Magazine

Utopian Disruption Concept
Anca Badut + Matthias Bühler (vrbn), Ulrich Gehmann ( Ideal Spaces) Joining their creative forces again, Ideal Spaces Working Group (ISWG) and vrbn are facing the challenge of reframing an old architectural and philosophical theme under a new approach: what would an ideal city look like in a contemporary context? Under the leadership of Ulrich […]
Resilience, Utopia, Community
Resilience, Utopia, Community Ulrich Gehmann The general relations between space, place, utopia, community and architecture have been outlined at https://www.idealspaces.org/magazines/ideal-spaces/; here, it is about a specific aspect of a ‘true’ community and the idea of its ideal space, an aspect that turned into a buzzword recently: resilience. In its broad terms, resilience is defined as […]
Community, Space, Utopia
Utopia is typically associated with community. Despite the existence of individual, “private” utopias, traditionally, a utopia does not exist for a single human being but for a group of people – a community. If we set aside the more sinister version of utopia, the so-called dystopia (which also has groups of humans as its focus) […]
Crystal Architecture
Cities made of rocks, palaces of crystal and towers of minerals designed by the Expressionist Glass Chain group are famous, but were not the only design concepts that informed the world of “crystalline” architecture. Whilst the term “crystalline” is not strictly codified, it is not widely accepted and used by architectural historians; it relates to […]
Sentences on Gestalt
My work on formulating sentences about gestalt began three years ago. I went into academia in the late ’90s with a background in art/design and it was especially important for me to incorporate the unique qualities of digital media as a material and its methods and process in relation to the physical and real worlds. […]
Gestalt – an Introduction
The following contribution is about a notion long forgotten: gestalt. It refers to an anthropological necessity, namely the ability to conceive wholes, entire contexts, and the unity of both perceiving and conceiving as a precondition to do so. Gestalt relates to another notion, that of order, as well as to another deeply ingrained in modernity, […]
Ideal Spaces
What is an ideal space, what is the ideal about it? An ideal space can denote both a space imagined, and a space ‘ideal’ in the word’s common sense as a space perfected.