Oscar Wilde was born in 1854 in Dublin, the son of a physicianand writer who, among other things, left a book about JonathanSwift; his mother wrote poems and was an authority on Celtic folklore.He studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and later at MagdalenCollege, Oxford. As a student, already an enthusiastic follower ofWalter Pater, he began to lead a life completely shaped by aestheticpremises. Typical of this attitude is Pater's statement: 'To burnalways with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, issuccess in life.'In 1884, after a lecture tour in the United States and Canada,where he caused a sensation as a dandy who had 'nothing to declarebut his genius', Wilde married the daughter of a prominentIrish barrister. At the same time, the marriage marked the beginningof a peak creative period for him. During this time, in additionto his fairy-tale collections The Happy Prince and Other Tales(1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1892) and numerous poemsand plays, he alsowrote his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray(1891), whose hero's life rises above all morality and ends in themorass of a sinful existence, anticipating the author's own fate.Wilde's most successful works, in his lifetime, were his plays.Among them, Salome (1891) occupies a special place because ofthe congenial illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley.Wilde's homoerotic relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas causedhim to be sued by the young man's father, resulting in a two-yearprison sentence. A social pariah, he tried with little success tobegin a new career as a writer in France after he had served hissentence. On 30 November 1900, he died, completely impoverished,in Paris.The two collections of fairy tales do not go back to folktales thathave come down to us anonymously, but belong to the genre of'literary fairy tales', which, as the creation of a particular writer,represent a separate literary genre with a long tradition that goesback to antiquity.Reinhard Gieselmann, born in Münster in 1925, studied architecturein Danzig and Karlsruhe. From 1969 until 1992, he was professorat the Technische Universität Wien. Gieselmann is one of thosewho were not satisfied, already in the early post-war years dominatedby the credo of rationality, functionalism and formal self-limitation,with explaining building simply as meeting functional needs.'Technology is not art., form expresses intellectual content', hepostulated in 1960, with his friend Oswald Mathias Ungers, in aprogrammatic 'Manifesto for a new architecture'. Seeing architectureas a sensual experience, design as a 'search of style' runsthrough all Gieselmann's numerous theoretical statements, whichmark him out as a sensitive thinker.