Architecture has always been a great and heavily debated scene of zeitgeist, world view, everyday life and aesthetics. It is the bold materialization of private and public visions, applied art and avant-garde simultaneously, and it is also, as Slavoj Žižek writes, ideology turned into stone. The history of buildings designed by architects trod the path in the Western world from the squat, coarse, thick-walled volume to the wafer-thin, smooth, elongated or elevated, at any rate starkly extended body. Old houses in the Engadin region, for example, often have walls of an incredible thickness of one to two metres, as though required to withstand landslides and avalanches. Steel-and-glass buildings, on the other hand, are often so delicate that interior and exterior can barely be distinguished now, so delicate that the inhabitants inside have a sense of the outside and swap the cosiness of being embedded for the feeling of being exposed. Only the thickness of the compound glass separates the worlds.

The most radical attenuation of the building occurs in architectural illustration. Voluminous physicality is contrasted by these architectures’ (ultra-flat) images. Architectures have been devised, drawn, dreamed up and, since the medium’s invention, endlessly photographed. The first photographs were, all of them, architecture images. Architectures experience through images a second, a parallel life. Before, during and after their existence images talk about them, superimpose them with thoughts, fantasies and ideologies. Over the centuries buildings have become ever more slender, until they were quite delicate, until they were transparent, almost like their inhabitants too. But only the images dematerialize the architectures entirely, remove their substance and reduce them to form and sign. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s euphoric call at the beginning of photo history, to photograph the world so that we can experience it without matter and to burn down the world afterwards, is becoming, particularly in the digital, virtual, media-based world, a form of "reality": The long path from substance to surface, from matter to symbol, has been trodden – even without the destruction of matter, which for Holmes was imminent as the final corollary.

The “Urbanism & Real Estate” topic deals with various developments undergone by urban structures today. With breathtakingly fast upheavals, for example, such as the total redevelopment of Beijing, which, laid out to plan, is causing extensive sweeps of a traditional single-storey city to shoot straight into the profitable sky. Ai Weiwei has photographed and documented in minute detail the tabula rasa, this break with the traditional construction and life structure in the 2000s, and deposited it in Provisional Landscapes as testimony to the economization of the urban landscape. This chapter deals with real estate developments that less fulfil the basic, structuring, ordering meaning of “house” than are both capital investment and symbol of power, and many people who have put their faith in them are plunging into the abyss because, suddenly, they have only worthless paper in their hands. Frank van der Salm and Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques thematize the financial, the investment aspect of architecture and urban space. Van der Salm from, if you will, the viewpoint of the victors who put up glass-and-steel palaces, power symbols; Couzinet-Jacques from that of the losers. He shows Spain’s real estate and financial crisis using the visual metaphor of light that burns, in both senses.

Nick Waplington lived among settlers for more than one year in the occupied areas of the West Bank and, with them, experienced how individual urge for freedom blends here with political strategy, how architecture is used as a weapon, how no brick can be without political connotations. Architecture, settlements, rows of houses which, like the vanguards in war-making, are positioned, built, in this place or that so that other developments are prevented, so that potential opponents are weakened.

Taysir Badniji, drawing inspiration from realtors’ display windows, installs a block of real estate offers, with picture and information about the houses. Only, the illustrated houses have been destroyed during the Israeli army’s attack on the Gaza Strip: a very unfriendly takeover.

Laurence Bonvin's film Sounds of Blikkiesdorp (2014) is an exquisite, calm social study of a new hometown, a tin shack settlement outside Cape Town, a so-called “temporary relocating area”, in which, despite the poverty, despite the violence, despite the violent decreed resettlement (also on account of the soccer World Cup) life is gradually unfolding.

Jules Spinatsch photographs, in Heidelberg, Bahnstadt, a new, major, urban project: The city of the future, in the region. As the only artist on assignment from the Festival he realizes a new panorama work on each of the project’s seven topics. He thereby associates the topics with the Mannheim-Ludwigshafen-Heidelberg region, and at the same time he ties together the seven chapters to form the overall theme, [7P]. To do this he uses a computer-controlled mirror reflex camera, which for several hours precisely sweeps a place, an event in hundreds or even thousands of individual shots, seconds or minutes apart, according to a programmed pattern. Finally, all single images are mounted in chronological order to form a total image. The special thing about this method is the contradictory combination of precise planning and chance: as seamlessly as the space is rendered, it is made up of thousands and thousands of intentionless fragments of time. These are speculative documentations. Besides the seen space, Spinatsch’s image also contain lived, experienced time. The single image of a certain space is dissolved, stretched in time, and for all that visualizes, in the end, an essence of space and time, of space in a certain time, of condensed, deferred time in a certain space.

In conclusion the work by Hiroko Komatsu, a walk-in image temple, an explorable performance, which uses images, as it were, to build an architecture and which uses materials, architecture at the unresolved stage of construction or deconstruction, factory sites, tools, waste to generate an atmosphere of the catastrophic, unfathomable, dramatic. The installation of photographs of building and construction materials of kinds becomes a type of existential, physical, three-dimensional conceptual space: a Sanitary Bio-Preservation (2015).