O.M. Ungers, Morphologie. City Metaphors,Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, Köln, 1. Auflage 1982, 2. Auflage 2011
First published in 1982, architect Oswald Matthias Ungers places 128 city plans next to images of flora, fauna, scientific diagrams as well as more banal things like doughnuts. Under each image — the city on the left and its analogous image on the right — Ungers assigns a title, in English and in German.
In Unger’s vision the structure of the Berlin wall becomes the backbone of a serpent and the 1809 plan of St Gallen becomes a womb. This book is an experiment in creative cartography open to subjective speculation. In Unger’s words, his approach ” is not meant as a substitute for quantitative sciences which break down forms, as we know them, into funstions that make them controllable, but is meant to counteract the increasing influence of those sciences that claim a monopoly of understanding”. Unger’s uses metaphor as a means for knowledge to osmose beyond the strictures of measurable criteria and functional design.
