E-037

House Without Qualities, Cologne . Oswald Mathias Ungers . 1995

'Haus III or the “House Without qualities” (Haus ohne Eigenschaften) is a late work by German architect Oswald Mathias Ungers which the architect built for his wife and himself. Constructed in Cologne in 1995, the house is considered an experiment on the reduction of architectural elements  and it materializes the research on abstraction which Ungers had developed over the years; in this sense, the building can by seen as a conceptual model for a house which has been made real through building.
The house has a rectangular plan based on a classical architectural scheme, a central space and two side-aisles. It consists of two floors with five rooms, a central double-height volume and four equal rooms in the side-aisles.
Crucial in the design of the plan is the thickness of the exterior and the interior walls which are used to incorporate service facilities, like stairs, toilets, the elevator, bathrooms and storage spaces. The width of the walls is always the same through the whole plan.
The façades are identical by twos, symmetrical and constructed according to specific rules of proportions, no differentiation is pursued between the front and the back and the same window/door size is employed. The plan’s geometry is not made evident in the elevations in any way.
The extreme synthesis, the reduction of elements (no decoration, no hierarchy, no style) makes evident Ungers’ obsessive research for the essence of architecture, which the architect identified in the strict rules of composition.'

http://socks-studio.com/2015/11/10/house-without-qualities-by-o-m-ungers-1995/

A-009

Das über Pflanzen ist eins mit ihnen . Lois Weinberger . 1997

Railway track, planting with indigenous plants and neophytes, length 100m.
'Lois Weinberger made use of the open-air area of the Kulturbahnhof Kassel by sowing neophytes among indigenous plants. This type of vegetation grows rapidly, spreads across large sweeps of land, and crowds out native species. "The way a society deals with its plants tells us a lot about itself", says Weinberger. The struggle instigated by the artist is a metaphor of migration problems facing us today.'

http://www.loisweinberger.net/

E-031

La Congiunta, Giornico . Peter Märkli . 1992

F-007

Vescona . © Axel Hütte . 1991

'Axel Hütte es un fotógrafo alemán (nacido en Essen en 1951)  que intenta atrapar en sus fotografías lo intangible de la naturaleza. Sus imágenes, de un tamaño gigantesco y una perfección formal y detallismo extraordinarios, prescinden de la presencia humana y descomponen la realidad en una visión casi abstracta.
Estudió con Bernd Becher en la Academia de Bellas Artes de Düsseldorf, junto con Tomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Cándida Höffer o Andreas Gursky,...
"No me interesan los lugares en los que se han hecho cientos de miles de fotografías. Quiero atrapar la realidad que hay entre líneas, la que nunca ha sido capturada, ser yo el que atrape su primer momento como imagen.
La fotografía es como el lenguaje, hay muchísimas cosas que no se pueden decir pero está bien que sea así. Todos los intersticio son llenados por la imaginación."'

http://www.cadadiaunfotografo.com/2012/09/axel-hutte.html

F-003

Michigan Theater (from Detroit Photos) . © Stan Douglas . 1999

'Bernd Becher, born 1931 in Siegen, Germany, died 2007; Hilla Becher, born 1934 in Potsdam, Germany, lives and works in Düsseldorf. The photography of the Bechers is a documentary one. The buildings, mostly industrial manufacturing plants, regarded by the artists as "anonymous sculptures", appear isolated without the workers. They are monuments in and of themselves, and at the same time symbols of functionality. In typological series, constructions or devices with the same functions and comparable structures are analyzed, always under the same  - objective - shooting circumstances, in absolute abstention from an expressive treatment.'

http://www.schellmannart.com/sa/sa_worklist.php?aid=5

E-007

Convention Centre, Agadir . OMA . 1990

Our project can be read as a single building 'split' in two parts, a roof and a sockle, to create a major urban 'room', a covered plaza on the beach, facing the sea. The two axes culminate on the plaza. Floating above the verandah; the hotel: a single layer of rooms, each its own view. The conference centre forms the lower part, the sockle.
It was our challenge in this competition to find an original architectural expression for this enormous program which is compatible with the beauty of the site.
The curvilinear landscape of the dunes continues as the 'hills’ and 'valleys’ of the sockle, which accommodate the major components of the program: auditorium, etc.
As in a mirror image, the same kind of relief appears on the roof where it accommodates the royal chamber.
In this way the experience of the plaza will be determined by the similarity between above and below. 
The landscape which is generated with its concave and convex domes, with the 'forest’ of columns, its shafts of light, is a modern interpretation of Islamic space which will also be expressed by the materials: polished concrete, mosaic, tiles etc.

http://oma.eu/projects/agadir-convention-centre

A-001

House, London . Rachel Whiteread . 1993

'Whiteread and her team faced the daunting challenge of actually creating 'House'. The meticulous process involved pumping 193 Grove Road full of liquid concrete and stripping off the exterior – that is, the house itself – so that only the impression of its innards remained [...]
It was an extraordinary work of art by any standard, an impenetrable inversion of domesticity – a machine for not living'

http://www.apollo-magazine.com/house/

E-001

Studio House, London . Caruso & St.John . © Hélène Binet . 1993