In Coexistences, Walter Niedermayr turns his attention to the villages of the Fiemme Valley in Trentino, South Tyrol, following a seven-year project across eleven communes. These communities have administered common property for nearly a millennium, and Niedermayr approaches them chiefly through their architecture: houses and village structures shaped by long habits of shared use, careful resource management, and adaptation to contemporary life.

The book’s subject is not architecture as isolated form. Its focus is the threshold between private, semi-public, and public space—the intermediate zones in which domestic life becomes collective and the organisation of a settlement expresses social relations. The homes documented here have survived by changing, producing hybrid arrangements whose continued relevance lies in how they accommodate everyday life rather than in any picturesque sense of tradition.

Niedermayr’s sequencing gives this inquiry its particular force. A small number of images appear as diptychs, but most are arranged in sequences organised by building type. Repetition and comparison make shared characteristics visible: the ways entrances, walls, passages, courtyards, and adjoining spaces regulate movement and coexistence. The method is measured and analytical, yet it remains attentive to the lived potential of these structures and to what they might offer the future.

Published by Hatje Cantz Verlag in 2017, the 212-page English-language hardcover also accompanied an exhibition at aut. architektur und tirol in Innsbruck. For collectors interested in architectural photography that extends into social and territorial questions, Coexistences is significant for the clarity with which it connects built form to communal practice. Its value lies in the sustained coherence of the project, the disciplined use of sequence, and Niedermayr’s close reading of a specific Alpine culture rather than in spectacle or monumentality.