Search results for ""author axel"
Edition Axel Menges Screening
Text in English & German. Photographs of a huge building site, taken by night, show a bewildering world of machines, boards, cables and scaffolding, seemingly in total chaos and with mud and puddles everywhere. The viewer's gaze enters dim underworlds that look like a modern equivalent of Piranesi's Carceri. Behind clearly structured, transparent façades we can see office workers, politicians, hotel guests and laboratory staff. We can see what they are doing and how they interact with one another. Both everyday work and private business are on public display. The figures' various social roles are revealed by their body language, clothing and attributes. In contrast to the kind of voyeuristic view through a window we see in Alfred Hitchcock's famous film Rear Window (1954), the glass façade freely reveals what the classic perforated façade hides. Like the propaganda images turned out by totalitarian systems, the vastness of advertising spaces turns our usual sense of proportions on its head. Monumentally large, usually female human figures dwarf houses and people. They look down on the city's inhabitants from above. No passerby can evade their gaze or their attractions. Taken together, the photographs in this book represent a visual commentary on our present day lifestyle. All the pictures were taken in the centre of Berlin -- but the same scenes can be seen all over the world. The buildings are just as interchangeable as the monumental images of sex and consumerism. Stefan Koppelkamm's photographs are accompanied by selected monologues from Roland Schimmelpfennig's drama Push Up 1--3, which give the "ideal inhabitants" of this world a voice. These are people who fully subscribe to the images of success and beauty taken from adverts and from the media.
£30.60
Edition Axel Menges Fritz Leonhardt 1909-1999: The Art of Engineering Design
Text in English & German. Fritz Leonhardt would have been 100 years old in 2009. The Südwestdeutsches Archiv für Architektur und Ingenieurbau (saai) at the University of Karlsruhe is presenting the first full retrospective of this famous structural engineer's work, which holds his exten-sive estate. Leonhardt studied at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart and then travelled in the USA. He made his professional début with the German autobahn, for which he designed the Rodenkirchen suspension bridge in 1938-41. Leonhardt supported Herrmann Giesler's plans for the "capital of the movement" with a domed structure for the new main station in Munich, a project that was never realised. In the post-war period he worked mainly on reinforced and pre-stressed concrete structures. He combined pioneering structural innovations with a high standard of creative design. The television tower in Stuttgart, which he designed in 1953/54, is a good example of this. It has had countless successors all over the world. Leonhardt made important technical innovations in bridge-building in particular. He and his colleagues worked on the Düsseldorf family of bridges from the 1950s to the 1970s, diagonal cable bridges with an aesthetic shaping the urban landscape, and the Leonhardt, Andrä und Partner practice founded by him created wide-span bridges all over the world based on these models. Leonhardt was involved as a structural engineer on the first post-war high-rise buildings in Germany. He worked with the architects concerned on the cable-net structures for the German Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal World's Fair, and for the roofs of the 1972 Munich Olympics buildings. The interplay between science and practice was crucial to Leonhardt. With texts by Hans-Peter Andrä, Wolfgang Eilzer, Holger Svens-son and Thomas Wickbold, Ursula Baus, Norbert Becker, Dirk Bühler, Hans-Wolf Reinhardt and Christoph Gehlen, Theresia Gürtler Berger, Gerhard Kabierske, Joachim Kleinmanns, Karl-Eugen Kurrer, Alfred Pauser, Eberhard Pelke, Jörg Peter, Klaus Jan Philipp, Jörg Schlaich, Dietrich W. Schmidt, Werner Sobek, Elisabeth Spieker, Christiane Weber and Friedmar Voormann, Fritz Weller, and Fritz Wenzel.
£62.10
Edition Axel Menges Norman Foster: Commerzbank, Frankfurt am Main (Opus 21): Universitat Ulm
Norman Foster, one of the most consistent advocates of architec- ture based on modern technology, achieved a world-wide reputa- tion with the headquarters for the Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation in Hong Kong, Stansted Airport in London, Century Tower in Tokyo and his telecommunications tower in Barcelona. His most important projects in Germany are the conversion of the Reichstag building in Berlin and the new Commerzbank headquar- ters in Frankfurt am Main.
£24.30
Edition Axel Menges Rob Krier-Figures: A Pictorial Journal 2000-2002
Text in German & English. The architect is at all times also an artist. How otherwise would he be able to tame the three-dimensionality of space and subdue the urges of physics and structural mechanics with the creations of his fantasy? This creativity is however mostly restricted purely to its own field. In this respect, Rob Krier, born in 1938 in Grevenmacher, Luxembourg, is indeed the proverbial exception that proves the rule. Besides his actual profession, which demands his daily attention, Krier has for years also made a vocation of his love of art, one which he nurtures parallel to his work. Fine art could stand in dialogue with architecture and it is Krier's ambition to have iconographic themes brought into the latter, so that they might speak equally to both the occupants of a building and to bystanders and move them to thoughtful reflection. In the works of Mies van der Rohe it is not rare that one finds naturalistic figures from, for example, Aristide Maillol or Wilhelm Lehmbruck -- as an anthropomorphic contrast to the strict geometry of the architecture, notes Rob Krier in the comments on his journal. If one is already aware of the realisation of his masterful architectural accomplishments through projects such as Potsdam-Kirchsteigfeld (1991 to 1997), De Resident in The Hague (1993-2001), Noorderhof in Amsterdam (1994-99), Veste Brandevoort near Helmond (since 1995), Citadel Broekpolder near Beverwijk (2000-04), or the Cité Judiciaire in Luxembourg (1992-2008) -- be assured, Krier's artistic skills are in no way inferior to his architectural work. Quite the contrary: as a sculptor and illustrator, too, Rob Krier brings together extraordinarily musical qualities and incorporates them into his work: his bronze The Jumper was erected in Montpellier in 2004, the Cowering Woman ten years earlier on Berlin's Friedrichstraße, the four metre-high duo Bosch i Alsina and Papasseit on Moll de la Fusta in Barcelona in 1992.
£62.10
Edition Axel Menges Alsfeld (Opus 29): Alsfeld
In 1975, the European Year of Protection of Ancient Monuments, Alsfeld in Upper Hesse acquired model-town status, along with Berlin, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Xanten and Trier in Germany. In this way the Council of Europe was acknowledging the long tradition of monument protection in a place where an astonishingly large number of historic buildings have survived. There are numerous tightly-packed timber-frame buildings in the medieval ground plan of the town, some built as long ago as the 14th century. The market place, forming the centre of the town with town hall, Weinhaus (wine house) and Hochzeitshaus (wedding house), is one of the most important complexes of its kind in Germany. The town hall, built in a way that inspired many of its German successors, was to have been pulled down in 1878 by order of the town council. It was not until residents protested that preservation and restoration of what is now the symbol of the town were assured, providing the first example of Alsfeld's tradition in this field. Even today ensembles of unique unity are to be found in its main streets. There is almost nowhere else where one can form such a good impression of a small German medieval town than here.
£21.60
Edition Axel Menges Martha Schwartz Partners: Landscape Art and Urbanism
Situated at the intersection of public realm, urban design and site specific art, Martha Schwartz Partners has over 35 years of experience designing and implementing installations, gardens, civic plazas, parks, institutional landscapes, corporate headquarters, master plans, and urban regeneration projects. MSP works with city leaders, planners and builders at a strategic level so as to advocate for the inclusion of the public landscape as a means to achieve environmental, economic and social sustainability. With offices in London, New York and Shanghai, the practice is engaged in projects and consultation around the globe and has to date worked on projects in over 20 countries and five continents. This monograph is the first publication to document 55 built projects and a selection of master plans by this internationally acclaimed practice.
£53.10
Edition Axel Menges German Architects in Great Britain: Planning & Building in Exile 19331945
Text in English & German. In the years after 1933 several hundred architects were forced to emigrate from Germany by the National Socialist dictatorship. Between seventy and eighty of them went to Great Britain -- in part, prominent representatives of Modernism like Walter Gropius, Erich Mendelsohn, Erwin Gutkind, Arthur Korn and Marcel Breuer, but also less well known architects who had adopted very divergent positions. They found the architectural scene in Great Britain to be surprisingly conservative. Only a small circle of architects, clients and specialist journalists was open to modern design and construction methods and stylistic idioms. A few emigrants very quickly and successfully managed to gain a foothold in an environment that was for the most part unfamiliar to them, while for others exile meant a serious break in their career. Just a few months after his arrival in Great Britain, Erich Mendelsohn, together with Serge Chermayeff, won the prestigious competition for the De La Warr Pavilion in the southern English seaside resort of Bexhill (1933-35). The leisure centre is one of the most important examples of classic Modernism on the British Isles. Impington Village College (1936-39), which Walter Gropius designed in partnership with E. Maxwell Fry, also received a great deal of attention and had an impact on the development of British architecture. Furthermore, the spectrum of projects tackled by the emigrants ranged from houses to traffic structures and industrial buildings to buildings for Jewish communities and designs for exhibitions and shops. During this period German architects also left their mark in Great Britain as university lecturers, scientists and publicists. The book offers an overview of the topic and presents select buildings in detail. Moreover, hitherto largely unpublished documents from the estate of Walter Gropius provide a direct insight in-to his life and work in British exile.
£44.10
Edition Axel Menges Weissenhofsiedlung: Experimental Housing Built for the Deutscher Werkbund, Stuttgart, 1927
First published in 1989 by Rizzoli International Publications, Inc. The fundamental significance of the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart for the history of early modern architecture should not be underestimated. Almost all the influential architects of the 20th century built their proposed solutions in response to the theme "a home for modern city dwellers" on the beautifully located slope on the north side of Stuttgart. The choice of architects and the fact that a project of this type could be implemented at all so few years after World War I and the inflation, is one of the outstanding characteristics of this building exhibition". The German Werkbund is aware, and points out most emphatically that so important a task can only be successful and have a major impact if it is not only carried out in a technically flawless manner but also creates trend-setting architectonic solutions. The Werkbund therefore recommends to the city of Stuttgart that leading architects be commissioned with planning the exhibition and thus assuming a leading role in the construction of modern housing both in Germany and abroad. This memorandum, dated January 1926, concludes with the following appeal: It is now up to the municipal council whether this event, so crucial for the promotion of our housing, will be able to take place in Stuttgart in 1927. An interesting situation thus arose: members of the municipal council had to decide on the merits of this pioneering project. The majority voted for it. The result: 25 yes votes, 11 no votes and 6 abstentions. How did this project ever come to Stuttgart, anyway? What made it possible was a favourable constellation of both personnel and chronological circumstances. Gustaf Stotz must be regarded as the project's initiator. It was he who managed to fire up the enthusiasm of the leadership of the German Werkbund and of the city about the project. It is also thanks to him that Mies van der Rohe undertook to be its artistic director. Mies and many of the architects of the Weissenhofsiedlung were relatively young and not established. They had a fine reputation in avantgarde circles, but hardly outside them. Moreover, in the German Werkbund the entire project was regarded as not really important -- a sort of practice piece for a "world building exhibition" that would take place in Berlin in 1930.
£62.10
Edition Axel Menges Heinz Tesar Architecture of Layers: Ten Recent Buildings
Heinz Tesar's architecture is associated with holistic ideas, and is 'value-conservative' in this sense. But at the same time, this architecture relates to its time, is modern, frank and open to consensus in a subjective dialectic between connection and isolation. However, this holistic concept is not concerned with hierarchical orders, but with relative weighting in a denomination process. Tesar is someone who names things, a 'baptist' who makes his objects that have acquired form individual and thus unmistakable.
£33.21
Edition Axel Menges Opus 77: Ferdinand Kramer / SSP SchurmannSpannel, Forschungszentrum BiK-F, Frankfurt am Main
Text in English & German. A whole issue of the architectural magazine Bauwelt, being published in Berlin, was dedicated to the completed building. The Institutes of Pharmacology and Food Chemistry of the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main by Ferdinand Kramer, who had also built most of the other new buildings on the campus, soon advanced to a highly appreciated master work of modern post-war architecture but later it was nearly forgotten. Many years of intensive use and neglected maintenance rendered the rehabilitation of the buildings indispensable. After a comprehensive renovation by the architects SSP Schürmann-Spannel of Bochum, the concrete structure with its striking brise-soleil elements on the south side and the lecture-hall cube detached from the main building, is not only again a convincing built monument, but also an exemplary example of a successful conversion. Where for many years students of pharmacology and food chemistry studied and experimented, 160 scientists of the Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiK-F) are researching the interaction of climate and biosphere. The book provides a detailed description of the building, which dates from 1957 and which was completely reconditioned by the office of SchürmannSpannel in the years 2009 to 2013. The pictorial section contains plans of the original and present condition as well as photographs especially made for this publication by Jörg Hempel. It is preceded by Fabian Wurm's essay, which not only discusses the building in detail, but also addresses the pressing question of converting buildings from the time after World War II.
£22.41
Edition Axel Menges Otto Ernst Schweizer: Milchhof Nurnberg, Opus 59
Text in English and German. Otto Ernst Schweizer (1890-1965), architect, philosopher and teacher, had a crucial effect on the path of Modern architecture. When the central dairy in Nuremberg was finished in 1931 it was the largest complex of its kind in Europe and was seen by critics as a work that deserved the rank of prototype.
£22.41
Edition Axel Menges Peter Kulka: Minimalismus und Sinnlichkeit / Minimalism and Sensuality
Text in English and German. Peter Kulka is a major German architect. His buildings in recent years have been characteristically succinct and minimalist. This started with the Sächsischer Landtag in Dresden. Since then Kulka has produced numerous works of high creative ambition. His projects regularly feature in architecture magazines, and also on the arts pages in the daily press. Following a 1996 publication, this is the second monograph on his work. The book accompanies the show of his work in the Deutsches Architektur Museum in Frankfurt am Main from late 2005 to early 2006. The exhibition is based on Kulka's archives, which contain an extensive range of first-class architectural photographs as well as project designs and visual presentations. 22 projects are presented, centred around his work over the past 15 years and leading up to the most recent projects like the rebuilding of the Schloß in his home town of Dresden. Kulka studied under Selman Selmanagic' in Weißensee, Berlin. He then worked with Hermann Henselmann in East Berlin, later moving to Hans Scharoun in West Berlin. He had his first major success in the Herzog, Köpke, Kulka, Töpper and Siepmann partnership with the design for the University of Bielefeld. In 1979 he started his own practice in Cologne, followed by a Dresden branch in 1991. Alongside the Sächsischer Landtag in Dresden, Kulka's best-known designs include the "Haus der Stille" in the Abtei Königsmünster in Meschede, the Bosch Haus Heidehof in Stuttgart, and also the new chamber music hall and the new foyer in the Konzerthaus Berlin, Karl Friedrich Schinkel's former Deutsches Schauspielhaus.
£44.10
Edition Axel Menges Ludwig Persius: The Architectural Work Today
Text in English and German. Ludwig Persius (1803-1845) was a pupil of Karl Friedrich Schinkel and his closest assistant. Very little has been published about him to date. With the aim of providing an exhaustive documentation of all his work that is still in existence, the present volume now shows Persius' architectural work in its current condition in 180 photographs, with numerous as yet unpublished exterior and interior photographs including also many detailed views. Persius' architecture was moulded by the work of Schinkel. He was his site supervisor at the Hofgärtnerhaus in Charlottenhof, adopting its style inspired by Italian domestic architecture for his numerous villas with towers, which are still characteristic features of the Potsdam cityscape. He was a master of the disposition of building volumes and of tying buildings into the landscape. About 50 buildings have survived, including early industrial structures. Persius' work is to be found almost exclusively in Potsdam. King Friedrich Wilhelm IV appointed him to the post of an "Architect to the King", a title he shared only with Friedrich August Stüler. His best-known buildings are the Friedenskirche in Potsdam, the Heilandskirche in Sacrow and the so-called Mosque by the Havel bay in Potsdam, a steam-driven pump-house in the Moorish style for the fountains in the gardens of Sanssouci and an eminent example of the romantic and exotic transfiguration of a simple functional building.
£10.90
Edition Axel Menges Heinz Tesar: Drawings: Drawings (Zeichnungen)
Text in English and German. This book presents a selection from all Tesar's creative periods and an essay introduces the background to this art and its current positioning, which not least raises theoretical questions about the relationship between pictorial art and architecture. Tesar's drawings are presented as a project that turns a vision of Modernism into reality within a manageable personal sphere. The vision conjures up, as modern creative work is condemned to becoming increasingly specialised, an alternative 'art as a life practice', but -- and this is the present level of perception -- one that can ultimately be realised only in individual art projects.
£41.40
Edition Axel Menges Urbanismus im Industriezeitalter: Von der klassizistischen Stadt zur Garden City
Text in German. Despite the wide variety of publications about urban development, there has long been a lack of a full and coherent presentation of the way town planning has developed in our time. The present publication closes this gap in urban-development literature. It starts at the point at which the upheaval of the French Revolution and industrialisation set the course for today's urban constellations. The survey follows the narrative approach taken by Anglo-Saxon historians, and the individual sections deal with the main urban-development themes that shifted into the foreground in the 19th century: municipal revolution and urban regulations; industrial revolution and urban growth, above all in relation to the special part played by Great Britain; and the continuation of the classical urban-design ideal in France, England and Germany. Also the social-Utopian estate and urban-development models devised by Robert Owen and Charles Fourier in the early days of industrialisation; the great city re-developments (Paris, Lyon etc.), urban beautification (the Ringstrasse in Vienna) and urban expansion (London's suburban growth, the Berlin general building plan of 1862 and tenement building); paternalistic workers' housing programmes in England, France and Germany; attempts at aesthetic renewal by Camillo Sitte, Raymond Unwin and the 'City-Beautiful Movement' in the USA in the late 19th century; attempts at reform through the garden-city idea and subsequent movement. The treatment of these themes illustrates the extent to which contemporary urban situations are determined by 19th century ideas and enterprises. Thus the book provides all readers interested in urban development with an extensive set of facts and strategies. It has turned out as a compendium that aims to present and cast light on the essential features of the city as a Gesamtkunstwerk and to identify important criteria for future urban-development decisions.
£52.20
Edition Axel Menges Villa Lante, Bagnia
Text in German. The Villa Lante in Bagnaia near Viterbo is outstanding among 16th-century Italian gardens. It is not particularly large, but it is the undisputed highlight of this epoch, the heyday of Italian horticulture, not just because it is outstandingly well maintained, but also because of its unique formal qualities and its extremely complex iconographic programme. The present monograph attempts to establish what triggers the intense sense of beauty with which visitors to the gardens are confronted. It is immediately clear that it is essential to analyse the form of the garden -- here the extremely precise treatment of central perspective as a device is of considerable interest -- but close attention has also to be paid to the significance of the individual elements and the connections between them. This examination brings an elaborate accumulation of various sign systems to light, which seem to have the astonishing characteristic of not being entirely reconcilable, indeed they appear to build in contradictions as a basic constant. From this develops a panorama of the late 16th century, presenting the tangled pathways of perception of the gardens in all their complex relations, from the various late Renaissance garden types, via philosophy, the response to antiquity, perception of nature, perspective, harmony, literature, theatre and religion, and on to models of time and the forms it takes. Against this background the garden of the Villa Lante, which belonged to the scholarly cardinal and inquisitor Francesco Gambara, proves to be a difficult -- and perhaps not entirely successful -- balancing act between Renaissance traditions and the thrust of the Counter-Reformation, but showing at the same time, as a kind of 'apotheosis of the artwork', a surprising affinity with the present day.
£62.10
Edition Axel Menges New Hollywood: The American Film After 1968
Text in English and German. The surprising success of Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate and Easy Rider in the late 60s marks a turning-point in the history of the American cinema, as these are films that differ fundamentally from the traditional Hollywood style. They revised the traditional genre formulae and overturned the rules of classical narrative structure, but they were also aimed at a young audience influenced by alternative culture, a group that the big studios had ignored until then. The American film industry, which was in financial crisis and a phase of artistic stagnation in the sixties because it had tried to meet increasing competition from television by producing blockbusters, started to think again, and became more receptive to new ideas. This created a degree of artistic scope that young directors and filmmakers with artistic ambitions were not slow to exploit in order to realise their creative ideas in the context of mainstream cinema. A period of artistic renewal began, of a kind that had never been possible before in America on such a radical scale. The first wave of New Hollywood was starting to die down in 1971, as the films were often too experimental, too self-referential and too alien for a mass audience, and the market for the limited target group of a young audience interested in culture was quickly saturated. But important stimuli emerged, and made it possible for a series of film-makers like Robert Altman, Arthur Penn, Mike Nichols, Alan Pakula, Sydney Pollack, Stanley Kubrick, Sam Peckinpah, Paul Mazursky, Hal Ashby and ultimately an exceptional figure like Woody Allen establish themselves permanently. They were joined in the seventies by the younger generation of so-called 'whiz kids' like Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, William Friedkin, Martin Scorcese, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, Paul Schrader or George Lucas. They all represented the liberation of the director from the dictates of the studio, the acquisition of a right to have individual artistic handwriting and the era of the director as superstar.
£28.80
Edition Axel Menges Four Museums: Carlo Scarpa: Museo Canoviano, Possagnos Frank O. Gehry: Guggenheim Bilbao Museum, Rafael Moneo: The Audrey Jones Beck Building, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Heinz Tesar: Dammlung Essl, Klosterneuburg
The book presents four of the most important contemporary museums of the world: Museo Canoviano, Possagno; Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa; The Audrey Jones Beck Building, MFAH; Sammlung Essl, Klosterneuburg. Each essay details the unique design concepts of each museum, illustrated with interior and exterior details
£32.40
Edition Axel Menges Heinz Tesar: Christus, Hoffnung der Welt, Donau City, Wien: Opus 42 Series
Text in English and German. The church rises to the challenge of providing a spiritual centre for Donau City, the new residential and commercial centre on the opposite bank of the Danube -- not as an act of coronation for the city in the sense of Taut's urban crown, as a temple or cathedral, but as miniature, as a demonstration of the power of the quiet as opposed to the loud, as an 'oasis in the diaspora', to use Karl Rahner's formulation about the parishes of the future. The building gives an impression of starkness: a hard cube, cut off at the corners, clad with sheets of black chromium steel. But it is only stark at first glance. A second glance shows that the hardness is a friendly hardness: because of the reflections that the material admits; because of the grid of the large-format sheets, to which the brightly gleaming drill-holes that cover the walls like fine gossamer respond; because of circular apertures that allow light to shine outwards after dark; because of large, rectangular windows in the receding corners that create a contrast with the closed quality of the building. Inside the starkness gives way altogether: a light space, which one comes into through an art-fully designed entrance. Originally a sparse covering for the space, which thrives mainly because of the light material -- birch wood -, because of the arrangement of the pews, which is as lively as it is peaceful -- segments of circles of different sizes, surrounding the dark syenite altar block in the form of an open circle -- and especially because of the wide range of circular light sources that render the introverted interior transparent, the large windows that create islands of light, the free-form aperture in the ceiling, which sends light gliding down on to the altar. Heinz Tesar's church continues a tradition of forward-looking modern church building, from Rudolf Schwarz's Fronleichnamskirche in Aachen via Egon Eiermann's Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedachtniskirche in Berlin, Franz Fueg's Piuskirche in Meggen on Lake Lucerne to the new Herz-Jesu-Kirche in Munich by Allmann, Sattler and Wappner; and alongside all this there is also the tradition of a genuinely Viennese development of this theme, from Otto Wagner's Kirche am Steinhof to Ottokar Uhl's parish church Katharina von Siena.
£25.20
Edition Axel Menges Rafael Moneo: Audrey Jones Beck Building, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: Opus 36 series
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is a unique collection of architectural works -- the Caroline Wiess Law Building, comprising the original William Ward Watkin Building of 1924 and the 1958 and 1974 additions designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; the Lillie and Hugh Roy Culien Sculpture Garden created by Isamu Noguchi in 1986; the Central Administration and Glassell Junior School Building designed by Carlos Jimenez in 1994; and now the Audrey Jones Beck Building by Rafael Moneo. Moneo, winner of the 1996 Pritzker Architecture Prize, has proposed a four-storey facility directly facing the Law Building and connected to it via an underground walkway. The limestone building occupies the whole site, thereby reinforcing its urban character. On the inside, visitors can assemble in the dramatic atrium before proceeding to the upper level galleries to begin their itinerary. The Beck Building is a natural progression of some of the ideas put forth by the architect in previous museum projects, especially the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid and the complex of the Moderna Museet and the Arkitekturmuseet in Stockholm. A collection of rooms is the underlying concept for the gallery spaces. The galleries may seem conventional, but their organisation within the building is guided by the desire for freedom. The exhaustive studies undertaken to help design the skylights allow for optimum lighting conditions combining natural and artificial light. Climate, light, circulation through the space, dialogue between building and art, and simplicity and elegance of materials are once again concerns that Moneo has addressed thoughtfully and successfully in the new Beck Building.
£21.60
Edition Axel Menges Frank Lloyd Wright Home & Studio, Oak Park
It was in his home in Oak Park that Frank Lloyd Wright made his first contributions to the Modern movement. In 1889 he designed the first part of the house, in 1895 he added to it for his wife, Catherine, and their family, and in 1898 for his architectural practice. The entire building was a learning laboratory of modern architecture. While not a Prairie School house, it led to the development of the Prairie School. Wrights constant changes to this complex paralleled the evolution of his early architectural work and career. There, with his young assistants, he rethought the plan, spaces, materials, proportions, and lines of American residential architecture, creating a revolution on the Prairie. His home and studio provided the architectural environment in which to experiment with his ideas in three dimensions. The house featured contemporary art work, oriental tribal rugs, and Japanese decorative arts chosen by Wright and his wife. The studio was decorated with classical plaster sculpture, Teco ceramics and selections from Wrights large collection of Japanese prints. Wright completed the interiors, toned in natures hues, with furniture and built-in furnishings of his own design, harmonious to the whole. The colour photographs of Jon Miller of Hedrich-Blessing show a glimpse into Wrights first haven, where he challenged prevailing notions about the countrys architecture, and which he then left, to continue as one of Americas most significant architects. Included in the book is a portfolio of historic black and white photographs of the building, a number of them taken by Wright himself.
£26.91
Edition Axel Menges Space Architecture: The Work of John Frassanito & Associates for NASA
Book & CD. When visitors to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., walk through the Skylab of 1967-73 they experience the vehicles interior space but learn nothing about the industrial design of the spacecraft nor the designers who created it.
£32.40
Edition Axel Menges Richard Meier: Stadhaus Ulm
Richard Meier's architecture in dialogue with the Ulm Munster, the most famous German Gothic cathedral.
£9.80
Edition Axel Menges Pienza: Il progetto di una visione umanistica del mondo
The meaning and significance of Pienza, the first Renaissance ideal city built by Pope Pius II, are explored in this precise survey.
£106.20
Edition Axel Menges Penthauser fur alle /Penthouses for All
The dream of owning your own home in the countryside has led to that Cities are expanding more and more, growing together and the destroy untouched nature. In addition, however, the demand is increasing affordable housing and small residential units in the cities. The proximity to the workplace and the good infrastructure are clear advantages of city life. The concept Penthouses for everyone represents the individual living wishes of people at the center. It shows that sophisticated architecture can be affordable for everyone can and is also possible in cities in the course of densification. The Development of the new living space for everyone takes place via the development of flat roofs, which exist in large numbers in urban areas are. Unfortunately, the possibilities of targeted development remained roofs especially in the new development areas in the past largely unrecognized. So far, flat roofs are mostly only here planted or used for energy production. Here and there will be although they are also subsequently built on, they usually remain unused for residential purposes. How different it is in many people southern countries. It goes without saying there that flat roofs are used To use housing and to include it in the planning right from the start. The book gives an insight into the inexhaustible possibilities that arise when living on roofs. Based on numerous Examples are shown that the dream of home ownership in the countryside can also be realized in the city. It's not just small inexpensive roof houses possible. With special construction kits larger units can also be assembled; also alternatives Forms of living can be thought of and implemented, nothing remains utopia. Ultimately, it's about living in the cities to make it more attractive again, to avoid urban sprawl and the destruction of nature to prevent and people well in the city home and return identity. However, this requires new building laws and development plans create the conditions. So far, a subsequent development of roofs is often prevented or excluded by building laws rejected for aesthetic reasons. A further construction on roof surfaces is paralyzed with the demand for adaptation to the existing situation. Only roof structures are created that are hardly recognizable as such or the given monotonous design elements record to adapt to the inventory.
£35.10
Edition Axel Menges Sanjay Patil: Nesting in Nature
Sanjay Patils tryst with architecture began in his early childhood as he soaked up the environs that surrounded him in his birthplace, Nashik. Moving on to formal education in architecture at the Sir JJ College of Architecture in Mumbai, Sanjay returned to his hometown in 1981 to immerse himself into a meaningful and sensitive architectural practice. Over the years, Sanjay Patil has received many honours from the industry and his projects have been widely published in architectural journals. His greatest reward however continues to be the appreciation and support of his numerous clients who have played a vital role in his approach to architecture. His Workspace 'Environ Planners' has also evolved into a centre for learning; inspiring, training and providing roots and wings to budding architects from various parts of the country. 'Knowledge sharing is integral to me and has always given me great pleasure and satisfaction. I have always made a conscious effort to share with others the little bit that I have learnt through my work, travel and other hobbies. This book is just an extension of this love for sharing; a humble effort to document some of my works across the last three decades and present it to a wider audience. It is an honest endeavour to make the reader a part of the design process and my passion for my work that is so much a part of my being.' The book is an attempt to chronicle the architects journey and delve deeper into his philosophy towards architecture and life, his love for nature and his commitment to architecture. Our journey thus encompasses influences from vernacular architecture, his leaning towards sustainable design, response to nature and his diverse use of courtyards in varying building typologies. It showcases 19 noteworthy projects, which include private residences, restoration projects, educational institutions, resorts and retreats, office spaces including his own workspace and farmhouse. It also includes essays by Christopher Benninger, Anand Mahindra (chairman and managing director, Mahindra Group) and Anu-rag Kashyap (principal, BNCA College of Architecture, Pune) providing valuable insights and perceptions about Sanjay Patils work.
£35.91
Edition Axel Menges Peter Hübner: Building as a Social Process
Text in English and German. Peter Hübner began his career as an orthopaedic shoemaker and moved on to cabinet-making before studying architecture. In the 1960s he became a successful designer of prefabricated buildings and sanitary units. This expertise gained him a chair in building construction at the University of Stuttgart where, in collaboration with fellow professor Peter Sulzer, he undertook a series of experiments that changed the course of his architecture. It began with an elaboration of the Walter Segal building method, but culminated in a student hostel designed, built and lived-in by architectural students at Stuttgart University's Vaihingen campus. Using student labour and superfluous or recycled materials it was very cheap, but it also reflected the capabilities and aspirations of its owners in a surprising and potent way, imbuing them with confidence. Hübner was struck by the importance of building as a social process, and understood that the mechanised construction he had earlier been involved in had largely taken the soul out of it. As word about the Vaihingen project got about, Hübner received requests for more cheap self-help buildings and discovered a new professional role as facilitator and ringmaster. Unable to predict how these improvised buildings would turn out, he yielded up the aesthetic control of the designer-despot in favour of experiencing the pleasure of human relationships as a project unfolds. Most new buildings are received by their users with comparative indifference, but the self-help projects engender passionate commitment, and it continues long after they are finished. People identify with the spaces they helped to determine, and naturally appropriate them. As a producer of such anarchic work, it is perhaps surprising to discover that Hübner has also long been at the forefront of CAD, but this is a natural development of systematisation, for if computers can calculate all the variants and irregularities, we need no longer conform to Ford's production line. Hübner uses three-dimensional programmes which connect design directly with production. His work also responds to ecological concerns, not only through the use of recycled and low-energy materials and in avoiding toxicity, but also in passive energy collection. All these issues are explored in the book.
£44.10
Edition Axel Menges Time, Space & Material: The Mechanics of Layering in Architecture
This book examines the application of the principle of layering in architecture, its mechanics, possible application and meaning. Layering is widely used in the discussions of the 20th and 21st centuries architecture but rarely defined or examined. Layering bridges the tectonics of structure and skin, offers a system for the creation of different architectural spaces over time and functions as a design principle without hierarchy. Three types of layering are identified: a chronological sedimentation of planes materializing changes over time (temporal layering), the additive sequence of spaces (spatial layering), and the stratification of individual planes (material layering). Like a palimpsest, historic cities frequently reveal temporal layering and aspects of change over time, a condition familiar to archaeologists who study layer upon layer of remnants of civilisation, including architectural remains and urban organization. In historic cities, one can read at least the most recent layers to determine a physical chronology of the city's history; contemporary architects add strata of the 21st century. Cities are composed of several layers, offering a complex understanding of time in which a view of the present includes also the perception of the past. At a building scale, layers can be part of the spatial composition, multiple elements of walls, the skin, the structure or decorative and narrative elements. Just as the position and order of geological strata contain information related to their age, formation, and origin, the position and form of architectural layers come with information about their function, intellectual scope, and provenance. The possible elements of such an architectural strategy include materials, light, water, and color as well as associations, memories, and analogies embedded in the layers or in the voids between them. Material layering is based on a perceived separation of spatial enclosures into floor, wall, and ceiling or roof elements and combinations thereof. Individual elements may consist of multiple planes fulfilling a series of specific functions. The architectural enclosure can represent the physical wrapper of a building and might transport the structure's narrative, tectonic information, cultural expression, the architect's design intent, and other topics that might be embedded.
£35.82
Edition Axel Menges Bolles + Wilson Landeszentralbank, Magdeburg: Opus 51
Text in English and German. Julia Bolles-Wilson and Peter L Wilson have built a large number of striking, thoroughly detailed cultural and commercial buildings in recent years, all sharing the characteristic that they stubbornly resist superficial stylistic categorisation. Their buildings are articulated and positioned in an unmistakable way in their respective urban spaces, thanks to pointed breaks with rational space configurations, sculptural shapes for architectural silhouettes and the use of polychrome surfaces.
£21.60
Edition Axel Menges Karl Friedrich Schinkel: Late Projects
Text in English and German. 2 Books in slipcase. Karl Friedrich Schinkel called his designs for a palace on the Acropolis in Athens and for Orianda Castle in the Crimea a 'beautiful dream'. They date from 1834 and 1838 and were Schinkel's last major projects, in which he presented his ideal of architecture in brilliant drawings and watercolours, as if in a last will and testament. Both the formal language of neo-Classical architecture and the quality of presentation are brought to a level here that can scarcely be surpassed. It is clear how highly Schinkel himself esteemed these two unrealized designs from the fact that he had them printed as coloured lithographs in his publication 'Werke der hoheren Baukunst fur die Ausfuhrung erfunden' (Potsdam 1840 to 1942). These lithographs are reprinted in a large format for the first time here, complemented by the no less spectacular lithographs of the two Pliny villas, Tusculum and Laurentinum. These works, which represent a high point in the long story of the reconstruction of the two villas that have come down to us only in literature, also show Schinkel's impressive ability to demonstrate and convey his architectural ideas. He is profoundly concerned, both in the reconstructions of the Pliny villas and in the designs for the royal palace on the Acropolis and Orianda Castle to be archaeologically precise and to fulfil prescribed building programmes, but also to plumb the possibilities of architecture beyond mere utility. For the Acropolis palace project he had his eye mainly on the way in which the new building would interact with the surviving remains of the Propylaea and the Parthenon. In the Orianda project it is a glazed observation pavilion in the form of a temple that expresses architecture's perception of itself more clearly than perhaps ever before.
£38.61
Edition Axel Menges The Architecture of Pica Ciamarra Associati: From Urban Fragments to Ecological Systems
Since 1970, based in an isolated building situated on the peninsula of Posillipo, Pica Ciamarra Associati (www.pcaint.eu) has acted as a laboratory of architectural and urban design which has gradually incorporated new members and new energies over the time: using a multidisciplinary approach, the roots of the architectural practice lie in the intensive theoretical and practical work begun in the early 1960s by Massimo Pica Ciamarra. Since then the practice has been marked by a continuous relationship with Le Carré Bleu Feuille internationale darchitecture and leading members of the cultural milieu of Team 10: this has led to constant attention to everything that lies beyond form, to the relation ship with contexts that also include non-spatial contexts, and to high levels of integration and dialectical discussion. According to Pica Ciamarra Associati, a design transcends the approaches of a single sector, providing simultaneous solutions to contradictory requirements, combining utopia and practicality. The poetics of the fragment: it mediates between architecture and the urban dimension; some designs also have the aim of becoming absorbed within a context as 'informed fragments'. This monograph is the result of an intensive period of work and consists of two interacting parts. It stems from research into the archive of the studio Pica Ciamarra and conversation with the members of the architectural practice. Organised diachronically, the book tells the long story, unfolding over a period of over fifty years of a team of Neapolitan architects and designers, who have maintained the lively spirit of the practice which is still geared towards the future. The textual and iconographic account tells a story and offers an interpretation that highlight the vibrant atmosphere of the studio, based on a consistency of thought and action, and fuelled by an interest in many different forms of knowledge. The contextualisation of the events related to the studio, as they unfolded over time, is wide-ranging, coherent and connotative. Antonietta Iolanda Lima, professor of history of architecture at the University of Palermo, has always tried, through theory, teaching and design, to disseminate the importance of history which can embracing innovation and tradition to an equal degree, forming a new architectural language. According to her view of architecture, history and design are closely connected, a 'single entity' as is reflected by her career. Since the 1980s, her academic work has gained increasing importance, a way of avoiding narrow sectoral approaches in the training of future architects, offering a holistic stance of the history of architecture and an architecture that contributes to shaping critical thought and a thriving cultural life.
£61.20
Edition Axel Menges Rhine Bridges
Text in English & German. Manfred Sack, in an essay about bridges: The Latin word relegere' means to connect. The assumption is that this is the basis of the word religion. The chief priest in Rome was the pontifex maximus, the highest builder of bridges between man and god, between this world and the other world'. The Germanic tribes saw the bridge in the rainbow physically before them, it was their road of light to Valhalla. For those who are disheartened, drugs are the bridge of escape into other, very illusory, worlds of experience. Tradition builds bridges from yesterday to tomorrow. There are so many bridges: music, a letter, the sounds of a radio, phone conversations, light signals, Morse signals, calls. The building of bridges is thus not only a physical process, but a spiritual and emotional event, a longing felt by the soul. No wonder that those who design and calculate bridges, who build them and therefore take risks, at least subconsciously sense some of the extrasensory significance of their sensory activity. And this is all the more true when we are talking about the bridges across the Rhine, the most important European river, which is wreathed in myths and legends and has inspired poetry and music like no other. Until the 19th century it was crossed almost exclusively by means of ferries. With the onset of industrialisation, more and more goods had to be transported increasingly rapidly. Today, over 250 bridges cross the river. They too now shape the unsurpassed diversity of the Rhine landscape. Since 1987, Riehle has photographed some 150 Rhine bridges from the river's headwaters in Switzerland to the Rhine's delta in the Netherlands. The most interesting 100 bridges are published in this book.
£64.80
Edition Axel Menges Prussian Gardens
The Prussian gardens in Berlin, Potsdam and elsewhere in Brandenburg: for the first time, texts and photographs present an overall view of all the gardens and parks created under the Hohenzollerns over a period of more than three centuries. Only the cross-genre collaborative effort of garden designers, gardeners, architects, scenographers, sculptors, painters, and creative rulers, the most prominent of whom were Frederick II and Frederick William IV, made it possible "to turn the environs of Berlin and Potsdam step by step into a garden", as Frederick William IV put it in 1840. Figures such as David Garmatter, Friedrich Christian Glume, Siméon Godeau, Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, Peter Joseph Lenné, Antoine Pesne, Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, Georg Potente, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the Sello brothers, and Antoine Watteau -- picked from a whole cornucopia of names -- indicate the spectrum of artistic forces that created the Prussian garden realm. Impatient with his royal client, who had once again cut his funding, Lenné alluded to the high standard of princely landscape art: "Your Majesty still does not understand how ingenious my idea is". The present volume is an attempt to examine the "ingeniousness of the idea" specifically inherent in the gardens of the Hohenzollerns in Prussia.
£16.90
Edition Axel Menges Wilhelm Hauff, Three Fairy Tales
Text in English & German. "Poverty is the greatest plague, wealth is the highest good", Goethe wrote in his ballad "The Treasure Seeker". Over the course of the poem, however, it becomes apparent that this is a mistaken conclusion. The search for riches, fame and power often brings with it greed, inhumanity and violence, as Wilhelm Hauff shows us in this book of fairytales. The best known of these is The Cold Heart, in which the wish for a better life leads Peter Munk the charcoal-burner to seek the help of the spirits of the Black Forest. The first spirit he encounters is the kindly glass manikin, who makes him the owner of a glassworks, but, as he never wished for the necessary understanding, he cannot give the running of his glassworks the attention it deserves. He becomes idle, fails miserably and falls victim to Hollander Michael, the evil spirit, who demands Peter's heart in return for helping him and gives him a stone in return. With a heart of stone, Peter loses all his social competence, and is filled with avarice, which, however, does not prevent him from pursuing his new profession as a businessman and money-lender. Rather, it helps him to succeed. But when he kills his wife for showing kindness to a destitute man, he finally comes to his senses, with the assistance of the glass manikin, who helps him to recover his original heart. And so everything turns out for the best. Peter Munk becomes a charcoal-burner again, and lives humbly but happily with his mother and his wife, restored to life by the glass manikin, for the rest of his days. The Cave of Steenfoll has a less happy outcome. In this story, greed becomes an obsession and even a madness that finally leads to the death of William Falcon. Having found the long-sought treasure -- a little chest full of gold pieces -- he is still not satisfied, and he dives into the sea a second time, never to emerge again. The fairytale of Said's Adventures is the opposite of the other two. The hero, a man under the protection of a good fairy, embarks on a dangerous journey. The hero encounters greed and avarice everywhere during his adventures, but they have no place in his own character. He is a skilful fighter, but always guided by compassion. Finally, he is rewarded with wealth, good fortune and contentment.
£25.20
Edition Axel Menges Castles of the Weser Renaissance
Text in English & German. In the area along the Weser, there was a great deal of building activity between the Reformation and the Thirty Years War which was helped along by economic prosperity. Little affected later by war or modernisation, high quality Renaissance castles, aristocratic estates, town halls and civic architecture have survived here in exceptional density. This facet of Central European Renaissance architecture started to be appreciated in the early 20th century. This led to the concept of the Weser Renaissance, oriented above all towards formal and regional history, and still popular today, like a kind of brand. The present volume offers a representative selection of the region's castles and palaces for the first time, dealing with both princely residences and seats of the nobility. Architecture and court culture are placed in a European context that goes beyond older approaches based on the stylistic history and shows that forms demonstrating princely prestige have qualities in common well outside the region. Michael Bischoff's introductory text provides an overview of Renaissance architecture in the Weser area. Uwe Albrecht and Julian Jachmann explain the terminology and function of princely architecture. Heiner Borggrefe analyses early Renaissance architectural ornamentation, G Ulrich Großmann covers the topic after the mid-16th century. Thomas Fusenig writes on the arts and sciences at the courts. Rolf Schönlau discusses aspects of building materials in terms of economic history. Hillert Ibbeken deals with the sandstone that is most frequently used from a geological point of view. The descriptive catalogue is by Katja Schoene and Michael Bischoff.
£31.41
Edition Axel Menges Gypsy Architecture: Houses of the Roma in Eastern Europe
The fact that there is Gypsy architecture may surprise quite a few people, for Gypsies are regarded as nomads who roam through the world and settle now here, now there, never stay long in one place, and consider everything that normal citizens find important to be an unreasonable restriction of their freedom. Nevertheless, in southeastern Europe, there exists a remarkable architecture created by Gypsies. It seems to have been created from a dream: Unreal, abstruse, and colourful, it is a composition of all the architectural styles of this world. Uninfluenced by any deeper knowledge of architectural culture, each family head chose the style, size and finishings on the basis of his own personal tastes or memories of travels, houses and things seen in other countries. The result has been the creation of bizarre and fantastic jumbles of buildings that it is hard to classify in terms of western stylistic features. Very often the houses are the result of enormous jigsaw puzzles created from an assembly of images or photographs of various different buildings, and their execution precisely follows these crazy guidelines, perhaps because they are incomprehensible to those carrying out the project. Otherwise, how could one possibly explain Indian-style roofs crowning neoclassical buildings, mansard roofs on structures of improbable style, Frenchified Chinese pagodas, heterogeneous assemblies of diverse and contrasting elements. The structures, the villas gradually soften their bizarre and fantastic imagery the closer they are built to European countries. Undoubtedly, the cultural influence of neighbouring countries already immersed in the culture and lifestyle of Europe has helped to 'contaminate' the owners and bring their dwellings, the expression of their wishes, more into line with the ruling culture. What, however, remains staggering is the quality of the execution of the complex decorations, of the architectural elements and buildings that are very often contrasting, of widely differing façades surmounted by steepling roofs of no practical use whose only function is to represent, through their lack of proportion and absolute needlessness, the financial and social power of the family. Besides pieces of sculpture that are undoubtedly ritual and symbolic and originating from Indian culture, suns with spiny rays, various forms of pinnacle, geometrical moons, zoomorphic decorations, the tops of the roofs bear metalwork inscriptions giving the date of building and the name of the family or that of the wife, symbolising a desire for display and the proclamation of ownership.
£45.86
Edition Axel Menges Energy Designs for Tomorrow: Energy Design feur Morgen
Text in English & German. The challenges facing the 21st century are staggering: rapidly increasing population, mounting social instability due to global imbalances of wealth and welfare, resource scarcity and resulting conflicts related to their exploitation and distribution, and certainly the ongoing distress of the environment as a whole. Such severe conditions, including climate change, continue to become greater in number, complexity, and clarity, even though most of them had already been introduced as areas of concern in the 1970s and 1980s. Part I of the book describes potential strategies that will play an essential role in curbing carbon emissions, reducing -- or replacing -- fossil fuel usage. To better understand the current global energy industry, the book is unique in showing energy consumption data across the globe in comparable units, and it explains how fossil fuels could be replaced by renewable energy resources. Part II explains how the necessary significant reductions in energy consumption can be achieved by alternative means at reasonable cost for power generation to be maintained. A great number of projects are described in the book as case studies that fulfil the variety of international energy codes. Part III addresses the technological possibilities for energy savings and resource-sensitive solutions related to buildings. Here, the potential of building-integrated solar systems, wind-power generation, rain-water harvesting, and the use of geothermal energy, as well as their implementation in the architecture are presented in detail. On the one hand, the book presents the background for a broader understanding of the medium-range and long-range changes in our energy landscape, and on the other it provides the basis for avenues required to enable us to design strategies based on local conditions and individual geographical locations. Over the past 20 years, Klaus Daniels and the engineers of his engineering consultancy HL Technik have published four volumes of seminal work related to this subject, and their work is continuously being updated. In this series, the new book is an attempt to illustrate how modern architecture needs to be adaptive to energy conditions and how design and technology can be blended successfully.
£62.10
Edition Axel Menges Dear Diary / Liebes Tagebuch
Text in English and German. The narrowest building in Cologne is the office of the advertising agency rendel & spitz. Once a year, during the 'Passagen', the offsite- programme of the international furniture fair in Cologne, the office is turned into an exhibition space: It serves as a stage for an installation of a chosen designer. In 2005 there was no exhibition. The accompanying book to the exhibition that never took place contained only empty pages. Just as in previous years, the book was sent out to designers, architects, artists, journalists and friends. One of the recipients then asked rendel & spitz whether he was supposed to fill the empty pages and sent the book back. An idea was born: each recipient was asked to lend his (used) book for the 2006 exhibition 'Dear Diary / Liebes Tagebuch'. The result is a collection of private notes, sketches, photographs, collages, and objects. The accompanying book shows a synopsis of the contributions, which in some cases are very personal. In addition to the book, there is a CD-ROM with the complete contents of each book that was contributed.
£12.90
Edition Axel Menges Expanding the Gap / Das Weite Suchen
Text in English and German. As in 2001, during the 2002 Cologne International Furniture Fair three internationally known designers squeezed themselves into the town's best known building between buildings. There they presented their ideas on the subject of 'expanding the gap'. From Tokyo came the idea of expanding the exhibition space with an installation to make it snow. Designer Tokujin Yoshioka had 18 kilos of down whirled up by fans at the end of the room to create an everlasting blizzard, and the largest snowball of the year. -- In order to burst through the austere geometry of the exhibition building, projections from lava lamps from the London-based designer Ross Lovegrove covered the greater part of the interior. The coloured, gently moving bubbles created in these lamps by heat caused the sharp contours and hard black and white contrasts of the ceilings and walls to melt and flow. -- Greg Lynn from Los Angeles installed an over-dimensioned, organic sculpture on one of the side walls. It reached out well into the room, and so the visitors were obliged to squeeze past it and search on the other side for space.
£12.90
Edition Axel Menges Karl Friedrich Schinkel: The Architectural Work Today
This comprehensively illustrated book records and assembles material on over 150 buildings by Karl Schinkel, Germany's most important 19th century architect.
£61.20
Edition Axel Menges Car Design: From the Carriage to the Electric Car
Text in English & German. If laziness is the mother of all inventions, then the car is its masterpiece. The earliest means of locomotion was walking, followed by riding on horses or camels; finally, with the invention of the wheel, came the ability to use carriages, which not only made locomotion far more comfortable but also brought the transportation of goods to a whole new level. However, it then took millennia for carriages to go from being propelled by horses or oxen to engines, initially steam-driven, then propelled by internal combustion engines and early experiments with electric propulsion. Cars were initially the result of pure craftsmanship, and as passenger cars were based on the concept of the carriage. The assembly line had not entirely abandoned the carriage look, but already showed a typical automobile profile: equal-sized wheels, engine bonnet, passenger compartment. The predominant body colour of cars manufactured between 1910 and 1930 was black, while all makes of car had an almost uniform appearance. As manufacturers moved away from metal-panelled wooden frames to an all-steel design, they hesitantly ventured to adopt new forms. Improved undercarriages and higher engine performance were initially limited by air resistance, which above a speed of 60 kilometres per hour is the strongest of all driving resistances. This led to the development of new body shapes that offer less resistance to the airstream. Engineers still determined the form of the car, sometimes even achieving formal elegance. It was only rarely that members of other professions, such as the architects Le Corbusier or Walter Gropius, were commissioned to design a car. Between the two World Wars North America had the worlds largest fleet of cars; this also meant that their design became an increasingly important sales factor. Professsional automobile design was established. As they continued to develop technically, cars in the 1950s moved further and further away from the physically logical form of a moving body. One of the last and most outstanding examples of a form with optimum resistance to the airstream is the Citroën ID/DS of 1955. Others, indeed almost all, opted for the pure symbolism of speed and power, whose most important ingredients were tail fins and chrome. Today, with a global annual production of close to 100 million passenger cars, automotive style has come to be represented by a wide range of almost every imaginable form. Architect Hans-Ulrich von Mende has worked with partners in an independent practice since 1990. For 50 years his writings and drawings on automotive design have appeared in books, trade journals (mot, autobild) and the daily press (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung).
£38.61
Edition Axel Menges Ada Karmi-Melamede and Ram Karmi, Supreme Court of Israel, Jerusalem: Opus 71
Intent on realising her late husband's vision, Dorothy de Rothschild first offered to provide funding for a new building housing the Supreme Court of Israel in the 1960s. In 1983 the offer was seriously considered and accepted. Renowned architects from Israel and from all over the world entered into a two-stage competition in 1986. Ada Karmi-Melamede and Ram Karmi, siblings their own architecture practices, were asked to compete as a team. Their contribution stood out clearly against the other entries. Instead of proposing a formal and monumental scheme, the Karmis came up with a coherent site-specific building which roots itself into the land, continues the stone language of Jerusalem, and relates to its unique vibrant light. Pure geometrical volumes are arranged to form a balanced composition and complex whole. A careful equilibrium is created between the gravity of local stone-masonry walls and the immaterial play of light and shadow in the voids and volumes of the structure. The Supreme Court acts as part of a larger civic urban ensemble and forms a gateway to Government Hill offering a pedestrian walkway to the Knesset. While referred to as a single building, in reality the Supreme Court building is an ensemble applying urban principles to the interior, thus producing public spaces throughout. Half architecture, half landscape architecture, the building is deeply anchored in its site and reaches out further than its own walls. Four main functions are manifested in four distinct geometric volumes organised by two cardinal axes. These axes separate the four main program elements: the library, the judges' chambers, the courtrooms and the parking area. The allocation of the various volumes within the building allows for a sequence of in-between spaces which are used for circulation, for the penetration of natural light and for the transition between the public and private domains. Paul Goldberger stated in The New York Times in 1995 that "the sharpness of the Mediterranean architectural tradition and the dignity of law are here married with remarkable grace.
£26.10
Edition Axel Menges Johannes Peter Holzinger, Haus in Bad Nauheim: Opus 53
Text in English and German. In the summer 1978, the cover of the magazine Bauwelt showed a photograph of an unusual building. It was tersely introduced to readers as a 'private house with office in Bad Nauheim', but it was immediately obvious that this was a built manifesto. What appeared was a strictly symmetrically articulated, steeply rising façade, emanating dignity and composure. It also seemed able to manage without windows, which further enhanced its austere elegance. And then there were the strikingly slender, sharp-angled wall elements, which seemed captivatingly graceful, or even delicate and fragile -- as though folded from paper. The fact is that, long before Gilles Deleuze had cast his spell on a new generation of aesthetically ambitious architects, Johannes Peter Hölzinger was putting his folding skills into practice as a matter of course.
£21.60
Edition Axel Menges Klaus Kinold. Architectural Photographs: Photographs of Architecture
Text in English & German. The work of Klaus Kinold, born 1939 in Essen, is part of a tradition of photography, and particularly of architectural photography. Architecture was one of the most important themes even of early photography -- not least because it stood still. Initially this was an important characteristic, since exposure times were long. Thus began the affinity of photography with the documentary. Reality and representation were supposed to correspond. Quoting a statement by Roland Barthes, Kinold has referred to the still "mysterious bonus of confidence given to the documentary". At a time when digital photographic and processing techniques make all sorts of manipulation possible, the now rare quality of reliability is assigned to this attitude. It was self-evident for Kinold to explore the period whose very name included the term objectivity -- the New Objectivity (in German: Neue Sachlichkeit). The work of colleagues such as Werner Mantz, Hugo Schmölz, Arthur Köster and above all Albert Renger-Patzsch combined useful information and contemporary artistic expression. Walter Peterhans, photographer at the Bauhaus, called it the "magic of precision". At the same time, Kinold did not let himself be confused by the special effects indulged in by some modernist artists. His photographs indicate the structure of the surfaces of a building, the spatial depth and the details concealed in its shadowed sections, the proportions in which they present themselves to the user. The accuracy of observation, the precision in detail, the translation of three-dimensional objects into a convincingly construed image are among the virtues of the architectural photographer Klaus Kinold. What takes precedence in his work is not the moment at which a thing suddenly reveals its essence, a lucky coincidence, but rather the condition that is considered to be essential, set also by the right photographic standpoint. For Kinold, who owed a great deal to his teacher Egon Eiermann at the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe, including in his capacity as a photographer, logic, purity and clarity went without saying. Accordingly, predominant in his work, we find photographs of buildings by architects whom he could expect to have such qualities: classic Modernists like Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and contemporaries like Alvar Aalto, Hans Döllgast, Herman Hertzberger, Louis Kahn, Karljosef Schattner, Rudolf Schwarz, Alvaro Siza. Architectural historian Wolfgang Pehnt, born 1931, has often reaped the benefits of insights gained from Kinolds photographic art. Pehnt has published monographs about German architecture since 1900 and about Expressionist architecture, but he has also written about numerous individual uvres. He formerly taught at the Ruhruniversität Bochum.
£35.91
Edition Axel Menges Figures: A Project in St. Petersburg 2010-2012
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. For years, he has seen his love of art as a vocation -- one which he nurtures parallel to his work in construction. 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 contribution to the European Embankment project in St Petersburg, Krier recently demonstrated the power of architecture and fine art to cross-fertilise. The architects in charge of the urban development of this district are Sergei Tchoban and Evgeny Gerasimov. Krier designed the façade for a 132-metres long building on the Newa riverbank one that looks across the water onto the rear façade of the Hermitage. The vibrancy of the architecture is enhanced by its sculptural ornamentation based on the Balzac theme, 'The Human Comedy'. In this regard, Krier modelled over 50 figures in white clay, as well as around 65 linear metres of reliefs. The short poems that comment on the sculptures also centre on the theme of mankind and its interrelationships in society.
£53.10
Edition Axel Menges Second Look: Hitchcock: The Birds; Edwards: The Party; Scott: Blade Runner; Ruzowitzky: Anatomy; Scott: Gladiator
Text in English & German. Like literary texts, films often tell stories on multiple levels. Ridley Scott made an ironic reference to this when he called his legendary science-fiction film Blade Runner a "700-layer cake". These buried structures are created in two ways: by elements that resonate throughout the film itself and by references to other films, texts, myths, paintings, historical events etc. that are adapted in a specific way by the director, the scriptwriter and the production team. The heroine in Hitchcock's film The Birds, for instance, is a modern Aphrodite / Venus. Just as Venus, born from the sea foam, was carried to land on a seashell, Melanie is carried across Bodega Bay in a boat that is not much bigger than Venus' vessel in Botticelli's painting. Melanie's name is another reference to Aphrodite, who was also known as Melaina, "the black one". In the fist scene of the film, in which she enters the pet shop where she later gets to know Mitch and buys the love birds, Melanie is also dressed in black. The Venus-like Melanie is felt to be a threat by others within their world, and especially by more conventional women. One of them screams at her hysterically: "I think you're evil! Evil!". This creates a particular connection between love and horror in the film. The classical Aphrodite also had a dark side -- her union with Ares produced not only Harmonia, but also Deimos and Phobos: "dread" and "fear". Detecting hidden references is only the first step in creating an analysis; the next step is to elucidate the function of the reference within the film. For instance, what does it mean that Hitchcock's heroine is attacked by birds, whereas Venus was depicted accompanied by a dove? And why does Melanie, our "Venus", wear furs? Kirsch's investigations of this and other questions open up new perspectives on a number of films, with extensive illustrations allowing the reader to follow these in detail. The book invites us to take a second look at The Birds, Blake Edwards' The Party, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Gladiator and Stefan Ruzowitzky's Anatomy. Konrad Kirsch is a PhD in literature and an enthusiastic viewer of films. He has published texts on Georg Büchner, Elias Canetti, Robert Walser, Franz Kafka and William Shakespeare. Most recently, his article on Heinrich von Kleist was published in the Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie.
£40.41
Edition Axel Menges Robert-Bosch-Krankenhaus, Stuttgart: Opus 68
In 1940, manufacturer Robert Bosch (1861-1942) opened the first hospital to bear his name. He was interested in promoting public welfare as well as his highly successful business activities. Since 1964, 92 per cent of Robert Bosch GmbH has belonged to the Robert Bosch Foundation, whose dividends benefit education, science, understanding among nations and health care. So in 1973 it became possible to open a new hospital complex in Stuttgart. There has been continual extension and improvement of the existing stock by Arcass Frei Architekten, and in recent years the geriatric rehabilitation clinic and the very stimulating chapel have been added, both by Günter Leonhardt, and also the entrance building by Joachim Schürmann & Partner.
£35.10
Edition Axel Menges Steidle + Partner, Alfred-Wegener-Institut, Bremerhaven: Alfred-Wegener-Institut Bremerhaven
Text in English and German. The building for the Alfred-Wegener-Institut für Polar- und Meeresforschung is near the city centre by the commercial harbour. What is striking is the unusual façade: a pattern is made with glazed tiles in white, grey and black, seeming more regular than it actually is.
£22.41