Dear friends, for the next three weeks OfHouses will be guest curated by Weltgebraus, a Paris- and Tokyo-based office founded in 2013 by Andreas Kofler and Marcello Tavone. Andreas Kofler is an architect, urbanist and freelance editor. Originally from Italy’s German-speaking province of South Tyrol, he graduated from the Technical University of Vienna in 2005. Since then, he has worked for numerous offices: STAR, TD, OMA/AMO, l’AUC and Dominique Perrault Architecture (DPA). Most of his projects imply a multidisciplinary declension, such as the work on Greater Paris (DPA), Greater Moscow (l’AUC), Prada (AMO), or the exhibition The Image of Europe (TD/AMO) for the European Union. Marcello Tavone is an architect and urbanist. He studied at the Technische Universiteit of Delft (NL) and in Venice, where he graduated in 2011 from the IUAV. By collaborating with the Parisian offices of l’AUC and Dominique Perrault he has been able to develop projects on, and through, various scales - from prospective urban research (Montpellier 2040, Grand Paris) to architecture, conceptual studies, graphic and web design, ultimately also curating Dominique Perrault’s research platform DPAx. Weltgebraus have assembled for OfHouses a very consistent selection of residential projects for which they wrote this insightful introduction:

"When in 1901 Peter Behrens completed his first and own house on Darmstadt’s Mathildenhöhe, he decided to inscribe a “Hausspruch” by lyricist Richard Dehmel on its façade. “Stand steady, my house, amidst the roaring of the world” (Steh’ fest mein Haus im Weltgebraus) is a sort of Godspeed wishing the house may withstand all kind of physical and metaphoric maelstroms the future might bring. A desire for perfection, but also a fatalistic acknowledgment that the unknown can’t be fully anticipated – like a shipbuilder, the architect confidently puts his unmanned house at sea whilst anxiously hoping it won’t collide with anything. Ultimately it would be Behrens’ himself that would sail swiftly towards modernist waters, ideologically abandoning his Jugendstil-house which he sold before even having lived in it. While in theory the modes in which architecture can react to Weltgebraus can be summarized in adaptation or denial – and its consequences in relativization or monumentalization – the reading of this interrelation on specific cases is anything but binary. The gradient and array of situations that is revealed by examining houses through this lens was ultimately the criteria for our selection for OfHouses."