archadia

Welcome to my World!

This website and the brand identity was not created in 3 weeks by a professional marketing agency.
Rather, what you see now is the result of an evolutionary process, and it will certainly change a lot more.
The name, the slogan, the logo and the colors...they came together in months, like the pieces of a puzzle.
Each of them comes from somewhere, a thought, an image, a feeling that is important to me.
And I had to experiment a lot before I figured out their final form.
This is not a professional website without any personality.
I am my own web designer. My own graphic designer and photographer. And of course my own copywriter.

Wondering what images and thoughts inspired me?

Let me tell you the Story of Archadia!

Et in Arcadia ego.

Arcadia is the country of meadows and fields in Greek mythology, the bygone golden age, in which man still lived in harmony with nature, and where the muses also found a home. The god Pan lived in Arcadia, with the nymphs and dryads, this was the land of untouched, wild forests. Arcadia symbolized a world devoid of civilization for the Greeks, and later for the creators of the Renaissance and Romanticism.

Les Mondes Engloutis

For my generation, Arcadia is the decaying city of the "Sunken Worlds" (Les Mondes Engloutis) whose sun is dying. This was perhaps the first fairy tale - in the form of a French cartoon - about sustainability, environmental responsibility, cultures and civilizations that was shown at the end of the 80s, with a very special visual world. Anyone who saw it as a child still remembers its special, mystical atmosphere.

Arcadia Darell

Another age, another tale. Arcadia is not a city this time, but a restless teenage girl interested in the secrets of the universe. And considering the universe, it is none other than the world of Isaac Asimov's Foundation, the scene of this incomparably brilliant, shocking and thought-provoking series of novels.

De Arcitectura

Because if we want to understand cities, we have to learn to understand the language of architects. And we have to think in buildings and about buildings, about construction, destruction and more and more, mostly about reconstruction. And we have to think even more about everything that is between the buildings. About streets, squares, parks. About markets. About playgrounds. About waterfronts. About ad hoc small green islands converted from parking lots. About puddles, bee pastures, butterfly gardens. Because that's where life takes place, in the spaces in between. The life of the city. And the quality of this life really determines the quality of our life in the city.

Archeologia

A tour guide once said about Rome: it's like lasagna.
Every city is like lasagna.
Thousands of years of past are layered on the surface and below the surface.
But - quoting Calvino again - “the city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning roads, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indetations, scrolls.”

The city is a museum in itself, with the difference that its deep layers are not dead, they live on not only in ancient ruins and maps, but also define us to this day.

Divine natura dedit agros, ars humana aedificavit urbes.

"Divine nature gave us fields, human art built our cities."
- wrote Marcus Terentius Varro sometime in the first century BC.

And would anyone argue with him that nature is infinite and eternal, both in space and time?
That it is beyond us and greater than us?

Divine.

There is nothing divine in the city.
The city is infinitely human.
The city is the expression of everything that man ever created with ingenuity, creativity,
with a sense of beauty and boundless ambition.

Cities were built by man, shaped by man, and most likely destroyed by man.

And so every city in every age is the essence of who we are.

Homo mensura

The Greeks knew.
The Romans learned it from the Greeks.
Vitruvius wrote about it.
Then for a while it was as if we had forgotten.
But Leonardo knew it again, as did Michelangelo and Botticelli.

That man is the measure of everything.
That a city can be a good city only, if measured on a human scale.
It is true that the designers of the time worked out the human scale and the perfect geometric harmony with a drawing compass and a ruler.
But still: how much more unsuccessful were the urban experiments of the Renaissance compared to Le Corbusier's Modulor-sized residential buildings,
or compared to the car utopias dreamed up on the drawing boards of the 70s also with the help of drawing compasses and rulers?

And how much more successful will the cities be that are built on big data-based data sets, machines that communicate with each other without human intervention, and so-called "smart" technologies that high-tech giants are trying to sell us as some kind of next delirium?

What kind of city is it where the planners do not think of the citizens?
What kind of city do we design who don't design for the people?
What kind of city do we design who don't design together with the people?

The colors of Venus

By now, the whole image has come together. The name, the slogan, the logo. Don't only colors have a history?
Of course, they have. This image was the source of inspiration.
It has nothing to do with cities. It' simply beautiful. Amazingly beautiful.

And sometimes that's enough.