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  • Oswald Mathias Ungers: dialectical principles of design

Jacoby, Sam, 2018, Journal Article, Oswald Mathias Ungers: dialectical principles of design The Journal of Architecture, 23 (7-8). pp. 1230-1258. ISSN 1360-2365 (Print) 1466-4410 (Online)

Abstract or Description:

An important contributor to the post-war debate on architecture’s relationship to the city was the German architect Oswald Mathias Ungers (1926–2007). Starting in the early 1960s, he became increasingly interested in questions of typological organisation and morphological transformation, positing their relationship in dialectical principles. This paper traces some of the shifts in Ungers’s understanding of architecture through a utilisation of typology as a design theme, the morphological transformation of architectural form, and the coincidence of opposites in urban building complexes by reviewing a selection of closely linked pieces of design research (lectures, writings, and large-scale housing projects) from the 1960s to 80s.

This paper examines how Ungers’s interest in rational design as a problem of serial formal and social transformations led him to new understandings of architectural and urban design. The concepts of typology and morphology hereby played a central role in reclaiming architecture as a formal and intellectual, but also a social and imaginative project, through which the city could be reasoned, however, always through the problems arising from architectural form itself.

Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2018.1513415
Subjects: Architecture > K100 Architecture > K110 Architectural Design Theory
School or Centre: School of Architecture
Identification Number or DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2018.1513415
Date Deposited: 06 Jun 2018 20:45
Last Modified: 25 Mar 2020 08:38
URI: https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/id/eprint/3205
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