The book presents the installation artist Markus Heinsdorff'scontinuing study of the topics of space, the forces of nature and upcyclingby means of over40 works. The overview is completed by text contributions by famous authors who interpret Heinsdorff's internationalcreative works from a variety of perspectives. Anyone wishing to understand the comprehensive work of Markus Heinsdorffwill have to embark on a voyage around the world: from the depths of the Amazonto the vast cities of India and the small villages of Africa. The projects presented here are subject to a wide range of influences which the artist approaches with imagination and engineering precision. The volume introduces an impressive oeuvre through sketchesandphotos of models and realisations which hover atthe interface between architecture and sustainable art.

Max Mannheimer (* 1920) survived the Holocaust as a Jew in a concentration camp. His moving life history has been published in several books in different languages. However, few people are aware of his paintings, which were created under his Hebrew name "ben jakov". This volume assembles a selection of 70 of his works. Max Mannheimer's oeuvre follows his poetic motto "I marry colours". Starting from a completely independent artistic position, since 1955 he has demonstrated tremendous pleasure in experimentation and has created a total of more than one thousand works. His dynamic abstract paintings and drawings are signed "ben jakov" (Son of Jakob) in memory of his father, who was killed in concentration camp. They bear witness to the horror as well as the joy of an eventful life. Together with an introductory essay by Gottfried Knapp, the publication provides for the first time an overview of the paintings of Ma x Mannheimer which have been created away from the public eye

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 Hoech 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 colles' 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 Kunste, 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'.

Text in English and German. Otto Steidle acquired international recognition for his extraordinary early residential buildings in Munich and for exemplary solutions for school and office buildings. His office and residential complex for Wacker-Chemie in Munich is a lively accent on a particularly conspicuous site in architecturally conservative Munich. Individually balanced buildings are arranged along the block perimeter in Prinzregentenstrasse, the most important east-west axis in the inner city, diagonally opposite the Haus der Kunst, and in Bruderstrasse, which leads to Lehel, a traditional residential area. Steidle has not packed the different functions in layers one above the other, as is usual in commercial projects of this kind, but has separated them clearly from each other. The office building on the noisy carriageway of Prinzregentenstrasse takes the curve to the narrow side street in an elegant sweep, with the glass skin suspended in front of the corner giving the building an almost Mendelsohn-like verve. The series of residential buildings in Bruderstrasse is given a different quality by Berlin painter Erich Wiesner's strong colours and the projecting and recessed facades. And as here too the normal Munich scale is considerably exceeded -- the three residential towers placed diagonally to the courtyard rise eight storeys high -- there is a surprising amount of room for publicly accessible gardens inside the block, designed by landscape architects Latz + Partner, and also scope for revealing the torrential Stadtmuhlbach in a spectacular fashion, which used to be covered, but now shoots directly past one of the windows of the sunken cafeteria and then under the entrance hall of the office building, before playing at waterfalls as it gushes into the Englischer Garten at the other side of the road. Thus Prinzregentenstrasse, as a mile of museum and government buildings, and the Lehel residential area have acquired an architectural attraction of elemental impact in the shape of the Wacker building.

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.

In their sculptural works, artists have always broken out of the workshop or studio and into open-air spaces. After all, the place where sculptures are best able to show their three-dimensionalquality is in an open space not enclosed by walls and ceiling, in which all flows of power and movement can have free rein. However, because public spaces offer only very limited possibilitiesfor sculpture development, sculpture parks have been developed almost everywhere in the world where invited artists can work without restrictive conditions. During his search for a place in France where he could present his large sculptures, Erich Engelbrecht discovered in 2000 the open, meadow-like land, with the chateau tucked into a piece of forest behind it. This open space, picturesquely framed by groups of trees, was precisely what he had imagined. And the fact that a chateau was waiting for its new owner at the end of this tract of land made this discovery a stroke of luck rarely experienced by anyone in general, and almost never by artists in particular. His monumental sculptures that dominate the landscape have given Erich Engelbrecht a place in the history of modern sculpture. His method of drawing images plastically in the space, and of using these drawings transformed into solid bodies to occupy whole landscapes, is unparalleled. The enigma balanced between representationality and the abstract, the multiplicity of meaning, which invites freely poetic titles, is essential to the unique charm of Erich Engelbrecht's visual work. In the park of Chateau des Fougis, 29 of these artworks, at once plainly revealing and mystifying, communicate with each other in such a relaxed way that visitors are prompted to think and to enjoy. One strolls through a garden of poetic artworks, through a park of beautiful riddles and silent secrets. There has been nothing comparable to this in Europe since the Mannerist gardens, conceived by poets andequipped with creatures of the imagination by inspired sculptors.

The book presents the installation artist Markus Heinsdorff's continuing study of the topics of space, the forces of nature and upcycling by means of over 40 works. The overview is completed by text contributions by famous authors who interpret Heinsdorff's international creative works from a variety of perspectives. Anyone wishing to understand the comprehensive work of Markus Heinsdorff will have to embark on a voyage around the world: from the depths of the Amazon to the vast cities of India and the small villages of Africa. The projects presented here are subject to a wide range of influences which the artist approaches with imagination and engineering precision. The volume introduces an impressive oeuvre through sketches and photos of models and realisations which hover at the interface between architecture and sustainable art.

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.

Text in English & German. Manfred Sack, in an essay about bridges: The Latin word relegere' means to connect. The assumption is that this is the basis of the word religion. The chief priest in Rome was the pontifex maximus, the highest builder of bridges between man and god, between this world and the other world'. The Germanic tribes saw the bridge in the rainbow physically before them, it was their road of light to Valhalla. For those who are disheartened, drugs are the bridge of escape into other, very illusory, worlds of experience. Tradition builds bridges from yesterday to tomorrow. There are so many bridges: music, a letter, the sounds of a radio, phone conversations, light signals, Morse signals, calls. The building of bridges is thus not only a physical process, but a spiritual and emotional event, a longing felt by the soul. No wonder that those who design and calculate bridges, who build them and therefore take risks, at least subconsciously sense some of the extrasensory significance of their sensory activity. And this is all the more true when we are talking about the bridges across the Rhine, the most important European river, which is wreathed in myths and legends and has inspired poetry and music like no other. Until the 19th century it was crossed almost exclusively by means of ferries. With the onset of industrialisation, more and more goods had to be transported increasingly rapidly. Today, over 250 bridges cross the river. They too now shape the unsurpassed diversity of the Rhine landscape. Since 1987, Riehle has photographed some 150 Rhine bridges from the river's headwaters in Switzerland to the Rhine's delta in the Netherlands. The most interesting 100 bridges are published in this book.

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.