The online magazine moderneREGIONAL is dedicated to the architecture of the 20th century. What began in 2014 as a project of a freelance team was transformed into a non-profit institutional form in 2016. The fields of interest of moderneREGIONAL (Link in German) range from architecture to urban planning and horticulture to design, photography and art in construction. Particularly close to the hearts of the team around the publishers Daniel Bartetzko and Karin Berkemann as well as the editors Peter Liptau, Jasmin Rettinger and Fabian Schmerbeck and their supporting writers are the “often neglected ‘small’ formats, regions and building types”. Expertly, committedly and independently, they, who all pursue “bread and butter jobs” on the side, provide information about current topics in modern architecture free of charge and free of commercial advertising. In addition to a column in which the editors have their say, the online magazine reports daily on events, exhibitions and books and presents the latest in building and research. In addition, in-depth texts and photo essays appear once a week in the category “mehR”. A newsletter goes online every two weeks and a themed issue every three months. The new summer issue “Small Heritage” has just been published and is freely accessible online. And last but not least, the virtual map “invisibilis” saves closed, unused or demolished church buildings from oblivion.
Under the title “The Architecture of Late Modernism”, the “Best of 90s”(Link in German) series currently presents a different portrait of the architecture of the 1990s every fortnight. In the decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the millennium, architecture sat between all chairs – “between eco and high-tech, between reconstruction and rendering, between magenta-mint and anthracite” – but at the same time modernism did not reach the end of its tether; on the contrary, it gained “perfect momentum for a new round”. Fired by neoliberalism, there was a lot of building and even more discussion in the search for a reunification architecture. Those years were held together by “the tasks and contents, the breaking through and redefining of boundaries”.
As a starting point for the project, the anthology “The End of Modernism?” (Link in German) describes overarching developments as well as concrete buildings of work, living and leisure. The spectrum of projects between “post-modernity and trans-modernity, which are presented and described in as much detail as they are precise, ranges from the “Smart Towers” to the Zürichhaus in Hamburg and clay buildings of an eco-settlement in Kassel to the WDR-Arkaden in Cologne.
In addition, the exhibition project “Tower and Tunnel” will be on view at the Freie Akademie der Künste Hamburg from 6 September to 9 October 2022. In the exhibition, the work of the architect Friedhelm Grundmann (1925-2015) is comprehensively honoured for the first time. The central theme is the comparison of the two seemingly contradictory architectural genres of church and underground railway.
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