Eurotopians

The project Eurotopians is dedicated to the visionary buildings and experimental designs which arose particularly in the 1960s and 1970s in Europe – at a time in which architects and autodidacts were fundamentally questioning the conventional concepts of »living,« »building,« and »accommodation.« Many of these buildings are now ruins, forgotten by architects.

A few of the architects – often over 90 years old – still live in these building. For their joint project Eurotopians, the artist and photographer Johanna Diehl and the author and journalist Niklas Maak, who has published extensive reports on visionary architects in the FAZ since 2002, visited these visionary people and places. In her photographs, Diehl presents the uninhabited spherical houses of the architect Antii Lovag, which are situated on an elevated plateau in Southern France, and the models, drawings, and flat full of found objects of architect and urbanist Yona Friedman. Another utopian of the project is Claude Parent, who discovered »architecture oblique« in the 1960s – buildings which contained no furniture and only had sloping floors on which living together was to assume more relaxed and dynamic forms. Accompanied by Maak’s texts, a series of impressive photographs was created that discovers images of revolutionary living concepts in the ruins of this utopian modernity, which are not only historically interesting, but also surprisingly modern looking. The photographs and texts will be published in a joint book expected to be published in 2017 under the title Eurotopians. – Here we show a few of these images with this photograph series. The work will be on show at Akademie Schloss Solitude May 12 until June 24, 2016.