O. M. Ungers and Frankfurt: A Career Renewed and Architecture Repositioned

Abstract

The career of Oswald Mathias Ungers as a practising architect, writer, and educator spanned more than five decades, reaching from post-war reconstruction well beyond German reunification. During the 1960s, Ungers was drawn to the technocratic planning culture to which mass residential commissions were central. His response to the criticism that was subsequently directed at him for his involvement in this mode of building production was to reposition his practice, investing vast energies in the theorisation of architecture as an autonomous discipline. After a decade-long absence from building, Frankfurt proved to be the crucial setting for the transfer of his architecture into the symbolic economy of the postmodern city. It was here that changes in urban governance facilitated both a reframing of the objectives of practice and an evolution in the public of architecture. This essay is centred on the German Architecture Museum (1979–1984), a building that, with its didactic ambitions, materialises a set of core conceptual issues for Ungers.