Search results for ""author niklas maak""

Our cities are atrophying: What was once an open system inhabitable by all and that was about freedom and self-determination is becoming a zone in which architecture focuses only on comfort and security: a walk-in investment portfolio of luxury properties, offices and token patches of green. The masses, meanwhile, continue to live in the endless housing developments of the suburbs. Accommodation is characterised by a mania for barricades and comfort. The construction industry is booming – and builds the same houses over and over again. But do those buildings have anything to do with the way in which most people want to live today, considering dramatic demographic, technological and social change? Where does the dream of the detached house come from? Which ideal form of living are we taught by children’s books, lifestyle magazines and DIY shops? Who benefits from us living the way we live? Niklas Maak shows how the interests of the construction industry, overextended policies mired in regulations and the habits of planners prevent us from rethinking construction, living arrangements and the city. This humorous, controversial and very well researched book is a precise economic analysis of the architectural world, a brilliant cultural history of living arrangements and a political manifesto for a new kind of architecture.

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How do we want to live? How shall we build? Where can we find ideas for the houses and cities of the future? Niklas Maak and Johanna Diehl focus their attention on these highly topical questions in their joint project “Eurotopians”. In times of change this volume casts its backward gaze on the work of European utopians in order to find visions for the present. During the 1960s and 1970s visionary architecture was created in Europe which raised fundamental questions about our current ideas of how we should live. Many of these buildings are in ruins and their architects forgotten – although they still live there. Maak visited them and created an “archaeology of the utopian”, which shows that important ideas for the world of tomorrow can be found in the ruins. Johanna Diehl has taken impressive photographs of great intensity. In the ruins of these utopias of the modern age she discovered pictures of revolutionary approaches to life which seem surprisingly topical.

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If data is the greatest collective treasure of a digital society, basic material for business and politics: Why are the places where it is stored still so invisible? Niklas Maak, architectural critic and Professor for Architecture at Städelschule Frankfurt, explores this question in his new publication and envisions radical solutions for the future.

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