The Museum für Angewandte Kunst Köln (MAKK) is currently hosting the exhibition ‚O.M. Ungers – Architektur als Idee‘ (22 May – 27 September 2026), marking the centenary of Oswald Mathias Ungers. Accompanying the exhibition is an insightful opening lecture by Martin Kieren, who presents Ungers not merely as one of Germany’s most influential post-war architects, but as an architect whose buildings emerged from a remarkably coherent intellectual project.
I have to admit that I have long regarded Ungers primarily as a formalist—an architect of geometric rigor, proportion and typological clarity. That perception, however, probably says as much about my own limited familiarity with his theoretical writings as it does about his architecture.
What struck me most in Kierens’s lecture is the suggestion that Ungers‘ buildings cannot really be understood independently of the conceptual framework behind them. Geometry, proportion and reduction were apparently never ends in themselves, but instruments in a broader search for the enduring principles of architecture. This perspective encourages a return to his work with fresh eyes.
The exhibition therefore seems to offer more than a retrospective of a celebrated architect. It appears to invite a reconsideration of architecture itself—not as the pursuit of novelty or spectacle, but as a disciplined intellectual practice grounded in ideas. That is an invitation well worth accepting.
Architekt und Architekturhistoriker
Luigi Monzo 