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Negotiating Ungers

negotiating ungers: the aesthetics of sustainability
Edited by Common Room and Cornelia Escher
Common Books, 2019

Paperback | 4-3/4 x 6-1/2 inches | 224 pages | English | ISBN: 9780988290624 | $23.50

PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:

in 1980 oswald mathias ungers participated in a competition for solar housing. though ungers’ contribution received a special prize, his design never materialized and has since fallen into oblivion. designing solar housing meant ungers was faced with a new field. as an outsider to the contemporary debates on sustainability, he approached the assignment with a particular position: the energy efficiency of the houses should not depend on construction and building technology. instead, energy should be understood as a dimension of architecture itself, as an integral part of the design. in his design ungers searched for a new style, a set of simple architectural types which could adapt to seasonal change and help modify patterns of use.

developed through research started with a summer school at the ungers archiv für architekturwissenschaft in cologne in 2018 and continued with an exhibition at civa brussels in 2019, the publication contextualizes ungers’ design in contemporary discussions on sustainability and gives a more in-depth view into the ideas behind it.

with an essay by kim förster, texts by cornelia escher, lars fischer and others, a statement by ungers on sustainability, and reproductions from his self-published book on the solar house, including detailed material on his designs.

(Note: Book is available via Idea Books)

REVIEW:

The only project by Oswald Matthias Ungers that I've seen in person is the Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM), the renovation of a turn-of-the-century mansion in Frankfurt. Completed in 1984 and considered an "emblem of postmodernism," Ungers' design is like a "building within a building," featuring a house-shaped gallery inserted into the former residence. DAM and other projects by Ungers that predated and followed it indicate the German architect was interested in form and aesthetics rather than environmental concerns. As such, this book on a solar house he designed for a competition in Landstuhl in 1980 (it received a special prize) is eye-opening, revealing a little-known project that has renewed relevance today.
negotiating ungers (in lowercase, more on that later) is the outcome of a summer school held at the Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft (UAA) in 2018 and an exhibition at CIVA the following year. It is actually two books in one: the 112-page "book 1," with essays and other texts, a bibliography (most sources in German), and visual documentation of the summer school; and the 124-page "book 2," with drawings of five solar houses designed by Ungers taken from a self-published book on them and a lengthy essay by Kim Förster. The two bound paperbacks are glued together into one object; this unique format, combined with the subject, led me to buy it when I can across it at a bookstore recently.
Formally, at least one of the solar house designs by Ungers was very much like DAM: a house within a house. The detached two-story single-family house, one of the five designs, has a glazed, greenhouse-like exterior wrapping a smaller volume with solid walls. The interstitial space, heated by the sun, is alternately a veranda, kitchen, and other spaces, with living space and bedrooms in the center. Plants covering the outer layer help shade the interior in warmer months, protecting it from overheating. Simply put, this and the other designs used passive rather than active solar design to promote low-energy, architectural solutions without relying on technology. The subtitle of the book(s), "the aesthetics of sustainability," is appropriate in this regard, as is the applicability of Ungers' designs to contemporary conditions.
While I enthusiastically agree with the passive principles and low-tech, architectural approach of Ungers (setting aside the suburban context required of the single-family houses, a car-dependent context offsetting any sustainable gains in the proposed buildings), I feel like the design and layout of the book(s) is an impediment to fully understanding his designs and the contributions addressing them. Firstly, the paper size — basically like a postcard — means drawings and photographs, even large on the page, are too small. Some pages, especially the summer school documentation in book 1, are laid out so photographs are not much larger than stamps, making their captions more important than the hard-to-decipher images themselves. Secondly, the grainy images, akin to a newspaper, don't help at all with the legibility of the photographs and drawings.
Thirdly, the graphic design by Geoff Han and Anna Feng also features, as mentioned above, lowercase characters throughout. While I'm not sure if this approach is rooted in Herbert Bayer's Bauhaus typography, or something more recent like designboom, the combination of all-lowercase typography, large type, and small pages makes reading the text more frustrating than effortless. I'll admit that the occasional uppercase words do work well at accentuating particular names or phrases, but the same could probably said if it were bold with more traditional typography. Also not helping the legibility of the texts are the occasional multi-page breaks in paragraphs, sentences, and even words, with images filling the pages in between. For example, the reader must flip from "...TRULY ECO-" on page 83 all the way to 116 in book 2 to see the "LOGICAL..." continuation of the word and sentence, without knowing how many pages of images are in between. This happens repeatedly throughout the book, though at lesser degrees — none aiding the reader in understanding the contents. I think a larger page size, bigger and higher-quality images, and a better layout of text and images would have made explanations of Ungers' solar house designs that much better — and easier to digest for younger audiences today.

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