Beate Söntgen

Renowned for such prominent buildings as London’s Tate Modern, Beijing’s Bird’s Nest National Stadium and 1111 Lincoln Road in Miami Beach, Herzog & de Meuron sits at the cutting edge of contemporary design. Founded in Basel over 40 years ago, the Swiss architectural practice is now an international partnership with projects across the globe – among them museums, hospitals, skyscrapers, arenas, and private and civic buildings. Produced in close collaboration with the architects, and comprising new texts by leading writers, practitioners and thinkers, this exciting new publication gives an authoritative account of the inner workings of what the New York Times dubbed ‘one of the most admired architecture firms in the world’.

Critique is a form of thinking and acting. Since the end of the 18th century, there has been a dynamization and fluidization of the understanding of form, as concepts such as the break, marginalization, tearing, and opening indicate. As a philosophical problem, the question of form arises in critical theory from Marx to Adorno. Since the 1960s, literary practices have proliferated that generate critical statements less through traditional argument and more through the programmatic use of formal means. At the same time, the writing self, along with its attitudes, reflections, affects, and instruments, visibly enters the critical scene. This volume examines how the interdependence of critique, object, and form translates into critical stances, understood as learnable, reproducible gestures, which bear witness to changing conditions and media of critical practice.