J. Mayer H.

The members of J. Mayer H. Architects, founded in Berlin in 1996 by Jürgen Mayer, have already won a number of awards for their extraordinary work--for example, their very first building won the Mies van der Rohe Emerging Architect Prize in 2003. Their structures bulge and pop inorganically in a style that aims to go, as Mayer puts it, "beyond the blob." In recent years the firm has created a furor with attention-getting buildings such as the new commons for the Universität Karlsruhe, the ADA 1 offices in Hamburg and the Metropol Parasol, a gigantic structure for the marketplace in the heart of old Seville. Edited by Henry Urbach, this is the first book to present J. Mayer H. Architects' entire oeuvre, tracking the firm's constructions from the research stage through design to project development and culminating in the actual building itself.