· N E W   B O O K S   O F   I N T E R E S T ·

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(***  =  New additions)

 

***   Stefan Koppelkamm.

Ortszeit / Local Time

224 pages with 100 photographs and an essay by Ludger Derenthal.

Size: 230 x 320 mm, Printing: Duotone, Hardcover with jacket, Text: 

German / English

Edition Axel Menges, Stuttgart/London

ISBN 3-936681-03-1

48.00 Euro / 78.00 sfr / 36.00 £ / 59.00 US $ / 89 $A

»Mehr als dieses Fotobuch kann eigentlich auch der große Wenderoman nicht sagen, auf den immer alle warten.« Peter Richter in der Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung vom 27.11.05 über Stefan Koppelkamm, Ortszeit / Local Time

Die Fotografien in diesem Buch zeigen eine subjektive Auswahl von Bauten und Stadträumen im Osten Deutschlands zu zwei verschiedenen Zeitpunkten: Die ersten entstanden nach dem Fall der Mauer in den frühen 1990er Jahren, die zweiten mehr als ein Jahrzehnt später. Die Aufnahmen von Stefan Koppelkamm ermöglichen das detaillierte Lesen aller Zeitspuren. In den Veränderungen des baulichen Zustands und selbst in den nebensächlichsten Einzelheiten spiegeln sich die dramatischen gesellschaftlichen und ökonomischen Veränderungen, die zwischen erster und zweiter Aufnahme stattgefunden haben. www.ortszeitlocaltime.de

»Even the great novel about the fall of the Berlin Wall everyone is always waiting for cannot actually say any more than this book of photographs.« Peter Richter about Stefan Koppelkamm’s Ortszeit / Local Time in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 27.11.05.

The photographs in this book show a subjective selection of buildings and townscapes in East Germany at two different times: the first ones were taken after the Berlin Wall fell in the early 1990s, and the second set over a decade later. Stefan Koppelkamm’s photographs let us study the traces left by passing time in great detail. Changes in the condition of the buildings and even in the most trivial minor features reflect the dramatic social and economic transformation that came about between the first and the second set of photographs.  www.ortszeitlocaltime.de

www.editionsimbernon.com
Les Riviera de Charles Garnier et Gustave Eiffel : le rêve de la raison /
Charles Garnier and Gustave Eiffel on the French and Italian Riviera : the dream of reason
coordonné par Jean-Lucien Bonillo
Un volume de 208 pages
au format de 24,5 x 31 cm, relié
208 illustrations couleur
bilingue français/anglais: bilingual french / english
Parution : janvier 2005
ISBN : 2-9516396-1-9

Le livre
L’ouvrage s’attache à faire le point sur les séjours et l’oeuvre de Charles Garnier, le célèbre architecte de l’Opéra, sur les Riviera italienne et française, juste avant l’invention du vocable “ Côte d’Azur ”. Point d’accroche de cette importante activité dans le Midi, si inhabituelle pour un architecte parisien au XIXème siècle, sa résidence d’hiver à Bordighera, petit village de pêcheurs que sa présence et ses projets (villas, école, église, plan d’urbanisme...) contribuent à transformer en station de villégiature. A Monte-Carlo, où il dirige la rénovation et l’extension du casino, se retrouvent avec un faste plus grandiose encore les tendances néobaroques de l’opéra parisien. A l’inverse l’ensemble de l’observatoire astronomique de Nice, parc et pavillons, sera traité dans un esprit de “ fantaisie sévère ”. La pureté des masses architecturales et l’expression de la statuaire du grand équatorial expriment un jeu de correspondances symbolistes qui évoquent les rêves de la science et les intuitions rationnelles de l’art. L’accent est mis également sur un sujet inédit, la rencontre des deux monstres sacrés du monde de la construction au XIXème siècle, Charles Garnier et Gustave Eiffel. Leurs échanges s’amorcent comme une fructueuse collaboration à l’observatoire de Nice où l’ingénieur-constructeur installe sa fameuse coupole “ flottante ” et se poursuivent comme une âpre confrontation dans le cadre de l’Exposition Universelle de 1889 à Paris où se font face la tour éponyme de l’ingénieur et les pavillons de l’architectequi illustrent l’Histoire de l’habitation humaine. Face à Face les oeuvres de Gustave Eiffel et Charles Garnier traduisaient au fond les deux tendances opposées et complémentaires du siècle : le progrès et la modernité conquérante et sûre d’elle-même et la passion pour l’histoire ainsi que les cultures exotiques et le primitif dont les artistes d’avant-garde allaient bientôt se nourrir.

Coordonné par Jean-Lucien Bonillo, architecte, historien de l’architecture et enseignant à l’école d’architecture de Marseille, ce travail a réuni :
• Béatrice Bouvier, historienne
• Andréa Folli, architecte
• Jean-Louis Heudier, astronome, directeur du projet muséal de l’observatoire astronomique de Nice
• Françoise Le Guet-Tully, responsable des archives à l’observatoire astronomique de Nice
• Jean-Michel Leniaud, historien, directeur d’études à l’EPHE-Paris
• Gisella Merello, historienne

Jean-Francois Lejeune
CIVA: Cruelty And Utopia: Cities And Landscapes Of Latin America
Paperback: 264 pages
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
ISBN: 1568984898

This landmark collection of illustrated essays explores the vastly underappreciated history of America's other cities -- the great metropolises found south of our borders in Central and South America. Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Mexico City, Caracas, Havana, Santiago, Rio, Tijuana, and Quito are just some of the subjects of this diverse collection. How have desires to create modern societies shaped these cities, leading to both architectural masterworks (by the likes of Luis Barragán, Juan O'Gorman, Lúcio Costa, Roberto Burle Marx, Carlos Raúl Villanueva, and Lina Bo Bardi) and the most shocking favelas? How have they grappled with concepts of national identity, their colonial history, and the continued demands of a globalized economy? Lavishly illustrated, Cruelty and Utopia features the work of such leading scholars as Carlos Fuentes, Edward Burian, Lauro Cavalcanti, Fernando Oayrzún, Roberto Segre, and Eduardo Subirats, along with artwork ranging from colonial paintings to stills from Chantal Akerman's film From the Other Side. Also included is a revised translation of Spanish King Philip II's influential planning treatise of 1573, the "Laws of the Indies," which did so much to define the form of the Latin American city. In July 2005, Prof. Lejeune 's Cruelty and Utopia received the prestigious "Julius Posener Award for an Exhibtion Catalogue".

Christian W. Thomsen, Angela Krewani, eds.
Hollywood: Recent Developments
208 pp. with 181 ill., most of them in colour, 233 x 284,5 mm,
hard-cover, English
ISBN 3-932565-44-4

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 transnationalization and new digital technologies. Interdependences between computer games and movies are scrutinized 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 cooperation 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. Christian W. Thomsen is professor of English literature and media studies at the University of Siegen. Since 1982 he also teaches architectural history, theory and criticism. He was cofounder of Germany’s largest media research institute and coeditor (together with Helmut Kreuzer) of a five-volume history of German television. He is author of 26 books and editor of another 55 books. He published more than 300 articles on literature, theatre, film, architecture, design and the development of modern media in leading journals of Germany, Great Britain, Austria, Switzerland, the USA, Canada and Japan. He taught as visiting professor in Copenhagen, London, Jerusalem, Vancouver, Los Angeles and Houston and organized many international symposia and art exhibitions. From a director of stage and radio plays he grew into filmmaking and produced and directed 25 documentaries so far. Angela Krewani read English and American literature and history at the universities of Cologne and Siegen and did graduate research studies at Yale University. She took her PhD with Modernism and Femininity. American Writers in Paris and her habilitation with New British Cinema under Christian W. Thomsen. She is professor of media studies at the University of Marburg. Hollywood grew to be the most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks.

Recent Developments is edited by Christian W. Thomsen, Angela Krewani with contribututions by Robert Blanche, Dietmar Fröhlich, Jean-Pierre Geuens, Randi Gunzenhäuser Vinzenz Hediger, Kay Hoffmann, Angela Krewani, Claudia Liebrand, Gudula Moritz, Volker Pietsch, Karen A. Ritzenhoff, Pamela C. Scorzin, Christian W. Thomsen, Frederic Wasser, Celeste M. Williams

Contents
Christian W. Thomsen / Angela Krewani: Preface
Christian W. Thomsen: 9/11: before and after
Karen A. Ritzenhoff: On the cutting edge – new visual languages in film-editing
Kay Hoffmann: The digital cinema dilemma: obstacles to digitalizing the movie screens
Jean-Pierre Geuens: The digital world picture
Vinzenz Hediger: Making movies is like making cars, only more fun
Frederic Wasser: The transnationalization of Hollywood
Claudia Liebrand: Negotiations of genre and gender in contemporary Hollywood film
Robert Blanchet, Deep impact: emotion and performance in contemporary blockbuster cinema
Volker Pietsch: Body Snatchers. Recycling in Hollywood
Christian W. Thomsen: Mixed realities: from HAL 9000 to The Matrix. Computers and androids
in contemporary science-fiction movie
Christian W. Thomsen: The recycling of myths in Hollywood science-fiction films, exemplified
by Roland Emmerich’s Stargate (1994), Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (1997) and Andrew
Niccol’s S1mOne (2002)
Gudula Moritz: Pentagon pictures: how Hollywood has its scripts censored by Washington
Angela Krewani: Hollywood’s new brand: independent film production
Randi Gunzenhäuser: Hyperkinetic images: Hollywood and computer games
Dietmar Fröhlich: Architecture and film: the reality play
Celeste M. Williams / Dietmar Fröhlich: Cinema architecture in the United States
Pamela C. Scorzin: Authentic replicas, or just like a Hollywood movie. Notes on the cinematised
Las Vegas strip
Biographies
Picture credits

Christian W. Thomsen / Angela Krewana
Preface
I, Christian Thomsen, started cherishing a particular liking for the cinema when I was about ten years old. As a youngster in post-war Germany in the late 1940s and 1950s visiting our local film theatre cost about a dime. I loved westerns and those American films where beautiful cars cruised along Californian beaches. I tried to imitate the sheriffs’ walk with large-caliber colts at their hips, always on the alert and ready to draw. But one thing puzzled me from very early on. I had no idea about editing techniques and wondered how film music was created. I first imagined camera crews being accompanied by bands of musicians. It became more puzzling with symphonic orchestras. Enjoying films with African scenarios, jungles, adventure stories in exotic settings, I wondered how on earth film producers could make us believe that there are whole orchestras playing in a humid tropical environment while an expedition is searching for hidden treasures or gangsters are hunted on a river. Just think about sensitive string instruments and their tuning! Getting more knowledgeable I thought this highly unrealistic, even absurd and ironic. Music and action for me often fell apart; the sole function of film music seemed to me the creation of dramatic emotion – a poor surrogate for something that should have been told in moving images, with the art of acting and sounds suited to the action. What I wanted – even in early student days – was an integrative sound concept as part of an overall aesthetic concept for the mixed medium of film. This should consist of visual, auditive and body languages as well as of environmental texts of setting, architecture, nature etc. I had to wait a long time for this and even today old mistakes of a mere supporting background of film music are frequently repeated. Meanwhile, my notions about sound tracks have considerably deepened. Reflecting on the most characteristic and noteworthy developments of Hollywood since the early 1990s, I think that – together with the rapid growth of an entire CGI-industry and their ever more spectacular effects – it is the quality of sound that has improved most. The creation of sound worlds, the immersion into an organically composed whole of visual and auditory experiences has dramatically changed our perception of Hollywood films. Today, sound worlds – of which music is only a part – are at least as important as special effects. Born from the tradition of 19th century European symphonic music as I still remember it
from my youth, film music and sound tracks have grown into a multi-sensory experience. They support actions, emotions, moods and ideological contents of movies as well as deeply influencing our aesthetic and intellectual facilities – via subconscious levels – without illustrating and explaining visual levels in the sense of program music. The »director of sound« has been upgraded comparable to the former cameraman who has risen to the status of »director of photography«. The film’s director ranks equal with the leading actors at least. In a star-oriented – even star-possessed – Western culture they all tend to become stars and entrepreneurs of their own. Only the script writer’s role still seems to be underrated. But: without scripts, no movies. And without sound and music much of the visual experience becomes pretty banal. The extreme proliferation of sound ties in with a general impact of today’s cinematic visual systems that turn cinema into a »cinema of visual and aural effects«: Besides the upgrade of sound systems the reception of film is optimised through special effects, usually being produced digitally. Although a digital cinema could offer new and fantastic worlds to explore, special effects are employed to augment the viewer’s immersion into the film. This tendency goes along with a highly developed cinematic architecture, which also points to the notion of cinema as »special event«. As counterpart to these developments stands the televisualisation of most parts of the film production: Recent figures evidence that about 50% of the revenues emerge from the video and DVD home market – in this respect the filmic experience is vanished in favour of the completely different involvement of watching TV. And TV itself has been developing new formats that constantly undermine the cinematic experience it historically had tried to achieve. As another consequence of the televisualisation of film production occurs the transnationalisation of film production. Since productions for television are somewhat smaller in production costs and Hollywood itself has ventured into global corporate culture, executives turned to European broadcasting stations intending joint projects: This brought the international heritage genre into being. This genre feeds on literary adaptions of canonical novels, generally by eminent literary figures such as Henry James, Jane Austen or Charles Dickens, just to name a few. These films set 6 out to recreate an authentic experience of times gone by through elaborate mise-en-scene, romantic landscape and period costumes. But over the last years the genre has branched out into more contemporary settings as well: Although not being period pieces movies such as Bridget Jones’ Diary, Notting Hill and Chocolat sport images of contemporary France and England.
Especially the films referring to France allude to French national film culture without being French at all. Thus national film cultures are incorporated into Hollywood, which – in return – becomes increasingly globalized. Whereas the reference to European tradition plays a minor role within Hollywood film production, the integration of Asian films and their aesthetics has been pivoting over the years. Especially Hong Kong films and its martial arts scenes have highly affected Hollywood film production as it can be watched in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or in the Matrix series. Particularly Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a seminal example for a new but steadily increasing form of transnational or global cinema referring to a set of national traditions and being closely affiliated with Hollywood. The film was made with a relative modest budget of $15 million and it earned more than $ 200 million worldwide. It earned $ 128 million in the movie theaters and an additional $112 million on the video and DVD market. Although the film was not directly produced within Hollywood, but shot on location in China, it displays the global aspects of film production, which are also quite common within recent production structures. Much of the money came from the various divisions of Sony – being itself one of the major players in Hollywood at one time. Funds were provided by Columbia Film Productions Asia, Sony’s Hong Kong branch that was set up in order to produce films for the Asian local markets, Sony Picture Classics in New York bought the US distribution, Columbia Pictures in Hollywood endowed the rights for Latin America and Sony Classical provided the funds for the soundtrack. (Klein, 2004, 18–19) As mentioned above, the film was shot on location in China, the soundtrack was recorded in Shanghai, the post production took place in Hong Kong and the film finally was edited in New York. Thus the production and screening of Crouching Tiger provides the perfect example for the new, globalised movie, which cannot be traced back to an authentic cultural situation or even to a certain pattern of national film production. Thus Christina Klein concludes her essay on Crouching Tiger with some remarks on the global characteristics of this film which also very easily can be understood as a delineation of the trends towards globalisation within Hollywood. »Crouching Tiger stands as an exemplary instance of transnational cinema. ... The production and consumption of these films take place on a multinational rather than a national scale, and the aesthetic affiliations they make cross multiple cultural boundaries. Thus, the national-cultural identity of these films is surprisingly fluid; it changes depending on whether one looks at studio ownership, sources of financing, production locale, the ethnic or legal identity of the cast and crew, audiences, narrative and cinematic style, or thematic concerns. The emergence of this cinema makes it vitally important to develop critical tools that enable us to read films from a transnational perspective. « (Klein, 2004, 37 f) Although the Matrix alludes to martial art movies as well, it also tempers with the tradition of the Japanese manga and anime: It is well known that the narrative forerunner to Matrix is an anime called Ghost in the Shell. But Japan has not only entered Hollywood economically, but it is shaping filmic narratives as well, either in the form of fascination with a foreign culture and as fear of being outmoded by this strong economy and culture. Whereas Ridley Scott’s Black Rain and Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbour voice the fear of being overtaken by Japan, Edward Zwick’s The Last Samurai delivers an unabridged fascination with ancient Japanese culture. In a somewhat critical vein American manhood and American values are depicted as degenerated comparable to Japanese codes of honor, fighting and masculinity. As Barbara Wyllie notes, American masculinity seems to be in a big crisis, up to a point where it erases all other concerns. (Wyllie, 2003, 181) In order to conquer the crisis in masculinity, the superheroe re-enters the screen: Letting the 1990s pass there is an overwhelming collection of male superheroes, The Terminator and all the other fighters overstress their masculinity in order to cover up the fear of female dominance as it is expressed in Ridley Scott’s J .I. Jane. This development may correspond to the upsurge of academic masculinity studies in the US. (Mosse, 1996; McLaren, 1997) The construction of gender identities has experienced a change over the last years. While Thelma and Louise weren’t allowed to leave male culture and patriarchal relationships, women today can do as they want to. Maybe G.I. Jane’s entrance into the military world is not everybody’s cup of tea, but comedy in particular seems to overturn established gender relationships. Diane Keaton in Something’s Gotta Give favors a younger lover, even if she ends up with the old, Viagra driven friend, played by Jack Nicholson, who steps around the role of the super hero by giving 7 the old fool instead. The remake of the Stepford Wives’ functions in a similar fashion, being a black parody on the 1950s family values: In this case even well educated women are not allowed to take up professional careers but are – with the help of nanotechnology – turned into perfect, Barbie-like housewives. This film opposes the intentions of a political right wing movement of returning to the outlived family values of the 1950s. Talking about the theory of the short story, Edgar Allan Poe always emphasizes unity and totality of effect which should form the aesthetic core of a story. We are concerned that it is exactly this quality, the artistic and technical unity of effects, which – apart from all the other developments dealt with in this book – counts most when we discuss positive achievements of recent Hollywood films. We are fully aware that our book does not cover the entire range of recent developments in the film industry. But we are optimistic that it will contribute substantially to an ongoing discussion on a number of important aspects. We are grateful to all contributors and the international cooperation which is stimulating and mind-enhancing. Nonetheless, we think this book turned out much more homogeneous than we imagined this experiment could be. We thank our secretary, Anne Weber, »Hippo«, Kevin and all the other student assistants, who helped to turn manuscripts and pictures into data packages. Where would we be without them? After all, even if we are critical we love Hollywood. We owe much of our interior landscapes to the visions, the characters and the stories of that most characteristic ingredient of American culture. And, of course, to the people who earn their living by creating those complex products resulting in contemporary movies. We hope for fruitful response from our readers.
Christian W. Thomsen
9/11: before and after
Before
»The Plot of the Event of September 11 – the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center by terrorists – might have been written by Hollywood, or by Baudrillard. So fantasmatic, so familiar was the scenario that it fitted seamlessly into the manichaen agenda of the Pentagon hawks planning the next American war and the next. Indeed, a perfectly plausible paranoid response reads this plot as a plot on the part of those who have most thoroughly benefited from it.«1 Here we will ask about the role of Hollywood, and its interdependence with the events around 9/11. Even if we know that a fully satisfactory answer to so complex a question cannot be given, it remains a key question to be researched when dealing with Hollywood’s developments in the early 21st century. Did Hollywood anticipate, conjure up, contribute to 9/11? What was its reaction to 9/11? Has anything changed in Hollywood’s mainstream treatment of 9/11 related topics like terrorism, war, interior and external politics, disasters, the science-fiction treatment of aliens, extraterrestrial events? These are the questions to be discussed in short in this contribution. There certainly were greater catastrophes in human history, but never before has a nation – a world power – received a more traumatic blow and shock. In early November 2001, film director Robert Altman argued that the current wave of violent movies had »created the atmosphere« that »set the pattern«, in which terrorists could plan and execute acts of mass destruction. Yet, »in the American imagination these fantasies have been around for a long time«.2 And, indeed, even when we concentrate on only a few films released in the decade preceding 9/11 it cannot be overlooked that »it was prepared by years of ideological work which created a ready-made explanatory framework« and that »it is precisely now when we are dealing with the raw Real of a catastrophe that we should bear in mind the ideological and fantasmatic coordinates which determine its perception«.3 The latter have to do with language and sets of images spread by literature, films and other media creating fragments of reality consciousness in our mind. When uttering such a constructivist position I remember my Vietnamese friend Thien with whom I studied in London in the years1964/65 at the height of the Vietnamese war. Thien, who was later to become President of the University of Saigon and cruelly tortured by the Vietcong, came from a 4000 year old Vietnamese family. His thesis was: »The Americans will lose this war.« Asked why, he replied: »Because they hardly know any conjunctive. They only know black and white, yes and no. But we«, he continued, »we have seven different varieties of conjunctive in our language, henceforth in our mind oscillate seven shades of grey between black and white, seven possibilities of perhaps between yes and no.« That war, almost as unjustified and false in its causes as the present disaster surrounding the Iraq politics of the George W. Bush administration and the reasons given for the war, is still a haunting trauma in the American psyche. It still offers ammunition for election campaigns and inexhaustible material for the film industry. Iraq and the false pretenses surrounding possible connections with 9/11, as it will turn out, might last even longer. The roots are deep and have grown
from a distant past. Just to mention a few stages in an ongoing process: rigid Calvinism and its inhuman double moral standards as exemplified in Hawthorne’s Scarlett Letter (1850); Sectarian Christian fundamentalism of many Bible Belt preachers ready for self-righteous crusades in the name of an unrelenting god of their own making; arms fetishism glorified through a pioneer period and as skillfully as unscrupulous, exploited by the NRA and the various lobbies of the arms industry; the deep seated fear that foreign or even extraterrestrial invasions might devastate the New World, the New Found Land, the earthly paradise of the chosen people of WASP origin; McCarthyism and other related campaigns to puff up political opponents from mere scapegoats into gigantic dimensions of Satan incarnate: Milosevich, Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden, to name the most recent ones. And who will be next? In the age of moving images the film industry is deeply involved in the creation of a set of collective mind patterns from the very beginning. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) still lurks behind every movie-skyscraper demolition. King Kong (1932/33) and all its filiations in their fantasies of rape and destruction still testify how much the world is turned around by »sex and bananas«, by exotism and commercialism, by power games, by dreams of adventure and heroism.

William Owen Harrod

Bruno Paul – The Life and Work of a Pragmatic Modernist

128 pp. with 205 ill., 233 x 284,5 mm, hard-cover, English

ISBN 3-932565-47-9

Jasper Cepl..
Kollhoff & Timmermann Architects: Hans Kollhoff
Phaidon Press (December 1, 2004)
440 pages
ISBN 1904313272

This volume is a complete monograph on the work of German architect Hans Kollhoff (b. 1946) and his partner, Helga Timmerman (b. 1953), with whom he has collaborated since 1984. It presents 100 buildings and projects completed by Kollhoff and his firm since the 1970s, beginning with his Project for an Analagous City of 1976 and including competitions, office and multiuse buildings, banks, apartment complexes, and urban planning. Jasper Cepl introduces this book with an investigative essay examining Kollhoff’s career and theoretical direction since the late 1960s. Following the introduction are 100 projects presented chronologically, including recent work in Berlin, such as the DaimlerChrysler High-rise Building (2000), the Extension of the Pergamon Museum (2000), and the renovation of the Former Seat of the Reichsbank for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1999).

Volker Fischer
Die Schwingen des Kranichs – 50 Jahre Lufthansa-Design
The Wings of the Crane – 50 Years of Lufthansa Design
Edition Axel Menges GmbH
192 pp. with ca. 300 ill. in b&w and colour, 242 x 297,5 mm,
hard-cover., German/English
ISBN 3-932565-53-3

The basic features of Deutsche Lufthansa’s present Corporate Identity 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 his 1972 Corporate Identity for the Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen. The Corporate Identity 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 worldwide as a perfect example of consistently and thoroughly developed Corporate Identity. 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 für Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt deals with the same subject as the book.
The internationally known architecture and design historian Volker Fischer was deputy director of the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt am Main for over ten years. Since 1995 he has built up a new design department in the Museum for Applied Arts in Frankfurt; in addition to his museum work he teaches history of architecture and design at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach.

Peter Hübner, Evangelische Gesamtschule Gelsenkirchen
With texts by Henry Beierlorzer, Volkmar Bleicher, Peter Hübner,
Harald Lehmann, Heiner Nienhaus and Fritz Sundermeier and
photographs by Peter Hübner, Christian Schramm and Cornelia
Suhan.
Edition Axel Menges GmbH
180 pp. with 600 ill. in colour, 280 x 300 mm, soft-cover,
German/ English
ISBN 3-932565-52-5

When the synod of the Westphalian Evangelical Church made the decision to build the school in about 20 years ago, this was accompanied by a large number of hopes and desires that – formulated as a commission – were expressed in the foundation stone document that was walled up when building started in 1997. It runs like this: »The Evangelical Church of Westphalia, by establishing the comprehensive school in a district with particular need for renewal would like to set a sign of hope and help to prepare young people to deal with the urgent problems of our day. For this reason the school’s educational work will focus on the following three points: 1. The school should be a meeting-place, making it possible for
young people coming from various nations and practising different religions to live together peacefully. 2. The school is to be an ecological place of learning, and enable young people to look after the creation that has been entrusted to mankind. 3. The school should open up to the district in which it is sited, and become a cultural centre.«The architects conceived the school as a little town, with the key aims of achieving diversity, sophistication and responsibility taken on by the users themselves. Hence the individual sections were all planned independently by colleagues of Peter Hübner and his plus+ bauplanung practice, with active participation by all the pupils involved. As the building was for a new foundation, it was possible to involve a whole year consisting of 130 pupils in planning and designing their own teaching area throughout the six-year building phase. Each year has a housing group, and each of the five classes has its own house inside it. Each house has its own entrance, its own cloakroom with toilets attached, a large gallery, a terrace and a garden. The book shows the entire process from developing the educational programme via the competition, planning and realization including
the participation processes to the everyday running of the school. It is a must for anyone interested in new educational concepts.
Peter Hübner is professor in the University of Stuttgart architecture faculty and has been running an architecture practice in Neckartenzlingen near Stuttgart for 30 years; this has so far realized18 schools, as well as other buildings.





Josef Paul Kleihues : Ausgewählte Texte
Vorwort, Hans Kollhoff;  Einleitung, Gerwin Zohlen
(Schriftenreihe der Internationale Bauakademie Berlin, Band 3)
ISBN 3-9810075-0-6

Band 3 der Schriftenreihe der Internationalen Bauakademie Berlin legt die wichtigsten Texte Ihres Gründungspräsident vor. Kleihues zählt zu den bedeutendsten und einflußreichen Architekten der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Er legte großen Wert auf die theoretische Untermauerung der Architektur. Sein zentrales Thema war die Stadt in unserer Kultur.
Zu Kleihues' wichtigsten Bauten zählen die Erweiterung des Hamburger Bahnhofs, der Neubau des Krankenhaus Neukölln, das Kant Dreieck, die Hauptwerkstatt der Berliner Stadtreinungen sowie zahlreiche Gebäude in der Friedrichstraße, im Gendarmenmarkt und am Pariser Platz in Berlin. Darüber hinaus hat er Museen in Franfurt/Main, Kornwestheim, Hamburg. Telgte in Westfalen sowie in Chicago, USA verwirklicht.
 

Harald Bodenschatz, Barbara Schönig
Smart Growth - New Urbanism - Livable Communities
Program and Praxis Der Anti-Sprawl Bewegung In Den USA
(Band 2 Der Schriftenreihe „Zwischenstadt”
(Hrsg. Thomas Severts)
Erscheint Ende September 2004 im Verlag Müller + Busmann

Die Mehrheit der Menschen in Deutschland lebt in einem scheinbar eigenschaftslosen Raum jenseits der Kernstädte, der „Zwischenstadt”. Deren städtebauliche Gestaltung und Entwicklung sind jedoch nach wie vor ungelieferte Aufgaben. Innovative Konzepte sscheitern oft an politischen und planungsrechtlichen Hürden. Der zweite Band der reihe Zwischenstadt richtet den Blick auf die Metropolenregionen in den USA. Dort sind die negativen Folgen des Sprawl, der ungebremsten Zersiedlung der Städte, inzwischen sichtbarer denn je. Dem Sprawl tritt seit den 1990er jahren eine städtebaulich und planerisch orientierte Reformbewegung entgegen. Diese Anti-Sprawl-Bewegung wird von Nonprofit-Organisationen wie CONGRESS FOR THE NEW URBANISM oder SMART GRWOTH AMERICA, Forschungsinsituten, Fachverbänden und Lobbygruppen getragen, ihre Programme zur gestalterischen, funktionalen und politischen Neuorganisationen der metropolenregionen haben offentlich großen Einfluss entfaltet und die politischen Eliten für Reformen sensibilisiert. Zudem haben sie dem suburbanen Immobilenmarkt neue impulse gegeben. Die Anti-Sprawl-Bewegung bietet Anregungen, wie die Zwischenstadt zivilgesellschaftlich gestaltet werden kann.
 

Stanford Anderson
Eladio Dieste: Innovation in Structural Art
Hardcover: 272 pages
Princeton Architectural Press (July, 2004)
ISBN: 1568983719

In an industry so often enamored by media-coddled superstars with trendy clients, Eladio Dieste stands out as a refreshing and inspiring figure. Born in Uruguay, Dieste spent most of his long and productive career creating industrial and agrarian works, public infrastructure, commercial buildings, and small churches in his native country. Dieste's unique and innovative method of design, a melding of architecture and engineering, elevated these often humble buildings to masterworks of art. Capitalizing on his revolutionary approach to building with reinforced masonry, Dieste built aesthetically stunning structures economically. If he often worked outside the architectural mainstream, he never lost sight of the modest people for whom his structures were built. Today, those familiar with his work consider him the equal of such structural innovators as Pier Luigi Nervi and Eduardo Terroja. In this, the first comprehensive analysis of his work to be published in English, both the beauty and technical innovation of Dieste's projects are examined in detail. Three essays by Dieste himself convey his thoughts on art, culture, and technology. With Dieste's death in 2000, this book serves as a tribute and a definitive reference to his extraordinary work and its brilliant union of architecture and engineering.
Stanford Anderson is a practicing architect and head of the Department of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

 

Hrsg. Giusepe Barbera, Michele Buffa
Der Sizilianische Garten in Sanssouci / Un giardino Siciliano in Germania
Texte von / Testi di Giuseppe Barbera; Michele Buffa; Axel Klausmeier; Jörg Klausmeier; Jorg Wacker.
Palermo: Eidos Edizioni, 2003.

"Il giardino siciliano, sintesi delle influenze culturali europee e mediterranee e delle infinite possibilità di acclimatazione e coltura di specie esotiche offerte dal clima della Sicilia, è un bene culturale e ambiementale unico che va tutelato e valorizzato. Come altri sistemi culturali e ambientali in Europa, ben più conosciuti e visitati, il giardino storico siciliano ha forza, ricchezza, varietà, traduzione e idenitià ed è nostra responsibilità impedirne la distruzione, ma al contrario farlo rivivere in forme compatibili con la sua dignità. È dunque con vero piacere che l'Assessorato dei Beni Culturali Ambientali e della Pubblica Istruzione promuove la presentazione del catalogo della mostra sul Sizilianische Garten di Potsdam, che va nella direzione del recupera della memoria, dell'identità e del valore del giardino siciliano, viste attraverso gli occhi di una mediazatione culturali alta, come quella operata dal paesaggista Lennè nel 1856. Questa iniziativa, realizzata in collaborazione con il Dipartimento di Colture Arboree dell'Università degli Studi di Palermo, la Fondazione dei Giardini e Palazzi Prussiani Berlino-Brandenburgo (Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg) e con il Goethe Institut di Palermo rappresenta un'occasione per riscoprire beni il cui valore in passato non è stao adeguatamente riconsciuto, ma ci parla anche e sopratutto di quello che ancora possiamo valorizzare e recuperare."
—On. Fabio Granata, Assessore dei beni Culturali Ambientali e delle Pubblica Istruzione.

"Der sizilianische Garten, Synthese der kulturellen Einflüsse aus Europa und dem Mittelmeerraum und der unendlichen Möglichkeiten der Akklimasierung und der Zucht exotischer Arten, die das sizlianische Klima bietet stellt ein einzigartiges Kultur- und Naturgut dar, das es zu schützen und aufzuwerten gilt. Wie auch andere, sehr viel bekanntere un besuchtere Kultur- und Natursysteme in Europa besitzt auch der sizilianische historische Garten Kraft,  Artenreichtum und -vielfalt, Tradition und Identität, und uns obliegt die Verantwortung, nicht nur seine Zerstörung zu verhindern, sondern ihn in einer Form wieder aufleben zu lassen, die mit seine Würde vereinbar ist. Mit großem Vergnügen präsentiert das Ministeriums für Kultur- und Naturgüter und für Erziehung daher den Katalog zur Ausstellung über den Sizilianischen Garten in Potsdam, die mithilft, Erinnerung, Identität und Wert des sizilianischen Gartens wieder aufzubauen, wird er doch gesehen mit den Augen eines hoch kompeteten kulturellen Mittlers wie dem Gartenkünstler Lenné, im Jahre 1856. Diese Initiative entstand in Zusammenarbeit mit der Abteilung für Baumkulturen der Universität Palermo, der Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg und dem Goethe-Institut Palermo und bietet die Gelegenheit zur Entdeckung von Gütern, deren Wert in der Vergangenheit nicht angemessen gewürdigt wurde und die uns nun vor allem auf all die Dinge hinweisen, die wir noch sanieren und wieder zugänglich machen müssen."
—On. Fabio Granata, Minister für Kultur- und Naturgüter und für Erziehung.
 

Augusto Romano Burelli
Mors et Renovatio der Antike: Das Heidelberg Schloss 
Vorworte: Siegried Kendel; Andreas Kern
Einleitungen: Dethelm Fichtner; Peter Thoma
Ausstellung: Print Media Academy - Heidelberg von 11. November bis zum 21. Dezember 2003.
Projektleitung: Augusto Romano Burelli
Editoriale Ergon
2003

Einführung: Augusto Romano Burelli
"Die Thesen der Renovatio"

Das Schiff des Theseus mit seinen dreißig Riemen wurde von den Athenern Jahrhunderte lang wenn nötig repariert und in Ehren gehalten. So kam es unter den Philospohen der Stadt zum Streit: Einige meinten, es sei immer noch das Schiff des Helden, die Anderen behaupteten, auch wenn sein Abbild noch existiere, das mythische Schiff gebe es längst nicht mehr. (Plutarch).

"Diesen Disput könnte man auch auf das Schloss zu Heidelberg anwenden. Es überlebte die heftige Zerstörung von 1693 dank der ständigen Pflege seiner Ruinen. Das Schloss ist ein chronisch Kranker, der durch die therapeutische Ausdauser seiner Restauratoren am Leben gehalten wird. Tatsächlich wird das Schloss wie ein Heiligtum behandelt, das die Verehung durch seine besucher fordert, die jedoch im allgemeinen seine Geschichte nicht kennen. Irgendwie handelt es sich bei diesem Schloss um einen deutschen Mythos.
Die Ruinen aber tragen wenig zu ihrer eigenen Erklärung bei, hchstens Spezialisten verstehen ihre Bedeutung; diese Unentzifferbarkeit scheint notwendig zu sein für den spätromantischen Traum vom hastigen Touristen. Oder die Schlossüberreste bilden nur den Rahmen für eine Gemeinde, welche sich die Vergangenheit nach eigenen Wunchvorstellungen auszumalen versucht.
Aber auf diese Art und Weise ist die Vergangenheit völlig sinnlos. Denn sie bedrängt die Gegenwart, nährt sie in gewisser Weise, beeinflusst und erleuchtet sie. Deshalb müssen die Schlossruinen zur festen Bühne für das geistige leben der Stadt und des Landes werden und identitätsförderende Funktionen aufnehmen. Wenn es wieder Zentrum des Gemeinschaftslebens ist, wird das Schloss Teil der historischen Kontinuität werden. Deshalb sind die Ruinen für die Bürger gleichzeitig Denk- und Mahnmal.
Die alten Gemäuer des Schlosses mit dem Geiste des neuen Lebens erfüllen.

"Der Entwurf für das Kurfürstliche Schloss zu Heidelberg"
Thema; Drei Plätze, Drei Propyläen, Sieben Säle

Das Projekt für dieses neue funktionale Leben bezieht sich nur auf den westlichen Teil des Schlosses. Hier ist das Ausmaß der Zerstörungen am größten und der Besucher hat es am schwersten, die Überreste zu verstehen. Der Westteil ist der strategishe Punkt, um das Scholss und die Stadt zu seinen Füßen wieder zu verbinden.
Das Zentrum des Eingriffs ist das Bollwerk der Grossen Batterie oder des Stückgarten, welches den neuen Eingang zum Schloss bilden soll, 250 Meter vom Kornmarkt entfernt. Diesen Punkt haben wir ironisch "Die dritten Propyläen" genannt, weil er dem Fußgänger das Betreten des heiligen Bezirks der deutschen Romantik ohne die mühevollen Umwege von heute ermöglicht.
Die drei Plätze - Marktplatz, Kornmarkt und Karlsplatz - werden zum Vestibül des Schlosses, zu dem man zu Fuß (auch in Abendrobe) gelangt, um eine Konzert, eine Lesung, eine Konferenz oder eine Ausstellung zu besuchen - Veranstaltungen, die in den sieben Sälen, die für die Allgemeinheit zugänglich gemacht werden sollen, stattfinden.
Die Grosse Batterie soll die ersten vier Säle aufnehmen:
- einen "Freilichttheatersaal", welcher die Erfahrung des Provisorischen Theaters von Gottfried Semper für München wieder aufnimmt;
- einen Saal für kleine Theaterveranstaltungen und Konferenzen;
- zwei große untereinander kommunizierende Foyers und
- einen Ausstellungsraum.
Der vorletzte Stock des Inigo Jones gewidmeten Baukörpers des Englischen Baus soll partiell restauriert werden. Hier soll ein Kammermusiksaal mit Aufzug und eigenem Treppenaufgang enstehen. Neben diesem Saal wird ein Geschoss tiefer über dem Grossen Fass von Carl-Theodor ein sechster Saal kleine Konferenzen für bis zu 40 Personen ermöglichen. Der siebte ist der Königsaal für große Gedenkveranstaltungen und Tagungen."

Augusto Romano Burelli wurde 1938 in Udine geboren. Seit 1976 unterrichtet er Composizione Architettonica am Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia. 1986 wird er zum ordenlichen Professor ernannt. Seit 1991 ist er außerdem Direktor des Fachbereich Entwerfen der Universität Venedig. Zu seinen Werken zählen Bücher und Schriften über
- die Architektur und ihre Wurzeln, im Besonderen über die Rekonstruktion des Haus des Odysseus und die Skeuotheke in Athen;
- die Architektur und ihre Lehre mir verschiedenen Aufsätzen über Choisy, Schinkel und Semper;
- die Architektur und ihre typologische Gesetze mit Studien über die Moschee Sinans und das Wagner-Theater in Bayreuth. Unter seinen realisierten Entwürfen befinden sich Wohnhäuser, Rathäuser und Kirchen.
1991 erhielt er den Preis für die beste italienische Teilnahme an der Quinta Mostra Internazionale die Architettura della Biennale di Venezia. 1996 gewann er den Wettbewerb für den Baublock Komische Oper in Berlin. In Jahre 200 wurde er mit dem projekt fur den Bahnhofsvorplatz von Heidelberg beaufragt.
Augusto Romano Burelli lebt und arbeitet in Undine, Venedig und Berlin.
 

Eva Linart.
Almir Mavignier – Additive Plakate / Additive Posters

With contributions by Bernd Kracke and Almir Mavignier.
96 pp. with 60 ill. in colour., 295 x 295 mm, soft-cover,
German/English
ISBN 3-932565-41-X

Since the 1960s, the development of poster design in Germany has been determined by the Brazilian-German painter and graphic artist Almir Mavignier. For it is he who, like no other, has learned to apply Op Art’s powerful colour effects to the art of the poster. Mavignier was born on 1 May 1925 in Rio de Janeiro. Initially a student of painting, he was inspired by the work of the Swiss artist Max Bill to go to Europe. In 1953 he arrived at the newly founded Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, where he was to encounter the painter Josef Albers, the art theoretician and philosopher Max Bense, the graphic artist Otl Aicher and many others. Mavignier developed his own approach to the school’s ideal of connecting formative and technical skill with political responsibility: »The artist is an official of the unknown.« In 1958 he joined the Zero Group, to which he contributed important impulses with his grid-dot paintings. In the decade that followed, the poster began to take its place alongside painting as an essential form of expression for Mavignier, with the »additive posters« playing a special part. They are designed in such a way that they can be joined on all four sides and thus, in the manner of a module, combined to form infinitely large surfaces. Due to the highly charged tension between their space-piercing luminous force and ornamental-geometric abstraction, these posters are capable of casting every passerby under their spell and advertising for the cause they represent. The publication on hand elucidates the »additive posters« within the context of Almir Mavignier’s influential oeuvre. Special attention is paid to the interfaces between painting, poster design and the artist’s other fields of activity such as postagestamp and tableware design. Light is also shed upon the historical relationship between abstract art and ornament. Of particular relevance in this connection is Mavignier’s profound and active interest in the work of the German Romanticist Philipp Otto Runge.
Eva Linhart is head of the department of book art and graphics at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt. Bernd Kracke, once a student of Mavignier at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, is now himself a professor at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach.
 

William Owen Harrod.
Bruno Paul – The Life and Work of a Pragmatic Modernist
160 pp. with 205 ill., 233 x 284,5 mm, hard-cover,
English ISBN 3-932565-47-9

At the dawn of the 20th century, Bruno Paul (1874–1968) stood like a colossus astride the landscape of an emerging Modernism. As an illustrator, architect, and educator his influence was unequalled. Arguably the most important German designer of his generation, his work was ubiquitous in the technical and professional publications of his day. For five decades, Paul’s reputation was unparalleled among progressive German artists. As a young man he was a member of the Munich avant-garde responsible for the creation of the Jugendstil. As a designer of furniture and interiors, he achieved a commercial success unmatched by his illustrious contemporaries. In light of his professional accomplishments, he was the most influential German architect of his generation, a figure of international significance. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Adolf Meyer, and Kem Weber were among his students, and their work developed from the practices of his atelier. Indeed, as director of the Vereinigte Staatsschulen für freie und angewandte Kunst in Berlin he presided over an institution that rivaled the Bauhaus as a center of progressive instruction in the arts. Despite the renown he enjoyed at the height of his career, Paul’s name has been largely absent from the standard histories of the modern movement. Indeed, this book is the first comprehensive study of his life and work. Nevertheless, Paul’s story embodies a significant facet of the history of 20th-century design: the development of Modernism in Central Europe, and its coalescence from the influences of Jugendstil, Elementarism, Classicism, Expressionism, and Functionalism. Paul played a prominent role in this coalescence, and he deserves a place of honor in the history of the modern movement. Yet his biography also encompasses a less familiar, but no less significant, aspect of the history of modern design. It is the story of a pragmatic Modernism that occupied a middle ground between avant-garde experimentation and conservative professional practice, a Modernism that was timeless, practical, and principled. It was this pragmatic Modernism that won the patronage of the middle classes, and established progressive design as an accepted alternative, and eventually as the preferred alternative, to the period styles. Moreover Paul’s pragmatic Modernism, and its underlying principles, remain as relevant today as when they were first conceived.
W. Owen Harrod is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Texas at Austin, where he received his doctorate in architectural history. He is a practicing architect, theoretician, and historian, based inAustin, Texas.
 

Hillert Ibbeken (ed.)
Ludwig Persius – Das architektonische Werk heute / The architectural work today
With texts by Eva Börsch-Supan, Stefan Gehlen,
Hillert Ibbeken, Andreas Meinecke and Heinz
Schönemann and photographs by Hillert Ibbeken.
204 pp. with 180 ill. in duotone, 280 x 300 mm,
hard-cover, German / English
ISBN 3-932565-46-0

Ludwig Persius (1803–1845) was a pupil of Karl Friedrich Schinkel and his closest assistant. Very little has been published about him to date; relatively comprehensive information is provided by a 1993 illustrated volume containing about 65 photographs as well as by the catalogue for an exhibition in Schloß Babelsberg and by an architecture guide with about 50 photographs, both dating from 2003. The present volume shows Persius’ architectural work in its current condition in 180 photographs, with the aim of providing an exhaustive documentation of all his work that is still in existence, with numerous as yet unpublished interior and exterior photographs. Persius's architecture was moulded by the work of Schinkel. He was his site supervisor at the Hofgärtnerhaus in Charlottenhof, adopting its style inspired by Italian domestic architecture for his numerous villas with towers, which are still characteristic features of the Potsdam cityscape. He was a master of the disposition of building volumes and of tying buildings into the landscape. About 50 buildings have survived, including early industrial structures. Persius’s work is to be found almost exclusively in Potsdam. King Friedrich Wilhelm IV appointed him to the post of »Architekt des Königs « (royal architect), a title he shared only with August Stüler. His best-known buildings are the Friedenskirche in Potsdam, the Heilandskirche in Sacrow and the so-called Mosque by the Havel bay in Potsdam, a steam-driven pump-house in the Moorish style for the fountains in the gardens of Sanssouci and an eminent example of the romantic and exotic transfiguration of a simple functional building.
Eva Börsch-Supan describes Persius’ life as an architect, Stefan Gehlen writes about the condition of his buildings and about problems of use and maintenance, Andreas Meinecke looks at the way the architect came to terms with the theme of symmetry and asymmetry, and Heinz Schönemann’s contribution examines Persius's role in the shadow of Schinkel. Hillert Ibbeken, who provided the idea for this project, wrote the catalogue texts. Hillert Ibbeken was professor of geology at the Freie Universität Berlin until his retirement; he has been involved in architectural photography throughout his life. The book Karl Friedrich Schinkel – Das architektonische Werk heute / The architectural work today, edited by Hillert Ibbeken and Elke Blauert, was published by Edition Axel Menges in 2001.
 

Opus 53
Johannes Peter Hölzinger, Haus in Bad Nauheim
With an introduction by Gerd de Bruyn und photographs by Dieter Leistner.
60 pp. with 85 ill. in b & w and colour, 280 x 300 mm,
hard-cover, German/English.
ISBN 3-930698-53-6

In summer 1978, the cover of the magazine Bauwelt showed a photograph of an unusual building. It was tersely introduced to readers as a »private house with office in Bad Nauheim«, but it was immediately obvious that this was a built manifesto. What appeared was a strictly symmetrically articulated, steeply rising façade, emanating dignity and composure. It also seemed able to manage without windows, which further enhanced its austere elegance. And then there were the strikingly slender, sharp-angled wall elements, which seemed captivatingly graceful, or even delicate and fragile – as though folded from paper. The fact is that, long before Gilles Deleuze had cast his spell on a new generation of aesthetically ambitious architects, Johannes Peter Hölzinger was putting his folding skills into practice as a matter of course. Seen from an architectural point of view, Hölzinger’s original contribution to the history of modern architecture lies in the fact that he eliminated the antithesis between elevation and ground plan. His building demonstrates precise agreement between internal and external geometry. And as well as this, it met the demand of reconciling art and life, as Hölzinger assumed that people would be prepared to allow their daily tasks to lead to aesthetic behaviour at all times, and would go along with the rhythmic narrowing down and opening up of the space, a current that draws them through the building – from bottom to top, accompanied by ever-in-creasing light and sunshine. This thrilling movement towards the light, this injection of dynamism into space, and their synthetic effect of always presenting what is separate as a unity, deserve to be called avant-garde in the best sense.
Gerd de Bruyn was appointed professor of architectural theory at the University of Stuttgart in 2001 and has been director of the Institut Grundlagen moderner Architektur und Entwerfen since then. He is also a member of the board of the Internationales Zentrum für Kulturund Technikforschung. His most recent publication is Fisch und Frosch oder Die Selbstkritik der Moderne, Basel 2001, and architektur_theorie. doc. Texte seit 1960 (with Stephan Trüby), Basel 2003. Dieter Leistner studied communication design at the Folkwangschule in Essen and the Bergische Universität in Wuppertal. He started to work as a free-lance architectural photographer in 1982. In addition, he has been professor of photography at the Fachhochschule Würzburg since 1999.
 

Opus 54
Peter Kulka, Bosch-Haus Heidehof, Stuttgart

With an introduction by Wolfgang Pehnt and photographs by Peter Walser.
60 pp. with ca. 70 ill., 280 x 300 mm,
hard-cover, German/English
ISBN 3-930698-55-2

Early in the 20th century, Robert Bosch, the founder of the Stuttgart electrical business, built a large villa on the hills east of the city. It was half Palladian, half in the reform style of the period before the First World War. The building was to meet the head of the company’s need for prestige, and to provide a private refuge thanks to the pleasant qualities of its large park and open position. The foundation of the same name is now housed in the Villa Bosch, but the space available has not been adequate for some time. As the company also needed rooms for seminars and other events, a decision was taken to build new accommodation next to the villa. Seven well-known teams took part in a restricted competition, including Tadao Ando, Richard Meier and Richard Rogers. The commission went to Peter Kulka, based in Cologne and Dresden. He found a convincing solution to the problem of leaving the dominance of the old building untouched and at the same time making the foundation’s new accommodation attractive in its own right. He came up with a second »villa« slightly below the first one, precise in its volume and minimalist in its resources. The building responds impressively to the challenges of the topography, the landscape around it and its neighbouring building. Kulka’s work combines transparency with physical presence, structural austerity with poetry. This villa suburbana represents a milestone in his career. Kulka, born in 1937, was a pupil of Selman Selmanagic and worked with Hermann Henselmann, Hans Scharoun and in various partnerships before setting up his own practice in 1979. He has been seen as a member of the German architectural avant-garde since his Dresden parliament building (1991–94).
Wolfgang Pehnt, who teaches architectural history at the Ruhr University in Bochum, is the author of many publications on 19th- and 20thcentury architecture; in addition to his standard work on Expressionist architecture he has published, among others, monographs on Gottfried Böhm, Karljosef Schattner and Rudolf Schwarz. The very first volume of the Opus series, about Rudolf Steiner’s Goetheanum, is also by him. Peter Walser is not only an architect as his first profession, but also works as a sought-after designer and architectural photographer. He has already appeared in the Opus series with the volume on Balthasar Neumann’s pilgrimage church in Neresheim.
 

Opus 56
Am Bavariapark, München
With an introduction by Michael Goj and Christoph Tempel and photographs by Franziska von Gagern.
60 pp. with ca. 70 ill., 280 x 300 mm,
hard-cover, German/English
ISBN 3-930698-56-0

An urban quarter with an identity of its own has come into being by the Bavariapark in Munich.It is based on an urban-development design bySteidle + Partner and involved various architects. Otto Steidle interpreted the Munich town-planning motto »compact – urban – green« by logically taking up the grid of the Westend area in the northern part of the quarter: the city is to continue to be built as a metropolis here. The »esplanade«, on a surprising large scale for this part of the city, along Ganghoferstraße fulfils two functions: with its large office buildings flanking the block periphery it forms the urban spine of the new quarter, and at the same time creates a connection with the surrounding 1920s and 1930s housing. At the point where all that might have been expected after the metropolitan prelude was nothing but rear façades, the development opens up into a residential quarter and reveals a new, almost private side of the office buildings. The arrangement of the wings, the choice of materials and above all the colour schemes makes the rear of the buildings into the first part of a very varied figure. Consistently implementing the guideline of the dissolved block that characterizes his urban-development concept, Steidle has created a kindof estate that is not like an estate. The picture is not dominated by rows of dwellings, for example but point-type residential buildings arranged like a chess-board by Ortner & Ortner, Hilmer & Sattler und Albrecht, and, restricting themselves to one building only, by Steidle + Partner themselves. The architects have realized a paradox in the internal park of the Munich exhibition centre, which used to be only partly accessible: they create a sense of spaciousness by extreme compression. The point buildings, exposed on all sides, stand at the edge of the park in two rows; views through dominate the scene, with glimpses of the old trees and the three old, listed halls which are becoming the new cultural centre of Munich’s west end because the transport museum is moving in.
Michael Goj and Christoph Tempel are freelance authors working in Berlin; their output includes editing the Bauwelt Berlin Annuals series. Franziska von Gagern, who trained at the Staatliche Fachschule für Optik und Fototechnik in Berlin and at the Fachakademie für Fotodesign in Munich has worked in Munich as a free-lance photographer since 1998.
 

Opus 57
Gerber Architekten, Messe Karlsruhe
With an introduction by Frank R. Werner and photographs by Hans Jürgen Landes.
60 pp. with 65 ill., 280 x 300 mm,
hard-cover, German/English
ISBN 3-932565-57-6

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. From here onwards, visitors can enjoy wellnigh boundless views of the central orientation and action space, a »green axis« next to it, and two exhibition halls to both the left and the right of it. Transparent glazed corridors connect the different parts of the building. All four of the 160 m long and 80 m wide halls are freely spanned by airy, arched timber structures, with hourglass daylight apertures introduced at intervals transversely to the length of the hall. In three of the halls the undersides of the arch structures are presented as smooth timber shells, but in the fourth the supporting structure, also made of wood, is conceived as a »diamond truss«. For this, a complex system of continuous diagonal timber arches placed one above the other was developed, guaranteeing greater load-bearing capacity. This meant that the hall’s particular use as a »multi-functional arena« was taken into account structurally, as well as in terms of formal aesthetics. 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.
Frank R. Werner was professor of history and theory of architecture at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart from 1990 to 1993, since 1993 he has been director of the Institut für Architekturgeschichte und Architekturtheorie at the Bergische Universität in Wuppertal. He studied painting, architecture and architectural history in Mainz, Hanover and Stuttgart. Hans Jürgen Landes studied at the Fachhochschule Dortmund. He lives in Dortmund as a freelance photographer.
 

Volker Fischer
Ornament & Versprechen – Postmoderne und Memphis im Rückblick
64 pp. with 116 ill. in colour, 210 x 297 mm, softcover,
German
ISBN 3-932565-45-2

The title of the publication is intended as an allusion to the virtually manifesto-like treatise »Ornament und Verbrechen« of 1908 by the Viennese architect Adolf Loos. For more than six decades – from the Deutscher Werkbund and the Bauhaus to the Ulm School and Functionalism – this influential document effectively legitimized the taboo on every kind of decoration and ornamentation. Our title thus calls attention to the change of perspective unanimously adopted by architecture and product design primarily in the 1980s. Both Postmodernism and Memphis – two movements which today exhibit greater similarities than differences – were above all aesthetic reactions to Functionalism, which they considered cold, technocratic and one-sidedly rational. The 1980s were generally described as the decade of a »semantic turn«, i. e. a turn towards narrative-poetic products which countered the iconographic drought of late Functionalism with cheeky, nostalgic, brilliantly colourful, ornamentenamoured alternatives. With its recourse to historical styles from the Renaissance to Biedermeier, Postmodernism also attributed new meaning and relevance to surfaces and their internal structures, and accordingly to decoration and ornamentation. The Memphis designers also generated a new richness and sensuality of the surface, deriving stylistic elements from ethnological ornament or distilling them from contemporary »everyday« surfaces such as tram steps, computer patterns or the printed forms on which every bureaucratic procedure depends. Both Postmodernism and Memphis ultimately attempted to apply traditional means of aesthetic surface design to the »Zweite Moderne« (Second Modernism) of electronics, digitalization, microelectronics and micromechanics. In this sense, as a transitional phase to a digitalized world and product environment, »reornamentalization « was indeed a promise.
The internationally known architecture and design historian Volker Fischer was deputy director of the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt am Main for over ten years. Since 1995 he has built up a new design department in the Museum for Applied Arts in Frankfurt; in addition to his museum work he teaches history of architecture and design at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach.
 

Christian W. Thomsen, Angela Krewani, eds.
Hollywood: Recent Developments
176 pp. with 200 ill., 233 x 284,5 mm, hardcover,
English
ISBN 3-932565-44-4

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 trans-nationalization and new digital technologies. Interdependences between computer games and movies are scrutinized 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 cooperation 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.
Christian W. Thomsen is professor of English literature and media studies at the University of Siegen. Since 1982 he also teaches architectural history, theory and criticism. He was cofounder of Germany’s largest media research institute and coeditor (together with Helmut Kreuzer) of a fivevolume history of German television. He is author of 26 books and editor of another 55 books. He published more than 300 articles on literature, theatre, film, architecture, design and the development of modern media in leading journals of Germany, Great Britain, Austria, Switzerland, the USA, Canada and Japan. He taught as visiting professor in Copenhagen, London, Jerusalem, Vancouver, Los Angeles and Houston and organized many international symposia and art exhibitions. From a director of stage and radio plays he grew into filmmaking and produced and directed 25 documentaries so far. Angela Krewani read English and American literature and history at the universities of Cologne and Siegen and did graduate research studies at Yale University. She took her PhD with Modernism and Femininity. American Writers in Paris and her habilitation with New British Cinema under Christian W. Thomsen. She is professor of media studies at the University of Marburg. Isles, North America, Australia and New Zealand.
 

Markus Jatsch
Entgrenzter Raum – Unbestimmtheit in der visuellen
Raumwahrnehmung
Debordered Space – Indeterminacy within the Visual
Perception of Space
128 pp. with 120 ill., 233 x 284,5 mm, hard-cover, German/English
ISBN 3-932565-43-6

As our visual perception is increasingly flooded with stimuli, potential ways of perceiving space have also been affected to a greater degree.The viewer is deprived of the right to form an independent opinion, and there is a concomitant need for new spaces of freedom. There is aneed for a subjectivity capable of constantly renewing and expanding the borders of perception. Viewers must be given free play to arrive at their own individual interpretation in order to make autonomous perception possible. This monograph describes the construction of reality through the cognitive subject, and, associated with this, potential ways for producing space. The book studies methods for exposing, through indeterminacy, the definition of space to a larger field of possibility within personal interpretation, and thus virtually debordering space. Against a historical background of past attempts to deborder space visually, new possible ways of indeterminately defining space through the modulation of light are shown. The analysis of various modulation phenomena is illustrated with references to works of art, and the phenomena are studied with a view to integrating them in the actual production of space. The modulation of light has the potential of creating diffuse and ambivalent characteristics on space-defining surfaces. This fuzziness offers an opportunity for a freer interpretation of spatial definition and thus also for debordering space due to the process of perception. New materials and technologies can be used to create spatial worlds that open up genuine, hitherto unknown realms of cognition and experience. Based on multilayered, ambiguous spatial situations, according to the author, new open spaces of perception are possible and thus an expansion of human consciousness as well with respect to the world around us.
Markus Jatsch is an architect and a partner in the firm Jatsch Laux
Architects in Boston and Munich. He studied architecture at the University of Stuttgart and at Columbia University, New York, and received a
doctorate in architecture and philosophy from the Technical University of Munich. He has held teaching positions in Europe and the United
States and is internationally active as a specialist in spatial studies and the production of space.

Vorwort

Es scheint selbstverständlich zu sein, daß Architektur mehr damit zu tun hat, Raum zu begrenzen, anstatt ihn zu entgrenzen. Markus Jatsch, selber Architekt, sollte dem zustimmen, aber er wird wahrscheinlich argumentieren, daß die Dekonstruktion der räumlichen Begrenzung faszinierender und herausfordernder sei als deren Umkehrung. Dies ist sie in der Tat, und seine konstruktivistische Perspektive der Dekonstruktion der räumlichen Begrenzung bietet vor allen Dingen einen Anhaltspunkt über die Entwicklung und die Tendenzen des modernen Sehens, der visuellen Kunst und der modernen Architektur. Die menschlichen Augen sind für eine der fünf Wahrnehmungsarten geschaffen. Aber Sehen ist mehr als ein passiver Wahrnehmungssinn. Jatsch führt in die Theorie der visuellen Sinneswahrnehmung ein Sehen ein, welches subjektiver, theoriegeladenerund konstruktiver geworden ist. Entgrenzung von Raum ist möglich, sobald die Grenzen zwischen dem Innen und Außen des Geistigen einstürzen. Die Grenze zwischen Gedanke und Realität und zwischen dem Mentalen und dem Physischen scheinen ihren Halt verloren zu haben und schließlich aufgegeben worden zu sein. Visuelle Wahrnehmung, so wie sie Jatsch versteht,
bekommt einen Impuls durch Gedanken und Bewußtsein. Was wir sehen können, ist durch das geformt, was wir denken können. Sehen wird in eine Aktivität verwandelt, welche ihre eigenen Ziele definiert und dadurch ihre Objekte kreiert. Und je mehr wir natürlich über diese Aktivität lernen, desto mehr sind wir in der Lage, diese zu genießen und damit zu spielen. Visuelle Ambiguitäten werden absichtlich mit Hilfe diaphaner Materialien und Licht produziert. Jatsch führt uns
durch eine atemberaubende Welt der visuellen Kunst, die uns lehrt, zu sehen, was wir niemals zuvordachten. Wir lernen hierdurch, Dinge zu denken, die wir zuerst sehen und dann durch unsere eigenen Gedanken wieder reflektieren. Eine neue und faszinierende Welt der Formen kommt zum
Vorschein, welche wir gespannt sein können, gebaut zu sehen.
Wilhelm Vossenkuhl

Preface

It seems self-evident that architecture is more involved in limiting space than in delimiting it. Markus Jatsch, architect himself, should agree but he will probably argue that deconstructingspatial limitations is more fascinating and daring than the opposite. It is indeed, and, above all, his constructivist perspective of the deconstruction of spatial limits offers a clue to the development and tendencies of modern vision, of visual art, and of modern architecture. Human eyes are made for one of the five means of perception. But vision is more than a passive, perceiving sense. Jatsch introduces into the theory of visual perception that seeing has become more subjective, more and more theory-laden, and more and more constructive. Delimiting space is possible, as the limits between inside and outside the mental collapse. The border between thoughtand reality, and between the mental and the physical seems to have lost its grip and to be finally abandoned. Visual perception, as Jatsch understands it, gains momentum from thought and consciousness. What we can see is shaped by what we can think. Vision is transformed into an activity which defines its own targets and thereby creates its objects. And, of course, the more we learn about this activity the more we are able to enjoy and play with it. Visual ambiguities are produced on purpose with the help of diaphanous materials and light. Jatsch leads us through a
breathtaking world of visual art that teaches us to see what we never thought of before. We thus learn to think things that we first see and then reflect again in our own thoughts. A new and intriguing world of forms emerges which we are eager to see built.
Wilhelm Vossenkuhl
 

Opus 54
Egon Eiermann, Deutsche Botschaft, Washington

With an introduction by Immo Boyken
and photographs by J. Alexander and Jerry Hecht.
48 pp. with ca. 70 ill., 50 of which in duotone,
280 x 300 mm, hard-cover, German/English
Edition Axel Menges
ISBN 3-930698-54-4

When the German Embassy in Washington was completed in 1964, the architecural critic of the Washington Post wrote that the express aim of those commissioning the building had been to make an architectural statement that would embody the spirit of the young German democracy and avoid any form that could revive grim memories of the past. The paper felt that it had been right to engage Egon Eiermann for this project, as he had already solved the same problem of »architectural diplomacy« with his German Pavilion for the Brussels World Fair in 1958.
Eiermann (1904–1970) studied at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin, finally in Hans Poelzig’s master-class, but he was also influenced by Heinrich Tessenow. As early as 1931 his first building, which he had planned as an architect employed in a practice, was published in Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst und Städtebau; his major buildings and projects continued to be featured in maga-zines in Germany and abroad, and impressed with their formal language, which remained uninfluenced by fashionable trends. Building was first and foremost an intellectual process for Eiermann, determined by the factors construction, function and material, by objectivity and a self-control that granted the imagination only limited scope. Eiermann developed the vocabulary he had found in the thirties consistently after 1945. The works dating from the early post-war period still appeal, no less than the major sixties projects, because of their tight organization of functional necessities, unity of construction and architectural form, and precise shaping of even the tiniest detail – and not least because of an effortless elegance and lightness that raise the work above merely fulfilling a purpose into the ranks of great architecture.
J. Alexander and Jerry Hecht were the official photographers for the building. Their pictures are undoubtedly among the most convincing photographic interpretations of Eiermann’s work. Immo Boyken is professor of building history and architectural theory in Konstanz. He is particularly interested in late 19th-century architecture and classical Modernism. He made a major contribution to the 1984 monograph on Eiermann.
The book is published to mark the architect’s hundredth birthday.
Summer 2004.
 

Opus 55
Peter Kulka, Bosch-Haus Heidehof, Stuttgart
With an introduction by Wolfgang Pehnt
photographs by Peter Walser.
60 pp. with ca. 70 ill., 280 x 300 mm, hard-cover,
German/English
Edition Axel Menges GmbH
ISBN 3-930698-55-2

Early in the 20th century, Robert Bosch, the founder of the Stuttgart electrical business, built a large villa on the hills east of the city. It was half Palladian, half in the reform style of the period before the First World War. The building was to meet the head of the company's need for prestige, and to provide a private refuge thanks to the pleasant qualities of its large park and open position. The foundation of the same name is now housed in the Villa Bosch, but the space available has not been adequate for some time. As the company also needed rooms for seminars and other events, a decision was taken to build new accommodation next to the villa. Seven well-known teams took part in a restricted competition, including Tadao Ando, Richard Meier and Richard Rogers. The commission went to Peter Kulka, based in Cologne and Dresden. He found a convincing solution to the problem of leaving the dominance of the old building untouched and at the same time making the foundation's new accommodation attractive in its own right. He came up with a second »villa« slightly below the first one, precise in its volume and minimalist in its resources. The building responds impressively to the challenges of the topography, the landscape around it and its neighbouring building.
Kulka's work combines transparency with physical presence, structural austerity with poetry. This villa suburbana represents a milestone in his career. Kulka, born in 1937, was a pupil of Selman Selmanagic and worked with Hermann Henselmann, Hans Scharoun and in various partnerships before setting up his own practice in 1979. He has been seen as a member of the German architectural avant-garde since his Dresden parliament building (1991–94).
Wolfgang Pehnt, who teaches architectural history at the Ruhr University in Bochum, is the author of many publications on 19th-and 20th-century architecture; in addition to his standard work on Expressionist architecture he has published, among others, monographs on Gottfried Böhm, Karljosef Schattner and Rudolf Schwarz. The very first volume of the Opus series, about Rudolf Steiner's Goetheanum, is also by him. Peter Walser is not only as an architect as his first profession, but also works as a sought-after designer and architectural photographer. He has already appeared in the Opus series with the volume on Balthasar Neumann's pilgrimage church in Neresheim.
 

Four Museums

Carlo Scarpa, Museo Canoviano, Possagno
Frank O. Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa
Rafael Moneo, The Audrey Jones Beck Building, MFAH
Heinz Tesar, Sammlung Essl, Klosterneuburg

With texts by Stefan Buzas, Judith Carmel-Arthur, Kurt W. Forster, Gottfried Knapp, and Martha Thorne and photographs by Joe C. Aker, Richard Bryant, Ralph Richter, Christian Richters, and Gary Zvonkovic.
224 pp. with 217 ill., 141 in colour, 204 x 219 mm, hard-cover,
Edition Axel Menges GmbH
English.
ISBN 3-930698-68-4

To commemorate the bicentenary of Antonio Canova’s birth, the Venetian authorities decided to have an extension added to the original museum, and they commissioned Carlo Scarpa for this delicate task. Scarpa composed a small, but highly articulated building that is in a strong contrast to the neo-Classical basilica. The subtly designed sequence of spaces is unique even among Scarpa’s so many extraordinary museum interiors as the architect was here in the rare position to compose the spaces as well as the placings of the exhibits. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is perhaps the most spectacular building of recent years. The building raised high expectations from the outset, as the central element in Bilbao’s comprehensive urban renewal programme. Its site between river, railway, bridge and new town makes it a symbol of the Basque metropolis that can be seen from a considerable distance. It is both the heart of the city and a testbed for the arts, representing both public presence and artistic change. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is a unique collection of architectural works – among them the Caroline Wiess Law Building, comprising the original William Ward Watkin Building of 1924 and the 1958 and 1974 additions designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden created by Isamu Noguchi in 1986 – and now the Audrey Jones Beck Building by Rafael Moneo. Moneo has proposed a four-story facility directly facing the Law Building and connected to it via an underground walkway. The limestone building occupies the whole site, thereby reinforcing its urban character. Heinz Tesar’s buildings occupy a very particular place on the Austrian architectural scene. There is a creative imagination at work here, which always operates outside the scope of modern routine. The town of Klosterneuburg has become something like an artistic home for Tesar. The Schömerhaus, an office building whose huge oval central hall leaves convention far behind, and the Protestant church, which has a rounded floor plan like a tear-drop, were now followed by the impressive museum he has built here to house 4000 objects from the Essl collection, which includes the most important collection of Austrian art after 1945. April 2004
 

Opus 52
Brunnert und Partner, Flughafen Leipzig/Halle
With an introduction by Martina Düttmann and photographs by Christian
Richters. 72 pp. with 70 ill. in b & w and colour,
280 x 300 mm, hard-cover, German / English
ISBN 3-930698-52-8

The new Leipzig/Halle airport has not just one, but two predecessors. One was Leipzig-Mockau airport, opened as a »World Airport« in 1923 and often still used after the Second World War in the GDR days to serve the Leipziger Messe, and then its competitor, Leipzig/Halle airport (near Schkeuditz), which opened in 1927 and by 1937 was already the second-largest airport in Germany. It took over the Messe flights from 1963 onwards, and continued to grow until 1989. After that, quick action was needed. Passenger numbers had increased fourfold by 1994. A master plan was worked out for a second takeoff and land- ing runway, intended for 3.5 million passengers per year. An open architectural competition followed in 1994, 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 running east–west, which, in addition, is cut through in parallel by the A14 motorway and a new high-speed railway line, with individual buildings, the architects designed a bridge structure spanning the railway track and the motorway from south to north. It is able to integrate the multi-storey car-park, the mall, the check-in hall, the access road and the transfer to the railway station. The functions were so skilfully arranged and interlinked above and alongside each other within this gigantic bridge that it was possible to create an airport of simple routes that at the same time made an unmistakable landmark and kept the centre of the site free because of its cleverly devised construction, so that all the subsequent buildings can develop in an east–west ribbon.The car-park has been in existence ever since 1998, the baggage hall to the south since 2002, and the mall and the central check-in hall since 2003. 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. The inserted ICE station, a direct commission, also started operating in 2003; passengers reach the airport from Leipzig's main station in fourteen minutes.
Martina Düttmann founded her own architectural press, called Archibook, in 1979, became an editor for the Birkhäuser Verlag in 1988, edited the Bauwelt Berlin Annuals series from 1996 to 2000 and now works as an author and translator, mainly for Bauwelt.
 

Opus 53
Johannes Peter Hötzinger: Haus in Bad-Nauheim
With an introduction by Gerd de Bruyn und photographs by Dieter Leistner.
60 pp. with 85 ill. in b &w and colour,
280 x 300 mm, hard-cover,
German/English
Edition Axel Menges GmbH
ISBN 3-930698-53-6

In summer 1978, the cover of the magazine Bauwelt showed a photograph of an unusual building. It was tersely introduced to readers as a »private house with office in Bad Nauheim«, but it was immediately obvious that this was a built manifesto. What appeared was a strictly symmetrically articulated, steeply rising façade, emanating dignity and composure. It also seemed able to manage without windows, which further enhanced its austere ele-gance. And then there were the strikingly slender, sharp-angled wall elements, which seemed captivatingly graceful, or even delicate and fragile – as though folded from paper. The fact is that, long before Gilles Deleuze had cast his spell on a new generation of aesthetically ambitious architects, Johannes Peter Hölzinger was putting his folding skills into practice as a matter of course. Seen from an architectural point of view, Hölzinger’s original contribution to the history of modern architecture lies in the fact that he eliminated the antithesis between elevation and ground plan. His building demonstrates precise agreement between internal and external geometry. And as well as this, it met the demand of reconciling art and life, as Hölzinger assumed that people would be prepared to allow their daily tasks to lead to aesthetic behaviour at all times, and would go along with the rhythmic narrowing down and opening up of the space, a current that draws them through the building – from bottom to top, accompanied by ever-increasing light and sunshine. This thrilling movement towards the light, this injection of dynamism into space, and their synthetic effect of always presenting what is separate as a unity, deserve to be called avant-garde in the best sense. Gerd de Bruyn was appointed professor of architectural theory at the University of Stuttgart in 2001 and has been director of the Institut Grundlagen moderner Architektur und Entwerfen since then. He is also a member of the board of the Internationales Zentrum für Kultur- und Technikforschung. His most recent publication is Fisch und Frosch oder Die Selbstkritik der Moderne, Basel 2001, and architektur_theorie.doc. Texte seit 1960 (with Stephan Trübt), Basel 2003. Dieter Leistner studied communication design at the Folkwangschule in Essen and the Bergische Universität in Wuppertal. He started to work as a free-lance architectural photographer in 1982. In addition, he has been professor of  photography at the Fachhochschule Würzburg since 1999.
 

John Shearman
Raphael in Early Modern Sources
This extraordinary work presents every known document concerning Raphael during a period of 120 years, beginning with his birth in 1483. The 1,100 documents, many newly discovered or little known, are each accompanied by commentary. There is also a general introduction and three useful indexes. Published in cooperation with the Bibliotheca Hertziana
(Max-Planck-Institut), Rome.
Cloth ISBN 0-300-09918-5
 

Kunst in der Bibliothek: Der Geschichte und Ihrer Sammlungen.
Preface, Bernd Evers.
845 Pages.
1.66 x 9.94 x 7.96 (inches)
Taschen America
December 2002
John McKean
 

Giancarlo De Carlo – Layered Places
Ca. 240 pp. with ca. 250 ill. in b &w and colour,
242 x 297,5 mm, hard-cover, English
ISBN 3-932565-12-6

Giancarlo De Carlo (born in 1919) has been at the centre of the European architectural scene
for half a century. His career epitomises the engaged intellectual. His rigorously achieved socio-political position grew from action as a young anti-Fascist partisan in the 1940s who then in the 1950s became an uncompromising critic of the International Style and a central member of
Team X which finally broke with the CIAM establishment in 1959. His philosophy has found expression in half a century of coherent architectural work: writings, teaching, design projects,publishing and – centrally – built and inhabited places layered into an existing world. History is central to his design process. There is a deep physical »reading« of place which allows the layering of new engravings on its surfaces, transformations which can unlock behaviours and rearticulate perceptions of place. Such work also depends on a deep social »reading«, an engagement through active participation with the actual social condition and the rights of users to express themselves, and to question the traditional processes of architectural formation. De Carlo gained an international reputation with his first student housing at Urbino. Since the publication of his planning study of Urbino, his name has become almost synonymous with that Renaissance city, which he continues to
transform with newly inserted layers right up to the end of the millennium. His ability to work with city fabric, adding and removing with surgical precision, is exemplified by his celebrated University School of Education in Urbino (1968). But his careful yet utterly unnostalgic processes have produced plans and built projects all over Italy from Sicily to Venice. By the 1980s he has become one of the most important and penetrating architectural thinkers of our time. Astonishingly, since then his architectural designing has itself been renewed with a series of sinuous, luminous and amazingly youthful, even playful, building forms most of which have not before been widely published. The book accompanies an exhibition on Giancarlo De Carlo in the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
John McKean trained as both architect andhistorian. He is professor of architecture and director of architectural research at the University of Brighton. For two decades, he has been invited by De Carlo to Il Laboratorio Internazionale di Architettura e Urbanistica (ILAUD) each summer. He guest-edited the World Architecture monograph issue on De Carlo in 1991. He has recently made a video film on Carlo Scarpa and published books on Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the Crystal Palace and James Stirling’s Leicester Engineering Building.
 

Andrew Ayers
The Architecture of Paris
Edition Axel Menges GmbH
AxelMenges@aol.com
416 pp. with ca. 310 ill., 161,5 x 222 mm, soft-cover, English
ISBN 3-930698-96-X

The City of Light has long been an architectural innovator and showcase for France and her rulers. A site of strategic importance since the 3rd century BC, Paris flourished under the Romans, but subsequent Barbarian invasions meant that comparatively little remains of her Antique splendour. In the 6th century AD the Merovingian kings made Paris the seat of the realm, a status the city has retained bar the odd interruption throughout the centuries. By the 12th century, Paris was established as a political, economic, religious and cultural capital. Each epoch has left its mark on Paris: the Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance churches and fountains, the aristocratic hôtels particuliers of the 17th and 18th centuries, railways, industry and world fairs in the 19th and 20th. A centralisation of power in the capital long ensured that Paris received more than its fair share of attention from princely »architectes manqués«, from the Bourbons through the Napoléons to Président Mitterrand.
Baron Haussmann’s recasting of the city in the image of Napoléon III became the model of
its age for urban development, and the phenomenon of the presidential »grands projets« in the 1980s and early 1990s provoked comment the world over. When not directly shaping the fabric of Paris themselves, its rulers have always kept tight control over the activities of others, with the result that Paris has developed under some of the strictest building regulations of any major city. Despite Paris’s much vaunted reputation as the cultural salon of Europe, a certain suspicion towards foreign architectural imports has characterized its development, and outside influences have always been adapted to local needs and indigenous modes of expression, a tradition which carried on until the post-war era and arguably continues today. The last decades of the 20th century have witnessed a rush to modernize and adapt a crumbling fabric to the exigencies of the electronic age.
Andrew Ayers studied at the Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning, University College London, and now lives in Paris.
 

Anette Gangler, Heinz Gaube, Attilio Petruccioli.
Bukhara – The Eastern Dome of Islam
Edition Axel Menges
224 pp. with 256 ill. in b&w and colour
233 x 284,5 mm,
Hard-cover, English
3-932565-27-4

Bukhara is one of the architectural miracles of the East. A Persian author of the Middle Ages called Bukhara the »Eastern Dome ofIslam«. This honorary title was given to the city on account of its prestige as one of the most famous centers of learning in the Islamic world. Many outstanding scholars, among them the great philosopher and medic Avicenna (Ibn Sina), came from Bukhara. Therefore it is not surprising that the name of the city itself is traditionally derived from the Indian Buddhist term »vihara« (place of learning). Bukhara, located in the fertile valley of the Zarafshan river is the third-largest city of the Republic of Uzbekistan. It was founded some decades after Alexander the Great’s campaigns to the east. In the pre-Islamic period (before 700 AD) it was one of the cities of the Sogdian confederation and had grown to a considerable size. In the 10th century the Persian dynasty of the Samanids made Bukhara to one of the richest cities of the Islamic world and to the meeting point of the most famous scholars of the time. After the fall of the Samanids Bukhara declined steadily. It took about 500 years until the city became a political and intellectual center again. After 1500 the Uzbek Khans controlled from Bukhara the most powerful state of Central Asia. Under the Uzbeks Bukhara was rebuilt and embellished with buildings. The high rising domes and façades of these buildings decorated with glazed tiles characterize the city’s appearance up to the day. Under Uzbek rule the city also became a famous center of learning again. In 1868 the Khanate of Bukhara and its capital were conquered by the Russians. 1920 Soviet rule started, and since 1991 the city is one of the historical treasures of the independent Republic of Uzbekistan.
In this book a city planner, an architect and a historian trace the urban development of this outstanding city and analyze its architecture in urban and historical contexts from its origins in the pre Islamic period to the situation today. The authors did extensive fieldwork in Bukhara and have published a number of books and many articles on Near Eastern and Persian architecture and urbanism.
Anette Gangler teaches city planning at the University of Stuttgart. Heinz Gaube is professor of Oriental studies at the University of Tübingen. Attilio Petruccioli was Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1994 to 1998; today he teaches at the Politecnico de Bari.
 

Ludwig Persius - Architekt des Königs
Verlag Schnell & Steiner
ca. 270 Seiten. Zalhreichen Farb -u. sw. Abb.
[Katalog after exhibition of the same name.
20. Juli bis 19. Oktober 2003 Schloss Babelsberg, Potsdam
Maschinenhaus, Glienicke, Berlin, SPSG].
 

Opus 51
Bolles + Wilson, Domviertel, Magdeburg
With an introduction by Frank R. Werner und photographs by
Christian Richters. 60 pp. with ca. 60 ill. in b &w and colour,
280 x 300 mm, hard-cover, German / English
Edition Axel Menges
ISBN 3-930698-51-X

Julia Bolles-Wilson and Peter L. Wilson have built a large number of striking, thoroughly detailed cultural and commercial buildings in recent years, all sharing the characteristic that they stubbornly resist superficial stylistic categorization. Their buildings are articulated and positioned in an unmistakable way in their respective urban spaces, thanks to pointed breaks with rational space config-urations, sculptural shapes for architectural silhouettes and the use of polychrome surfaces. The concept for the new cathedral quarter in Magdeburg, which was just like creating a little town-within-a-town, is also based in the first instance on reinterpreting existing contexts on the western periphery of the highly sensitive cathedral square in Magdeburg. Sections are deliberately punched out of two compact blocks and then partly folded, thus creating an ensemble that can be read in various ways despite its lucid overall form. The spatial sequences are like stage sets, forming a basis for decoding the compositional strategy. Voluminous folds in the roofs break up the austere geometry of the façades below them, which are about twenty metres high, by acting like vectors to create new transverse links across the historic urban panorama. The interior design is articulated as a three-dimensional, strictly regular and functional system, successively broken by pointed sequences of eventful spatial expansion. These look like cavities or open spaces cut out of the blocks. The pedestrian route through them is distantly reminiscent of a walk through English landscape gardens, offering strollers scenically composed sequences of con-densed or slowed-down space that cut across both space and time, and also scenarios using compressed perspective.
Frank R. Werner was professor of history and theory of architecture at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart from 1990 to 1993, since 1993 he has been director of the Institut für Architekturgeschichte und Architekturtheorie at the Bergische Universität in Wuppertal. He studied painting, architecture and ar-chitectural history at the Kunstakademie in Mainz, the Technische Hochschule in Hanover and Stuttgart University. After voluntary work with Pan Walther, Christian Richters studied communication design at the Folkwangschule in Essen. He is one of the most sought-after architectural photographers in Europe today. His photographs are to be found in publications like The Architectural Review, Architecture, Bauwelt, Domus, El Croquis, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui and Zodiac.
Summer 2003.
 

Rolf Reiner Maria Borchard/ Yali Yu.
Gärten in Suzhou/ Gardens in Suzhou
156 pp. with 144 ill., 104 in colour, 280x300mm, hard-cover,
German/ English
Edition Axel Menges GmbH
ISBN 3-932565-36-3

The city of Suzhou, which was mentioned as early as the 5th century BC is on the Imperial Canal, three hours by train from Shanghai. Its chequer-board pattern of canals has gained it the title of the Venice of the East and makes it an ideal location for gardens. Suzhou has over 150 of them, some of which have been in existence for over a thousand years. The gardens of Suzhou reflect an attitude of mind that sees man as be-ing in harmony with nature. Former officials and rich merchants linked up with poets and painters to vie with each other over garden design. They created miniature landscapes in which nature and architecture fuse into a coherent whole. To a certain extent, the scenes produced are like contrived landscape paintings. In European gardens, most atten-tion is paid to the various plant species, but in Chinese gardens the interplay of rocks, soil, water, plants, pavilions, light and paths is the principal concern.
The architect and photographer Rolf Reiner Maria Borchard, who is professor of design principles at the Muthesius-Hochschule in Kiel, has chosen seven of the most beautiful gardens and pho-tographed them during several trips, always in spring, in other words at a time when the garden architecture has not yet been overwhelmed by the vegetation, and so can make the best possible impact in the image. His trained eye for the way architecture is embedded in the landscape in particular means that here again, as in his older books, now out of print, Hannoverscher Klassizismus, Elysische Felder – Landschaftsgärten und ihre Bauten and Hamburger Elbchaussee, he has found striking and convincing images, steeped in the harmony of the gardens. Yali Yu is a diploma garden architect with proven knowledge in practice (for example she coordinated the cultivation of the Chinese garden in Marzahn, Berlin) and in theory (including an acade-mic study of Italian gardens). Her essay emphasizes the essential characteristics of Chinese horticulture and of the seven selected gardens.
 

Opus 50
Ernst Neufert / Peter Karle und Ramona Buxbaum,
Meisterbau, Darmstadt
With an introduction by Klaus Honold and photographs by Thomas Eicken.
60 pp. with ca. 65 ill. in b &w and colour, 280 x 300 mm,
hard-cover, German / English
Edition Axel Menges
ISBN 3-930698-50-8

Zu den herausragenden Bauten der Nachkriegsmoderne gehört das Apartmenthaus von Ernst Neufert am Fuß der Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt. Neufert, bekannt geworden als Verfasser der Bau-entwurfslehre (1936), wurde 1946 Professor für Baukunst an der Technischen Hochschule Darmstadt. Bei seinem 1954/55 errichteten Baugriff er auf die minimalistischen Prinzipien der Normierung zurück, die er zwischen 1940 und 1945 im Arbeitsstab Albert Speers entwickelt hatte. Die Hülle des Gebäudes verbindet die tektonische Gestik der zwanziger mit dekorativen Elementen der fünfziger Jahre. Neuferts Bau ist das einzige Wohnhaus unter den »Darmstädter Meisterbauten«, einem beispiellosen Aufbauprogramm in den frühen fünfziger Jahren. Die schwer zerstörte Stadt hatte dafür 1951 im »Darmstädter Gespräch: Mensch und Raum« den philosophi-schen Rahmen abgesteckt; anschließend wurden elf namhafte Architekten mit der Planung vor allem öffentlicher Gebäude beauftragt. Umgesetzt wurden jedoch nur fünf Projekte: neben Neuferts Beitrag Arbeiten von Otto Bartning, Franz Schuster, Hans Schwippert und Max Taut. 1960 wurde das Programm abgebrochen; zu den nicht verwirklichten Entwürfen zählt auch eine aufsehenerregende Volksschule von Hans Scharoun. Neuferts Bau prägte fortan an prominenter Stelle die Silhouette der Stadt. Äußerlich nach wie vor eindrucksvoll, genügte das Haus im Inneren jedoch nach fast fünfzig Jahren nicht mehr den heutigen Wohnansprüchen. Die Darmstädter Architekten Peter Karle und Ramona Buxbaum lösten die alte Zellenstruktur auf, verknüpften die Appartements über Flure und Etagen hinweg zu größeren Woh-nungen und gaben dem Bau in dieser Form seine alte Strahlkraft zurück. Peter Karle und Ramona Buxbaum gründeten ihr Büro im Jahr 1990. Aufmerksamkeit erzielten sie unter anderem mit einem Doppelhaus für Frauen mit Kindern, mit der Leitstelle der Verkehrsgesellschaft HEAG und mit der Feuerwehrzentrale des Pharmakonzerns Merck.
Der Berufsphotograph Thomas Eicken studierte Architektur und war Stipendiat in der Akademie Schloß Solitude in Stuttgart. Klaus Honold studied literature and theatre at the Freie Universität Berlin. He is on the editorial staff of the daily Darmstädter Echo. He was one of the authors of Kramm+Strigl – Buildings and Projects / Bauten und Projekte, published by Edition Axel Menges in 1999.
 

Renate Hehr
New Hollywood
Der amerikanische film nach 1968 / The American film after 1968
Edition Axel Menges
144 pp. with 180 ill., 233 x 284,5 mm, hard-cover, German/English
ISBN 3-930698-94-3

The surprising success of Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate and Easy Rider in the late 60s marks a turning-point in the history of the American cinema, as these are films that differ fundamentally from the traditional Hollywood style. They revised the traditional genre formulae and overturned the rules of classical narrative structure, but they were also aimed at a young audience influenced by alternative culture, a group that the big studios had ignored until then. The American film industry, which was in financial crisis and a phase of artistic stagnation in the sixties because it had tried to meet increasing competition from television by producing block-busters, started to think again, and became more receptive to new ideas. This created a degree of artistic scope that young directors and filmmakers with artistic ambitions were not slow to exploit in order to realize their creative ideas in the context of mainstream cinema. A period of artistic renewal began, of a kind that had never been possible before in America on such a radical scale. The first wave of New Hollywood was starting to die down in 1971, as the films were often too experimental, too self-referential and too alien for a mass audience, and the market for the limited target group of a young audience interested in culture was quickly saturated. But important stimuli emerged, and made it possible for a series of filmmakers like Robert Altman, Arthur Penn, Mike Nichols, Alan Pakula, Sydney Pollack, Stanley Kubrick, Sam Peckinpah, Paul Mazursky, Hal Ashby and ultimately an exceptional figure like Woody Allen to establish themselves permanently. They were joined in the seventies by the younger generation of so-called film prodigies like Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, William Friedkin, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, Paul Schrader or George Lucas. They all represented the liberation of the director from the dictates of the studio, the acquisition of aright to have individual artistic handwriting and the era of the director as superstar. Renate Hehr studied theatre science, German and journalism at the Freie Universität Berlin. She emigrated to South America in the late seventies. In 1992 she returned to Berlin, where she lives and works as a writer and translator. Her book on Margarethe von Trotta was recently published by Edition Axel Menges.
 

Friedrich Ragette.
Traditional Domestic Architecture of the Arab Region
Edition Axel Menges
304 pp. with ca. 1100 ill., 233 x 284,5 mm, hard-cover, English
ISBN 3-932565-30-4
January / February 2003

Probably for the first time the domestic architecture of the whole Arab Region, from the Atlantic to the Gulf, is being considered. In systematic fashion the factors influencing architecture are analyzed and the extent and character of the Arab Region are determined. Construction materials and building techniques are reviewed and the evolution of settlement from the nomad?s tent to the tightly packed town is discussed. The domestic planning elements are identified, from roof to basement and from the closed cell to systems of courtyards with loggias and galleries. Water and waste management also receive proper attention. From this information traditional design strategies concerning privacy, variable space needs, environmental control and a specific concept of beauty are derived. Exceptions to the rule are identified as related to special geographic or climatic conditions, or the need for defense. The analytical part is supported by a collection of more than 200 domestic examples from all thirteen countries comprising the Arab Region. Each building is briefly described and documented by means of plans, sections and elevations arranged for easy reading at uniform scales and with uniform reference numbers. Having treated the traditional architecture, the author turns to present times and the impact of the West on Arab architecture. He contrasts Eastern and Western ways of planning and design, again largely based upon environmental differences. Old restrictions are compared with new freedoms, the Industrial Revolution and globalization are considered. The challenge of adaptation and integration is discussed through an exchange of views between an Iranian traditionalist and a Turkish modernist. In an appendix brief appreciations of Hassan Fathy and the Aga Khan Program for Architecture are added, as well as two contemporary projects and planning guidelines for the region. A glossary with about 600 Arabic terms and a bibliography with credit references complete the work.
Friedrich Ragette has published standard books on architecture in Lebanon and Baalbek. He spent about 30 years teaching and practicing architecture in the Middle East. The past couple of years he was professor of architecture at the American University of Sharjah, which supports the preparation of this book through a reasearch grant.
 

Heinz Tesar. Zeichnungen / Drawings
With an essay by Matthias Boeckl.
Edition Axel Menges
188 p. with ca. 200 ill. in b&w
and colour. 242 x 297,5 mm, hard-cover, German/English
ISBN 3-932565-31-2
January / February 2003

Heinz Tesar’s drawings and water-colours show the well-known Viennese architect, whose designs include the building for the Essl Collection in Klosterneuburg (Opus 38) and the »Christus Hoffnung der Welt« church in the Donau City in Vienna (Opus 42), and is now working on the refurbishment of the Bode-Museum on the Museum Island in Berlin, to be a sensitive, knowledgeable and thoughtful artist. Reduced to a few organoid forms made up of pencil lines and a single water-colour tone, floating in a kind of »primeval condition« on the sheet, these works are a considerable distance from architectural history. They are reminiscent of early sheets by Joseph Beuys and the expressive modes of 1950s abstraction, which were further developed as individual figures with a graphical and structural framework. Their objective range extends from the autonomous creation of form to abstract notes on familiar buildings. Usually they represent thoughts about basic phenomena of the physical world, condensed into a reduced and three-dimensional form, then processed in this creative laboratory from the note stage until they are transformed into works in their own right. Often they remain as drawings, but quite frequently the findings from these touching sheets are further developed into sculptures or buildings. This book presents a selection from all Tesar's creative periods and an essay introduces the background to this art and its current positioning, which not least raises theoretical questions about the relationship between pictorial art and architecture. Tesar’s drawings are presented as a project that turns a vision of Modernism into reality within a manageable personal sphere. The vision conjures up, as modern creative work is condemned to becoming increasingly specialized, an alternative »art as a life practice«, but – and this is the present level of perception – one that can ultimately be realized only in individual art projects.
Matthias Boeckl is professor of history and theory of architecture at the Universität für angewandte Kunst in Vienna. He has produced numerous exhibitions, essays and books about contemporary art and architecture, and since 1999 has been editor-in-chief of the magazine 'architektur aktuell'.
 

Herausgegeben von der Bauakademie Berlin.
Die Hand des Architekten:
Zeichnungen aus Berliner Architektursammlungen
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln.
Catalogue of exhibition with the same name:
21. to 29 September 2002 in the Alten Museum der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin.
Schriftenreihe der Bauakademie Berlin - Band 1
346 pp. with numerous ill. in b & w, some color.
soft-cover, German.
ISBN 3-88375-606-7

"Die am 25. September 2001 gegründete Bauakademie Berlin hat im ersten Jahr ihrer Aktivitäten in einer Folge von Vorträge die Berliner Institutionen vorgestellt. welche über wichtige Materialien zur Architektur verfügen. In diesen Vorträgen, die Teil der vorliegenden Publikation sind, wurde über die Enstehungsgeschichte, die Schwerpunkte und den Umfang der verschiedenen Sammlungen sowie deren Präsenz und Ziele Auskunft:

Bauhaus-Archiv
Berlinsiche-Galerie
Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin
Institut für Regionalentwicklung
und Strukturplanung
Landesarchiv Berlin
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste
Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg
Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin
Technische Universität Berlin
Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin

Die in Schinkels Altem Museum gezeigte Ausstellung nimmt auf fünf für die Entwicklung Berlins essentielle Stadtbereiche Bezug - nämlich Berlin-Mitte, Spreebogen, Pariser Platz und Alexanderplatz. Die Liste der aus 14 Archiven zusammengetragenen Exponate und die Texte der Vorträge zu diesen Architektursammlungen sind Gegenstand der vorgeliegenden Publikation. Sie is der erste Band einer geplante Schriftenreihe der Bauakademie Berlin."
 

Anthony Alofsin.
The Struggle for Modernism:
Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning at Harvard
W.W. Norton & Company
June 2002
hardcover, English, 320 pp.
ISBN 0393730484
 

Volker Fischer
Richard Meier –
Der Architekt als Designer und Künstler / The architect as Designer and Artist
Edition Axel Menges
128 pp. with 200 ill. in b & w and colour, 242 x 297,5 mm,
hard-cover, German/English
ISBN 3-932565-32-0

With a special section about the recently reorganized Museum für angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt by Richard Meier

The distinguished architect and Pritzker laureate Richard Meier has attracted public attention mainly with his museum and cultural buildings including the Atheneum in New Harmony, Indiana, the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Stadthaus in Ulm and the Museum d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. But he has also worked for decades as a designer and fine artist, creating a number of products for companies in the USA and Europe, including furniture for Knoll International and Stow Davis, lamps for Baldinger, door and window handles for Valli & Valli, a concert grand for Ibach, tableware for Swid Powell, Alessi, Arabia and Reed & Barton, watches for Markuse and jewellery for Cleto Munari. All these products are visually reminiscent of an entirely European aesthetic relating to the Viennese school around 1900 and the Bauhaus. They thus correspond with his architecture formally and in their design convictions, and often try to transfer the logic of his architectural language into products on this scale. Meier’s practical objects derive their charm, which effortlessly transcends mere function,.from precisely this convergence. Meier’s collages display a similarly »late-Modern« approach, owing a great deal to Russian Constructivism, and developing its principles in a contemporary manner. The book accompanies the exhibition of the same name at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, which has recently been relaunched with differently conceived museum facilities and new service areas; these are addressed in detail in an appendix to the book.
The internationally known architecture and design historian Volker Fischer was vice director of the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt for over 10 years. Since 1995 he has built up a new design department in the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt; in addition to his museum work he teaches history of architecture and design at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach.
 

Opus 22
Carlo Scarpa, Museo Canoviano, Possagno
With an introduction by Stefan Buzas and Judith Carmel-Arthur
and photographs by Richard Bryant.
Edition Axel Menges
60 pp. with ca. 60 ill. in b &w and colour.
280 x 300 mm, hard-cover, English
ISBN 3-930698-22-6

In a letter from London, dated 9 November 1815, Antonio Canova wrote: »... Here I am in London, dear and best friend, a wonderful city. ... I have seen the marbles arriving from Greece. Of the basreliefs we had some ideas from engravings, but of the full colossal figures, in which an artist can display his whole power and science, we have known nothing. ... The figures of Phidias are all real and living flesh, that is to say are beautiful nature itself.« With his admiring words for the famous Elgin Marbles Canova, one of the last great artists embodying the grandiose heritage of the classical world, gave at the same time an appropriate description of his own artistic aims. It was his half-brother who decided to assemble most of Canova’splaster originals and to place them in a museum he had built in the garden of his brother’s home in Possagno, a small village north of Venice, where the artist saw the light of day on 1 November 1757. This basilica-like building erected in 1836 now holds the great majority of Canova’s compositions. To commemorate the bicentenary of his birth, the Venetian authorities decided to have an extension added to the overcrowded basilica, and they commissioned the Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa for this delicate task. Scarpa composed a small, but highly articulated building hat is in a strong contrast to the neo-Classical, monumental basilica. The subtly designed sequence of spaces is unique even among Scarpa’s so many extraordinary museum interiors as the architect was here in the rare position to compose the spaces as well as the placing of the exhibits. The placing of the sources of natural light which infuses the plaster surfaces with the softness of real life is in itself a rare achievement and it took an equally rare photographer to record such symphonies in white in all their magic. Stefan Buzas is an architect who has studied the work of Scarpa for many years. He is a member of the Faculty of Royal Designers for Industry of the Royal Society of Arts in London. Judith Carmel-Arthur took her degree in architectural history, and subsequently studied at the Courtauld Institute and Warburg Institute (University of London). She is a lecturer in design and architectural history at Kingston University and the University of Southampton, and is presently completing her PhD in the history of design. Richard Bryant is one of the best-known architectural photographers, working all over the world. He is the only photographer with an honorary fellowship of the Royal Institute of British Architects.
 

Arturo Almandoz (ed.)  
Planning Latin America's Capital Cities 1850-1950
This is the first book in English to describe the development of the capital cities of Latin America in the post-colonial period - their planning, urban morphology and social evolution. These cities provide a unique example of the influence of urban planning and design ideas of one continent on another. The well-illustrated case studies of Buenos Aires, Caracas, Mexico City, Havana, Lima, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Santiago, and San Jose de Costa Rica, are each written by an authority on the city concerned.

Contents:
1. Introduction.
2. Urbanism and Planning in Latin America: from Haussmann to CIAM.

PART I: Capitals Of The Expanding Economies. |
3. Buenos Aires, a Great European City.
4. Liberalism and Normalization. Urban Planning in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo: Words, Actors and Projects, 1889-1945.
5. Cities within the City: Urban and Architectural Transfers. Santiago de Chile 1840-1940.

PART II: Former Viceregal Capitals.
6. Urban Development of Mexico City, 1850 -1930.
7. The Script of Urban Surgery: Lima, 1850-1940.

PART III: The Caribbean Rim.
8. Havana, from Tacón to Forestier.
9. Alternate Modernities in Caracas: Territory, Architecture and Urban Space.
10. Urbanism, Architecture, and Cultural Transformations in a Central American Capital. San José, Costa Rica 1850-1930.
11. Conclusions.

Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415272653
Pub Date: 26 JUL 2002
Type: Hardback Book
Extent: 296 pages (Dimensions 246x189 mm)
Illustrations: 110 line illustrations
 

a cura di Maria Giuffrè  e Marco Rosario Nobile.
Palermo Nell'Eta dei Neoclassicismo
(Disegni di architettura conservati negli archivi palermitani)
Palermo: Dipartimento di Storia di Progetto nell' architettura,
Università degli Studi di Palermo.
Offset Studio, Maggio 2000.
Tel. Fax  091/343849.
 

Gazda, Elaine K., ed.
The Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii: Ancient Ritual--Modern Muse
Ann Arbor: The Kelsey Museum of Archaeology and
The University of Michigan Museum of Art,
2000. 262pp.
ISBN  0300092032.
 

Frampton, Kenneth, gen. ed.
Modernity and Community: Architecture in the Islamic World.
London: Thames & Hudson.
2002. 176p.
ISBN 0500283303
 

Herzog & de Meuron, Renny Zauug, Rene Imhof
and Eva Schmidt, contiributors.
Architecture by Herzog & de Meuron:
Wall Painting by Remy Zaugg/A work for Roche Basel.
Basel: Birkhauser, 2002. 128p.
ISBN 374366222
 

Nnamdi Elleh.
African Architecture: Evolution and Transformation
McGraw-Hill, 382pp.
ISBN 0-07-021506-5
The first comprehensive illustrated study of African Architecture from
antiquity to the present.
 

Editions Imbernon. 
Ferdnand Pouillon, architecte méditerranéen 1912-1986
ISBN 2-9516396-0-0      LIVRE APPARTENANT A LA CATEGORIE DES BEAUX LIVRES
 

Paul McGillick
Alex Popov – An Australian Architect
128 pp. with ca. 200 ill., 242 x 297,5 mm, hard-cover, English
ISBN 3-932565-18-5

Australia may not, at first glance, seem a likely place for the principles and strategies of Scandinavian architecture to take root, but Alex Popov’s cosmopolitan provenance typifies the cultural eclecticism of the country. Born in Shanghai to Russian parents, Popov moved to Australia a decade later and eventually completed his first degree in Sydney. In 1968, however, he moved to Denmark where he completed a master’s degree in architecture and worked for Henning Larsen and Jørn Utzon before returning to Australia in 1982. In Australia, where domestic architecture was for so long dominated by British models imported without adaptation, Popov is linked to a new wave of architects who have applied the principles of Scandinavian architecture to create an increasingly distinctive body of Australian domestic architecture. Although the spirit of Scandinavian architecture is crucial, Popov’s work also assimilates equally important influences from China and Japan and – most significantly – the light, topography and bushland flora of Australia’s eastern seaboard. Popov has discovered that the open forms and spirit of place which mark the Scandinavian tradition translate wonderfully to the very different landscape of Australia. Best known for his domestic architecture, Popov celebrates the house as a home, a refuge from the world – personalised, nurturing, reflective and soothing –, a place which interfaces with the public domain, but then turns inward and away from the drama of the outside world. Inside, Popov creates other, more tranquil, dramas. His homes are typically a series of separate, but inter-connected spaces, each with its own character. Outside, the house is meticulously sited to generate a harmony between the building and its natural context. This emotional attachment to place, however, does not lead to vernacular sentimentalism. Popov is essentially a Modernist, his homes are invariably elegant and scrupulous in their detailing.
For many years Paul McGillick combined an academic career as a linguist with writing about the visual and performing arts. As series editor and producer with a national television weekly arts programme, he became increasingly involved with architecture and design, for example as editor of the leading Australian architecture and design journal, Monument.
 

Opus 46
Kishi Kurokawa, Oita Stadium, Oita, Japan
With an introduction by Dennis Sharp und photographs by Koji Kobayashi.
60 pp. with ca. 65 ill., 280 x 300 mm, hard-cover
English
ISBN 3-930698-46-3

Known as the »Big Eye« the Oita Stadium is one of the chosen venues for the next World Cup in 2002. It will be reused for the second stage of the Japan Inter-Prefectural Athletic Competition in 2008 after the World Cup, continuing to grow in the future to become a large scale all-purpose sports park for Oita. The whole site covers an area of 225 ha and has several facilities outside the main football stadium. These include general fitness, training and lodging centres, a botanical pool, two multi-purpose athletic fields, two rugby and soccer practise pitches, a softball field, tennis courts and other game areas.The main stadium features an open track for athletic events as well as the football pitch. It can also be used year-round for public events aided by its retractable roof. For soccer matches, spectator seats are placed right up to the edge of the pitch to bring them close to the action. To change over for track events a rectractable seating system was developed. The stadium sits elegantly on its site, enhanced by the gentle curves of its spherical design. The choice of the sphere, Kurokawa says, is »an expression of abstract symbolism«. This spherical shape also enables the rectractable portion to move along its curved surface. The use of Teflon membrane panels with 25 % light permeability obviates the need for artificial lighting during daylight hours. In order for the pitch to get proper exposure to sunlight the elliptical roof opening runs along the north–south axis. A main arch with perpendicular horizontal sub members follows the elliptical shape of the roof opening. Between the roof and the spectator seating below the surrounding mountains can be seen from a slender ventilation clearstorey set just below the roof line. This slit of space is designed to create a feeling of openness inside the stadium. Since the original design, an idea emerged for a moving camera to be located on the main beam to deliver special dynamic images for television audiences around the world.
Dennis Sharp studied architecture at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and architectural history at Liverpool University. He is professor of architecture at Nottingham University. Koji Kobayashi is famous for his distinguished photographs of contemporary architecture; previously he worked as a photographer for the architectural Japanese magazine Shinkenchiku.
 

Opus 47
Bolles + Wilson, Nieuwe Luxor Theater, Rotterdam
With an introduction by Mirko Zardini und photographs by Christian Richters.
120 pp. with ca. 100 ill., 280 x 300 mm, hard-cover,
English
ISBN 3-930698-47-1

This building, opened by the Dutch Queen in April 2001, is a theatre for musicals, concerts and opera with a long tradition deeply rooted in Dutch popular culture. The Bolles + Wilson design, which won the original competition against such Dutch luminaries like Koolhaas, Hertzberger or Christianse, responds to the multiple orientation of the harbourside site, radically reconstituting theatre plan form and organisational logistics, with back-stage facilities at the front of the building and delivery trucks routed through to a first-floor stage. A wrap-round red façade encloses visually dramatic foyer sequences like a stage curtain; at the same time it presentsthe Luxor as a leading actor in Rotterdam’s new docklands district of Kop van Zuid on a wider urban stage. This »house of illusion« is a full-scale camera obscura with spectacular bridge, city and harbour panoramas choreographed into the unfolding interior landscape. The Luxor is a significant milestone in the œuvre of Bolles + Wilson. As a major public building it pursues themes first tested in the 1993 new city library in Münster: a characteristic plan form, an intervention that redefines its context, and a synthesis of the abstract with a spatial warmth, an ambience that communicates directly and subliminally to a wide audience base. The architecture of this German/Australian duo does not fit easily into conventional architectural genres. Smallness, intimacy, and precise details characterise their work, just like an increasing number of urban interventions that have made a major impact on cities like Hengelo, The Hague or Magdeburg. The design of the Luxor Theatre, the process of its realisation, Bolles + Wilson’s surrounding urban fields and, most importantly, the internal life in the building engendered by the architecture are fully presented in this book.
Mirko Zardini has been a member of the editorial board of Casabella and Lotus International and visiting professor at several universities including Lausanne Polytechnique and Harvard University. He has written of the Luxor as »... set in the city, occupying its amorphous spaces with precision and determination, so that it immediately looks necessary, and therefore indelible«. Christian Richters studied at the Folkwangschule in Essen. He is one of the most sought-after architectural photographers in Europe today.
 

Martin Rendel, René Spitz (eds.)
Das Weite suchen / Expanding the Gap
112 pp. with 110 ill., 210 x 148 mm, hard-cover, German/English
ISBN 3-93256528-2

A yawning gap between two 1960s buildings. Not at all unusual in Cologne. A gap between two buildings, 2.56 m wide and 33 m long. Scarcely wide enough to park a few bicycles. This gap has been used as an office by the rendel & spitz advertising agency since early 1999. As in 2001, during the 2002 Cologne International Furniture Fair three internationally known designers squeezed themselves into the town’s best known building between buildings. There they presented their ideas on the subject of »expanding the gap«. From Tokyo came the idea of expanding the exhibition space with an installation to make it snow. Designer Tokujin Yoshioka had 18 kilos of down whirled up by fans at the end of the room to create an everlasting blizzard, and the largest snowball of the year. – In order to burst through the austere geometry of the exhibition building, projections from lava lamps from the London-based designer Ross Lovegrove covered the greater part of the interior. The coloured, gently moving bubbles created in these lamps by heat caused the sharp contours and hard black and white contrasts of the ceilings and walls to melt and flow. – Greg Lynn from Los Angeles installed an overdimensioned, organic sculpture on one of the side walls. It reached out well into the room, and so the visitors were obliged to squeeze past it and search on the other side for space.
Martin Rendel studied design in Germany and Switzerland. He has had his own studio since 1995, first in Hamburg, then in Paris. He has prepared designs for clients including L'Oréal, Yves Saint Laurent and Gucci. He has worked jointly on projects with René Spitz since 1998. Spitz studied German, communications and history in Munich and Cologne. He has worked in advertising since 1988, first as a partner in the Munich agency Oesterle, Spitz & Jaeger, then as a free-lance. He was awarded the »Roter Punkt« for high-quality design in 1991. He has published work on themes relating to design history, and reports on the radio and in the specialist press on current events on the design scene. See also: Martin Rendel, René Spitz, Mut zur Lücke / Braving the Gap, Edition Axel Menges, 2001; Rene Spitz, Die Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm – A View behind the Background, Edition Axel Menges, 2002.
 

Gerhard Ullmann
Venezia oscura
With an introduction by Lucius Burckhardt. 96 pp. with 87 ill. in colour,
280 x 300 mm, hard-cover, German / English
ISBN 3-932565-26-6

We could find a great deal to say about masks and concealment when leafing through Gerhard Ullmann’s photographs. Half of Venice is masked, stuck over with posters or covered with paintings, so convincingly that with some of the pictures by Ullmann you don’t know whether you are seeing the reality or just the pictures overlapping it. But in fact it is just like the old Venetian half-masks, where the face shows through at some point – and above all it is keeping a sharp and watchful eye on us, the strangers. These pasted images are like the old masks, they are evil or sad, the last thing they are is amusing. We are aware of the decay that is being hidden here, the flaking decorations that would reappear if the area under the paper were cleaned. Is Venice decaying? No other city flaunts its decline as much as Venice, and perhaps the papering has something to be said for it because it makes us wonder whether there might be something beautiful under there, a carved slab or an inscription. John Ruskin responded to the signals of decay by writing his book about Venice, which was supposed to ensure that there was at least a record of the city after it disappeared. A postcard written by his young wife to her parents has survived; she writes: »John has gone into a church to draw it, at least while it is still standing.« So for the author of The Stones of Venice the masking was simply grounds for mourning. He did not understand what else it had to offer. – Here we have to add a sentence by Leon Battista Alberti: »Io scrissi queste cose ridendo, voi ancora ridete.«
Gerhard Ullmann was born in Teplitz in 1935, and has lived in Berlin since 1956, where he studied architecture and painting at the Hochschule der Künste, then worked as an architecture and art critic, and also as a photographer. His work include books on Sanssouci and derelict industrial sites. He has also acquired a reputation abroad with his photographic exhibitions on Berlin and Venice, on masks and carnivals. Lucius Burckhardt, a young don at HfG Ulm and ETH Zurich, later editor-in-chief of the magazine werk, professor at the Gesamthochschule Kassel from 1973 to1997, in the meantime chairman of the Deutscher Werkbund, is indubitably one of the most unusual »lateral« thinkers of our day.
 

Andreas Kahlow / Fachhochschule Potsdam (Hrsg.)
Brücken in der Stadt - Der Potsdamer Stadtkanal und seine Brücken
Potsdam 2001, 128 Seiten, 169 Abbildungen. layout: Friedrich Grögel.
ISBN 3-934329-11

Diese Veröffenltlichung der FH Potsdam ist der Geschichte des Brückenbaus von der Renaissance bis zum 19. Jahrhundert gewidmet. Sie entstand aus Anlaß einer Tagung und Ausstellung zu den historischen Brücken der Potsdamer Innenstadt und Neubauprojekten innerstädtischer Brücken. Dem ehemaligen Potsdamer Stadtkanal sowie der Langen Brücke in Potsdam ist der Hauptteil der reich bebilderten Veröffenlichung gewidmet. Eine Vielzahl von Bauplänen, unter anderem auch bisher unpublizierte Entwurfsarbeiten von Ludwig Persius, dokumentieren den hohen Stand der Brückenbaukultur in Potsdam im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Abbildungen von Modellnachbauten geben eine plastische Vorstellung von der Reichhaltigkeit der Potsdamer Kanalbrücken, die in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren abgerissen wurden.
Beiträge u.a. von:
H. Falter, A. Kahlow, K.-E. Kurrer, G. Stolarski, G.J. Luijendijk, E. DeLony, G. Gose,
S. Ast, R.J. Dietrich, B. Steigerwald, A. Geschwind, J. Vielhaber, R.J. Dietrich. W. Verch.
 

Fritz Neumeyer.
Der Klang der Steine. Nietzsches Architekturen.
Gebr. Mann Verlag
Berlin 2001
ISBN 3-7861-2418-3, 256 p.
 

Bill MacMahon (ed.)
The Architecture of East Australia

With photographs by Max Dupain and Associates.
256 pp. with 455 ill., 161,5 x  222 mm, soft-cover, English
Edtion Axel Menges
ISBN 3-930698-90-0

In 1840 Sir Thomas Mitchell, Surveyor General of the British Crown, chose a rocky promontory on Sydney harbour for his home. He built a cottage in the style of Gothic Revival, popularized in England by Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin and documented in popular copy books shipped with his baggage from his home country. The house perfectly expresses the imaginative dislocation of European culture into the romantic wilderness. Whether they came out of duty, like Mitchell, or in the hope of opportunity, the European immigrants viewed Australia as a »terra nullius«, as an empty land, a vacant space waiting to receive a model of Christian civilization.It took a century to realize that the dream did not comfortably fit the continent. The story of Australian architecture might be said to parallel the endeavours of Australians to adapt and reconcile themselves with their home and neighbours. It is the story of 200 years of coming to terms with the land: of adaptation, insight and making do. Early settlers were poorly provisioned, profoundly ignorant of the land and richly prejudiced towards its peoples. They pursued many paths over many terrains. From the moist temperate region of Tasmania with heavy Palladian villas to the monsoonal north with open, lightweight stilt houses, the continent has induced most different regional building styles. The buildings included within this guide extend from the first examples of Australian architecture by convict architect Francis Greenway to the works by today’s rising generation. It will cover not only buildings by such famous architects as Walter Burley Griffin, Harry Seidler, Jørn Utzon, John Andrews, Philip Cox and Glenn Murcutt, but also many high-quality works by less known exponents of the profession.Photographs by the renowned Max Dupain and the present proprietor of his firm, Eric Sierins, including many especially commissioned for this book, support the text. Contributing authors have supplied material where vital local knowledge is essential.
Bill MacMahon is an architect practising in Sydney, a lecturer at the University of New South Wales and a contributor to various Australian architectural and design journals. He is best known for his work with D4Design whose projects included the Rockpool Restaurant and the Regents Court Hotel.
 

Hilmer & Sattler – Bauten und Projekte/ Buildings and Projects

With an introduction by Stanislaus von Moos.
244 pp. with ca. 250 ill., 242 x 297,5 mm, hard-cover, German/English.
Edition Axel Menges
ISBN 3-930698-77-3.

»Designing has less to do with inventing than with recombining stored architectural memories.« By saying this, architects Heinz Hilmer and Christoph Sattler are trying to express that they are not inclined to give into the hope that is especially raised in Modernism of being able to invent some- thing really new, but that instead they consciously take their bearings from constantly recurring forms of architecture and urbanism. They neither desire nor aim to design a quite different building or a quite different town, but to develop the building and the city as well as they possibly can from their particular context, literally building on the experience of the past. Another of the two architects’ credos is that architecture is an independent discipline with its own laws, and that therefore it should not draw from other areas: »A building is neither a cave nor a tent, neither a tree nor an umbrella, neither a stand nor a machine, neither structure nor construction. A building is a building.« Leafing through this book about Hilmer and Sattler’s work over the last 25 years – from their first private house, built for philosopher Jürgen Habermas, a reflection on the white, cubic architecture of early Modernism, via the block-edge development in the centre of Karlsruhe and the Gemäldegalerie in the Tiergarten in Berlin down to the urban design for the area around Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, which helped to gain acceptance for the principle of the European city as a living tissue of buildings, streets and squares rather than an ultimately city-hostile agglomeration of high-rise buildings in this part of Berlin – what is conveyed as well as precision of detail, diversity and proportionality is above all the self-confidence of these two architects who are so sure of themselves.
Stanislaus von Moos is Professor of Art History at Zurich University. He was the »inventor« and first editor of the magazine archithese, which succeeded in becoming one of the most important architectural discussion forums from a standing start. Works on Le Corbusier, Venturi and Rauch and the Esprit Nouveau have a particular place among Stanislaus von Moos’s published books.
 

Poul Erik Skriver Knud Holscher – Architect and Industrial Designer
With an introduction by Poul Erik Tøjner.
180 pp. with ca. 250 ill., 280 x 300 mm, hard-cover, English.
Edition Axel Menges
ISBN 3-930698-79-X.

Architect and industrial designer Knud Holscher is well known not only in Denmark, but also in the rest of the world. His buildings include Odense University, the additions to the Royal Theatre and the extension of Kastrup Airport in Copenhagen and the National Museum in Bahrain. His most famous work in the field of industrial design is the d-line series of door handles, and his most recent being the Quinta spotlights for the German company ERCO. Holscher is an outstanding representative of an architectural attitude that was more or less neglected by Deconstructivism and the ruling aestheticism characteristic of the last decades. Thus, he still believes that architecture and design are essentially a matter of daily life. His enormous scope ranging from classic tectonic business to the design of everyday things such as lavatories and vacuum jugs indicates his devotion to overall solutions as well as his passionate attention to detail. In this one cannot but recognize the influence of the Danish architect Arne Jacobsen with whom Holscher started his career. For Holscher architecture and design have nothing to do with accidental qualities that vary through time according to aesthetic conventions; rather he conceives it as an intrinsic dimension in our metabolism with the world. For him designing is solving problems. It has to do with our body, with our hands, with our surroundings before it becomes a fancy category of the mind. Good design accumulates all the aspects of a specific use in one form and thereby reduces complexity to such an extent that the form seems almost natural. Only malfunction makes you ask a door handle why it looks the way it does. A key word for both the architect and the industrial designer Knud Holscher is technological simplification, but nevertheless by means of technology. There is no romantic nor nostalgic spirit in his works except for the fundamental care that he thinks architecture and industrial design should still be rooted in.
Poul Erik Tøjner is a critic and editor on the weekly newspaper Weekendavi sen in Copenhagen. He has studied philosophy and literature at the University of Copenhagen and has written a PhD on Søren Kierkegaard. His main interests as a writer are the visual arts, poetry and philosophy. Poul Erik Skriver, qualified as an architect, has been editor of Arkitekten and Arkitektur DK for many decades. He has written numerous articles in newspapers and periodicals both in Denmark and in other countries and has been a contributor to several anthologies.
 

Opus 35 Frank O. Gehry, Energie-Forum-Innovation, Bad Oeynhausen.

With an introduction by Gottfried Knapp. Photographs by Christian Richters.
60 pp. with ca. 65 ill., 280 x 300 mm, hard-cover, German/English.
Edition Axel Menges
ISBN 3-930698-35-8.

After his deconstructive beginnings in the eighties and nineties, Frank Gehry increasingly practised a very plastic form of architecture. His expressively sculptural cultural buildings, the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, his project for the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and above all the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (see Opus 32), have shaped the architectural awareness of our period and provided exemplary artistic alternatives to the architectural canon of Modernism. Within Gehry’s rapidly growing volume of work the comparatively small energy forum for the Minden-Ravensburg Electricity Company (EMR) plays a particularly striking role insofar as the extraordinarily complex brief involved blending almost contradictory functions in a very cramped space, thus compelling the architect to use highly differentiated forms and materials. In this way something like a primal model of sculptural building emerged, a massively fissured, subtly lit structure that explains itself inside with amazing naturalness, making visitors gasp with its changing spatial situations as an exhibition and events centre, exploding all conventions as an office building and translating the theme of energy into sensual forms by architectural means as the electricity company’s technical distribution centre. The old dictum »form follows function« acquires a new and radical quality in the architecture of the Energieforum. In additon to the presentation of the energy forum in Bad Oeynhausen the book contains an illustrated survey of all other buildings by Frank Gehry in Europe.
Gottfried Knapp is responsible for architectural reporting as cultural editor of the Sueddeutsche Zeitung in Munich. He has written on contemporary architecture and urban development in almost all the specialist publications in Germany. After voluntary work with Pan Walther, Christian Richters studied communication design at the Fokwangschule in Essen. He is one of the most sought-after architectural photographers in Europe today. His photographs are to be found in publications like The Architectural Review, Architecture, Bauwelt, Domus, El Croquis, L’Architecture Aujourd’hui and Zodiac.
 

Opus 36 Rafael Moneo, The Audrey Jones Beck Building, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

With an introduction by Martha Thorne and photographs by Paul Hester.
60 pp. with ca. 65 ill., 280 x 300 mm, hard-cover, English.
Edition Axel Menges
ISBN 3-930698-36-6. 

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is a unique collection of architectural works – the Caroline Wiess Law Building, comprising the original William Ward Watkin Building of 1924 and the 1958 and 1974 additions designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; the Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden created by Isamu Noguchi in 1986; the Central Administration and Glassell Junior School Building designed by Carlos Jiménez in 1994; and now the Audrey Jones Beck Building by Rafael Moneo. Moneo, winner of the 1996 Pritzker Architectural Prize, has proposed a four-storey facility directly facing the Law Building and connected to it via an underground walkway. The limestone building occupies the whole site, thereby reinforcing its urban character. On the inside, visitors can assemble in the dramatic atrium before proceeding to the upper level galleries to begin their itinerary. The Beck Building is a natural progression of some of the ideas put forth by the architect in previous museum projects, especially the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid and the complex of the Moderna Museet and the Arkitekturmuseet in Stockholm. A collection of rooms is the underlying concept for the gallery spaces. The galleries may seem conventional, but their organization within the building is guided by the desire for freedom. The exhaustive studies undertaken to help design the skylights allow for optimum lighting conditions combining natural and artificial light. Climate, light, circulation through the space, dialogue between building and art, and simplicity and elegance of materials are once again concerns that Moneo has addressed thoughtfully and successfully in the new Beck Building.
Martha Thorne is associate curator of architecture at The Art Institute of Chicago. After receiving a master’s degree in city planning from the University of Pennsylvania she resided for many years in Madrid, where she collaborated with architectural publications and curated exhibitions for the Spanish Ministry of Public Works and Urbanism, including Museums and Architecture: New Perspectives and Building in a New Spain. Paul Hester’s photographs are to be found in numerous collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC, the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. His photographs of the Audrey Jones Beck Building were especially commissioned for this book.
 

Opus 40 Berger + Parkkinen, Die Botschaften der Nordischen Länder, Berlin.

With an introduction by Klaus-Dieter Weiss. Photographs by Christian Richters.
60 pp. with ca. 50 ill., 280 x 300 mm, hard-cover, German/English.
Edition Axel Menges
ISBN 3-930698-40-4.

The Embassies of the Nordic Countries in Berlin are political architecture of a particular kind, political architecture that does not assert a claim to power, but that is a self-portrait in the best sense of the word. The vision, which is already a reality on the level of architecture and design, aims to combine individual interests within a greater whole: the ancient democratic ideal that has perhaps never been expressed in a more beautiful and convincing gesture than in this combination of five countries, six buildings and six teams of architects, chosen in five national competitions for the individual buildings and a European competition for the central design concept. It is certainly no coincidence that such convincing symbolism of joint responsibility and action is not a success due to one of the European mammoth institutions but to the comparatively small Scandinavian countries Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland. Perhaps it is not even a coincidence that the concept of the individual sections that form an individual whole and while doing so preserve their individual quality as well as the unity comes from a young Viennese architectural practice whose principal protagonists, the Austrian Alfred Berger and the Finn Tiina Parkkinen, think and work across boundaries. A crucial factor was the location in Berlin, because it was only here that the new buildings for all five embassies could be commissioned at once. Berger + Parkinen’s architecture risks striking breaches of boundaries, not just between the countries involved but also between urban development and architecture, and technology and art. Urban space is an integral part of the embassy complex, to the same extent as nature. Materials and furniture indicate different cultures. And yet the composition, for all its openness and transparency, works to exact spatial sequences and precise external lines for the building, within the 226 metre long and 15 metre high band of meandering copper. The idea that the work of Alvar Aalto is being unexpectedly continued here comes involuntarily to mind.
Klaus-Dieter Weiss is a free-lance author and journalist. He develops his contributions to architectural criticism and theory against a comprehensive typological and historical background. Christian Richters studied communication design at the Folkwangschule in Essen. He is one of the most sought-after architectural photographers in Europe today.
 

Wolfgang Jacobsen, Werner Sudendorf.
Metropolis – Ein filmisches Laboratorium der modernen Architektur  /
                      A Cinematic Laboratory for Modern Architecture

With contributions by Martin Koerber and Yvonne Rehhahn.
240 pp. with 191 ill., 233 x 284,5 mm, hard-cover, German/English.
Edition Axel Menges
ISBN 3-930698-85-4.

What links film and architecture? Above all it is Metropolis, the film that Fritz Lang made in the Babelsberg studios in 1925/26. Its extravagance created enormous financial difficulties for Ufa, the biggest German film concern, but it had a brilliant première in Berlin in January 1927, went on to enjoy unparalleled success world-wide – and then came to symbolize (film) architectural design for the future. Metropolis, internationally renowned as a major piece of German film culture, represents film art in the Weimar Republic in an artistically unique and yet unusually popular way, but it also contains one of the first fully-formulated 20th-century city fantasies. Fritz Lang, stimulated by a journey to New York, had his architect Erich Kettelhut build a city of the future in the Babelsberg Studios outside Berlin, which, as a vision, went far beyond the real skyscraper silhouette. Luis Buñuel wrote the following about Metropolis as early as 1927: »Henceforth and for ever more the scenic designer has been replaced by the architect. The cinema will serve as a time interpreter of the architect’s boldest dreams.« The Tower of Babel from Metropolis has been a piece of urban fantasy that has inspired architects of every colour right down to the present day. American urban visions in films of the 80s and 90s, like for instance the cult film Blade Runner, would be inconceivable without Lang’s Metropolis. Now as then the Metropolis designs are considered to be highly-developed examples of a Modemist laboratory for film and architecture. All the surviving scenic architectural designs, over 200 working, factory and set photographs as well as numerous other documents, including the film architect’s hitherto unpublished memoirs and working reports had been placed at the authors’ disposal. In addition, other photographs from the Cinémathèque Française and a bundle of over 300 hitherto unpublished photographs from the estate of a German emigrant to Australia have been included.
Wolfgang Jacobsen studied German and English literature, theory of drama and art history; from 1982 to 1991 he was an editor at the Berlin International Film Festival; from 1991 he has been director of the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek’s publications department. Werner Sudendorf studied philosophy, journalism and theory of drama; since 1980 he has been director of the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek’s collections department.
 

Heidi and Toni Lüdi.
Movie Worlds – Production Design in Film / Das Szenenbild im Film.

With contributions by Kathinka Schreiber.
128 pp. with 170 ill., 233 x 284,5 mm, hardcover, English/ German.
Edition Axel Menges
ISBN 3-932565-13-4.  

It is not just the performers and directors, the household names, who make a film successful: every element – acting and photography, art direction and music, editing and staging – has to be of an equally high standard. Production de-sign has a particular role to play here: a designed image for a photographic medium is not a mere background, but an independent creative contribution, supporting the action and the atmosphere. The German Expressionist works that made film history after the First World War – Metropo lis, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or The Golem, for example – were highly dependent on their set designers. Art direction for a film, which also includes film architecture, is the result of a creative design process, and is thus an artistic product. This book takes up the cudgels for art in films, here above all for the careful design of images. There is almost no literature about the complex and demanding role of art directors, or production designers, as they are known internationally. This gap is filled by our book written by the two experienced film set designers Heidi and Toni Lüdi. They use familiar films and television series to portray the complex process leading to the design of film sets. They go into detail over the pros and cons of filming »on location« or in the studio, take a look at the problems of historical and contemporary settings and clear up the linguistic muddle of names for particular jobs that has grown up as a result of different film production developments in Europe and America. This generous, lavishly illustrated volume is a must for everyone involved in film and also for everyone interested in art film. Swiss designers Heidi and Toni Lüdi have designed countless film sets since studying art in London and Munich, including such famous examples as The Magic Mountain, Edith’s Diary, Wings of Desire, The Bear, Lindenstraße and Die zweite Heimat. Both are actively committed to their profession; they pass their experience on to the younger generation in frequent lectures and seminars, in Toni Lüdi’s case from 1989 also as professor at the Fachhochschule Rosenheim.
 

Jan Pieper.
Pienza -- Il progetto di una visione umanistica del mondo.

632 pp. with 1600 ill., 245 x 309 mm, hard-cover, Italian.
Edition Axel Menges
ISBN 3-930698-07-2. 

The city of Pienza, which the humanist Enea Silvio Piccolomini had built at his birthplace as Pope Pius II (1458--1464), is considered to be the first Renaissance ideal city. Here for the first time the urban interior of a piazza opens on to open countryside, and also for the first time in the history of modern building, architecture and nature are seen as complementary opposites. Fundamental early Renaissance architectural ideas like the classical church façade following the scheme of the ancient triumphal arch or the block-like isolation of a palace in the manner of a Roman insula are formulated with total clarity here for the first time and brought together in one project. One might think that this incunabulum of mod-ern urban architecture has been so central to the view of architectural and art history that there is nothing more to document, or even to research here. But this is true only of a series of individual art-historical problems. While painting and sculpture have definitely drawn the interest of large-scale treatment in work monographs, architec-ture and urban development have so far been the subject only of short works or individual essays. So far there has been no precise survey of the project as a whole, the essential basis of any academic analysis of architecture. And so it is not surprising that even fundamental typological details of the architecture of Pienza have not been noted. But when even the facts have scarcely been recorded, the truly interesting questions of architectural history like style, structure and iconography cannot be considered. This volume is the first comprehensive monograph that does justice to all aspects of Pius II’s creation.
Jan Pieper was Director of the Institute of Architectural and Urban History at the Technische Universitaet Berlin from 1988 to 1993, and from 1993 he has occupied the Chair of Architectural History and Preservation of Historic Monuments at the Rheinisch-Westfaelische Technische Hochschule in Aachen. He studied architecture in Berlin, Aachen and London, and after that architectural history in London. Central to his work is comparative architectural history, which deals with the investigation of generally widespread architectural thinking and fundamental common features of architectural tradition in quite different cultures.
 

Walter Kieß. 
Urbanismus im Industriezeitalter. Von der klassizistischen Stadt zur Garden City.

492 pp. with 480 ill., 230 x 300 mm, German.
Edition Axel Menges
ISBN 3-433-02058-8.

Now available from Edition Axel Menges Despite the wide variety of publications about urban development there has long been a lack of a full and coherent presentation of the way town planning has developed in our time. The present publication closes this gap in urban-development literature. It starts at the point at which the up-heaval of the French Revolution and industrialization set the course for today’s urban constellations. The survey follows the narrative approach taken by Anglo-Saxon historians, and the individual sections deal with the main urban-development themes that shifted into the foreground in the 19th century: municipal revolution and urban regulations; industrial revolution and urban growth, above all in relation to the special part played by Great Britain; the continuation of the classical urban-design ideal in France, England and Germany; the social-utopian estate and urban-development models devised by Robert Owen and Charles Fourier in the early days of industrialization; the great city redevelopments (Paris, Lyon etc.), urban beautification (the Ringstraße in Vien-na) and urban expansion (London’s suburban growth, the Berlin general building plan of 1862 and tenement building); paternalistic workers’ housing programmes in England, France and Germany; attempts at aesthetic renewal by Camillo Sitte, Raymond Unwin and the »City-Beautiful Movement« in the USA in the late 19th century; attempts at reform through the garden-city idea and subsequent movement. The treatment of these themes illustrates the extent to which contemporary urban situations are determined by 19th century ideas and enterprises. Thus the book provides all readers interested in urban development with an extensive set of facts and strategies. It has turned out as a compendium that aims to present and cast light on the essential features of the city as a Gesamtkunstwerk and to identify important criteria for future urban-development decisions.
Walter Kieß studied architecture at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart and graduated as a government architect. He worked as a planner for several years and gained his doctorate as an academic assistant at the Institute of Architectural History at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart. He was Professor of Architectural History, Urban-Development History and Preservation of Historic Monuments at the Hochschule für Technik Stuttgart from 1963 to 1993. Today the author works as an expert on monument preservation and historical themes in urban development.   
 

Waro Kishi – Buildings and Projects

With an introduction by Hiroshi Watanabe.
128 pp. with 180 ill., 242 x 297,5 mm, hard-cover, English.
Edition Axel Menges
ISBN 3-932565-03-7.

Waro Kishi first caught the attention of the architectural world with his house in Nipponbashi, an elegant townhouse in an Osaka district full of stores marketing electric and electronic goods. Like a slender volume of poetry in a shelf otherwise crowded with how-to books, it is a work of remarkable lightness and transparency, four storeys high, 13 m deep, but only 2.5 m wide. The award-winning house, which has a steel-frame structure, is economically constructed of readily available materials such as cement boards, yet it is put together with enormous care. The austerity makes the high-ceilinged dining room, a dramatic aerie on the top floor, seem that much more luxurious. Kishi was educated at Kyoto University and opened his own office in Kyoto in 1981. Many of his buildings are located in the Kansai region, which, besi des Kyoto, includes Osaka, Kobe and Nara. Kansai offers a working environment for architects that is very different from the one in Tokyo, where almost anything is permitted. It has an older history and, arguably, a more complex urban fabric that requires the observation of certain rules. A narrow frontage such as the one in Nipponbashi is commonplace in heavily built- up districts. The discipline that is demanded of someone working under such difficult conditions has helped to nurture Kishi’s work. Born in 1950, Kishi belongs to the generation of Japanese architects that emerged after Tadao Ando. Although he has acknowledged the influence of the Osaka architect, Kishi has a very different sensibility. His buildings are more delicate and subtle, and his designs are less driven by form. A self-described contrarian, who preferred the works of architects such as Marcel Breuer and Richard Neutra when many others were embracing Post-Modernism, he refuses in today’s changed climate to be labeled a Modernist or Miesian.
Hiroshi Watanabe studied architecture at Princeton University in Princeton, N. J., and at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. He has written extensively on contemporary Japanese architecture and on the work of architects from Western countries in Japan. He was the Japan correspondent for Progressive Architecture for many years. His writings include Amazing Architecture from Japan and the text for the monograph on the Marugame Hirai Museum by Alfredo Arribas (Opus 20). He also translated Space in Japanese Architecture by Mitsuo Inoue.
 

Hiroshi Watanabe.
The Architecture of Tokyo
348 pp. with ca. 400 ill., 161,5 x 222 mm, soft-cover, English.
Edition Axel Menges
ISBN 3-930698-93-5.

The Tokyo region is the most populous metropolitan area in the world and a place of extraordinary vitality. The political, economic and cultural centre of Japan, Tokyo also exerts an enormous international influence. In fact the region has been pivotal to the nation’s affairs for centuries. Its sheer size, its concentration of resources and institutions and its long history have produced buildings of many different types from many different eras. This is the first guide to introduce in one volume the architecture of the Tokyo region, encompassing Tokyo proper and adjacent prefectures, in all its remarkable variety. The buildings are presented chronologically and grouped into six periods: the medieval period (1185–1600), the Edo period (1600–1868), the Meiji period (1868–1912), the Taisho and early Showa period (1912–1945), the post-war reconstruction period (1945 to 1970) and the contemporary period (1970 until today). This comprehensive coverage permits those interested in Japanese architecture or culture to focus on a particular era or to examine buildings within a larger temporal framework. A concise discussion of the history of the region and the architecture of Japan develops a con- text within which the individual works may be viewed. Nearly 500 buildings are presented, from 15th-century Buddhist temples to 20th-century cultural buildings, from venerable folkhouses to works by leading contemporary architects of Japan such as Kenzo Tange, Fumihiko Maki, Arata Isozaki, Hiroshi Hara, Toyo Ito and Riken Yamamoto as well as by foreign architects such as Sir Norman Foster, Peter Eisenman and Steven Holl.
Hiroshi Watanabe studied architecture at Princeton University in Princeton, N. J., and at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. He has written extensively on contemporary Japanese architecture and on the work of architects from Western countries in Japan. He was the Japan correspondent for Progressive Architecture for many years. His writings include Amazing Architecture from Japan and the text for the monograph on the Marugame Hirai Museum by Alfredo Arribas (Opus 20). He also translated Space in Japanese Architecture by Mitsuo Inoue.

 

Opus 38 Heinz Tesar, Sammlung Essl, Klosterneuburg.
With an introduction by Gottfried Knapp and photographs by Christian Richters.
60 pp. with ca. 65 ill., 280 x 300 mm, hard-cover, German/English.
Edition Axel Menges
ISBN 3-930698-38-2.

Heinz Tesar’s buildings occupy a very particular place on the Austrian architectural scene, which is anyway populated by a lot of individualists. There is a great deal of creative imagination at work here, which always operates outside the scope of modern routine. The town of Klosterneuburg, north of Vienna, has become something like an artistic home for Tesar. The Schömerhaus, an office building whose huge oval central hall leaves convention far behind, and the Protestant church, which has a rounded floor plan like a tear-drop, were now followed by the impressive museum he has built here to house 4000 objects from the private Essl collection, which includes the most important collection of Austrian art after 1945. The floor plan is based on a triangle. Above a storage floor that runs the whole length of the building three individually shaped architectural entities are grouped around a green courtyard. The elaborately orchestrated section of the building on the short leg of the triangle accommodates the entrance foyer, staircase, library, offices and a flat. The long side of the triangle contains the hall for temporary exhibitions extending over two storeys; on the lower floor it is glazed on the courtyard side, and in the upper storey it is lit partly from the side and partly from the skylights in the slightly undulating roof. The hypotenuse is made up of a sequence of parallel galleries; they are topped by lanterns, which admit a great deal of daylight. Finally, Tesar gives the cubic building an organic touch with a curved flourish at the tip of the triangle. Following Gehry and Zumthor, who have recently made important contributions to the theme of art museums, Tesar is now of-fering a variant that responds very physically to its surroundings, creating individual spaces with a variety of light. Gottfried Knapp is responsible for architectural reporting as cultural editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung in Munich. He has written on contemporary architecture and urban development in almost all the specialist publications in Germany. After voluntary work with Pan Walther, Christian Richters studied communication design at the Folkwangschule in Essen. He is one of the most sought-after architectural photographers in Europe today. His photographs are to be found in publications like The Architectural Review, Architecture, Bauwelt, Domus, El Croquis, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui and Zodiac.
 

Fritz Barth.
Die Villa Lante in Bagnaia

512 pp. with ca. 180 ill., 210 x 280 mm, hard-cover, German.
Edition Axel Menges
ISBN 3-932565-05-3.

The Villa Lante in Bagnaia near Viterbo is outstanding among 16th-century Italian gardens. It is not particularly large, but it is the undisputed highlight of this epoch, the heyday of Italian horticulture, not just because it is outstandingly well maintained, but also because of its unique formal qualities and its extremely complex iconographic programme. The present monograph attempts to establish what triggers the intense sense of beauty with which visitors to the gardens are confronted. It is immediately clear that it is essential to analyse the form of the garden – here the extremely precise treatment of central perspective as a device is of considerable interest – but close attention has also to be paid to the significance of the in-dividual elements and the connections between them. This examination brings an elaborate accumulation of various sign systems to light, which seem to have the astonishing characteristic of not being entirely reconcilable, indeed they appear to build in contradictions as a basic constant. From this develops a panorama of the late 16th century, presenting the tangled pathways of perception of the gardens in all their complex relations, from the various late Renaissance garden types, via philosophy, the response to antiquity, perception of nature, perspective, harmony, literature, theatre and religion, and on to models of time and the forms it takes. Against this background the garden of the Villa Lante, which belonged to the scholarly cardinal and inquisitor Francesco Gambara, proves to be a difficult – and perhaps not entirely successful – balancing act between Renaissance traditions and the thrust of the Counter-Reformation, but showing at the same time, as a kind of »apotheosis of the art-work«, a surprising affinity with the present day.
Fritz Barth studied architecture at Stuttgart University. He runs an architectural practice in Fellbach and has been concerned with architectural theory and history for many years, especially with the way in which architecture becomes tied up with art and literature.   

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