July was once known as Quintilis, and was the fifth month of the Roman calender. The fifth of ten. "Winter" being but an ill-defined cold and dark period between December and March. And sensible as such as an arrangement sounds, and much as we could live with such an arrangement today, with the rise of the Roman Republic the wise decision was made to divide winter into January and February. Wise not least because it means our contemporary year has 12 months: and thus two extra months in which
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Cities grow, mutate, evolve, a process which, as with human development, is rarely straightforward, rarely occurs without sacrifice and/or leaving one or the other scar. Physical as well as emotional. With the exhibition Stuttgart reißt sich ab - Stuttgart Demolishes Itself - the Architekturgalerie am Weissenhof aim to explore the nature of post-war urban development in Stuttgart, and to present what they refer to as a "Plea for the preservation of cityscape defining buildings" Co-curated by
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"...the strict, logical lines which avoid anything unnecessary and which with the sleekest form and through the simplest means embodies the modern objectivity"1, with this, glowing, description of his design the Supreme Court of the German Reich in Leipzig awarded on June 1st 1932 Mart Stam the artistic copyright of the cubic, quadratic, cantilever chair, and thus settled arguably the very first legal dispute over the copyright of the form of a piece of furniture intended for industrial mass
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December can be a trying month: always having to think of others; always having to patronise bars and restaurants you've spent the rest of the year wishing would return to the parallel hell from whence they came; eating, eating and eating as if trapped in some culinary Groundhog Day. Do yourself a favour, gift yourself a few hours and visit one of the following new design and architecture exhibitions opening in December 2015. We can't guarantee they'll be good, but can guarantee they'll be
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"The challenges of contemporary housing are rooted in the changing materials, social and intellectual structures of our time; and can only be understood in such terms. The degree of structural change determines the nature and extent of the problems. They are deprived of any arbitrariness. They cannot be solved with slogans, nor hidden and ignored behind words of good intention. The problem of rationalisation and standardisation is only one part of the problem. Rationalisation and
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Erected in 1927 in context of the Deutscher Werkbund exhibition "Die Wohnung" the Weißenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart aimed to achieve "…. a reduction in house construction and running costs, in addition to a simplification of housework and a general improvement in living standards" But did it? Or is it just a collection of buildings by Max Taut, Hans Poelzig, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Mart Stam, Peter Behrens and their ilk? A chance for a close connected group of modernists to show off?
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Since the beginning of July the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart has been one building richer with the official unveiling of the so-called B10 Active House by Stuttgart based architect Werner Sobek. Realised in collaboration with the Stuttgart Institute of Sustainability in context of the Schaufenster Elektromobilität - Electric Mobility Showcase - research project, the B10 Active House goes beyond normal passive house standards and has been designed to enable it to utilise renewable energy
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Enter "Stuttgart architecture" into a well known search engine and you''ll get an awful lot of responses relating to the Stuttgart 21 Central Train Station redevelopment project. A situation which, in our opinion, does the city and its architecture a great disservice. For Stuttgart's architecture tradition is perhaps richer and more interesting than anywhere else in Europe. And yes we're talking about modern, 20th century architecture. What happened before the flushing toilet and
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