An architecture book composed of visual essays in five acts: persons / outside / inside / ideas / actors; as intermezzi there are plans and texts in the form of written reflections by five authors: Emmanuel Caille, Andrea Maria Dusl, Marina Hämmerle, Otto Kapfinger and Anatxu Zabalbeascoa. The buildings appear in all acts, the separate pictures establish cross-references across the pages to the virtual whole. In the manner of a “road movie” the journey through the architectural landscape of Marte.Marte is deliberately separated into inside and outside. Why? The aim is to enable the viewer to experience the architecture of Marte.Marte sensually – from the void to the volume and back again. Marte.Marte build their “nests” with very precise external shells, the “semi-outside” of the internal courtyards seems itself like a split or separation, a part of the rigid spatial boundaries. The fascinating qualities of the interiors include the special scale, the way in which expansiveness alternates with constriction, the increase and reduction of the pressure of spatial states and the architects’ handling of light. In the external elevations one is struck by the way the horizontal building volumes are anchored in the ground, the special figure-ground relationships and field of forces generated by the buildings. The graphical implementation of these qualities offers a new visual narrative of architecture in an unconventional book form. The inside / outside relationships in Marte.Marte’s architecture are woven together in a complex way. These relationships are presented in analogous form in the space of the pages of the book: aerial views of the buildings on the one hand convey an “extreme outside” in the sequence of photos of indoor spaces; on the other hand the reduced “X-rays” of the floor plans and sections form icon-like counterpoints in the “outside” sequence of images. The aerial views produce a visual miniaturization of the landscape and the buildings. By raising the buildings from the familiar plane the aerial perspective gives them a dimension of depth like a model. The magnificent series of colour images by Bruno Klomfar, Mark Lins, Petra Rainer, Ignacio Martinez forms the actual substance of the visual narrative and the images are articulated and reflected upon by informative passages of text with their own typographical design. As a volume, looked at from outside, the book seems like a building block – monochrome, compact, straight-edged and sharp without any protrusions or modelling. The voluminous, coarse-grain paper gives the book a tangible volume and a tactile lightness – a black box 163 x 225 x 41mm, with surprising insights on 416 pages. The cut edges, which are black on all sides, additionally give each panorama page an ultra-thin surround. The cover title makes its visual impact solely as the result of being partly painted – black on black.

This is not a book. As architecture, what you are holding is an unusual object that contains a multiplicity of situations and places. There’s room for reading, for vision, for comparison. This publication presents the APPROACH, the attitudes, and the architectural works of Geninasca Delefortrie as an opportunity to reflect in general on the relationship between architecture and its geographical, cultural, economic, and political context. You can run through the following pages in several ways. In accordance with its title, the book is structured like an open matrix of various elements. A polyphonic dialogue runs throughout the book, involving the words and viewpoints of many participants, who discuss the assumptions behind the practice of architecture, analysing the relationship between architecture and its context, between architecture and its clients, between public and private. It considers what the architect does, his work between programme and interpretation, the various planning tools at his disposal, and his end product: the shape and beauty of things. This wide discussion is illustrated by and imbued with the architectural works of Geninasca Delefortrie. Twenty projects are presented at length, each as a specific operation. These are put forward as concrete examples of how to clarify the ongoing relationship between architects, clients, contractors, public officials, and civilised society. A double page at the beginning of the book collects and compares all the principal buildings, presented according to the same parameters, in such a way as to bring out their richness of dimensions, the variety of functions, and the typological complexity that the architects have dealt with from 1995 to the present day. The independent judgements of five ‘critics’ complete the deliberation and help to define the character and qualities of the architectural approach that Geninasca Delefortrie works out in their creations. All these discrete elements are indissolubly interwoven among themselves: every theme for discussion relates to another aspect of the practice of architecture, projects can crop up in many parts of the book; attitudes and dialogues often return to the same argument, but always linking it to further aspects and insights. Alberto Alessi

WOODDAYS are “best practice events” devoted to the theme of timber construction for greener, expanding cities. The core element of the “road-show” is a mobile exhibition box measuring 3 x 3 x 12 metres. The first stops on this tour initiated by proHolz Austria and planned to extend over a period of several years are Bratislava, Ljubljana and Milan, where a start was made on 21 March 2014. In terms of content the exhibition aims to present the evident potential of timber construction; in terms of communication it addresses the material’s thematic presence in urban space, its direct appeal and how it is encountered ; in design terms the focus is on eliminating the folksy quality, on the material’s haptic quality and elegance, while in terms of function the show concentrates on mobility and autarchy (through the photovoltaic supply of energy). On one side wall of the interior pioneering developments in the field of timber building are shown. Vertical text bars and illuminated panels showing examples of projects are inserted rhythmically in the timber structure. The wall opposite communicates the ecological arguments for forests and wood. This is done by means of eye-catching graffiti with in-depth messages that relate to the pictograms on the external facades. The entrance and exit at the ends of the box contain introductory texts, labels and display windows featuring attractive exhibits. The starting point for this action was the exciting exhibition “Bauen mit Holz” in the Pinakothek der Moderne. It was initiated and curated by Hermann Kaufmann, TU München and designed in collaboration with Atelier Gassner. The innovative German timber building expert Alexander Gumpp, gumpp&maier, working in collaboration with the department of timber construction at the TU Munich, was responsible for condensing the large exhibition for this small mobile exhibition box. This show is the predecessor of the WOODBOX and was awarded the Gold Medal for Exhibition Design in the European Design Awards 2013. The new box is optimized in terms of content and design and equipped for different languages. The event label created by Andrea Gassner is a further development of the trademark created in 2005 by Stefan Gassner for “european wood”. The striking façade logo on the outside wall is made by incisions in the black wooden cladding of the box, accentuated by a restrained use of colour. The line grid produced as a result is continued graphically in various marketing communication applications. Poster subjects with “forests of battens” and folders with bar charts are created.

The principal protagonist of this exhibition is the exhibition space itself – a wooden box in the form of a shipping container that is transportable and can be erected and taken down quickly. “schauholz” – the name and motto of the action are cut into the external walls in oversized letters. The short ends of the box allow a view into the interior. The contents of the exhibition represent a “distillation” of the large exhibition “Bauen mit Holz - Wege in die Zukunft”. Openings to introduce light are made in the structure of beams and posts that is exposed in the ceiling and the right-hand wall. A show of current timber construction is embedded in the opening, similar to an analogous slide viewing box. It presents the current importance and the architectural range of wood as a building material. On 120 plates the screen presentation offers a second way of reading the selected projects. On the untreated left-hand wooden wall various ecological and economic aspects of the raw material wood are presented in a memorable way by graphics that employ crate lettering. The starting point for the texts and illustration was the scientific consultancy work for the original exhibition by Gerd Wegener and Holger König, Munich. The show case in the rear area forms a stage for a spectacular model building. It terminates the exhibition space and, seen from outside, creates an attractive display window for the show.

For a number of years Reinhard Gassner has been practicing phenomena with the simple word ‘text’. The ‘T’ at the start is pronounced differently to the ‘T’ at the end. At first it accelerates, it even borrows an aspirated ‘H’ and then ends with a rather dry final note, between the ‘X’ and the ‘T’ a ‘sharp S’ develops. The ‘E’ is essentially a letter with many different tones. The typographical grimaces that result from the various fonts tell different stories; for instance the ‘E’ that laughs out loud, the shyly smiling ‘E’, or the ‘E’ that grins maliciously.