Search results for ""Author Axel"

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Richard Meier's architecture in dialogue with the Ulm Munster, the most famous German Gothic cathedral.

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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.

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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.

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

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

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Text in English 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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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Text in French and English. Mouans-Sartoux, a small community near Cannes, has become a Mecca for concrete art. Since 1990 two collectors from Switzerland, Sybil Albers and the artist Gottfried Honegger, have been working to establish the Espace de l'Art Concret (EAC). Neither a museum nor a municipal gallery, this institution is located in the Château de Mouans and in two new buildings in its large park. The first of the two new buildings was a studio designed by Marc Barani from Nice for children who come here to paint and to develop their aesthetic senses. Barani began work in 1990 with the extension to the cemetery of Saint Pancrace in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. The way he located the cemetery in the local landscape and his use of original vegetable and mineral materials immediately brought him to international notice. In 2000 Albers and Honegger decided to donate their collections to the French state, on the understanding that it would finance a building to house the nearly 500 works of art. A competition was launched and was won by the Zurich architects Annette Gigon and Mike Guyer. The building, which opened its doors in 2004, stands on a steeply sloping wooded terrain. As one enters the park, one sees its yellowish-green hues through the branches of the trees. The monochrome colour unifies the five levels of the building that give no clue as to what it contains. While the outside of the building looks artificial, independent, sculptural, its interior is set up in accordance with Honegger's special instructions. He wanted the building that was to house his collection to be distinct from the official and sterile museums that are often laid out on the gallery model, passageways for contemplation, internal streets with overhead lighting. Honegger prefers an interior that is like a private home rather than a public institution. The domestic framework of the rooms must reflect a principle dear to the heart of the donors: that the works are to be lived with. Honegger takes an overall view of our material environment and emphasises that for him the distinction between fine arts and applied arts has no meaning, because "an unapplied art would have no purpose and would be bound to be insignificant and disappear".

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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.

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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.

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

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

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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.

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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.

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