Oswald Mathias Ungers Book order

In the manifesto The City in the City – Berlin: A Green Archipelago, Oswald Mathias Ungers and a number of his colleagues from Cornell University presented the first concepts and intellectual models for the shrinking city. In contrast to the reconstruction of the European city that was popular at the time, they developed the figure of a polycentric urban landscape. However, the manifesto really began to exert an effect beginning in the 1990s, when the focus of the urban planning discourse turned to the examination of crises, recessions, and the phenomenon of demographic shrinking. This critical edition by Florian Hertweck and Sébastien Marot contains a previously unpublished version of the manifesto by Rem Koolhaas, as well as interviews with coauthors Koolhaas, Peter Riemann, Hans Kollhoff, and Arthur Ovaska. Introductory texts explain the development of the manifesto between Cornell and Berlin, position the work in the planning history of Berlin, and reveal its influence on current approaches.

First published in 1982, German architect Oswald Mathias Ungers' "City Metaphors" juxtaposes more than 100 various city maps throughout history with images of flora and fauna and other images from science and nature. Ungers assigns each a title--a single descriptive word printed in both English and German. In Ungers' vision, the divisions of Venice are transformed into a handshake and the 1809 plan of St Gallen becomes a womb. Ungers writes in his foreword: "Without a comprehensive vision reality will appear as a mass of unrelated phenomenon and meaningless facts, in other words, totally chaotic. In such a world it would be like living in a vacuum; everything would be of equal importance; nothing could attract our attention; and there would be no possibility to utilize the mind." A classic of creative cartography and visual thinking, "City Metaphors" is also an experiment in conscious vision-building.