The project was conceived and prepared (in terms of content) by an international curatorium of researchers and later adopted by two institutions. Having taken over the project in 2001, the Akademie der Künste is currently continuing the work alone, while the English-language publication is being prepared in the Netherlands.
One of the tasks involved in contemporary historiography is to relegate to the past the stereotypical East-West concept that have dominated our thinking and seeing for more than fifty years. A thorough investigation of our cultural-historical frame of reference is the first prerequisite for fulfilling this task. This also has repercussions for our interpretation and appreciation of urban design and architecture, and for the appraisal of the cultural issues for which these disciplines stand.
The goal of this international project is to find, expose and publish images of those urban-design and architectonic spaces in Europe’s large(r) cities that did and do serve – from 1945 to the present – as a collective framework for experiences that make individuals and the masses happy. Taking several lines of approach, the study focuses on material and immaterial public space as a window to society and as a base of operations for social interaction, events, rituals, relaxation, and the presentation of activities and physical achievements. Book and exhibition have a common point of departure: an approach rooted in the experiences and emotions of the urbanite as s/he uses and perceives public space. Europe has been parcelled out, so to speak, among a number of coordinators who, aided by local ‘agents’ (with local networks and regional knowledge at their fingertips) track down special places in the city, dig into archives for ‘building blocks’ and/or carry out on-the-spot interviews. In other words, they are collecting historical material in the large(r) cities of twenty European countries. In so doing, they pay a great deal of attention to the ‘afterlife’ of a design and, in particular, to the survival of urban spaces designed in the second half of the 20th century, the reuse and ‘redesign’ of these spaces by designers of events (top-down or bottom-up), the perception of these spaces by consumers of the experiential economy (moments of happiness for the individual and the masses) and long-term typological-functional changes in urban spaces.