Durch Manhattan

Maak, Niklas

Hanser, Carl GmbH + Co.

If data is the greatest collective treasure of a digital society, why are the places where it is stored still so invisible?German journalist and architectural critic Niklas Maak (born 1972) works with graduate students to study the future of data storehouses as a signature building typology of the 21st century.

Niklas Maak: Servermanifest: Architecture of the Data Center and the Future of Democracy

Arts & Photography

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Hatje Cantz

Cities today have become portfolios of investment properties with token patches of green. The cost to live in a fortress-like luxury housing complex in London or Manhattan is so high that most of us can’t afford it. As the masses move to the suburbs, the construction industry responds by churning out clusters of the same barracks-style row houses, ensuring that, there too, one can live in utmost privacy and security. But what do these buildings say about us? Do they have anything to do with the way in which most people actually want to live? Niklas Maak provocatively argues that the construction industry and a number of outdated or poorly thought-out policies have prevented us from rethinking how we live in the city. Yet many of our current crises—from the mortgage crisis to global warming—are closely connected to problematic forms of accommodation in our cities. And the problem will only get worse: Over the next twenty years, influx into the world’s cities is expected to create the need for an additional one billion units of housing. Fortunately, Maak shows, there are practicable solutions. In Europe, Japan, and the United States, the author explores promising new forms of housing. Cities should be reflections of their inhabitants—not forces to be contended with. Controversial, yet well-researched and wryly funny, Living Complex is a call for change from the “comfortable defense lines” that epitomize the current sorry state of housing.

Living Complex: From Zombie City to the New Communal

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Hirmer Publishers

How do we want to inhabit the spaces we live in? How can we build homes that match our ideals and meet the demands of a changing world? Where can we find ideas for the houses and cities of the future? During the 1960s and 1970s, visionary architecture in Europe began to raise these fundamental questions about the homes we inhabit. Journalist Niklas Maak has visited the buildings of this era—many of which are now in ruins—and curates here an “archaeology of the utopian,” founding ideas for future architectures in the buildings of the past. Featuring works by Antti Lovag, Yona Friedman, Claude Parent, Dante Bini, Cini Boeri, Hans-Walter Müller, Renée Gailhoustet, and Jean Renaudie, all impressively photographed by Johanna Diehl, this intelligent new volume explores inspiring revolutionary forms of living through the utopian architectures of the past.

Eurotopians: Fragments of a Different Future

Diehl, Johanna

Photography & Video

The mastermind behind what he termed beautiful and functional “machines for living,” Le Corbusier has long been recognized as one of the foremost figures in the international style of architecture. Yet, beginning in the 1940s, the famed architect and urbanist increasingly took modernism in a new direction that has until now been insufficiently considered—and little understood. Dispensing with his trademark suit and bowtie, Le Corbusier was spending increasing amounts of time at the shore in the 1940s, collecting stones, shells, and other jetsam, and enjoying the works of the philosopher and ardent shell collector Paul Valéry. And it was here that the seemingly hyper-rational architect developed a revolutionary new theory of design, built around these polished and splintered shapes. Stating that nature was the source of his inspiration, Le Corbusier embarked on a meandering odyssey through the literature and esoteric writings of his day, going on to produce such unorthodox projects as Chandigarh’s Palace of Assembly and the strange and beautiful Ronchamp Chapel in Paris, whose roof is said to have been modeled after an inverted crab’s shell. The development of Le Corbusier’s new approach not only changed modernism but also inspired—and continues to inspire—new shapes and lines in the work of a host of architects. In this superbly written and accessible piece of architectural history, Maak develops the intricate story of a breakthrough in architecture that began on a beach.

Le Corbusier: The Architect on the Beach

History & Criticism

Tobias Rehberger: 1993–2022

Rehberger, Tobias

Khadivi, Jesi

Individual Artists

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Books by Maak, Niklas