Urban Space. Stadt Raum. Spazio Urbano

The scenario of public space is as elementary as a kind of “positional play” of architecture as it has proven itself in various manifestations over centuries in the history of European urban planning. It forms the visible framework and intellectual background for contemporary urban architecture. In this way, modern architecture is finally (after almost 100 years) overcoming the prescribed obliviousness to history and the blind avant-garde mania of an ideological modernism. This has made and still makes a considerable contribution to the impoverishment of our cities by ignoring even the most elementary rules of “positional play” in favor of the autonomy of objects or the settlement of green meadows. The rich visual material of this book, and in particular René Wildgrube’s photographs of Milan with its urban architecture of the 1920s/30s, substantiate this claim to a New Urban Architecture in a surprising as well as impressive way.