Oswald Mathias Ungers

Lara Schrijver examines the work of Oswald Mathias Ungers and Rem Koolhaas as intellectual legacy of the 1970s for architecture today. Particularly in the United States, this period focused on the autonomy of architecture as a correction to the social orientation of the 1960s. Yet, these two architects pioneered a more situated autonomy, initiating an intellectual discourse on architecture that was inherently design-based. Their work provides room for interpreting social conditions and disciplinary formal developments, thus constructing a `plausible' relationship between the two that allows the life within to flourish and adapt. In doing so, they provide a foundation for recalibrating architecture today.

Oswald Mathias Ungers is one of Germany's most influential architects as well as one of the 20th century's most influential architectural theorists. This volume uses his collection of art and architectural models, his buildings and library, to shed light on the different aspects of his theoretical approach.

Architectural form reconsidered in light of a unitary conception of architecture and the city. In The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Pier Vittorio Aureli proposes that a sharpened formal consciousness in architecture is a precondition for political, cultural, and social engagement with the city. Aureli uses the term absolute not in the conventional sense of “pure,” but to denote something that is resolutely itself after being separated from its other. In the pursuit of the possibility of an absolute architecture, the other is the space of the city, its extensive organization, and its government. Politics is agonism through separation and confrontation; the very condition of architectural form is to separate and be separated. Through its act of separation and being separated, architecture reveals at once the essence of the city and the essence of itself as political form: the city as the composition of (separate) parts. Aureli revisits the work of four architects whose projects were advanced through the making of architectural form but whose concern was the city at large: Andrea Palladio, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Étienne Louis-Boullée, and Oswald Mathias Ungers. The work of these architects, Aureli argues, addressed the transformations of the modern city and its urban implications through the elaboration of specific and strategic architectural forms. Their projects for the city do not take the form of an overall plan but are expressed as an “archipelago” of site-specific interventions.

The second volume of the complete works of Oswald Mathias Ungers.

''In this revealing autobiographical account, Jean Nouvel, one of today's most interesting international architects, looks at his work from his debut at the end of the 1970s up to his most recent projects, giving a detailed description of his planning philosophy and, in certain passages, proposing his own ideas regarding the future of architecture.The book is handsomely illustrated by photographs from the architect's personal archive and focuses in particular on Nouvel's principal works, including the Institute du Monde Arabe and Fondation Cartier in Paris, the restructuring of the Lyons Opera House and the recently completed Lafayette Department Store in BerlinIn this revealing autobiographical account, Jean Nouvel, one of today's most interesting international architects, looks at his work from his debut at the end of the 1970s up to his most recent projects, giving a detailed description of his planning philosophy and, in certain passages, proposing his own ideas regarding the future of architecture.The book is handsomely illustrated by photographs from the architect's personal archive and focuses in particular on Nouvel's principal works, including the Institute du Monde Arabe and Fondation Cartier in Paris, the restructuring of the Lyons Opera House and the recently completed Lafayette Department Store in Berlin''--