On the death of Nikolaus Kuhnert (1939 – 2025)

The Schelling Architecture Foundation mourns the loss of Nikolaus Kuhnert, founder and co-editor of the architecture magazine arch+.
In 1996, he received the Schelling Architecture Prize for Architectural Theory.

 

His successor at arch+, Anh-Linh Ngo, describes his work as follows:

 

“It is the survivor’s attitude to life that gave him – Nikolaus Kuhnert – a lifelong critical distance and made him suspicious of false alternatives and absolutisms. This applies both on a political and an architectural level: ‘ The contrasts with which [Berlin architecture] legitimizes itself, such as those between America and Europe, between steel/glass and stone, are merely constructed.‘ In times when ‘imaginary cultural differences’ are being exploited politically, it is all the more important to insist on a ‘common civilization’. This also applies to architecture. (…) Nothing is finished, nothing is over.”