Kramm + Strigl : Buildings and Projects / Bauten und Projekte

This book features text in English and German. Rudiger Kramm is one of the most prominent representatives of that generation of architects having stepped out, in the late seventies, of the shadow of their predecessors, who had refounded and developed further Modern architecture in Germany in the three decades after the war. Kramm, with his constantly independent interpretation of brief and spatial context, avoids both the dogma of rigid functionalism and the random qualities of Postmodern aesthetics in order to find an astonishing range of design concepts for the functional quality of buildings, which is a central question for him. Kramm studied at the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt from 1966 to 1972, where the architecture faculty largely bore the stamp of Gunter Behnisch at the time. After gaining his diploma, he went on to the University College in London, where he subsequently worked on urban renewal projects with D W Insall. He opened his own office in Darmstadt in 1977. In 1990, he was appointed professor of building construction and design at the University of Karlsruhe; in the same year he made Axel Strigl his office partner. After projects for refurbishing historical building stock and early residential buildings, in which he tried out concepts for energy- and resource-saving construction, Kramm acquired a reputation outside the immediate vicinity with the residential complex in Bessunger Strasse in Darmstadt. This estate, with its sophisticated floor-plan typology and open-space design is still considered an exemplary piece of housing design, in which changing household types and lifestyles are appropriately expressed in terms of design. In 1988, the estate won the Deutscher Stadtebaupreis, and in 1989, it was commended as a model building in Hesse. Housing remains the main focus of the office's work, but it has also been responsible for numerous commercial, administrative and retail buildings, including the Zeilgalerie shopping complex in Frankfurt.