Reinhard Gieselmann In Search of Style / Auf der Suche nach Stil

Rediscovering a major architect: Reinhard Gieselmann, born 1925, is one of those who were not satisfied, shortly after studying in the post-war period, with explaining building simply as meeting functional needs. »Technology is not art ..., form expresses intellectual content«, he postulated in 1960, with his friend and long-term fellow- traveller Oswald Mathias Ungers, in a programmatic »Manifesto for a new architecture«. Here their own position of determined subjectivity was set against the credo of rationality, functionalism and formal self-limitation conveyed by their teacher Egon Eiermann . Seeing architecture as a sensual experience, design as a »search of style« runs through all Gieselmann's numerous theoretical statements, which mark him out as a sensitive thinker. His extensive built work, focussing on housing and church architecture, is characterized by powerfully three-dimensional buildings, dramatic spatial effects, sophisticated handling of light and explicit material...