Oswald Mathias Ungers's unrealized proposal for student housing was done for a competition sponsored by the University of Technology, Twente, the Netherlands. The monumental Enschede dormitory at first appears to be designed in a traditional Beaux-Arts plan, incorporating classical circular and rectangular courtyards, on axis; but in fact the lower portion has been sliced open, shifted, and rotated. Such a permutation undermines the integrity of the perimeter, and fragments what appears to have been once a stable form. The viewer's sense of instability increases as the perspective in the drawing shifts at the point where the building complex pivots. During the time he conceived this project, Ungers was highly influenced by the Russian Constructivists" monumental and dynamic forms and by Giambattista Piranesi's sublime fragmented images.
Publication excerpt from an essay by Bevin Cline and Tina di Carlo, in Terence Riley, ed., The Changing of the Avant-Garde: Visionary Architectural Drawings from the Howard Gilman Collection, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002, p. 100.