Tag Archives: Berlin

New Books: APL Studios

Last week I was able to sit in on the studio lotteries to hear about all the classes that will be taught this semester in the School – I am a little jealous that I cannot take some of them myself! While reviewing the new books this morning, I discovered that two of our recent arrivals may be of interest to two of the studios – Wilfried Wang’s studio on Berlin and Margaret Griffin’s studio on tower design in LA.

Ward, Simon. Urban Memory and Visual Culture in Berlin: Framing the Asynchronous City, 1957-2012. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016.

Ward_Berlin

Gigon, Annette, Mike Guyer, and Felix Jerusalem. Residential Towers. Zürich: GTA Verlag, 2015.

Residential_Towers

I will keep an eye out for other new arrivals that may be valuable to the work done in the studios throughout the semester. If you need help locating a resource or would like to request a purchase for material we do not have, please feel  free to stop in or drop us a line.

New Books at the Architecture and Planning Library: Fragments of Metropolis Berlin

Lehmann, Niels and Christoph Rauhut. Fragments of Metropolis Berlin: Berlin’s Expressionist Legacy. Introduction by Hans Kolhoff. Translated by Philip Shelley. Munich: Hirmer, 2015.

Fragments_of_Metropolis_BerlinTwo short articles, one by Hans Kolhoff and the other by Christoph Rauhut, are offered by way of introduction in which the authors seek to situate the importance of Expression in architectural history.  Kolhoff writes:

The Expressionists believed in a modernity that emerged from tradition but without rupture and which denied all forms of the purely stylistic; this was how they were able to achieve their own style. For us they represent ‘another Modernism’, that was intuitively opposed to that kind of white Modernism before it was ever celebrated as the International Style. (pg. viii)

Most of the book is dedicated to creating a record of Expressionism in Berlin, consisting primarily of photographs accompanied occasionally by a drawing, whether plan, section, or elevation. Lehamann and Rauhut write:

The surviving fragments are witnesses of an avant-garde that gave expression to a new society through architecture: the buildings are built utopias.  (Preface)

The book itself is thus an attempt to bear witness to the surviving fragments.