Search results for ""Author Axel"
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 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 LOG ID BGW, Dresden
Air pollution resulting from high energy consumption is a major factor threatening our environment. Heating buildings accounts for about 40 per cent of germany's total energy consumption. Current heat insulation regulations for buildings aimed at reducing energy consumption have become considerably more stringent. However, grweater heat insulation and energy saving necessarily restrict the exchange of air between outside and inside the building deteriorates and CO2 and other pollutant contents increase. For this reason, when planning the district headquarters for the Berufsgenossenschaft Gesundheitsdienst und Wohlfahrtspflege (Proffesional Association for Health and Welfare) in Dresden the aim was to produce an economical, environment-friendly building with a high proportion of solar heating and workplaces designed ergonomically and with an eye to health requirements.
£27.00
Edition Axel Menges Francesco di Giorgio Martini's Fortress Complexes
Text in English & German. Francesco di Giorgio Martini's fortress complexes, created at the end of the Quattrocento, continue to look experimental and highly speculative half a millennium later by their semiotic character. They represent an extreme of European architectural history, occupying a position where architecture and sculpture cannot be sharply distinguished any longer. The alien-looking creations represented in this book have their origins in a particular historic situation: the emergence of firearms in the 14th century and their spread in the 15th century had shifted the balance of warfare in favour of the attacking side, against which the defensive structure had not yet found a remedy. Enter Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439 to 1502) at this point, a native of Siena and one of the Quattrocento's highly versatile artists. He worked mainly in Federico da Montefeltro's Urbino, and left behind a body of work that included painting -- the three famous prospects of ideal cities in Berlin, Baltimore and Urbino are attributed to him -- sculpture -- primarily his imposing reliefs -- and architecture -- here he was definitely the outstanding figure between Alberti and Bramante. His achievements as an engineer are equally impressive, and his elaborate designs for machines strongly influenced those of Leonardo da Vinci. He was a true Renaissance uomo universale, though, despite of his voluminous and influential theoretical work, less in the sense of a humanist homme de lettres than as an all-round artist. Francesco's sacred and secular structures are classicist and austere in nature, yet his fortress structures look as if, moving beyond all functional concerns, he is exploiting the newness of the task, the lack of any tried and tested technical solutions and the removal of all typological boundaries to give his architectonic fantasies free rein, resulting in an apotheosis of the new, the unfamiliar and the alien. This book is an attempt to understand the strangely grandiose semiotic character of these structures. In doing so, it poses the question of what strategies can be used when seeking a shape for buildings for which there is no precedent.
£44.74
Edition Axel Menges Rathaus Bremen: Opus 69
Test in English & German. The town hall in Bremen with its associated Roland statue in the market square in front of the building make up a UNESCO World Heritage site and thus count as outstanding examples of architectural and cultural history. The Bremen town hall is an ideal image of this building type that is so important for European and Western history. It is almost a textbook example of the medieval and early modern town hall. The building dates from 1405 to 1410 and has not been fundamentally altered since. The only exception is that it was carefully continued between 1595 and 1614, when it acquired an extended figurative façade decoration based on the forms of the Weser Renaissance that were current at the time. This underlined the Hanseatic city's claims to immediacy as a free imperial city. The figurative decoration is almost encyclopaedic in its scope, showing the period's striving for humanistic education in the form of iconography with a wide-ranging political and religious spectrum of allegorical themes. The old town hall has remained almost untouched to the present day. In the late 19th century, when the city administration had acquired greater responsibilities, and thus needed more space, an extension was finally added at the back of the building, which Munich architect Gabriel von Seidl sensitively subordinated to the existing structure. The particular importance of the town hall in Bremen is based on the fact that it is extremely ambitious in architectural terms, and at the same time symbolises the republican and municipal structures of European cities. The Free Hanseatic City of Bremen is the oldest European city republic, and has retained its independence until today as a Land in its own right in the German Federal Republic. This self-confidence is expressed through the resources of architecture and the pictorial programme. As the best-preserved example for this particular building type in Germany the town hall in Bremen has also a unique significance as a historical monument.
£26.91
Edition Axel Menges Venezia oscura
Text in English and German. Ullmann has explored Venice photographically for more than twenty years. This book shows the famous city from a very individual point of view, not emphasising the tourist highlights, but investigating the 'essence' of Venice in a number of impressive photographs.
£34.20
Edition Axel Menges Ivano Gianola, LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura, Lugano: Opus 78
Text in English & Italian. Ivano Gianola is one of the founding members of the so-called Ticino School. Like the other significant figures of this legendary school he is primarily concerned with urban-development and architectonic quality of building in the Canton of Ticino. The extensive uvre that has sprung from this concern has produced a plethora of intuitively designed, distinctive buildings. After more than ten years of planning and building, Gianola's most extensive project and at the same time the largest project of the Canton of Ticino to date is now open to the public. The new Cultural and Art Centre of Lugano is located directly on the shore of Lake Lugano. The spacious and spatially differentiated new building is an architectonic hybrid that combines a museum for contemporary art, a convention centre, various restaurants and cafés as well as a theatre under one roofscape. The theatre is not only equipped as an optimal venue for operas and theatrical performances, but can also be used as a concert hall or convention auditorium. Moreover the urban configuration of the new complex functions as a most convincing contemporary gateway to the largest city in Ticino. This Opus volume tries to decipher not only the obvious and hidden urban-planning aspects of this major project but also its multilayered formal esthetic and haptic connotations. Thereby the book pays tribute to a high point of contemporary Ticino architecture and to Ivano Gianola's late masterpiece.
£28.80
Edition Axel Menges Steidle + Partner, Wacker-Haus, Munchen (Opus 31): Steidle and Partner Wacker-Haus, Munich
Text in English and German. Otto Steidle acquired international recognition for his extraordinary early residential buildings in Munich and for exemplary solutions for school and office buildings. His office and residential complex for Wacker-Chemie in Munich is a lively accent on a particularly conspicuous site in architecturally conservative Munich. Individually balanced buildings are arranged along the block perimeter in Prinzregentenstrasse, the most important east-west axis in the inner city, diagonally opposite the Haus der Kunst, and in Bruderstrasse, which leads to Lehel, a traditional residential area. Steidle has not packed the different functions in layers one above the other, as is usual in commercial projects of this kind, but has separated them clearly from each other. The office building on the noisy carriageway of Prinzregentenstrasse takes the curve to the narrow side street in an elegant sweep, with the glass skin suspended in front of the corner giving the building an almost Mendelsohn-like verve. The series of residential buildings in Bruderstrasse is given a different quality by Berlin painter Erich Wiesner's strong colours and the projecting and recessed facades. And as here too the normal Munich scale is considerably exceeded -- the three residential towers placed diagonally to the courtyard rise eight storeys high -- there is a surprising amount of room for publicly accessible gardens inside the block, designed by landscape architects Latz + Partner, and also scope for revealing the torrential Stadtmuhlbach in a spectacular fashion, which used to be covered, but now shoots directly past one of the windows of the sunken cafeteria and then under the entrance hall of the office building, before playing at waterfalls as it gushes into the Englischer Garten at the other side of the road. Thus Prinzregentenstrasse, as a mile of museum and government buildings, and the Lehel residential area have acquired an architectural attraction of elemental impact in the shape of the Wacker building.
£21.60
Edition Axel Menges Paul Bohm: Buildings and Projects
Text in English & German. The central Mosque of the Turkish-Islamic Union in Köln-Ehrenfeld has given us one of the most vigorously discussed German building projects of the past 10 years. With this spectacular domed structure, Paul Böhm, the youngest son of Pritzker Prize-winner Gottfried Böhm and grandchild of Dominikus Böhm, has successfully introduced the Osman mosque typus into the modern age. The dome and minaret provide the Turkish / Islamic community with visual identification points. At the same time, this shell-construction structure is broken up into individual segments in a manner that opens it up to both the neighbourhood and the world. Containing conference halls, rooms for community use, a bazaar, a library and a museum, the complex is intended to convey to the surrounding area a message of retained ties to the historical country of origin coupled with acceptance and integration into the new homeland, and a willingness to engage in dialogue. Up to now the mosque represents the high point of the architectural career of Paul Böhm, who was born in 1959 and who is teaching at the Fachhochschule Köln. His work encompasses a multitude of exciting projects and realised buildings, including cultural buildings, university buildings, administration buildings and residential buildings. It is, perhaps, unsurprising that an architect who comes from a family of church builders should have added an impressive religious structure to uvre. St. Theodor in Köln-Vingst is a central-plan building that possesses a coherent atmosphere suited to contemplation whilst, at the same time, opening itself to a part of the city that suffers from social problems. Figures who have played a significant role in Paul Böhm's professional development include Tadao Ando, the master of velvet-smooth concrete, Oswald Mathias Ungers, the great lover of geometry, and Peter Zumthor, the essentialist of his generation. Like these three figures, the architects who Böhm worked with prior to founding his own firm in 2001, all espoused very different philosophies of architecture: Otto Steidle, Anton Schweighofer, Richard Meier . Paul Böhm does, of course, also owe a debt to the traditions of the family of architects that he comes from -- a tradition that he continues in his own individual way.
£53.91
Edition Axel Menges Open Space: Transparency - Freedom - Dematerialisation
The aim of the study is to analyse and describe in detail one of the most important trends in architecture in the 19th and 20th centuries: the evolution leading from the closed, hermetic spaces of the early cultures and the Middle Ages to the "open space" and transparency of the 19th and 20th/21st centuries. Historically, the focus is on the "diaphanous" space of the Gothic cathedral, the opening of the late-Baroque dome towards the sky, the transparency of exhibition halls and hothouses in the 19th century, and the glass dreams of the early 20th century. The steel-and-glass technology of the past one hundred years has permitted even more transparency, openness, and dematerialisation on a scale never seen before. It is notable -- to quote just one aspect of the study -- that many modern glass buildings have been compared to a "crystal". This is the material with which we associate concepts such as purity, transparency, and order. We have thus also found a symbol for clarity and translucency in architecture. One key objective of the study is to demonstrate that this trend has been driven by no means only by a functionalist, pragmatic, or physical motivation but that, as in past epochs, the "opening up" of architecture reflects elementary desires of humankind: these are, first of all, psychological, aesthetic and artistic desires, the wish to overcome gravity as far as possible and, last but not least, the liberation of architecture and the attempt to resolve the heteronomy of "indoors" and "outdoors". Many statements have suggested that this touches even on the borders of the irrational and the metaphysical. The study should therefore also contribute to a fresh debate on the boundaries of architecture and, most importantly, should serve as a plea to allow architecture to remain open, free, light, and transparent even in the future.
£44.91
Edition Axel Menges The Act of Creation and the Spirit of a Place: A Holistic-Phenomenological Approach to Architecture
NOMINATED FOR THE RIBA INTERNATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2007. In this book Nili Portugali, presents her particular interpretation of the holistic-phenomenological worldview in theory and in practice, a worldview which stands in recent years at the forefront of the scientific discourse, and is tightly related to Buddhist philosophy. The purpose of architecture is first and foremost to create a human environment for human beings. The real challenge of current architectural practice is to make the best use of the potential inherent in our modern technological age. Yet, modern society has lost the value of man and thus created a feeling of alienation between man and the environment. Contemporary architecture sought to dissociate itself from the world of emotions and connect the design process to the world of ideas, thus creating a rational relation between building and man, devoid of any emotion. Portugali argues that in order to change the feeling of the environment and create places and buildings we really feel at home' and want to live in, what is needed is not a change of style or fashion, but a transformation of the mechanistic worldview underlying current thought and approaches. Based on Christopher Alexander's basic assumption that behind human architecture there are universal and eternal codes common to us all as human beings, and that there is absolute truth underlying beauty and comfort, Portugali demonstrates how this approach, as well as her unique planning process stemming from it (based on the way things actually exist already on site) generates that common spiritual experience people undergo in buildings endowed with soul, no matter where or from what culture they come from. That she demonstrates through a variety of her buildings and projects (with over 600 color illustrations and drawings), in relation to the physical, cultural and social reality of the place they were planned and built on, an Israeli reality which reflects a unique interface between the orient and the west, a cultural interface she personally represents. The book is valuable to architects, artists, scientists, philosophers and anyone who cares about the quality and beauty of the environment we live in.
£35.91
Edition Axel Menges Otto Ernst Schweizer, Stadium in Vienna: Stadion Wien
Text in German & English. When the stadium for a "Workers Olympiad" -- one of the most beautiful complexes in Europe, as the daily press put it -- was opened in 1931 on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Republic of Austria on the Prater site in Vienna, Otto Ernst Schweizer, the architect, was suddenly catapulted into the ranks of internationally acclaimed architects. The stadium, which can seat 60,000, was built as an amphitheatre on the model of its ancient predecessors, in particular the Colosseum in Rome, which Schweizer had studied intensively; the Viennese stadium seen as a reinterpretation of the enormous Roman structure on the basis of the constancy of things that were valid, which was one of the basic premises of his architecture. Otto Ernst Schweizer, born in 1890, and thus of the same generation as Le Corbusier, Hans Scharoun, Erich Mendelsohn and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, had attracted attention even as a young architect with some outstanding competition entries, and was acclaimed for his planetarium on the periphery of the old town in Nuremberg and for the stands and the two cafés of the stadium complex there. He had left municipal service as an Oberbaurat to dedicate himself to planning and realizing the Milchhof in Nuremberg and also the stadium in Vienna. For thirty years he worked as one of the great teachers and researchers in the architecture faculty of the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe. He built -- after a long break forced upon him by National Socialist culture policy -- the II. Kollegiengebäude for Freiburg University. This was his last building, and once again Schweizer's approach to form and function was concentrated in it, almost as the quintessence of a rich creative life. And what remains of the stadium, this most beautiful complex in Europe, as has been said? The landscape around it has been wrecked and allowed to fray into randomness and Schweizer's reflecting lake in front of the arena has been filled in. The arena itself has been enlarged by almost double its appropriate cubature and its height increased, so generally it has changed to such an extent that the original is unrecognisable; hence this book.
£22.41
Edition Axel Menges Grimms Marchen
TEXT IN GERMAN. The fairy-tales by the Brothers Grimm presented in this book were selected and illustrated by the artist Dorothee Menzel, who lives with the German scholar Carl Wege in a little village near Bremen. The artist's pictures seem to restore the unity of man and nature. The charm of the numerous colour illustrations makes it possible for both children and adults to relate to the world of folk poetry in a new way.
£19.80
Edition Axel Menges Living in a Small Space/Wohnen Auf Kleinem Raum
Text in English and German. Architects in Europe, the Far East, the U.S., and Australia illustrate that a positive sense of space is more dependent on light and sun, air and warmth than on a defined minimum number of square feet.
£34.20
Edition Axel Menges Karl Friedrich Schinkel: Ein Sohn Der Spataufklarung
Text in German. Specialist literature on Schinkel has grown enormously since the 200th anniversary of his birth in 1981. But so far questions about the basis of his education and training remain unanswered. No one seems to have seen that Schinkel -- who is often called a classical or a Romantic architect -- was actually a son of the late Enlightenment. This is supported by his teachers' lesson notes (presented here for the first time), the educational periodicals of his period, private letters, exhibition catalogues and also treatises by avant-garde architectural theorists, who also have their say. It was a time of great elation, Kant's cry of 'sapere aude', have the courage to use your own reason, was the motto of this crucial epoch in the history of ideas. Schinkel's father, an unorthodox cleric, fought for the principles of the Enlightenment, and so did the teachers at the two progressive 'model schools' that Schinkel attended. For the first time, these schools brought children from all walks of life together under the same roof -- unheard of in those days. Friedrich Gedike, a leading Enlightenment teacher and the headmaster of Schinkel's grammar school Zum Grauen Kloster, not only tried to impart universal modern knowledge to his pupils, but also to educate them as citizens and servants of the state, with strong characters, and who could cope with life. The state was not just increasingly concerned with schooling, which had been dominated by the Church until that time, but also with education as a whole. The art academy, exhibitions and art as practised were to promote general enlightenment. To a certain extent this also applied to architecture. Friedrich Gilly, Schinkel's fervently revered master, even spoke of an architectural renaissance. The brightest minds of this period -- Schinkel met several of them -- were utterly convinced that the influence of science, culture and the fine arts was powerful enough to refine human nature and to sow peace and concord among nations. And so it is not surprising that the young Schinkel came to Fichte's philosophy at an early stage. Fichte defined the concept of virtue as the good will, which prevailed without exception, to "promote the purposes of humankind to the utmost of one's strength, and to promote them especially in the state, as it instructs". This became Schinkel's life's work.
£17.91
Edition Axel Menges The Film Minister: Goebbels and the Cinema in the Third Reich
Goebbels' film programme, his propaganda strategies, the planning of perfidious anti-Semitic feature films and suggestive war newsreels are reflected in these pages, and so is Hitler's influence and the way in which famous film stars coo-operated with the Nazi leadership.
£32.40
Edition Axel Menges Peter Kulka, Opus 55: Bosch-Haus Heidehof, Stuttgart
Text in English and German. Early in the 20th century, Robert Bosch, the founder of the Stuttgart electrical business, built a large villa on the hills east of the city. It was half Palladian, half in the reform style of the period before the First World War. The building was to meet the head of the company's need for prestige, and to provide a private refuge thanks to the pleasant qualities of its large park and open position. The foundation of the same name is now housed in the Villa Bosch, but the space available has not been adequate for some time. As the company also needed rooms for seminars and other events, a decision was taken to build new accommodation next to the villa. Seven well-known teams took part in a restricted competition, including Tadao Ando, Richard Meier and Richard Rogers. The commission went to Peter Kulka, based in Cologne and Dresden. He found a convincing solution to the problem of leaving the dominance of the old building untouched and at the same time making the foundation's new accommodation attractive in its own right. He came up with a second 'villa' slightly below the first one, precise in its volume and minimalist in its resources. The building responds impressively to the challenges of the topography, the landscape around it and its neighbouring building. Kulka's work combines transparency with physical presence, structural austerity with poetry. This villa suburbana represents a milestone in his career. Kulka, born in 1937, was a pupil of Selman Selmanagic and worked with Hermann Henselmann, Hans Scharoun and in various partnerships before setting up his own practice in 1979. He has been seen as a member of the German architectural avant-garde since his Dresden parliament building (1991-94).
£21.60
Edition Axel Menges Kisho Kurokawa, Oita Stadium, Oita, Japan: Opus 46
Known as the 'Big Eye' the Oita Stadium is one of the chosen venues for the next World Cup in 2002. It will be reused for the second stage of the Japan Inter-Prefectural Athletic Competition in 2008 after the World Cup, continuing to grow in the future to become a large-scale all-purpose sports park for Oita. The whole site covers an area of 225 ha and has several facilities outside the main football stadium. These include general fitness, training and lodging centres, a botanical pool, two multipurpose athletic fields, two rugby and soccer practise pitches, a softball field, tennis courts and other game areas. The main stadium features an open track for athletic events as well as the football pitch. It can also be used year-round for public events aided by its retractable roof. For soccer matches, spectator seats are placed right up to the edge of the pitch to bring them close to the action. To change over for track events a retractable seating system was developed. The stadium sits elegantly on its site, enhanced by the gentle curves of its spherical design. The choice of the sphere, Kurokawa says, is 'an expression of abstract symbolism'. This spherical shape also enables the retractable portion to move along its curved surface. The use of Teflon membrane panels with 25 percent light permeability obviates the need for artificial lighting during daylight hours. In order for the pitch to get proper exposure to sunlight the elliptical roof opening runs along the north-south axis. A main arch with perpendicular horizontal sub-members follows the elliptical shape of the roof opening. Between the roof and the spectator seating below the surrounding mountains can be seen from a slender ventilation clearstorey set just below the roof line. This slit of space is designed to create a feeling of openness inside the stadium. Since the original design, an idea emerged for a moving camera to be located on the main beam to deliver special dynamic images for television audiences around the world.
£19.80
Edition Axel Menges Peichl/Achatz/Schumer. Munchner Kammerspiele, Neues Haus: Opus 43 Series
Text in English and German. The Neues Haus, the new building for the Munchner Kammerspiele, is not a big building in any sense. The plot of land not far from Maximilian-strasse, whose greatest advantage is its proximity to Richard Riemerschmied's Schauspielhaus, is only about 1000 m2 in area. The most important quality of the design is in fact that it accepts the modesty of its role. The new building subordinates itself to the main Kammerspiele building, and manages without lavish foyers and extensive prestigious areas. The Neues Haus is a servant building, a place where work is done. A hasty passer-by would see the building simply as a white cube, reticent and introverted. Given the serene mastery of the brief and the architectural resources, one is almost inclined to call it a work of Peichl's old age, combining his love of clear volumes with a sovereign grasp of technical requirements. Like the silvery-sparkling ORF studios, the ground radio station in Styria and the liner-like phosphate elimination plant in Berlin before it, the Neues Haus is also crammed full of technology. It contains three stages, and two of them can be used at the same time. The largest playing area is elaborately equipped with gallery and under-stage; it is therefore intended as the main rehearsal area in future. The two large auditoriums are stacked one above the other like shoe-boxes and form a massive hollow core surrounded by all the service functions. The interior is dominated by a plainness that oscillates between poverty and asceticism. The corridors and foyers are narrow, the stairs simple, the interval areas positively sparse. The only opulent feature is the splendid technical equipment. Peichl's handwriting can be seen in the treatment of the details and his ingenious practice of self-quotation. Many of the motifs are reminiscent of earlier projects, and of course the typical portholes, spiral staircases and railings made of steel hawsers crop up again, all Peichl's usual maritime metaphors. In this way he has produced a building whose cool elegance reveals scarcely anything of its inner values.
£25.20
Edition Axel Menges Otto Ernst Schweizer: Bauten und Projekte: Bauten und Projekte
An architect, philosopher, and teacher who had a crucial effect on modern architecture.
£10.90
Edition Axel Menges Wanderndes Licht Duft der Zeit Wandering Light Fragrance of Time
Text in English & German. An ode to light sings the way of the wandering light, which comes from the universe and is born from the union of night and light. Wandering, it lingers for a short time in each place it visits, wandering around it, going from door to door and leaving its gift of light behind. It overcomes boundaries, falls in love, is angry, shows the future and laughs. It visits places of humiliation, powerlessness and hopelessness, and gives them a home, courage and protection. The wandering light tries to understand each place it visits and shows itself to them in different guises: as a shimmering cube, a folded labyrinth of light, as a pulsating vibration in rainbow colours, as a diamond light floating above the horizon, gently humming the music of the night. It dissolves boundaries, unites continents in the air, transforms what is fear, is here and there at the same time, lifts up the reality of time. At the end of its wanderings around the earth, it moves on into space, but not before leaving behind its scent, like the scent of time and its omnipresence. Beijing, Agra, Barcelona, New York, Gerona, Ankara and Zaatari are the places it encounters on its journey. The movements, frozen for a moment, allow us to sense its vibrations and its pulse on its way around the earth.
£21.60
Edition Axel Menges And the alley she whitewashed in light blue: The secret of all those timeless places where one feels »at home«
If someone asked me: what is the film about, I would have to say: It is really about the essence of human life! I find it incredibly beautiful! It is really a moving experience ... I think it is obviously art built and master full ..." (Prof. Howard Davis, University of Oregon, on my film and the alley she whitewashed in light blue.) At a time of existential threat to the physical and human environment we live in, architect and film maker Nili Portugali takes the readers through a poetic essay and a spectacular photo gallery, extracted from her awarded new film, into a deeply intimate journey of memories in the Galilean holy "Kabbala" city of Tsefat. A childhood journey that unfolds gradually from her present holistic / Buddhist / phenomenological point of view to a discovery of profound universal insights of what is the secret of all those timeless places endowed with beauty and soul where one feels "at home"? And what is that "one pure art of making" that creates them? At any culture at any place and at any time.
£32.40
Edition Axel Menges Innovative Apartment Buildings: New Directions in Sustainable Design
Current design of apartment buildings is facing challenges of philosophy and form. Past approaches no longer sustain new demands and require innovative thinking. The need for a new outlook is propelled by fundamental changes that touch upon environmental, economic, cultural and social aspects that led to the writing of this book. The depletion of non-renewable natural resources and climate change are a few of the environmental challenges that prompted designers to reconsider conceptual approaches in favour of ones that promote a better suitability between buildings and their environments. Concepts that minimize the buildings carbon footprint, passive solar gain, net-zero structures and water harvesting system are some of the contemporary strategies that architects and builders are integrating into their thought processes and design. Increasing costs of material, labour, land and infrastructure have posed economic challenges with affordability being paramount among them. The need to do with less brings about concepts that include adaptable dwellings, and smaller-sized yet quality-designed housing. Social challenges are also drawing attention. As the 'baby-boom' generation plans now for retirement, housing an elderly population will take priority. Walkable communities, aging in place, live-work residences, and multigenerational living are some of the concepts considered. The book offers information on contemporary design concepts and illustrates them with plans and photographs of outstanding international examples.
£53.91
Edition Axel Menges Zaha Hadid, Judith Turner: A Dialogue
The juxtapositions of Zaha Hadid's architectural models and drawings and Judith Turner's photographs of the architect's buildings in this volume reveal that Hadid and Turner are complicit. There is a clear agreement of sensibilities. Each understands the other. Hadid does not design with complete geometries in stable con-figurations, but designs instead with incomplete or distorted geometries that are dynamic and visually unstable. Turner does the same in her photographs, cropping before a form completes itself in a frame that leaves the rest of the form suggested outside the frame. Hadid's work is abstract a permutation of Modernism's trifecta of point, line and plane. Turner's photography, too, is abstract so that Turner's photographs of Hadid's buildings compound the abstraction, arguably intensifying the three-dimension-al abstraction by compressing it into two. Hadid's neutral palette of materials, especially concrete, takes on value in Turner's graphic compositions of black, white and gray, counterintuitively giving neutrality subtle intensity. Hadid structures her designs dynamically with diagonal lines and oblique planes playing with and against each other in three-dimensional fields. Likewise Turner works on the diagonal, always positioning herself obliquely to buildings, shooting glancingly rather than frontally: her diagonal position further dynamizes Hadid's already energized diagonals. Often Turner doubles down on the diagonality by cranking the camera's lens off its up-down axis to heighten the architectural dynamism. Turning her photographic angle lofts Hadid's already anti-gravitational architectural system off the ground. Judith Turner resides in New York where she began taking photographs in 1972. She has had solo exhibitions in various cities in the United States, Europe, South America, Israel, and Japan. Turner has been awarded several grants and fellowships. She received an Honor Award from The American Institute of Architects in 1994 and a Stars of Design Award in Photography from The Design Center of New York in 2007.
£26.91
Edition Axel Menges Parks and Gardens in Greater Paris
For over 350 years Parisians have designed and preserved phenomenal public outdoor spaces. In this book Jacqueline Widmar Stewart follows the fine-spun threads of the parklands tapestry in greater Paris. Identification of various hallmarks of premiere park-building eras imbues individual parks with multi-dimensional qualities and allows readers to experience these grand green places in the way Parisians do. Multiple layers of elements and themes are woven into the fabric of French parks. Reaching back as far as its Roman heritage, vestiges of the history of Paris are apparent in virtually all its parks, regardless of size. Even the balanced distribution of green spaces throughout the city reflects a major 19th-century city-planning epoch and is still carried forward in current park development. A number of French parks and gardens from the 17th century initially belonged to royal estates but now welcome public visits -- it should be noted that the Tuileries first opened its gates to the public in 1667. Thoughtfully designed and meticulously tailored to needs of the time, others have covered unsightly urban blight with splendor, and have converted industrial sites to recreational usage while maintaining cultural ties with the past. Many marvels beckon all who enter Paris' magical spheres: a several-kilometer-long landscaped promenade above busy streets; a modern garden suspended above a major train station; the Parc de la Villette with its grand red architectural curiosities of form and motion; a midisland allée in the Seine; newly created marshlands now home to mallard ducklings; clouds of fragrance from rose-descendants of Josephine Bonaparte's original collection; not one, but two gardens of the quintessential sculptor, Auguste Rodin.
£53.91
Edition Axel Menges Bruno Paul: The Life & Work of a Pragmatic Modernist
At the dawn of the 20th century, Bruno Paul (1874-1968) stood like a colossus astride the landscape of an emerging Modernism. As an illustrator, architect and educator his influence was unequalled. Arguably the most important German designer of his generation, his work was ubiquitous in the technical and professional publications of his day. For five decades, Paul's reputation was unparalleled among progressive German artists. As a young man he was a member of the Munich avant-garde responsible for the creation of the Jugendstil. As a designer of furniture and interiors, he achieved a commercial success unmatched by his illustrious contemporaries. In the light of his professional accomplishments, he was the most influential German architect of his generation, a figure of international significance. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Adolf Meyer and Kem Weber were among his students, and their work developed from the practices of his atelier. Indeed, as director of the Vereinigte Staatsschulen für freie und angewandte Kunst in Berlin he presided over an institution that rivaled the Bauhaus as a centre of progressive instruction in the arts. Despite the renown he enjoyed at the height of his career, Paul's name has been largely absent from the standard histories of the modern movement. Indeed, this book is the first comprehensive study of his life and work. Nevertheless, Paul's story embodies a significant facet of the history of 20th-century design: the development of Modernism in Central Europe and its coalescence from the influences of Jugendstil, Elementarism, Classicism, Expressionism and Functionalism. Paul played a prominent role in this coalescence, and he deserves a place of honour in the history of the modern movement. Yet his biography also encompasses a less familiar, but no less significant, aspect of the history of modern design. It is the story of a pragmatic Modernism that occupied a middle ground between avant-garde experimentation and conservative professional practice, a Modernism that was timeless, practical and principled. It was this pragmatic Modernism that won the patronage of the middle classes and established progressive design as an accepted alternative, and eventually as the preferred alternative to the period styles. Moreover Paul's pragmatic Modernism, and its underlying principles, remain as relevant today as when they were first conceived.
£35.10
Edition Axel Menges Hans Dieter Schaal: Exhibition Architecture
Hans Dieter Schaal is already something of a cultural institution in Germany. Trained as an architect, he always operates outside the "main stream", designing and realizing stage sets, sculptures, cemeteries, parks, squares, spatial installations or book projects, which are often trendsetting in their own field. In the last ten years Schaal has established a focal point that seems to be the sum of all his themes: exhibition architecture. He has provided expansive installations for the broadest possible range of exhibition subjects in such high-volume buildings as the Martin-Gropius-Bau or the Zeughaus in Berlin, the Haus der Geschichte in Bonn, the Kunstvereinsgebäude in Stuttgart, the Deutsches Postmuseum or the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome. His work was never mere exhibition design in these cases. Instead of this he was always concerned to tell spatial stories about the exhibits or their historical background. Of course he was able to draw on his experience in stage-set design here. Admittedly Schaal would not be Schaal, if he were not to use the whole stock of ideas from his decades of lateral thinking or his insatiable search for archetypes and images. On occasions this has meant that Schaal's exhibitions were ad-mired simply of their spatial sensations. It was only the very few people who were prepared to analyse the extraordinarily extensive and complex work more profoundly who found a carefully established subliminal relationship network of selected motifs running through all his exhibition installations like a central theme. Sometimes they come from his own early work, sometimes from literary or cinematic finds, then again from psychological-philosophical footnotes or even private obsessions. Such image particles constitute a thought-edifice perhaps comparable only with Aby Warburg's legendary picture archive which breaks right through the bounds of traditional exhibition architecture. Frank R. Werner has been director of the Institut für Architektur-geschichte und Architekturtheorie at the Bergische Universität in Wuppertal since 1993. He studied painting, architecture and architectural history at the Kunstakademie in Mainz, the Technische Hochschule in Hanover and Stuttgart University.
£46.80
Edition Axel Menges Selected Works/Ausgewahlte Arbeiten 19712023
In his note to the edition of Neue Landschafts-architektur/New Landscape Architecture published 1994 in England as Landscape as Inspiration, Geoffrey Jellicoe compares my drawing considerations with the works of Paul Klee. What at first sounds a bit highfalutin is correct insofar as I do not move exclusively in the banal everyday and functional space in everything I draw, design and realize, but always reflect second and third surrealities as well. Art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible", how Paul Klee formulated the process. Every viewer and reader could rightly ask the question: What do such expressions of art have to do with every-day architecture? I think: a great deal. And that is because all architectural problems and their solutions are multi-layered. Just like pure works of art. Every building summarizes and redefines its architectural, urban, village and landscape surroundings. Intentionally or unintentionally, exaggerated or restrained, each building can look like a meteorite or bomb strike, an inconspicuous remark or a beautification attack. I am interested in the past, the present and the future of an urban or landscape site. My view wants to integrate archaeological working methods just as much as functional fulfilments and imaginative-surreal, sometimes utopian efflorescence. I would never go so far as to formulate: Architecture is the necessary, and art is the unnecessary. Of course, every artist-architect who embarks on this complicated-complex path will have difficulties with the banal, seemingly superficial everyday reality in nature, the landscape and the city. It is therefore not surprising that I have only been able to realize a few architectural and visual productions and that, in the course of the last decades, I have been increasingly pushed into the areas of stage design and other design areas. At the moment, thanks to the ecological movement, hardly anyone is interested in the connection between art and architecture. More important are sustainability and zeroenergy houses in which the windows can hardly be opened. Could it be that building culture, indeed the whole of culture, will soon sink into green primeval forests and huge wetland biotopes? Or will foreign, warlike peoples destroy or occupy our cities and landscapes and cultivate them anew?
£32.40
Edition Axel Menges Carlo Scarpa: Layers
In recent decades, Carlo Scarpa's relevance has been steadily on the rise. At a time when architects have to use existing city and building structures as a point of departure for their work, his oeuvre remains a source of inspiration. Buildings such as the Castelvecchio in Verona show us that architecture is capable of communicating its own history, has meaning, and develops a contemporary dynamic of its own. Scarpa's layered architecture makes visible the process of becoming and the time-related sedimentation of material and meanings. It is especially at points of transition and interface that layering becomes a narrative element that elucidates the tectonic qualities of the building. Overlaying includes leaving a record of how an object came into being -- either by means of the sediments of its history or through the intervention of the architect. In this book Anne-Catrin Schultz presents her research about the phenomenon of layering in Carlo Scarpa's architecture. Layering describes the physical composition of layers defining space as well as the parallel presence of cultural referrals and formal associations imbedded in the physical layers. Scarpa's work is an embodiment of multidimensional layering and, at the same time, a focal point for architectural movements of his time that have stratification as their theme. In most buildings, the principle of layering may be regarded as something that is part of the nature of building. Functional conditions call for planes, elements, or "layers" to provide the supporting structure, and others to protect from rain, cold or the heat of the sun. However, architectonic layering goes beyond merely fulfilling technical requirements -- the principle of layering may be used as a formative method that allows elements of different origins to be combined into a non-hierarchical whole. Layering exists in a realm of complexity and implies a capacity of being interpreted that goes beyond itself and creates references to the world at large. The first part of the book examines Scarpa's fields of influence and intellectual roots and puts them in perspective with former theories and their interpretation of architecture as layered, for example Gottfried Semper's theory of clothing. The second part displays an analysis of three major projects, Castelvecchio and Banca Popolare in Verona and the Querini Foundation in Venice.
£43.42
Edition Axel Menges Erdmut Bramke, Werkverzeichnis: Bd.1 -- Gemalde 19642002 / Bd.2 -- Arbeiten auf Papier 19612002
Text in German. Erdmut Bramke, who was born in 1940 in Kiel and died in 2002 in Stuttgart, is one of the few 20th-century artists whose work consistently expressed a purely painterly position. She worked only with colour and structures. The use of acrylic colours enabled her to create unique colour constellations. Her unusual palate of colours and novel shades of colour were a constant surprise. In her stylistic idiom she emphasised flowing lines, interspersed colour shadowing with linear structures and experimented with images produced by dip-ping the image body in colour and also by using different materials. Her works are represented in many public and private collections, including the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, the Ulmer Museum, the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the Bundeskunsthalle, also in Bonn, and the Kunsthalle Kiel. Erdmut Bramke studied painting from 1961 to 1967 at the academies in Berlin and Stuttgart. Her teachers were Heinz Trökes and K R H Sonderborg. Repeated study periods in France and Italy took her creative work into constantly new directions. Particularly important for her artistic development was the time she spent as a stipendiary fellow at the Villa Massimo in Rome in 1979/80 and at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 1986. The present catalogue raisonné of the artists freelance work was commissioned by the Freunde der Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, as prescribed by the terms of the bequest of Erdmut Bramke her artistic design of buildings will follow in a later volume. Volume one is devoted to the paintings. It is introduced by essays of six people in her circle who focus on Bramkes importance for painting in the latter half of the 20th century. Volume two presents the sizable uvre of her works on paper, which must be accorded equal weight in the artists work. Reprinted in both volumes are contemporary texts from catalogues, newspaper articles and talks by Reinhard Döhl, Eugen Gomringer, Karin von Maur and others that show how the artists work was received during her lifetime. Until her retirement, Ulrike Gauß was the head of the Graphische Sammlung of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Susanne Grötz is a freelance art historian and exhibition curator, Carolin Jörg teaches artistic design at the Hochschule Augsburg.
£116.10
Edition Axel Menges Arcaid Images: Architectural Photography Awards 20122015
We live in a visual age where everyone considers him- or herself to be a photographer, and 1.8 billion images are posted online each day. User-generated content has been used in a myriad of high-profile advertisements. Like a lottery winner, the amateur photographer may achieve a one-off lucky shot by being in the right place at the right time. This feeds the illusion that professional photographs can be achieved without any great effort and that anyone can do it. Arcaid Images is a world-leading resource for imagery of the built environment and is used globally by advertisers, architects, publishers and educators. It represents a diverse range of photographers worldwide who focus their cameras on architecture, homes, heritage and destinations. Arcaid images was founded on the work of architect-turned-photographer Richard Bryant, making the photography of architecture of particular interest. The Arcaid Images Architectural Photography Awards aims to draw attention to the expertise of this specialist, architectural, area of photography. And the World Architecture Festival exemplifies the need for the best architectural photography. Over 2000 professionals from more than 145 countries gather annually to show and appraise each others work. The overriding common language is the photographic image. Projects with better images make strong initial impact, and the more prosaic the building type, the more important it is to capture the essence of the scheme and not merely record it. Photography has long been the means of communicating architecture. The earliest known photograph by French scientist Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, taken with a camera obscura in the late 1820s, was architectural. This photograph, taken from an upstairs window of the family home, was a record of the courtyard and outbuildings an architectural subject. The medium may have changed from a bitumen-coated plate to a memory card, but the technology is only a means to an end. It is the interpretation, the eye and the creativity of the photographer that the Arcaid Images Architectural Photography Awards are focusing on. The World Architecture Festival had the vision to see the value of the awards by giving it a platform, and working with the Sto company has extended the overall visibility of the awards. This book seeks to record, celebrate and give a permanence to the first four years of the Arcaid Architectural Photography Awards. Whilst attending an exhibition of images from the awards offers members of the public a time-limited opportunity to share in appreciation of the selected images, the physicality of a book extends that opportunity both temporally and geographically. Lynne Bryant is director of Arcaid Images, Amy Croft is curator of Sto Werkstatt and Paul Finch is editorial director of the The Architectural Review and programme director of the World Architecture Festival.
£32.31
Edition Axel Menges Wolfgang Rang Light Space
The ongoing paradigm change in regard to the use of energy, its efficient usage and the consumption of resources is giving rise to new light systems and lighting appliances. This development might also lead to the use of light as a building material in its own right, comparable to traditional building materials, making it possible to create light space productions something that did not seem feasible up to now due to the high cost of energy and of light systems. The goal of this book is to develop temporary light spaces that re-interpret the existing urban environment on a seasonal basis or over a cycle of several years. As a result, the city will literally appear in a new light. Strollers in the city streets will experience their familiar environment in a new way. Illuminated planes interlacing with planes made by linear fields of light beams will create immaterial material space experiences: still lifes of light within which one can move about and light choreographies that move barely noticeably, creating still lifes in motion. Current research aims at exploring, imagining and inventing stand-alone spatial structures of light, adding on to and transforming existing spaces, creating a new spatial awareness that may enable people to experience urban space in a different way. Similar to the process of architectural design, where haptic built volumes create interspaces, the light spaces that are presently being designed make these interspaces visible and allow urban dwellers to experience unexpected spatial constellations. The discourse in this book starts with essays introducing aspects of light spaces, including the following: Christian Bartenbach on the perception of light as something that creates space; Niels Gutschow on the ritual dimension of light, an element in the history of creation; Samuel Widmer on light in near-death experiences; Aldous Huxley on light as the messenger from a world we perceive on an unconscious level; Jun'ichiro Tanizaki on the world of the shadow and Tadashi Endo on movement as a relation between time and space in Butoh, the Japanese dance of darkness. The discourse concludes with documents on light spaces by Wolfgang Rang collected over a period of 30 years showing how these light spaces were regarded in the writings of con-temporaries, including Max Bächer on the dawn of a new era; Hans-Peter Schwarz on the deconstruction of space by light; Jürgen Hasse on light as a discourse fragment of public space; Manuel Cuadra on red luminescence; and Antonio de Campos on shadow as an expression of light.
£61.20
Edition Axel Menges John Fowler, Benjamin Baker, Forth Bridge: Opus 18
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.
£26.10
Edition Axel Menges Erich Engelbrecht Château des Fougis, Parc de sculptures
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.
£26.91
Edition Axel Menges Chinese Vernacular: The Weiwu at Dafuzhen
Two main types of residential architecture have dominated the architecture in the Fujian region in China. Known as tulou and weiwu, they have been developed in parallel. Both are designed for communal living, but are distinct from each other in terms of setting, layout, form and size. A good deal is known about tulou which has been inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage in 2008, but existing scholarship on weiwu is lacking. The weiwu at Dafuzhen in central Fujian is of particular interest because of its architectural and planning sophistication and its commoners status. It is the Family Xiaos estate built during 1870 to 1885. Our tasks were: first, to survey in situ each building part of the complex in the current situation with attention to details; second, to portray what was hidden from view using masterly "x-ray" eyes; third, to convey the information in measured drawings at technological and design levels. Our work is graphic and analytical in nature, ranged within a series of research questions: What was the planning made to suit the hillside setting? What was the architectural arrangement made to accommodate the community living? To what extent do water supply and drainage design serve as a planning strategy? This study suggests that water management was a key issue which was not a topic of great interest in traditional scholarship. The book offers students and professionals an expert introduction to Chinese vernacular that has been termed the essence of architecture, with the Dafuzhen weiwu as a case study. It describes characters and structures, discusses functions and rationales, and investigates methods and techniques at design and construction levels.
£38.61
Edition Axel Menges Dietrich & Dietrich Max-Plank-Institutfur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin: Opus 74
Text in German & English. Dahlem has developed in two different ways since the early years of the 20th century. An important scientific centre emerged on the site of this former royal territory south-west of Berlin, alongside a suburban villa colony. Elite research institutes were established in Dahlem, with the intention of creating a "German Oxford", including the first institutes for the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, founded in 1911. Then Dahlem was chosen as the location for the Freie Universität Berlin after the Second World War. The Max-Planck-Gesellschaft commissioned a new building in these surroundings in order to provide the Institute for the History of Science, dating from 1994, with accommodation appropriate to its needs. The building was erected in 2004/5 to a competition design by the Stuttgart architects Marion Dietrich-Schake, Hans-Jürgen Dietrich and Thomas Tafel (who left the team after drawing up the planning application). The buildings adjacent to the plot, which is bordered by streets on three sides, date mainly from the 1930s. Alongside the institutional buildings detached homes determine the local character. The Max-Planck-Institut reflects the dimensions and structure of its surroundings. Its height relates to the two-storey homes; the building masses were structured as eight connected, pavilion-like sections, which means that, despite its size, the institute is reticent in its impact on the urban space. The symmetrical complex is built around a spacious courtyard with old chestnut trees. The library is the key element of the building, and so was arranged around all four sides of the inner courtyard. Extensively glazed internal and external walls afford a wide range of views into the library rooms. This ensures a constant presence for the institute's most important set of working tools, and at the same time makes it accessible over very short distances from various parts of the building.
£26.91
Edition Axel Menges Blossoming Gap
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.
£12.90