Already with his thesis project Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius questioned the traditional activities of architects. The emphasis of his work lies in the planning and realization of events as well as ephemeral buildings such as for example the “bad ly”, a public swimming pool amongst building waste containers, or the 100 m long kitchen counter for the Architectural Forum Linz, both projects from 1999.
As a member of the Berlin group raumlabor Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius and his partners develop urban design and architectural projects, for which architectural collaborations are assembled according to need based on a “loose bunch, a pleasant network, two rooms with a little technology”.
Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius dares to forecast that “raumlabor will be one of the largest architecture networks in ten years, with 950 members worldwide and the first two thousand realized raumlabor projects. The name stands for green, witty and far too cheap.”
Kazuyo Sejima already came to notice with her early buildings, which not only demonstrate an elegant formal composition and material assembly but also a thorough independent design approach. The Japanese architect starts from an abstract description of functional relationships, for which the respective building is intended, transposes this into a spatial diagram and transforms this diagram into architecture. The resulting buildings are as unusual as they are memorable, seemingly transcending any traditional typology, however, remaining closely related to their function.
In this manner, Sejima picks up the modernist thread, whose premises and ambitions she nevertheless interprets in an unorthodox and contemporary way. Distinct from her teacher Toyo Ito and most of his generation, she is not concerned with the exaggerated representation of the fleeting character of our times, but, on the contrary, with a contemplative deceleration – devoid of any nostalgia.
The fact that architecture is effective via images, that communicate it, has long been overlooked, later on it has been abused as a blank cheque for meaningless referential games and exhibitionisms. Volker Busse and Andreas Geitner counter such overreactions with an intelligent as well as responsible handling of architectural form. It is an inseparable component of the substance and of the constructive composition. Persistent design development makes the image ever more precise until a seeming self-evidence has been reached: until the questions of use, material, context and symbolism have been resolved into a clear and consistent answer. The controlled abstraction works against any one-sided commitment towards either the past or the future and presents the architecture as utterly contemporaneous, complete also in terms of its functional qualities and the carefully selected and executed materiality. (V. M. Lampugnani)
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)
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)
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