Architecture

The metaphor of the archipelago, which is the subject matter of this article, has been used in architectural literature as design strategy for shrinking urban environments. Within a contemporary context of increasing coexistence of manmade and natural environments in expanding metropolitan areas, archipelago becomes a pertinent strategy with sustainable potentials. With this article, we aim to introduce possible ways of using this strategy in natural contexts, which are gradually becoming part of expanding urban agglomeration areas. We go on further to talk about an 'archipelago à la carte' where the various users can shape their own archipelagos across natural and artificial environments and yet retain amongst them a common ground. The case study is the proposal for the Liopetri Fishing Harbour and Park in Cyprus, which was submitted by our team, (Ioannou, Papastergiou, Stratis) and was awarded the 3d prize in a two stage architectural competition. The article is part of a research by design process, a post-design reflection. We make explicit ideas about achieving sustainability through the reconnection of "asfound" fragmented territories both natural and artificial by the design of an "archipelago à la carte", yielding to multiple forms of engagement and belonging.

Artykuł przedstawia urzeczywistnienie idei zrównoważonego rozwoju w budownictwie. Zadania tego podjęli się architekci budując na Pomorzu dom jednorodzinny, w którym zastosowano nowatorskie rozwiązania w znacznej części przynależące do specjalistów z zakresu ogrzewania i wentylacji.

The paper attempts to outline the urban visions and architectural ideas and vocabulary behind the formation of the large urban conglomeration in Japan, South Korea and China, and how the seeds of Western planning theories and architectural design practice have helped shaping and building the contemporary cites along the vast regions of Asia Pacific Region, and frame a local language in envisioning the city of the future.
Reflecting on the contributions from East Asia to the discourse of planning and design a city for the future as promoted by single actors, larger cultural movements and national elites fostering economic ambitions and political agendas of autocratic forces (e.g. from the experimental cities by the Metabolists in Japan, to the more “pragmatic” urban development projects fostered by local and national governments in South Korea and China), the paper tries to explain the key socio-economic factors and engines which have dramatically and radically transformed the skylines of the most dynamic and growing influential area of the world at the dawn of 21st century; it also aims at describe the origins of the various forms and elements of the modern built environments which have been shaped and molded by these same forces, and how/whether these urban forms embodies a true genuine East Asian vision of the city of the future, and what is the current trend in terms of new urban forms and architectural design research at the beginning of 21st century.

My paper addresses the founding body emotions of architecture, and in particular it aims at redefining the sublime into phenomenological terms. Starting from Kant, it argues that the phenomenological sublime is a bodily-felt emotion aroused by the excess of sensuousness over conceptuality. But at present, the body metaphor does no longer guarantee order and symbolic meaning. This disruption was brought about by Husserl's and Merleau-Ponty's criticism of compossibility and representation, which led, paradoxically enough, to a sublime bodily experience of space. As contemporary architectural space shows, body and space are affectively intertwined, but this co-belonging is characterized by conflicts, tensions, and the suspension of meaning.

Architectural practices constitute an appropriate field for the application of combined technological and social perspectives into the study of human action. Domestic buildings, rather than being examined as spatial and organisational products containing other materials and activities, can also be viewed as technological and cultural products or 'artifacts'. Stemming from this, the analysis of house construction may contribute to the understanding of certain choices, technological criteria, as well as the constellations of knowledge surrounding the whole process. This paper introduces the study of the domestic architectural remains of Neolithic northern Greece by focusing on the construction practices in their wider social context. Selected case studies will be presented in order a) to reconstruct the different stages and ramifications of the building process, and b) to demarcate the multi-faceted aspects that influence the nature and degree of homogeneity or diversity in the architectural record. The former issue refers to the segmentation of certain sequences of activities (from the ways of processing building materials to the ways in which they are finally transformed) in time and space. The latter issue will address the determining or 'suggestive' role that specific variables play in the shaping of human built environments. These include external broad limiting factors, such as physical environments and locally available materials (with their potentials and limitations), as well as social conceptions and constraints. Moreover, attention will be drawn to the role of tradition and social agency in house construction, as well as to the socialities involved.

The Seagram Building in Manhattan (1954-58), by Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe and Philip Johnson, is one of those rare pieces of architecture
which has come to define an era. For Mies van der Rohe the achievement of the Seagram Building was the resolution of years of theoretical and exacting architectural investigation.
The influence of the Seagram Building stretches beyond that of a single work of a modernist master, however. Its significance is also felt in the way it changed planning legislation and became associated with the fragmentation of the urban realm, through the spread of the generic modernist combination of tower, plaza and artwork.

The co-production of resilience in European urban neighbourhoods is explored based on the experiences from a case study. Within the current 'resilience imperative', co-production processes involving multiple stakeholders can be a key factor for increasing cities' resilience. Co-produced resilience processes are more successful when embedded in collaborative forms of governance such as those associated with urban commons and when fulfilling needed roles with a community. Through the application of the R-Urban approach in a neighbourhood of Colombes (near Paris), the coproduction of a commons-based resilience strategy is described. This involved a group of designers as initiators and a number of citizen as stakeholders of a network of civic hubs. The specific strategies involving a participatory setting, collective governance aspects and circular economies are analysed in the light of co-production theories and practices. Internal and external challenges are identified within the implementation process. The nature of conflicts and negotiations in this co-production approach are discussed, and the role of the architects/designers as agents within the process is investigated. Reflections from this example are provided on the limits and promises of this approach and the lessons learned from R-Urban for collaborative civic resilience.

« L’hôtel Tassel : maison portrait d’un collectionneur », in Liber amicorum Françoise Aubry, Bruxelles, s.e., 2018.

This study try to recollect the important collection of Japanese prints, Tsubas and artefacts owned by Emile Tassel who commission a house to Victor Horta. On that basis the links between Japanese Art and Art nouveau and between the Architect and his client are studied.

Las investigaciones realizadas para la elaboración del informe histórico-artístico encargado para la restauración de la torre campanario de la iglesia parroquial de Ricla (Zaragoza) han permitido trazar con bastante precisión la historia constructiva y la correspondiente crítica de autenticidad del monumento. Así, hoy estamos en condiciones de afirmar que fue levantada por Juan Lucas Botero el Joven en 1542 y recrecida durante la segunda mitad del siglo XVI. También se ha podido precisar que ese cuerpo superior terminó generando graves problemas estructurales, que fue derribado a comienzos del siglo XVIII, y reconstruido poco después, para reformarse a mediados del siglo XIX y, por última vez, un siglo más tarde, a mediados del XX. Para entonces, su característico chapitel bulboso fue sustituido por el remate edicular inspirado en el de la torre de Utebo que todavía puede contemplarse en la actualidad.

Longarone and Venzone are two towns that were reconstructed completely. Their destruction originated from two disastrous events: Longarone
disappeared because of the Vajont catastrophe of 9th October 1963, while Venzone was razed to the ground during the 1976 Friuli earthquake. Their locations were similar: indeed, both towns had been built in a river valley,
where several roads met, al the feet of very steep mountains; both were strategic for the nearby villages.
The years immediately preceding their destruction had been characterised by two different ideas of development and urban planning, with Longarone focused on economic recovery and Venzone on cultural growth. It is therefore difficult to compare the results of the reconstruction of these two towns, given the differences in their history. Longarone was founded anew on the basis of an urban plan inspired by the “most modern urban planning concepts”. Venzone, on the other hand, retained the same structure and the same buildings, having been rebuilt as was and where was by popular request.

This book provides, for the first time, a visual documentation of the wave of 'starchitect' designed museums under construction in certain Arabian Peninsula states, in China, and emerging economies, such as Azerbaijan and India. It offers a sustained architectural critique of the style of these new museums and suggests they represent a new dynamic in the production of cultural spaces. Karen Exell argues projects and finished buildings by the likes of Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry and Norman Foster+Associates are less connected to regional cultural production than to globalized capitalist modernity, and contrasts this globalised aesthetic with the architecture of smaller museums that responds to more traditional regional materials and construction methods. These projects are less well known, but no less striking in their thoughtful and richly contextualised architectural approach, and reveal a nuanced interpretation of the role and function of contemporary museums. For anyone seeking to understand the profusion of grand architectural projects within the cultural sector of emerging economies, The Global Spectacular provides invaluable insight into the varying socio-economic contexts driving their development and poses vital questions about their likely impact.

This article contains information about the importance of preserving the historical objects as a vital condition of a normal development of historical cities. The main legislative and regulatory documents in the fields of protecting of cultural heritage, preserving the traditional character and reconstructing of the lost objects are mentioned.
The analysis of the legislation of preserving the objects of cultural heritage, the current regulations and practices of their implementation in Ukraine give grounds for considering importance of improving the regulations with the consideration of numerous violations of conditions and restrictions of urban planning of the cities with the status of historical sites.
One of the important topics of the formation of traditional historical character is the re-creation of the lost objects of cultural heritage with the consideration of their role in the city-forming, using as an example the reconstructed in 1999-2010 the Transfiguration Cathedral in Odessa.

Préface d’Augustin Berque
Un siècle de banlieue japonaise apporte une réflexion inédite sur les processus d’urbanisation de l’une des sociétés de consommation les plus avancées de la planète, dans un pays dont la population doit, de surcroît, souvent faire face à des désastres naturels. De la fin du 19e  siècle aux temps présents en passant par la crise de Fukushima, l’histoire de la production de l’espace nippon retracée ici nous permet de saisir l’évolution du rapport des Japonais à l’urbain et à leur milieu.

Dans ce contexte, la formation du tissu urbain banlieusard qui entoure les villes, et notamment la capitale, est un phénomène particulièrement éloquent.
Au Japon, logements publics et sociaux n’allant pas de pair, il est essentiel de saisir les motivations d’une réflexion liée au logement populaire en banlieue. Quelles sont les conséquences foncières, sociales et culturelles de la transformation de l’espace imposée par les politiques planificatrices de la seconde moitié du 20e siècle? Un siècle de banlieue japonaise présente les premières initiatives externalisées dans le domaine du logement, les influences occidentales et les prises de position qui ont donné naissance au processus de création de la banlieue japonaise, ainsi que les grands mouvements d’idées sous-jacents.

Afin d’illustrer les résultats concrets de ces phénomènes, l’auteure examine en profondeur la situation des cités de loge-ments publics japonaises, qui exprime certes la mise en œuvre de la modernité dans l’aménagement spatial, mais entraîne également des réalités socioculturelles difficiles. De la naissance du noyau urbain de Tôkyô aux emprunts à l’Amérique de l’après-guerre, de la vague du bunka à l’apogée de Kôdan (l’organisme public du logement), en passant par l’évolution inexorable d’un village où les traditions disparaissent progressivement, Cécile Asanuma-Brice nous présente la poétique et la politique de l’urbain nippon. Elle nous invite de manière spéculaire à nous interroger sur la production de l’espace urbain occidental.

Table des matières
Remerciements | 11

Préface d’Augustin Berque | 13

Introduction / Au paroxysme de
la société de consommation | 15

PARTIE I / NAISSANCE DE VILLE ET STRUCTURATION DE L’ALENTOUR

De la naissance d’Edo à la formation d’une culture d’habiter propre à la périphérie urbaine | 25

Chapitre 1 / Une organisation urbaine au rythme des plateaux | 27
Chapitre 2 / Le rôle des transports dans l’étalement urbain de Tôkyô | 53
Chapitre 3 / L’ère du Bunka 文化 | 71

PARTIE II / FORMATION D’UN SYSTÈME DE LOGEMENT PUBLIC  ET TRANSFORMATION DU MODE DE VIE EN PÉRIPHÉRIE

Naissance d’une préoccupation publique sur la question du logement social
au Japon | 85

Chapitre 1 / L’émergence de la question du logement ouvrier | 87
Chapitre 2 / Du logement d’entreprise à la ville d’entreprise Shatakugai 社宅街 | 95
Chapitre 3 / Lorsque le logement devient une préoccupation publique | 111

PARTIE III / QUAND LA BANLIEUE PERD SON LIEU

Aux prémices de la métamorphose banlieusarde | 129

Chapitre 1 / L’après-guerre 1945-1955 : mise en place des organismes de production et de gestion des logements pu-blics et évolution du cadre juridique | 131
Chapitre 2 / De la modernité | 143
Chapitre 3 / Les influences américaines | 149

PARTIE IV / L’ORGANISME PUBLIC DU LOGEMENT (KÔDAN JÛTAKU)

Naissance et décadence | 157

Chapitre 1 / 1955, début de la période de haute croissance | 159
Chapitre 2 / À nouvelle forme d’urba-nisme, communautés nouvelles | 167
Chapitre 3 / Les années 1980 : kôdan, apogée et déclin | 179

PARTIE V / VAGABONDAGE PÉRIURBAIN, DU TERRITOIRE
À LA CHOSE CONSTRUITE

Chapitre 1 / La formation de la banlieue fasuto-fûdo (ファスト風土 ) | 195
Chapitre 2 /  L’inadaptation de la ville-objet de consommation au territoire: le séisme de 2011 | 205

Conclusion / Du local au global, quand la domination de l’appareil  organisationnel détruit ceux pour qui il a été mis en place | 215

Annexe / Si la banlieue nous était contée… par ses habitants | 221
Bibliographie | 227
Glossaire | 243
Index des lieux | 247
Sources iconographiques | 249
Crédits | 253

This paper deals with contemporary discourse regarding urban revival, elaborating the Educational Campus as a paradigm for global innovation. The objective is to examine the significance and capacity of education and its spatial articulation for social incubation and overall urban development. Furthermore through case of the city of Nis it was demonstrated the possibilities for connecting capacities and priorities in order to build a theoretical ‘platform’ for systematic urban design package in respect to the local resource. The new needed identity for the city of Nis in the time of transition from former industrial into the modern competitive city, can take many forms. Here was argued that, while there is the absence of a formal response to neoliberal governance regarding the strategic urban development, new Educational Campus paradigm might be solution for urban revival. This paper has examined possibilities of formation of the University Campus within the city core as a plausible...

Field trip publication on the subject of everyday conversations and dispersed initiatives in changing urban landscapes in Agra, India. Produced by students from Diploma Unit 6 and Degree Studio 7 at the Faculty of Architecture and Spatial Design at London Metropolitan University in 2006/7. Edited by Stefanie Rhodes and Bo Tang.

The Gold Coast is Australia’s most rapidly changing city – regularly compared to Miami and Las Vegas for its embrace of bad taste and the good life; and with Dubai for its sudden moments of high-rise assuredness and seeming lack of restraint in either the ambitions of building or their manifestations.
Beautifully illustrated throughout, this book offers the first comprehensive history of the city and its architecture, documenting its rise from a series of seaside villages in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the present-day city, set to host the 2018 Commonwealth Games. Considering city plans, architectural works, landscape formations and modes of inhabitation over the time in which the Gold Coast has been peopled, it considers the role of architecture in carrying the city forward. Its main focus is on the contemporary city and the conditions that have given rise to its character - high rise, bad taste and skewed towards the beach edge.

Chinese rural settlements face different critical challenges in the current framework of rapid transformation. Tangible and intangible elements related to the traditional spatial organisation of siting and living are threatened by a socioeconomic transition which appears to be indifferent to local specificities. Such aspects express and shape the rural built fabric, which shows no resistance to the pressures of both planned and spontaneous development. The few exceptions are mainly represented by the survived vernacular architectures, whose function goes beyond practical uses, such as the ancestral halls. Their spatial principles persisted in the malleable rural patterns, making such buildings the physical carrier of local traditions. This paper takes a rural village in the Fujian Province, China, as a paradigmatic case study to explore the settlement pattern's degree of resilience. The data collected in two years of fieldworks allows authors to assert the prominent role played by the fifteen ancestral halls of the village. After introducing the current patterns of change, with a focus on the phenomenon of rural hollowing, the paper emphasises both the spatial rules and the contextual relationships of vernacular buildings. In the conclusions, we remark their importance against the backdrop of current land use development, suggesting to reconsider the vernacular buildings as an alternative approach for more conscious and sustainable development.

Sailing the Islands of São Paulo was an enquiry into São Paulo's fragmented urban space through an on-foot exploration. The project aimed at revealing unseen lines of fracture or tension in the continuity of the urban matter. The exploration took place in the context of the 10th São Paulo Architecture Biennale in November 2013. The 10th São Paulo Architecture Biennale proposed a reflection on the making and using of the contemporary city. Arquipélagos Urbanos invited all those interested to approach the city through the practice of walking as a tool to discover and reflect on urban transformations. Experiences such as the Transurbance practised by the Stalker collective in the marginal spaces of Italian cities show that when the urban space is confronted on foot, cities reveal themselves as uncharted and unpredictable territories. Within this uncharted territory, the practice of walking functions as a twofold method of direct exploration and place-making. The project focused on this very method as a way to deal with several questions regarding São Paulo today, such as bottom-up appropriation of public space, urban mobility, and the balance between planned and unplanned development. Methodology The project was designed in order to allow for the individual contributions to nurture interaction between the participants and provide multiple research perspectives to the subject matter. We used two forms of movement in space, which we called navigation and exploration. They both relied on walking understood as a form of investigation and not merely as a goal. The navigation mode consisted in walking as a group point-to-point. It happened mostly in silence to keep concentration and pace, and to allow for the use of individual observational skills. Once an island of urban matter had been reached, on the other hand, the group entered exploration mode. Some of these island stops had been designated in advance, some were recognised as the project unfolded. During exploration mode, the participants explored the area and collected documents according to the thematic cell they had been assigned to. In both modes the group behaved as a social structure, an ephemeral, yet coherent organism. We developed the project methodology preemptively, and we could count on the collaboration of Marie-Anne Lerjen, a Swiss researcher in urban walking, who provided important feedback and advice drawn from her multi-year experience in the subject.

Infrastructural practices, made by the manipulations of pumps, pipes and hydraulic expertise, play a critical role in managing urban populations. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in Mumbai, in this article I show how Muslim settlers in a northern suburb are being rendered abject residents of the city. Abjection isn’t not a lack of social and political entitlements, but a denial of them. As Muslim settlers are being pushed down to claim less desirable water through the deliberate inaction of city engineers and technocrats, this article shows the iterative process through which abjection is made through tenuous and contentious infrastructural connections between the government and the governed.

This Master thesis directs attention to a paired subset of translation/transformation, namely mediation/derivation, by tracing the architectural work of Jan Ruhtenberg (1896-1975). Despite his leading role as educator and practitioner, Ruhtenberg may well be the best “unknown” architect of the modern era. Part of the forgetting is due to a tragic biography that reveals the prejudices of the 1950s; he was disgraced as a homosexual, dropped by clients, and rejected by his family. Consequently, many of his buildings have been demolished in recent years—most famously the 1939 El Pomar Carriage House Museum at the Broadmoor Resort, Colorado Springs (known as the “Round Barcelona Pavilion”).

The biographical narrative serves as a nodal matrix through which I approach the concepts of mediation—the medium of transmission that surfaces as agency at the interposition of stages between stimulus and reaction—and derivation—which I define as the action of drawing, obtaining, or deducing from a source; the transposition from one point to another—as transformative acts of translation so as to offer an interpretation of selected projects that emerged from his professional experience as well as geographical and socio-cultural displacements.

Zeroing in on Ruhtenberg’s formative years 1929-1932 in Berlin, Germany, this thesis aims to analyze a distinct manipulation of minimalist syntax as a means of understanding what his approach to architecture ultimately represents: a highly particular and inventive reflection about Modernism’s mediation and derivation. The architect’s particular project under investigation is the “Four-Room Apartment for a Childless Couple,” Ruhtenberg's Gold-Medal-winning contribution to the German Building Exhibition in Berlin (1931). By tracing the historical narrative that explores Ruhtenberg’s close friendship with Philip Johnson and his early architectural beginnings as a private assistant to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the philosophical motif of the apprentice manifests warranting closer inspection as a figure that sustains intricate links to the notions of transference and origination; synthetic properties for a unique formulation of architectural Modernism.

The present article focuses on a long-lasting phenomenon that has not yet been treated from a regional and comparative perspective, despite its exceptional character: the walled oases of north-western Arabia. It appears that several oases in the region (Al-Ḥuwayyiṭ, Dūmat al-Jandal, Ḥāʾiṭ, Khaybar, Qurayyah and Taymāʾ) were entirely, or in large part, enclosed by outer walls prior to the Islamic era. These compounds comprised not only densely populated areas but the whole oasis territory, including rural zones and sometimes burial grounds. Measuring several kilometres in length, these immense defensive schemes required considerable investment by indigenous populations for their construction and maintenance until their disuse. According to our research, the walled oases phenomenon in north-western Arabia originated sometime in the late fourth−early third millennium BCE, possibly inspired by Early Bronze Age southern Levant defensive concepts, and further expanded in connection with the emergence of the trans-Arabian trade and the caravan kingdoms. These conclusions are based on the detailed technological study of the ramparts of the oasis of Dūmat al-Jandal and on the analysis of satellite imagery and scientific literature on other sites in northwestern Arabia.

Giulio Cesare Lensi Orlandi Cardini (14/01/1911-15/01/2005) fiorentino, figlio dell'architetto Alfredo Lensi, già direttore del museo Stibbert, e di Alda Orlandi Cardini di Pescia, si laureò a Pisa, alla Regia Scuola degli ingegneri, nel 1933.

As cities compete globally, the Smart City has been touted as the important new strategic driver for regeneration and growth. Smart Cities are employing information and communication technologies in the quest for sustainable economic development and the fostering of new forms of collective life. This has made the Smart City an essential focus for engineers, architects, urban designers, urban planners, and politicians, as well as businesses such as CISCO, IBM and Siemens. Despite its broad appeal, few comprehensive books have been devoted to the subject so far, and even fewer have tried to relate it to cultural issues and to assume a truly critical stance by trying to decipher its consequences on urban space and experience. This cultural and critical lens is all the more important as the Smart City is as much an ideal permeated by utopian beliefs as a concrete process of urban transformation. This ideal possesses a strong self-fulfilling character: our cities will become Smart because we want them to.

The books opens with an examination of the technological reality on which Smart Cities are built, from the chips and sensors that enable us to monitor what happens within the infrastructure to the smart phones that connect individuals. Through these technologies, the urban space appears as activated, almost sentient. This activation generates two contrasting visions: on the one hand, a neo-cybernetic ambition to steer the city in the most efficient way; and on the other, a more bottom-up, participative approach in which empowered individuals invent new modes of cooperation. A thorough analysis of these two trends reveal them to be complementary. The Smart City of the near future will result from their mutual adjustment. In this process, urban space plays a decisive role. Smart Cities are contemporary with a ‘spatial turn’ of the digital. Based on key technological developments like geo-localisation and augmented reality, the rising importance of space explains the strategic role of mapping in the evolution of the urban experience. Throughout this exploration of some of the key dimensions of the Smart City, the book constantly moves from the technological to the spatial as well as from a critical assessment of existing experiments to speculations on the rise of a new form of collective intelligence. In the future, cities will become smarter in a much more literal way than what is often currently assumed.

The will to recreate a graphic reconstruction of a lost architecture (as well as a transformed, or damaged, or never built one) asks to make logic investigations, putt ing together all the possible evidences. This process needs an accurate work of reading the project: the intents of the original designer. The actual digital 3D modelling tools allow to reconstruct and give communicative strength to just formulated hypothesis, but they must be clearly aimed to verify and test these ideas, in a sort of reverse design process, oriented to find back the choices of past architects and constructors.

Like its counterparts in many major countries, the poor performance of Singapore's construction industry in many areas compared to the other sectors of the economy has been highlighted in many studies. The most recent study in Singapore is the investigation into the state of the construction industry undertaken by the Construction 21 Steering Committee. Its report, titled "Re-inventing Construction", criticised the performance of the industry. Fragmentation and the segregation of design and construction activities are seen to be among the main barriers preventing the industry from investing in further improvements and developments. This paper reports the findings of a study which examined the key factors that would enable and motivate greater integration and innovation in Singapore construction. Six factors were identified. The main theme underlying these factors is the need for the creation of market conditions that would demand further integration and encourage greater innovation effort.