Whither Architecture? This is one of the central questions underlying the new issue of Texte zur Kunst. We situate architecture in the forcefields of art and aesthetics; the economy of the market and configurations of power; between social processes of displacement and collective political projects; between the materially articulated volumes of buildings and their implication in technological mediatization. Architecture has its time and place. It intervenes in historically built conditions, and is, in this sense, a built politics of history. By materially pre-forming the way in which a society lives together, it also models the future. We put a special focus on the question of a communally shared existence, which here and now particularly implies addressing questions of property. In the interplay of art and architecture, ownership has always played a crucial role. Yet we are also concerned with how the analysis of various forms of building, in the sense of a critical aesthetics of architecture, can do justice to such political issues.
We look at developers’ architecture and how it co-opts art on the streets and in galleries. We speak to members of a Berlin Baugruppe, a building community, who explore new modes of shared planning and living. Our authors investigate design for high-end gallery spaces in the age of hyper-capitalism, and critically re-examine architecture exhibitions beyond the pure aestheticization of space. With an eye to recent architectural history we reconsider the legacy of Oswald Mathias Ungers, who in 1970s West-Berlin authored unfulfilled promises for contemporary cities: the green archipelago and the urban villa. We also publish a plea against the destruction of the Marx-Engels-Forum in former East Berlin, and recount the development of the audio-visual architecture-statement amidst the deployment of an international media-architecture of administration, as it occurred at the 1976 UN ‘Habitat’-conference.