Unfinished Atlas—19 Projects by Manuel Herz Architects

On the occasion of the publication of Unfinished Atlas (Park Books), the editors Manuel Herz and Ludovic Balland will be joined by Philip Ursprung for a conversation on architecture, publishing, and the question of how architectural work can be represented today.

Gathering nineteen projects by Manuel Herz Architects across Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, Unfinished Atlas departs from the conventional format of the architectural monograph. Instead of presenting buildings as isolated and completed objects, the book traces how ideas, concepts, references, and techniques are passed on from one project to another—sometimes directly, sometimes through unexpected detours and transformations. Projects are therefore not organized chronologically or according to typology, but through thematic and conceptual relationships that unfold across different scales, geographies, and political contexts.

The publication emerged from the observation that architecture is rarely produced in the linear and self-contained way through which monographs usually represent it. The process of making architecture includes failed attempts, discarded ideas, dead ends, research trajectories, and afterlives that continue beyond the completion of a building itself. Unfinished Atlas approaches these processes as integral to architectural production rather than secondary to it.

Conceived as a kind of cartography, the book attempts to map the multiple relations between projects, research, and forms of practice. The conversation will take the publication as a point of departure to discuss how architecture can be documented, connected, and understood beyond the logic of the finished object.

Order the book here.

Unfinished Atlas—19 Projects by Manuel Herz Architects
Edited by Ludovic Balland, Francesca Mautone, Manuel Herz / Texts by Nick Axel, Ludovic Balland, Jean-Louis Cohen, Manuel Herz, Nikolaus Hirsch, Marina Otero Verzier, Robert Jan van Pelt, Eyal Weizman, Ines Weizman / Photography by Iwan Baan, Boris Becker, Julien Lanoo and Yuri Palmin / Park Books, ISBN 978-3-03860-418-1.