Hermann Kaufmann is a European pioneer in the field of modern building with wood. This book presents an interim balance of the projects he has carried out in the last decade. 25 works are organised in five thematic groups and comprehensively documented. Through the design of the book the complex contents and the descriptions, which are in three languages throughout, are presented in as clear a form as possible. A double page is divided into four columns. In the first column the chapter or project title, short introductory texts and paginated footnotes are positioned. The language mutations – typographically slightly differentiated – are given equal value and arranged beside each other in the remaining three columns. The typographical design invites you to read, gives the layout a rhythm, and provides the necessary interim stops amidst the generously laid out pages of images and plans. “Wood Works” is illustrated with top class reproductions of images and plans and provides construction details of important aspects along with specially designed tables and diagrams. Photographer Nikolaus Walter’s picture essay on the everyday world of the buildings provides a view that expands on Bruno Klomfar’s objective architecture photography. In accordance with the “aesthetic” of Hermann Kaufmann’s buildings instead of heavy, smooth art paper a fine and open-pored substrate is used. The fine grain and the reduced colour contrasts of the illustrations are entirely intentional. In terms of the kind of paper, the binding and format the book-block is deliberately light and “soft”, flexible and handy. With a width of 216 mm and a height of 270 mm the volume has 256 pages and, including the linen cover, a thickness of 25 mm.

The dwelling house and studio in Schlins, Vorarlberg erected by clay builder Martin Rauch together with architect Roger Boltshauser is a model of contemporary building with clay. The publication describes the development of a house built of earth, documents the construction details and shows the ecological nature of the material clay. The motivation lies in coming closer to the varied aspects – largely unknown in the current architecture discourse – of this special rammed clay building and awakening an understanding of the material’s qualities and potential. Through formal quality the theme is rescued from the alleged naivety of the ecological movement and is given a new presence. Calm sections of text contrast with exciting sequences of images. The reader is invited to explore the house visually and in terms of content. For the lamination of the cover, the front and back endpapers and in the core a highly voluminous substrate with a haptic velvety surface was used. The book itself is more like a textbook than an illustrated book. The reliefs on the half-linen cover tell about genesis and decay.

A magazine with a rich tradition, “KONstruktiv” is the media flagship of the Austrian Federal Chamber of Architects and Consulting Engineers. For a re-launch of the magazine the professional transfer of knowledge was prepared in a contemporary form and revitalised. For the cover concept the title images were placed on one side and different decorative colours used. Other elements include an exciting use of text wrapping and careful macro and micro-typography with interwoven narrative and factual typefaces, editorially oriented explanatory graphics and lexically built-up pages in-between. Additionally, there is also a kind of “display case” with a consistent design line that provides a new form of presentation for advertisements.

The title materialegno is derived from the words material and legno (wood). It thus conveys the content in a clear and concentrated manner. materialegno is an Italian language magazine that appears at irregular intervals, produced by promo_legno, Milan – an Italian platform for timber marketing. The magazine is directed at designers and those interested in building. materialegno shows new methods of production, construction, design and implementation of the material timber. To embed the messages from the start in a good reader environment this extra-large medium appears as a supplement to the Italian architecture magazine Domus“. The aim of the design is to convey the language of modern architecture through visual communication. The concept of the magazine alone makes it clear that here information is not to be disturbed by foreign images or advertisements. It is not the name of the main sponsor that is placed on the back cover but art connected to the material wood. Every cover is in a different decorative colour. Thus the key visuals are viewed through coloured sun-glasses, as it were. Inside the magazine the typographical interventions are combined with generous amounts of pictures. The layout is cleanly organized but also variable and fresh.

Eberl Print im Allgäu is a regular partner of Gassner Redolfi that implements ideas in the area of high quality printing. With the 3D E effect and printed packaging material Eberl opened up a new area of business and sought our assistance with the visually equipping of the sample boxes and the design of the firm’s trade fair presence at CO-REACH 2014 – Fair for Crossmedia Marketing in Nuremberg. The basic idea of the trade fair architecture is a huge capital “E”. The horizontal bars extend on the long axis. They define the space while at the same time functioning as an attractive display window that offers interesting views inside and outside. The broad vertical bar of the “E” extends into the depth of the stand throughout its entire height, offering wall area and the necessary storage space. The floor area of the island stand measures 12 x 7 metres. The entire scenography with its spatial intimacy and communicative appeal when seen from different distances achieves an unexpectedly high visitor frequency and is great success at the trade fair. The new sample box “3D E-Elements” also contributed to this success. A continuous word and image landscape that extends across 12 effect cards weaves together, organises and provides samples of the different colour groups, different finishes and various types of paper. The information system is supported by a clear verbal and visual declination.

Working together with architect Alberto Alessi, Zürich, Gassner-Redolfi develops a permanent exhibition in an exhibition space measuring 400 m² in the new administration building of the international timber construction company RUBENS in Kiens, South Tyrol. With the title “Holzperspektiven” (Wood Perspectives) the exhibition tells about the forest, trees and buildings, makes the physical and haptic qualities of wood tangible, and demonstrates the importance of this material for the culture of building, in earlier times and today, both regionally and internationally. The exhibition is a reminiscence of the phenomenon wood, a haptic, spatial narrative about wood, starting from its source as a raw material and extending to different perspectives on how the material can be utilised. This is not a product exhibition but a wood exhibition. It is about the passion for wood which is clearly evident in the RUBNER business and which the exhibition aims to convey.

Since November 2011 the Vorarlberger Architektur Institut – known in short as vai – has been responsible for the project selection and editorial design of the cover series for the “Leben & Wohnen”supplement to the Vorarlberger Nachrichten newspaper. The concept of a media cooperative, which Reinhard Gassner helped to develop, is new. The exhibition “Hohe Auflage” is intended to present this remarkable collaboration between vai and VN in an enjoyable, enthusiastic overall show. 33 reports, representing a total of 175 pages on architecture, are detached from the property supplement and a facsimile is made of them on a fifty-metre-long piece of paper. This length of paper is stretched through the exhibition spaces, moves up and down, is twisted in the middle around its own axis, and finally runs out on the floor. Associations with the form of reproduction are awakened by web offset printing on a paper roll, which is standard in massprinting. By lining up the contributions the enormous variety and quality of this reportage is clearly demonstrated. A glossary concludes the series of contributions on the length of printed material web. The selected words from the fields of architecture and mass communications were compiled from various encyclopaedias and dictionaries. A section of a printed image enlarged more than one hundred times serves as a macro view of the reproduction technology. This wall-mounted image, 566 cm wide by 302 cm high, shows the dot matrix of images and the blurred edges of letters. In the special issue “Nur Text” (only text) the architecture stories – just the texts – are combined in a limited edition of 3500, stacked on a pallet for people to take them home with them. A word image the size of a wall makes the 33 headlines of the contributions readable in a new way. The “forced justification” in narrow columns placed beside each other, with exaggerated spacing between the lines, leads you to read horizontally. This typographical faux pas produces poetic lines made up of words and fragments of words apparently arranged at random next to each other.

»Bauen mit Holz – Wege in die Zukunft« (Building with Wood – Paths to the Future) is an exhibition by the architecture museum and the timber building department of the TU Munich that was launched in 2012 in Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne. Now, in an adapted form, it is presented by proHolz in cooperation with the Künstlerhaus in Munich. The aim of the exhibition is to explain and convey to a wider public the transformation of the building material wood, ignored for so long by modern architecture, into a new source of hope for forward-looking urban building. The information is presented in the form of short texts, plans, photographs or videos on 120 cm wide, vertical strips of silk paper that extend the height of the space. The unbleached, naturally brown strips of paper are combined with models of timber buildings precisely constructed in the TU Munich and give the exhibition its rhythm. Dates and facts are transformed in impressive explanatory graphics. The relationship between the “primal plant tree” and the technical world of planning and building is also a theme of the exhibition logo. An archetypical house is here formed out of the branches of a tree and semantically focuses on the core messages: that wood is a renewable, highly efficient building material and that building with wood is active climate protection. In the publication that accompanies the exhibition well-known specialist authors analyse the ecological significance, technological potential, and new aesthetic of this familiar construction material.

The United Nations declared 2011 the “International Year of Forests”. In response to this the architecture museum and the department of timber construction at the University of Technology in Munich presented an exhibition that dealt with the ecological, technical and design possibilities of this material. The exhibition starts with the forest and reflections on wood as a raw material. Opposite this, five current timber construction projects are presented and their benefits in terms of climate protection are explained. After this 52 selected international examples illustrate new digital finishing methods and illustrate the architectural diversity of modern timber construction: from the low energy house to wide-spanning structure to high-rise buildings. A room made entirely of beech wood completes the exhibition. Rarely encountered in timber construction, this wood is here used most effectively for various building elements that form the floor, ceiling and wall, employing a variety of surface finishes. The chief protagonists are the models of timber buildings made with acribic precision by students from the architecture faculty at the TU Munich (department of timber construction). The stands for the models presented are uniform, delicate frames made of spruce. The information is presented in the form of short texts, plans, photographs or videos on 120-centimetre-wide strips of silk paper extending the height of the room. The unbleached, naturally brown lengths of paper surround the huge rooms and give the exhibition a rhythm. Dates and facts are transformed into impressive explanatory graphics. For example: the amounts of different kinds of wood are translated into a 20-metre long bar diagram that uses pieces of the various woods. An 80-year old spruce tree – from the rootstock to the tree top – lies in the middle of the exhibition space as a scenographic intervention. The 40-metre-long trunk is freed from branches, some of the bark is removed, and it is divided into individual sections with increasingly fine longitudinal cuts. The top of the trunk points towards a 5x5 metre patchwork made up of different wood-based materials. The link between the tree as a primal form of plant and the technical world of planning and building is also a theme of the exhibition logo. An archetypical house is shaped from the branches of a tree and focuses in semantic terms on the core messages: wood is a sustainable, highly efficient building material and building with wood is active climate protection. In the publication accompanying the exhibition nine well-known experts analyse the ecological significance, technological potential and new aesthetics of this familiar material. Bauen mit Holz – Wege in die Zukunft Architecture museum of the TU Munich in the Pinakothek der Moderne 10.11.2011 – 05.02.2012

The design of the exhibition with sculptural models of the buildings and reduced plan graphics is continued in the truest sense of the word by 8 A1-size “poster tear-off blocks“. Here visitors to the exhibition can help themselves. For each of the projects exhibited an iconographic image is chosen that conveys the atmosphere of the respective building in the most striking way. The strong photographs speak for themselves. The header to each poster clearly classifies the particular building depicted and through pictogram-like representations also refers to the other seven buildings in the exhibition.