The era, in which architecture was the most important field of experimentation in terms of new artistic and scientific ideas, has long passed. Today, architecture generally reacts to innovations in the field of economy, technology and society. The architectural journal Arch+ is one of the few magazines that has maintained its ambition to shape theory and to lead the debate. As chief editor for twenty years, Nikolaus Kuhnert has made Arch+ into the most important German medium for architectural and urbanistic discussions. In essays and interviews, above all as initiator and moderator Kuhnert has assembled the most important international authors in the recent past and thereby has publicized in Germany themes such as deconstruction, the dissolution of cities, new media, new geometries, new building materials or technologies. As a spearhead for a second modernism, Kuhnert has once again made architecture into a laboratory of ideas that extends far beyond the act of building. (M. Mönninger)
In courageous opposition to a world full of borrowed or falsified conventions, Peter Zumthor’s work places the “real” things at the centre. Materials, building techniques and spaces once again become what they used to be; albeit not with an uncritical (and consequently anachronistic) recourse to the past, but, on the contrary, by means of placing them into a new semantic context. Zumthor’s thoroughly independent attitude withstands rational examination, at the same time opening a multivalent, poetic universe, which leads anyone, who is willing to become engaged with it, to an existential reflection. (V. M. Lampugnani)
Stanislaus von Moos began his career as an art historian with a spectacular publication on the origin of the Italian Renaissance Palace, thus at the same time raising interest in a new complex of themes: “political iconography”. Soon afterwards he himself became interested in architecture. His monograph on Le Corbusier has become a textbook in Le Corbusier research. As one of few art historians he subsequently became engaged in the development of contemporary architecture. His book on Venturi, Rauch & Scott Brown was one the first commentaries on postmodernism. His longlasting activity as founding editor of the Swiss architectural journal Archithese is as significant as his publications. Stanislaus von Moos is one of the influential architectural theoreticians of our time. (H. Klotz)
Besides recovering history and repairing destroyed structures, the continued construction and the new interpretation of existing cities are the most important challenges in contemporary architecture. With their powerful free-standing composition for the GSW Headquarters in Berlin, Sauerbruch Hutton came onto the scene right at the beginning of Berlin’s second period of economic renewal, during which the reconstruction of the urban fabric was being discussed. They had to wait almost five years until the time for their vertical reinterpretation of that segment of the Kochstrasse was ripe that until then was to have represented a complete break with the pre-war Berlin. Their design not only accepts the urban fabric but also the collage character of the new context, one that is to be filled with new density and which creates a flexing sculptural-architectural silhouette in the vertical dimension. In doing so, energy saving technology is used. Thus, their design attains an exemplary status of an ecological architecture which does not dissolve the city but aims to strengthen and modernize it. (M. Mönninger)
For four decades now, Martin Steinmann has been engaged at almost all levels of architecture: research, education, publications and practice. Above all, Steinmann has dealt with the conditions under which buildings come into being. In connection with his research and parallel to the foundation of the CIAM-Archive at the ETH-Zurich he developed his position on the continuation of modernism. By means of his editorships of the journals Archithese and Steinmann influenced architecture over a period of two decades not only in Switzerland. His ambition, that contemporary architecture has to be created in the public interest under the confluence of tradition and rules, has established high intellectual standards for himself as well as for his colleagues. (W. Wang)
