Search results for ""Bauhaus-Universität""

The inter- and transdisciplinary research project Drei Zimmer, Küche, Diele, Bad used a vacant home to formulate and consider questions about the future of housing. The residence, a listed building ensemble in Weimar dating from the 1920s, initially served as a work, discussion, and exhibition space for students of architecture and urbanism. A small number of significant interventions transformed it into a space that enabled not just alternative dwelling options, but also neighborhood-focused activities. The new residents were selected through a concept proposal process, and the researchers analyzed their usage of the dwelling over the course of two years. Lasting five years in total (2017–2021), the project began as a cooperation between the Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar, the Thuringer Aufbaubank funding and development agency, and the Weimarer Wohnstatte municipal housing company under the aegis of the Thuringian Ministry for Infrastructure and Agriculture.

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Germany is currently experiencing an intense debate about the reconstruction of synagogues that were destroyed under Nazi rule in the 1930s, and the related search for an appropriate architectural expression of Jewish life and culture in the country’s major cities today. This book, which results from a collaboration between the Technical Universities of Darmstadt and Dresden, Hamburg’s HafenCity University, and the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, vividly contributes to this discussion. The Synagogue Project features designs for new synagogues replacing the lost buildings on Berlin’s Fraenkelufer and on Joseph-Carlebach-Platz and Poolstrasse in Hamburg by students at the participating universities. They illustrate the search for a structural expression that can provide space for Jewish life and worship in the future. In conversation, members of Jewish communities and Franz-Josef Höing, representing the City of Hamburg’s department of urban development and housing, explain their views on the past and future of synagogues in Hamburg and Berlin. Mirjam Wenzel, director of the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt, Salomon Korn, former vice-president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, Rabbi Edward van Voolen, and Swiss architect Roger Diener also contribute to the discussion on the history and significance of spaces for Jewish life, culture, and religion in German cities. Text in English and German.

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When it comes to determining the relative quality of architecture, who is best equipped to make the distinctions? Is it the public who lives in and among the buildings? The people who commission and pay for the buildings? Art historians? Or architects themselves? These provocative essays take up the questions of what people value in architecture and how changing values influence opinions about it. In the intriguing opening essay, Michael Benedikt makes an argument for the role of architects in the delineation of value in architecture. He discusses the differences between icon and canon, a theme threaded through many of the essays. In addition to unexpected analyses of buildings such as Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Paul Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building at Yale University, and the work of Antoni Gaudí and Frank Gehry, the collection includes a clear-eyed look at the role of architecture in addressing social problems. Ultimately, these essays assert that judging architecture requires more than a refined sensibility. Buildings also need to be evaluated by their impact on the people living within and around them. Contributors: John Beardsley, Harvard Design School; Michael Benedikt, U of Texas, Austin; Tim Culvahouse, California College of the Arts; Lisa Finley, California College of the Arts; Kurt W. Forster, Bauhaus-Universität, Weimar, Germany; Kenneth Frampton, Columbia U; Diane Ghirardo, U of Southern California; Charles Jencks; David Leatherbarrow, U of Pennsylvania; Nancy Levinson; Hélène Lipstadt; Juhani Pallasmaa, Helsinki U of Technology; Timothy M. Rohan, U of Massachusetts, Amherst; Roger Scruton; Daniel Willis, Pennsylvania State U. William S. Saunders is editor of Harvard Design Magazine and assistant dean for external relations at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. He is the author of Modern Architecture: Photographs by Ezra Stoller and editor of three other Harvard Design Magazine Readers. Michael Benedikt is Hal Box Chair in Urbanism and director of the Center for American Architecture and Design at the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin.

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