Anna-Maria Meister – författare

Experiments in architectural education in the post–World War II era that challenged and transformed architectural discourse and practice. In the decades after World War II, new forms of learning transformed architectural education. These radical experiments sought to upend disciplinary foundations and conventional assumptions about the nature of architecture as much as they challenged modernist and colonial norms, decentered building, imagined new roles for the architect, and envisioned participatory forms of practice. Although many of the experimental programs were subsequently abandoned, terminated, or assimilated, they nevertheless helped shape and in some sense define architectural discourse and practice. This book explores and documents these radical pedagogies and efforts to defy architecture’s status quo. The experiments include the adaptation of Bauhaus pedagogy as a means of “unlearning” under the conditions of decolonization in Africa; a movement to design for “every body,” including the disabled, by architecture students and faculty at the University of California, Berkeley; the founding of a support network for women interested in the built environment, regardless of their academic backgrounds; and a design studio in the USSR that offered an alternative to the widespread functionalist approach in Soviet design. Viewed through their dissolution and afterlife as well as through their founding stories, these projects from the last century raise provocative questions about architecture’s role in the new century.

Winner of the Architecture Book of the Year Award 2025 - Practice MonographDrawing on the latest research and exclusive access to archival materials, this visually stunning monograph traces Otto’s groundbreaking career as one of the twentieth century’s most important and influential architects.Published to mark the architect’s centennial, this beautifully illustrated book celebrates Frei Otto’s groundbreaking achievements in creating lightweight architectural structures and pioneering sustainable design practices. Featuring insightful essays by leading scholars and a thematic overview of his most important works, the book investigates Otto’s mastery of tensile structures, his innovative application of biological principles to architecture, and his trailblazing use of unconventional materials and construction techniques.Otto’s forward-thinking approach paved the way for energy-efficient and environmentally conscious architecture long before these ideas became mainstream. With plans and photographs from the saai archive for architecture and civil engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, which highlight the influence of natural concepts in his work, this monograph serves as an essential introduction to a visionary architect who provided a blueprint for creating sustainable, functional, and harmonious buildings.

Are You a Model? explores the model as architectural tool and practice. The volume approaches architectural models not as categorical objects but through questions such as: What determines a model’s functions and agencies? When in the design process does it unfold its power and when has it served its purpose? Based on nine overarching questions, the book brings together interdisciplinary voices from architecture, art history as well as architectural and curatorial practice, and software engineering. 31 contributions interweave perspectives from various disciplines and geographies, and reveal surprising affinities rather than seeking conclusive answers. Models are thus not classified according to time of origin, genre, or material, but rather understood as an epistemologically diverse practice.