Book details

240 Pages
Publication date: October 2018
E.W. Heine

New York Sits In The Neander Valley

A History of Mankind from the Cave to Virtual Space

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Historical records impart the knowledge of the purpose and style of buildings to us. But this book shows us which sense of space designed the architectural shape of the structures and which other powers were at work here. The French writer and philosopher Albert Camus said that everyone was responsible for their face. A building can be considered as the face of society—it is shaped by the character of its era.

In the beginning there was the cave, what follows is told by the history of architecture. At the same time, however, the ancient pyramids of Egypt are regarded as the technically most accomplished structures. But why were the stones used for the construction of the pyramids that weighed several tons dragged over long distances with the sheer human muscle power—when they could have been built right next to the quarries, after all? Were there no better possibilities to protect the dead from robbers than those gigantic monuments? If Goethe’s work Theory of Colors reflects the essence and the versatility of colors, E. W. Heine’s New York Sits In The Neander Valley constitutes the psychological profile of human architectural history. In short stories, E. W. Heine documents the epochs of building history from an adventurous perspective.

»Nowadays, we believe that a building doesn’t need to be more than a well-functioning machine, an object of utility like a car, or at best a financial investment like industrial stock. But in reality, you cannot separate house and man just as you cannot separate a snail from its shell. They are a unity come life or death. The drive to dwell is what separates humans from nature’s other creations.«

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Author

E.W. Heine

Ernst Wilhelm Heine, born in Berlin in 1940, is a German architect and writer. As an architect, he has worked in places such as South Africa and Saudi Arabia, where he acted as an engineering consultant to the Saudi government and was involved in the construction of large-scale projects.

His previous works have been translated to Arabic, Czech, Danish, French, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish.