Holger Kleine. Archimorphosen (Architekturphantasien in Vier Zyklen/Architectural Fantasies in Four Cycles)

This book presents the first comprehensive overview of Holger Kleine’s architectural fantasies, created since 2021 and previously published only in scattered form. His hand drawings are part of a centuries-old tradition of imaginary architecture: works realized in the act of drawing, not intended to be built. The drawings, grouped into four cycles, explore themes of body and space, light, geometry, and antinomy – fundamental realities inherent in every spatial creation. As such, they are contributions to a drawn phenomenology
of architecture. The drawings have other shared properties: all of them are atmospherically dense, drawn with layers of colored pencil, employ a parallel-projection method, and explore the possibilities of sequencing architecture in a field of nine squares. Further layers of meaning are formed through literary references. Each cycle has its starting point in an idiosyncratic reading of a literary masterwork: the biblical Genesis, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Marcel
Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. Kleine’s drawings do not illustrate scenes or episodes in these works: rather, they function as what he calls »archimorphoses«, transforming themes, methods and motifs from literature into the realm of architecture. Through this critical-poetic process, the drawings explore different linguistic possibilities of text and image, literary fiction and drawn fiction, without getting caught up in simplistic correspondences.
The book’s accompanying essays, written by architectural theorists, practising architects, art historians, and philosophers, interpret Kleine’s drawings from the disciplinary perspectives of their authors.