Egon Eiermann influenced postwar German architecture to an extent unrivalled by any other architect. His rich architectural oeuvre is characterized by striking transparency, sensitive response to materials, high artistic standards, and rigorous attention to design quality--down to the very last detail. Eiermann also created a number of successful furniture designs, including his famous drawing table stand, the SE 18 folding chair, and the E 10 rattan lounge chair, now known as the Eiermann chair. Among Eiermann's best-known buildings are the IBM headquarters in Stuttgart-Vaihingen, the Olivetti corporate center in Frankfurt am Main, the former high-rise office building for Members of the German Bundestag in Bonn, and the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Ged'chtniskirche in Berlin. Eiermann was also a highly respected educator and architectural innovator. During his tenure as a professor of architecture at the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe, he influenced an entire generation of young architects. This volume considers his entire life's work.

When the German Embassy in Washington was completed in 1964, the architectural critic for the Washington Post wrote that the express aim of those commissioning the building had been to make an architectural statement that would embody the spirit of the young German democracy.

" In February 1956 the president of IBM, Thomas Watson Jr., hired the industrial designer and architect Eliot F. Noyes, charging him with reinventing IBM’s corporate image, from stationery and curtains to products such as typewriters and computers and to laboratory and administration buildings. What followed—a story told in full for the first time in John Harwood’s The Interface—remade IBM in a way that would also transform the relationships between design, computer science, and corporate culture. IBM’s program assembled a cast of leading figures in American design: Noyes, Charles Eames, Paul Rand, George Nelson, and Edgar Kaufmann Jr. The Interface offers a detailed account of the key role these designers played in shaping both the computer and the multinational corporation. Harwood describes a surprising inverse effect: the influence of computer and corporation on the theory and practice of design. Here we see how, in the period stretching from the “invention” of the computer during World War II to the appearance of the personal computer in the mid-1970s, disciplines once well outside the realm of architectural design—information and management theory, cybernetics, ergonomics, computer science—became integral aspects of design. As the first critical history of the industrial design of the computer, of Eliot Noyes’s career, and of some of the most important work of the Office of Charles and Ray Eames, The Interface supplies a crucial chapter in the story of architecture and design in postwar America—and an invaluable perspective on the computer and corporate cultures of today. "

As models and paradigms, patterns have been helping to orient architects since the Middle Ages. But patterns are also the basis of the history of ornament, an aesthetic phenomenon that links all times and cultures at a fundamental level. Ornament – and hence pattern as well – was abolished by the avant-garde in the first half of the twentieth century, but the notion of pattern has taken on new meaning and importance since the 1960s. Complexity research has ultimately shown that even highly complex, dynamic patterns may be based on simple behavioral rules, and that has allowed the notions of pattern and pattern formation to take on new meanings, that are also central for architecture. Today the use of generative computerized methods is opening up new ways of talking about an idea that is becoming increasingly abstract and dynamic. Pattern explores the question: what are the notions of pattern that must be discussed in the context of contemporary architecture?

After World War II, West Germans and West Berliners found ways of communicating both their recent sufferings and aspirations for stable communities through buildings that fused the ruins of historicist structures with new constructions rooted in the modernism of the 1910s and ‘20s. As Modernism as Memory illustrates, these postwar practices undergird the approaches later taken in influential structures created or renovated in Berlin following the fall of the Wall, including the Jewish Museum and the Reichstag, the New Museum and the Topography of Terror. While others have characterized contemporary Berlin’s museums and memorials as postmodern, Kathleen James-Chakraborty argues that these environments are examples of an “architecture of modern memory” that is much older, more complex, and historically contingent. She reveals that churches and museums repaired and designed before 1989 in Düren, Hanover, Munich, Neviges, Pforzheim, Stuttgart, and Weil am Rhein contributed to a modernist precedent for the relationship between German identity and the past developed since then in the Ruhr region and in Berlin. Modernism as Memory demonstrates that how one remembers can be detached from what one remembers, contrasting ruins with recollections of modernism to commemorate German suffering, the Holocaust, and the industrial revolution, as well as new spaces for Islam in the country.

"The present publication includes the work done by the MEAM Net research group at the Politecnico di Milano in collaboration with 27 institutions Europe-wide. This work, titled "One hundred houses for one hundred European architects of the 20th century", bore fruit in a travelling exhibition and a website"

A new and challenging perspective on Nazi exhibition design In one of the most comprehensive analyses ever written on the subject, Michael Tymkiw reassesses the relationship between Nazi exhibition design and modernism. While National Socialist exhibitions are widely understood as platforms for attacking modern art, they also served as sites of surprising formal experimentation among artists, architects, and others, who often drew upon and reconfigured the practices and principles of modernism when designing exhibition spaces and the objects within. In this book, Tymkiw reveals that a central motivation behind such experimentation was the interest in provoking what he calls "engaged spectatorship"—attempts to elicit experiences among exhibition-goers that would pique their desire to become involved in wider processes of social and political change. For historians of art, architecture, performance, and other forms of visual culture, Nazi Exhibition Design and Modernism unravels long-held assumptions, particularly concerning the ideological stakes of participation.