Hans Kollhoff: Kollhoff and Timmermann Architects

This volume is a complete monograph on the work of German architect Hans Kollhoff (b. 1946) and his partner, Helga Timmerman (b. 1953), with whom he has collaborated since 1984. It presents 100 buildings and projects completed by Kollhoff and his firm since the 1970s, beginning with his Project for an Analagous City of 1976 and including competitions, office and multiuse buildings, banks, apartment complexes, and urban planning. Jasper Cepl introduces this book with an investigative essay examining Kollhoff's career and theoretical direction since the late 1960s. Following the introduction are 100 projects presented chronologically, including recent work in Berlin, such as the DaimlerChrysler High-rise Building (2000), the Extension of the Pergamon Museum (2000), and the renovation of the Former Seat of the Reichsbank for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1999). Kollhoff began his teaching and investigations into the city during the postmodern debates of the 1970s, when he studied with O.M. Ungers at Cornell University. Since that time he has focused on large-scale architecture and its role in preserving the urban landscape, striving to discover the essence in traditional architecture, and to build a new tradition from it. Kollhoff and Timmermann are known for paying great attention to detail and quality of construction, and for these reasons they have been entrusted with important commissions throughout Europe. At the moment they have projects ongoing in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague; throughout Germany; in Switzerland and Austria. This book is the first and only publication to include a complete selection of Kollhoff's work: 100 projects organized in chronological order, from his first theoretical project of 1976 to projects completed in 2003. No other book provides a comprehensive survey of the work of this firm, and each project is fully illustrated with plans, sections, drawings, and high-quality photographs. The firm has designed high-rises, government buildings, multiuse complexes, master plans, urban plans, furniture and lighting fixtures for various German manufacturers, and door and window pulls for the product design firm FSB. In many ways their work can be compared to that of the American firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, albeit smaller and more European in context. In the introduction to this book, Kollhoff comments, "The buildings aspire to be conventional, in the best sense of the term: along with similar constructions they set out to give form to a street, a city. Only when looked at more closely do they draw attention to themselves." The monograph includes a detailed critical essay that gives the reader excellent background on the architectural debates ongoing in the 1970s and 1980s, at the time that Kollhoff was forming his approach and his practice, as well as a summary of German urban planning of the postwar period.