In several theoretical essays, dialogues on collaborative projects and reflections on his own work, the architect Nikolaus Hirsch explores the critical transformations of contemporary space and its effects on spatial practice.

The applied research project and publication The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict deals with archival practice and its spatial repercussions. Inquiring whether any accumulation and organization of knowledge is productive—to the effect that it generates a narrative and/or history—the project focuses specifically on archives becoming productive due to their spatial framework.

An extension of the collaboration between artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, architects Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller, and chef Antto Melasniemi. Including interviews, texts, images, and poems that illuminate the installation’s properties of self-sufficiency and as a new component of Tiravanija and Kamin Lertchaiprasert’s ongoing project “the land,” a self-sustaining artistic community near Chiang Mai, Thailand.

First published in German in 1987, this is artist and writer Jutta Koether’s meditation on painting. In novella form, f. follows several disembodied female characters as they consider velvet, coral, the curtain, money, color, red.

Painting has demonstrated remarkable perseverance in the expanding field of contemporary art and the surrounding ecology of media images. It appears, however, to have dispelled its own once-uncontested material basis: no longer confined to being synonymous with a flat picture plane hung on the wall, today, painting instead tends to emphasize the apparatus of its appearance and the conduits of its circulation.

Against the historical backdrop of expansions of the notion of sculpture, one could think that the sculptural discipline has become defined by its near arbitrary malleability, since practically anything can be construed as sculpture. Yet there seems to be a revived interest in the history of sculpture, especially traditional techniques, which often appear appealing, even radical, in the age of the Internet and social media.

This book brings together contributions from the eponymous conference, all of which seek to speculate on the reasons as to why, since the turn of the millennium, we have encountered so many artworks that tend to reconcile Minimalism with suggestions of the human figure.

This book presents a study that conceptualizes, tests, and practically applies the spatial strategy for the European Kunsthalle. The investigation is the result of the activities incorporated into a two-year work practice from 2005 to 2007, an iterative “applied research” informed by resonances between theory and practice.

“German entrepreneurs are planning to outstrip the ancient Egyptians by building the world’s largest pyramid on a derelict site in eastern Germany – which they claim will eventually contain the remains of millions of people in concrete burial blocks.”
—The Independent

Europe, as a political space, is as conflictual as its constitution. It needs to be designed and negotiated. It is longing for an architecture of strategic encounters. Based on the curation of a space at the 2007 Lyon Biennial, London-based architect and writer Markus Miessen has drawn together a group of people to lead conversations around alternative notions of participation, the clash of democratic heterogeneities, and what it means to live in Europe today.