Bøger af Christoph Grafe

This issue of OASE proactively confronts a disturbing trend: the encroaching standardization of interiors as civilization moves inwards. Rather than simply identifying the issue, the editors single out projects for interiors that derive their significance from a specific approach and show a recognizable element of authorship.

This latest edition of Oase, one of the leading professional journals on architectural theory, asks a critical question: has the party ended? In the early 1990s, favorable economic and political conditions in the Netherlands created an advantageous climate for unorthodox design approaches and experiments. In the years that ensued, architects built on a unique aesthetic, producing works that remain pragmatic, self-assured, uncompromisingly modern and unmistakably Dutch. Since the turn of the century, however, economic design and market-driven politics have seemingly brought an end to the post-ideological party of the 1990s. Within recent years, there have been contradictions between interest groups, ideas and mentalities, which have resulted in inevitable confrontation. Today, however, it seems as though the sky has cleared, and, as evidenced in Oase 67, there is new space to think about architecture, public concerns and the culture and design future of the Netherlands and Europe.

The OASE Architectural Journal is one of the leading professional journals on architectural theory. Issue No. 62 asks whether the idea of the "European city" is still tenable at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Taking contemporary de-urbanized, suburbanized Europe as its background, OASE explores Tendenza, the movement founded by Aldo Rossi in the mid-1960s that redefined architecture based on an analysis of existing cities as architectural phenomena. The city, Rossi and Giorgio Grassi proposed, could provide formal patterns to be reworked into elements of a new design. The reception of these ideas in Holland, from the early 1970s onward, provides examples for debate on the relation between planning and the design of architectural objects, and the redefinition of the disciplines engaged in these activities. Here these issues are examined through the work of Carel Weeber, arguably the most controversial and successful architect to adopt the Italian ideas and to transform them in the Dutch context of large-scale planning and highly-specialized design disciplines.