Bücher veröffentlicht von gta Verlag / eth Zürich

Shopping is history, in both senses of the word. As shopping shifts online and the economic shocks associated with the COVID-19 pandemic push bankruptcies to ­unprecedented levels, retail is facing its own version of the end of days. The arsenal of commercial techniques that retail has developed can no longer function as usual. The entangled worlds of architecture, fashion, business and art that supplied those techniques now appear to us in a new way, as a museum of a culture that is now ­becoming extinct. At the same time, retail's techniques of attraction and distraction have become visible in a new way. Stripped of their use value, they reveal themselves as techniques of pure display. Retail Apocalypse presents a compendium of case studies, interventions, and object lessons rescued from the bonfire of retail culture. It ranges from Friedrich Kiesler's display windows to Gae Aulenti's Fiat show­rooms, from J. G. Ballard's dystopian fantasies to TELFAR's critical utopias, from Rem Koolhaas to Herzog & de Meuron.

"Lore" as a term suggests a cumulative and collective understanding of a topic. Today, it is particularly common in gaming and serial storytelling to refer to the comprehensive background story of a fictive universe. This issue of trans magazine attempts to understand the many ways in which lore affects our present moment: the texts deal with narrated realities, logistics of knowledge, ghosts and angels, and how the subconscious influences the built environment.

Methodological, epistemic, and ontological borders have long prevented landscape and urban studies from engaging in transdisciplinary dialogue, sensuousness, and affect. Researching Otherwise uncovers possibilities for deploying sensory, collaborative, and restitutive methodological tools to craft spaces for producing knowledge from pluriversal worlds. These methods connect researchers and their objects of investigation in new ways to empower restitutive and regenerative futures "otherwise." Original contributions stem from research methods based on drawing, photography, sounding and listening, filmmaking, walking, and cartography. They reveal journeys of specialists and their companions while navigating through multi-species walks, engaging in cinematic and performative ways of knowing, submerging in ocean worlds, unsilencing bank vaults and troubled architectural histories, and exploring collaborative ethnographic investigations with refugees.

Do you feel heard?We try to put our thoughts into words to describe what we feel or what we believe in. We communicate with our bodies and speak through our actions. But silence is a form of communication, too. In silence, complex relationships unfold and allow unspoken realities to emerge. In every absence lies a presence, in every pause a possibility.This issue of trans magazin invites you to perceive the phenomenon of silence beyond the absence of sound.

A window is a mediating device between our body and the environment: by simply opening or closing it, we can regulate air, light, and sight. Both climatic and cultural conditions, alongside technological developments, shape the architecture of windows. Switzerland's diverse climate, which results from the Alps' particular geomorphology and its geographical location at the crossroads of European cultures, has generated a wide variety of window forms.The collection of windows gathered from field research takes the reader on a tour of the diverse practices of living and working in the country. Full-page hand drawings portray each window as a part of a complex network of elements and a site of knowledge. Short texts offer insight into various historical, technological, and socio-economic conditions of each spatial configuration. Conversations with Swiss architects reveal challenges of window design in contemporary building processes. The book unveils the role of the window as a tool for resourceful living practice and suggests ecological perspectives for its architectural design.

Whether experienced as a courtroom, a competitive talent show, or a theater of the absurd, critical reviews - "crits" - are a galvanizing, confrontational, and memorable rite of passage in architectural education. The crit stages a drama in which students are asked to present and defend their work in front of an audience of peers, teachers, and external experts. Although it is often a source of acute discomfort, the crit is also a tool of instruction, a forum for exchange, and a scene of discovery.A close analysis of the crit uncovers radical possibilities in experimental teaching, process-driven design, and the presentation of architectural ideas. At the same time, this analysis reveals fault lines in global architectural discourse and education, its historical dissemination, and its contemporary discontents. This issue of gta papers presents both a critique and a celebration of this storied rite.

By the time the computer arrived on the architectural scene, its place had been prepared by decades of avant-gardist experimentation. The modernist program of rationalizing creative practice took a decidedly bureaucratic turn between two generations of constructivists in the 1930s and 1960s. From Paris to Cambridge, painters, poets, designers, and architects poured their energy into cracking the code of artistic genius in hopes of democratizing the creation of better environments, thus stimulating a nascent repertoire of algorithmic techniques. The motivation to use these new techniques emerged from attempts to understand art and architecture through serial effects. By reformulating their disciplines in terms of flowcharting procedures developed in the field of scientific management, artists and architects enacted a paradigm shift that had long been a cherished dream of modernism, replacing composition with organization as the basis of design.

What was once a fixed notion of landscape has long since evolved and diversified. New buzzwords continue to fuel the discussion about the past, present, and future of our environment. Where do current debates about landscape start? Which paths remain, and where are unknown paths being trodden? This primer on current concepts in landscape architecture reflects the range of approaches in theory and practice that the Chair of Landscape Architecture of Christophe Girot at ETH Zurich has engaged with. A collection of short texts and audiovisual contributions, it forms an intergenerational terrain in which old and new ideas have taken shape. Terrain Vogue also marks the end of a publication series that has shaped discourse on research, teaching, and design with nature and landscape for twenty years.

Vitruvius's De architectura, written in the first century BCE, has been revered as the first treatise on architectural theory. Since its resurrection during the Renaissance, its enigmatic text has been adjusted, refined, and redefined in subsequent iterations. The book at hand bypasses exegeses of the text to focus on the material history of the printed editions disseminated throughout Europe. It surveys overa hundred editions of Vitruvius from 1486 to the present, tracing the power of the printed page in establishing the Roman author as an authority. Focusing on the impact of the physical objects that embody the Vitruvian canon highlights how book history and architectural history cross paths and how a symbiotic relationship between the printed and the built emerges. The resulting picture is that of a zigzagging thread between practice and theory, an elusive network of fruitful carelessness in architecture.

Lehmbau gehört nicht nur zu den ältesten, sondern auch zu den modernsten Bauweisen unserer Zeit. Welche ökonomischen, ökologischen und sozialen Chancen liegen in der verstärkten Nutzung von Erde als Baumaterial? Zement als wichtiger Bestandteil von Beton wird - wie andere knappe Ressourcen auch - in Zukunft nur noch begrenzt herstellbar sein und immer teurer gehandelt werden. Es ist notwendig, alternativen Baumaterialien mehr Beachtung zu schenken.Dieser Band stellt ein weites Spektrum gebauter und ungebauter Projekte sowie neue Strategien zur Realisierung von Lehmarchitektur vor - eine Bauweise, die jeder Kultur und jedem Kontext angepasst werden kann. Die Autoren präsentieren anhand eindrucksvoller Beispiele bahnbrechende technologische Innovationen, wobei sie die Vorteile dieses Materials veranschaulichen: von der weltweiten Verfügbarkeit bis zur Möglichkeit der vollständigen Wiederverwertung, von der klimaneutralen Produktion bis zum sozialverträglichen Einsatz insbesondere auch in Schwellenländern. Dieses Buch zeigt die erstaunlichen Potenziale der Lehmarchitektur auf - für die Menschen und für den ganzen Planeten.

Care work is at once omnipresent and invisible. It encompasses all forms of socially necessary - or reproductive - labor: raising children, cooking, cleaning, shopping, looking after the elderly and the ill, and many other tasks. It is what allows for and sustains productive labor (including architectural labor) in the first place. Although economic production depends on the work of social reproduction, care work is usually unpaid and pushed out of sight. It is indisputable that care work falls disproportionately upon women and unevenly along lines of race and class. Demographic changes, environmental crises, growing mobility, transformations of labor, and the reconfiguration of traditional institutions of care - from the nuclear family to welfare state provisions - have made the inequity of care a key problem in architectural debates.

Als Architekt, Umweltgestalter, Biologe und Denkmalpfleger hat Eduard Neuen­schwander (1924-2013) stets die Grenzen des Metiers überschritten: Sein gesamtes OEuvre, zu dem die Kantonsschule Rämibühl (1960-1970), der westliche Teil des ­Irchelparks (1979-1986) oder das vor dem Abriss gerettete Haus am Rindermarkt 7 in Zürich zählen, ist Ausdruck seines ganzheitlichen Denkens. Mit rund zwanzig exemplarisch vorgestellten Gebäuden und Aussenanlagen breitet das Buch das umfangreiche Werk Neuenschwanders aus und vertieft einzelne ­Aspekte seines Schaffens. Seine fachliche Herkunft, von der frühen Naturbegeis­terung bis zu den beiden Lehrmeistern Sigfried Giedion und Alvar Aalto, wird ebenso beleuchtet wie seine Fragment gebliebene Idee einer Künstlerkolonie in Gockhausen, wo der Architekt lebte. Weitere Schwerpunkte sind seine Rolle in der Naturgartenbewegung, seine grossmassstäblichen Planungen, die von ihm gegründete Stiftung Baukultur und seine Gestaltungselemente, die stets Architektur, Natur und Geschichte miteinander verbinden.

The second Venice Architecture Biennale, directed by Paolo Portoghesi, raised questions about a postmodernity throughout realms extending south and east from the Mediterranean, where modernity and decolonisation were converging. Though the exhibition on architecture in Islamic countries was largely forgotten, these questions are ever more relevant. Selected texts by Portoghesi, Medhi Kowsar and Udo Kultermann from the original exhibition catalogue, which was published only in Italian, are translated for the first time for an English-speaking readership and accompanied by commentary.Following an introduction by the editor, Esra Akcan reflects on the historical and socio-political contexts of the exhibition. In addition, Asli Çiçek and Véronique Patteeuw consider the catalogue itself from an architectural history perspective. Together, this historical and contemporary material suggests starting points for investigating this broadly overlooked biennale.

West German architecture underwent a phase of intense productivity from 1949 to 1964. In the immediate postwar years, architects confronted Nazi legacies in building culture amidst drastic privation that hampered construction. As industrial production recovered and a middle-class nation emerged, so too did a new architecture influenced by the American International Style model, especially as Bauhaus masters returned to Germany from the United States as advisers. But there was much more at stake than style. Construction details and other technical documents reveal that this was a moment when architectural practice aspired to calibrate social, material, and political norms through design. At the center of all these transformations were Hans Schwippert and Sep Ruf, two architects who shared political, religious, and professional allegiances. Schwippert, architect of the new Bonn parliament, worked to align economic redevelopment and a burgeoning consumer goods industry with design. Ruf, to whom Schwippert directed the commission for West Germany's first World's Fair pavilion, found ways to master architectural construction amidst both scarcity and largess. Photographs, drawings, and a broad range of unpublished documents introduce these two architects to an English-language audience.

The term 'social distance' was once only a vague metaphor to describe the relationship between different social groups. Yet it has acquired a precise meaning as the mandatory minimum distance for face-to-face interactions: 1, 1.5, or 2 metres (or 6 feet), depending on the jurisdiction. But what is the appropriate distance from which to interpret a pandemic? Rather than asserting a diagnosis of the con­tem­porary emergency, the issue Social Distance offers perspectives from archi­tectural history and theory. From the great plague of Venice to cholera in the indus­trializing city, from the human placenta to the 1960s bubble or the office of today, the fifth gta papers provides a broad range of reflections on contagion, disease, and health.

The Lloyd's building in London was constructed in the early 1980s based on a vi­sion­ary design by Richard Rogers and Partners. Its planning and construction transformed the ideas of megastructure and intelligent environment into built reality. Mock-ups (prototypic full-size models) played a crucial role in this, enabling Rogers' team to test and refine the necessary novel constructions and procedures to minimize the risks of such an ­ambitious project. Lloyd's 1¿:¿1 is the first case study of one of the most important building projects of the late modern era. It showcases pre­viously unpublished ma­ter­ial from the ­archives of Rogers Stirk Harbour¿+¿Partners, Josef Gartner and Arup to reconstruct the planning process and demonstrate the working methods. Ex­amples of how mock-ups were used as research or planning ­instruments highlight their ­relevance for further developing building culture.

In der Arbeit von Michael Hopkins and Partners fand in den 1980er und 1990er Jahren ein Wandel statt, der sich in den fünf in diesem Buch untersuchten städtischen Gebäuden besonders deutlich widerspiegelt. Hopkins, ausserhalb Grossbritanniens relativ unbekannt, präsentiert seine damalige Perspektive in seinem Vortrag «Technology Comes to Town», der hier veröffentlicht und durch Baustudien von fünf zeitgenössischen europäischen Architekten ergänzt wird. Essays von Adam Caruso und Helen Thomas untersuchen die britische Szene, in der grundlegende Fragen zu Technologie, Stil und Kontext die Diskussionen über die Architektur des 20. Jahrhunderts pr.gen. Die Präsenz dieser Themen in Hopkins' Architektur wird durch neu angefertigte Zeichnungen und durch aktuelle Fotos von Hélène Binet deutlich.

Wie lehrt man Architektur und Konstruktion im ersten Studienjahr, wie nutzt man die mitgebrachte ErfaETH Zürichhrung und das unterschiedliche Potential der angehenden Architekten? Mit diesen Fragen hat sich Annette Spiro, Architektin und ETH-Professorin, über viele Jahre intensiv auseinandergesetzt. Als engagierte Lehrerin war und ist es ihr ein Anliegen, die Studentinnen und Studenten mit versierter Fachkenntnis, aber auch mit der ihr eigenen grossen Neugierde in die Disziplin einzuführen. Spiros Ziel ist es, in ihnen das Feuer und die Freude für das eigene, gute Projekt zu entfachen. Das Buch beleuchtet in sechs Heften die unterschiedlichen Aspekte und Einflüsse, die im ersten Studienjahr auf die Entwürfe der Studierenden einwirken. Die Vorlesungen sind dabei ebenso wesentlich wie die Semesterprojekte und das persönliche Umfeld der Studierenden, die sich in Interviews über ihr Studium äussern. Die wöchentlichen Übungen beschreiben die elementaren Grundbegriffe und Prinzipien, die im ersten Jahr gelehrt werden. Ein Glossar greift wichtige Schlüsselbegriffe und Thesen aus der Architektur auf, und das Logbuch stellt begleitende Ereignisse und Veröffentlichungen dar, die das erste Studienjahr mitprägen.

Sind Politik und Wirtschaft Motoren für künstlerische und architektonische Verän- derungen? Das Forschungsprojekt «Der Wert der Oberfläche» an der ETH Zürich unter der Leitung von Philip Ursprung folgte dieser Fragestellung. Der Begriff «Wert» wird hier ebenso sehr in ökonomischen Zusammenhängen wie als eine Idee der Qualität in Kunst und Architektur gesehen. Wo sind Vergleichbarkeiten etwa zwi- schen dem frühen Industriekapitalismus, dem Crystal Palace in London, Herman Melvilles Roman Moby Dick und der leibhaftigen Erscheinung eines weissen Wals zu beobachten? Oder inwieweit prägten die Folgen der Bologna-Reform die Struktur der Hochschule für Architektur in Nantes von Lacaton & Vassal?Aus dezidiert subjektiver Sicht zeigt Philip Ursprung in seinen 14 im Rahmen des Projekts entstandenen Essays Verbindungen zwischen Ökonomie, Architekturund Kunst auf. Seine unkonventionellen gedanklichen Pfade regen zur kritischen Reflexion an. Sie führen in teils neue, teils unerwartete, überraschende Denkräume, die es ermöglichen, Phänomene in bisher so nicht gesehenen, einander wechsel- seitig bedingenden Erscheinungsformen zu betrachten. Das Buch plädiert für eine spekulative Geschichtsschreibung und fordert dazu auf, manche theoretische Prämisse zu revidieren.

Die Fassadengestaltungen der Architekten Mario Asnago (1896-1981) und Claudio Vender (1904-1986) geben zahlreichen Strassenzügen in Mailand ein Gesicht. Sie modellieren den Aussenraum, so dass er, einem Innenraum vergleichbar, einen behausenden Charakter annimmt. Mit eleganten, von formaler Zurückhaltung, doch zugleich von grossem Erfindungsreichtum geprägten Fassaden rhythmisieren die Gebäude von Asnago Vender das Erscheinungsbild der Strassen. Welche kompositorischen Elemente kamen hier zum Einsatz? Wie wirken sich einzelne architektonische Kunstgriffe auf die Stadtgestalt aus?Alle zwei Jahre vergibt der Bund Schweizer Architekten (BSA) ein Forschungsstipendium, dessen Ergebnisse veröffentlicht werden. In der vierten Publikation dieser Reihe beschreibt und analysiert Giulio Bettini die von Asnago Vender eingesetzten volumetrischen, architektonischen und konstruktiven Mittel und setzt sie in Bezug zur städtebaulichen Tradition Mailands sowie zur Stadtbaukunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. Hier wird eine urbane Entwurfspraxis ablesbar, die über die Grenzen der norditalienischen Stadt hinausgreift und deren Kraft bis in die Gegenwart hinein wirksam ist.