Oswald Mathias Ungers’s completed and complete early works: attribution and acknowledgement

Abstract

This article revises the accepted catalogue of architectural works — proposed and built structures, planning studies, and other projects — by the German architect Oswald Mathias Ungers (1926–2007). Based on primary research conducted at the Ungers office in Cologne beginning in 1973 and continuing to the present at the Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft (UAA), as well as on field documentation, the article identifies a number of projects left out of the accepted catalogue that was first enumerated in the monograph Oswald Mathias Ungers: Architetture 1951–1990, (Milan: Electa, 1991). It discusses uncatalogued design projects based on materials found at the UAA and analyses the most significant of these related to design strategies that Ungers was exploring in the early phase of his professional life.