50th Anniversary of the Olympic Games, 1972

It is not only the athletes who compete against one another at the Olympics and Paralympics. In exactly the same way, the manufacturers of sports equipment attempt to outdo one another in supplying the athletes with equipment, as do the host nations with their visual and architectural designs for the relevant Games.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the Olympics Games in Munich in 1972, Die Neue Sammlung is taking a close look at the diverse interdependencies that exist between design and the Olympics.

The Vanishing Architecture of a 'Paradise Lost'

This book brings together a group of essays, a photo series, and a catalogue of selected projects of Miami’s 1980s architecture – some built, some unbuilt.

The text and the accompanying images celebrate a period in American architecture when, in Miami, the subtropical nexus of the Americas, art and architecture were intensely interconnected, and Miami architects were partaking in the discipline’s international discourse.

This book was recently selected and featured on World-Architects.com as well as the New York Times.

Design as an Attitude: New Edition

Four years after its initial release, Alice Rawsthorn’s bestselling book is republished in an expanded edition, updated in response to recent social, political, and ecological challenges worldwide.

Fully revised by the author, the book is enriched by a new chapter on design’s response to the climate emergency, while also exploring the impact of COVID-19, rising inequality, and new developments in identity politics on design.

Design as an Attitude describes the resourcefulness and ingenuity with which designers are responding to complex and intersectional global challenges at an extraordinarily turbulent time. Public interest in design is soaring as a new generation of designers uses advanced technologies to pursue their humanitarian and ecological objectives in increasingly ambitious projects, as well as to reinvent the objects and spaces we use daily.

Cui Jie

Accompanying Cui Jie’s solo exhibition ‘New Model Village’ at Focal Point Gallery, this publication presents an international view of the pioneering modernist architecture and art of Essex through newly commissioned paintings and prints, linking practices to the worker towns and villages of Shanghai.

Including images of new works and installation views, archival material, essays by Wenny Teo, Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art at The Courtauld, London; and Zhou Jianjia, founding partner and principal architect of YeArch Studio (YEAS), and an interview between Cui Jie and Katharine Stout, Director of Focal Point Gallery, this publication documents Cui Jie’s first solo institutional show outside of China

As featured in the Guardian.

Gilded Keyholes

Gilded Keyholes presents 30 new designs for keyhole escutcheons by London-based artist Pablo Bronstein. His ink drawings in a variety of styles are printed in yellow and black.

This publication follows up to Bronstein’s  very popular A Guide to Postmodern Architecture in London (why not treat yourself to both?)

Architectural Images

This publication presents the photographic work of Irmel Kamp in the form of a comprehensive overview of her series of pictures taken since 1978.

Focusing on architectural subjects, this work has been one of the artistic discoveries of a typologically oriented black-and-white photography that is characterised by individual perspectives and cultural historical as well as sociological-atmospheric references.

Includes a conversation between Irmel Kamp with Barbara Hofmann-Johnson, Director of the Museum für Photographie Braunschweig, and Markus Mascher, Curator and Deputy Director of the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren.

The Society of Signs

The ‘Pictograms, Signs of Life, Emojis: The Society of Signs’ catalogue explores the questions: What objectives, and hopes are linked to the development of the modern language of images, including emojis? To which issues of their time are they each reacting to? Do they expand our possibilities of expression, or do they limit them by defining stereotypes?

The focus of this catalogue is on lexicons and systems of pictorial signs devised by designers and artists like Gerd Arntz, Marie and Otto Neurath, Otl Aicher, Yukio Ōta or Wolfgang Schmidt and others.

How functional or engaging do the designers consider their pictorial signs to be? Are they interested in universal forms of communication or personal spaces of retreat, rapid transmission of information or complex or poetic forms of language, abstraction or individualisation?

A conversation between Marc Camille Chaimowicz and Roger Diener.

The conversation between the artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz and the architect Roger Diener departs from their collaboration ‘The Armadillo House’ in Basel.

Rather than striving to build a “Meisterhaus” – an idealised representation of Diener & Diener’s architectural programme – they joined forces with someone who seems at first sight to be a most unlikely contributor to their project.

The collaboration between artist and architect has led to a result that goes far beyond conventional parameters.

Sumayya Vally. Counterspace

The 20th Serpentine Pavilion is designed by Johannesburg-based practice Counterspace, directed by Sumayya Vally (b. 1990). A TIME100 Next List honouree, Vally is the youngest architect to be commissioned for this internationally renowned architecture programme.

The Pavilion’s design is based on past and present places of meeting, organising and belonging across several London neighbourhoods significant to diasporic and cross-cultural communities, including Brixton, Hoxton, Tower Hamlets, Edgware Road, Barking and Dagenham and Peckham, among others.

Responding to the historical erasure and scarcity of informal community spaces across the city, the Pavilion references and pays homage to existing and erased places that have held communities over time and continue to do so today. Among them are some of the first mosques built in the city, cooperative bookshops and cultural sites.

free space, transformation, habiter

In this book, the French architects Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, winners of the 2021 Pritzker Prize, present their work through three concepts:

Free Space – the ideal space would invariably be generous of size, efficiency and comfort. This pre-determined aim is a fundamental principle for Lacaton and Vassal: it is no longer up for debate, and it forms the basis of all their projects.

Transformation – never demolish, always add, transform, extend. Apply free space to existing structures and situations. Treat the place as an existing prerequisite. Take the values of the place as it is and integrate them into the project, never in opposition to it.

Habiter – life, uses, making the space one’s own. Making the others and the inhabited space tangible through the frames of Karine Dana’s films, showing the life and inhabitants in nine built works by the architects.

Fashion in Steel

Five hundred years ago the harness, this archetypical-looking piece of male protective clothing made of steel was a phenomenon that deeply impacted Europe’s military and cultural history. Yet, the image of the armoured knight on his charger who proves himself on the battlefield and in the tiltyard continues to inform our language and culture to this day.

In the early twenty-first century, we need to understand the roots of a role model that glorifies a strong man always ready to take up arms. On closer inspection, the story of the steel harness turns out to be much more complex than we expect. It is full of details we would probably not associate with the chivalric culture of the past nor with the dominant male image of the present.

Spaces of the 21st Century

Cultural districts are playing a key cultural and social role throughout the world in the twenty-first century. They offer an incomparable density of art and culture and have a profound influence on the development of cities and regions.

‘World Culture Districts’ presents the first-ever overview of this phenomenon, featuring fifteen of the most important cultural districts on six continents.

The range of different kinds of cultural districts and their respective influence on space and society is revealed, and essays by international experts such as Gail Lord, Adrian Ellis, Matthias Sauerbruch and Louisa Hutton, Vitus H. Weh and Christian Strasser shed light on current issues surrounding their development and impact.

public buildings at the beginning of the 21st century

The first symposium of the series Dortmunder Positionen (Dortmund Positions) broaches the issue of the ‘monumental’ as a characteristic that is increasingly losing its self-evident nature.

It seems that with the advent of the 21st century, the concept of the monumental in general – and in urban planning in particular – has turned into something dubious.

Thus, despite a sense of growing digital restlessness, museum construction remains perhaps the only remaining discipline in which the monument and monumentality may still form a single entity, albeit unspoken.

Anonymous Club Archive 2017–2021

This publication traces the collective Anonymous Club’s work from its inception to now. It is a complete forensic collection of artifacts and ephemera presented in six discrete folios, each dedicated to a specific stage of their work.

Together these folios function as both a manifesto and a working record, documenting the efforts of the club and its members.

i-D magazine describes Anonymous Club as an entity which “…serves as an open-ended residency programme, incubating emerging creative talents, and realising their wildest artistic dreams in the fields of music, fashion, performance and beyond.”

Revolutions of Choice

‘Revolutions of Choice’ marks Barkow Leibinger’s third edition of their atlas series following ‘Bricoleur Bricolage’ (2013) and ‘An Atlas of Fabrication’ (2009).

Complimenting Barkow Leibinger’s retrospective exhibition of the same title at the Haus am Waldsee in Berlin (2020) this manual-like format, like the earlier editions, focusses on the practice’s material experimentation and research with an emphasis on processes.

Rather than a chronological ordering of projects these investigations are selected around six work areas: bundles, casting, topographical, liminal façade, ultrastructural, and frames.

Inken Baller & Hinrich Baller: Berlin 1966-89

Although most of Inken and Hinrich Baller‘s buildings were developed within the tight constraints of the social housing program in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, they always offer more than the standard: slenderness, lightness, large balconies, complex spatial relationships across multiple floors, and outdoor green spaces. 

With their unconventional residential and public buildings, the Ballers‘ creations are today as much as ever examples for high-quality and affordable housing and intriguing urban spaces. 

During visits with current residents of these buildings, photographs of the lively and lived- in architecture were taken.

A collection of archive material, original plans and essays complement these images to present a complete picture of these multifaceted buildings

A book about a large building recently built in Asia... Amorepacific headquarter by David Chipperfield Architects Berlin

David Chipperfield Architects Berlin presents, ‘A book about a large building…’ (216,000 m2) recently built (between 2010 and 2018) in East Asia (Seoul) for Amorepacifia, a Korean beauty and cosmetics company as their headquarters.

The building encompasses a museum, library, auditorium, kindergarden, restaurants, laboratories and offices for 7000 employees which follows clear design principles (simple form and organisation, connecting with city and nature, real materials).

This book compiles 860 documents that were generated during the planning and construction process of the Amorepacific headquarters in Seoul. The artefacts are complemented by two image series by photographer Laurian Ghinitoiu.