This book addresses an urban architecture that is just as timeless and fascinating in the past as it is in the present. Historical and contemporary photographs unveil a picture of the city which reconciles memories and utopias. In the process, urban space as public space together with the houses which constitute it emerge as a stage - for the urban dweller, a place for adventure and home in one. This scenario as a kind of architectural "jockeying for position" is just as elementary today, as its various manifestations over centuries in the course of European urban development. It also shapes the visible framework and intellectual background for contemporary urban architecture. Modern architecture thereby finally overcomes (after almost 100 years) the prescribed historical obliviousness and the blind avant-garde mania of an ideological Modern which has contributed substantially to the debasement of our cities - to the extent that the most elementary rules of "jockeying for position" are ignored to the benefit of the built object or greenfield developments.
The pictures in this book and especially the Rene Wildgrube photographs of the Milan urban architecture of the 1920s and 30s provide a surprising as well as fascinating argument for a new approach to urban architecture.