Ton Matton - Stadtplaner, Indie-Urbanist, bekennender Fan des performativen Urbanimus, Zweifelnder, Briefeschreiber. Zu Beginn seiner Karriere als Stadtplaner schrieb Matton Briefe, in denen er sich mit nachhaltiger Stadtplanung befasste (damals fur Stadtplaner*innen ein noch ganz neues Arbeitsfeld): an einen Minister, um ihm klarzumachen, dass eine Siedlung nur ein Kompromiss ist und kein Ersatz fur ein Leben in der Stadt oder auf dem Land. An eine Bundeskanzlerin, um sie daran zu erinnern, dass man aus Wind- und Sonnenenergie gewonnenen Strom in elektrischen Zahnbursten und Handyakkus speichern sollte. Seitdem sind viele weitere Briefe entstanden - an Politiker*innen, Projektentwickler*innen und andere mehr oder weniger prominente Personen. Was in ihnen zum Ausdruck kommt, ist Mattons leidenschaftlicher Spass am Zweifeln. Mit viel Humor und gewohnt provokativ fordert er seine Adressat*innen zum Umdenken auf und ladt damit wieder einmal auch die Leser*innen dazu ein, Eigeninitiative zu ergreifen.

Since the mid-1990s, when China allowed its architects to practice independently from government-run design institutes, a new kind of architecture, distinguished by unique regional characteristics, has emerged. China Dialogues is a rigorously selected collection of insightful interviews that the book's author Vladimir Belogolovsky has conducted with 21 leading Chinese architects during his extensive travels in China. At the time when so many buildings that are being built around the world are no longer rooted in their place and culture, the leading Chinese architects succeeded collectively in producing unique architectural body of work that could not be confused with any other regional school. The interviews are accompanied by over 120 photographs and drawings of beautifully executed projects built throughout China since early 2000s. China Dialogues opens up the thinking process of the country's top architects, as they share their ideas, insights, intentions, and visions in unusually revealing and candid ways.

In 1996, Francois Jolliet, Antoine Hahne et Guy Nicollier founded their office Pont12. In 2013, Christiane von Roten, Cyril Michod and Norbert Seara, associate partners, joined the management. A large proportion of their contracts are the result of competition successes. Their architecture is inspired by the needs of the users and is characterised by a careful choice of materials and sophisticated details. Text in English, German and French.

The Neue Nationalgalerie on the Berlin Kulturforum is an architectural icon as well as the crowning conclusion of architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's life work. An outstandingly successful and sensitive refurbishment and modernization project was carried out for the building's most significant overhaul since its opening in 1968. It complies with the requirements of a contemporary museum exhibition facility, as well as monument-preservation guidelines. David Chipperfield Architects developed the renovation concept under the motto of "As much Mies as possible." This publication provides deep insight into the planning, execution, monument preservation, and restoration from the perspective of those involved. The exemplary handling of the historical fabric is presented in design documents and numerous large-format photographs that impressively illustrate the design stage, the construction site, and the refurbishment results. With articles by David Chipperfield, Bernhard Furrer, Gunny Harboe, Joachim Jager, Dirk Lohan, Fritz Neumeyer, Alexander Schwarz, Gerrit Wegener, and some 30 project managers

As the signature event of Hong Kong Interior Design Association (HKIDA), APIDA aims to promote professional standards among interior design practices, recognise outstanding interior design projects and invites interior design on a broader social level. Many outstanding submissions have not only grown in number this year, but also completed on a whole new level. Many projects pursue minimalism, adhering to the user-oriented view, reinforcing the intimate relationship among design, nature and man, transcending good interior design to sculpt space, emphasising the balance between architecture and nature with tranquil atmosphere, and pushing the boundaries of design.

Professor Pekka Pitkanen (1927 - 2018) was one of the most significant Finnish architects of the post-war period. He is known as a master of concrete buildings and as a staunch supporter of modernist approach to architecture. He won numerous commissions by architectural competitions. The Chapel of the Holy Cross (1963 - 1967) in Turku is usually considered as Pitkanen's main work. From 1950's to 1980's Pitkanen built in Turku numerous residential and commercial buildings, often in co-operation with the building company Urakoitsijat Oy. Together with Ola Laiho and Ilpo Raunio, Pitkanen planned the extension of the Finnish Parliament (1972 - 1978). Late in his career Pitkanen focused on public buildings, the finish of the career was the Turku court building, completed in 1997. The book presents Pitkanen's architecture through his whole career, based on research of his archive, the presentations of the works in contemporary magazines as well as the memoir of Pitkanen.

Powerful, memorable architecture in response to diverse conditions and briefs, conceived and developed by the Geneva architectural couple Kristina Sylla Widmann and Marc Widmann: this volume presents five school buildings and facilities with a high architectural quality, as well as several outstanding residential and administrative buildings. Text in English and German.

An essential record of Australia's annual architectural commission, MPavilion

MPavilion is an annual architectural commission designed by a leading international architect for the Queen Victoria Gardens in Melbourne, Australia. Inspired by the Serpentine Pavilion in London, the MPavilion project was established in 2014 by Naomi Milgrom AO, one of Australia's foremost cultural visionaries and philanthropists. It is, in the words of Professor Alan Pert, Director of Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne, a 'cultural laboratory ... an educational environment beyond the institution, a museum without a collection.'

Centred around the six pavilion projects to date, this book reflects on MPavilion's ongoing architectural and cultural impact. Incorporating architectural drawings, renders, models and design statements, as well as eight essays by leading design writers and photographs documenting each project and the activities that it inspired, it considers how each architect responds to or highlights issues relevant to contemporary design, architecture and community building. In doing so, MPavilion positions their collective endeavour as a global model for cultural activation, design leadership, place-making, community building, architectural tourism, philanthropy and public/private partnerships. This is at once the perfect introduction to and critical assessment of the MPavilion project.

Monograph.it is a unique contemporary magazine that combines monography and review. Each volume follows an original structure, although all devote several pages to the study of architecture. Accompanying these case studies are galleries flush with places, buildings, and landscapes; when combined with detailed studies focusing on cities in evolution, Monograph.it encourages its readers to conceive of urbanisation and landscape as mutually complementary. The aim of this is to provide a comprehensive overview that acknowledges differing development-speeds of architectural productions, across a variety of scales. An ongoing project, this survey will be summarised in 'Researches' (a chapter to be published in the next issue). This will stress the importance of encouraging innovation in students of architecture. Monograph.it acts as a platform for theoretical debate, conducting interviews and hosting essays from big-name figures in the architecture world for example, the woman featured in this issue: Odil Decq. Perhaps this celebrated French architect's most renowned project is the L'Opera Restaurant in Paris, France, whose softly sweeping lines and red and white decor create an atmosphere that is simultaneously majestic and cosy. A breath of fresh air among modern architects bewitched by the strength of a straight line, Decq's constructions are not afraid to be curvaceous.

By retracing Frank Lloyd Wright's footsteps on journeys he made beyond his homeland of the USA, this book explores his global ambitions and his lasting legacy and offers an original and contemporary view of Wright and his architecture. While Lloyd Wright is perceived as the quintessential American architect, in fact he was well-travelled, and these six journeys were to develop and promote his globalising 'organic' philosophy. The author takes off first to Japan and Germany to explore the way Wright's visits to these countries informed and framed his 'Prairie House' period. He then travels to Russia and the UK, where Wright presented his global 'Usonian' manifesto. The final two chapters pursue Wright to Italy and the Middle East as part of his 'Legacy' period. The book is beautifully illustrated with Wright's own sketches and photographs, as well as some historical photographs of Wright's original journeys and works. The author meets people who are living and coping with Wright's 'organic' architecture today and asks them whether their homes are still true to Wright's intent or whether there is something else that made their home particular.By considering Wright beyond America, his architecture is critiqued against different cultural settings so that it can be evaluated as emerging from a new globalised era of architectural production. The author reflects on Frank Lloyd Wright as an early promoter of globalisation - in fact, as the first 'global architect'.

Sandra Giraudi and Felix Wettstein, another architect couple from Lugano, became renowned with the construction of a residential building in Cadro (1997), the laboratory building on the university campus in Lugano (2002) and the new concourse in Basel station (2003, with Cruz-Ortis, Sevilla). Sharply defined, finely shaped structures respectfully and yet pointedly combine with the evolved surrounding environment. Text in English and German.

Diedrich Anton Wilhelm Rulfs, the German-born architect who immigrated to Nacogdoches, Texas in 1880, transformed the historic frontier town into a modern city. The life and work of Rulfs and his interaction with his contemporaries "is" the story of Nacogdoches in the crucial years at the turn of the 20th century.
The substantial visual legacy of Rulfs to the history of a pioneering town can be enjoyed today. Over fifty architectural creations are extant and form the core for the city's extensive National Registry Districts. Rulfs incorporated the motifs of his homeland along with elements from current trends in American architecture into Nacogdoches projects. He comfortably used classical and Palladian features, romantic (Gothic), flamboyant (Queen Ann), and eclectic (Mediterranean) styles.
Rulfs proved himself a master at servicing many architectural needs: modest domestic structures, commercial buildings, city blocks, hotels, elaborately fashionable mansions, churches for all denominations, and public schools. While few towns the size of Nacogdoches had, or could have supported, a talented resident architect, Rulfs returned the admiration by working flawlessly with the community. His success resided in his professionalism, his intimate knowledge of his clients, and his willingness to accommodate his designs to the needs and budgets of his patrons. Rulfs, as the architect and builder of choice in Nacogdoches between 1880 to the mid-1920s, left an architectural legacy.

The now venerable firm of Royal Barry Wills was founded in a one-room office on Boston's Beacon Street in 1925. Initially fueled by word of mouth and occasional newspaper exposure, the firm gained admiration for Wills s fresh take on various New England styles, including Georgian, Tudor, French Provincial, and Colonial American. Driven by the country's desire for both aesthetic appeal and practicality, the firm's popularity increased dramatically with its focus on the creation of modern homes inspired by the one-and-a-half-story Cape Cod houses, which perfectly balanced the classic and the new. Now run by his son, Richard Wills, the firm has been designing elegant private homes in the classically inspired Colonial New England tradition for more than eighty-five years. As time has passed, their Cape Cod-style homes have proven remarkably adaptable to the demands of contemporary life, while staying true to Wills's original flair for intermingling past and present. This book features examples of the firm's work from its founding to the present, with an emphasis on more recent houses that have been built throughout New England."

Byoung Cho aims to make each of his buildings `so it looks like it's not designed at all, it's just there'. Influenced by Korea's rich aesthetic tradition, Cho utilizes understated forms to create serene buildings that yield powerful and subtle experiences for their inhabitants. His work focuses on seemingly simple structures and has a strong regard for nature and sustainability. He has created many iconic buildings, art and cultural centres, schools, health facilities and residences throughout Korea, Japan and the United States. This book features over 25 of Cho's most highly acclaimed projects, including Twin Trees (2010), his instantly iconic towers located adjacent to the 14th-century royal Gyeongbok Palace in Seoul. The projects are accompanied throughout by sketches and plans, providing a comprehensive insight into the making of these buildings. Byoung Cho offers an engaging and indepth overview of one of the most creative and deeply thoughtful designers working today. It will inspire architects, architectural students and anyone interested in sustainability and the built environment.

Bruno Taut (1880-1938) is generally considered the leading housing estate architect of the modern era. Utilizing the latest architectural techniques and concentrating on the needs of the people who were to inhabit his buildings, he made a lasting impression on the housing construction of his time - which is not simply reflected by the 10,000 flats built by him. This revised and extended edition presents the extensive catalogue of Bruno Taut's works. Each project is portrayed by means of texts, plans as well as historic and contemporary photos. Proven experts lead the reader through the creative work and life of Bruno Taut in several introductory essays that show him not only as a city planner, designer and social reformer but above all as an artist who therefore truly deserves to be honored as the master of colourful architecture in Berlin.

"Beautiful, haunted, evocative and so open to where memory takes you. I kept thinking that this is the book that I have waited for: where objects, and poetry intertwine. Just wonderful and completely sui generis." (Edmund de Waal, author of "The Hare with Amber Eyes")
An unforgettable voyage across the reaches of America and the depths of memory, this generational memoir of one incredible family reveals America's unique craft tradition. In "Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay," renowned critic Christopher Benfey shares stories--of his mother's upbringing in rural North Carolina among centuries-old folk potteries; of his father's escape from Nazi Europe; of his great-aunt and -uncle Josef and Anni Albers, famed Bauhaus artists exiled at Black Mountain College--unearthing an ancestry, and an aesthetic, that is quintessentially American. With the grace of a novelist and the eye of a historian, Benfey threads these stories together into a radiant and mesmerizing harmony.

The Home has emerged as an elementary figure in architectural research and practice over the last decade. This book highlights the variety of ways in which Home has been individually articulated and explored. In text and images it takes an original look at projects such as MVRDV's Hagen Island residential units, AZL's Slit House in Nanjing, Haus Walter in Malans by Bearth and Deplazes, and the Rudin house by Herzog & de Meuron.

This revealing memoir by Aldo Rossi (1937--1997), one of the most visible and controversial figures ever on the international architecture scene, intermingles discussions of Rossi's architectural projects--including the major literary and artistic influences on his work--with his personal history. Drawn from notebooks Rossi kept beginning in 1971, these ruminations and reflections range from his obsession with theater to his concept of architecture as ritual. The book originally appeared as one of the landmark titles in the MIT Press's Oppositions Books series, but has been out of print for many years. This newly issued paperback reprint includes illustrations--photographs, evocative images, and a set of drawings of Rossi's major architectural projects prepared particularly for this publication--selected by the author himself to augment the text.

How modern architecture came to embrace the urges and fears of the affective unconscious. "Eight million Americans a year cool their heels in psychiatric waiting rooms. Design can help lower this nervous overhead."-Richard Neutra, 1954 Sylvia Lavin's Form Follows Libido argues that by the 1950s, some architects felt an urge to steer the cool abstraction of high modernism away from a neutral formalism toward the production of more erotic, affective environments. Lavin turns to the architecture of Richard Neutra (1892-1970) to explore the genesis of these new mood-inducing environments. In a series of engaging essays weaving through the designs and writings of this Vienna-born, California-based architect, Lavin discovers in Neutra a sustained and poignant psychoanalytic reflection set in the context of a burgeoning psychoanalytic culture in America. Lavin shows that Neutra's redirection of modernism constituted not a lyrical regression to sentimentality but a deliberate advance of architectural theory and technique to engage the unconscious mind, fueled by the ideas of psychoanalysis that were being rapidly disseminated at the time. In Neutra's responses to a vivid range of issues, from psychoanalysis proper to the popular psychology of tele-evangelical prayer, Lavin uncovers a radical reconstitution of the architectural discipline. Arguing persuasively that the received historical views of both psychoanalysis and architecture have led to a suppression of their compelling coincidences and unorthodoxies, Lavin sets out to unleash midcentury architecture's hidden libido. Neither Neutra nor psychoanalysis emerges unscathed from her investigation of how architecture came to be saturated by the intrigues of affect, often against its will. If Reyner Banham sought to put architecture "on the couch," then Lavin, through Neutra, leaps beyond Banham's ameliorative aim to lure contemporary architecture into the lush and dangerous liaisons of environmental design.

The ciliary muscle reproduces the effect of a lens and allows the eye to focus or blur vision. It became the emblem of the critical vision that Diller + Scofidio (+ Renfro) had in their research and experimentation, including most recently the High Line park design for New York City. Their interdisciplinary projects range from objects, installations, and performances to media and architecture. In recent years they have expanded- with a third partner joining their studio-to embrace projects on a larger urban scale.
"Diller + Scofidio ("+"Renfro)" covers their development, documenting about twenty works, for the earliest to the most recent. It also includes essays investigating the studio's contect, influences and strategies; some interviews with the architects; and a scheme showing the evolutiuon and growth of the studio from 1979 to today.

Celebrated by his peers for such masterpieces as the City Hall, War Memorial Opera House, Temple Emanu-El, and Coit Tower in San Francisco; the Pasadena City Hall; and the Labor-ICC block of the Federal Triangle in Washington, DC, Brown epitomized the idea that architecture not only houses society s daily rituals and defining events but also can itself shape the sociopolitical landscape of America. Arthur Brown Jr.: Progressive Classicist, the first full study of Brown within his architectural and social context, unifies the varied strands of the architect s life, from the architectural forms and methods of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris to the reforming spirit and self-reliant confidence of San Francisco after the earthquake and fire of 1906 to the challenging economics and changing aesthetics of machine-age America. It details the development of Brown s major works and many other civic, commercial, religious, academic, and residential buildings. It chronicles his unflagging commitment to the classical tradition, which he employed in contemporary, forward-looking institutional buildings that emphasized continuity with the past while meeting the needs of the future. To Brown, the classical tradition was not a sacrosanct, unchanging body of knowledge; it was an expanding and evolving set of ideas about architectural design that permitted, and even demanded, change as new conditions and technologies were developed. Arthur Brown Jr. is a fascinating look at the man-captivated by the classical movement and obsessed with the slightest architectural detail-and at his buildings, at once canonical and inventive and singularly American."

In 1940, The Museum of Modern Art staged a retrospective of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, the great American architect, then in his 70s, who had experienced a professional rebirth over the previous decade after many years of relative invisibility. Wright was a full collaborator in the organization of the project, which he intended, he said to be "the show to end all shows." To accompany the exhibition, the Museum planned a publication in the form of a "Festschrift, commissioning essays from many of the best-known architecture figures of the day--Alvar Aalto, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Richard Neutra, Mies van der Rohe, and others. Wright, however, took issue with certain parts of the book, complimentary though it was, and after an incendiary exchange of correspondence, including the architect's threat to cancel the entire exhibition, the show went forward but the book did not. In the 60-odd years since, the essays that MoMA commissioned have remained in its files, most of them lost to public view. Now, for the first time in one volume, MoMA is publishing the entire surviving group, along with a full selection of the letters and telegrams between Wright, MoMA, and others detailing MoMA's and the architect's collaboration-cum-collision. Accompanying these period documents is an extensive essay by the noted Frank Lloyd Wright scholar Kathryn Smith, who provides a full account of the exhibition, both as is was and as it was intended to be--including, for example, an unrealized plan to erect one of Wright's Usonian Houses in the MoMA garden. Smith also explores Wright's relationship to his critics, the architectural profession, and the Museum in the years leading up to the exhibition.

Cass Gilbert's pioneering buildings injected vitality into skyscraper design, and his "Gothic skyscraper," epitomized by the Woolworth Building, profoundly influenced architects during the first decades of the twentieth century. Now, as the New-York Historical Society mounts a major exhibit documenting his architectural career, the full breadth of Gilbert's achievements is visible in one lavishly illustrated volume.

Architect of the Broadway Chambers Building, the US Custom House, the Minnesota State Capitol, the St. Louis Art Museum, and large-scale projects like the city plan for New Haven, Connecticut, Gilbert is most famous for his skyscrapers -- "symbols of our national genius and unrestraint" -- monuments of the Beaux Arts "City Beautiful" aesthetic he embraced throughout his career.

Containing essays by major Gilbert scholars, "Inventing the Skyline" documents fascinating details about the buildings: the color scheme of the main entrance of the Minnesota State Capitol, made to resemble the Byzantine tomb of Galla Placidia in Ravenna; the controversy that erupted over the use of female nudes on the relief of the Essex County Courthouse; and the ill-fated plans for the George Washington Bridge as a Beaux Arts monument with elaborate plazas, fountains, and sculptures.

A Stonewall Honor Book of the American Library Association's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table "Rare and Commonplace Flowers performs an invaluable service: unforgettably memorializing the remarkable Lota de Macedo Soares, and in the process filling in a crucial gap in Bishop's biography. This book honors a deeply moving love between two brilliant women: each highly public, a celebrity in her own nation; each deeply private, and happy (for a time) in the fragile heaven of their home."-The New York Times Book Review "As a portrait of Lota and Bishop in Brazil, Rare and Commonplace Flowers is a rare and illuminating book."-Women's Review of Books "Novelist Oliveira's engaging dual biography tells of Bishop and Soares's] 'long and sad' relationship. . . . This book offers a new perspective on the American poet, and the love story between these two women is undeniably intense and tragic. Recommended."-Library Journal Rare and Commonplace Flowers tells the story of two fascinating and controversial women. Elizabeth Bishop, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, sought artistic inspiration in Brazil. There she fell in love with Lota de Macedo Soares, a self-trained Brazilian architect. This dual biography-brilliantly researched, and written in a lively, novelistic style-follows their relationship from 1951 to 1967, the time when the two lived together in Brazil. A tale of two artists and two cultures, Rare and Commonplace Flowers offers unique perspectives on both women and their work. Carmen L. Oliveira provides an unparalleled level of detail and insight, due to both her familiarity with Brazil and her access to the country's artistic elite, many of whom had a direct connection with Bishop and Soares. Rare pictures of the two artists and their home bring this unique story to life. Carmen L. Oliveira is a Brazilian novelist. Neil K. Besner is a professor in the English department at the University of Winnipeg in Canada.