Tibor Joanelly Boeken

Far from Tokyo, in a holiday resort frequented by artists and intellectuals, the Japanese master architect Kazuo Shinohara constructed an enigma in 1974. Most of the holiday house he designed for the poet Shuntarō Tanikawa consists of a room that is hardly usable: A roof spans a patch of sloping terrain like a large tent, enclosing two wooden logs, a ladder, a bench and the sculpture of a rooster. The poet soon gave up using this impractical house. But for the architect it generated a slew of new ideas and terminology, which he transformed into radically new concepts and spaces in his subsequent essays and designs.Tibor Joanelly’s treatise deconstructs the terms that appear in Shinohara’s theoretical texts about the poet’s house – terms like “naked reality”, “machine” and “meaning”. Using the tools of contemporary philosophy, Joanelly develops an ontology of architectural space, of metaphor, and of the hidden mechanisms that lie behind all art.

This revised and updated edition is a comprehensive monograph on the Swiss architects E2A. Brothers Piet and Wim Eckert see their work as an interpretation of contemporary living conditions. In today’s context, expectations, experiences, and ambitions characterize places and clash with reality. The incompatible becomes the platform of the discipline of architecture, and in the work by the two architects it becomes a prolonged journey of discovery during which associations and relationships are explored and exposed. Here, one experiences a fine line between dream and reality that could be described as systematic incoherence. Thus, rather than designing the perfect machine for an idealized image of society, E2A integrate different and diametrically opposed conditions that were once mutually exclusive. Projects, ideas, essays, and notes supplement building projects and record positions, assessments, and ongoing questions. In this way the reader becomes a witness to an intense debate on the city and its architecture.