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 …

Light, Order, and the Question of Meaning. On the Stuttgart City Library and Boullée’s Shadow

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 …

Foster’s New Tower and the Lost Civic Contract

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 …

Stadium Dreams and Real Estate Realities: Serie A’s Urban Question

From Football to Real Estate Italian football has always been more than a sport. Today, however, Serie A increasingly reveals itself as a laboratory where urban development, financial speculation, and cultural identity intersect. Stadium projects are no longer only about the game. They are catalysts for massive real estate operations, bargaining chips between municipalities and …

Marseille Beyond the Icon: MuCEM and the Mediterranean Metropolis

From Peripheral Port to Cultural MetropolisIn recent decades, Marseille has undergone a dramatic transformation from peripheral port to cultural metropolis. At the heart of this shift stands the MuCEM, Rudy Ricciotti’s Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations, completed in 2013 as the centerpiece of Marseille’s year as European Capital of Culture. Its role has been …

Die unsichtbaren Städte

Phantasivolle Betrachtung der Stadt in der Übersetzung von Burkhart Kroeber neu aufgelegt 1972 erstmals herausgegeben ist Italo Calvinos Buch ‘Le città invisibili’ (Die unsichtbaren Städte) inzwischen neu im Fischer Verlag aufgelegt worden. Bis heute ist der fantastische Dialog Marco Polos mit Kublai Khan eine virtuose Reise in die unsichtbaren Zusammenhänge menschlichen Zusammelebens. Calvino gelingt dabei …