Following the recent deaths of Lotus editor-in-chief Pierluigi Nicolin (1941-2025) and Quaderns director Manuel Gausa Navarro (1959-2025), European architectural discourse loses its third central journalistic figure this year with the passing of longtime ARCH+ editor Nikolaus Kuhnert. Just as Nicolin and Gausa were indispensable voices for the Italian and Spanish-Catalonian linguistic spheres respectively, Kuhnert strongly influenced the German-speaking world. Since the late 1980s, no one in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland has done so in such an inimitably indirect yet simultaneously profound manner as this native of Potsdam. ARCH+ issues such as “The Disappearance of Architecture” (No. 95, August 1988), “ChaosCity” (No. 105/106, October 1990), “The American Era” (No. 114/115, December 1992), “The Architecture of the Event” (No. 119/120, December 1993), “The Architecture of the Complex” (No. 121, March 1994), “Living at Disposition” (No. 134/135, December 1996), or “Crisis of Representation” (No. 204, October 2011) were curatorial masterpieces and influenced generations—including myself. Many of these issues—above all “From Berlin to Neuteutonia” (No. 122, June 1994)—sparked discussions lasting months, even years. Despite his influence, however, Kuhnert rarely appeared as an author in his own publication beyond more or less brief editorials. Vain literary dandyism was foreign to him. This was because, by his own admission, while speaking came easily to him, written articulation—quite unusual for a journalist—caused him considerable difficulty.¹ This, in turn, had reasons that will be addressed later. All the more important it seems to return to Kuhnert’s few longer texts to measure his intellectual significance beyond what he naturally also was: an immensely successful and hands-on magazine maker who accomplished the improbable feat of producing an architecture magazine independent of associations, universities, and major publishers while maintaining uncompromising content for decades.

“As the main task of a politically engaged professional journal, which is how we understand ARCH+, we see criticism in the sense of a materialist analysis of existing social conditions as the foundation for political practice, as developed by Marx in the system of political economy.”

In the issues of ARCH+, founded at the University of Stuttgart in 1967, Nikolaus Kuhnert’s name first appears in issue 16, published in December 1972, as part of the newly established Aachen editorial team. The first issue for which Kuhnert was solely responsible for content was number 20 from December 1973. It dealt primarily with “The ‘Renovation’ of Stuttgart’s West and its Impact on the Municipal Budget” (summarized by Wolfgang Ehrlinger), but also with “Urban Structures and State Interventionism” (Adalbert Evers) and “The Housing Problem for the Lower Classes in the USA” (Hans H. Harms). This not only sounds Marxist-influenced—it was. The editorial includes the sentence: “As the main task of a politically engaged professional journal, which is how we understand ARCH+, we see criticism in the sense of a materialist analysis of existing social conditions as the foundation for political practice, as developed by Marx in the system of political economy.”²

But in the following period, it was precisely Kuhnert who did not want to completely sacrifice the intrinsic value of the architectural to rigid politicization. Against this background, he began to engage with the Italian context in general and the “Architettura Razionale” of Aldo Rossi in particular. An engagement with society coming from architecture, he realized, can hardly gain credibility without an engagement with buildings. Under the impression of the Rational Architecture exhibition that took place in 1975 at Peter Cook’s Art Net Gallery, Kuhnert therefore also advocated for a “change of direction” in Germany; however, one of a special kind: maintaining distance from postmodern frills. Accordingly, the legendary ARCH+ 27 appeared in September 1975 with its ten-page “Change of Direction?” editorial, which, with Kuhnert’s participation, struck a new tone in the German leftist architecture scene: a self-critical “revision” was needed!³ ARCH+ had become “too much a magazine by leftist intellectuals for leftist intellectuals”⁴ As in Italy, one had to be open to “explicitly politically targeted attempts at architectural renewal”!⁵ The publication was not to be understood solely as a magazine by socialists for socialists, but as one that provides a platform for “all practical and theoretical criticism” that “refuses to conform to existing conditions”!⁶ They demanded a “broader orientation”⁷ and a “plurality of opinions”⁸ With this, the reformist Aachen faction launched a full-scale attack against the meanwhile also existing and decidedly more revolutionary-minded Berlin faction around Klaus Brake, Helga Fassbinder, and Renate Petzinger, who wanted to place union orientation and the interests of wage-dependent architects at the centre of their struggle. In 1977, they published their “Declaration of Withdrawal” with fanfare, vehemently opposing the shift of ARCH+ into the “context of bourgeois existential concepts.” They also criticized the “journalistically more or less skilfully disguised flat reproduction of immediate experiences”—referring to things like “situation reports from citizens’ initiatives.” Like pitbulls, socialism and communism stood on one side and an “anti-authoritarian” self-conceited left-liberalism on the other during this conflict. When we at the IGmA of the University of Stuttgart interviewed the protagonists of that time in 2019 and 2020 as part of a research project on the history of ARCH+, it quickly became clear how deeply the wounds still gaped among all participants decades later, especially since the “Radicals Decree” had additionally hardened the fronts. Some conversations about this are still not released for publication today, almost 50 years after the dispute.

At the same time as the internal leftist ARCH+ conflict became public with the “Declaration of Withdrawal,” Kuhnert was working on his dissertation Social Elements of Architecture: Type and the Concept of Type in the Context of Rational Architecture, strongly influenced by the Italian context, which was examined by Gerhard Fehl and Manfred Speidel and defended in 1979. This far too rarely read book should be consulted if one wants to better understand the admittedly precarious but nonetheless enduring success of ARCH+. In it, the author strikes a kind of middle path between the Scylla of a late-functionalist, planning-emphatic architectural forgetfulness and the Charybdis of a depoliticized search for building culture. He writes critically about the (Stuttgart) early phase of ARCH+: “Architecture could only be discussed in the form of social science treatises. But architecture itself fell silent.”⁹ At the same time, however, he also turns against the “‘leftist’ conservatism” of the communist Rossi, who believes he must constantly trace a supportable “architecture of the city” back to its “ideal-typical origins,” to an “essence of architecture,” ¹⁰ to primitive huts, etc. Instead of Rossi and his “fatal conclusion”¹¹ of architectural autonomy, Kuhnert relies on another Italian communist-architect, namely Carlo Aymonino, who, unlike almost all other Italians interested in “typology,” does not conjure up some origins visions of space, but emphasizes its usability in the sense of a “social spatial theory.”¹² Aymonino becomes the decisive guiding figure for the ARCH+ editor for “a tentatively progressive line,”¹³ with which he, on one hand, pays tribute to a “Renaissance of architecture,”¹⁴ but on the other hand avoids the danger of archetypical and mythical thinking that makes the dominant varieties of typological design so attractive for conservative embraces. The interest in a typologically inspired “social spatial theory” is likely the deeper reason why Kuhnert, unlike virtually everyone else who looked from the FRG toward Italy in the 1970s and absorbed neorationalism there, did not end up with Critical or Uncritical Reconstruction or New Urbanism in advanced age.

Kuhnert’s endeavor to distance himself from German left radicals who were rather uninterested in architecture with the help of Italian communists who were equally interested in both social issues and architecture proved to be a suitable formula for ARCH+ in the coming decades. After the move to Berlin in 1987, he henceforth demonstrated, together with his colleague Sabine Kraft (1945-2016), who remained in Aachen, the necessary manoeuvrability of a somehow left-leaning journalism in neoliberalized times, including zeitgeist-typical greentech and starchitecture issues—which today might seem more foreign to some younger people than the Berlin “Declaration of Withdrawal” of 1977. And yet—although Aymonino’s name almost completely disappeared—the “social spatial theory” of the post-“change of direction” ARCH+ is always present; even in what is perhaps the most liberal, certainly most frivolous ARCH+ issue of the 2000s: number 171, created in cooperation with IGmA, titled “Pop, Economy, Attention” from 2004.

“Today it is clear to me that due to my background, I was fear-driven in many things and behaved accordingly. I could only express myself in mediated ways.”

This also began my close personal collaboration with Kuhnert. His “social spatial theory” becomes—even when the term as such does not appear—particularly clear in the second major journalistic work he leaves us alongside his dissertation: his Architectural Autobiography, published in allusion to Rossi’s Scientific Autobiography, which appeared as ARCH+ 237 in 2019 on the occasion of his 80th birthday, in the middle of our ARCH+ research project. Anyone who wants to get to know a paradigmatic West German intellectual biography of the second half of the 20th century in the field of architecture should inhale this grippingly written and equally informative as touching document; I consider it, in its combination of panoramically narrated contemporary history and idiosyncrasy, one of the strongest ARCH+ issues ever. Kuhnert’s relative restraint as a writer—his ventriloquist-like readiness to let others speak for “him,” i.e., for ARCH+—literally discharges here into the opposite. And in doing so reveals its traumatized core: “Today it is clear to me that due to my background, I was fear-driven in many things and behaved accordingly. I could only express myself in mediated ways.”¹⁵ With this, he alludes to his Jewish identity—and the fact that he, his Jewish mother, and his Catholic father only survived National Socialism by chance. His maternal grandfather, Robert Gumpert, was murdered in Theresienstadt in 1942. Against this background, Kuhnert’s decision to articulate himself “in mediated ways,” especially through Julius Posener, appears all the more compelling. With the Berlin architectural historian of Jewish origin, whom the Zionist movement saved, he produced a total of five ARCH+ issues between 1979 and 1983. Their commercial success laid the foundation for the magazine’s economic independence, including being able to make a living from it, and in 1983 Kuhnert became the first paid editor of the publication: “Posener had gotten us out of leftist self-isolation.”¹⁶ In old age, Kuhnert even began learning Hebrew. Especially today, when antisemitism is forcefully creeping back into society from all possible political directions and anti-Jewish crimes are exploding worldwide, his genius for mediation would be more urgently needed than ever. Nikolaus, you are already missed. It was a great honor for me.

¹ Cf. Nikolaus Kuhnert: ARCH+ 237: “An Architectural Autobiography”, November 2019, p. 35.

² Klaus Brake, Wolfgang Ehrlinger, Helga Fassbinder, Christoph Feldtkeller, Mark Fester, Nikolaus Kuhnert, Jörg Pampe, Renate Petzinger, Heinrich Stoffl: “Editorial,” in: ARCH+ 20, December 1973, p. 4.

³ Wolfgang Ehrlinger, Adalbert Evers, Christoph Feldtkeller, Mark Fester, Sabine Kraft, Nikolaus Kuhnert, Jörg Pampe: “Editorial: Change of Direction?” in: ARCH+ 27, September 1975, p. 1.

⁴ Ibidem.

⁵ Ehrlinger et al., “Editorial: Change of Direction?”, op. cit., p. 8.

⁶ Ehrlinger et al., “Editorial: Change of Direction?”, op. cit., p. 9.

⁷ Ibidem.

⁸ Ibidem.

⁹ Nikolaus Kuhnert: Social Elements of Architecture. Type and the Concept of Type in the Context of Rational Architecture, Diss. RWTH Aachen, 1979, p. 5.

¹⁰ Kuhnert, Social Elements of Architecture, op. cit., p. 34.

¹¹ Ibidem.

¹² Kuhnert, Social Elements of Architecture, op. cit., p. 124.

¹³ Ibidem.

¹⁴ Kuhnert, Social Elements of Architecture, op. cit., p. 1.

¹⁵ Kuhnert, ARCH+ 237: An Architectural Autobiography, op. cit., p. 35.¹⁶ Kuhnert, ARCH+ 237: An Architectural Autobiography, op. cit., p. 59.