Lara Schrijver examines the work of Oswald Mathias Ungers and Rem Koolhaas as intellectual legacy of the 1970s for architecture today. Particularly in the United States, this period focused on the autonomy of architecture as a correction to the social orientation of the 1960s. Yet, these two architects pioneered a more situated autonomy, initiating an intellectual discourse on architecture that was inherently design-based. Their work provides room for interpreting social conditions and disciplinary formal developments, thus constructing a `plausible' relationship between the two that allows the life within to flourish and adapt. In doing so, they provide a foundation for recalibrating architecture today.

Oswald Mathias Ungers is one of Germany's most influential architects as well as one of the 20th century's most influential architectural theorists. This volume uses his collection of art and architectural models, his buildings and library, to shed light on the different aspects of his theoretical approach.

Architectural form reconsidered in light of a unitary conception of architecture and the city. In The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Pier Vittorio Aureli proposes that a sharpened formal consciousness in architecture is a precondition for political, cultural, and social engagement with the city. Aureli uses the term absolute not in the conventional sense of “pure,” but to denote something that is resolutely itself after being separated from its other. In the pursuit of the possibility of an absolute architecture, the other is the space of the city, its extensive organization, and its government. Politics is agonism through separation and confrontation; the very condition of architectural form is to separate and be separated. Through its act of separation and being separated, architecture reveals at once the essence of the city and the essence of itself as political form: the city as the composition of (separate) parts. Aureli revisits the work of four architects whose projects were advanced through the making of architectural form but whose concern was the city at large: Andrea Palladio, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Étienne Louis-Boullée, and Oswald Mathias Ungers. The work of these architects, Aureli argues, addressed the transformations of the modern city and its urban implications through the elaboration of specific and strategic architectural forms. Their projects for the city do not take the form of an overall plan but are expressed as an “archipelago” of site-specific interventions.

In 1987, Berlin as a whole became a laboratory for architecture. A wide range of notable buildings with a unique density was created in the East and the West in connection with the city?s 750th anniversary. While the buildings were vilified at the time, they now appear as important witnesses to a ?postmodern? era of building, which called the traditional architecture of the modern living environment into question. Today, the buildings have disappeared, been modified, or are threatened with demolition. For the first time, the exhibition and publication examine the significance of the architectural visions developed in East and West Berlin in the final decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall.00Exhibition: Berlinische Galerie ? Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur, Berlin, Germany (30.10.2020 - 22.03.2021).

Hans Kollhoff on Oswald Mathias, Tom Emerson on Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Donatella Fioretti on Walter Gropius; these are just three of the fascinating pairs. In this compilation of conversations and essays, architects speak about architects and present the reader with a wide-ranging insight into the architecture of the present day and of previous generations. Outstanding architects of our time at the Faculty of Architecture of the Technical University Munich spoke under the heading Architects on Architects about their predecessors from previous generations who influenced the way they see architecture. Viewed from a present-day perspective, the focus lay on the relevance of concepts and ideas across the generations and on their adaptation for the world today. The format and diversity of the lectures provided in particular an opportunity to participate in the transfer of ideas and the discussions on the subject of building culture. The additional personal conversations between the architects presenting the lectures and renowned architectural theorists and artists examine the subject in greater depth and are now published for the first time in the form of this book.