Volume 47, Issue 1-2

Although the affinity of medieval architectural drawings to the graphic procedures of setting-out has been extensively discussed, the role of scale drawings in the design practice of the late Middle-Ages and the Early Modern period is still subject of debate. This regards also the drawings of complex late Gothic rib vaults. An opportunity for better understanding their precise use and function within the design and planning of complex stone structures is given by a case study on the vault in St. Catherine’s chapel in Strasbourg Cathedral, where an original drawing of the plan can be compared with the existing structure as it was actually built. The vault with looping ribs was completed in 1547. The comparative study of the drawing and the building is based on the previous research on the procedures of stone-planning in late Gothic vaults, and comprises also building archaeology, surveys, and geometric analyses of the vault.

The tournament house at the Munich Hofgarten was once a place of glittering festivals and spectacles. There, tournaments on horseback, as well as elaborately staged theater performances and court balls took place. Despite its former importance, the building is more or less forgotten, possibly because it had to give way to the urban redevelopment of Munich in 1825. The great feature of the building was its construction, especially the roofing, which held additional places for spectators. The master builder, Marx Schinnagl, created a construction that spanned over 23.30 m, without any support and without tie beams. The tournament house with its roofing system, which was exceptional for the 17th century, was reconstructed in the course of recent research and rebuilt as a model.

First published in Paris in 1706, the ›Nouveau Traité de toute l’architecture ou l’art de Bastir‹ by Jean-Louis de Cordemoy marked a provocatively unprecedented point of view in the panorama of 18 th century architectural theories. Through a critical revision of the excesses of the Baroque, which was considered the last rhetorical public manifestation of the Ancien Régime, and in the name of a logical renewal of design, the work immediately became the focus of a broad cultural debate, which continued until 1713 in a polemic with Amédée François Frézier. Revolutionary in its challenge to the Vitruvian orthodoxy, the Nouveau Traité developed the search for a Greek-Gothic architectural ideal, which, in a comparison between classical and modern, was realized in the querelle des Anciens et des Modernes and developed in France in the effort to define a ›national‹ architectural style. As precursor and inspiration for the aesthetics of Marc-Antoine Laugier, Cordemoy subjected adornment to the laws of bienséance and was a harbinger of the modern functionalist language – the principles of simplification of surfaces, a rigorous volumetric study that anticipated what in later decades would result in stereometric purity of Enlightenment experiments.

19 th century brick façades between craft and industrialization: Towards an onsite reading of traces. Brick facades are one of the characteristic ingredients of 19 th century architecture. They became ubiquitous during the period. The spread of visible brick and the development of heat-insulating façade claddings are intimately connected to the industrialization of the brick production, providing new moulding techniques such as extrusion, and new products such as hollow bricks. The present article presents the main steps of innovation, based on a review of contemporary technical literature, and establishes the direct link to traces which can be observed on site, providing necessary information for a first assessment, coarse dating and structural hypothesis on the basis of a visual inspection.

The architect Leo von Klenze was invited by the Greek government to modify the map of Athens of the architects Stamatios Kleanthes and Eduard Schaubert in 1834. One of Klenze’s major modifications concerns the separation of the market area into a commercial and an amusement part. Our recently conducted research in Greek archives brought to light documents which reveal an unknown contribution of Klenze in the establishment of a modern market in the center of Athens. The market of Athens would have included stores, apartments, green areas and a fountain and would have been realized by the French entrepreneur François Théophile Feraldi. Klenze designed a three-story building type for the stores and the apartments in Italian style. The government would have bought the building ground from private owners at a low price and would have sold it to Feraldi at the same price. The market center was finally not realized, but the drawing, which, on the basis of the new archive material, can be clearly attributed to Klenze, shows how Klenze had imagined the architectural form of the private buildings in Athens. Another novelty our research brought to light and which is discussed in our paper is a concept of the section of architects for the central market of Athens, submitted one year later, which was not implemented either.

Sometimes scientific-technical objects can be given an extended meaning as cultural icons and be received in art and architecture. To this end, the object must be detached from its original context and viewed from different, new perspectives. In 1922 Walter Bauersfeld constructed one of the first geodesic domes for testing projection devices in Jena. Walter Gropius and Lázló Moholy-Nagy were among the first to visit the Jena Planetarium; Moholy-Nagy received the dome in his book ›Von Material zu Architektur‹. Richard Buckminster Fuller further developed Bauersfeld’s concept from the 1940s and patented the construction principle of a geodesic dome under the name ›Building Construction‹ in 1954. His patent bears resemblances to the Bauersfeld Planetarium in Jena, which can be demonstrated by manuscripts by Bauersfeld from the Zeiss Archive in Jena. Fuller, on the other hand, also used the geodesic dome to explain his theory as Synergetic. The article traces the transformation of the technical object conceived by Bauersfeld via Moholy-Nagy and Fuller into a cultural icon of the 20th century.

Zbąszynek (Neu Bentschen), a German border post, with accommodation for railway workers, customs officials, postmen and border guards, was established primarily between 1923 and 1930. It was built in the middle of the countryside, designed according to the garden city concept and provided with an urban technical infrastructure. In the years 1932 to 1945, the town had the status of a rural parish. The majority of the houses and civic buildings (railway station, school, town hall, Protestant church, Catholic church, inn) were designed by Wilhelm Beringer from the Deutsche Reichsbahn administration in Frankfurt (Oder). He incorporated neo-baroque and expressionist motifs. The monumental and expressionist water tower, designed by Bruno Möhring from Berlin, is also worth noting. The town comprised two parts. The eastern part contained housing for company workers and officials, a school at the main town square and an inn; the western part was intended – though the idea was short-lived – to comprise privately owned houses, both churches and the town hall. By design, the slaughterhouse, sewage treatment plant and cemetery were all placed on the periphery of the town. The two parts were, and still are divided by ul. Wojska Polskiego, Zbąszynek’s main street. Its southern end is the imposing pl. Dworcowy, the Station Square, taking the form of a cour d’honneur.

The architecture of Spain of the 1920s and 1930s remains a little studied aspect of the emergence of the modern movement. In 1926 –1931 the architects Carlos Arniches and Martín Domínguez, both prominent members of the so called ›Generación del 25‹, constructed a country estate near Córdoba for the Marqués de Murrieta. The remains of the now lost villa and garden have recently been investigated by the German Archaeological Institute, as part of a comprehensive study of the 10th century Islamic palace on which the estate had been built. The singular design of the building attests to the search for a new style of architecture based on the ›honest‹ rural architecture of Andalusia, as called for by Fernando García Mercadal and others. The design of a promenade architecturale moreover hints at the innovative potential of the architects and their contribution to the modern movement in Spain.

In the reconstruction of German cities after the Second World War, public administrations attempted to find solutions for essential urban situations through targeted competitions. In the city of Goch on the Lower Rhine the area around the medieval Steintor (Stone Gate) had to be adapted to modern traffic requirements. In the course of the urban planning the private interests of the residents who were willing to build up clashed with the planned construction as a concern of the common good, which was represented by the district government of Düsseldorf. The solution was to be found through an urban design competition among selected experts, from whose proposals the City Planning Office drew up an alignment plan. The exemplary recapitulation of this urban planning process illustrates aspects of the history of planning, monument preservation and reconstruction competitions