Architekt und Architekturhistoriker
In recent weeks, public debate once again circled around a familiar accusation: architecture has abandoned beauty. Contemporary award shortlists, suburban housing developments, and public buildings are cited as evidence that aesthetic judgment no longer plays a meaningful role in architectural culture.1 The tone is often indignant: how could the profession drift so far from what …
Weiterlesen "Beauty After Suspicion. Architecture, Expertise, and the Public Gaze"
Architecture, Ethics, and the Erosion of Collective Responsibility Within the framework of postwar social-contract architecture, contemporary minimalism appears not as a neutral stylistic preference but as a symptom of a broken ethical horizon. Its widespread appeal marks a decisive shift away from architecture’s former role as a material agent of collective obligation and toward a …
Weiterlesen "The Architecture of Low Obligation: Minimalism in a Post-Welfare Society"
Pezo von Ellrichshausen’s Casa Luna and Casa Guna are often described through the familiar vocabulary of contemporary concrete architecture—monolith, prism, fortress, abstraction. Yet what makes these houses persuasive is not primarily their formal bravura and severe minimalism, but the way each project re-stages the ethical question of Brutalism’s heritage: how can architectural frankness, mass, and …
Weiterlesen "Casa Luna and Casa Guna: Ethical Monumentality at the Human Register"
The cultural functionality of architecture should not be regarded as fundamental. Architecture is by far the most cumbersome and inert of all cultural expression techniques. Its production is bound to material, time, and social negotiation; it resists acceleration. Yet precisely this resistance has turned against it. In an age of ever-faster content consumption and the …
For much of the twentieth century, architecture was widely understood as a cultural practice in the strong sense of the term. Buildings were not merely shelters or infrastructures; they were carriers of collective values, spatial condensations of political ambition, social ideals, and shared futures. This assumption has become increasingly fragile. The recurrent diagnosis that architecture …
When Louis Kahn spoke about architecture, he rarely did so in the language of efficiency or economy. Cost, for him, was not a technical constraint to be optimized away but a condition to be answered. What mattered was not how little could be built, but whether what was built was commensurate with its task—spatially, materially, …
Weiterlesen "Measure, Means, and Intention: Louis Kahn and the Question of Architectural Worth"
Few formulations in twentieth-century architectural thinking are quoted as often—and misunderstood as frequently—as “Silence to Light.” For Louis Kahn, this was not a metaphor, nor a poetic afterthought appended to built work. It was a condensed theory of architecture itself: a description of how architecture comes into being, and of the ethical discipline required to …
Weiterlesen "From Silence to Light. On Louis Kahn’s understanding of architecture"
ALA Architects: Zentralbibliothek Oodi, Helsinki, 2012-18 (Simon Wieland 2025). Helsinki’s Central Library Oodi is frequently described as a “living room for the city.” The phrase may sound casual, but it captures a precise architectural stance—one that becomes especially legible when read against the Stadtbibliothek Stuttgart. Where Stuttgart insists on architectural clarity and abstraction, Oodi pursues …
Weiterlesen "Civic Ease and Architectural Intention. Reflections on Helsinki’s Central Library"
Eun Young Yi: Stuttgart City Library, 1999-2011. (Luigi Monzo 2025). The Stuttgart City Library is one of those buildings that demands to be taken seriously. Not because it overwhelms the city by scale or gesture—on the contrary—but because it insists on clarity, discipline, and restraint in an urban environment that rarely rewards such qualities. More …
Norman Foster’s new tower at 270 Park Avenue is a telling marker of how architectural mass has changed its meaning. In the postwar decades, designers like Paul Rudolph, Denys Lasdun, and Gottfried Böhm used weight, structure, and spatial density to embody institutions—universities, professional bodies, parishes—that belonged to the public realm. Their muscular forms carried ethical …
Weiterlesen "Foster’s New Tower and the Lost Civic Contract"
Luigi Monzo 