Tiles of Space: Typology and Morphology in Action Genealogy and Legacy of the Project for the Neue Stadt in Köln by Oswald Mathias Ungers

Abstract

The article studies, through interpretation and redrawing, one of Ungers’ least studied works, the project for the Neue Stadt in Cologne. In fact, it analyses two projects: the first, competition, more experimental and a second, the executive, of realisation. The first project, known for its application of the principle of solids and voids, matter and spaces, is more experimental and seminal; the second, completely different from the urban point of view, transforms fragmentation into compactness. The aim of the research is to place this work within a broader reflection on the residential cell, identifying how the com[1]positional principle of fullness and emptiness, of volume and space, already originates in some of Le Corbusier’s projects and is a widespread theme in the critical reconstruction of the residential house in post-war architecture. Through Jean Prouvé or Alison and Peter Smithson, but also Hejiduk or SANAA, a genealogy and inheritance is traced, which finds its full relevance in contemporary design. Indeed, the legacy is evident in more recent contemporary housing, as in the projects of the cooperatives in Zurich or Barcelona. All the topicality of the process of typological variation and transformation, in relation to morphology, seems in fact to be well gathered in the intermediate spaces, the potential of a collective and now, shared project.