42 - Josef Paul Kleihues

Josef Paul Kleihues (Rheine 1933 – 2004 Berlin), "Conceptual drawing for the project 'Una casa una città, Paris' (A House, a City, Paris)," 1989, minimal gouache-glazed pen-and-ink drawing on coarse packing paper, 35.3 x 16 cm, with traces of earlier folding to the size of the tower, mounted on backing board and framed under glass and a mat in a white anodized aluminum frame, overall size: 44 x 44 cm. Limit 270,- In 1989, Kleihues made a visionary contribution to the Paris exhibition “Paris – Architecture et utopie: Projets d’urbanisme pour l’entrée dans le 21ème siècle.” The monumental, utopian megastructure project was conceived as a linear, urban complex intended to stretch along or across the Seine. Inspired by Le Corbusier’s visions of a self-sufficient “living machine” from the 1920s, Kleihues designed a monumental megastructure: The concept defied traditional scales and envisioned a cohesive structural complex with a utopian 49,000 residential units. The building was scaled so that it was no longer merely a part of the city but autonomously incorporated the functions of an entire city within itself. The plans reveal a strictly rational layout in which vertical, grid-like residential towers rise from an elongated, horizontal base. It is precisely this combination of a geometric tower grid on a flat base structure that characterizes this drawing as well, in which the silhouette of a passenger steamship is depicted alongside the sky-high residential tower for scale. The sketch is a classic working document from Kleihues’s studio. The architect deliberately used this type of rough packing paper for preliminary conceptual studies. The delicate blue and red dots in such architectural sketches usually serve to visually mark axis points, grid transitions, or three-dimensional projections within the mathematical matrix before the design was transferred to precise final drawings.