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COOP HIMMELBLAU 6 Projects for 4 Cities

COOP HIMMELBLAU 6 Projects for 4 Cities 

Catalog Recent Works 1990
Verlag Jürgen Jäusser, 2nd edition, Darmstadt 1993
ISBN 3 – 927902-45 – 4
English

Our architecture has four cities and seven lives.
Always when we design for foreign cities’, we stumble upon the question of the context. It’s not that we ask ourselves this question of the context, it’s that we’ll most certainly be asked it. But since we long ago lost sight of the genius loci – or better said, we never had it in our baggage – our response is yet another question in sequence. The context in what sense? In terms of production? of material? of color? of construction?
All this doesn’t actually interest us. We are much more interested in the real difference of the different city. The different light, the different tempo, the slower or faster time of the city for which we will be designing, using foreign materials and different construction methods. Because we love to discover the (invisible) real and potential force lines and force fields of a city and to design for it, to make its power visible. Just as we love to build buildings and their wandering shadows.” (Excerpt text Coop Himmelb(l)au)