Between visible and imagined city. Architecture and ruins in Oswald Mathias Ungers’s work

Oswald Mathias Ungers's position on relationship between architecture and ruin is based on the same principles as his urban vision: a contradictory, dialectical and non-homogeneous system. In OMU’s work, historical fragments define a new architectural concept conforms to contemporary urban form. He says: “I am an architect. Not a conservator of architectural assets, who focuses only on maintaining what still exists. And not a restore, who tries only to recover what was once whole. As an architect, I aminterested in realizing personal ideas, though inside the historical and architectural context” . OMU's attitude to architecture and history clearly distances itself from design that aims at integral reconstruction, mimesis and evocation of ancient spaces. This attitude is demonstrated in several author's projects for museums in archaeological context: the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum (1996-2000) and the Diözesan-Museum (1997) in Cologne, the Museum of Thermen am Forum (1988-96) and the Entrance to the Kaiserthermen archeological complex (2003-07) in Treviri are a paradigm to think over the relationship between ‘project’ and ‘ruins’. Rotations, misalignments and morphological sequences are, in this context, the autonomy of OMU’s design above the surface of history palimpsest.