et cetera - Mahendra Raj

Last year the Indian civil engineer Mahendra Raj celebrated his 85th birthday. We honour his work, which is scarcely known in this country, with a portrait of three of his most important buildings. Raj’s spectacular constructions of reinforced concrete reveal a search for architectural strength in the load-bearing structure – in contrast to the approach in this country that is usually based on a rational reciprocity between architecture and structure. In his book “The Architecture of Happiness” Alain de Botton states that we can call something beautiful when it conveys to us in a concentrated form those values that we lack ourselves or that are generally lacking in our society. Mahendra Raj‘s buildings invite us to examine our own work with regard to precisely this kind of lack and to think about immediacy, openness to the unanticipated – and perhaps about optimism. The fact that, following an issue devoted to elegance, we now explore a phenomenon described elsewhere by the newly coined hybrid term “brutiful” does not represent a contradiction. We are just refining the diagnosis of our time: the gallery, studio and dwelling house by Arno Brandlhuber presented in this issue is a provocative response to the constant aesthetic upgrading and gentrification of Berlin’s inner city (which is carried out with the aid of a number of stringent building regulations) and to an image of the city that never existed in such an idealized way. The consequences of the process of change in the inner city are also revealed on the periphery, in Berlin just as in Frankfurt. In the latter city, in surroundings marked by mediocre architecture, the new housing development at Riedberg by Atelier 5 represents an ensemble of residential buildings in which the communal public space is not just an empty promise but a vessel that explains through its volumetric increments how a neighbourhood slowly grows and flourishes. The quality of the Riedberg development as a place to live offers a strong contrast to investors’ architecture of the kind also found in this country. In general public space plays an important role in this issue: the example of a new culture centre in the small Belgian town of Soignies shows that the building by architects l’Escaut and Bureau d‘études Weinand creates a community by serving as a stage for festivals - an aspect that is often not adequately considered in town planning in Switzerland. The fact that architecture and urban planning do not just talk about what is lacking but also about what should not be is the subject of an enlightening article by Inge Beckel: she shows how designs produced during the Cold War era were opposed the values of the other political side and how architecture and town planning voluntarily submitted themselves to ways of thinking that excluded other ideas. The current issue is intended to invite readers to enquire critically about what is missing from architectural production so that in our age, when everything appears possible, we can discover what could develop out of this absence.

The editors