Niklas Maak

How do we want to live? How shall we build? Where can we find ideas for the houses and cities of the future? Niklas Maak and Johanna Diehl focus their attention on these highly topical questions in their joint project “Eurotopians”. In times of change this volume casts its backward gaze on the work of European utopians in order to find visions for the present. During the 1960s and 1970s visionary architecture was created in Europe which raised fundamental questions about our current ideas of how we should live. Many of these buildings are in ruins and their architects forgotten – although they still live there. Maak visited them and created an “archaeology of the utopian”, which shows that important ideas for the world of tomorrow can be found in the ruins. Johanna Diehl has taken impressive photographs of great intensity. In the ruins of these utopias of the modern age she discovered pictures of revolutionary approaches to life which seem surprisingly topical.

If data is the greatest collective treasure of a digital society, basic material for business and politics: Why are the places where it is stored still so invisible? Niklas Maak, architectural critic and Professor for Architecture at Stadelschule Frankfurt, explores this question in his new publication and envisions radical solutions for the future.