Wolkenkuckucksheim|Cloud-Cuckoo-Land|Воздушный замок is a multilingual, international, open-access scientific online journal on the theory of architecture. Its aim is to promote scholarship and research in the field of architecture, in particular to provide working resources for third parties on the Internet. It initiates research and promotes discussions, especially on questions of scientific theory and methodology, on the Internet or at conferences. The title of the journal comes from the comedy The Birds by Aristophanes, in which the birds seek to establish a realm between heaven and earth, which they call νεφελοκοκυγία (Cloud Cuckoo's Home).
The Urban Habitat
Jörg H. Gleiter
Today's cities are planned and built for humans. Animals have been largely excluded since the mid-20th century, but are slowly returning, which may be due to the destruction of rural habitats. This issue, conceived together with Jörg H. Gleiter, gets to the bottom of this phenomenon: Is the return of animals a sign of increasing urban biodiversity? And is it at all compatible with demands for their greater densification in the wake of climate change?
gleiters universum
Jörg H. Gleiter
"Architecture is second nature to us, it surrounds us and envelops us", writes Jörg H. Gleiter in his volume "gleiters universum. architektur" - and takes his readers on a journey into the world of architecture. In 24 philosophical, poetic essays, the architect and professor of architectural theory elegantly circles around the most diverse aspects of the design of our environment.
In doing so, he approaches the art of building on the basis of central concepts. For example, Gleiter writes about the significance of ornamentation, about monumentality and sublimity, as well as about the translucency or the inviting character inherent in architectural works. For doesn't a door virtually entice us to enter a room? Doesn't a staircase invite us to go up or down it?
"Our actions are inherent in things," writes the attentive observer Gleiter, who is able to recognise and name so much in buildings. So the universe he opens up here is about far more than just the famous "roof over one's head" - it is about humanity and metamorphoses, psychology and development, aesthetics, style, sustainability and much more. Karl Friedrich Schinkel appears in his lines just as much as Nietzsche, Leonardo Da Vinci or Arnold Gehlen.
In short: Gleiter, like an architect, designs buildings of thought with original perspectives. These are wonderfully complemented by Sara Touissant's photographs, which are as sensual as they are mysterious. Images that, each in their own right, open up new spaces and dimensions and unfold their own presence.
Surplus of Form. Architecture and the Status of the Object
Jörg H. Gleiter
The surplus of matter in form designates the principles of architecture.It contains not only a constructive principle, but also an aesthetic principle thatenables sensuous experience. In the coupling of construction and sensuous expe-rience, we find the basic prerequisites for an aesthetics of architecture, but alsothe philosophical-aesthetic difficulties confronting architecture. For Kant, it wasarchitecture’s object character that stood in the way of an architectural aestheticsas part of a general aesthetics. For him, only the architectural drawing, becausedetached from matter, construction, and function, could meet the criteria of thebeautiful, and that only as a façade view and not as a ground plan or sectionaldrawing. With reference to Aristotle, Kant and Schopenhauer and an outlookon contemporary architecture, the essay outlines the principles of an aestheticsof architecture as it is to be developed out of the specific material conditions ofarchitecture and which has its starting point in the surplus of form
Architecture and Philosophy: The Failure of Translation
Jörg H. Gleiter
In the connection between architecture and philosophy,
the “and” connects and separates at the same time. In classical rhetoric,
the concept and technique of ekphrasis stands for this. Ekphrasis means
transfer from the medium of sensual experience into the medium of lan-
guage and back into the realm of sensual imagination. As will be shown
here, however, the “and” unfolds its full functionality only in the failure
of ekphrasis. Only in failure does the “and” become the medium of in-
tellectuality and sensuality, that is, when the “and” no longer designates
a center and a place of symmetry, but when it describes a marginal con-
dition, when it shifts the discourse toward the margins, when it clears
the space and gives freedom a place. An example of the creative failure
of ekphrasis is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin
by Peter Eisenman. In the failed translation of sensory and cognitive ex-
perience, Eisenman forces architecture and philosophy into a unity that
cannot be resolved into a dialectical third. Thus, the memorial creates a
void in the center of Berlin that becomes a trigger of sensual and intellec-
tual imagination for the unimaginable of the Holocaust.
Project Earth. From Knowledge to Everyday Practice
Jörg H. Gleiter, Lidia Gasperoni
Crisis-ridden times are forcing a rethinking in all areas. The knowledge about the necessary changes is there, but how does one put it into practice? Our new issue, conceived together with Jörg Gleiter and Lidia Gasperoni, examines the extent to which the architectural project can serve as a model for this transfer.
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Introduction to Architectural Theory
Jörg H. Gleiter
What actually is architectural theory? This volume introduces a neglected discipline. For architecture is by no means an activity that exclusively creates material things for practical use. On the contrary, it is a cultural technique that links theoretical knowledge, practical action and emotional experience in a complex way. How it does this and what principles it follows in the process is the subject of theory, which at the same time always pre-structures architecture. For the first time, this volume systematically presents architectural theory in its basic terms, such as sign, phenomenon, atmosphere, ornament, style, space, tectonics and form. In the age of the Anthropocene, architecture faces great challenges and therefore needs more than ever the reassurance of its theoretical foundations.
Construction and Design Manual. Experimental Diagrams in Architecture
Lidia Gasperoni
After its golden age in the last decades of the 20th century, diagramming is still an experimental practice today, but it focuses on the synthesis of complexity and on new disciplinary territories on the edge between humanities, art, architecture, urban planning and landscape. This manual presents experimental diagrams through sensing, analysing and transforming space. The contributions critically delineate diagrammatic behaviours in architectural history, present the design practices of offices such as AZPML and MVRDV, take the medium to its extreme consequences, and outline future trajectories.
Artefacts of Design
Rikke Lyngsø Christensen, Ekkerhard Drach, Lidia Gasperoni, Doris Hallama, Anna Hougaard, Ralf Liptau
The conference proceedings are a collection of contributions from the 4th Forum Architekturwissenschaft on architectural design and its artifacts. The Conference was held in November, 2017 at the TU Berlin.
Contributors to the present publication are interested in the epistemic potential of sketches, renderings, models, photographs and drawings in architectural design. All follow the thesis that media in the draft not only depict, but in turn are the basis of further acts of knowledge. Using case studies ranging from the Middle Ages to the present, the texts trace the particular qualitative influence that “making” a design has on the artifact for this design. The structure for both the conference and this publication came out of the attempt to bring together theoretical positions and the results of practical work – artifacts: The conference was associated with an exhibition at the Museum of Architecture of the TU Berlin and in the present volume, theoretical contributions alternate with textual descriptions of the shown artifacts.
Architecture and Diagram. A Theoretical Experiment
Jörg H. Gleiter, Lidia Gasperoni
This publication documents an innovative teaching project in the Department of Architectural Theory, whose specific impact lies in the work of students and their reflection on the function of the diagram in architectural theory and practice, its reactivation and sometimes revision. This volume is the result of a multifaceted and productive cooperation between the Department of Architectural Theory at the TU Berlin, the TU Berlin Press Verlag and the student association Roundabout. After the introduction, the volume contains the essays of the participants of the seminar "Diagram and Design", which was conceived and conducted in the summer semester of 2015. This seminar represented the first theoretical phase in the creation of this volume, which found its final form in the summer semester 2017 as part of the seminar "Architecture of the Book".
Type-Prototype-Archetype: Type Formation in Architecture
Matthias von Ballestrem, Jörg H. Gleiter
Issue 38 of Wolkenkuckucksheim Type-Prototype-Archetype: Type Formation in Architecture is devoted to typology in architecture and thus to a complex question between theory, design and practice. The accelerated processes of differentiation in the worlds of work and production as a result of the introduction of Web 2.0, the development of new models of living together with the changing forms of communication result in the spontaneous emergence of new, often unusual and experimental types in architecture, design and urban planning. It is the task of architectural theory to describe, summarise and systematise these tendencies, which often arise from spontaneous impulses and reactions to specific local situations, and to make their cultural relevance visible in a dynamically changing society.
Traditional Theory. Architectural Theory 1863-1938
Jörg H. Gleiter
„Architecture is always already theoretical, however unconsciously this may be. To make the models behind it recognisable and open them up to critical analysis, to confirm them or, if necessary, to reformulate them, that is the task of architectural theory." - Jörg H. Gleiter
With Architectural Theory in Three Volumes, Jörg H. Gleiter presents a fundamental work on the systems of thought in architectural theory since the 19th century. The theme is the parallel between theory and modernity, and how the concept of theory itself changes with the modern development dynamic. The first volume, Traditional Theory. 1863 to 1938 is devoted to the difficulty of tradition. With new materials, technologies and models of society, the tension between continuity and discontinuity of tradition becomes a trigger for theoretical reflection. - Traditional Theory. 1863 to 1938 - Critical Theory. 1940 to 1990 Critical epistemology. 1992 until today.
Architecture and Philosophy
Jörg H. Gleiter, Ludger Schwarte (publisher)
As a metaphor of logical-constructive activity, architecture has played a central role in philosophy from the very beginning. Since the crisis of modern architecture, approaches have increasingly been discernible that critically expand the architectural-theoretical question of the cultural function of architecture from a philosophical point of view. So far, however, there is no integral form of reflection in the philosophy of architecture that does justice to the role of architecture as the central, cultural practice with which man creates an environment for himself that is uniquely appropriate and different from nature. The contributions in this volume are dedicated to this theoretical and philosophical reflection on architecture.
Complex Perception and Modern Urban Design
Tom Steinert
With the concept of the 'dialogical city', Paul Hofer and Bernhard Hoesli confronted modern urban planning with the offer of a complex spatial-visual perception at the end of the 1970s. The aim was to overcome the aesthetic impoverishment of post-war modernism. At the same time, the 'dialogical city' was an alternative to postmodernism. It was conceived 35 years ago at ETH Zurich, but remains an ongoing challenge to architectural education, politics and urban planning. For only cities that are liveable in the long term can also be 'sustainable'. The book discloses the history of ideas of the 'dialogical city' and the manifold foundations processed by Hofer and Hoesli, which go back over almost a century. The book is thus the first intellectual biography of the art and urban planning historian Paul Hofer (1909-1995) and the architect Bernhard Hoesli (1923-1984).
Symptom Design
Jörg H. Gleiter
Today more than ever, architecture and design are symptoms of contemporary culture. They show society as it is, but also as it wants to be. They reveal the wishes, desires and suppressed longings as well as the psychological abysses of a society.
But what exactly is revealed in design? And how does it show itself? Can we speak of a language of design? But does it speak at all? Or should we not rather assume a special kind of reference of things, of traces, indices and signals, in which symptom-like something of the inner preconditions of culture becomes visible?
The contributions by Christoph Baumberger, Remei Capdevila-Werning, Claus Dreyer, Kurt W. Forster, Jörg H. Gleiter, Tatsuma Padoan, Gerd Selle and Uwe Wirth provide answers.
Alphabet and Algorithm
Mario Carpo
In this brilliant essay, Mario Carpo shows how, in alphabet and algorithm of architecture, the processes of digital production undermine the ideal of modernity: The idea of identical reproduction. For everything that is digital is variable and changeable and thus stands in the strongest opposition to the idea of standardisation, serialisation and authorship. In the process, Carpo traces the power of parameterisation and algorithmisation procedures in all their theoretical and historical ramifications. The end result is an all-encompassing reconceptualisation of architecture, the likes of which have not been seen since the Renaissance and Leon Battista Alberti.
Ornament Today
Jörg H. Gleiter
The very thing that modernity attempted to abolish at the beginning of the machine age is making a comeback in architecture and design: the ornament. Whenever debates over ornament break out, it is a sign of a crisis. That theme runs like a thread through the essays collected in the book Ornament Today. Ornaments are not aesthetic events that affect style and taste but are rather symptoms that reveal a culture in transformation. Ornaments reveal changes, shifts, and rejections of culture.
The Panorama and its Promise of Objects
Jörg H. Gleiter
Panorama is the name of that seemingly outdated image form that no one really believes in any more, but before whose suggestive pictorial power even the eye accustomed to the flood of digital images must capitulate. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty says, panoramas practise their own "magical theory of seeing", at the centre of which is the "metamorphosis of being in its being". Perceiving here is a constant crossing and interlocking of the pictorial world and bodily being. The panoramas always reach beyond themselves into space and, in the total absorption of the viewer, make us forget that they are pictures. They do what other pictures do, but they touch the extremes. If pictures awaken the longing to be in the picture, the panoramas place the viewer in the middle of the action. Just as pictures always shake our bodies, panoramas demand our entire, undivided bodily presence. If pictures are amplifiers of the imagination, the panoramas are so much so that they make us forget this. In the panorama, everyone settles into the "position as a person who sees". Here we are one with the gaze.
Prehistory of Modernity
Jörg H. Gleiter
Modernism is by no means without history. As the author shows, this is especially true of architecture. After modernism's break with the obsolete and the immediately past - the 19th century - the reconceptualisation of architecture serves nothing less than the search for the oldest and previous, for the prehistory to which it can only succeed within the open horizon of expectation of its innovative contemporary practice.
Theory of Architecture Today
Jörg H. Gleiter
Recklessly, digital technologies today impose their logic on everything and everyone. They are less and less confined to the screen. Thus, they challenge architecture as the universal cultural practice through which the cultural logic of a time is translated into everyday life. In the renaissance it was neoplatonism, in the baroque the counter-reformation and in modernism machine rationality; today, on the other hand, it is the logic of digital technologies that demands to be incorporated into the content of architecture. Where there is no alternative, there is a need for critical reflection on the foundations of architecture today.
The Philosophical Flaneur - Nietzsche and Architecture
Jörg H. Gleiter
This comprehensive study is the first to elaborate the significance that architecture and the city acquired for the late Nietzsche. In the spring and again from autumn 1888 onwards, Friedrich Nietzsche spent his last seizure-free months in Turin. In contrast to the cliché of the philosopher who developed his thoughts in dialogue with nature, on mountain paths and deserted seashores, he praised the city in rushing hymns of praise. Turin was the city he could use now. It flattered his "instincts" and was a "paradise for the feet". "The other day I said to myself: to have a place where you don't want to go out, not even to the countryside, where you are happy to walk in the streets! - Before, I would have thought it impossible." Hitherto hardly noticed, Nietzsche transformed himself in Turin into a city dweller and "philosophical flâneur", on whose long city walks architecture turned into a medium of cognition.
Empathy and Phenomenological Reduction
Thomas Friedrich, Jörg H. Gleiter
Under the influence of experimental psychology and neurophysiology, the second half of the 19th century saw a turn in aesthetics and architecture that went far beyond its actual fields. With the idea of "empathy", the question of our sensory perception between object and self-imagination moved to the centre of aesthetics. The aesthetics of empathy was characterised by a turning away from representation and formal symbolism and towards the bodily presence in the spatial continuum. However, with its underlying psychologism and the notion of a separate inner and outer world, it remained vague and unfinished, which only received its conceptual specification with Edmund Husserl's transcendental phenomenology and the method of "phenomenological reduction". Empathy aesthetics thus becomes visible as a precursor to phenomenology, as a phenomenology avant la lettre.