A Postscript on Preservation and Transformation in urban planning and architecture In a recent essay on the redevelopment of central Pforzheim and the impending demolition of two buildings from the postwar period (cfr. Was bleibt von der Stadt des Wiederaufbaus? In: Pforzheimer Zeitung, 08-15-2026, p. 22), I wrote a sentence that was meant almost as …
Complex Value and the Architecture of Integration
In discussions about architecture, individual qualities are often elevated to the status of ultimate criteria. One generation celebrates structural expression, another sustainability. Some architects prioritise flexibility, others beauty, economy, material honesty, social inclusion, or energy performance. Each of these concerns is legitimate. Yet architecture rarely succeeds because it excels in only one of them.Watching major …
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Beyond Form: What Total Football Reveals About Architecture
Football and architecture are rarely discussed together. Yet one of the most influential ideas in the history of football offers an unexpected lesson for architects. When Rinus Michels developed Total Football and Johan Cruyff transformed it into a broader philosophy, they were not merely rethinking tactics. They were rethinking space.At its core, Total Football is …
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Too Hot? Alexander von Branca and the Return of Architecture’s Fundamental Questions
A few days ago, I came across a 1998 interview with the Munich architect Alexander von Branca. Known for projects such as the Neue Pinakothek in Munich and numerous religious buildings, von Branca reflected on architecture, the city, community, and the responsibilities of the architect. Around the same time, I learned about the exhibition Too …
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Tectonics Against the Image: On Frampton, Brutalism, and the Drift of Contemporary Architecture
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 …
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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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 