Can a haphazard assemblage of buildings, each conceived in isolation, and expressing nothing but its own immediate purpose, really can be described as a city?
If designing is understood in analogy to curatorial practice, we can also understand it as a process of selection and arrangement. Designing a building follows traces that are morphological and typological at once, belonging to the specific site, but equally genealogical connections to foreign sites. What these traces have in common is their relationship to the existing: Designing is less inventing than discovering, less adding than uncovering. Building of Buildings means in the concrete task to surprisingly understand the context as foreground, while the building to be designed will oscillate at any time between figure and ground. The more intensive the design, the stronger the oscillation will be. We consider the urban space as the protagonist of our architectural design, as the collection of our exhibits and as the content of our practice.
A building of buildings is the quintessence of urbanity, as it stands at the intersection between the scale of the single house and that of the collective construction. Articulated in a particular way, it has the capacity to be both a composition of two or more elements and, at the same time, a unitary presence, a single figure.
Edited by
Wilfried Kuehn, Angelo Lunati with Emilio Ellena
Aknowledgements
Inge Andritz, Hermann Czech, Lorenzo De Chiffre, Job Floris, Tony Fretton, Tina Gregoric, David Kohn, Wilfried Kuehn, Christian Kühn, Simona Malvezzi, Umberto Napolitano, Michael Obrist, Pier Paolo Tamburelli
Teaching Assistants
Sarah Deubelli, Amy Estermann
Translations
Saskia Haag
Copy Editing
Pamela Johnston
Photography
Nermina Dolamić, Julia Wannenmacher
Design
pupilla grafik
Students
Behnam Akbarzadehghorbani, Lou Andersson, Emma Ariaudo, Joshua Berroth, Camilla Calabrese, Rosaria Carlino, Cristiana Czerwinschi, Jean-Baptiste Diot, Laura Duchesne, Ege Engin, Karine Espedalen, Marek Frait, Kathrin Geußer, Marta Inama, Sander Janssen, Tamara Knezevic, Judith Köhler, Fabian Kompatscher, Radim Koutny, Antonia Löschenkohl, Sofija Milenovic, Mariapaola Nastro, Lukas Newman, Noah Otte, Elisa Plank, Theresa Pointner, Denise Redl, Vladimir Reisch, Mikaël Rey, Óscar Santos, Grischa Schmidt, Idil Sentürk , Paulina Slivkova, Sebastian Steenbock, Matilda Svensk