Architecture

Multistory carparks are the storage medium of the automobile age. Here, traffic comes to a planned halt.

Right at the top of the parking garage at Berlin’s “Neukölln Arcaden”, for some years now the “Klunkerkranich” has happily existed in its very own urban biotope. A local meeting point, and not just for hipsters.

For a long time, the old railway station hall in Chemnitz was nothing more than a relic of East Germany. Now Grüntuch Ernst Architekten have transformed it into a pleasant, open and covered urban space.

Horace Gifford never made a secret of his homosexuality. He loved life on the beach and he loved some of his clients. His life is closely linked with the liberalization of homosexuality in the second half of the 20th century.

With the Switch House, the Tate Modern recently opened its long-cherished extension on the South Bank of the Thames. So what exactly have Herzog & de Meuron built?

An exhibition in Berlin offers you an unadulterated view of the urban scenery in some Japanese anime films.

Roger Bundschuh dissects a house into three parts. To create any number of views outwards and inwards.

Was the “Endless House” the original model for architecture without properties? The Museum für angewandte Kunst in Vienna is devoting an exhibition called “Life Visions” to the visionary Frederick Kiesler.

When the cities learnt to walk in superstructures – people stayed where they were, left to their own devices. Is this why yesterday’s future visions and utopias are suddenly back en vogue in architecture?

Not only has Constant’s archive been unpacked in The Hague: the show at the Gemeentemuseum also considers the future of a “New Babylon”.

50 years ago, one of the most influential and radical architecture groups of the 1970s was founded in Florence: Superstudio. Rome’s Maxxi Museum celebrates the anniversary with a big retrospective.

Superstudio was consciously radical and critiqued progress. Barbara-Brigitte Mak and Ludwig Engel talked with Gabriele Mastrigli, curator of the jubilee exhibition, about the group’s legacy and importance today.

Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM) is showcasing Studio Mumbai in a major exhibition in Frankfurt/Main, in which it demonstrates how contemporary construction can be a successful symbiosis of Indian tradition and Western Modernism.

Sometimes the history of architecture is full of irony. The same is true of Charles Moore’s house in New Haven, which featured in “Playboy” in 1969.

Taking five buildings by Mies van der Rohe as examples, an exhibition in Heerlen demonstrates how successful good refurbishment in line with the original can be.

Paul Rudolph’s New York penthouse has lots of levels. Even today, architectural history is divided on the true significance of the building in which Rudolph lived with his partner Ernst Wagner.

Almost 40 years after construction work started, a subsidized public housing project by Álvaro Siza is being continued in Venice. A superb exhibition turns it into the Portuguese country exhibition at this year’s Architecture Biennale – and shows us that sometimes the front runs right past our front foors.

So who has the time to see everything at this Biennale? We’ve chosen a few of the really eye-catching exhibitions for you.

So many unfinished buildings: The Spanish pavilion focuses on unfinished and abandoned structures and thus discovers more than just the legacies of a burst property bubble.

Aravena’s main exhibition celebrates hand-made architecture, as can be sensed from all the materials and smells. But does that suffice for the major challenges?

How to make Heimat? The German Pavilion opens its walls and the curators put forward hypotheses on what cities should look like where people not only arrive, but want to stay.