Bücher veröffentlicht von Edition Axel Menges GmbH

Christopher Nolans Werk bildet ein Corpus, aus dessen Analyse sich eine Poetik ableiten lässt. Den Schlüssel dazu stellen THE PRESTIGE und das Skript der Zaubertricks dar; sämtliche Filme Nolans nach INSOMNIA sind davon geprägt. Die Analyse zeigt nicht nur, wie herausragend Nolans Filme sind, sondern sie erweisen sich auch als überraschend politisch. Der Joker in THE DARK KNIGHT verkörpert den Neoliberalismus, und mit Bane profitiert in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES ein Populist von der Zerstörung, die dieser anrichtet. INCEPTION stellt eine Allegorie aufs Filmemachen dar, die vollständig vom Skript der Zaubertricks bestimmt ist. In INTERSTELLAR und TENET geht es darum, wie die Menschheit auf die Klimakatastrophe reagiert: In INTERSTELLAR bleibt ihr nur die Flucht ins All; in TENET schlägt die Zukunft gegen die Gegenwart zurück. Mit der Atombombe gibt der Protagonist von OPPENHEIMER der Menschheit die Macht, sich selbst zu vernichten. Er läutet damit nicht nur das Nuklearzeitalter ein, sondern auch das Anthropozän.Weitere Themen sind unter anderem: der Angriff auf die Kiewer Oper in TENET und der russische Angriffskrieg auf die Ukraine; die Bezüge in INCEPTION auf SOLARIS von Andrej Tarkowski; die toten Frauenfiguren in Nolans Filmen und Edgar Allan Poes THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION; die Flugzeuge in Nolans Filmen transformieren die Kanarienvögel in THE PRESTIGE; die Evakuierung in DUNKIRK ergänzt die Flucht von der Erde in INTERSTELLAR; die Wechselwirkungen zwischen INTERSTELLAR und Zack Snyders MAN OF STEEL; Michael Manns Thriller THIEF und der Neoliberalismus; die Anspielungen in TENET auf den James-Bond-Film SKYFALL von Sam Mendes.Aufgrund des letzten Punkts beschäftigt sich ein Exkurs mit SKYFALL. Vor dem Hintergrund des sich wandelnden Geschlechterverhältnisses sucht Bond nach einer neuen Identität. Silvas Homosexualität ist eine Chiffre für Misogynie, und der Femizid an Sévérine rekurriert auf den Tod von Joan Vollmer Burroughs. Dabei wird geklärt, weshalb Bond in Terence Youngs DR NO auf seine Beretta verzichten muss und statt dessen von dem >Triumvirat< Walther PPK, Aston Martin und Wodka Martini durch die Filmreihe begleitet wird. Diese Befunde werden in Beziehung zu den folgenden Bond-Filmen mit Daniel Craig gesetzt.

Europe, indeed the whole world, is littered with concentration-camp memorials, information centres, memorial plaques, and other signs that have been set up as a reminder of the atrocities committed by the National Socialists and their numerous willing helpers. In the United States alone, there are around 100 Holocaust memorials. In Germany, there are over 500 of all kinds of memorial facilities commemorating the Nazi victims (without the uncounted »Stolpersteine« by Gunter Demnig installed in memory of individual Nazi victims). Perhaps without these facilities, the deeds of that time would have longsince been forgotten. Nevertheless, the memories of what happened are fading everywhere. Almost all of those once affected, victims and perpetrators, have now passed away, and many of us today would rather not be bothered by it.How should we deal with this? Remembrance can only be present and have an effect in the future if those dealing with the subject succeed in touching us emotionally in such a way that what we hear, read and see causes us to beginto deal intensively with what happened and and ask questions: How could so many of our ancestors be so merciless, so inhuman? How could these monstrosities happen? How was this possible, especially in Germany, against the backdrop of the Enlightenment, German Humanism, German Classicism, German Romanticism and the highly developed German culturein general? And as the present unfortunately shows, much of this has since been repeated - even in places where one would no longer have expected it.The author has visited over 60 memorial sites himself in the last 40 years and has been personally involved in many of them as an architect, designer and artist. The book presents his views on the design of Nazi memorials and information centres with numerous examples of his own, illustrated with photographs and drawings. For the author, the creative confrontation with the Nazi past is a means of naming and visualising the suffering and cruelty of which people are capable, using all the artistic means at his disposal.

What all these buildings have in common is that with the availablematerial, wood, and the most modest means, places of worship,centres in the villages, were built with much feeling and love. The constructions in wood were derived in an old tradition from the dwellings and farm buildings of the peasant population. Their architecture with their typological forms probably penetrated into this seclusion as anidea. »The idea of a church as a building«, brought with them by clergymenand wandering master craftsmen from the more fertile plainsand the rich, large mining and trading towns. The oldest churches were built as early as in the 15th century, most of those still standing were built in the 18th and 19th centuries, and quite a few are still being built today. Many were destroyed in the two world wars, many fell victim to ethnic cleansing after 1945. Many were destroyed in the two world wars, many fell victim to ethnic cleansing after 1945, some fell into disrepair during the Soviet era, others were burnt down by lightning or short circuits, and quite a few simply gave way to the more »represen-tative« stone churches as early as the 19th century. But a large number are still standing, consecrated, and believers gather in them. In fact almost of them in the various Carpathian countries are protected monuments, and many have been lovingly restored in recent times.More than the architectural-historical value, the question ariseshere of the aesthetic assessment of these small buildings. It is not arefined canon of forms of great architecture that can be derived andproven from the history of architecture that inspires us so much. Basically,they are not overly sophisticated constructions in terms of craftsmanship, they are safe and beautiful in their simplicity. Their aestheticappeal, however, also includes the surface-weathered material,deformed structures, colour improvisations, recently ornamentedsheet metal, inside wall paintings, altar and iconostasis furnishingsderived from Renaissance and Baroque periods, but above all theirlocation in the village, mostly isolated, often elevated, surrounded byold trees, enclosures and graves without cemetery order.Siegfried von Quast came from an old Prussian noble family. Hisgreat-grandfather, Allexander Ferdinand von Quast (1807-1877), wasa pupil of Karl Friedrich Schinkel and from 1843 the first Prussianstate conservator. In addition to his work in Prussia, he also took partin Schinkel's considerations for a royal residence for Otto I on theAcropolis in Athens. Siegfried von Quast (1931-2017) first studiedphilosophy, German literature and art history, and then architecture(among others with Egon Eiermann in Karlsruhe). As an architecturalphotographer, he was a sought-after partner for renowned architecturalfirms. His freelance artistic activity was primarily the photographicrecording of the wooden churches in Eastern Europe. He devotedhimself almost exclusively to this task for many years.

After the first volume was published in 2009 under the title Jean-Yves Barrier. Architect and Urbanist / Architecte et Urbaniste, which documented 25 years of his architectural practice, this second volume is dedicated to architecturaland artistic projects since the mid-2000s. While the first volume focused on architectural and urbanistic projects, this second volume presents not only 25 new architectural projects of Barrier, but also a completely different facet of his work:the relationship between architecture and art. In this context, »folding« becomes a fundamental concept that can be applied from design objects to art installations in public spaces and architecture. This new volume also shows once again theastonishing variety of architectural typologies that Barrier deals with in his current oeuvre. Whether it concerns residential buildings, collective housing, public facilities, urban design or functional buildings (such as supermarkets, an employmentoffice or an engineering structure), Barrier never adopts a repetitive or doctrinaire attitude, but develops new solutions for each project, which can be found in his ideal »lexicon of constants«. This is particularly true for the permanent search forurban coherence for the most varied interventions: in city centres, in derelict industrial zonesor in diffuse periurban spaces. Contemporary garden cities, condensed and compact assemblies, collages or the interweaving with what exists represent possibilities for Barrier to requalify and redevelop forgotten or abandoned urban situations with contemporary architecture. This is accompanied by the search to create urban signs and new networks in urban space, with the attempt to perpetuate the existing layers of the city. But it is not only the city that serves him as an architectural projection screen, but also andin particular the manifold interplay between art, design and architecture, which is expressed in a specific method, an edifice of thoughts, which allows him to achieve a creative coherence on these various levels of scale and thus simultaneouslyconnects different disciplines with each other.

»In seiner Anmerkung zu der in England 1994 als Landscape as Inspiration erschienenen Ausgabe meines Buches Neue Landschaftsarchitektur / New Landscape Architecture vergleicht Geoffrey Jellicoe meine Zeichnungsüberlegungen mit den Arbeiten Paul Klees. Was zunächst etwas hochgegriffen klingt, ist insofern richtig, als ich mich in allem, was ich zeichne, entwerfe und realisiere, nicht ausschließlich im banalen Alltags- und Funktionsraum bewege, sondern immer zweite und dritte Surrealitäten mit reflektiere. »Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar«, so formulierte Paul Klee den Vorgang. Zu Recht könnte jeder Betrachter und Leser die Frage dagegenstellen: Was haben derartige Kunst-äußerungen mit der Alltagsarchitektur zu tun? Ich denke: sehr viel, und zwar deswegen, weil alle Architekturprobleme und deren Lösungen mehrschichtig sind, genauso wie reine Kunstwerke. Jeder Bau faßt seine architektonische, städtische, dörfliche und landschaftliche Umgebung zusammen und definiert sie neu. Gewollt oder ungewollt, übertrieben oder zurückhaltend, jeder Bau kann wirken wie ein Meteor- oder Bombeneinschlag, eine unauffällige Anmerkung oder ein Verschönerungsattentat. Mich interessieren an einem städtischen oder landschaftlichen Ort die Vergangenheit, die Gegenwart und die Zukunft. Mein Blick will archäologische Arbeitsweisen genauso integrieren wie Funktionserfüllungen und phantasievoll-surreale, manchmal auch utopische Ausblühungen. Ich würde niemals so weit gehen zu behaupten: Architektur ist das Notwendige, und Kunst ist das Unnötige. Natürlich wird jeder Künstler-Architekt, der sich auf diesen kompliziert-komplexen Weg begibt, Schwierigkeiten mit der banalen, scheinbar oberflächlichen Alltagsrealität in der Natur, der Landschaft und der Stadt bekommen. Deswegen ist es nicht verwunderlich, daß ich nur wenige Architekturen und Bildinszenierungen verwirklichen konnte und daß ich im Laufe der letzten Jahrzehnte zunehmend in die Bühnenbild- und Gestaltungsbereiche abgedrängt wurde. Im Augenblick interessiert sich, dank der ökologischen Bewegung, kaum noch jemand für die Verbindung von Kunst und Architektur. Wichtiger sind Nachhaltigkeits- und Nullenergiehäuser, bei denen sich kaum noch die Fenster öffnen lassen. Könnte es sein, daß Baukultur, ja die gesamte Kultur, bald in grünen Urwäldern und riesigen Feuchtbiotopen versinkt? Oder werden vorher fremde, kriegerische Völker unsere Städte und Landschaften zerstören oder besetzen und neu kultivieren?«

Cities, estates and routing systems develop, change constantlyand fundamentally cannot be planned. Claims to ownership, landand building regulations, planning decisions and political interventionsmake it difficult for settlement structures to adapt to constantlychanging requirements to such an extent that meaningfuland totally ecological use of the surface of the earth is becomingincreasingly difficult, although new techniques and flexible planningmodels mean that a connection could be found with the self-designingprocesses of urban-development history.Plants are anchored in their location on the face of the earth, animalsand human beings have mobile territory and encampmentsthat become static with increasing density. Human settlements areorganisms, but they are not hereditarily anchored in their form likecorals, sponges or beehives. They often grow and shrink at thesame time. Their form can almost never be called chaotic. Typicalself-formation processes lead to astonishing genetic optimization inthe course of time. Processes of change have become so rapid todaythat current urban-planning theories have been overtaken.But high effectiveness of self-created, in other words unplannedsettlements in terms of energy and biology is totally achievable todayin »natural« town and transport planning and leads to ecologicallymeaningful solutions that are also full of beauty.The study was written in the context of special research into»natural constructions« by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft,and has hitherto been available only in German and as aworking paper for circulation between those involved in the researchproject.Frei Otto is one of the 20th-century's most important architecturalvisionaries. Although at a first glance his buildings like theGerman Pavilion for the 1967 World Fair in Montreal, designed withRolf Gutbrod, the roofs for the Olympic buildings in Munich designedby Günter Behnisch or the project developed with ChristophIngenhoven for a new main station in Stuttgart seem to be inthe tradition only of the great constructors of this century like FelixCandela or Pier Luigi Nervi, his work goes way beyond mere construction.He is a technician, artist and philosopher in one, and hiscentral concern is for a new and all-embracing link with nature inbuilding.