development models devised by Robert Owen and Charles Fourier in the early days of industrialisation; the great city re-developments (Paris, Lyon etc.), urban beautification (the Ringstrasse in Vienna) and urban expansion (London's suburban growth, the Berlin general building plan of 1862 and tenement building); paternalistic workers' housing programmes in England, France and Germany; attempts at aesthetic renewal by Camillo Sitte, Raymond Unwin and the 'City-Beautiful Movement' in the USA in the late 19th century; attempts at reform through the garden-city idea and subsequent movement. The treatment of these themes illustrates the extent to which contemporary urban situations are determined by 19th century ideas and enterprises. Thus the book provides all readers interested in urban development with an extensive set of facts and strategies. It has turned out as a compendium that aims to present and cast light on the essential features of the city as a Gesamtkunstwerk and to identify important criteria for future urban-development decisions.

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