Foto cortesía de Aedes
The German architecture curator, writer, and editor Kristin Feireiss has passed away at 82 years of age. She studied art history and philosophy at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt.
In 1980, she and Helga Retzer founded the Aedes Architecture Forum in Berlin, Europe’s first private architecture gallery. Since 1994 she had run this influential international platform hand in hand with Hans-Jürgen Commerell, with whom she organized over 350 exhibitions and their respective catalogs. In 2009 the duo created ANCB The Aedes Metropolitan Laboratory, which received the German Innovation Prize in 2010.
Feireiss’s work focused on deepening people’s understanding of architecture and urbanism on an international level, integrating cultural, social, and economic perspectives. In 1989, commissioned by the cities of Berlin and Paris, she put together the exhibition ‘Paris: Architecture and Utopia.’ As director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) from 1996 to 2001, she put special emphasis on urban transformation processes and initiated pioneering research in this field.
As the editor of numerous monographs and theme-centered books, Feireiss tackled key issues, such as the relationship between the human being and architecture, the city as a social space, and the creative potential of the informal.
Among the books by her that Arquitectura Viva has reviewed are Sauerbruch Hutton. Drawing in Space (2024), Architecture in Times of Need (2009), Ingenhoven Overdiek und Partner: energies (2002) y The Art of Architecture Exhibitions (2002).
