Alessandro Toti (UCL) - 2017-18 Students
ucqbtot@ucl.ac.uk

O. M. Ungers’ collaborative architectural publications: the Veröffentlichungen zur Architektur (1965-1969)

My research investigates a series of 27 booklets published in Berlin between 1965 and 1969 by the architect O. M. Ungers (1926-2007). Titled ‘Veröffentlichungen zur Architektur’ [Publications on Architecture], the booklets present Ungers’ collaborative teaching, research and professional activities, which involved as much architecture as non-design-based disciplines (e.g. politics, economy, sociology, history, geography, cybernetics and arts). I will inquire into the booklets’ theoretical environment and editorial production to show that the Veröffentlichungen are:

• innovative visual artefacts of architectural dissemination;
• a comprehensive and unstudied ‘milieu’ of critical knowledge, addressing 1960s European-wide architectural, cultural and socio-political questions;
• the result of a non-hierarchical collaboration between Ungers and his young team of assistants, who independently edited the vast majority of the issues;
• insights into Ungers’ historiography, which oppose the reliance upon his ‘autonomist’ legacy by retrieving an interdisciplinary and progressive period of his career;
• a site of an incipient political agency and ideology, leading up to the Berlin 1968 student movement and the 1970s new architectural paradigms.