Hans Ibelings (ed.)

Claus en Kaan
Building

Hardcover, 240 pages, illustrated (350 colour and 550 b/w), size: 31.5 x 24 cm
Text in English, ISBN 90-5662-228-5, € 68.00 /OUT OF PRINT

With support of the Netherlands Architecture Fund

Building - for all its simplicity the title of this book speaks volumes about the work of Claus and Kaan. It reduces architecture to what they see as the essence of their profession. Kees Kaan and Felix Claus once claimed that their ambition was to extinguish the schism between low practice and high theory, between architecture that serves its immediate objective and architecture that speaks over the heads of its users to colleagues and critics.

Severity and repose are hallmarks of Claus and Kaan's oeuvre and these qualities are often found in it simultaneously. For even at its most Spartan, their architecture is never harsh.

Although one can hardly describe Claus and Kaan's architecture as postmodern, their stance does owe something to postmodernism. This can be seen in their free handling of references, such as Marcel Breuer's Whitney Museum or Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion, and in their undogmatically broad range of interest, spanning from Heinrich Tessenow to Gordon Bunshaft and from Auguste Perret to I.M. Pei. For them there is no essential contradiction between modernity and classical values.

This first comprehensive monograph on Claus and Kaan gives a complete overview of all their projects (250 or so), including those yet to be realized. Of this total, fifty are exhaustively documented and illustrated.
With essays by Rafael Moneo, David Chipperfield, Andrea Deplazes, Christoph Grafe, Han Michel, and Felix Claus and Kees Kaan themselves.