The DAM is presenting draft projects that remained a utopia and were all realized as true-to-scale model precious steel sculptures – selected from the Estate of Simon Ungers, who died young. They will appeal to members of the general public interested in architecture or in art. Simon Ungers (1957-2006) worked as an artist and an architect. From 1969 to 2000, he lived in the United States, where he and his father, architect Oswald Mathias Ungers, at times taught at Cornell University. His “T-House”, built in New York in 1992, made with world acclaim – a steel building in the form of a huge “T”. In Germany, his entry for the Berlin “Monument to the murdered Jews in Europe” competition caused a public stir; it won first prize in 1994, but was not realized. The show at DAM will present draft projects that Ungers made in the last two years of his life, most of which have never been on public display before. Without having a specific contract in his pocket, Ungers worked incessantly to develop buildings – in ever new variations. Usually, the results were ideal architectures, whose often daring structures would without doubt on occasion have sorely tried the limits of load-bearing edifices. Massiveness, and in this sense “Heavy Metal”, and lightness, were combined in a quite unprecedented manner by Simon Ungers in his steel buildings. The DAM is exhibiting several of his drafts for museum buildings, as well as examples from his close focus on libraries, cathedrals and the theater.

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