Hans Kollhoff is one of Germany's most widely discussed and prominent architects, his works ranging from the high-rise at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, and the conversion of the former Berliner Reichsbank to the Foreign Office of the new Berlin Republic. Kollhoff continues to define the essence of contemporary architecture while maintaining the standard of excellence and attention to detail that recall the world's classic structures. This volume offers a close examination of twelve buildings, designed by Kollhoff between 1996 and 2001. Each building is depicted in five full-page duotone photographs, dramatically illustrating their facades' tectonic structure and highlighting Kollhoff's characteristic use of light and shadow. An in-depth essay by architectural theorist Fritz Neumeyer analyzes Kollhoff's many important contributions to the urban landscape.

This volume is a complete monograph on the work of German architect Hans Kollhoff (b. 1946) and his partner, Helga Timmerman (b. 1953), with whom he has collaborated since 1984. It presents 100 buildings and projects completed by Kollhoff and his firm since the 1970s, beginning with his Project for an Analogous City of 1976 and including competitions, office and multiuse buildings, banks, apartment complexes, and urban planning. Kollhoff began his teaching and investigations into the city during the postmodern debates of the 1970s, when he studied with O.M. Ungers at Cornell University. Since that time he has focused on large-scale architecture and its role in preserving the urban landscape, striving to discover the essence in traditional architecture, and to build a new tradition from it. Jasper Cepl introduces this book with an investigative essay examining Kollhoff’s career and theoretical direction since the late 1960s. Following the introduction are 100 projects presented chronologically, including recent work in Berlin, such as the DaimlerChrysler Highrise Building (2000), the Extension of the Pergamon Museum (2000), and the renovation of the Former Seat of the Reichsbank for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1999).

The book examines the tower as the architectural expression of a long-term commitment to the city. The conclusion is that development must be driven not only by property value and architectural ingenuity but also by respect for collective memory and common humanity. The book argues that these public commitments find architectural expression in a radically different tectonic to that of contemporary patterns of development. The volume presents a series of prompts, provocations, and projects to address the challenge of designing a tower that can be understood as a monolithic whole, even if assembled from discrete parts.

Now in its second edition: the trailblazing introduction and textbook on construction includes a new section on translucent materials and an article on the use of glass.

The introduction of iron – and later steel – construction and decoration transformed architecture in the nineteenth century. While the structural employment of iron has been a frequent subject of study, this book re-directs scholarly scrutiny on its place in the aesthetics of architecture in the long nineteenth century. Together, its eleven unique and original chapters chart – for the first time – the global reach of iron’s architectural reception, from the first debates on how iron could be incorporated into architecture’s traditional aesthetics to the modernist cleaving of its structural and ornamental roles. The book is divided into three sections. Formations considers the rising tension between the desire to translate traditional architectural motifs into iron and the nascent feeling that iron buildings were themselves creating an entirely new field of aesthetic expression. Exchanges charts the commercial and cultural interactions that took place between British iron foundries and clients in far-flung locations such as Argentina, Jamaica, Nigeria and Australia. Expressing colonial control as well as local agency, iron buildings struck a balance between pre-fabricated functionalism and a desire to convey beauty, value and often exoticism through ornament. Transformations looks at the place of the aesthetics of iron architecture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period in which iron ornament sought to harmonize wide social ambitions while offering the tantalizing possibility that iron architecture as a whole could transform the fundamental meanings of ornament. Taken together, these chapters call for a re-evaluation of modernism’s supposedly rationalist interest in nineteenth-century iron structures, one that has potentially radical implications for the recent ornamental turn in contemporary architecture.

For as long as humans have gathered in cities, those cities have had their shining—or shadowy—counterparts. Imaginary cities, potential cities, future cities, perfect cities. It is as if the city itself, its inescapable gritty reality and elbow-to-elbow nature, demands we call into being some alternative, yearned-for better place. This book is about those cities. It’s neither a history of grand plans nor a literary exploration of the utopian impulse, but rather something different, hybrid, idiosyncratic. It’s a magpie’s book, full of characters and incidents and ideas drawn from cities real and imagined around the globe and throughout history. Thomas More’s allegorical island shares space with Soviet mega-planning; Marco Polo links up with James Joyce’s meticulously imagined Dublin; the medieval land of Cockaigne meets the hopeful future of Star Trek. With Darran Anderson as our guide, we find common themes and recurring dreams, tied to the seemingly ineluctable problems of our actual cities, of poverty and exclusion and waste and destruction. And that’s where Imaginary Cities becomes more than a mere—if ecstatically entertaining—intellectual exercise: for, as Anderson says, “If a city can be imagined into being, it can be re-imagined.” Every architect, philosopher, artist, writer, planner, or citizen who dreams up an imaginary city offers lessons for our real ones; harnessing those flights of hopeful fancy can help us improve the streets where we live. Though it shares DNA with books as disparate as Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities, there’s no other book quite like Imaginary Cities. After reading it, you’ll walk the streets of your city—real or imagined—with fresh eyes.

Typology+ documents and analyzes roughly one hundred international housing structures. It uses diagrammatic drawings to elaborate a broad and varied range of residential types and present them systematically. In the process, it examines variants under the categories of access, space (ground plan and open space), and morphology, supplemented by detailed typological descriptions and the elaboration of the special qualities of each individual type. More general essays draw connections between the housing types and twentieth-century reference projects. All of the projects are newly drawn to uniform standards; every project is presented with its ground plan drawn to a scale of 1:200. Site maps, sections, elevations, and photographs illuminate the urban setting, the building structure and design, and the spatial and functional qualities of each residential structure. Thus, Typology+ not only offers a broad range of sustainable approaches to apartment block construction, but also possibilities for using and transforming them in a practical planning context.

At Dwell, we're staging a minor revolution. We think that it's possible to live in a house or apartment by a bold modern architect, to own furniture and products that are exceptionally well designed, and still be a regular human being. We think that good design is an integral part of real life. And that real life has been conspicuous by its absence in most design and architecture magazines.

The most important buildings from the past decade exemplify the architecture of Hans Kollhoff in this new book. Hans Kollhoff's work is counted among the most sophisticated architecture currently being created in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The projects are characterized by an insistence on a level of craftmanship and quality that is often considered outdated in relation to contemporary construction techniques.