There is a line of thought—most clearly articulated by Kenneth Frampton—that should be stated as precisely as possible: construction is not merely the technical basis of architecture; it is its language. What architecture communicates emerges through how it is made—through material, joint, assembly, and the specific conditions of its time. This is the tectonic argument …
Joseph Greissing und die Comburg: Architektur als Weiterbau
Die Großcomburg bei Schwäbisch Hall ist kein Werk im klassischen Sinne, sondern ein über Jahrhunderte gewachsenes Ensemble. Gerade in dieser langen Dauer liegt ihre architektonische Qualität. Im frühen 18. Jahrhundert tritt mit Joseph Greissing eine Figur auf den Plan, die diesen Bestand nicht ersetzt, sondern transformiert und neu ordnet.Greissing, aus dem Vorarlberger Baumeistermilieu hervorgegangen und …
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Abendvortrag: Fritz Leonhardt und die Stuttgarter Schule des Leichtbaus
Abendvortrag Fritz Leonhardt und die Stuttgarter Schule des Leichtbaus Christiane Weber, Institut für Architekturgeschichte der Universität Stuttgart (ifag) 9. Juni 2026, 19.00 Uhr, Hällisch-Fränkisches Museum (Medienraum), Schwäbisch Hall. Der Eintritt ist frei. Die Kammergruppe Schwäbisch Hall lädt im Hällisch-Fränkischen-Museum zu einem Vortrag mit dem Titel Fritz Leonhardt und die Stuttgarter Schule des Leichtbaus ein. Der …
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Complex Value: Why Architecture is more than a Service
Complex Value: Why Architecture is more than a ServiceIn recent decades architecture has increasingly been described as a service. The language of the discipline has shifted accordingly: efficiency, performance indicators, delivery models, stakeholder management. Architects are often asked to demonstrate that their work behaves like other professional services—predictable, measurable, and optimized.This description is not entirely …
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Beauty After Suspicion. Architecture, Expertise, and the Public Gaze
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 …
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The Architecture of Low Obligation: Minimalism in a Post-Welfare Society
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 …
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Casa Luna and Casa Guna: Ethical Monumentality at the Human Register
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 …
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The Cultural Functionality of Architecture
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 …
Architecture as a Slow Medium in a Fast Culture. On the Structural Erosion of Architectural Meaning
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 …
Measure, Means, and Intention: Louis Kahn and the Question of Architectural Worth
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, …
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Luigi Monzo 