AWC 28 – ARCHITECTURE AS THEME

In his seminal publication Architecture as Theme, Oswald Mathias Ungers looks back at his work and distils a set of tools that could ultimately provide a base for the architectural project. Pier Luigi Nicolin had invited him for a special issue of Lotus, to reflect upon his work - something Ungers, in the midst of a transformation from an educating theorist towards a fully operational architectural powerhouse, had happily accepted. The book is remarkable in its lucidity. A set of five themes, roughly complementary, roughly in overlap are presented in such a way that they are always partly the engine for numerous projects. The success of the book lays perhaps in the way in which the examples (from Unger’s work) make the theory tangible though not exhaustible.