Architectural Papers is a series of books published by the Chair of Josep Lluís Mateo, department of architecture (D-ARCH) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (ETH Zürich). Established in 2005, the series covers a wide range of topics related to teaching architecture and architectural culture in general. It aims at expanding the theoretical boundaries of the discipline. Contributors include distinguished architects and thinkers of our time, while a strong focus remains set on the content produced as part of the educational curriculum at ETH Zürich. The series is being published by Park Books. The Middle East describes this region from a contemporary architectural perspective. The Middle East has been at the heart of the Old World since the beginning of time. Recent history has widened our idea about this region from that of a petrified place where nothing changes to a site of immense opportunities where everything is possible. The future of the architectural profession and its exciting possibilities are being tested there now. This new book comprises essays reflecting visits to countries in the region and describing manifold aspects, interviews with distinguished personalities, along with a selection of paradigmatic projects. It aims to describe the manifold facets of the Middle East. Contributors are practicing architects, renowned academics, artists and experts from the region. All material in the book has been produced exclusively for this program and is published here for the first time. Also available in the Architectural Papers series: Expression ISBN: 9783906027043

In architecture, nothing is ever truly new; everything has been tried before. And nowhere is this more evident than in the architecture of housing. Each proffered solution to a specific architectural problem is actually an amalgam of predecessors’ ideas and new approaches, which itself contributes in turn to a great global ‘pool’ for succeeding concepts. For twenty years, this philosophy has driven the activities of Zurich-based cooperative Pool Architekten, with a special focus on the research and design of residential buildings. Poolology of Housing is an up-close look at the collective’s body of work and a potential font of inspiration for others interested in letting this philosophy guide the creation of innovative architecture. At the core of the book are two hundred floor plans, designed by members of the collective and students during Pool Architects’ tenure from 2013 to 2016 at Technische Universität Berlin. Direct comparison of these floor plans demonstrates the incredible scope an architect has for residential buildings despite the many constraints imposed by external factors. Richly illustrated with both built and unrealised projects by Pool Architekten, as well as of model replicas of iconic historic interiors, Poolology of Housing reflects a novel social culture of housing design. Text in English and German.

Promenades is both a treatise on the relationship between architecture and photography and the first book to focus on the work of the Swiss architectural firm Bauart Architects and Planners. The firm commissioned a variety of photographers working in landscape or architecture to document nine of their projects throughout Switzerland, from houses, schools, and government and office buildings to entirely new neighbourhoods. Each of the photographs represents a personal, wide-angled view of a project, drawing on the rich legacy of nearly two centuries of architectural photography. An essay by Markus Jakob explores the relationship between photography and architecture in the context of the firm’s work over the course of three decades, which carefully accounts for ecology and urban and social context.

Text in English, French and German.

Contemporary architectural criticism tends to focus on the theories and concepts behind buildings. Yet there is much to be learned by venturing beyond the library walls to contemplate the real buildings – the things themselves. This urge for ‘real living contact’ is the impetus behind this new and exhilarating collection of essays by renowned British architectural critic and scholar Irénée Scalbert.

This new book selects nine essays written throughout Scalbert’s career from the early 1990s to the present. They comprise detailed studies of major buildings and pieces that represent broader studies of historical movements and ideas. All texts are based on direct experience, whether through quiet contemplation or candid interviews with architects, builders, or inhabitants. An architect by training, Scalbert writes with the purpose of illuminating the design efforts made and enriching the form of the architecture he describes, and his essays thus contribute to many key moments in the architectural history of the past three decades.

Scalbert’s incisive and boldly original criticism – together with a wealth of illustrations – make this a book an enlightening read for architects and architectural students or anyone with an appreciation of this important voice in architectural criticism.

Riegler Riewe Architects is among the most distinguished and internationally renowned Austrian architectural firms with branches in Berlin and Katowice, Poland. Since establishing the firm in Graz in 1987, Florian Riegler and Roger Riewe have been rejecting the mere pictorial with striking continuity and consistency. Riegler Riewe focus on use-orientated, yet still usage-neutral spatial structures and aim for an inquiring, “undesigned”, yet precise and subtle architecture. This position is evident in their buildings that embody both the “common” and the ambiguous and offer latitude rather than rigid form at all scales, in floor plan as well as in urban planning. The new monograph Riegler Riewe – 10 Years 20 Projects presents twenty built and unrealised projects between 2004 and 2014, most of them published here for the first time. Richly illustrated with images and plans, the book features essays by internationally renowned authors analysing Riegler Riewe’s work in the contexts of both architecture and urbanism.

Following Papers and Papers 2, the third volume in the series contains papers written by Jonathan Sergison and Stephen Bates between 2008 and 2014. Illustrated with photographs and drawings, the papers focus on some of the themes that are at the heart of the work of Sergison Bates architects and their approach to architectural practice, such as domesticity, typology and density.

Text in German.

A residential building with exceptional spatial qualities in the Basel Jura region made Jakob Steib renowned in 1995. The thematic focus of his designs lies in apartment buildings and their typology. Well conceived spatial constellations, coherent materials and careful placement within settlement structures characterise his buildings.

Text in English and German.

In their office Bassi Carella Marello, the two Geneva architects focus on a few fundamental themes of architectural research: material, presence, construction, prefabrication and the interior figure. The architects reflect on those themes in a sequence of volumes within the Bibliotheca series. This second volume analyses the appearance and expression of their high-quality buildings in the Geneva region.

Also available: Andrea Bassi, Roberto Carella: Materialität, Materiality, Matérialité ISBN 9783037611159.

Text in English, French, and German.

100 years ago Siam declared war on Germany. In the early morning hours of 22 July 1917, army units and gendarmerie called the roughly 200 completely unsuspecting German and Austro-Hungarian men in Bangkok out of their beds, presented them with the declaration of war and went on to arrest them. At the same time, marine units boarded the nine ocean going German ships anchored on the river, capturing what was considered by all to be the greatest prize. With these events began Siam’s 17 months at war with two European powers.

The story of how these 17 months unfolded in Siam and in Europe is at the heart of this book. It is a complex tale interweaving political, diplomatic, military, cultural and social history. The book introduces adventurous and scared Thai soldiers on the battlefields of the Western Front, arrogant European politicians and diplomats convinced of their racial and cultural superiority, shrewd Thai officials beating the West at its own game of imperialism, princes rivalling over influence and power, German businessmen imprisoned by “Orientals”, Thai students caught up in world events and submarine attacks, and the King of Siam himself.

Siam’s participation in World War I was the single most important international event for contemporaries in the kingdom, its symbolism unmatched by any other occurrence of the times. The book is the first-ever extensively researched study of Siam and World War I in all its facets. By combining primary sources from Thailand, Germany, France, Great Britain, and Austria, the study describes local events in a global context and explains how world events manifested themselves in the royal palaces and on the streets of Bangkok. The legacy of the events a century ago is remarkably tangible even today, and the book connects the reader with this legacy.

The book is easily accessible to the non-specialist reader interested in history and political affairs, as it describes numerous colourful episodes and vignettes, and includes over 300 rare photographs and illustrations, reproduced in high-quality print.

Perched atop a five-hundred-meter cliff in the far north of Cambodia, Preah Vihear ranks among the world’s holiest sites. It was built a millennium ago as a shrine to Hindu god Shiva by the same civilization that gave the world Angkor Wat. Sadly, it has been transformed recently into a battlefield prize, first with Cambodian factions during the Cambodian civil war, and later (to present) it has been the focus of sometimes violent border disputes with Thailand. In Temple in the Clouds former Washington Post foreign correspondent John Burgess and author of two previous books on Cambodia, draws on extensive research in Cambodia, Thailand, France and the United States to recount the cliff top monument’s full history, ancient and modern. He reveals previously unknown legal strategies and diplomatic manoeuvring behind a contentious World Court case of 1959-62 that awarded the temple to Cambodia. Written in a lively, accessible style, Temple in the Clouds brings new insight to one of Southeast Asia’s greatest temples and most intractable border conflicts. With 50 photographs, plans and maps.

Also by John Burgess: Stories in Stone: ISBN: 9786167339016; A Woman of Angkor ISBN: 9786167339252

Thread and Fire is a fascinating journey through the centuries-old trade networks that developed across a group of archipelagos along the equator. Of the 18,000 islands, more than 900 are permanently settled by over 360 ethnic groups, speaking 700 languages and dialects. For centuries this vast and rich environment favoured local and regional exchanges, and it was only later that people visited from afar. New connections integrated these archipelagos with the distant civilisations of continental Asia: first India, later China and from the 13th century onwards, the Islamic world. Finally, with the arrival of Europeans in the early 16th century, global trade and connections grew rapidly. Spices and forest & sea products were the focus of foreign interests, and textiles were the currency for their acquisition. These imported textiles, complemented with ornaments and jewellery, soon became part of the region’s social fabric, indispensable items of gift and exchange, essential markers for the indictment of ceremonies, rights of passage and signifiers of rank and prestige.

Thread and Fire explores and illustrates those ancient connections and traditions through Indonesian and Timorese textiles, regalia and jewellery from the Francisco Capelo collection, assembled over a 20-year period and now part of the permanent collection of Casa Asia-Colecao Francisco Capelo in Lisbon.

With an eclectic practice embracing urban planning, public sculpture and industrial design, Ian Ritchie CBE RA is one of Britains most visionary architects. Published here for the first time, his poems, aphorisms and etchings witness a profound engagement with the built environment. Ritchie writes poetry in order to better understand a project, using words to investigate the particularities or challenges of a site, and the process of composition to bring ideas into focus. His calligraphic etchings imagine the shape or spirit of commissions in simple but powerful strokes. Variably pragmatic and philosophical, often witty, his aphorisms on work and life from the importance of light to the nature and possibility of progress reveal a modernists belief in the potential of architecture to improve society. These are lines of thought, committed to paper before any designing begins. They demonstrate that, for Ritchie, being an architect is many more things besides. Ian Ritchie CBE RA is an internationally acclaimed architect. His built designs include the Leipzig Glass Hall, the Spire of Dublin, the elevator shafts for the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the RSC Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, winner of the RIBA National Award in 2007.

In 2006, the book Historic Houses in the Engadin: Architectural Interventions by Hans-Jörg Ruch brought the name and work of this Swiss architect to international attention. His new book, with equally opulent design and again lavishly illustrated, now documents the entire range of his achievements over nearly twenty-five years. His oeuvre comprises private houses and multi-unit residential buildings, public buildings such as museums or libraries, as well as infrastructure designs. A focus of the firm’s work is the rebuilding and restoration of existing and in particular of historic buildings. Close-up – Ruch & Partner Architects 1994-2016 features all of the firm’s realised buildings and projects to date, including the restored historic houses in the Engadine with the careful and sensitive contemporary interventions that made his name internationally known. Each is presented with atmospheric photographs and selected plans that demonstrate the firm’s approach and concepts and with a concise text. A topical essay on Ruch’s architecture in context with his biography and the surrounding Swiss mountain landscape.

Lee Mullican (1919-98) was best known for his inimitable West Coast-inspired explorations in abstraction, infused with mysticism and the transcendent. First exhibited as part of the pivotal exhibition of the Dynaton Group, which Mullican co-founded with fellow artists Gordon Onslow Ford and Wolfgang Paalen, his works are today widely collected and held in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, among many others. The first book in more than a decade to focus on this important figure in twentieth-century American art, Cosmic Theatre: The Art of Lee Mullican surveys a key theme running through the artist’s career, framing his unusual hybridisation of symbolic figuration, abstracted landscapes, and abstract space with his long-time fascination with the sky and the galaxy beyond. The book explores the development of the Mullican’s work in the context of his time and his biography, looking also at the implications of Jungian philosophy in relation to his admiration of pre-Columbian and Native American cultures. Michael Auping’s essay is complemented by fifty full-colour illustrations, featuring major rare paintings and drawings by Mullican from the 1940s to the 1970s.

Celestial mechanics have fascinated mankind in all known cultures. Many artists throughout history have been captivated by the spectacle we observe above us day and night. Swiss photographer Guido Baselgia has expanded the focus of his work on the sky, with the stellar and solar movements and phenomena as we see them from earth. In his most recent work Light Fall, Baselgia makes traceable the trajectory of celestial bodies invisible to the human eye and shows astounding occurrences of light and shadow. Taken in Norway, the Tierra del Fuego archipelago in Argentina, in Ecuador, and the Swiss Alps, the images visualise the geometry of astrodynamics and celestial mechanics. His photography also capture the phenomenon of umbra, planet earth’s shadow thrown into space. The new book Guido Baselgia – Light Fall features 80 stunning tritone plates. Complemented with essays by German scholar Andrea Gnam and Swiss photography critic Nadine Olonetzky, they offer a window into the light phenomena that leave us awestruck today as much as they did our ancestors. Text in English and German.

Built in 1913 for a local politician and engineer and beautifully situated on the shore of Lake Zurich, this handsome villa today is home to the Jacobs Foundation and the Johann Jacobs Museum. It was acquired in the 1980s by the Jacobs family, who had been in the coffee, tea, and cocoa trade in Bremen since 1895 but eventually sold the business to an international conglomerate in the 1990s. The Johann Jacobs Museum focuses on the history and present of global trade routes. Its exhibitions and educational program revolves around cultural hybrids that develop sometimes intentionally, sometimes incidentally along the main routes and byways of trade.

This new book tells the story of the Jacobs House and offers an introduction to the goals of the Jacobs Foundation and the museum. It also documents the building’s extensive reconstruction by Basel-based architects Miller & Maranta, who have made major changes to its structure with equal measures of radicalism and sensitivity while entirely preserving its character and style.

Text in English and German.

Markus Raetz is one of the most renowned contemporary artists in Switzerland. Initially educated and working as a primary school teacher, he became an artist in his early twenties. Since the 1970s, his work, including solo exhibitions, has been on the international stage. Raetz works with a variety of materials and media. The phenomenon of perception is his main focus, rather than how something is represented. Prints form a major part of his work. Markus Raetz.The Prints 1951-2013 covers his complete body of work in this genre.; the Catalogue Raisonné is complemented by a separate volume, with essays on his work and artistic development. Exhibitions: Museum of Fine Arts Bern, early 2014 (date TBC). Markus Raetz is represented with works also in the permanent collections of museums such as: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (Main); San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla CA; Tate Gallery, London; MoMA, New York; Musée national d art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Schaulager, Münchenstein near Basel; Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Text in English, German and French.

Henri Matisse (1869-1954) is adored worldwide as a revolutionary painter and loved for his collages, or papiers découpés, the icons of his late work. His paintings and drawings for a long time overshadowed his achievements as a sculptor. Yet his Back Series, four bas-reliefs showing a nude, created between 1908 and 1930, are widely recognised as a milestone in modern sculpture. Starting out from the naturalistic depiction, Matisse gradually transformed it to reach a radically abstracted figure. Each of the four original plaster casts represents a decisive moment of this artistic process. This transformative process has parallels in Matisse’s painting and drawing. Published in conjunction with a major exhibition at Kunsthaus Zürich marking the artist’s 150th anniversary, this is the first book to explore the relation between metamorphosis and feedback in both main fields of the artist’s work. Documents of his diverse sources of inspiration for his sculptures – photographs of nudes, examples from African and ancient art – as well as images featuring Matisse at work as sculptor, round out this volume. It is a welcome addition to any art library, highlighting the lesser known side of this modern master. Published to coincide with the exhibitions ‘Matisse – Metamorphoses’ at the Kunsthaus, Zürich between 30 August and 8 December 2019, and ‘Musée Matisse’, in Nice between 15 February and 15 May 2020.

Henri Matisse (1869-1954) is adored worldwide as a revolutionary painter and loved for his collages, or papiers découpés, the icons of his late work. His paintings and drawings for a long time overshadowed his achievements as a sculptor. Yet his Back Series, four bas-reliefs showing a nude, created between 1908 and 1930, are widely recognised as a milestone in modern sculpture. Starting out from the naturalistic depiction, Matisse gradually transformed it to reach a radically abstracted figure. Each of the four original plaster casts represents a decisive moment of this artistic process. This transformative process has parallels in Matisse’s painting and drawing. Published in conjunction with a major exhibition at Kunsthaus Zürich marking the artist’s 150th anniversary, this is the first book to explore the relation between metamorphosis and feedback in both main fields of the artist’s work. Documents of his diverse sources of inspiration for his sculptures – photographs of nudes, examples from African and ancient art – as well as images featuring Matisse at work as sculptor, round out this volume. It is a welcome addition to any art library, highlighting the llesser known side of this modern master. Text in French. Published to coincide with the exhibitions: Matisse-Metamorphoses at the Kunsthaus Zürich between 30 August and 8 December 2019, and ‘Musée Matisse’ in Nice between 15 February and 15 May 2020.

Swiss artist, architect, designer, typographer, and theorist Max Bill (1908-94) was one of the most important exponents of concrete and constructive art and a key figure in the history of 20th-century European applied arts and design. Educated by such eminent teachers as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Bill immediately displayed a genius for work in fields as diverse as painting, sculpture, architecture, typography and design from the outset of his career in the 1930s. In the 1950s, he teamed up with Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher to found the legendary Ulm College of Design in Ulm, of which he became the first director. In his work, Max Bill carried on the Bauhaus legacy, both as an artist and a teacher, and made a decisive and lasting contribution to 20th-century cultural life.

The new edition of this authoritative and much sought-after monograph displays Bill’s wide-ranging work and sets him in the context of his cultural milieu by featuring works by his contemporaries, such as Kurt Schwitters, Wassily Kandinsky, and Donald Judd. Accompanying essays investigate Bill’s influence on other artists and the lasting importance of his oeuvre in the present.

Text in English and German.

Minoru Onoda was born in Japanese-occupied Manchuria to a Japanese family in 1937. Before the outbreak of World War II, they moved to Himeji in Japan, which remained the artist’s residence until his passing in 2008. Following his artistic education at the Osaka Institute of Fine Arts and at Osaka School of Art in the 1960s, Onoda joined the Gutai, Japan’s first post-war radical artistic movement. Gutai challenged what the movement considered a reactionary understanding to initiate new notions of art, and redefined the relationships among body, matter, time, and space. Enchanted by concepts of repetition, Onoda produced panels with amalgamations of gradually increasing dots with relief, creating organically growing shapes, progressing to infinite circles and ultimately moving to a monochrome style in painting. When Gutai disbanded in 1972, he opted for a conceptual style in which the proliferating dots disappeared. The Western world has received Minoru Onoda’s art almost exclusively in the Gutai context, for example in the 2013 exhibition Gutai: Splendid Playground at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. This overdue first-ever monograph on Minoru Onoda introduces him as an artist in his own right. Apart from investigating his relations with Gutai, it explores his creative process with a particular focus on his sketchbooks.

For two decades, Swiss photographer Serge Fruehauf has documented fascinating architectural details cast in concrete. But his focus lies not only in the beauty of the built environment, but also in the surprising and sometimes absurd puzzles created by later interventions: stairways that lead to dead ends, disfigured garden walls that have long outlived their purpose. With Serge Fruehauf – Extra Normal, Joerg Bader has selected the best and most interesting of more than one thousand images in Fruehauf’s most recent series. Taken throughout Paris, Geneva, Grenoble, and Lyon, Fruehauf’s photographs form a critical reflection on architectural modernity mitigated by the photographer’s love of the spaces he has photographed, and his deep sympathy for the architects and planners who were drawn to concrete as a versatile and multifaceted building material in the latter part of the twentieth century. Despite its promise, the buildings or clusters of buildings that have come out of the modern methods of construction with concrete appear today as bland monstrosities or grotesque hybrids of traditional and modern architecture. Fruehauf’s photographs are joined by a preface by scholar and curator Martino Stierli, which offers an insightful discussion of how Fruehauf’s work highlights these structures as allegories of the current cultural situation. Text by English, French and German.

The Image Archive of the main library at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH-Bibliothek) is home to a vast collection of photographs. It includes material collected by professors and other staff at the ETH, images created and collected by institutes and chairs within the ETH, but also the entire archives of companies or other institutions, such as Switzerland s legendary former national airline Swissair (1931 – 2001), or private collections bequeathed to ETH-Bibliothek. The aim of the new book series Pictorial Worlds. Photographs from the ETH-Bibliothek’s Image Archive is to build a bridge between analytical treatment of historical image sources and the interest in individual photographs for any possible reason. One of the collections held at the Image Archive has been put together by Swiss entrepreneur Adolf Feller (1879 – 1931) and his daughter Elisabeth (1910 – 1973). Unique in size, scope and period covered, it comprises 54,000 postcards from 1889 – 1980. It documents comprehensively what can be called the ‘Golden Age’ of picture postcards before World War I, with its enormous diversity of motifs, radical changes of style in design and of the era when postcards had their heyday as a communication medium. The collection’s main focus is on images of individual sites, places and landscapes in 140 countries. Around 15,000 motifs are from Switzerland. The period best represented in the collection is from 1893 – 1930. The World in Pocket-size Format is a documentation of this magnificent collection. The book is also an illustrated history of this means of communication that has had its time of utmost importance in human relationships. Text in English and German.