In his works, the Stuttgart artist Karl-Heinz Bogner processes impressions of built spaces, places and landscapes and develops them further into independent and complex reflections on space and imagination. Fragments and systems, structure and topography, metaphor, and reification merge in drawings and objects. With this eclectic approach he creates new worlds. In the interweaving of pictorial invention and seemingly familiar sign systems, his works oscillate between references to another reality and the one created in the work itself. They disclose themselves to the new discovery of the environment and of the space and challenge the viewer to a substantive rendition and interpretation.
Diagrams: Tropes, Tools and Abstract Machines examines the pervasive roles of diagrams as analytical, generative, narrative and critical devices manifest in design practices by architects and non-architects that draw on thick cultural milieus and that operate at personal, architectural and urban scales. What are potentials of diagrams beyond representation, as situated cultural practices, corporeal engagement and choreographic script, as instruments of speculation and invention, as manifestation of ideas and incrimination of ideology, as abstract machines in scenarios of allopoïesis, autopoïesis and cosmopoïesis?
The Death of Urbanism - Transitions through five stages of grief
Koolhaas pronounced urbanism dead in 1995. Since then, urban design has struggled to come to terms with this and other losses including environmental stability, affordable housing, design control, and urban amenity. This book explores urban design paradigms transitioning through a misappropriation of Kübler-Ross’ “five stages of grief” – from pro-sprawl ‘denial’, NIMBY ‘anger’, revisionist new urbanist ‘bargaining’, ‘depressed’ starchitects, through to an optimistic manifesto of ‘acceptance’.
In the easternmost district of the Axarquía region of Málaga province there is Frigiliana, a white village of 4,000 people. 300 metres above sea level and benefitting from a subtropical microclimate, looms Frigiliana’s much awarded and praised historic quarter, named “Barribarto”. Here its narrow, steep and winding streets, passageways and alleys combine to form a distinctive framework of small houses, piled one upon another.
