Introduction

by HM, translated from german by Diana Marian

- for the catalogue "Ephesos, a modern protection building - an idea becoming reality"
issued february 2000 by Prof.W.Ziesel, no ISBN,
with concept, most drawings, text and layout by Horia Marinescu -

The perhaps most radical change since the golden era of modern architecture, when Le Courbusier or Mies van der Rohe acted just as the uomini universali of the Renaissance, is the fact that architecture developed from a purely artistic discipline, where the architect searched for a solution to his vision in engineers and specialists, into an art in itself no longer extremely hierarchically structured, but uniting different arts and technologies of equal importance.

Even if it is often only a matter of fashion, today's architectural developments often try to produce something like an "organic Gesamtkunstwerk". Using the living organism as model and technology as means, one tries to create buildings which interacts in various ways with the environment and context. Dynamic structures able to adapt to variable loads, outer skins able to control the exchanges of air and energy of a building acting like a self-sufficient cell, etc.
Everything will probably have begun with the attempts of Vladimir Suchow (around the turn of the century), Buckminster Fuller or Konrad Wachsmann to find an answer to the first arising question regarding the structure of a building.

Today we are able to derive from nature not only the static principles for our buildings but also the general principle of interaction with the environment. An architecture able to organically unite the knowledge and talent of so many different specialists seems to have become possible today. At this point, the contribution of Professor Wolfdietrich Ziesel to this development is worth mentioning. He frees the civil engineer from the subordinated role of computing official upgrading his work to the mentioned level of organic interference between art and science and makes him a so-called "civil engineering artist". the present project is perhaps the most successful example of this art of civil engineering so far.