Text in English & German. The central Mosque of the Turkish-Islamic Union in Koeln-Ehrenfeld has given us one of the most vigorously discussed German building projects of the past 10 years. With this spectacular domed structure, Paul Boehm, the youngest son of Pritzker Prize-winner Gottfried Boehm and grandchild of Dominikus Boehm, has successfully introduced the Osman mosque typus into the modern age. The dome and minaret provide the Turkish / Islamic community with visual identification points. At the same time, this shell-construction structure is broken up into individual segments in a manner that opens it up to both the neighbourhood and the world. Containing conference halls, rooms for community use, a bazaar, a library and a museum, the complex is intended to convey to the surrounding area a message of retained ties to the historical country of origin coupled with acceptance and integration into the new homeland, and a willingness to engage in dialogue. Up to now the mosque represents the high point of the architectural career of Paul Boehm, who was born in 1959 and who is teaching at the Fachhochschule Koeln. His work encompasses a multitude of exciting projects and realised buildings, including cultural buildings, university buildings, administration buildings and residential buildings. It is, perhaps, unsurprising that an architect who comes from a family of church builders should have added an impressive religious structure to uvre. St. Theodor in Koeln-Vingst is a central-plan building that possesses a coherent atmosphere suited to contemplation whilst, at the same time, opening itself to a part of the city that suffers from social problems. Figures who have played a significant role in Paul Boehm's professional development include Tadao Ando, the master of velvet-smooth concrete, Oswald Mathias Ungers, the great lover of geometry, and Peter Zumthor, the essentialist of his generation. Like these three figures, the architects who Boehm worked with prior to founding his own firm in 2001, all espoused very different philosophies of architecture: Otto Steidle, Anton Schweighofer, Richard Meier . Paul Boehm does, of course, also owe a debt to the traditions of the family of architects that he comes from -- a tradition that he continues in his own individual way.

A house is a representation of the idea of the world, of life, of existence. For the Cologne architect Oswald Mathias Ungers (19262007), owner of a famous collection of books on architecture, who also repeatedly addressed the theoretical aspects of building, the construction of his own house, in 1958/59, was more than a private adventure. For him it meant a chance to gain spatial experience and explore what was possible. It was a laboratory, a little universe, a piece of world. In the course of his life, Ungers built himself and his family no less than three houses, two in the Cologne suburb of Mungersdorf, one in the Eifel highlands. Even the first house, to which this richly illustrated volume is dedicated, caused an international sensation; it was considered to be an important example of so-called Brutalism. It showed "everything I knew how to do at the time", Ungers wrote regarding the building. He wanted a house that enveloped and sheltered, he wanted metamorphosis and transformation; architecture that was autonomous but at the same time respected the genius loci. At the time, architects preferred to build their private homes as freestanding bungalows in the countryside. Ungers, on the other hand, settled in a place where there were traces of the Roman past and purchased a plot of land adjacent to an already existing row of terraced houses. Three decades later, Ungers expanded the cataract of forms of his first home by adding a geometrically strict cube, intended to house his library. The shock aesthetics of the early work had evolved into the rigorous abstractness of his late work. This building too one of a kind, and in interplay with its predecessor became a manifesto. It corresponded to the idea of a house as a small town and the town as a large house, an idea that has run through European architectural history since Alberti. In spite of all their differences, the two contrasting formats make common cause. They show a world full of contradictions, illusions and realities that reflects the entire spectrum of the image of architecture, from the fiction to the reality of the function. Today the house and the library are the seat of the UAA, the Ungers Archiv fur Architekturwissenschaft, and open to the public. The architectural historian Wolfgang Pehnt often visited Ungers. The author of an authoritative book about the architecture of Expressionism, he profited by Ungers' collection of material back in the years when Ungers was still interested in Expressionism. Thus he is familiar with the house in its details and has witnessed its modifications. As portrayed by him, the history of the origins of the house gives access to the impressive uvre of a great German architect.

Text in English & German. The work of Klaus Kinold, born 1939 in Essen, is part of a tradition of photography, and particularly of architectural photography. Architecture was one of the most important themes even of early photography -- not least because it stood still. Initially this was an important characteristic, since exposure times were long. Thus began the affinity of photography with the documentary. Reality and representation were supposed to correspond. Quoting a statement by Roland Barthes, Kinold has referred to the still "mysterious bonus of confidence given to the documentary". At a time when digital photographic and processing techniques make all sorts of manipulation possible, the now rare quality of reliability is assigned to this attitude. It was self-evident for Kinold to explore the period whose very name included the term objectivity -- the New Objectivity (in German: Neue Sachlichkeit). The work of colleagues such as Werner Mantz, Hugo Schmoelz, Arthur Koester and above all Albert Renger-Patzsch combined useful information and contemporary artistic expression. Walter Peterhans, photographer at the Bauhaus, called it the "magic of precision". At the same time, Kinold did not let himself be confused by the special effects indulged in by some modernist artists. His photographs indicate the structure of the surfaces of a building, the spatial depth and the details concealed in its shadowed sections, the proportions in which they present themselves to the user. The accuracy of observation, the precision in detail, the translation of three-dimensional objects into a convincingly construed image are among the virtues of the architectural photographer Klaus Kinold. What takes precedence in his work is not the moment at which a thing suddenly reveals its essence, a lucky coincidence, but rather the condition that is considered to be essential, set also by the right photographic standpoint. For Kinold, who owed a great deal to his teacher Egon Eiermann at the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe, including in his capacity as a photographer, logic, purity and clarity went without saying. Accordingly, predominant in his work, we find photographs of buildings by architects whom he could expect to have such qualities: classic Modernists like Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and contemporaries like Alvar Aalto, Hans Doellgast, Herman Hertzberger, Louis Kahn, Karljosef Schattner, Rudolf Schwarz, Alvaro Siza. Architectural historian Wolfgang Pehnt, born 1931, has often reaped the benefits of insights gained from Kinolds photographic art. Pehnt has published monographs about German architecture since 1900 and about Expressionist architecture, but he has also written about numerous individual uvres. He formerly taught at the Ruhruniversitat Bochum.