O.M. Ungers: Prime Case

The exhibition O.M. Ungers - Prime Case shows three key works in the early production of Oswald Mathias Ungers (1926-2007).
These houses show - in a negative moment for the Modern movement - a new way of intending architectural form, a research through which Ungers has become one of the protagonists of the architectural debate in the following decades.
This is true mostly in Italy where, in 1960, Aldo Rossi published a long article on Ungers' works in Casabella, showing a sort of Wahlverwandschaft - an affinity - between the German artist and a group of young architects close to Ernesto N. Rogers.
Beyond their meaning in the debate at the beginningof the 1960s these houses show a central aspect of Ungers' work: the research - continuous for morethan 50 years - on architectural form itself, thatmeans the laws of its formation and transformationand its basic phenomena: Körper und Raum (solid andspace).
It is a morphological research, as Goethewould say, where the architectural form is consideredas a unified whole, a Gestalt, a concept with a specificorder that is able to give a complete interpretation ofprogram and place.