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)
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)
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)
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)
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.
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