The Schelling Architecture Foundation recognizes the British-Canadian author Doug Saunders for the new perspective with which he explores the causes of basic parameters leading to the need for and the influences on new accommodation solutions for immigrants in Western societies. In doing so he has also developed basic principles for urban development that will ultimately determine the success or failure of our urban living conditions in the 21st century. In 2011 Doug Saunders recorded his observations and intensive research of the subject of migration in twenty metropolitan areas across all continents in the book „Arrival City“ and in 2012 in „The Myth of the Muslim Tide“.
Not only can Werner Durth lay claim to be one of the first, but also someone who has made transparent the “biographic interrelationships” between German architects of our century using a very special and decidedly independent method.
For example, how architects were already beginning to replan German cities even during the collapsing Nazi regime, unburdened by the least moral considerations, and how, subsequently, during the early phase of German reconstruction, they were able to rapidly establish themselves, all of this is knowledge wrought against obstruction, for which we have to thank above all Werner Durth. He is a moralist – and I mean this in a positive sense. His thirst for knowledge is neither devoted to the traditional nor bourgeois intellectual notion of the “good, true and beautiful”, but to the architectural political responsibility to which the said architects were exposed as well as their reactions to such a challenge.
For this reason it is quite logical that Werner Durth has turned to the objectified results of such biographic behaviours in architectural historiographic terms in a second step following the research into the personal fates. In this manner, Durth has delivered an analytical model for architectural historiography on the basis of his interdisciplinary research, that, while being especially focused on the German situation, his clearly formulated moral engagement can be transposed to other European contexts in its method as well as in its form.
Coop Himmelb(l)au is a mental state of emergency, having lasted over twenty years. It it is the attempt to pull away the rug beneath the feet so that at least the head can pass through the wall. What was once Coop Himmelb(l)au’s provocative aesthetic has today become an internationally recognized paradigmatic architecture. What for modernism was once the collage, Coop Himmelb(l)aus have turned into a crash. Their aesthetic of the accidental constitutes the built reaction time; they cultivate the shock of the impact up to the last detail. For this reason, Coop Himmelb(l)au’s buildings can be termed quite unmetaphorically as urban sound-boxes. They reflect and amplify the enormous overlay effects of large cities. Quite different from many of their “deconstructivist” comrade-at-arms, they are practitioners without theoretical concept. Jacques Derrida’s writings, for example, Prix and Swiczinsky have only heard of second hand. For them, their built abstractions come into existence out of their unperturbed conception. They were the first to liberate architecture from the technical and formal constraints of history. Although they have found comrades-at-arms and imitators all over the world, they are still the best of their kind by miles. (M. Mönninger)
As an art historian who is equipped with the profound knowledge of historical developments, cultural cross connections and personal interrelations, Wolfgang Pehnt is subtly able to subject architecture to the immanent observation as a work of art and to interpret concepts and designs against a background of an ideal gestation. Subsequent to the critical evaluation of a work and its designer, Wolfgang Pehnt consistently and systematically changes the frame of reference with regard to his architectural criticism by altering the scale so as to simultaneously investigate individual buildings from a cultural semiotic perspective as elements of heterogeneous structures for their ruptures, contradictions, asynchonicities. By speaking about invisible matters, about manners of use, people’s feelings, desires and fears, further dimensions are opened up, which leads his critique from the field of architecture to that of culture and society. His widely framed intellectual structures offer reflections and previews across decades. (W. Durth)
Milestones in architectural history are oftern dwarfish buildings. It was not the grand symphonies of the cathedrals and palaces that have inspired the history of ideas but the chamber musical building forms. Even in the case of a fire station for a furniture factory in the state of Baden, its creator Zaha M. Hadid has at once realized her ambitious, almost presumptuous architectural concept. Zaha Hadid is the most rigorous embodiment of a new spirit in architecture which simultaneously opposes late and post-modernism, high-tech and high-touch positions. The motive of this architecture is neither the rediscovery of history nor the beginning of a new modesty, neither the historistic cult of the dead nor the purist migration of the souls, but the foundation of an independent formal language free of imitations and utterly contemporaneous.” (M. Mönninger)
