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| ACT OF CREATION & THE SPIRIT OF A PLACE : A Holistic-Phenomenological Approach to Architecture [Nili Portugali] NOMINATED FOR THE RIBA INTERNATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2007. In this book Nili Portugali, presents her particular interpretation of the holistic-phenomenological worldview in theory and in practice, a worldview which stands in recent years at the forefront of the scientific discourse, and is tightly related to Buddhist philosophy. The purpose of architecture is first and foremost to create a human environment for human beings. The real challenge of current architectural practice is to make the best use of the potential inherent in our modern technological age. Yet, modern society has lost the value of man and thus created a feeling of alienation between man and the environment. Contemporary architecture sought to dissociate itself from the world of emotions and connect the design process to the world of ideas, thus creating a rational relation between building and man, devoid of any emotion. Portugali argues that in order to change the feeling of the environment and create places and buildings we really feel ‘at home’ and want to live in, what is needed is not a change of style or fashion, but a transformation of the mechanistic worldview underlying current thought and approaches. Based on Christopher Alexander’s basic assumption that behind human architecture there are universal and eternal codes common to us all as human beings, and that there is absolute truth underlying beauty and comfort, Portugali demonstrates how this approach, as well as her unique planning process stemming from it (based on the way things actually exist already on site) generates that common spiritual experience people undergo in buildings endowed with soul, no matter where or from what culture they come from. That she demonstrates through a variety of her buildings and projects (with over 600 color illustrations and drawings), in relation to the physical, cultural and social reality of the place they were planned and built on, an Israeli reality which reflects a unique interface between the orient and the west, a cultural interface she personally represents. The book is valuable to architects, artists, scientists, philosophers and anyone who cares about the quality and beauty of the environment we live in. REVIEW: "There is no other book quite like this one, it really is singular and worthy of your close attention." -- The RIBA Bookshops. "It is not every day that a book is published which describes the world view of an Israeli architect with a fascinating body of work and a structured thesis about how architecture should be practiced here, Such is Nili Portugali’s book." -- Books Supplement, 'Ha’aretz', December 13, 2006. { 248pp, 220x280mm, May 2006; HB, £39.90, 3936681058:9783936681055 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| ALBRECHT ADE : Painted with Light -- Photages [Gottfried Knapp] Text in English and German. Albrecht Ade’s 'photages', created with special light techniques, have nothing in common with the 'photocollages' or 'photomontages' of the 20th century. When artists as different as El Lissitzky, John Heartfield, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Raoul Hausmann or Hannah Höch constructed futuristically bold, surreal or satirical images from photographic materials as a response to quotations from reality cut out and then stuck into Cubist 'papiers collés' by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, they worked mainly with someone else’s material, with trouvailles. In contrast, Ade uses only his own material for his combination images, and his method for mounting images, for 'editing them into each other', does not need of scissors and paste either. He cultivates the usually involuntary effect of double exposure, a hazard from the days of analogue photography. He controls the chances of pictorial superimposition and confusion, artfully and purposefully arranging his own, deliberately positioned images among and on top of each other, using a technically elaborate matching and omission process. Ade, as well as teaching at the Stuttgart Akademie der Bildenden Künste, has intensively promoted cinematic animation techniques in his years as director of the Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film, and since 1990, as founder-director of the Filmakademie in Ludwigsburg, has allowed animated film and camera arts to develop in the greatest possible breadth, in fact has helped to win the Ludwigsburg model the highest artistic respect in the film world. This all suggests how inventively and ingeniously his creative output mingles artistically creative and elaborately echnical ideas and fascinations. Photography as a creative method for fine art -- something the pioneers of photography dreamed of in the 19th century -- becomes reality in Albrecht Ade’s 'photages'. { 96pp, 240x285mm, January 2006; HB, £36.00, 3932565509:9783932565502 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| ALEX POPOV : Buildings & Projects [Paul McGillick] 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. 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. Popov is essentially a Modernist, his homes are invariably elegant and scrupulous in their detailing. { 128pp, 242x297mm, August 2002; HB, £46.00, 3932565185:9783932565182 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| ALEXANDER BRENNER -- HOUSES / HÄUSER [Gottfried Knapp] Text in English and German. Brenner's villas can be seen and experienced as three-dimensional works of art, lucid sculptures to live in, thoroughly modelled down to the last detail. The geometrical sculptural effect is achieved outside by the horizontals and verticals of their architectural structure and bands of windows, used to powerful graphic effect, by the thrusting canopy roofs, the cubically effective white walls pushing into the rooms individually, and by their large expanses of glazed façades. They also stand up energetically to the organically designed gardens and other outdoor spaces. But what is completely unique is the design logic Brenner deploys to make the cubism of the external forms impact on the interior, applying it to the everyday utility objects in the living rooms, kitchen and bathroom. Amazingly, he makes it look completely natural that not only all the cupboards in these houses are adapted to the stereometric order of the spatial continuum's subtle rhythms, but so are bulky fittings like washbasins, bathtubs, cookers and dishwashers. So if there as ever been a Stuttgart style in the history of more recent architecture, as is so often asserted, then that style has achieved a new and functionally highly refined liveliness in Brenner's houses. { 128pp, 240x300mm, April 2009; HB, £39.90, 3936681201:9783936681208 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| ALFREDO ARRIBAS, SEAT-PAVILLON, WOLFSBURG Text in English and Spanish. In 2000 the Autostadt, a show park for the Volkswagen group and its subsidiaries from Seat via Audi to Bentley and Lamborghini, opened in Wolfsburg. Alfredo Arribas designed the Seat Pavilion, and has brought off the brilliant trick of making an essentially reticent building into the focal point of the Autostadt. The structure is like a snail shell, forbidding and closed with the exception of a band of windows that seems to rise directly out of the surface of the lake on the Autostadt site. The irregular curve of the ground plan is reminiscent of a leaf or other forms borrowed from nature. Access is via two elegant ramps floating over the water and the site and thrusting straight into the centre of the pavilion: a homage to the old master, Le Corbusier. And then inside we are confronted with a surprise-packed exhibition landscape: a dazzling synthesis of acoustic and visual impressions that cast their spell over visitors as they walk round. Alfredo Arribas was a provocative newcomer on the architectural scene in Barcelona in the late eighties and is now an international success. He was probably predestined for this job like no other architect. He showed a highly personal flair for presenting spaces and goods from the outset, attracting early attention with his designs for discotheques and bars like the enormous Louie Vega (1988) discotheque, or the Torres de Avila (1990). The expressive tower for the Marugame Hirai Museum (1993) is also part of this creative phase, where forms did not necessarily have to be justified by functional logic. But Arribas' architecture changed into its business suit for the very next commissions. For example, even bankers in their pin-stripe suits feel perfectly at home in the cafeteria he designed for Norman Foster's Commerzbank headquarters in Frankfurt. Arribas is working on two large projects at present: a family entertainment centre in Bari and the Cite des Musiques Vivantes in Montlucon. { 52pp, August 2002; HB, £24.00, 3930698447:9783930698448 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| ALMIR MAVIGNIER : Additive Posters (Additive Plakate) [Eva Linhart; Contributions by Bernd Kracke & Almir Mavignier] Text in English and German. 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. This book elucidates 'additive posters' within the context of Almir Mavignier's influential œuvre. Special attention is paid to the interfaces between painting, poster design and the artist's other fields of activity such as postage-stamp 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. { 96pp, 295x295mm, January 2005; HB, £36.00, 393256541X:9783932565410 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| AM BAVARIAPARK, MÜNCHEN [Introduction by Michael Goj & Christoph Tempel; Photographs by Franziska von Gagern] Text in English and German. 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 by Steidle+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 Ganghofer-Straße 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. The architects have realised 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. { 60pp, 280x300mm, September 1998; HB, £24.00, 3930698560:9783930698561 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| ANDERSENS MÄRCHEN [Illustrations by Aurélie Blanz] TEXT IN GERMAN. When Hans Christian Andersen was 14 years old, he left his hometown Odense on Fyn Island for Copenhagen in order to become an actor or dancer. No one knew him there. Also, he was completely destitute, had a rather unprepossessing appearance, and his education left much to be desired. He brought with him a whole host of little plays and lyrical dramas, part of them his own work -- pieces he had seen while working as an extra in the Odense theatre or learned from wandering troupes of actors. There were also stories he had heard from agricultural workers and from professional storytellers on the farms where his mother had worked as a hired hand. His father, an exceedingly well-read shoemaker who wished he had been able to go to grammar school, supported the child to the best of his ability and encouraged him in his ambitions, so that the boy’s self-confidence when he arrived in Copenhagen was undiminished. Thus Andersen was filled by the desire to become a great artist, and accordingly loved to play, sing, and dance in public. Full of determination, he found out the names of well-known Copenhagen artists, knocked on their doors, and in fact many of them allowed him to show off his skills in their homes. He was regarded as a kind of child of nature, an unspoiled young savage, a naïf with a trace of genius about him. In 1820 he succeeded in getting admitted to the drama school of the Royal Theatre. Very soon, however, he decided to follow a different career. One of the theatre’s directors obtained a government stipend for Andersen so that he could complete his schooling. Thus Andersen was able to finish his secondary schooling and to visit the university. In his fairy tales, children express themselves as they really are. They are not idealised, and often the stories do not end happily -- in "The Red Shoes", for example, a little girl succumbs to her vanity. Another thing that was new was the use of onomatopoetic words that break through the literary language with direct emotional expressions and that readers at the time considered to be uncultured and primitive. And yet it was the fairy tales that established Andersen’s fame after he had initially become known for his novels. This volume contains a few selected fairy tales, including "The Little Mermaid" and "The Ugly Duckling", said to be Andersen’s original inventions, while others go back to older Danish and foreign fairy-tale motifs that were rewritten and improved upon by Andersen. This book marks the German debut of Aurélie Blanz, who studied book illustration in Hamburg and Paris and has previously worked for a number of French publishing houses. { 80pp, 240x285mm, November 2005; HB, £22.00, 3936681023:9783936681024 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| ARCHITECTURE OF EAST AUSTRALIA [Bill MacMahon (ed)] 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, popularised 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 civilisation. It took a century to realise 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 covers 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. { 256pp, 160x220mm, September 1998; PB, £24.00, 3930698900:9783930698905 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| ARCHITECTURE AS PHILOSOPHY : The Work of Imre Makovecz [János Gerle] At the start of this book Imre Makovecz gently criticises the commentators who first brought his work to the West. He is grateful to them of course, but he claims they only half understood, simplifying and misinterpreting. They presented him as a heroic rebel against the communist system, rather than seeing his battle against a larger enemy that we all still face: this he calls impersonal intelligence. When he remarks that architecture is not regarded as an art in Hungary, but as a service, and that it has no place in the Ministry of Culture, we find it all too familiar. It is perhaps understandable that someone so concerned with cultural memory -- especially long-repressed folk memories -- should arise in much-oppressed Hungary, which was fought over for millennia even before the advent of the Soviet Empire, but the same cultural amnesia is occurring throughout the world, exhibited in increasing rootlessness and placelessness. Perhaps the most misleading reading of all has been Makovecz the wild man or primitive, but this book shows him to be a highly articulate architectural philosopher and intellectual, conversant from the start with a wide range of international sources. There is much more to the work than the expressive image we first encounter. It warmly embraces place and community, and quite aside from its ecological dimension, there is a concern with the building process and the participation of craftsmen that would have warmed William Morris’ heart. Most bold and most intriguing is Makovecz’s claim to be tapping into ancient and universal folk memories that are lodged in hand-made patterns, gestures and even dance. Over the last century we have had to revise our sense of civilisation, for cities and writing are but five thousand years old, yet our forebears tens of thousand years ago could scarcely have been less intelligent and communicative than ourselves. { 252pp, 240x300mm, January 2006; HB, £49.00, 3932565568:9783932565564 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| ARCHITECTURE OF PARIS [Andrew Ayers] 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 characterised 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 modernise and adapt a crumbling fabric to the exigencies of the electronic age. { 416pp, 161x222mm, April 2003; HB, £28.00, 393069896X:9783930698967 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| ARCHITECTURE OF ROME [Stefan Grundmann (ed); Translated by Michael Robinson] Architects and artists have always acknowledged over the centuries that Rome is rightly called the 'eternal city'. Rome is eternal above all because it was always young, always 'in its prime'. Here the buildings that defined the West appeared over more than 2000 years, here the history of European architecture was written. The foundations were laid even in ancient Roman times, when the first attempts were made to design interiors and thus make space open to experience as something physical. And at that time the Roman architects also started to develop building types that are still valid today, thus creating the cornerstone of later Western architecture. In it Rome's primacy remained unbroken -- whether it was with old St Peter's as the first medieval basilica or new St. Peter's as the building in which Bramante and Michelangelo developed the High Renaissance, or with works by Bernini and Borromini whose rich and lucid spatial forms were to shape Baroque as far as Vienna, Bohemia and Lower Franconia, and also with Modern buildings, of which there are many unexpected pearls to be found in Rome. All this is comprehensible only if it is presented historically, i. e. in chronological sequence, and so the guide has not been arranged topographically as usual but chronologically.This means that one is not led in random sequence from a Baroque building to an ancient or a modern one, but the historical development is followed successively. Every epoch is preceded by an introduction that identifies its key features. This produces a continuous, lavishly illustrated history of the architecture of Rome -- and thus at the same time of the whole of the West. Practical handling is guaranteed by an alphabetical index and detailed maps, whose information does not just immediately illustrate the historical picture, but also makes it possible to choose a personal route through history. { 384pppp, 160x220mm, October 1998; HB, £24.00, 3930698609:9783930698608 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| ARCHITECTURE OF ROME, 2ND EDITION : An Architectural History in 402 Individual Presentations [Stefan Grundmann (ed)] Rome is where the history of European architecture was written. The foundations were laid in ancient Roman times when the first attempts were made to design interiors which could be experienced as something physical. Ancient Roman architects also started to develop building types that are still valid today, thus creating the cornerstone of later Western architecture. This guide has been arranged chronologically. Every epoch is preceded by an introduction that identifies its key features. This produces a continuous, lavishly illustrated history of the architecture of Rome, indeed, the whole of the West. The book includes an alphabetical index and detailed maps, whose information does not just immediately illustrate the historical picture, but also makes it possible to choose a personal route through history. In order to clarify the historical development, the key buildings of each period and other major works are emphasised both in the text and on the maps. { 384pp, 160x225mm, September 2007; HB, £24.00, 3936681163:9783936681161 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| ARCHITECTURE OF TOKYO 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 Edoperiod (1600-1868), the Meiji period (1868-1912), the Taisho and early Showa period (1912-1945), the post-war reconstruction period (1945-1970) 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 context within which the individual works may be viewed. Over 500 buildings are presented, from 15th-century Buddhist temples to 20th-century cultural buildings, from venerable folk houses 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. { 272pp, August 2002; HB, £24.00, 3930698935:9783930698936 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| ARUP, HONG KONG STATION : New Wing, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam Recently returned to Chinese sovereignty after 150 years under the British Empire, Hong Kong is a city of constant reinvention. Decades of free-wheeling capitalism and rapid growth have created a unique urban organism, boasting a spectacular harbour-front skyline supported by one of the world's most sophisticated infrastructure systems. Yet, when plans to build a new, world-class airport and associated infrastructure were revealed in 1989, the territory's future was hanging in the balance. The Airport Core Programme would ensure that Hong Kong remains a global centre for business and tourism, and a major Asian transportation hub. It would be one of the world's largest single infrastructure projects and would become a symbol of Hong Kong's determination and self-confidence. Following an ambitious programme of design and construction, Hong Kong Station, the state-of-the-art terminus to the Airport and Lantau Railway, opened to coincide with the airport's debut on 7th July 1998.Situated on a newly created waterfront site at the heart of the central business district, the building has been designed as a comprehensive inter-modal transport facility, forging vital links to the surrounding urban fabric. This book, written by the designers who masterminded, planned and detailed the flagship station, chronicles the building's creation from a bold vision to working reality. Arup is recognised throughout the world for producing buildings of exceptional quality which advance the frontiers of architecture and engineering. Its multi-disciplinary collaboration on this project brings together an extraordinary synthesis of conventional design wisdom and technical innovation, to produce a holistic urban intervention driven by the symbiosis between mass transit and commerce. Designed in the tradition of the world's great railway terminal, 'Hong Kong Station' is effectively an extension to the city, creating a major public amenity within a spacious and naturally illuminated series of interconnected volumes. { 60pp, March 2000; HB, £28.00, 3930698390:9783930698394 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| BENARES : The Sacred Landscape of Varanasi [Niels Gutschow] The book gives a comprehensive view of the complex world of India's sacred place par excellence, also known as Benares. Beyond a scholarly presentation of pilgrimages and documentation of their routes the book opens a new view: visually compelling photographs focus on sacred objects. { 498pp, 280x270mm, February 2006; HB, £89.00, 393668104X:9783936681048 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| BERGER & PARKKINEN : Die Botschaften Der Nordischen Lander, Berlin [Klaus-Dieter Weiß] Test in German and English. 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 a European competition for the central design concept and in five national competitions for the individual buildings. 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 Nordic 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+ Parkkinen’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 metres long and 15 metres high band of meandering copper. The idea that the work of Alvar Aalto is being unexpectedly continued here comes involuntarily to mind. { 60pp, 285x310mm, April 2000; HB, £24.00, 3930698404:9783930698400 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| BIOMORPHIC ARCHITECTURE : Menschenund Tiergestalten in Der Architektur/Human & Animal Forms in Architecture Text in English and German. Mankind needs to relate to inanimate matter as well. Manking 'animates' stones, mountains, rivers, yes even the world and the cosmos so that it can communicate with them. There is quite clearly a need to initiate individual contact also with architecture, with our surroundings. This is easier if we can also recognise certain characteristics of our own bodies in the constructed bodies of the built environment. We can go well beyond the common phenomenon of corporeality to find countless analogies between buildings and human beings, thus demonstrating a first step towards an anthropomorphy of architecture. These statements become clearer if a column is interpreted as an anthropomorphic element. If certain features in facades are reminiscent of a pair of eyes, then architectural physiognomy helps us to a dialogue: the building is looking at us, in the direct sense of the word. In the world of Christian symbolism the church -- spatially and theologically -- is constantly compared with the body of Christ, and thus becomes an image of a man-god. The church is the 'mysterious body of Christ', and all parts of the building become metaphors of Christ and his congregation.The 'organic' architecture of the 20th century in its three-dimensional and sculptural manifestations constantly addresses the corporeality of biological creatures. In very recent times we are surprised how often the metaphor of man and architecture occurs: in the work of Ricardo Porro, Imre Makovecz, Santiago Calatrava, Reima Pietila and others. Zoomorphic architecture is a variant of anthropomorphic architecture. Elephants, birds, fishes, insects do not just appear in many current works of modern architecture like those of Frank O Gehry and Coop Himmelblau, they are also absurd manifestations of trivial architecture that has also to be considered in its everyday quality. If we are talking about 'expanded' architecture, then cities, the world and even the cosmos have to be included. Mankind is still moved by the transfer from man as microcosm to the universe as macrocosm. { 188pp, August 2002; HB, £46.00, 3930698870:9783930698875 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| BLOSSOMING GAP A yawning gap between two 1960s buildings is not at all unusual in Cologne. A gap scarcely wide enough to park a few bicycles has been used as an office by the Rendel and Spitz Advertising Agency since 1999. { January 2004; HB, £12.90, 3932565355:9783932565359 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| BOLLES + WILSON, NIEUWE LUXOR THEATER, ROTTERDAM [Lars Lerup, Mirko Zardini & Peter Wilson; Photographs by Christian Richters] 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. { 120pp, 280x300mm, October 2003; HB, £34.00, 3930698471:9783930698479 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| BOLLES + WILSON, NORD/LB, MAGDEBURG [Introduction by Frank R Werner; Photographs by Christian Richters] Text in English and German. Julia Bolles-Wilson and Peter L Wilson have built a large number of striking, thoroughly detailed cultural and commercial buildings in recent years, all sharing the characteristic that they stubbornly resist superficial stylistic categorisation. Their buildings are articulated and positioned in an unmistakable way in their respective urban spaces, thanks to pointed breaks with rational space configurations, sculptural shapes for architectural silhouettes and the use of polychrome surfaces. { 60pp, 280x300mm, April 2004; HB, £24.00, 393069851X:9783930698516 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| BRUNNERT UND PARTNER, FLUGHAFEN LEIPZIG HALLE [Introduction by Martina Düttmann; Photographs by Christian Richters] Text in English and German. The new Leipzig/Halle airport has not just one, but two predecessors. One was Leipzig-Mockau airport, opened in 1923 and often still used after the Second World War in the GDR days to serve the Leipziger Messe. The other was Leipzig/Halle airport which opened in 1927 and by 1937 was already the second-largest airport in Germany. Passenger numbers had increased fourfold by 1994. A master plan was worked out for a second runway, intended for 3.5 million passengers per year. An open architectural competition followed and was won by Brunnert und Partner from Stuttgart. They won with a risky concept that ran counter to the master plan. Instead of filling the site between the two runways the architects designed a huge bridge structure spanning the railway track and integrating the car-park, the mall, the check-in hall, the access road and the transfer to the railway station. This concludes the first building phase, which begins at the existing terminal and ends beyond the railway lines. The concept of the bridge will not be complete until the second building phase, although it can already be made out quite clearly. { 72pp, 280x300mm, April 2004; HB, £28.00, 3930698528:9783930698523 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| BRUNO PAUL : The Life & Work of a Pragmatic Modernist [William Owen Harrod] 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 the 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 centre 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 honour 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. REVIEW: "...a beautifully produced book..." -- Wallis Miller, University of Kentucky, H-Net Reviews. { 128pp, 235x285mm, January 2005; HB, £39.00, 3932565479:9783932565472 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| BRUNO PAUL, HAUS FRIEDWART, WETZLAR [Alfred Ziffer; Photographs by Deimel+Wittmar & Gerd Scharfscheer] Text in German & English. Ernst Leitz was taking the prototype for the legendary Leica camera to be tested in North America when 'Haus Friedwart' in his hometown of Wetzlar was begun. The architect Bruno Paul (1874-1968) was a sought-after designer of challenging interior designs and architect of grand upper-middle class houses and public buildings. By means of wood panelling, fittings and the design of ceilings he gives every room a special character. Details such as door handles, radiator screens and lamps remain today, as does all the furniture designed for the house. This building is therefore a unique example of Bruno Paul's special art, which, through zigzag lines, twin arches and star forms, represents an early example of Art Decó. { 56pp, 290x310mm, August 2008; HB, £24.90, 3932565673:9783932565670 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| BUILT OR UNBUILT : Architects Present Their Favourite Projects / Architekten zeigen ihre Lieblingsprojekte [Ursula Schwitalla (ed)] Text in English and German. Personal favourite projects selected by architects of international distinction are presented in a book for the first time. Projects that were devised and realised, but also some that were never built. Speakers in the 'Architecture Today' lecture series that has taken place for the last twenty years at Tübingen University were asked to contribute. Invitations went to 'established' master builders, provocative young developers of new forms and technologies or significant representatives of regional architecture: a promenade architectural ranges from coolly functional to free artistic design, from architecture that feels committed to the Bauhaus aesthetic to deconstructive design. The idea for this book came from the 20th anniversary of the lecture series. The result is an exciting catalogue of very different projects from the last three decades, like museums, buildings related to science and education and to music and theatre, offices and homes, government and religious buildings, right down to the architects' own houses. The scale ranges from mega-projects for whole cities in Asia to a subtle design for a lift in Salzburg or two thoughtful architectural visions expressed in a 'Tower of Dreams' or just in an exhibition. These are all projects that attach considerable significance to their inventors. A clear majority of the choice of architects lit upon realised projects originating in competitions, direct contracts or a problem the architects set themselves. The choice of projects that stayed on paper arouses even more curiosity -- buildings that did not win first prize in a competition, but still have a great deal to tell about the wealth of ideas, context and philosophy in contemporary architecture, presented in this publication because their designers definitely wanted to make their mark. A variety of answers were heard to the question of why a certain project was chosen. The fact is that ultimately favourite projects are the ones that represent philosophy and design ideals, as well a the knowledge and skill of the architects and teams in a particular way. But above all they were projects that moved the architects. { 235pp, 245x300mm, March 2007; HB, £39.90, 3932565088:9783932565083 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| BUKHARA -- THE EASTERN DOME OF ISLAM [Anette Gangler, Heinz Gaube, Attilio Petruccioli] A city planner, an architect and a historian trace the urban development of this outstanding city and analyse 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. { 224pp, 233x284mm, April 2003; HB, £49.00, 3932565274:9783932565274 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| CALIFORNIA : Impressions from the American West/Impressionen aus dem Amerikanischen Westen [Hillert Ibbeken] Text in English and German. Perhaps the fascination of American landscapes, particularly the deserts is their featurelessness. In Germany, Brandenburg for example, the much plainer landscape lives on in its history. This where the Great Elector won his victory and Napoleon lost a battle. Actual nature unaffected by human beings is hidden under the woodland and heath. The American desert landscape is dominated by grandiose nature with out human intervention. Here the history of the earth is to the fore exercising a particular fascination and anyone who reads it enjoys a double gift. The author travelled around the country photographing the mountains and valleys, the coastline and nature reserves. He also encountered people and writes about American friendliness. { 120pp, 280x300mm, November 2006; HB, £28.00, 3936681112:9783936681116 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| CARLO SCARPA, GIPSOTECA CANOVIANA, POSSAGNO Text in English and Italian. 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's plaster 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 that 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 placings 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. { 60pp, 280x300mm, April 2003; HB, £24.00, 3930698226:9783930698226 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| CASTLES OF THE WESER RENAISSANCE [Michael Bischoff & Hillert Ibbeken (eds). Photographs by Hillert Ibbeken] Text in English & German. In the area along the Weser, there was a great deal of building activity between the Reformation and the Thirty Years War which was helped along by economic prosperity. Little affected later by war or modernisation, high quality Renaissance castles, aristocratic estates, town halls and civic architecture have survived here in exceptional density. This facet of Central European Renaissance architecture started to be appreciated in the early 20th century. This led to the concept of the Weser Renaissance, oriented above all towards formal and regional history, and still popular today, like a kind of brand. The present volume offers a representative selection of the region's castles and palaces for the first time, dealing with both princely residences and seats of the nobility. Architecture and court culture are placed in a European context that goes beyond older approaches based on the stylistic history and shows that forms demonstrating princely prestige have qualities in common well outside the region. Michael Bischoff’s introductory text provides an overview of Renaissance architecture in the Weser area. Uwe Albrecht and Julian Jachmann explain the terminology and function of princely architecture. Heiner Borggrefe analyses early Renaissance architectural ornamentation, G Ulrich Großmann covers the topic after the mid-16th century. Thomas Fusenig writes on the arts and sciences at the courts. Rolf Schönlau discusses aspects of building materials in terms of economic history. Hillert Ibbeken deals with the sandstone that is most frequently used from a geological point of view. The descriptive catalogue is by Katja Schoene and Michael Bischoff. { 304pp, 280x300mm, August 2008; HB, £69.00, 3936681236:9783936681239 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| CHINESE ARCHITECTURE & PLANNING : Ideas, Methods, Techniques [Qinghua Guo] China possesses a long continuous architectural history, and architecture plays a distinctive role in Chinese civilisation itself, in which the concept of architecture and the way of construction are entirely different from those in the West. In the field of architectural history, a specialist study by a variety of distinguished scholars, both Chinese and non-Chinese, covered the style and aesthetics of Chinese architecture that has been recognised as timelessness and unchanging quality. The architectural diversity and variation, and technological innovation and evolution of Chinese architecture have largely been ignored. This book presents a thematic discussion of architectural history and a critical evaluation of city planning, with a focus on the issues of ideas, methods and techniques in the context of the culture, politics and religion of the pre-modern China. In the book, Qinghua Guo establishes a broad periodisation for the architectural formation and development with a clear conceptual framework for it, and interprets its architectonics and typology in details. This study attempts to identify major characters of Chinese architecture and planning in order to understand how they were formed and why. { 168pp, 235x285mm, October 2005; HB, £39.90, 3932565541:9783932565540 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| COOP HIMMELB(L)AU, BMW-WELT, MÜNCHEN [Introduction by Frank R Werner; Photographs by Christian Richters] Text in English and German. The architects in the Viennese Coop Himmelb(l)au team have felt committed to the credo of constructing cities and buildings that float like clouds ever since the practice was founded in 1968, though it did take a while before gently curving, 'floating' buildings became a reality. It was not until new, computer-aided design and building methods and the use of innovative building materials came along recently that it became possible to realise even unthinkable architectural hybrids so light that they actually do seem to float. So the new Musée des Confluences is currently under construction in Lyon, a cloud that has been in the planning phase for some years. And a cloud building like this also does exist in reality in Munich in the form of the new BMW World, conceived by Coop Himmelb(l)au and recently opened. This new building completes the spectacular trio of museum buildings, the Mercedes- Benz and the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart, by UNStudio and Delugan Meissl Associated Architects respectively. A series of excellent interior and exterior photographs provide a record of this demonstration project by BMW. The urban-sculptural and internal spatial qualities of the new BMW World are also analysed thoroughly, and dealt with in detail in the contexts of Coop Himmelb(l)au's older and more recent work. The question is also addressed of the extent to which the structural and material shape of the building actually corresponds with an image of something light enough to float. The presentation is rounded off by a digression into the world of 'branding', which has learned how to use spectacular architecture more and more directly as a publicity factor, and to convey an image, or as an artefact. { 60pp, 280x300mm, February 2009; HB, £24.90, 3932565665:9783932565663 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| DAS WEITE SUCHEN/EXPANDING THE GAP Text in English and German. 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 over-dimensioned, 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. { 112pp, August 2002; HB, £12.90, 3932565282:9783932565281 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| DEAR DIARY / LIEBES TAGEBUCH [Martin Rendel & René Spitz (eds)] Text in English and German. The narrowest building in Cologne is the office of the advertising agency rendel & spitz. Once a year, during the 'Passagen', the offsite- programme of the international furniture fair in Cologne, the office is turned into an exhibition space: It serves as a stage for an installation of a chosen designer. In 2005 there was no exhibition. The accompanying book to the exhibition that never took place contained only empty pages. Just as in previous years, the book was sent out to designers, architects, artists, journalists and friends. One of the recipients then asked rendel & spitz whether he was supposed to fill the empty pages and sent the book back. An idea was born: each recipient was asked to lend his (used) book for the 2006 exhibition 'Dear Diary / Liebes Tagebuch'. The result is a collection of private notes, sketches, photographs, collages, and objects. The accompanying book shows a synopsis of the contributions, which in some cases are very personal. In addition to the book, there is a CD-ROM with the complete contents of each book that was contributed. { 96pp, 210x150mm, February 2006; HB, £12.90, 3936681090:9783936681093 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| DEBORDERED SPACE (ENTGRENZTER RAUM) : Indeterminacy within the Visual Perception of Space (Unbestimmtheit in der visuellen Raumwahrnehmung) [Markus Jatsch] Text in English and German. 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 de-bordering space. Against a historical background of past attempts to de-border 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 de-bordering 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. { 128pp, 233x284mm, January 2005; HB, £36.00, 3932565436:9783932565434 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| DIE TEKTONIK DER HELLENEN : Kontext und Wirkung der Architekturtheorie von Karl Bötticher [Hartmut Mayer] TEXT IN GERMAN. Tectonics is back on the agenda for contemporary architectural discussion. Up to now tectonics tended to be associated with the language of neo-Classical architecture, which seemed to have faded out because of the triumph of Modernism, but now the dogmas of Modernism are being questioned, interest is reviving in architecture using tectonic design principles. So DIE TEKTONIK DER HELLENEN, Bötticher's main work published in 1844-52, does not just provide a theory of tectonic form that is still estimable today, it also contains a theory about the central problem of the 19th century, that of taking over the stylistic forms of past epochs. { 128pp, 233x284mm, April 2004; HB, £36.00, 3932565371:9783932565373 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| DIE VILLA LANTE IN BAGNAIA Text in German. The Villa Lante in Bagnaia near Viterbo is outstanding among 16th-century Italian gardens. It is not particularly large, but it is the undisputed highlight of this epoch, the heyday of Italian horticulture, not just because it is outstandingly well maintained, but also because of its unique formal qualities and its extremely complex iconographic programme. The present monograph attempts to establish what triggers the intense sense of beauty with which visitors to the gardens are confronted. It is immediately clear that it is essential to analyse the form of the garden -- here the extremely precise treatment of central perspective as a device is of considerable interest -- but close attention has also to be paid to the significance of the individual elements and the connections between them. This examination brings an elaborate accumulation of various sign systems to light, which seem to have the astonishing characteristic of not being entirely reconcilable, indeed they appear to build in contradictions as a basic constant. From this develops a panorama of the late 16th century, presenting the tangled pathways of perception of the gardens in all their complex relations, from the various late Renaissance garden types, via philosophy, the response to antiquity, perception of nature, perspective, harmony, literature, theatre and religion, and on to models of time and the forms it takes. Against this background the garden of the Villa Lante, which belonged to the scholarly cardinal and inquisitor Francesco Gambara, proves to be a difficult -- and perhaps not entirely successful -- balancing act between Renaissance traditions and the thrust of the Counter-Reformation, but showing at the same time, as a kind of 'apotheosis of the artwork', a surprising affinity with the present day. { 512pp, April 2002; HB, £69.00, 3932565053:9783932565052 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| EGON EIERMANN : German Embassy, Washington [Introduction by Immo Boyken; Photographs by J Alexander & Jerry Hecht] Text in English and German. When the German Embassy in Washington was completed in 1964, the architectural 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. { 60pp, 280x300mm, May 2005; HB, £24.90, 3930698544:9783930698547 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| EGON EIERMANN / SEP RUF, GERMAN PAVILIONS, BRUSSELS 1958 [Introduction by Immo Boyken; Photographs by Heinrich Heidersberger und Eberhard Troeger] Text in English and German. Architects Egon Eiermann and Sep Ruf created The German Pavilions at the 1958 Brussels World Fair. Walter Rossow was landscape and garden planner, and Hans Schwippert responsible for the exhibition programme. The architects placed eight pavilions of different sizes on a square ground plan, linked by bridge-style walkways and surrounding an inner courtyard. This courtyard created a peaceful garden which allowed visitors to look through the linking bridges to the outside world. The pavilions were raised off the ground by a plinth of clay-yellow brick, which gave the impression they were floating. From the outside, their floors showed outside as black bands in front of which was a network of white-painted steel tubes, forming a kind of filigree epidermis. The wooden floors in red pine matchboarding were reminiscent of classical sailing yachts. Blinds were set at the outer edge of the ceilings that when lowered transformed the open impression into a closed, cubic impression. Le Figaro remarked about the pavilions: ‘The Germans have created an exhibition of exemplary lucidity, treated delicately and with an entirely Parisian grace’. { 56pp, 280x300mm, August 2007; HB, £24.90, 3932565622:9783932565625 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| ERNST NEUFERT / KARLE + BUXBAUM, NEUFERTBAU, DARMSTADT [Introduction by Klaus Honold; Photographs by Thomas Eicken] Text in English and German. Ernst Neufert's apartment house at the foot of the Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt is one of the exemplary post-War Modernist buildings in Germany. For his 1954/55 building Neufert returned to the minimalistic standardisation principles he had developed on Albert Speer's staff between 1940 and 1945. The building's envelope combines the tectonic gestures of the twenties with the decorative elements of the fifties. Peter Karle and Ramona Buxbaum founded their practice in 1990. Among their projects that have attracted attention are a housing complex especially adapted to the needs of women, the HEAG transport control centre and the pharmaceutical firm Merck's fire station. { 60pp, 280x300mm, April 2004; HB, £24.00, 3930698501:9783930698509 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| ERNST VON IHNE / HEINZ TESAR BODE MUSEUM, BERLIN : Bode-Museum, Berlin [Gottfried Knapp] Text in English and German. Heinz Tesar has carefully preserved the existing Bode Museum building on the Museum Island in Berlin, and provided it with highly unusual additional sections for the anticipated hordes of visitors. His work proved its extraordinary qualities even at the opening. There is scarcely anywhere else in the world where the contrasting styles arising from a museum's various building periods come together to form such an individual whole, at best comparable in its density with the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa's museum designs. The essential basis for this successful symbiosis of heterogeneous stylistic elements is the variable historical architecture that museum director Wilhelm Bode invited architect Ernst Eberhard von Ihne to develop around 1900 for the collections, which were very disparate in both style and genre. When the museum opened in 1904, the magnificent architecture still had a political message to proclaim. It was called the 'Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum' at first, and there was a definite programme behind this: invoking the name of the art-minded earlier emperor and erecting ostentatious equestrian statues of figures from Prussian history was intended as a powerful pictorial display to anchor the Prussian dynasty in German history and European culture. But as Ihne eschewed any sense of regional identification, the museum could have carried his name after the abolition of the monarchy. But it was renamed Bode-Museum after its inventor Wilhelm von Bode in the GDR years, which indicates the significance of the stylistic spaces Bode created for the development of exhibition techniques. The text in the book provides a reminder of museum's first collection, a mixed one consisting of paintings, sculpture and furniture. The pictorial section then records the present content of the restored galleries, shaped by Heinz Tesar and using objects from the sculpture collection, the Byzantine museum and the numismatic collection. Tesar carried out some architectural interventions of considerable sculptural quality in the new basement under the small dome, in other words in the rotunda where the planned underground passage from the Pergamon-Museum will come in, and in the new stairwell added as a slim section in one of the courtyards. { 64pp, 280x300mm, December 2007; HB, £26.00, 3932565630:9783932565632 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| ESPACE DE L'ART CONCRET, MOUANS-SARTOUX [Axel Sowa] Text in French and English. Mouans-Sartoux, a small community near Cannes, has become a Mecca for concrete art. Since 1990 two collectors from Switzerland, Sybil Albers and the artist Gottfried Honegger, have been working to establish the Espace de l’Art Concret (EAC). Neither a museum nor a municipal gallery, this institution is located in the Château de Mouans and in two new buildings in its large park. The first of the two new buildings was a studio designed by Marc Barani from Nice for children who come here to paint and to develop their aesthetic senses. Barani began work in 1990 with the extension to the cemetery of Saint Pancrace in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. The way he located the cemetery in the local landscape and his use of original vegetable and mineral materials immediately brought him to international notice. In 2000 Albers and Honegger decided to donate their collections to the French state, on the understanding that it would finance a building to house the nearly 500 works of art. A competition was launched and was won by the Zurich architects Annette Gigon and Mike Guyer. The building, which opened its doors in 2004, stands on a steeply sloping wooded terrain. As one enters the park, one sees its yellowish-green hues through the branches of the trees. The monochrome colour unifies the five levels of the building that give no clue as to what it contains. While the outside of the building looks artificial, independent, sculptural, its interior is set up in accordance with Honegger’s special instructions. He wanted the building that was to house his collection to be distinct from the official and sterile museums that are often laid out on the gallery model, passageways for contemplation, internal streets with overhead lighting. Honegger prefers an interior that is like a private home rather than a public institution. The domestic framework of the rooms must reflect a principle dear to the heart of the donors: that the works are to be lived with. Honegger takes an overall view of our material environment and emphasises that for him the distinction between fine arts and applied arts has no meaning, because “an unapplied art would have no purpose and would be bound to be insignificant and disappear”. { 60pp, 280x300mm, April 2006; HB, £24.00, 3932565584:9783932565588 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| FILM MINISTER : Goebbels & the Cinema in the Third Reich [Felix Moeller] Goebbels' film programme, his propaganda strategies, the planning of perfidious anti-Semitic feature films and suggestive war newsreels are reflected in these pages, and so is Hitler's influence and the way in which famous film stars coo-operated with the Nazi leadership. { 480pp, June 2000; HB, £36.00, 393256510X:9783932565106 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| FOUR MUSEUMS [Stefan Buzas, Judith Carmel-Arthur, Kurt W Forster, Gottfried Knapp & Martha Thorne; Photographs by Joe C Aker, Richard Bryant, Ralph Richter, Christian Richters & Gary Zvonkovic] The book presents four of the most important contemporary museums of the world: Museo Canoviano, Possagno; Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa; The Audrey Jones Beck Building, MFAH; Sammlung Essl, Klosterneuburg. Each essay details the unique design concepts of each museum, illustrated with interior and exterior details { 224pp, 204x219mm, September 2004; HB, £36.00, 3930698684:9783930698684 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| FRANK O GEHRY, ENERGIE-FORUM-INNOVATION, BAD OEYNHAUSEN Text in English and German. 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 -- almost contradictory functions had to be blended in a very cramped space, compelled 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 addition to the presentation of the energy forum in Bad Oeynhausen this book contains an illustrated survey of all other buildings by Frank Gehry in Europe. { 60pp, March 2000; HB, £24.00, 3930698358:9783930698356 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| FRANK O GEHRY, GUGGENHEIM BILBAO MUSEOA There is no doubt at all that Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is one of the most spectacular buildings of recent years. As the central element in Bilbao's comprehensive urban renewal programme the building raised high expectations from the outset. 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 test bed for the arts, representing both public presence and artistic change. The process by which it was created demonstrates the most recent advances in computer aided design and in material manufacture. For a long time design and building were broken down into a large number of individual components, Gehry's museum unifies this process and is thus able to create fluent links between architectural detail and urban impact. But the innovations do not stop at technology, they also extend to the way in which the interior spaces are shaped. These are extremely varied in form, as the museum is not so much designed to house a permanent exhibition of the collection, but to enable artists to create installations. In contrast with the usual neutral gallery spaces, Gehry offers a whole variety of stages for artistic presentation. His artist friends have risen to the challenge of his architecture and are experimenting very successfully with this new way of showing their work to the public. { 56pp, August 2002; HB, £19.95, 3930698323:9783930698325 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| FRANZ RIEPL : Architect / Architekt [Paulhans Peters] Text in English and German. Franz Riepl is the outstanding exponent of the architecture now called 'the other architecture'. Housing was the dominant architectural theme of his entire working life. Riepl has always gone his own way, not attaching himself to the general trends of the day or to ideologies. Instead, his housing is distinguished by its humane form, and outstanding suitability for normal daily life inside it: calm, without exclamation marks so to speak. It is part of that other Modernism, which is austere but comprehensible without being populist. This also includes the disciplined building details, in many cases improved industrial products. The characteristics of Riepl’s buildings are durability, flexibility, sustainability and reticence. The book also intends to show that they do not become obsolete in terms of use, nor do they become old-fashioned. At the same time, lively respect has to be paid to Riepl’s buildings because of their surroundings. A second area of his work is building in the country. His buildings there show up-to-date, hence topical handwriting, fulfilling today's functions and fitting in with village and landscape without borrowing from folklore, local styles or even modernisms. All of them suggest and indicate that the country is an important space for current building as well. { 232pp, 250x310mm, June 2006; HB, £49.00, 3936681007:9783936681000 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| FRIEDRICH AUGUST STULER : The Architectural Work Today/Das Architektonische Werk Heute [Hillbert Ibbeken (ed)] Text in English and German. Friedrich Stuler was the third great Prussian architect of the 19th century, alongside Karl Schinkel and Ludwig Persius. This book produces most of Stuler's important buildings as well as exploring new academic aspects of his work. The essay herein sum up Stuler's life and work, his relationship with the middle ages, analysis of the museums, influences from the restoration in Prussia, the influence of Schinkel, Persius and Stuler on later architects. { 348pp, 280x300mm, November 2006; HB, £68.00, 3936681104:9783936681109 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| FUNDACIÓN CÉSAR MANRIQUE, LANZAROTE, 4TH EDITION Text in English, German and Spanish. Over the last decade the island of Lanzarote has become one of the favourite tourism destinations in the Canary Islands. However, our interest is more one of artistic than of touristic discovery, and this would be virtually unthinkable without the work of an artist who fell in love with this wonderful paradise. We refer to César Manrique (1919-1992), who was able to see and reveal to us the unique beauties arising out of the happy marriage of the four elements believed by the Greeks to form the whole of creation: air, earth, fire and water. In fact, after returning to his island in 1968 after a period spent in New York, Manrique dedicated himself passionately to realising his utopia, to renew Lanzarote out of his own sources. Among Manrique's best known works on Lanzarote are the Casa Museo del Campesino, the Jameos del Agua, the Mirador del Río, the Cactus Garden and his own house in the Taro de Tahíche. Manrique's house in Taro de Tahíche, which nowadays houses the César Manrique Foundation, can be considered as a 'work in progress' as it was built over a period of almost 25 years and was still not completed upon the artist's death. Arising out of the five interconnected volcanic bubbles of the underground storey, it has become a metaphor for the amorous meeting of man with Mother Earth, the latter being understood, to use Bruno Taut's expression, as 'a fine home for living'. The spaces on the upper floor can be virtually mistaken for the white cubic buildings dispersed throughout the island. But when we cross their thresholds, we have the unique feeling that here something was created which is really new. In fact, Manrique -- enemy in equal measure of the 'pastiche' of regionalism and the off-key International Style blind to differentiation -- sifted the vernacular with certain modern filters such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe or Le Corbusier, and at the same time he gave it such a specific stamp that the final result became indigenous and unmistakable. Simón Marchán Fiz is professor of aesthetics in Madrid. Like Marchán Fiz, Pedro Martínez de Albornoz lives in Madrid. The photographs shown in this book are the best photographic interpretation of one of Manrique's work up to now. { 60pp, 280x300 mm, December 1997; HB, £24.00, 3930698161:9783930698165 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| GARDENS IN SUZHOU (GÄRTEN IN SUZHOU) [Rolf Reiner Maria Borchard & Yali Yu] Text in English and German. 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 photographed 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 means that he has found striking and convincing images, steeped in the harmony of the gardens. { 152pp, 280x300mm, April 2004; HB, £46.00, 3932565363:9783932565366 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| GERBER ARCHITEKTEN, MESSE KARLSRUHE [Introduction by Frank R Werner; Photographs by Hans Jürgen Landes] Text in English and German. Despite their usually very large volumes, works by Eckhard Gerber's Dortmund practice are structurally light and transparent, precise in their detail, and make an unmistakable impact on the urban space. Presenting the new exhibition centre in Karlsruhe, this Opus volume is devoted to a building complex with all the self-confidence of a city-within-a-city. Admittedly visitors are not aware of that until they have passed a breath-taking exhibition loggia whose daring roof, protruding powerfully along the whole length of the building, attracts attention even from a distance. The basic concept, tailored to the urban landscape, the functional ground-plan arrangement, the unusually subtle use of structures and materials for a large building of this kind, and not least the high design quality of all structural parts will certainly mean a high level of acceptance and a long future for the Neue Messe in Karlsruhe. { 60pp, 280x300mm, January 2005; HB, £24.90, 3932565576:9783932565571 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| GIANCARLO DE CARLO : Layered Places [John McKean] Giancarlo De Carlo (born 1919) has been at the centre of the European architectural scene for half a century. 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. By the 1980s he had 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, which gives a survey of De Carlo's work from the beginning in the early 1950s up to the present day, accompanies an exhibition on the architect in the Centre Pompidou in Paris and other venues. { 208pp, 242x297mm, October 2003; HB, £49.00, 3932565126:9783932565120 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| GRIMMS MÄRCHEN [Illustrations by Dorothee Menzel] TEXT IN GERMAN. The fairy-tales by the Brothers Grimm presented in this book were selected and illustrated by the artist Dorothee Menzel, who lives with the German scholar Carl Wege in a little village near Bremen. The artist's pictures seem to restore the unity of man and nature. The charm of the numerous colour illustrations makes it possible for both children and adults to relate to the world of folk poetry in a new way. { 80pp, 242x284mm, April 2004; HB, £22.00, 393256538X:9783932565380 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| GUNTER RAMBOW : Plakate / Posters [Eva Linhart (ed)] Text in English and German. Gunter Rambow (b.1938) is one of the most prominent designers in the area of visual communication and cultural advertising. He produced numerous photo books and outstanding posters at the Rambow & Lienemeyer graphic design studio (1961-86), and is now carrying on his work at the Rambow, van de Sand studio. Particularly with his posters for the Schauspiel Frankfurt under the direction of Peter Palitzsch, Rambow succeeded in creating symbols for theatre’s claim to political involvement and effectively introducing them into the urban environment. From 1974 to 2003 Gunter Rambow taught at the Universität Kassel and the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe as a professor of visual communication. In 2007, the Museum für Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt is following the example of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Shanghai Art Museum and many other institutions and dedicating a major solo exhibition to his work. The show is an encounter between more than one hundred posters by Gunter Rambow -- dating from 1962 to the present -- and Richard Meier’s museum architecture. The publication appearing in conjunction with this exhibition documents the dialogue between Rambow’s poster art and Meier’s museum building. Authors Eva Linhart, Anita Kühnel and Volker Fischer acquaint readers with Rambow’s poster oeuvre -- far beyond the limited number on exhibit -- and his aesthetic strategies. Not only is light shed on the latter from the art-historical perspective, but a sense is conveyed of Rambow’s innovative achievement in using the medium of the poster to create unmistakable corporate designs for a spectrum of widely differing institutions. The catalogue moreover provides an analytical appraisal of Rambow’s ability to trigger insights about the environment and human relationships in those who view his posters. { 176pp, 245x300mm, June 2007; HB, £39.00, 3936681198:9783936681192 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| GYPSY ARCHITECTURE : Houses of the Roma in Eastern Europe [Renata Calzi & Patrizio Corno] The fact that there is Gypsy architecture may surprise quite a few people, for Gypsies are regarded as nomads who roam through the world and settle now here, now there, never stay long in one place, and consider everything that normal citizens find important to be an unreasonable restriction of their freedom. Nevertheless, in southeastern Europe, there exists a remarkable architecture created by Gypsies. It seems to have been created from a dream: Unreal, abstruse, and colourful, it is a composition of all the architectural styles of this world. Uninfluenced by any deeper knowledge of architectural culture, each family head chose the style, size and finishings on the basis of his own personal tastes or memories of travels, houses and things seen in other countries. The result has been the creation of bizarre and fantastic jumbles of buildings that it is hard to classify in terms of western stylistic features. Very often the houses are the result of enormous jigsaw puzzles created from an assembly of images or photographs of various different buildings, and their execution precisely follows these crazy guidelines, perhaps because they are incomprehensible to those carrying out the project. Otherwise, how could one possibly explain Indian-style roofs crowning neoclassical buildings, mansard roofs on structures of improbable style, Frenchified Chinese pagodas, heterogeneous assemblies of diverse and contrasting elements. The structures, the villas gradually soften their bizarre and fantastic imagery the closer they are built to European countries. Undoubtedly, the cultural influence of neighbouring countries already immersed in the culture and lifestyle of Europe has helped to 'contaminate' the owners and bring their dwellings, the expression of their wishes, more into line with the ruling culture. What, however, remains staggering is the quality of the execution of the complex decorations, of the architectural elements and buildings that are very often contrasting, of widely differing façades surmounted by steepling roofs of no practical use whose only function is to represent, through their lack of proportion and absolute needlessness, the financial and social power of the family. Besides pieces of sculpture that are undoubtedly ritual and symbolic and originating from Indian culture, suns with spiny rays, various forms of pinnacle, geometrical moons, zoomorphic decorations, the tops of the roofs bear metalwork inscriptions giving the date of building and the name of the family or that of the wife, symbolising a desire for display and the proclamation of ownership. { 160pp, 245x300mm, April 2007; HB, £39.90, 3936681120:9783936681123 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| HANS DIETER SCHAAL : Stage Architecture (Bühnenarchitektur) [Introduction by Gottfried Knapp; Interview by Frank R Werner] Text in English and German. Hans Dieter Schaal worked on opera with Ruth Berghaus for ten years, he also created unforgettable stage architecture for the operas of Heinz Werner Henze. Almost all the important European opera houses, for example those in Berlin, Brussels, Stuttgart, Paris, Vienna and Zurich, served as vehicles for his extraordinarily expressive artistic powers, which he used to captivate the public. { 224pp, 242x297mm, August 2002; HB, £49.00, 3930698862:9783930698868 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| HANS DIETER SCHAAL : Global Museum [Hans Dieter Schaal] All the world's knowledge is stored and collected here. The place serves as an assembly point and information centre and is all things in one: laboratory, workshop, building site, university, theatre, opera house and museum. The shape of the building should be like a sphere with a silver-grey surface gleaming in the sunlight. It stands in a shallow pool of water. Broad walkways lead to the entrance. Extensive gardens in gentle geometric patterns invite visitors to rest, play, chat and look. { 192pp, 245x300mm, May 2007; HB, £49.90, 3936681147:9783936681147 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| HASCHER JEHLE ARCHITEKTUR : Kunstmuseum Stuttgart [Kaye Geipel (ed); Photography by Svenja Bockhop & Roland Halbe] Text in English and German. The prize-winning design, of which all can be seen from the outside is a glass cube making an impact over a distance and defining the urban situation, solved the enormous space problem of a collection of contemporary art including 15000 works. { 92pp, 280x300mm, October 2006; HB, £32.00, 3936681066:9783936681062 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| HAUS EINES KUNSTFREUNDES : Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Leopold Bauer Text in English and German. In 1902 the Darmstadt publisher Alexander Koch issued a series of three large-format portfolios after an editorial competition on the subject of an 'art-lover's house'. These are among the most exquisite examples of the model collections that architects and designers used to develop their skills from the 19th century onwards. This lavishly conceived art-lover's house was intended to be in the 'new style', a high-quality alternative to Art Nouveau, which had become over-popularised and formulaic. Interior and exterior had to be matched to each other in terms of design. For this reason, particular attention was paid to the decoration of the rooms, which were presented in subtle water-colour tones. All three suggestions show a strikingly personal approach, while at the same time addressing new tendencies that were emerging around 1900. These portfolios became famous because of the artists involved, especially the Scot Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret Macdonald. In fact the two had been eliminated from the competition for formal reasons, but their designs were published because the quality was so high, along with the work of the two winners, Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott, a representative of the English Arts and Crafts movement, and Leopold Bauer, a pupil of Otto Wagner. One particularly interesting feature of the story of these portfolios is that the three artists were hardly known at the time of the competition. They were more or less discoveries based on the publisher's expertise, Hermann Muthesius's skills as a mediator on the European art scene, and the patronage of the Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig von Hessen und bei Rhein, who founded the artists' colony on the Mathildenhohe in Darmstadt. The designs were never realised, but the participants made a whole series of contacts afterwards, leading to other buildings and interior decoration projects. { 164pp, September 2002; HB, £49.00, 3930698889:9783930698882 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| HEINZ TESAR : Drawings (Zeichnungen) [Essay by Matthias Boeckl] Text in English and German. This book presents a selection from all Tesar's creative periods and an essay introduces the background to this art and its current positioning, which not least raises theoretical questions about the relationship between pictorial art and architecture. Tesar's drawings are presented as a project that turns a vision of Modernism into reality within a manageable personal sphere. The vision conjures up, as modern creative work is condemned to becoming increasingly specialised, an alternative 'art as a life practice', but -- and this is the present level of perception -- one that can ultimately be realised only in individual art projects. { 188pp, 242x297mm, March 2003; HB, £46.00, 3932565312:9783932565311 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| HEINZ TESAR -- ARCHITECTURE OF LAYERS : Nine Recent Works [Friedrich Achleitner] Heinz Tesar's architecture is associated with holistic ideas, and is 'value-conservative' in this sense. But at the same time, this architecture relates to its time, is modern, frank and open to consensus in a subjective dialectic between connection and isolation. However, this holistic concept is not concerned with hierarchical orders, but with relative weighting in a denomination process. Tesar is someone who names things, a 'baptist' who makes his objects that have acquired form individual and thus unmistakable. { 128pp, 245x280mm, February 2008; HB, £36.90, 393668121X:9783936681215 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| HEINZ TESAR, 'CHRISTUS HOFFNUNG DER WELT', DONAU CITY, WIEN Text in English and German. The church rises to the challenge of providing a spiritual centre for Donau City, the new residential and commercial centre on the opposite bank of the Danube -- not as an act of coronation for the city in the sense of Taut's urban crown, as a temple or cathedral, but as miniature, as a demonstration of the power of the quiet as opposed to the loud, as an 'oasis in the diaspora', to use Karl Rahner's formulation about the parishes of the future. The building gives an impression of starkness: a hard cube, cut off at the corners, clad with sheets of black chromium steel. But it is only stark at first glance. A second glance shows that the hardness is a friendly hardness: because of the reflections that the material admits; because of the grid of the large-format sheets, to which the brightly gleaming drill-holes that cover the walls like fine gossamer respond; because of circular apertures that allow light to shine outwards after dark; because of large, rectangular windows in the receding corners that create a contrast with the closed quality of the building. Inside the starkness gives way altogether: a light space, which one comes into through an art-fully designed entrance. Originally a sparse covering for the space, which thrives mainly because of the light material -- birch wood -, because of the arrangement of the pews, which is as lively as it is peaceful -- segments of circles of different sizes, surrounding the dark syenite altar block in the form of an open circle -- and especially because of the wide range of circular light sources that render the introverted interior transparent, the large windows that create islands of light, the free-form aperture in the ceiling, which sends light gliding down on to the altar. Heinz Tesar's church continues a tradition of forward-looking modern church building, from Rudolf Schwarz's Fronleichnamskirche in Aachen via Egon Eiermann's Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedachtniskirche in Berlin, Franz Fueg's Piuskirche in Meggen on Lake Lucerne to the new Herz-Jesu-Kirche in Munich by Allmann, Sattler and Wappner; and alongside all this there is also the tradition of a genuinely Viennese development of this theme, from Otto Wagner's Kirche am Steinhof to Ottokar Uhl's parish church Katharina von Siena. { 56pp, August 2002; HB, £28.00, 3930698420:9783930698424 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| HEINZ TESAR, SAMMIUNG ESSL, KLOSTER-NEUBURG Text in English and German. 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 Schomerhaus, 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 offering a variant that responds very physically to its surroundings, creating individual spaces with a variety of light. { 60pp, August 2002; HB, £24.00, 3930698382:9783930698387 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| HILMER + SATTLER UND ALBRECHT : Buildings & Projects (Bauten und Projekte) [Introduction by Klaus Jan Philipp] Text in English and German. Numerous buildings have been added to the œuvre of Hilmer & Sattler and Albrecht since the year 2000, when the first book about the architects' work was published The Berlin practice has tied itself more closely to historical models with its buildings in Potsdamer and Leipziger Platz and also at the Lenné-Dreieck, now rearranged in urban development terms, with the Beisheim Center and the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and Apartment Tower, while the Munich buildings in Karl- Scharnagl-Ring or on the Theresienhöhe keep to a formal language more closely related to Modernism The new residential buildings in Berlin and Munich, usually intended for particularly wealthy clients, tackle new urban-development and design, which means that Hilmer & Sattler und Albrecht are continuing one of the practice's important fields of activity One particular jewel is the little museum to house a reconstruction of the famous Gottorf Globe, in the Baroque garden of Schloss Gottorf near Schleswig In this small building, as also in the Picasso Museum in Münster, the architects set off a firework display of ideas and references from European architectural history, making it possible to speak of an intellectual game with the history of architecture Hilmer & Sattler and Albrecht have thus once more identified themselves as leading representatives of a building culture oscillating between relating to the present and understanding tradition properly. { 232pp, 242x297mm, April 2004; HB, £49.00, 3932565398:9783932565397 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| HOLLYWOOD : Recent Developments [Christian W Thomsen & Angela Krewani (eds)] In many years of collaboration a research group with scholars from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the United States has looked into the most recent developments of Hollywood and its movie productions of the 1990s and the first years of the new century. Technical and distributional questions of the film market played as important a part as those of transnationalisation and new digital technologies. Interdependences between computer games and movies are scrutinised and then, of course, focal points of thematic developments. They reach from remakes and blockbusters to Steven Soderbergh and the works of other independent filmmakers, from science fiction via old and new myths to questions of gender research. Hollywood’s treatment of the most important political event and trauma of the new century, the terrorist attack of 11 September 2001 on the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center in war, action, science fiction and disaster movies is dealt with and also the new wave of documentary films (Michael Moore and others). The Pentagon’s influence on the film industry has also to be seen in this context. A major focus of this book is dedicated to the interdisciplinary co-operation between film research, art history and architecture. The present study closes with articles about Hollywood and Las Vegas, American cinema architecture and the role of architecture in recent Hollywood movies. { 208pp, 235x285mm, January 2005; HB, £48.00, 3932565444:9783932565441 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| HOZON : Architectural & Urban Conservation in Japan Text in English, German and Japanese. The architecture of Japan, both historic and contemporary, has attracted architects from all over the world since the early 60s. In search of the 'Japaneseness' of place (ma), space and architecture several dissertations have been written, especially about the Japanese house and rituals, Conservation, however, was largely neglected. Only recently, with the listing of Japanese sites as Unesco World Heritage in 1994 and the Nara conference on authenticity in 1995, has the Japanese approach to conservation emerged as an intriguing issue. The practice of dismantling and reconstructing complex timber structures represents an essentially Japanese approach. Moreover, the refined documentation and structural research prior to any intervention are much admired by the international conservation community. The articles for this publication were prepared in the context of a Japanese-German co-operative programme in architectural and urban conservation in 1996-98. For the first time ever a Western publication attempts to portray the Japanese practice of repair -- hozon -- of historic structures. Detailed photographic documentations demonstrate the beauty of timber structures that are otherwise concealed by roofs and walls. It also becomes evident that an architectural object is not an entity that is defined once and for all, but an object that allows for change. Documentations of ongoing projects, with emphasis on the Fudo-do on the sacred mountain of Koyasan, explain and justify various kinds of interventions that are aimed at structural reinforcement and disaster prevention. { 208pp, August 2002; HB, £52.00, 3930698986:9783930698981 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| HUGO HARING : The Organic Versus the Geometric Although he has hitherto remained somewhat overlooked, Hugo Haring was a key figure of the Modern Movement, first as secretary of the Ring, the principal organisation for Modernists in the 1920s, and second as the main theorist for the Organic stream in German architecture. Trained at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart under Theodor Fischer, Haring's career as a Modernist began when he moved to Berlin in 1921. There he was befriended by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose office he was invited to share, and this became a centre of debate for the new direction in architecture. The two architects set up the Ring, which by 1926 included every German Modernist of note. Its members dominated the WeiBenhofsiedlung of 1927, for which Mies was artistic director, and its success also prepared the way for the CIAM congresses, which Haring attended as Ring representative. Despite their political collaboration, Haring and Mies pursued projects in increasingly opposed directions, clarifying each other's position by contrast. Mies pursued general solutions and repeated types, advocating rational construction and flexibility of use, while Haring sought the utmost specificity to function and place -- which meant that each building, even each element of a building, deserved to develop its own individual form. The key example was Gut Garkau near Lubeck of 1924/25, with its cowshed of a pear shaped plan devised around the requirements and rituals of farming. { 232pp, August 2002; HB, £52.00, 3930698919:9783930698912 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| IVANO GIANOLA : Buildings & Projects / Edifici e Progetti [Nicola Probst (ed)] Text in English and Italian. Ivano Gianola is one of the most important exponents of the so-called Ticino School. This developed in the early 1970s as a loose association of architects who thought in related ways. At the time, their ambition was to set radical alternatives of a powerfully symbolic nature against the increasing destruction of the environment by new building in Ticino. What made Gianola's buildings different from others of the Ticino School from the outset was the subtle way they were bound into their context, and their precise craftsmanship. The latter meant that building after building, especially in terms of interior finish and the coherence of all the details, became real total works of art. So it is hardly surprising that Gianola created the most beautiful living spaces in Ticino, in the best Artsand-Crafts tradition. This craft precision, combined with high formal and aesthetic values, was probably also crucial to the fact that in the 1990s Gianola was commissioned to design a series of public and private buildings abroad. Thus his conversions and new buildings for the Bayerische Vereinsbank in Schäfflerhof in Munich made a major contribution to the new concept for the well-known Fünf Höfe site. But Gianola's greatest success so far was winning an international competition for redesigning the extensive site around the ruins of the former 'Palace' luxury hotel in Lugano. Here a theatre seating over 1 200 people, a modern art museum, housing and offices, a municipal park and a new section of the lakeside promenade will be created over the next five years. This is the biggest project that the Canton of Ticino has ever awarded, and it will have found an appropriate architect. This first publication of the complete works of Gianola gives the latest of the leading protagonists of the Ticino School a monograph of his own. { 312pp, 245x300mm, February 2008; HB, £59.00, 3930698978:9783930698974 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| JEAN-YVES BARRIER -- ARCHITECT & URBANIST [Andrew Ayers] Text in French & English. Even though his viaducts for the TGV Atlantic line and several innovative projects rapidly brought him national recognition, Jean-Yves Barrier, who set up his own practice in Tours in 1990, managed to avoid involvement in fashions and trends. Whether he is dealing with homes, public facilities, offices, industrial buildings or shop design, Barrier approaches each project with a fresh eye, and tries to come up with a powerful idea that is then expressed spontaneously in his sketches. His initial insight is developed in very precise studies, bringing an architectural approach to the technical details. The originality of his buildings is inevitably associated with the renewal of form, a great variety of subjects and blending materials in a way that exploits the value of each to optimise the construction as a whole. Even though he was one of the first to realise a solar building (1978), an automated house (1990) and a low-energy apartment block (2001), these technical innovations are not his chief concern. The essential feature for Barrier is the correctness of the response applied to the programme and to the context, with consistent respect for the users. He combines generosity in his human contacts with rigour in conception and realisation. In all his exchanges with contractors, engineers, workmen and users, his taste for dialogue promotes a climate of confidence that enables every project to find its own distinctive quality. { 200pp, 245x300mm, October 2008; HB, £49.00, 393256524X:9783932565243 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| JOHANNES PETER HÖLZINGER, HAUS IN BAD NAUHEIM [Introduction by Gerd de Bruyn; Photographs by Dieter Leistner] Text in English and German. In the 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. { 60pp, 280x300mm, January 2005; HB, £24.00, 3930698536:9783930698530 , Edition Axel Menges } |
| JOHN FOWLER, BENJAMIN BAKER : Forth Bridge [Iain Boyd Whyte & Angus J MacDonald] When the Forth Bridge opened on 4 March 1890, it was the longest railway bridge in the world and the first large structure made of steel. Crossing the wide Firth of Forth west of Edinburgh in Scotland, it represents one of the greatest engineering triumphs of Victorian Britain, man's victory over the intractable topography of land and water. Not surprisingly, such a vigorous rebuff of the natural order was condemned at the time by those late Victorians who resisted the march of technology, and William Morris described the Bridge as the "supremest specimen of all ugliness". In response, Benjamin Baker insisted that its beauty lay in its functional elegance. Contrasting the bridge with the only comparable structure of the period, the Eiffel Tower, he concluded: "The Eiffel Tower is a foolish piece of work, ugly, ill-proportioned and of no real use to anyone." But the beauty and fascination of the Forth Bridge lies not simply in its functional performance, but in its scale and power. Over a mile long and higher than the dome of St. Peter's in Rome, it rivals the natural phenomena that the philosophers of the 18th century identified as sources of |