Oda Pälmke: Facades

A façade defines a building’s exterior character; it is the primary expression of its style, the overture that ostensibly sets the tone for the rest of the building. In this volume, the German architect Oda Pälmke demonstrates that the most expressive sides of houses are not always those that were originally designed as façades. Pälmke has established herself as a connoisseur of the overlooked and the ordinary in architecture, as her previous volume, the delightful Quite Good Houses, demonstrates. Here, she asks the viewer to imagine seemingly unspectacular side walls and temporary modifications as the faces of buildings, locating a wealth of possibilities in the marginal and the incomplete. Façades includes a foreword by filmmaker Wim Wenders, who brings a cinematic perspective ideally suited to the topic (façades often constituting the entirety of a building’s structure in movies).