Search results for ""Axel Menges""

Play-acting but above all the opera have only seemingly little to do with our everyday life. In fact opera is a very artificial work of art in which reality is nevertheless present, but condensed in such a way that it touches us throughout the ages. In experiencing opera performances, we thus become companions of the bard Orpheus in Monteverdis opera L'Orfeo, who mourns the death of his beloved nymph Eurydice with his laments. We transform ourselves into sympathetic and compassionate brothers and sisters of Orpheus, Wozzeck, Tosca, Tristan, Isolde or Jenufa and are thus directly referred to the perils and also pleasures in our own lives. In order to make the visual and sound dimensions of an opera tangible for the audience, a close interaction of dramaturges, actors, singers, dancers, directors, stage designers and technicians is necessary. What role do stage designers play in this? Dont some performances owe their success primarily to the work of the set designer? The stage settings created by Hans Dieter Schaal, who has worked on almost all German stages, but also in many important international theatre venues, including Vienna, Salzburg, Zurich, Brussels, Paris, Moscow and San Francisco, have, over and over again, such a lasting effect due to their visual power that they remain in the memory of the audience for a long time. The first volume on Hans Dieter Schaals stage settings covered the years 1982 to 2000, and this book now brings out a further volume dedicated to the works from 2001 to 2021. The book is captivating not only because of its abundance of mostly large-format photographs and many design drawings, but also because of the detailed texts written by Schaal himself, which reveal how intensively the artist deals with the respective work. As a result he invents images that often trigger a completely new perspective on the works. Hans Dieter Schaal, born in Ulm in 1943, is an architect, landscape designer, stage designer, exhibition designer and artist. His works, the majority of which have been published by Edition Axel Menges, have found an audience far beyond his home country. The author lives and works near Biberach an der Riß.

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Text in English & German. The inhabitants of our cities have undoubtedly come down with a gardening virus. Gardening is being propagated as the new sex. Wherever one looks, a gardening euphoria is in bloom. We only have to think of the riverbanks restored to their natural state, the urban gardening and urban farming projects springing up all over the world, the green skyscrapers (prospective and actually built) such as, for instance, the utopian farmscrapers of Vincent Callebout, the conversion of former high rail lines into green recreation spaces, the meditation gardens of Piet Oudolf, and the vertical gardens of Patrick Blanc. We dwell on the growing and sprouting, on the sowing and harvesting, with a kind of covert pleasure and sublimated erotic desire. These days, we feel close to greenery, just as we feel close to our pets. We tend and nurture the seeds and stalks, the leaves and flowers, the shrubs and grasses, the bushes and trees, with a matchless solicitude. These culturally coded natural phenomena also have therapeutic qualities, because they offer us self-determination and the possibility to share in social development. This is nothing less than the reintegration of the first, primal nature into the context of the conditions that have become ubiquitous today into the context of what has, today, become 'second nature'. For some people, such as the campaigners of 'Guerilla Gardening', these plants, wild and domestic, provide a way of criticizing the system; others, such as vertical planners of wall gardens like Ken Yeang, utopia-infatuated and bitten by the green bug, presumably see themselves as an avant-garde working in harmony with the system. All of those coming down the garden virus, however, have in common that they see themselves as reformers, as campaigners and as voices arguing for a reconciliation the first and the second, ubiquitous urban, nature, but also between the ecology and the economy. Volker Fischer was deputy director of the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt am Main for over ten years. From 1994 to 2012 he has built up a new design department at the Museum for Applied Arts in Frankfurt. At the same time, he taught on the history of architecture and design at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach. Fischer is already represented in Edition Axel Menges by books on Stefan Heiliger, Richard Meier, Stefan Wewerka, the Commerzbank in Frankfurt am Main by Norman Foster, Hall 3 of Messe Frankfurt by Nicholas Grimshaw, on 'beauty design' as well as on the design activities of Lufthansa and Apple.

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Text in German. The theme of this book is nutrition: the manufacture and availability of foodstuffs, and their preparation and presentation in the context of a societys social and cultural development. Nutrition and physical wellbeing are closely linked. Human beings and animals alike need to eat in order to survive. In our rich industrial nations, where the availability of food is taken for granted, attitudes towards food tend toward extremes: asceticism on the one hand, and overindulgence and excess on the other. Over the centuries, methods of food consumption and food preparation have become refined in tandem with the ever more differentiated organisation of human coexistence between these two poles. Regional and social differences in taste-related culture have arisen, each representative of the lifestyle of their time. Today, cooking and the arranging of food may have an almost artistic form, with high expectations for the quality of the product and its preparation. The fact is, however, that we live in a society in which almost all products are industrially produced. We have no power to influence the production process, and the lists of ingredients on the packaging that provide information on the composition of individual foods are puzzling, and make us doubt whether the product is really what it pretends to be. In a wide-ranging tour dhorizon, this book investigates the complex contemporary semantic fields of foods, their production and preparation, their presentation in a commercial context, and their marketing in the media. The author also takes a critical look at the new enthusiasm for DIY food production, baking, and even livestock slaughter, and examines the star system way cooking is presented in the media. The resulting book is a cultural history of food and of eating from a cultural history, sociology, psychology, economy, and media perspective, as they exist within the contemporary discourse on nutrition with its extremes of hype and hubris. Volker Fischer was deputy director of the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt am Main for over ten years. From 1994 to 2012 he has built up a new design department at the Museum for Applied Arts in Frankfurt. At the same time, he taught on the history of architecture and design at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach. Fischer is already represented in Edition Axel Menges by books on Stefan Heiliger, Richard Meier, Stefan Wewerka, the Commerzbank in Frankfurt am Main by Norman Foster, Hall 3 of Messe Frankfurt by Nicholas Grimshaw, on "beauty design" as well as on the design activities of Lufthansa and Apple.

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Text in French. Depuis plus de 350 ans les Parisiens ont conçu mais aussi préservé de phénoménaux espaces en plein air, ouverts au public. Dans son livre Jacqueline Widmar Stewart suit le tissage de la tapisserie des parcs de Paris et ses environs. LIdentification de lépoque á laquelle il a été construit peut donner á chaque parc des qualités multidimensionnelles et permet aux lecteurs de découvrir ces grands espaces verts tout comme les Parisiens. De nombreuses couches déléments et de thèmes tissent les parcs français. Aussi loin que lon remonte dans lhéritage ancien, les vestiges de lhistoire de Paris apparaissent dans tous les parcs, quelque soit leur taille. La répartition équilibrée des espaces verts dans la ville reflète une époque majeure du 19ème siècle; les parcs contemporains maintiennent ces traditions. Un certain nombre de parcs et jardins français du 17ème siècle ont appartenu initialement aux domaines royaux, mais maintenant accueillent le public. En aparté il convient de noter que le premier parc de Paris, le Jardin des Tuileries, a ouvert ses portes au public en 1667. Soigneusement conçus et méticuleusement adaptés aux besoins de lépoque, certains parcs ont camouflé le délabrement urbain inesthétique avec splendeur; dautres ont converti des sites industriels á un usage récréatif, tout en maintenant des liens culturels avec le passé. Beaucoup de merveilles invitent tous ceux qui pénètrent dans les sphères magiques de Paris: une promenade paysagère de plusieurs kilomètres au-dessus de rues animées; un jardin moderne suspendu au-dessus dune gare de train; un parc sur la rive dun canal avec ses grandes curiosités architecturales rouges; une allée au milieu dune île de la Seine; un marais récemment construit qui abrite déjá des canetons colverts; des nuages de parfum émanant des roses de la collection originale de Joséphine Bonaparte; au moins deux jardins ayant appartenu au célèbre sculpteur Auguste Rodin. Depuis ses études secondaires dans lIndiana, la langue et la littérature françaises ont fasciné Jacqueline Widmar Stewart, qui a étudié aux Universités du Colorado et du Michigan et qui a obtenu son doctorat en droit á lUniversité de Stanford á Palo Alto. Son premier livre, The Glaciers Treasure Trove: A Field Guide to the Lake Michigan Riviera, se penche sur les histoires géologiques et philanthropiques de cinq parcs au sud du lac, près de Chicago. Son deuxième livre, Finding Slovenia: A Guide to Old Europes New Country, met en valeur les merveilles de la terre natale de ses grands-parents. En 2011 Edition Axel Menges a publié Parks and Gardens in Greater Paris, maintenant aussi disponible en français. Champagne Regained, publié par Edition Axel Menges en 2013, raconte lhistoire de la boisson et du commerce du Champagne, depuis la période médiévale.

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The Königstein Fortress, located not far from Dresden on a rocky plateau high above the Elbe River, is considered one of the most interesting and best preserved fortifications in Europe. It has a long eventful history dating back to the Bronze Age. Königstein was first mentioned in documents in 1241. It was not until the end of the 16th century that the former castle began to be expanded into a fortress, which was then constantly adapted to new conditions. However, it was spared from warlike destruction over all the centuries. Instead, it was sometimes used as a prison camp in times of war, for example during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 and for the last time during the Second World War. In 1949, the then GDR set up a youth workshop in the fortress based on the teachings of Soviet pedagogue Anton Semyonovich Makarenko. In 1955, the GDRs Ministry of Culture finally converted Königstein into a museum and since 1991, now owned by the Free State of Saxony, it has undergone extensive structural renovation. The managing director of Festung Königstein gGmbH, Angelika Taube, became aware of Hans Dieter Schaal as early as 1997, and in the following years established an intensive collaboration with him, which has now resulted in six permanent and twelve temporary exhibitions. They illustrate the multifaceted history of the fortress in a way that clearly stands out from pure documentation and always creates something new and original from the factually given. This book presents these exhibitions in large-format colour illustrations. In addition, it contains descriptions and comments by Schaal that clarify the history of the exhibitions and also give the reader insights into the creative processes. Hans Dieter Schaal, born in Ulm in 1943, architect, stage designer, exhibition and landscape planner, makes the complexity of reality visible through his analytically differentiated stagings and brings its background into the field of vision of the attentive viewer. His works, the majority of which have been published by Edition Axel Menges, have since found an audience far beyond the borders of his native country. The author lives and works in a village near Biberach an der Riss.

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Since the end of the 20th century, an unprecedented number of remarkable museums have been built. None have had bigger worldwide implications than Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (199197). Until, that is, the new Musée des Confluences in Lyon was opened to the public, in late 2014. It was created by Wolf D. Prix of the Coop Himmelb(l)au team, which was founded in the 1970s. Many avant-garde groups from those wild years such as Archigram, Superstudio, Archizoom, Haus-Rucker-Co, and the Japanese Metabolists are now consigned to the past, but the Coop Himmelb(l)au architecture firm, whose special aspiration was always to bring into the world buildings that overcome the pull of the earth buildings 'to float on the horizon like clouds' is more in demand than ever. The finest demonstration of this endeavour to date can now be admired in Lyon. Functioning as a museum of human history, this impressive concrete, metal and glass colossus truly does appear to float above the peninsula at the confluence of the Rhône and the Saône. Like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, this new building, so impossible to overlook, is an inspiration for the revita-lisation of disrupted urban areas and the valorisation of derelict industrial areas within the city precincts, but also far beyond Lyon. This Opus volume deals with the origins, construction, function and formal appearance of the Musée des Confluences, and also offers a preliminary theoretically based evaluation of the architecture of the building. Frank R. Werner was professor of history and architecture theory at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart from 1990 until 1994 and director of the Institut für Architekturgeschichte und Architekturtheorie at the Bergische Universität in Wuppertal from 1993 until his retirement in 2012. He studied painting, architecture and history of architecture in Mainz, Hanover and Stuttgart. Christian Richters studied communication design at the Folkwang-schule in Essen. He is one of the most sought-after architecture photographers in Europe. To date he has been represented in the Opus series by 14 volumes, including ones about the embassies of the Nordic countries and the Bode Museum in Berlin, the Nieuwe Luxor Theater in Rotterdam and the BMW Welt in Munich. See also: Opus 66. Coop Himmelb(l)au, BMW Welt, München, Edition Axel Menges 2009.

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Text in German. Paul Stohrer was born in Stuttgart in 1909 and died there in 1975; from the 1950s to the 1970s he was among that city's most eminent and successful architects. He took advantage of rebuilding phase after 1945 for his professional development, and the boost given by the years of the economic miracle led to a peak in his architectural creativity. Today his name has largely disappeared from public memory in his field, and it is not well known that many of his buildings made a considerable contribution to Stuttgart's appearance. As he built several theatres and cinemas he was familiar with the glamorous world of theatre and cinema, and he created exclusive family homes for clients on the scene at the time. In addition to this, his commissioned repertoire included mainly commercial, office and factory buildings, as well as interiors for restaurants and shops. One of his best-known works is his house for the psychiatrist, filmmaker and collector of contemporary art Ottomar Do

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The pioneering character and continuing success of Schaal's scenic compositions for stage sets and exhibitions is significantly due to this field allowing him to take full advantage of his multiple talents. He succeeds equally in the thinking and practical skills of an architect, a painter, a sculptor, a landscape designer, an urban visionary, cineast, and a man of literature, and this allows him to discover, through his space-embracing scenographic installations, unique three-dimensional equivalents for his paper-drawn 'thought spaces' and 'path spaces' or 'thought buildings' from the 1970s. His renowned compendium entitled Architektonische Situationen, published in 1980 and containing, the essence of his early spatial studies, in fact contains within it the seeds of all his later stage set and exhibition configurations. The symbiotic relationship between legendary director Ruth Berghaus and spatial visionary Schaal first began producing history-making stage sets in the early 1980s. Working with Berghaus, Schaal created elementary spatial compositions possessed of great suggestive power for Les Troyens (1983), Wozzeck (1984), Orpheus (1986), Elektra (1986), Moses und Aron (1987), Tristan und Isolde (1988), Lulu (1988), Fierrabras (1988), Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (1991) and Nachtwache (1993), and also working with other directors to do the same for countless other operas and theatre pieces. In creating his installations and their powerful images, Schaal has never solely been concerned with creating suitable illustrations for scene-related plot action. Instead, he always adds something more, as it were, in the form of a boldly independent interpretation. The same is true of his concepts for temporary or permanent ex-hibitions. Before undertaking any of the individual projects on his long list of exhibition projects, Schaal has always researched archive material, historic background, and repercussions, but also the emotional and psychoanalytical implications of the exhibitions' theme and the exhibits concerned, with the meticulousness of a scientific specialist. In works such as his installations for Berlin Berlin (1987) or Prometheus (1998), for the Filmmuseum Berlin (2000), and for the memorials of the former concentration camps Mittelbau-Dora (2006), Bergen-Belsen (2007) or Esterwegen (2011), he always presents his own view of the world, his own view of things. Frank R. Werner studied painting, architecture and architectural history in Mainz, Hanover and Stuttgart. From 1990 to 1994 he was professor of history and theory of architecture at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart, from 1994 until his retirement in 2011 he was director of the Institut für Architekturgeschichte und Architekturtheorie at the Bergische Universität in Wuppertal.

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The term Europe has not always been understood in the same way. Depending on the period and influenced by the dominant interpreting elites at the time, it was always different features that were emphasised, "new" traditions that were discovered and created, and different values -- specific to the period -- that were claimed as European. Europe is a construct. That is as true today as in the period before 1945. This monograph focuses on 'Sachbücher' (non-fiction books), travelogues and literary-political writings by eight authors who played a key role in the discourse on Europe in the Third Reich and also partly in the early German Federal Republic. One of them is Walter Kiaulehn. In World War II, in the periodical Signal, Kiaulehn draws up a European family tree of a somewhat different, totalitarian kind -- naturally excluding semi-Asiatic Russia as well as England, a refugee from Europe. England has "swum off" in the direction of the USA. For Ernst Wilhelm Eschmann, Great Britain and France belong to the "margins of Europe" anyway, while the central powers, Germany and Italy, constitute the actual core of the continent. Europe evolves from the centre, and it is characteristically medial, balanced, mediating between tradition and progress. It is the others who are radical and have no appreciation for the middle course: the Americans with their skyscraper fantasies and the Bolsheviks with their anti-cultural tabula-rasa mentality. The New Europe", on the other hand, is the continent where in accordance with a golden mean that has developed historically, a moderate Modernism takes shape. An instance of this is the New Bari, the "favourite city of Fascism" that Gustav R. Hocke visits in 1937 and in which, instead of giant high-rises, he encounters much smaller, six-storey buildings along the new waterfront promenade. The term The New Europe became generally accepted in Germany during the 1930s, and by the beginning of World War II it was an integral part of the German discourse on Europe. Last but not least, this book would like to encourage the reader to critically question the provisionally last 'great narrative' of the Occident -- the narrative according to which Europe evolved from liberal humanist traditions and, based on democratic values, gradually came to have its present form in several intermediate stages beginning in classical antiquity.

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The global resources situation and the climate crisis are amongst the biggest challenges faced by mankind today. In the years to come, these issues will no doubt have an influence on societal evolution, on urban and rural land development, and how we define our cultural identities. These and related issues will be reflected in the world of architecture. In recent years many countries with high energy consumption have made the energy-related requirements for buildings more stringent; the new rules apply to the resources used for construction as well as to those used in the operation of buildings. In the future, these new requirements will have a major impact on the design of buildings. It will not be sufficient merely to increase the insulation thickness or to make the building envelope more airtight. Solutions of this type have an adverse impact on the architectural design, on the construction practices, on the indoor environment and on options for making buildings flexible so that they can be adapted for diverse uses over time. Equally important in terms of its impact on architectural quality is the challenge posed by the continuous growth of industrialisation. The move from craft-based construction methods to computer-controlled production processes now used in industrialised manufacturing has resulted in strict standards, established at design level, being imposed on the process as it takes place on the building site, creating an "assembly architecture" that no longer depends on the locally available materials, on local cultural traditions or on the specific physical context. In this book, ideas, design principles and practices that relate to tectonics in architecture are explored, and a series of themes are discussed in relation to various concepts of ecology. Ecology is, in this case, defined in its widest sense, which includes the cycling of resources, systems of social organisation and the environmental context. Tectonics a concept with a long tradition in architecture and architectural theory is comparable to ecology. It relates to the de-sign and assembly of structural elements, and implies a holistic approach to materials, to construction technology and to the design of structures. It is more than merely an instrumental strategy: it extends into the poetic, which elevates it to the status of a cultural practice. This book is part of a research project conducted by leading academics associated with the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture, the Aarhus School of Architecture and the Danish Building Research Institute. With contributions from a wider network of academic experts and from practicing architects, it provides the first comprehensive representation of contemporary tectonic thought and practices in architecture.

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In the 18th century the idea of the landscape garden, which had originated in England, spread all over Europe. The geometry of the Baroque park was abandoned in favour of a 'natural' design. At the same time the garden became "The land of illusion": Chinese pagodas, Egyptian tombs, and Turkish mosques, along with Gothic stables and Greek and Roman temples, formed a miniature world in which distance mingled with the past. The keen interest in a fairy-tale China, which was manifested not only in the gardens but also in the chinoiseries of the Rococo, abated in the 19th century. The increasing expansion of the European colonial powers was reflected in new exotic fashions. While in England it was primarily the conquest of the Indian subcontinent that captured the imagination, for France the occupation of Algiers triggered an Orient-inspired fashion that spread from Paris to encompass the entire Continent, and found its expression in paintings, novels, operas, and buildings. This 'Orient', which could not be clearly defined geographically, was characterised by Islamic culture: It extended around the Mediterranean Sea from Constantinople to Granada. There, it was the Alhambra that fascinated writers and architects. The Islamic styles seemed especially appropriate for "buildings of a secular and cheerful character". In contrast to ancient Egyptian building forms, which, being severe and monumental, were preferably used for cemetery buildings, prisons or libraries, they promised earthly sensuous pleasures. The promise of happiness associated with an Orient staged by architectural means was intended to guarantee the commercial success of coffee houses and music halls, amusement parks, and steam baths. But even extravagant summer residences and middle-class villas were often built in faux-Oriental styles: In Brighton, the Prince Regent George (George IV after 1820) built himself an Indian palace; in Bad Cannstatt near Stuttgart, a 'Moorish' refuge was erected for Württemberg's King Wilhelm I; and the French town of Tourcoing was the site of the Palais du Congo, a bombastic villa in the Indian Moghul style that belonged to a wealthy perfume and soap manufacturer.

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Text in German & English. Schinkel's Look towards India discusses a subject to which little attention has been paid to date: Schinkel's interest in Indian architecture and culture. This interest was first aroused by the English traveller to India William Hodges, who proposed the thesis that Greek and Indian architecture were of equal value. Later, the English landscape painters Thomas and William Daniell were to become even more important for Schinkel. Oriental Scenery, the book that described their travels, left its mark on Europe's image of India for decades and inspired longing for that country, which was considered almost magical. The cultural elite of Prussia were also caught up in this fascination. At the royal court of Prussia, Lalla Rookh, based on Thomas Moore's romance, was celebrated in 1821 as an oriental festival. In 1822 the Indian-themed pageant Nurmahalwas performed at the opera. For both productions Schinkel created enchantingly beautiful stage sets. His interest in exotic architecture was lifelong. The sketches he based on the work of the Daniells were preliminary studies for a huge round panorama that was to show the buildings of various periods and nations in their particular setting. His unrealised project for the summer palace Orianda on the Crimea, at the geographical interface of eastern and western culture, was Schinkel's convincing and timeless memorial to his dream of the unity of world cultures. The style of the exterior is classical, while that of the interior is Indian and Islamic. The work is character-ized by the hall of caryatids that lies in front of the building, with a view of the Black Sea, and the museum of Caucasian antiquities, its counterpart in the interior of the palace. Schinkel found the idea for the museum in Oriental Scenery, in the drawings of the legendary 1000-Pillar Hall in Madurai, in southern India, which the Daniells had toured full of admiration and included in their book.

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Text in English & German. Johannes Peter Hölzinger studied architecture at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main from 1954 to 1957. After a residency fellowship at the Deutsche Akademie Villa Massimo in Rome he founded a "planning association for new forms of the environment" in 1965 together with Zero artist Hermann Goepfert, who has since died. One of the most successful results of his work with Goepfert was a new design for the Schloßpark in Karlsruhe on the occasion of the Bundesgartenschau in 1967, which won a major German architectural prize, the Hugo-Häring-Preis. From 1991 until his retirement in 2002 Hölzinger directed the art and public-space course at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Nuremberg. Individualistic and oppositional in comparison to other post-World War II architectural achievements, the design of Hölzinger's buildings is very distinctive. The playful elements of Postmodernism are as alien to his work as the functionalism of New Building. Because of his association with Hermann Goepfert, Hölzinger is much more closely connected with the art scene of his time. The integration of art and architecture is a unique feature of his buildings. If we try to assign a category to this "object architecture" (a term he coined himself), we will find less overlap with architecture than with fine art. From the very beginning Hölzinger saw architecture as an artistic discipline. Light kinetics offered him important new perspectives. Lighting design and the resulting colour changes of white walls play a vital role in his work.

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As a civil engineer with leading German construction companies, Horst Barow has built highways and bridges in many parts of the world. He was aware of the importance infrastructure has for the development of a region, and he knew how important efficient administration is to achieve public works. During vacations he and his wife liked to visit the Mediterranean countries, and they were amazed by the vestiges of the Roman Empire, not the least of them being roads and bridges. In many cases they still carry modern traffic after 2000 years. Thus Barow decided to make the study of Roman roads and bridges his special interest, and through many years he systematically collected material and surveyed bridges on the spot. Having retired, he studied history, with emphasis on the Roman period. His untimely death in 2010 left his wife with a great work in progress, and it is thanks to the publisher that this book has been realised. Friedrich Ragette, an architect who taught history of architecture and engineering for many years, was entrusted with editing the material and translating it from German into English. The book covers all aspects of road and bridge construction in the Roman Empire, from commissioning, planning and design to contracting and execution. Technical details include surveying, materials, tools, and implements. The Roman road network is shown with Latin place names; principles and types of construction are explained. The core of the work deals with bridge construction: design criteria, structural systems, foundations and abutments are dealt with in detail. Particularly attractive are five dozens of case studies, presenting individual bridges, which were reviewed by the author on site. Countless illustrations, mostly in colour, enliven the book. Bibliography and glossary complete the work.

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Text in English & German. The way we sit simultaneously defines privileges, social status, power, and taboos. Parallel to the presentation of China as the guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2009, the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt presents a panorama of Chinese sitting culture through a period of five centuries. Exclusive, noble Ming chairs stand side by side with chairs of the 18th and 19th century used by the middle class of that time. Limited sitting sculptures by renowned artist designers such as Shao Fan, Freeman Lau, Kenneth Cobonpue, XYZ-Design and Ji Liwei, who is also in charge of the interior design of the Chinese pavilion at the book fair, are confronted with the bourgeois sofas and sitting of the Chinese middle class of today. The "Bastard Chairs" of migrant workers and the homeless, day-to-day seats improvised out of pure need and made of trash and leftover materials, are commented in the sitting contexts of celebrities: emperors and courtesans, politicians and pop stars, athletes and students of product design show how sitting was done formerly and is done today. It ranges from a man of letters from the Ming era to the Qianglong emperor on the throne to Mao and Nixon in characteristic armchairs in Mao's best room. The most famous contemporary Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, will also be represented with an excerpt of his grandiose chair performance at the Dokumenta XII. Of course, product piracy, which -- as the typical Chinese dipping figure "Shanzhai" -- has mean-while adopted characteristics that define society, is also dealt with.

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Text in English & German. Hollywood is not only the secret world capital of dreams and the fictions of the subconscious, but also the capital of architecture. Hollywood is the Rome and the Versailles of the 20th and 21st centuries. A new awareness of space spanning the entire world was created here. These backgrounds, stage sets and filmic spaces are indelibly fixed in every spectator's mind. It may be in the cinema that the first time you saw the desert, the Rocky Mountain cliffs, Greenland's glacier mountains and California's sandy beaches. You saw here the Western saloons and Al Capone's dark rooms, the poor Mexicans' huts and the Kennedys' penthouse apartments; you saw here also the jazz clubs of New Orleans and the dream houses in Los Angeles. There was and is scarcely a corner of the earth that the Hollywood film has not dreamed its way into. Every cinema-goer in the world sees the same plot, the same images, the same faces, the same rooms, buildings, towns and streets. Film's power to bring people together can scarcely be overestimated. Film architecture is world architecture. All other architecture -- your own town, your own street, your own house, your own flat -- remains small and parochial in the face of this, restricted to affecting a very tiny sphere. The architecture of the future will develop in the field of tension between these two aspects -- small and parochial, large and spanning the entire world. The real architecture of houses and cities could be enriched in its language by including film architecture, and real architecture could be jolted out of its banality by including the studio world. Films and their images can teach us that the architecture of houses, streets and towns is not just a problem of order, function and economic viability, but that psychology, atmosphere and images are being built here as well.

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Text in English and German. Perhaps the fascination of American landscapes, particularly the deserts is their featurelessness. In Germany, Brandenburg for example, the much plainer landscape lives on in its history. This where the Great Elector won his victory and Napoleon lost a battle. Actual nature unaffected by human beings is hidden under the woodland and heath. The American desert landscape is dominated by grandiose nature with out human intervention. Here the history of the earth is to the fore exercising a particular fascination and anyone who reads it enjoys a double gift. The author travelled around the country photographing the mountains and valleys, the coastline and nature reserves. He also encountered people and writes about American friendliness.

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Text in German & English. Fossils are the petrified remains of former living organisms. Their systematics and their former living conditions are studied and described in palaeontology. In contrast to this, this book attempts to show the character of these life forms as signs and to pursue the question of whether fossils and representations of fossils can be considered "beautiful". For this reason, the pictures' sequence is not based on a palaeontological system of classification, but instead progresses from realistic representations of, for instance, a coral's body in its entirety through ever smaller sectors of the image and details divorced from context to almost abstract images. In an introductory text, Hillert Ibbeken explains the concept and the methodology of the work. The ambiguous expression "design" is used deliberately -- not in the sense of a purposive undertaking by a creating subject, but in the sense of nature making a mark, guided by mutation and selection. Katja Schoene writes about fossils' reception in the early modern age. The plants and animals enclosed in stone appeared too fantastical for anyone to consider them as anything other than "freaks of nature" (lusus naturae). Explanations of their origin were as multifarious as their different manifestations. "Rudolf zur Lippe deals with the forms of petrified life in relation to philosophical perspectives, pursuing the question of what "beauty" means and indicating, among other things, that the expression "beauty" cannot be unequivocally defined; that, for instance, different cultures may have entirely different ideals of beauty. The illustrated section is followed by a glossary by Helmut Keupp with a synopsis of life's development on Earth and a table of the Earth's history. Hillert Ibbeken was professor of geology at the Freie Universität Berlin. He has had a lifelong interest in photography.

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All the world's knowledge is stored and collected here. The place serves as an assembly point and information centre and is all things in one: laboratory, workshop, building site, university, theatre, opera house and museum. The shape of the building should be like a sphere with a silver-grey surface gleaming in the sunlight. It stands in a shallow pool of water. Broad walkways lead to the entrance. Extensive gardens in gentle geometric patterns invite visitors to rest, play, chat and look.

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Text in English and German. The prize-winning design, of which all can be seen from the outside is a glass cube making an impact over a distance and defining the urban situation, solved the enormous space problem of a collection of contemporary art including 15000 works.

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Text in English & German. Three places mark the chequered history of the provost church of St Trinitatis Leipzig. Not far from the site of the present new building was the historic church built in 1847 that was largely destroyed in World War Two. It took almost three decades for this church finally to be replaced in 1982. At the insistence of the East-German authorities, however, this building had to be erected in a suburb. Because of its inconvenient location and also because the building had structural damage from the very beginning, the congregation decided in 2008 to take a chance on a new start in the city centre. The third church of St Trinitatis, consecrated in 2015, is the largest Catholic church to be built in East Germany since the political turnover of 1989/90. The new church is located not only in the centre of town, but at a place that could not be more prominent: facing the large complex of the Neues Rathaus. In 2009 a competition held for the new church building with the adjacent parish centre was won by the Leipzig architects Ansgar and Benedikt Schulz. Their clever use of the triangular site particularly impressed the selection committee; at the same time, with the compact body of the church on the east and the tower on the west, they created two striking urban landmarks. Between the tower and the church is the spacious courtyard, which is open on two sides towards the surrounding area, emphasising the congregations programmatic 'openness'. The complex owes its homogenous appearance to the fact that all parts of the buildings are clad with local porphyry, an igneous rock that shimmers in delicate shades of red. While outwardly the church looks quite hermetic, the interior, with an inside height of 14.5 m, surprises the visitor by its vibrant luminosity. The decisive factor here is the skylight on the east side at a height of 22 m. From a source that is invisible to the worshippers, zenith light falls on the entire back wall behind the altar. In its disposition the church interior follows the decisions of the Second Vatican Council: separation between the priests space and the congregations space is abolished, the high altar is replaced by a peoples altar, and the faithful gather of the believers in communio around the liturgical centre. In addition to his main activity as an architecture publicist Wolf-gang Jean Stock was head of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für christ-liche Kunst and its gallery in Munich for nine years. Considering his rigorous artistic attitude, instinctively reminiscent of the work of Hilla and Bernd Becher, there is a certain consistency about the fact that the photographer Stefan Müller congenially creates images of the buildings of Owald Mathias Ungers, Max Dudler, Kleihues + Kleihues or Schulz und Schulz.

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From the 1960s to the 1980s, new university buildings were regarded as real showcase projects in Germany. With their help, it was hoped to catch up with the international building scene again after the severe destruction of the Second World War. However, deficiencies in the technical execution and also in the subsequent building maintenance often led to the fact that in the course of the years serious structural problems appeared more and more frequently in the former showcase projects, which in some cases even led to the demolition of former demonstrative projects. This opus volume presents such an aging university ensemble on the old campus of the RWTH Aachen, which could not only be saved, but also embodies a renaissance of high-quality urban development and sustainable architecture. This balancing act is thanks to the architects and engineers of the renowned SSP AG from Bochum. First of all, they used the building task to significantly reorganise the old campus area in terms of urban development and to uncover lost urban references. In a next step, they demolished a dilapidated multi-storey car park and built the new technical centre, the Technikum on its foundations. In doing so, they followed the highest construction standards and sustainability strategies down to the smallest detail. However, the architects were able to retain the neighbouring, defective high-rise building of the so-called Sammelbau of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. They stripped the high-rise down to its bare supporting structure and then refurbished it to the highest technical and ecological standards, just like the Technikum. In times when terms such as sustainability or building ecology are being used in an almost inflationary manner, the project presented here is a real model, because it not only speaks of high standards, but has in fact implemented the highest standards and because it has given the concept of re-use (ie: the recycling of old, dilapidated building substance, a sensuously appealing structural form and a long-term new utility).

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Text in English & German. With the Kollegiengebäude II (college building II) of the University of Freiburg dedicated in 1961 the architect Otto Ernst Schweizer had achieved a masterpiece. Being built in the modern design idiom, it nevertheless took Freiburg's tradition into account and gave a new quality of life to the university and the urban development of the inner city quarters. On the whole it was a significant stimulus to university construction. Thanks to the neutral expression of the building, its compact overall for m and its "elastic structural system" (there is maximum flexibility in room layout without touching the bearing skeleton), and together with the laconically simple floor plan it became a prototype solution for smooth functioning. It is an open architecture, free of any suffocating pathos, with wide open spaces, human scale in size and proportions and in ideal accordance with academic freedom for research, instruction and learning. Schweizer, born in 1890 and deceased in 1965, professor of urban construction at the Technical University of Karlsruhe is one of the ground-breaking architects of the 20th century. In the late 1920s he gained international renognition and relevance with his buildings in Nuremburg, among them the stadium grounds and the Milchhof, as well as the Prater-Stadion in Vienna. During the 1930s, when he was not allowed to build, he studied fundamental questions of architecture and urbanism. After the Second World War he used his insights to make recommendations for the reconstruction of destroyed cities like Gießen, Karlsruhe, Mannheim or Stuttgart. In his last project, the Kollegiengebäude II we find the quintessence of a rich creative life, convincingly demonstrating Schweizer's high demands on architectural form and function. Immo Boyken is professor emeritus of building history and theory of architecture in Konstanz. His special interest is the architecture of the late 19th and the 20th century. He was a principal contributor to the monograph on Egon Eiermann, author ed the monograph on Otto Ernst Schweizer and lately wrote about Heinz Tesar's church in the Donau City in Vienna (Opus 42), the chancellery of the German embassy in Washington by Egon Eiermann (Opus 54), the Milchhof in Nuremburg by Otto Ernst Schweizer (Opus 59), the Prater-Stadion in Vienna (Opus 75) also by Schweizer, and the German Pavilions at the World Exhibition 1958 in Brussels by Sep Ruf and Egon Eiermann (Opus 62).

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Autumn 1958 marked the launching of the Bodensee-Wasserversorgung (Lake Constance water supply), an infrastructure project whose largest part is underground, hidden from view. Even in the first phase of the project, 2160 litres of water per second were taken from Lake Constance at a depth of roughly 60 m, treated on Sipplinger Berg and transported over hundreds of kilometres of pipeline through the Swabian Alb to the greater Stuttgart area. What is remarkable about this project, however, is not only the technological challenge of a combination of the lake-water treatment and the overland water pipeline, but particularly the special quality of the design of the visible parts of the waterworks, a result of the collaboration of engineers, architects, landscape designers and artists. Hermann Blomeier, who had settled in Constance in 1932 after graduating from the Bauhaus Dessau under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, was commissioned with implementing the Sipplingen pumping station following a competition and, with functionally and transparently designed buildings, created a counterpoint to the expressive landscape of Lake Constance that was as restrained as it was confident. The treatment plants on Sipplinger Berg, built by a team comprising Blomeier and the architect and academic Günter Wilhelm, from the 'Quelltopf' (source pot) and the filter basins to the clean-water reservoir, exactly meet functional requirements and at the same time impressively illustrate the technical processes. The long distance travelled by the water is accompanied by seemingly subordinate buildings designed by architect Wolf Irion, subtly integrated in the landscape as a kind of wayside chapels, housing the pipe-rupture safety devices and line valves. The high quality of the design is evident not only in the buildings, but also in the work of landscape architect Walter Rossow and of visual artists Hans-Dieter Bohnet, Martin Matschinsky and Brigitte Matschinksy-Denninghof. Andreas Schwarting is professor of architectural history and architecture theory at the Hochschule Konstanz. His research has focussed particularly on 20th-century architecture, its reception and historiography, and on specific issues of conservation and maintenance. His publications include the monograph on Walter Gropius Dessau-Törten estate, and he was instrumental in the publication of the Stiftung Wüstenrot on the preservation of contemporary buildings. He was appointed by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) to monitor the UNESCO world-heritage sites of the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau.

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Text in English & German. Heroic 20th-century Modernism saw the private home as a place to first test out utopian theories -- a place for free play and experimentation where new approaches could be put into action, on a small scale but no less radical. Here, where architecture and life are most closely interwoven, Frank Lloyd Wright, Gerrit Rietveld, Le Corbusier and even Konstantin Melnikov found the suitable space to give their visionary concepts a plastic reality. The house built by the architect Fritz Barth for his own use in his home town of Fellbach places itself in an ironic, possibly melancholic distance from this kind of heroic pathos, but still has this tradition as its background. So it is considered by his builder as an experiment to determine the state of architecture at the start of the 21st century -- not to apply whatever offers itself to expand the architectonic repertoire (an approach that Barth considers to be a questionable, increasingly rhetoricised form of a somewhat naïve belief in the future), but to find out what possibilities are still open to architecture and how far architecture still permits a concept of 'dwelling' in the sense the word was used by Heidegger. The result is not a backward-looking homeliness, but a structure that, as a commitment to architecture in and of itself, stands his ground like few others in its time and place. This is not least because its complexity its multi-layered, opulent fabric of allusions, references and quotations, only reveals itself gradually and with close observation behind a simple appearance targeted on the immediacy of experience and architecture. Despite the somewhat polemical intentions of its builder and inhabitant, the house is not experienced as an ideological manifesto in bricks and mortar. It is and here lies its radicality, devoted to the immediate experience of 'dwelling' in so far as it does not allow, as Thomas Hettche writes in his essay, any distinction between surface and function, life and experience.

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At the time San Francisco International Airport opened as Mills Field Municipal Airport of San Francisco in 1927, most of the San Francisco Peninsula was pastureland. Over the years, new terminals and hangars were built to satisfy the demand of increased air traffic. Beginning with a small administration building of residential character including horizontal wood siding and red cedar shingles, the airport advanced to the larger San Francisco Airport Administration Building. After continuous growth, in 2000 the airport was reorganised and expanded into the vast, structurally iconic new International Terminal. The new building acts as a gateway between land and air, offering a recognisable image to arriving and leaving passengers. It is organised over five levels, making it America's first mid-rise terminal. It receives multiple modes of transportation -- linking cars, busses, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system and the internal light-rail system. According to Craig Hartman, design architect with SOM, the terminal is "founded upon the qualities of light and lightness". He says of the new roof: "We conceived of it as a floating, sheltering plane and as a symbol." The building's position above several lanes of traffic required a 380-foot long span between the central columns -- essentially the building is a bridge. Thus the building itself is in a state of lift-off, offering the first step into the air for departure or a transition space for arrival before the traveller really gets back to the ground. The terminal is built on friction-pendulum base insulators that allow it to swing in the event of an earthquake. The roof trusses' shape evokes many possible associations, the rolling Bay Area hills, the wings of airplanes, a bird in flight -- all images not unusual inspirations for airport designs, though in this case especially elegantly achieved.

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Text in English and German. Despite their usually very large volumes, works by Eckhard Gerber's Dortmund practice are structurally light and transparent, precise in their detail, and make an unmistakable impact on the urban space. Presenting the new exhibition centre in Karlsruhe, this Opus volume is devoted to a building complex with all the self-confidence of a city-within-a-city. Admittedly visitors are not aware of that until they have passed a breath-taking exhibition loggia whose daring roof, protruding powerfully along the whole length of the building, attracts attention even from a distance. The basic concept, tailored to the urban landscape, the functional ground-plan arrangement, the unusually subtle use of structures and materials for a large building of this kind, and not least the high design quality of all structural parts will certainly mean a high level of acceptance and a long future for the Neue Messe in Karlsruhe.

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In many years of collaboration a research group with scholars from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the United States has looked into the most recent developments of Hollywood and its movie productions of the 1990s and the first years of the new century. Technical and distributional questions of the film market played as important a part as those of transnationalisation and new digital technologies. Interdependences between computer games and movies are scrutinised and then, of course, focal points of thematic developments. They reach from remakes and blockbusters to Steven Soderbergh and the works of other independent filmmakers, from science fiction via old and new myths to questions of gender research. Hollywood's treatment of the most important political event and trauma of the new century, the terrorist attack of 11 September 2001 on the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center in war, action, science fiction and disaster movies is dealt with and also the new wave of documentary films (Michael Moore and others). The Pentagon's influence on the film industry has also to be seen in this context. A major focus of this book is dedicated to the interdisciplinary co-operation between film research, art history and architecture. The present study closes with articles about Hollywood and Las Vegas, American cinema architecture and the role of architecture in recent Hollywood movies.

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Text in German. There is a copious and wide-ranging body of literature on Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Germany's most important 19th-century architect. But there is not a single work that records and assembles material on buildings by Schinkel that are still standing today, one hundred and sixty years after his death, after two world wars and major political upheavals. This volume is intended to fill the gap by providing the fullest possible compilation. It is surprising how many buildings by Schinkel still exist. There are over 170 of them in 112 different places, 62 in Germany and 49 in Poland and Russia, with Berlin and Potsdam each counting as a single location. The picture is very varied as far as the individual buildings are concerned. The churches make up the greatest number: about 86 of them are still standing. Then come 34 museums, theatres, guardhouses, schools and similar buildings, 18 palaces, castles and manor houses, 12 memorials, 12 tombs, 6 interiors and 4 fonts. A glance at a map of the former state of Prussia shows clearly that the buildings are not distributed evenly. In the west, the Rhineland and Westphalia, there were and are relatively few buildings by Schinkel. There is a decided cluster, the first regional concentration, in the present Saxony-Anhalt, between Magdeburg and Weimar. Further to the east come major accumulations in Berlin and Potsdam, and then the Oderbruch in the east of Brandenburg as another cluster. There are also concentrations of buildings by Schinkel in the Posen area as well as in West and East Prussia. Pomerania and Silesia have far fewer. Heinz Schonemann provides an introductory essay about Schinkel in his day, Helmut Borsch-Supan has contributed accounts of the way in which Schinkel's legacy is being handled today. The catalogue texts are by Martina Abri, Elke Blauert, Eva Borsch-Supan, Bernd Evers, Hillert Ibbeken and Heinz Schonemann.

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Text in English and German. Linking art and architecture is one of the great Utopias of our century. Art has been released from its traditional bonds and sees itself faced with a world that has made systems independent to the extent that a link between art and building based on the idea of unity is no longer admissible. The collapse of our 'world into pieces' also typifies that situation of the arts looking for new orders. Now artist-architect Johannes Peter Holzinger, in co-operation with artists Eberhard Fiebig, Ottmar Horl/Formalhaut, Leonardo Mosso, Norbert Muller-Everling, Ansgar Nierhoff and Andreas Sobeck, working on the government buildings on the Hardthohe in Bonn, has succeeded in creating 'an avant-garde landmark that shows in the interplay of the arts that the avant-garde can also work positively in a team', as Dieter Ronte, director of the Stadtisches Kunstmuseum Bonn, put it in a contribution to this book. Holzinger links heterogeneous artistic positions in attempting an order of the different. The art in the outer areas of the complex mediates between the surroundings and the buildings. The visual signing system leads further into the centres, which are the same shape, of the existing administrative buildings, and creates some thing that is unmistakable there. The special structures designed by Holzinger, an intermediate form of architecture and landscape developed from the relief, include the earth itself, and in the casino architecture and art combine to form an indissoluble unit.

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Text in English and Italian. Ivano Gianola is one of the most important exponents of the so-called Ticino School. This developed in the early 1970s as a loose association of architects who thought in related ways. At the time, their ambition was to set radical alternatives of a powerfully symbolic nature against the increasing destruction of the environment by new building in Ticino. What made Gianola's buildings different from others of the Ticino School from the outset was the subtle way they were bound into their context, and their precise craftsmanship. The latter meant that building after building, especially in terms of interior finish and the coherence of all the details, became real total works of art. So it is hardly surprising that Gianola created the most beautiful living spaces in Ticino, in the best Artsand-Crafts tradition. This craft precision, combined with high formal and aesthetic values, was probably also crucial to the fact that in the 1990s Gianola was commissioned to design a series of public and private buildings abroad. Thus his conversions and new buildings for the Bayerische Vereinsbank in Schäfflerhof in Munich made a major contribution to the new concept for the well-known Fünf Höfe site. But Gianola's greatest success so far was winning an international competition for redesigning the extensive site around the ruins of the former 'Palace' luxury hotel in Lugano. Here a theatre seating over 1 200 people, a modern art museum, housing and offices, a municipal park and a new section of the lakeside promenade will be created over the next five years. This is the biggest project that the Canton of Ticino has ever awarded, and it will have found an appropriate architect. This first publication of the complete works of Gianola gives the latest of the leading protagonists of the Ticino School a monograph of his own.

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Text in English and German. Mankind needs to relate to inanimate matter as well. Manking 'animates' stones, mountains, rivers, yes even the world and the cosmos so that it can communicate with them. There is quite clearly a need to initiate individual contact also with architecture, with our surroundings. This is easier if we can also recognise certain characteristics of our own bodies in the constructed bodies of the built environment. We can go well beyond the common phenomenon of corporeality to find countless analogies between buildings and human beings, thus demonstrating a first step towards an anthropomorphy of architecture. These statements become clearer if a column is interpreted as an anthropomorphic element. If certain features in facades are reminiscent of a pair of eyes, then architectural physiognomy helps us to a dialogue: the building is looking at us, in the direct sense of the word. In the world of Christian symbolism the church -- spatially and theologically -- is constantly compared with the body of Christ, and thus becomes an image of a man-god. The church is the 'mysterious body of Christ', and all parts of the building become metaphors of Christ and his congregation.The 'organic' architecture of the 20th century in its three-dimensional and sculptural manifestations constantly addresses the corporeality of biological creatures. In very recent times we are surprised how often the metaphor of man and architecture occurs: in the work of Ricardo Porro, Imre Makovecz, Santiago Calatrava, Reima Pietila and others. Zoomorphic architecture is a variant of anthropomorphic architecture. Elephants, birds, fishes, insects do not just appear in many current works of modern architecture like those of Frank O Gehry and Coop Himmelblau, they are also absurd manifestations of trivial architecture that has also to be considered in its everyday quality. If we are talking about 'expanded' architecture, then cities, the world and even the cosmos have to be included. Mankind is still moved by the transfer from man as microcosm to the universe as macrocosm.

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Text in English, German and Japanese. The architecture of Japan, both historic and contemporary, has attracted architects from all over the world since the early 60s. In search of the 'Japaneseness' of place (ma), space and architecture several dissertations have been written, especially about the Japanese house and rituals, Conservation, however, was largely neglected. Only recently, with the listing of Japanese sites as Unesco World Heritage in 1994 and the Nara conference on authenticity in 1995, has the Japanese approach to conservation emerged as an intriguing issue. The practice of dismantling and reconstructing complex timber structures represents an essentially Japanese approach. Moreover, the refined documentation and structural research prior to any intervention are much admired by the international conservation community. The articles for this publication were prepared in the context of a Japanese-German co-operative programme in architectural and urban conservation in 1996-98. For the first time ever a Western publication attempts to portray the Japanese practice of repair -- hozon -- of historic structures. Detailed photographic documentations demonstrate the beauty of timber structures that are otherwise concealed by roofs and walls. It also becomes evident that an architectural object is not an entity that is defined once and for all, but an object that allows for change. Documentations of ongoing projects, with emphasis on the Fudo-do on the sacred mountain of Koyasan, explain and justify various kinds of interventions that are aimed at structural reinforcement and disaster prevention.

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Text in English and German. The new Leipzig/Halle airport has not just one, but two predecessors. One was Leipzig-Mockau airport, opened in 1923 and often still used after the Second World War in the GDR days to serve the Leipziger Messe. The other was Leipzig/Halle airport which opened in 1927 and by 1937 was already the second-largest airport in Germany. Passenger numbers had increased fourfold by 1994. A master plan was worked out for a second runway, intended for 3.5 million passengers per year. An open architectural competition followed and was won by Brunnert und Partner from Stuttgart. They won with a risky concept that ran counter to the master plan. Instead of filling the site between the two runways the architects designed a huge bridge structure spanning the railway track and integrating the car-park, the mall, the check-in hall, the access road and the transfer to the railway station. This concludes the first building phase, which begins at the existing terminal and ends beyond the railway lines. The concept of the bridge will not be complete until the second building phase, although it can already be made out quite clearly.

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Text in German. Munich is lucky. A city that is at the top of the popularity scale needs nothing more than attractive building land. There has been a great deal more of this in recent years since industry and commerce have moved off to the periphery, barracks have been closed, the goods station and the airport have been relocated and the exhibition centre has gone to the empty site in Riem that was freed up. This meant that the Theresienhohe became an urban development area as well. Trade-exhibition halls were still being built around the historic parkland, established as an exhibition park around the turn of the century, in the 1980s. In 1997, an architectural competition was looking for ideas for an "inner-city, dense mixture of use for culture, as a central, for housing and commerce". The prize-winning suggestion by Steidle + Partner became the basis for further planning. The convincing feature was the instinctive sureness with which the practice imposed scale and urban character of the surrounded quarters on to the former exhibition-centre site. The development proposal, which could be interpreted in many ways but proposed an easily remembered line, is continued in the architecture, with its sets of buildings staggered against each other. The first buildings to be completed included the KPMG head office, which emerged from a workshop procedure: the ground plan for the complex uses a meander pattern, completed at one corner by a high-rise residential building -- which means that the quarter principle of reversible residential and office use is demonstrated within a single block. A central entrance courtyard provides access to the office block, but there is access from the outside elsewhere as well, should the function ever be changed. The building rises to seven storeys, and is pleasingly disturbing because of the lively colours on its facade of glazed ceramic panels. The even staccato of the narrow windows forms a contrast with this. Both together give the architecture the appeal of a mysterious musical instrument -- certainly intended for very young, rhythmic music.

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Otto Steidle has devoted himself continuously to the subject of housing for over 30 years, more perhaps than almost any other architect in Germany. At first the Munich office experimented with building with prefabricated elements. This was not in the first place a response to the building industry's production requirements, but intended to give occupants maximum flexibility when equipping or modifying their homes, for example in the residential estate in Genter Strasse in Munich (1969 -- 72) or at documenta urbana in Kassel (1979 -- 82). It was from 1986 -- 92, in the Kreuzgassenviertel in the old town in Nuremberg, that Steidle first addressed the high-density inner-city housing construction that he has increasingly made his own in recent years. For the Wacker-Haus in Munich (1992 -- 96, Opus 31) and the Michaelis quarter in Hamburg (1994 -- 2001) he experimented with tower-like residential buildings developed from the traditional urban block, right down to the inner courtyard, protected from the noise.For the Freischutzstrasse residential quarter in Munich Steidle first combined the 'classical' linear block with a sequence of tower-like slender buildings -- finding an up-to-date response in this way to the challenge of combining living in green surroundings with urban structures and appropriate density. The interplay of different building types made it possible to create exciting 'urban' spaces in green surroundings; an existing biotope with a fine stand of trees thrusts deep into the estate on the open south flank. Although the estate was built in five phases, it seems to be all of a piece. This is not least due to the sensitive colour scheme devised by the Berlin artist Erich Wiesner, who has been working with Steidle + Partner for many years. The dwellings are characterized by generous living areas lit on two sides. The sizes of the dwellings can be varied by removing or adding individual spaces.

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Text in English & German. Not just a winner, but a major winner. And Fellbach won it by letting Zurich architect Ernst Gisel build its new town hall. And it is just the same as winning the lottery: it takes time for it to sink in and to be really pleased. Winning also means stress, especially if the player never really believed in his luck. But why be pleased about a town hall, about a collection of official rooms, intended only to make administering the individual citizen even smoother? Can a town hall be anything at all more than a home for all the official panoply of tit-for-tat responses? It can indeed, if you make it into a piece of the town, a good piece of the town . . . Ernst Gisel's town hall for Fellbach is one of the very few buildings that make one enthuse about the town. Like Stirling's Neue Staatsgalerie it invites you to linger -- even without a reason: in the Stuttgart museum you are attracted by terraces, ramps and an open rotunda, whereas in the Fellbach building there is a sense of a strong suction that will draw the public into the inner courtyard of the complex. "A bit Italian" -- that is what Gisel himself says about the atmosphere there, and he is right. The urban quality of the new town hall corresponds with the quality of the detailed architectural solutions and the care with which Gisel devoted himself to the architectural design in the interior. Art in the building? There is that too. Gisel himself designed the fountain for the market-place façade: architecture on a small scale, a game with volumes through which the water slowly runs. In the inner courtyard, in the town-hall square, is the sculpture Überlebenskopf (survival head) by Zurich artist Otto Müller -- a sober monument that corresponds precisely with the confident but modest character of the building. The new town hall is a fairly perfect piece of architecture and urban art: reticent as a whole, monumental in detail.

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Text in English, German and Spanish. Over the last decade the island of Lanzarote has become one of the favourite tourism destinations in the Canary Islands. However, our interest is more one of artistic than of touristic discovery, and this would be virtually unthinkable without the work of an artist who fell in love with this wonderful paradise. We refer to César Manrique (1919-1992), who was able to see and reveal to us the unique beauties arising out of the happy marriage of the four elements believed by the Greeks to form the whole of creation: air, earth, fire and water. In fact, after returning to his island in 1968 after a period spent in New York, Manrique dedicated himself passionately to realising his utopia, to renew Lanzarote out of his own sources. Among Manrique's best known works on Lanzarote are the Casa Museo del Campesino, the Jameos del Agua, the Mirador del Río, the Cactus Garden and his own house in the Taro de Tahíche. Manrique's house in Taro de Tahíche, which nowadays houses the César Manrique Foundation, can be considered as a 'work in progress' as it was built over a period of almost 25 years and was still not completed upon the artist's death. Arising out of the five interconnected volcanic bubbles of the underground storey, it has become a metaphor for the amorous meeting of man with Mother Earth, the latter being understood, to use Bruno Taut's expression, as 'a fine home for living'. The spaces on the upper floor can be virtually mistaken for the white cubic buildings dispersed throughout the island. But when we cross their thresholds, we have the unique feeling that here something was created which is really new. In fact, Manrique -- enemy in equal measure of the 'pastiche' of regionalism and the off-key International Style blind to differentiation -- sifted the vernacular with certain modern filters such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe or Le Corbusier, and at the same time he gave it such a specific stamp that the final result became indigenous and unmistakable. Simón Marchán Fiz is professor of aesthetics in Madrid. Like Marchán Fiz, Pedro Martínez de Albornoz lives in Madrid. The photographs shown in this book are the best photographic interpretation of one of Manrique's work up to now.

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Together with his colleagues and students at the University of Cyprus, Phocas challenges traditional definitions of utopia by presenting us with analytical research and clearly delineated visions of some architectural futures, which defy easy description. Some may view the architecture-diploma projects in this book skeptically as fantastical or even as frightening visions of some technologically driven future, but they are anything but fantasy. They should be appreciated as a continuing creative search for the defining of what is the meaning in our 21st-century world of "utopia" and the role of architectural technology in expressing it. This search takes us beyond the traditional notions of utopia, which have historically been illustrated as overtly romantic, whimsical images along with a plethora of mechanistic formal architectural or architectonic proposals for utopian cities or communities. Some of these utopian visions, which were realized as isolated acts during the first half of the 20th century, in as socio-economically and culturally diverse places such as the United Kingdom, suburban North America or the Indian sub-continent proved to be, once inhabited, less than utopian. In studying the student proposals, one could argue that these architectural visions are derived from an evolution of human technology and an understanding of growth and adaptability in nature. For instance, some of the projects propose new "building blocks" which can be likened to the ancient technology of making bricks and the quarrying and shaping of stone which led to the development of masonry construction and an entire new architecture. Other proposals can be likened to the self-generating growth and renewal process of plant life. Like in nature, we see in the students work proposals for structural systems that grow vertically out of constructed or natural landscapes in a symbiotic relationship with the forces of gravity, wind and sun, while mining these primal forces to enable human habitation. Others appear as in natural growth, as expandable adaptable infrastructure systems intertwined with and serving existing conditions. And yet other proposals are developed as independent systems that are more au-tonomous in their form and function.

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The fact that the entire history of culture and technology could represent a single, continuous expulsion of mankind from the original, paradiese state of nature was already described visionarilyin the Bible and predicted with all its positive and negative consequences. Everyone knows the story of Adam and Eve, of their 'Fall' and their 'Expulsion from Paradise'. Even as a non-Christian it is worth taking a look at the fairytale-like-mythic text of the Old Testament, although the picture and the process completely contradict our current scientific findings. One would almost be inclined to assume that the idea of a primeval paradise is innate in all human beings and that every human being with his becoming, his birth, his childhood and his adulthood experiences something like a Genesis. He is born innocent and helpless, wakes up, looks around, believes to be free, gets to know his time, his surroundings, his life. The final expulsion of every human being from life is his death. He is a sentenced to death. Despite all religious promises, man has always been aware of this fact, also of the fact that he has only this one life and that he ultimately cannot count on the hope that beyond this life there is something that could be called 'salvation', a happy return to the Garden of Eden. As the book shows with numerous, primarily European examples, the history of man is therefore full of efforts to regain here and now the lost paradise, no matter how precarious the result may be. In search of the lost paradises: a somewhat unusual history of man in his relationship to nature, followed by a description of the current state of landscape planning and garden design. In the third, concluding part of the book, the author develops new, strangely surreal and poetic concepts of the treatment of nature, inspired by literature, film, theatre and tourism.Hans Dieter Schaal, born in Ulm in 1943, is an architect, landscape architect, stage designer and exhibition designer. His works, the majority of which have been published by the Axel MengesEdition, have meanwhile reached an audience far beyond his in my homeland. The author lives and works in a village near Biberach an der Riss.

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Museum architecture has blossomed over the past few decades. Art museums lead the way in terms of new buildings by superstar architects such as Frank Gehry, Herzog and de Meuron, Jean Nouvel, and Renzo Piano, among many more. Those facilities have received public and professional recognition through media attention and design awards. But other museum typologies exist, one such being for buildings that showcase military history and artifacts. All too often, one thinks of these as unsophisticated in their design and amateurish or antiquated in their exhibitions. Nowadays, nothingcan be further from the truth. This volume examines more than thirty of them internationally that were constructed over the past two decades and more. The museums are featured in individual entries and lavish color photography. Some were designed by internationally renowned architects such as Norman Foster, Daniel Libeskind, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, and Robert A.M. Stern, but many more are the products of creative, accomplished designers. Beyond the architecture of these museums, exhibition and installation designs by noted specialist firms such as Ralph Appelbaum Associates, Koosmann.dejong, and Gallagher & Associates, among others, have raised the bar in terms of immersive experiences for their visitors. New military museums presented within the book are examined within the context of the history of war memorials and military museums, the latter being a less well researched subject. In the end, military museums relate back to antique sculptural commemorationsof victorious campaigns and martial leaders, collections and displays of war trophies, and the search to find useful architectural memorials, the latter especially so after the World Wars of the twentieth century. Architectural historian John Zukowsky has an earned doctorate from Binghamton University. While curator of architecture for The Art Institute of Chicago (19782004), he organized a number of award-winning exhibitions accompanied by major books. After that, he held executive positions within military-related museums such as the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum and the Pritzker Military Museum and Library. Since 2012 he has authored several books about architecture and design, including Why on Earth Would Anyone Build That (2015), Building Chicago: The Architectural Masterworks (2016), and Architecture Inside Out: Understanding How Buildings Work (2018).

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Text in English & German. 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 currently being designed make these interspaces visible and allow urban dwellers to experience unexpected spatial constellations. In addition to the presentation of light-planning examples in Paris, Shanghai, Helsinki, Mekka and Frankfurt am Main the book includes a number of essays relating to the subject, among them: "Light architecture" (Werner Oechslin), The Potemkin city (Adolf Loos), Glass architecture and letters about glass houses (Paul Scheerbart), Alpine architecture (Bruno Taut), The unvisible cities (Italo Calvino), Architecture must burn (Coop Himmelb(l)au), In search of light (Wolfgang Rang), City light. About the social power of light (Helmut Bien), Light or the loss of darkness (Manuel Cuadra), Visible and unvisible light (Andreas Danler), Light concepts for Frankfurt am Main (Michael Hootz), Light planning for cities in China (Hao Luoxi), City light. An instrument of urban planning (Roger Narboni), Light for the public space (Susanne Seitinger), Sustainable urban lighting (Mark Burton-Page), Borders, places, light (Niels Gutschow), Earth and spirit (Wolfgang Rang). With texts by Michael Batz, Niels Gutschow, Hao Luoxi, Roger Narboni, Werner Oechslin, Wolfgang Rang and others.

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Text in English and German. The basic features of Deutsche Lufthansa's present corporate image emerged almost 45 years ago. It was created by Otl Aicher, one of the principal figures at the now legendary Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm. Another work by Aicher that spoke to the whole of Germany, as it were (and still does, in rudiments), is the 1972 corporate image for the Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen. The corporate image he created for the Olympic Games in Munich, which made an essential contribution to the ambience of the event, has also remained memorable. Since the ideas developed by Aicher and his colleagues were implemented in the early sixties, the airline has been seen world-wide as a perfect example of a consistently developed corporate image. Aicher based himself on ideas from the Deutscher Werkbund and took the company's entire inventory into consideration: "house colours, pictorial and typographic logos, typeface, graphic and typographic rules and standards, photographic style, quality of support materials, packaging, exhibition systems, architectural characteristics, forms (design) of interior furnishings and equipment, style of work and service clothes". As well as Otl Aicher, numerous other product and graphic designers, fashion designers and advertising and marketing agencies have worked for Lufthansa. They include Otto Firle, whose ideas led to the crane logo, Hartmut Esslinger and his company frog design, Priestman & Goode, Müller Romca Industriedesign, Don Wallance, Wilhelm Wagenfeld, Hans Theo Baumann, Nick Roericht, Wolfgang Karnagel, Topel & Pauser and the bhar design practice, fashion designers Uli Richter, Ursula Tautz and Werner Machnick, Jürgen Weiss, Gabriele Strehle and the Jobis company as well as the agencies Zintzmeyer & Lux, the Peter Schmidt Group, Ogilvy & Mather, Young & Rubicam, Spiess/Ermisch/Abel, Springer & Jacoby, McCann & Erickson and Fanghänel & Lohmann. An exhibition of the same name at the Museum for Applied Arts in Frankfurt deals with the same subject as the book.

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