Book Review

Oswald Mathias Ungers. Eine intellektuelle Biographie
Jasper Cepl

Kunstwissenschaftliche Bibliothek, Band 33
Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2007, 648pp., 90 ill., € 48.00
ISBN: 978-3-86560-158-2

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Jasper Cepl’s substantial book on Oswald Mathias Ungers (1926-2007) – based on his dissertation supervised by Fritz Neumeyer and Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani—treats one of the most important designers and architectural theorists in postwar Germany.  Born in Kaisersesch in the Eifel region, Ungers studied architecture at the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe from 1947 to 1950 and worked four years as a partner of the Cologne-based architect Helmut Goldschmidt. After having established a successful private practice in 1954 and following his seminal project for student flats in the Dutch town of Enschede, Ungers was appointed Professor of Design at the Technische Universität Berlin (1964). This teaching activity – followed by professorships in Cornell (1968-1983), Los Angeles and Harvard – marked the beginning of his theoretical phase, during which he dedicated himself primarily to the design of urban structures. Beginning in the mid-1970s Ungers increasingly turned his orientation back towards Europe and Germany, where colleagues, such as Josef Paul Kleihues, Heinrich Klotz and Leon Krier, helped him to re-establish himself as a practitioner.  With his projects for the Internationale Bauausstellung in Berlin (1984/1987) and for the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt (1979-1984), Ungers successfully returned to architectural design. Referring to archetypes such as the Pantheon and the Parthenon, he dedicated himself in the following two and a half decades to establishing the “perfect form,” leading to his typical geometric “ideal conceptions” as implemented, for example, in his third house in Cologne (1994-1996).

Based on a comprehensive evaluation of Ungers’s archive and library, Cepl’s book fills a gap in the research on the German architect. The author combines a multitude of sources (texts, design descriptions, editorials, critiques on students’ work, interview notes – some of them unpublished) to a significant character sketch. In contrast to previous studies by Heinrich Klotz (1985), Fritz Neumeyer (1991) and Martin Kieren (1994), who did not have full access to Ungers’s archive in Cologne, Cepl’s book is less a classical monograph than an “intellectual biography” aiming to trace “the metamorphoses in Ungers’s thinking” in a chronological manner (p. 15). While the preceding works primarily give a “clarifying overview” outlining the built oeuvre, Cepl examines the genesis of Ungers’s “complex architectural concept” contextualizing both his thinking and his design work within the contemporary professional debate (p. 16).

The book consists of four main chapters devoted to different stages of the architect’s biography.  After a short review of his education, Ungers is presented as a young designer who—at the beginning of his career—sought to evade the rationalistic canon of the 1950s und early 1960s “in search of ideas” (p. 39). Here, the CIAM Congress in Aix (1953) and the Triennale in Milan (1954)—attended together with Ulrich Conrads and Reinhard Gieselmann, respectively—are depicted as formative experiences leading to a shift from the functionalist principles of CIAM to a more individualistic conception of architecture as an “inventive art” (p. 68). By presenting designs such as the Oberhausen Institute (1953-1958) or the first house in Cologne (1958-1959), Cepl illustrates Ungers’s turn to an expressive brutalism informed by Alvar Aalto as well as his temporary enthusiasm for the utopian concepts of German expressionism.

The second chapter (1964-1973) examines Ungers’s teaching in Berlin and Cornell.  As an influential educator – among his disciples were Hans Kollhoff, Rem Koolhaas and Jürgen Sawade – Ungers at first advocated a “morphological method” (p. 179) which, by the end of the 1960s, was gradually replaced by an interest in social issues leading to extensive urban design schemes for Berlin-Ruhwald (1967) and Rüsselsheim (1972). Focusing on Cornell, Cepl describes the impact of Ungers’s educational work highlighting his ambiguous relationship with colleagues such as Peter Blake and Colin Rowe—the latter later described Ungers’s appointment as “the silliest thing I ever did” due to fundamental differences in their pedagogic concepts (p. 292).

The architect’s return to Europe from America, with his accompanying gradual shift from urban design to architecture, is discussed in the third chapter (1974-1981). Of particular interest is the description of Ungers’s cooperation with Rem Koolhaas, who, in 1975, established his Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) imitating the initials of his teacher (O.M.U.). Cepl exemplarily investigates the designs for Roosevelt Island (New York, 1975) and for a “city within the city” (“Städtearchipel” Berlin, 1977) referring to the interactions between Ungers und Koolhaas both aiming to “idealize reality” (p. 315).
Finally, Ungers’s universal “idealization” of architecture is examined in the last chapter treating the years 1982-2007. Here, the author describes the architect’s geometric-tectonic minimalism as a way to gain complete “objectivity” leading him to an “intellectual space” of architecture (p. 474). In Ungers’s late designs, focusing on proportions, “mathematic rules” and a “stringent geometrical system,” Cepl perceives the ideal of Renaissance humanism (p. 487) – an observation underlined by Ungers’s contribution to the exhibition Rinascimento da Brunelleschi a Michelangelo shown in Venice and other venues in 1994-96.

By densely intertwining biographical, theoretical and practical aspects Cepl succeeds in drawing a complex portrait revealing numerous facets of Ungers’s philosophy—a result quite astonishing for those who primarily knew the late “classical” period of the architect. Altogether, the author presents a Janus-faced designer whose architectural thinking—oscillating between “artistic freedom” and “social responsibility,” between a vision of alteration and of duration, between reality and utopia—is “full of contradictions” (p. 512). Beyond the concentration on Ungers, the well-documented book is also a commendable compendium illustrating the general architectural debate(s) of the postwar period. A second edition, however, should include an appendix with an index as well as a biographical overview of Ungers’s life. Beyond that one can only hope that the book will soon be translated into English.

Andreas Zeese
Vienna