ARCHIPELAGOS: Ungers vs.

Rowe

4 student projects from the Cornell studio "Ungers vs. Rowe"

This brief text attempts to discuss two interrelated concerns: an examination of the
techniques and analyses of the city that underpinned the work of O.M. Ungers and
Colin Rowe, and secondly, the way in which that examination served as the
conceptual foundation for a graduate architecture studio I taught in Fall 2011 at
Cornell University which took their legacies and positions as the basis for a urban
design and architectural project. The four projects shown here each enacted a
rigorous process of manipulation, transformation and distortion of precedents by
Ungers or Rowe (two of each). In doing so, the distinction between architectural
history and design was purposely collapsed, requiring a combination of analogical
and analytical thinking. While the discourse surrounding these two significant figures
is vast, the precise relationships between their distinct projects is less well-known.
Nevertheless, a key point of overlap (among others) is the issue of contextualism (a
term with a slippery and debatable history), ie. how architecture grapples with and
ultimately addresses the context of the historical and contemporary city. Ironically for
the Cornell studio, the context of Roosevelt Island was ultimately understood as a
kind of contextualism without a discrete context - a literal tabula rasa. In the place of
a meaningful and rich historical context to respond to, the studio focused instead on
the urban campus as type and the way in which it could become a microcosm of the
city itself. These became two dominant concerns that supplanted the literal context
often associated with contextualism. (Concurrent with the studio's timeframe, SOM
developed a master plan for the site according to Cornell University's ambitions for a
new Technology campus/ enclave on the very same site.) More importantly, the
studio attempted to situate the design project within larger questions about the
relationship between the city and architecture.

FOIL

Using the design of a new NYC Technology campus and research facility for Cornell
University as a foil, the studio, Ungers vs. Rowe, attempted to produce a theoretical

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argument about two divergent Cornell legacies: one, O.M. Ungers and the other,
Colin Rowe as exemplary urban design positions that after some forty years remain
still operative in today’s context. Their respective attitudes and ideas toward urban
design and the metropolitan city at large acted as the theoretical foundation for the
studio. Both Ungers and Rowe sought alternatives to the top-down methods of
modernist urban planning, social realism, and the utopian speculations of
megastructures. Both began their work on urban form from an observation of the
failure of modern architecture to articulate an urban project (ie., that modern
architecture was either naively utopian or helplessly artistic). Yet, there are both
clear and ambiguous divergences between their approaches to the city.

LEGACY

Given the number of years that have passed since crucial debates in the 1970s on
the relationship between architecture and the city, the studio was premised on the
idea that the shadows of Ungers and Rowe are arguably still lingering within today's
contemporary discourse. In addition to revisiting - and thus recuperating - these two
architects from architecture's not-so-distant past, the studio attempted to position
them within contemporary discussions on architectural and urban form. While the
disciplinary and personal disagreements between Ungers and Rowe are well known
and well documented, there is a surprisingly small amount of writing that has
attempted to locate and understand their overlapping ambitions. As Pier Vittorio
Aureli has outlined in his recent book The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture - a
sustained investigation of the archipelago in a number of different registers - both
Ungers and Rowe shared a desire to interpret “architectural form as the index for the
constitution of an idea of the city.”[1] Given the inherent dichotomies between design
and history, between the relationship between urban design and architectural
form, the implicit question for the studio to consider remains: given all of the
changes to urbanism and architecture since the 1970s, what can be taken from
these two figures that is productive today? Ultimately, the projects themselves
attempt to indirectly provide an answer to this question by activating the precedents
in a new context.

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Ungers/Rowe Comparison

FORM

Through various analytic methods that interrogated and documented the

metropolitan city, both Ungers and Rowe sought morphological principles and
processes that shaped the making of urban form and space. More importantly, they
each differently understood that these principles are founded upon the
transformation and distortion of precedents; ie. a historical past that holds value
structurally, formally, and urbanistically. Therefore, the mode in which the studio
chose to investigate these two architects was similar to the methods that Ungers and
Rowe used themselves, as architects interested in continuity with past
manifestations of urban form rather than as historians working directly from the
archives. Working analogically and analytically through a study of precedents,
methods, and ideas, the studio’s re-considered critical projects and extracted
principles as the basis for the architectural design of the new campus. While much of
today’s discussion on urbanism comes to terms with an increasingly complex
number of different forces, the paradox of the studio’s tabula rasa site condition on
Roosevelt Island - an island with a low density, a discrete number of building
typologies, and minimal infrastructure - became a testing ground for strategies that
“reflect the urban forms of the city through architecture.”

ISLAND

Given that the new campus was to be sited on the southern portion of Roosevelt
Island - and island within a metropolitan island - the design of the urban campus also
must address its proximity and development in the shadow of Manhattan, and its
past as an incubator of urban polemics and manifestos. Roosevelt Island’s unique
position as both an autonomous, entirely separate landmass and a conceptual
extension of the Manhattan street grid creates a dialectical position as both
discontinuous and continuous from its neighbor: as island and virtual extension, as

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connected and disconnected. The dialectic between autonomy from and
engagement with the city can be seen as a dominant concern shared by both
Ungers and Rowe. Secondly, the design of the urban campus necessitates an
attitude toward the the dialectic between the irreducible formal and spatial autonomy
of each part (or building) and the possibility of conceiving of the different parts
as one coherent structure, as a larger part of the urban context.

Ungers/ Rowe Comparison

CAVEAT

While the discussion around the studio and its output could be couched in its
pedagogical imperatives (primarily revolving around issues of precedent and history),
the argument extends further. While some will say “nothing new here,” others may
scoff at a return to “revisionism” and therefore shrug off any project that willingly
sidesteps current dominant discourses of globalization and infrastructure. How are
the ideas from the 70s translated to today’s context? And more critically, how does
the studio take into account other developments in urbanism that have since risen to
the forefront of discussions on the city? These questions remain latent in the
reception and reflection of the work.

A secondary agenda for the studio can be understood as a cumulative effort to

locate and position a recuperated version of Rowe which does not simply deadend in
the conservative postmodernist repetition of his work, and likewise for Ungers,
instead hoping to avoid his pure, absolutist geometric introspections. Instead, the
goal was to focus on periods of their work that might be repeated and abstracted
away from these dominant endgames. While academic studios typically showcase

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their results in the form of final jury reviews, the work produced typically disappears
into the archives shortly afterwards. Re-thinking this process, there is an opportunity
to extend the discussion outside of that singular setting and into a larger forum.
Therefore the ambition here is to provide an opportunity to revisit the studio in a
larger context for both critical examination and reflection.

Ungers/ Rowe Comparison

UNGERS

O.M. Ungers’ project “The City Within the City: Berlin as Green Archipelago”
(completed with a group of Cornell summer students and co-taught with Rem
Koolhaas, Peter Riemann, Hans Kolhoff and Arthur Ovaska in 1977) consisted of
shrinking post-war Berlin to its irreducible and significant parts while the remaining
depopulated area was to self-organize through agricultural and park land. Each of
the city parts were then understood as architectural micro-cities that were meant to
act as an urban composition in miniature which analogically could contain the
complexity of the city as a whole. As Aureli has written, Ungers sought to articulate
the limits and finitude of architectural form as a recovery of defining traits of the city -
its inherent collective dimension, its dialectical nature, and its composition of
contrasting urban forms. The design proposal for Berlin deliberately accepted and
made visible the effects of forces on the city; the fragmentation of urban form,
anonymity of architecture and instability of program.[2]

In the Archipelago projects, and what followed, architectural form was treated as a
simultaneous exploration of multivalent urban conditions and a confrontation with the
existing urban scenario. Rather than directly equating architectural form with political
ideologies or social imperatives, or denying any possibility of social impact, Ungers’
work addressed particular aspects and limits of architecture: the collective, the
contemporary condition of the metropolis, etc. Unlike Koolhaas, whose deft writing
framed the conditions under which architecture is constituted and simultaneously
effaced (program, scenario, event, etc.) Ungers maintained a belief in architecture as
a confrontation of concept and built reality. More importantly, his work maintained a

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commitment to architecture’s historical obligations to forms of order (institutional,
programmatic, etc) that provide organization to the human world. More specifically,
as Aureli has outlined in his book, Ungers’ operations on form were rooted in an
analysis of the collective nature of the city, its common ordinary forms (types) rather
than individual figures - through morphology, interpretation, and transformation, he
was able to read the as-found conditions and thus transform the conditions of the city
through precise architectural insertions.

Ungers/ Rowe Comparison

ROWE

Colin Rowe’s Collage City (published in 1978, with Fred Koetter) sought to create an
urbanism from eclectic “set pieces” which would allow forms to be freely extrapolated
from any historical, political or geographical context and put into place in a pluralistic,
morphological collage. Successful urban forms were understood to be the results of
a ceaseless process of fragmentation, collision and superimposition of many diverse
ideas imposed by successive generations. This strategy became a license for an
eclectic connoisseurship of history’s figural urban and architectural forms, once
abstracted and re-assembled, could create a continuous adjudication between
opposites, ie. tradition and utopia. The legacy of Collage Cityis a highly charged and
ambivalent one, especially given its criticism for “remaining primarily in plan as a play
of distorted axialities similar to Beaux-arts pattern making”[3] and Rowe’s own
acknowledgement that the tactics generally performed best in urban zones under a
height of five stories. Rowe’s formal tendencies, understood as visual and
conceptual complexity found in the dialectical balance between scaffold/ exhibit,
structure/ event, ideal/ empirical, etc., create a method of dealing with
heterogeneities and fragments rather than idealities and large-scale systems. In this

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sense, Rowe’ projects use “plan homologies as a way of collapsing history, merging
and transforming various past examples to remove them from their historical
specificity.”[4]

Ungers/ Rowe Comparison

ARCHIPELAGOS

Aureli describes the concept of the archipelago as a “condition where parts are
separated yet united by the common ground of their juxtaposition,” and understands
a crucial feature to be “the struggle of parts whose forms are finite and yet, by
virtue of their finiteness, are in constant relationship both with each other and
with the ‘sea’ that frames and delimits them.”[5] The ‘islands’ of architecture
stand in dialectical contrast to the space of urbanization, the city at large. While the
book outlines the work of four architects whose project “was advanced through the
making of architectural form, but whose concern was the city at large,” it traces an
underlying tension between the boundaries and exchanges of architecture and urban
form. Through the ‘metaform’ of the archipelago, he identifies the project of the city,
addressed through “transformations of the city as seen through the elaboration of
specific and strategic architectural forms.” More critically, the respective projects for
the city do not take the form of an overall plan but are manifested as an archipelago
of specific interventions. This metaphor is a productive entry into parsing the
differences between Ungers and Rowe because it offers a concept of architecture
and urbanism that concerns the inherent tension and dialectic that both architects
believed was not dealt with in modernism’s totalizing plans or its utopian polemics
and speculations.

In examining the metaphor of the archipelago further, it is possible to understand that

the architects chosen by Aureli (Mies, Palladio, Piranesi, Boullee, and Ungers) each,

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in their own way, exemplify ‘islands’ that provoke “architectural form toward the
possibility of being not a general rule but an example for the city.” In particular, the
last chapter focuses on a number of projects, competitions and works by Ungers,
leading up to his study of Berlin, which best exemplifies a number of Ungers’ urban
design principles. The fact that it literalized the ‘islands’ as self-contained city forms/
enclaves within the decay of post-war Berlin is secondary to the definition of
architecture as collective fragments which “pierces through urbanization.” The “sea”
is understood as a set of self-organized gardens, forests, agricultural and
recreational spaces, dialectically opposed to the collective, bounded condition of the
islands themselves. Ungers’ secondary idea of the “city as collection”[6] in which as-
foundconditions, both local and historical, are abstracted and systematized into a
restricted formal vocabulary creates a “city in miniature” or a “self-sufficient city”
(Enschede and Grunzud Sud in particular). This vocabulary is made up of clearly
formalized city parts - finite artifacts - that in their internal formal composition, were
evocative of an idea of the city (not unlike Rowe’s ‘set pieces’). A formal tension
between the simplicity of each architectural part and the complexity of spatial
arrangements is therefore created by their overall composition.

In contrast, Rowe’s work evidences a dominant concern for the ‘sea’ itself rather
than the islands. For Rowe, the islands are the public spaces of the city, the figural
voids in the urban fabric that best represent ‘cityness’ as opposed to the islands. The
Excursus in Collage Citylists a series of city parts - memorable streets, stabilizers,
splendid public terraces - all of which negotiate between urban texture and
architectural artifact. Rowe’s specific formal predilections - Beaux Arts axiality,
complex figuration, multiple levels of hierarchy and scale - create interrelationships
between architectural form and urban form that unites the two rather than
demarcating their distinct boundaries. For Rowe, the archipelago consists of those
openings or rifts in the fabric that create richness and diversity within the built mass
of the city. The well-known cover drawing of Collage City, which was meant to best
exemplify the idea that “an elegant hybrid - a solid equipped with local spaces, the
other largely a void in which objects have been encouraged to proliferate, each
giving value to its opposite condition”[7] stands in vivid contrast to Rowe’s later
meditation on Mondrian’s Boogie Woogie painting, which “maintains (a) spatial
matrix and figure in a reciprocal and constantly fluctuating relationship.”

PRECEDENT

Both Ungers and Rowe share an overwhelming concern for the deployment and
manipulation of precedent (with all of the baggage the term implies) as the basis for
making and conceptualizing form. While they both mask this issue behind different
methods and varying ideologies, it is clear that they each believe that
architecture’s raison d’etre comes from its ability to logically and rationally
manipulate the material, structure, and organization of the city. For example, “Thesis
6” in Ungers’ text on Berlin claims that “in order to determine this quality of urban
spaces, cases may be used to serve as a model, even if they were planned for

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another time and another occasion, if they have comparable typological qualities.”[8]
Meanwhile, a healthy portion of Rowe’s writing on urbanism points to the notion that
“history is open to the architect, ie. collage is a strategy for democratically integrating
disparate cultural impulses and hybridizing fragments of history.”[9] These lessons
and more underpinned the work in the studio, and hopefully serve to elucidate both
its theoretical basis and problematics for the student projects below.

Ungers Project 1:
Gunho Kim + Hyun Chung

Ungers 1: Manipulation of Solid/ Void Relationships

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Ungers 1: Plans

Ungers 1: Sectional Perspective

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Ungers 1: Aerial view

11 
 
Ungers 1: Model

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Ungers 1: Model

Ungers 1: Model

Rowe Project 1:
Vivian Shao Chen + Henry Adam Weber

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Rowe 1: Roma Interrota Analysis

Rowe 1: Project development

14 
 
Rowe 1: Axons

15 
 
Rowe 1: Model

16 
 
Rowe 1: Model

17 
 
Rowe 1: Model

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Rowe 1: Model

Ungers Project 2:
Ryan Glick + Julia Pascutto

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Ungers 2: Building Typology diagrams

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O.M.Ungers, Roosevelt Island competition, Roosevelt Island, New York, 1975

Ungers 2: Program Distribution diagram

21 
 
Ungers 2: Axonometric

22 
 
Ungers 2: Plan

Ungers 2: Model

Ungers 2: Model

23 
 
Ungers 2: Model

24 
 
Rowe Project 2:
Armando Rigau + William S. Smith

Rowe 2: Precedent Analysis Diagrams 1

25 
 
Rowe 2: Precedent Analysis Diagrams 2

26 
 
Rowe 2: Precedent Analysis Diagrams 3

27 
 
Rowe 2: Floor plan

28 
 
Rowe 2: Model

29 
 
Rowe 2: Model

Rowe 2: Model

________________

[1] Pier Vittorio Aureli. The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture. Cambrige: MA.
MIT Press, 2011.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Joan Ockman. “Form without Utopia: Contextualizing Colin Rowe.” Journal of the
Society of Architectural Historians. Volume 57 Number 4, Dec. 1998.

30 
 
[4] Amanda Reeser Lawrence, unpublished PhD on Jim Stirling, “Remaining Modern:
the Work of Jim Stirling 1955-1975.”

[5] Ibid.

[6] See Wilfried Kuhn’s chapter “The City as Collection” in O.M. Ungers; Cosmos of
Architecture.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Lotus 19

[9] Ibid.

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Urban city corridor

Areal View Linear City Collage Florence Italy 1968

The Atelier Ziggurat Architects/Designers founded by G. Fiorenzoli in 1966, made

several theoretically based proposals for alternative future appropriations of the
Renaissance and Medieval historical downtown of Florence in Italy.
The proposed “Linear City“ project with its innovative and controversial urban
vision states for the first time the urge to physically connect the tourists driven and
commercially prosperous downtown to the otherwise neglected and yet densely
populated outer rings of the city.

In fact entire new neighbourhoods have been added to the perimeter of the city in a
sort of chaotic urban sprawl. This uncontrolled urban process seems to have
distanced
dramatically most of citizens from participating to the opportunities and the cultural
life
offered by its more traditional core. As a result Florence historical downtown has
become

32 
 
most of all an international showcase for all visitors without the active presence of its
local residents.

The ‘ Linear City ‘project in its utopian infrastructural length proposes a series of
highly visible residential waves . Their imposed presence is possible by the
introduction of events and services such as , subway stations, parking, museums,
theatres, art galleries, exhibition spaces, shopping centres , schools, plaza’s and
markets , moderate scale manufacturing .
The deployment of new electronic ‘media’ effecting the city skyline seem to suggest
new forms of social and physical aggregations. A sort of public and collective
performances to be determined.
This project has been documented by the media and exhibited at the Venice
Biennale for Architecture in 1980.

This project does not want to resolve the inherent problems derived from the
dramatic physical intrusion of an external urban system upon the medieval grid like
architecture of the city. The images and the proposed plans are the driven manifesto
of an architectural program that highlights a sort of discrimination between the
current social components of the city and the failure of its traditional , historical core
to support changes both social and political.
The project is confrontational and politically charged. The physical autonomy of all
activities in the “Linear City “are contained in a sort of urban corridor and do not
to seek any integration with any aspects of the surrounding outside world.
In this project it is at stake the idea that cities cannot be representative of only one
official culture , instead they should be able to be conceived as a live dynamic
organism that expresses in architecture the subtleties of social and cultural changes.
Tourism , in fact , cannot be the only recipient of the complexity of urban living.
Looking at the artificial landscaped project’s display of stepped roofs there is a hint to
the fact that the ‘step’ as an ancestral tectonic tool can be re invented at a large
scale giving a strong image to the idea of a democratic view of the world.

Location
Florence Italy
Competition
1968

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Linear City Roof top Plan

Linear City high rise Residential 'wave '

34 
 
 \

Linear City Low rise Residential ' wave'

Linear City Ground Level Plan Metro

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Structural analysis High rise Residential 'wave'

Linear City cross sections Residential Cultural

36 
 
Visionary landscape Collage

37 
 
THE LIIMITS OF THE CITY
Y:
A STR
RATEGIC PROJECT
P FOR SEO
OUL

The stuudio focuse ed on the relationshi

r p betweenn forms of metropolit
m tan labor and
a the
possibility of polittical life. Ass one of th he most physically de ense, socia ally comple ex, and
technoologically ad dvanced cities
c in Asia, Seoul is
s the ideal site to testt how econ nomy
affects a city’s po olitical life. It is generrally assum
med that ou ur contemp porary civiliization
is a postindustria al one, shap ped by the e emergenc ce and the hegemony of immatterial
labor over
o the pro oduction off goods. The studio argued
a thaat the plac ce of this
proces ss of prod duction is the metro opolis. The e metropoliis brings th hese proce esses
outsidee of their ca anonical sp pace—the factory— and dissem minates them through all
aspects of urban life. If we assume th hat industrialism is no
ot simply thhe process s of
producction of goo ods, but a wayw to make anythin ng economically productive—fro om the
human n body to th he human mind—the en we can presume
p th
hat we are still part of
o the
industrrial civilizattion where urbanity ittself is the ultimate fa actory. Con nfronting th
his
scenarrio, the critiical issue this
t studio explored was
w what kind k of cityness can beb
imagined in the contempora
c ary metrop polis, wheree productioon seems tto be susta ained
by economics.

Seoul represents
r s an exemp plary case of “metrop politan prodduction,” it is a crucial case
study in understa anding the relationship between n the form of the city and our po ost-
industrrial civilizattion. The city
c is an extreme
e caase of a siituation ra apidly
transfoorming fro om a laborr society, based on agriculture, to a high advanc ce
workinng society y, based on highly te echnologiically deve eloped ind dustry. Th his is
not onnly manifes sted by th
he physica al expansion and tra ansformattion of the e city
from a rural tow wn to an in ndustrial metropolis
m s and lately y to a high h-tech
megalo opolis of tent million ns inhabittants in a relatively
r short time e—only fiffty
years——but also by the fac ct that thee city is in a conditio on of cons stant rush h of
twentyy-four hou ur working g, and dom minated by y the continuous mo oving and d
commuting of th he inhabittants from m one part of the city y to anoth her. Seoul’s s
inhabitants spend d a large part
p of theirr time by co ommuting within the enormous s space
of the city.
c One of o the mostt remarkab ble public space of Se eoul is the constant traffic
jam thaat moves th hrough thee city. A furrther sense e of alienattion of this activity is
producced by the fact that th he only wayy to orienta ate in toda
ay Seoul is by means s of
GPS navigation systems.
s T movem
The ment throug gh the city is thus redduced to a
multitude of trajecctories tha at go from point
p “A” to
o point “B”.. These tra ajectories have
h
the effe
ect of bypa assing the city as a public
p spac ce and thuss as a pote ential space e of the
unexpe ected and of o the encoounter. The e city is a conglomer
c rate of partts held together
by the movementt for the sa ake of prod duction.

The sitte of research and de esign was thet concep ptual borde er betweenn the city as a
locus of
o productio on and the e city as loccus of polittical life. Th
he studio aattempted to
t
answerr how an architectura
a al interventtion can coonsciously frame prottotypical fo orms of
densityy, shared fa
acilities, an
nd living an nd workspa aces. The Strategic P Project is
developed as an overall strrategy for the t entire city
c in the form f of elevven Immeu uble

38 
 
Cité that, in their exemplarity, are capable of transforming the geography of the
entire urban region of Seoul. These eleven punctual interventions define the limits of
the city. The plan locates the eleven Immeuble Cité both along the river Han, a
traditionally charged limit between the northern and southern part of the city and
along the external limit of the city, where the political border between Seoul and the
satellite cities lies. The sites along the River (Yeouido, Magok, Yongsan, Jamsil,
Ttukseom and Sangam-Goyang) have been chosen following the prescriptions
contained in the Hangang Renaissance Project, yet defining alternatives to the
image of the Hangang masterplan that rely mostly on landscape interventions
establishing, on the contrary, in each of these sites a new hub of living and working
functions. Complementary to the strategy for the river, the five other sites along the
urban fringe (Jungrang-Guri, Sinwol-Bucheon, Songpa-Hanam, Guro-Gwangmyeong
and Umeon-Gwacheon) have been chosen to offer an urban definition for the
territories in between the urban core and the satellites cities. The architecture of
each Immeuble Cité is made of extremely conventional forms. Silent and
monumental, the Immeuble Cité is not a landmark, but due to its scale and form, it
offers a framework or the background to the life that takes place in them.

From Dom-ino toPolykatoikia

A group of teachers and researchers from the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam harks
back to the precursor of infill architecture, Le Corbusier's Dom-ino construction
system, and finds in its cousin, the typical Greek polykatoikia tenement, the
possibility of generating a host of collective and shared spaces in Athens.

Architecture / Pier Vittorio Aureli, Maria S. Giudici, Platon Issaias

Author

Pier Vittorio Aureli, Maria S. Giudici, Platon Issaias

Published

31 October 2012

Location

Athens

Sections

Architecture

Keywords

Athens, Berlage Institute, collective spaces,Dom-ino, DOMUS 962, Le Corbusier,Polykayoikia, Shared space

This article was originally published in Domus 962 / October 2012

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 40 
 
In recent years there has been a resurgence of the "informal city" within the
discourse on architecture and urbanism. In times of economic recession, the
"informal" is often advocated as the solution to the evils of the neoliberal city. A
protagonist of the informal city is "infill architecture", in which housing is reduced to a
flexible framework customised by the inhabitants. This conception of the house
responds to the rapid growth of cities, but it is also promoted as a way to encourage
participation from the inhabitants themselves in building their own environment.
Against over-designed architecture, the infill model is celebrated as a way to give
space to inhabitants' creativity. Indeed there is a thin line that divides this model from
the reality of many shantytowns in which do-it-yourself is a forced option rather than
a fancy model for housing. The same model can be interpreted as a cynical solution
that confirms the status quo in which low-cost constructions and adaptability are
exploited in order to socially and politically tame an increasingly homeless
population. Perhaps the best way to discern the ambivalence of the infill model is to
reconsider its progenitor — Le Corbusier'sDom-ino construction system — and one
of its most radical applications, the Greek multifunctional dwelling also known
aspolykatoikia[1].

Dom-ino
Designed in 1914 as self-help construction system, Dom-ino (from the Latin dooms,
"house", and an abbreviation of "innovation") has become the ubiquitous form of
construction in all developing countries: a reinforced concrete framework open to any
infill and thus to any spatial interpretation. In developing this model, Le Corbusier
was inspired by wooden pillar buildings in Turkey [2] on one hand, and Flemish
houses on the other. Le Corbusier looked attentively to vernacular construction
systems in order to shorten the distance between architecture and everyday building
processes, but he reinterpreted these vernacular examples within the logic of a
typically industrial plan and the new developments in concrete construction.

Le Corbusier developed his prototype imagining a post-war reconstruction in which

the urgent need of housing would demand new and more flexible ways to build
houses, especially for the low classes. In this sense the Dom-ino principle is the best
embodiment of Le Corbusier's motto "Architecture or Revolution". In Dom-ino,
architecture is not simply a shelter, but in the words of Michel Foucault, it is a
"dispositif", an apparatus that puts to work and controls the most basic faculties of
unskilled workers.

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Top: Manolis Baboussis, View of a polykatoikia skeleton under construction, 1987.
Photo and courtesy of Manolis Baboussis. Above: Perspective view of the Dom-ino
system, 1914. Source: Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, OEuvre Complète
Volume 1, 1910–1929, Les Editions d’Architecture Artemis, Zürich, 1964

The seeming informality of the Dom-ino is the perfect housing counterpart of the rigid
Fordist-Taylorist organisation of work in which workers were uprooted from their
native environment and taken as pure labour force devoid of any specific skill by the
automatism of the assembly line. The Dom-ino system has proved to be effective
beyond the industrial age, thanks to its extreme genericness and adaptability. In the
Dom-ino model, flexibility is not only a positive quality, but also a fundamental
apparatus of social engineering that controls the economic development of
supposedly spontaneous settlements from the Brazilian favelas to the
Turkish gecekondu. First of all, while it exploits the cheap informal labour force,
Dom-inos are also based on industrially produced raw materials that drive the profit
back to larger scale corporations. Secondly, beyond the rhetoric of offering a house
to everybody, this apparatus boosts — sometimes artificially — the construction
sector, a sector that breeds a new range of small enterprises. In this way, the
possibility of social unrest is tamed by building a class of home-owners and micro-
entrepreneurs who, while economically not privileged, are however sceptical towards
the possibility of corporativism, sharing, and the demanding of social equality. The
subjectivity of the Dom-ino, in spite of what Le Corbusier had hoped, did not result in
a shared effort to construct readable urban environments, but rather in the myth of
self-entrepreneurship. If this result is often blurred by the poverty of such
developments, one of the best illustrations of this phenomenon is perhaps the
Greek polykatoikia, which on the contrary addresses primarily the middle class, and
which had a major impact in the development of post-war Greece.

Dimitris Philippidis, An Inner City Squatter Settlement in Athens, 1966. Source:

Dimitris Philippidis, “Town Planning in Greece”, in 20th Century Architecture in
Greece, Prestel Publishers, 1999. Courtesy of Dimitris Philippidis Archive

42 
 
The polykatoikia
The polykatoikia was originally conceived in the 1930s as a multistorey apartment
building for the Athenian bourgeoisie [3]. The proliferation of this type was supported
by the State in the form of a general building regulation and a property law [4], which
directly produced the basic rationale behind the architecture of the polykatoikia. This
law allowed landowners to barter tax-free their buildable ground in exchange for built
indoor space, effectively deregulating the construction industry. Another goal of
the polykatoikia as promoted by the State was to advance (and thus appropriate)
local construction knowledge towards a coherent and yet flexible system of building
techniques, materials, details and structural schemes. Like in the Dom-ino model this
system combined advanced industrial solutions with low-skilled manual labour.
Through the apparatus of the polykatoikia, the project of the city was advanced no
longer through top-down master planning, but through the production of abstract
legislative frameworks, which materialised in the bottom-up practice of self-building.

This building logic was extensively mobilised with the post-war reconstruction of
Athens. After World War II, Greece entered a bloody civil war that ended with the
defeat of the Communist forces. The new "democratic" government put forward a
plan to tame the rebellious potential of the working class. A fundamental issue was
to avoid big industrial concentrations and encourage a small-scale building economy
in order to fragment and thus control the population. By advancing the small-scale
building system of the polykatoikia, the government promoted the reconstruction of
the country and the consequent economic recovery with minimum state
intervention [5]. In this way increasing housing needs were met without a welfare
programme [6], while a large part of the population was guided towards private
ownership [7]. The generic form of thepolykatoikia was able to absorb all classes and

43 
 
allow any kind of infill and thus became a type suitable for all sorts of urban
densities.

The polykatoikia was originally conceived in the 1930s as a multi-storey apartment

building for the Athenian bourgeoisie.

Dimitris Philippidis, Typical View of Athens, 2000. Source: Dimitris

Philippides, Modern Architecture in Greece, Melissa, Athens 2001. Courtesy of
Dimitris Philippidis Archive

From the 1950s until very recently, the construction industry was a major asset in the
economy of Greece. In this way the polykatoikia has transformed the city itself into a
gigantic factory (the city as a factory of itself). The massive development of this
building process produced a middle-class subject that was simultaneously owner,
producer and consumer of space. Just before the economic crisis, Greece had 84.6
per cent of home ownership, ironically the second highest in Europe after Spain[8].
In spite of its questionable political origin the polykatoikiahas been often celebrated
as a successful experiment in informal, bottom-up housing building. However, its
implementation has produced a subjectivity based on radical individualism in which
the household itself became a source of economic speculation. It is precisely this
subjectivity that is under pressure with the dramatic economic crisis that has been
affecting Greece since 2008. If with the beginning of the Cold War Greece was
forced to develop a radical laissez-faire agenda, promoting a deliberate social
fragmentation of its working class, within the current economic crisis this
fragmentation has proved extremely problematic as private ownership becomes
unsafe ground in times of recession when the value of properties dramatically
decreases.

44 
 
At the same time the architecture of the polykatoikia itself, with its small scale and
lack of collective spaces, has developed an urban ethos completely locked within its
extreme individualism. And yet if the politics of post-war Greece were advanced
through the architecture of one single archetype it is precisely by altering this
archetype that it is possible to promote a large-scale reform of the city without
recurring to a master plan. An important premise of this reform is to show how in
spite of the urban fragmentation, the polykatoikia, as an architectural language,
manifests itself (in its utmost radical intensity) as a common and thus deeply
collective construction system. The fundamental goal of this reform would be to
overcome the fragmentation provoked by the application of this building type, by
working towards a reconstruction of collective urban formations.

The proliferation of new archetypes in the polykatoikia carpet would create a new
anatomy for central Athens through architecture rather than through abstract
legislation. This map does not represent the real geography of Athens, but rather an

45 
 
ideally reconstructed, analogous collage of its main urban conditions: the analogical
character of the drawing serves to underline the idea that no coherent master plan is
put forward here, but only a catalogue of possible actions that will unfold in different
ways depending on the context, changing the city through physical space one act at
a time. Research project “Athens: Labour, City, Architecture. Towards a Common
Architectural Language”, conducted at the Berlage Institute, Rotterdam, by Pier
Vittorio Aureli, Maria S. Giudici, Platon Issaias, Elia Zenghelis and postgraduate
researchers Juan Carlos Aristizabal, Hyun Soo Kim, Ivan K. Nasution, Davide
Sacconi, Roberto Soundy, Yuichi Watanabe, Ji Hyun Woo, Lingxiao Zhang (2010-
2011)

A project for Athens

In the financial and urban crisis that Athens has been undergoing since 2008, we
have developed at the Berlage Institute a project that starts from a critical evaluation
of the polykatoikia protocol and the subjectivity it has produced. Both the economic
rationale and the social functioning of the urban condition created by
thepolykatoikia have shown their limits. The disastrous current situation makes the
rethinking of this model a very urgent task. With this project we aim to expose the
generic nature of thepolykatoikia, while recovering the architecture of the city beyond
the pixel of the single dwelling. Instead of a master plan we propose a catalogue of
architectural actions that aim to connect the fragmented dwellings into coherent and
formally finite collective urban forms. These forms are the courtyard, the block, the
street, and the most collective layer of the city: the ground floor. The flexibility and
openness of the polykatoikia is thus manipulated towards the opposite scenario for
which it was developed. While the Dom-ino approach encourages the individual
house owner to become an independent entrepreneur who fills in, organises and
manipulates his part of the skeleton, the forms we propose all imply a form of
collective will and collaboration. The courtyard, the block, the street, and the ground
floor become figures that can be rescued from thepolykatoikia carpet. Our proposal
radicalises these figures into distinct architectural archetypes.

46 
 
Left, Cloister. By constituting a block community, the inhabitants of a block could
transform together the empty space in its middle, and the possibility of a new,
generous courtyard would emerge. The courtyard could become a cloister, hosting
an enlargement of the existing properties in the form of a shared balcony framing the
collective space. (Ji Hyun Woo, Berlage Institute, 2011). Right, Platform. With the
demolition of all the non load-bearing partitions of the ground floors — which are
almost never used except for retail — the street level becomes a private, yet publicly
accessible platform. The platform would expose the genericness of the polykatoikias:
a continuous space punctuated by a loadbearing structure, ready to be used for new
activities (Ivan K. Nasution, Berlage Institute, 2011)

Repetition and discontinuity, paradoxically, are the two hallmarks of contemporary

Athens: at a large scale, the Athenian urbanisation is repetitive and homogeneous —
it lacks hierarchy, public space and a clear anatomy — while on the other hand, if we
look at the scale of architecture, every city block is built in a fragmented and chaotic
way. The archetypes we propose are part of the grammar of any Mediterranean city,
but they are unreadable in Athens today: courtyards are cut up by fences, poorly
maintained and never used simply because they are divided between too many
owners; city blocks are built without logic because the properties are too fragmented;
and the streets and ground floors of the city are plagued by thousands of failed,
discontinuous attempts at building stoas that end up becoming unpleasant pockets
rather than social spaces. Our archetypes suggest looking again at the strength of
these basic figures to reconstruct spaces that can be shared. The archetypes of
thecloister and the platform are based on sharing (i.e. demolishing divisions) in order
to reclaim residual interstices revealing physical and linguistic possibilities for an
architectural "common". Other proposals focus on the need to insert new spatial
arrangements, since in Athens the space for work, production and interaction is often
stuffed into the straitjacket of bourgeois apartments that do not fit the need of the
users anymore (see archetypes entablature, roof and stoa). Beyond the manipulation

47 
 
of existing forms through demolition and localised insertion, the proposed grammar
also puts forward archetypes that challenge directly the polykatoikia as a tectonic
model. The Dom-ino skeleton can be rethought as a framework where different
productive and social activities can happen (seetheatre, wall and in-transit).

Left, Entablature. Urban blocks could be improved by the insertion of an extra

rooftop level on existing buildings—a continuous beam, a sort of entablature that
hosts wide working spaces and contrasts the fragmentation of contemporary Athens,
offering new readability to the block as a distinct piece of city (Davide Sacconi,
Berlage Institute, 2011). Right, Roof. An added linear structure hovering above the
fragmented façades of thepolykatoikias gives definition to the street alignment while
providing areas for production and education dedicated to the inhabitants of the
existing buildings. The new roof underlines the street as architectural space and
seeks the establishment of urban continuity (Lingxiao Zhang, Berlage Institute, 2011)

These archetypes — cloister, platform, stoa, roof, entablature, theatre, in-

transit and wall — are not meant as definite projects, or as parts of a large-scale
plan: they are examples [9] of how it would be possible to act on the existing tissue.
These examples are not normative: their principle can be applied in a variety of
sizes, shapes and characters depending on the context. They are paradigmatic
actions that can trigger different reactions and evolve in unforeseen manners. By the
same token, they have not been developed as diagrammatic universal principles:
they are presented as precise and concrete pieces of architecture, because
examples work by doing, by having an effect, rather than by prescribing abstract
rules. In this, the idea of remaking a city anatomy through examples radically
opposes the logic of the master plan; a proliferation of these examples would change
Athens through architecture, adding gardens, galleries, promenades, and attics. In
short, through making space.

48 
 
Left, Stoa. A free-standing layer of stoa added in front of the current facades, eating
a few metres from the street, would provide a new public portico as well as the
possibility to close the existing discontinuous stoas and turn them into productive
spaces (Roberto Soundy, Berlage Institute, 2011). Right, In-transit. Logistic spaces
are proliferating at the ground level, especially on large thoroughfares, making street
life impossible. This archetype proposes to group such spaces and implement them
with temporary living accommodation for precarious workers and visitors. It is
conceived as a screen shielding smallerscale neighbourhoods from traffic and
providing a largescale architectural backdrop to suburban highways (Juan Carlos
Aristizabal, Berlage Institute, 2011)

This new city would not be another Athens. It would be Athens as it really is, hidden
under the chaos of an apparently informal development that is actually one of the
most violent bio-political projects of the past century. The apparent individual
differences that gave the budding bourgeoisie in Greece the impression of having
unique lifestyles have ended up as a rather dreary and monotonous environment. It
is the hope of this project that through sharing, rather than fragmenting, we might
gain back real spatial variety; that maybe by exposing thepolykatoikia skeletons in
their genericness, rather than praising the fake originality of their fillings, a more
habitable and straightforward city might emerge. Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria S.
Giudici teach at the Architectural Association in London; Platon Issaias is a PhD
candidate at the Delft University of Technology (@cityasaproject)

49 
 
Left, Theatre. By simply manipulating the vertical circulation into a promenade
sequence, the skeleton becomes a theatre of sorts, a covered public space offered
to the citizens of the neighbourhood. This archetype bares the bones of
the polykatoikia as all non load-bearing partitions disappear and the typical
apartment building becomes again a Dom-ino structure. It shows how the Dom-ino
approach makes the wall itself, as an architectural element, irrelevant (Hyun Soo
Kim, Berlage Institute, 2011). Right, Wall. This archetype looks at the spatial
qualities that wall architecture—the opposite of the polykatoikia — can offer: the
possibility to define boundaries, to distinguish inside and outside, to create privacy.
Such a wall is an alternative to the polykatoikia landscape: a thick slab containing
services, opaque towards the street, supporting ample balcony apartments facing an
inner garden. While the service wall could be fixed, providing continuity on the
outside, the balconies can be occupied flexibly — thus reusing the infill logic of the
Dom-ino (Yuichi Watanabe, Berlage Institute, 2011)

Notes:
1. The term poly-katoikia is a composite word, from poly, translated as multi, and the
noun katoikia, dwelling. In Greek,polykatoikia stands for the multi-storey apartment
building, eventually becoming a term that describes every housing building except
for suburban single-family villas.
2. See Adolf Max Vogt, Le Corbusier, The Noble Savage, The MIT Press,
Cambridge 2000.
3. For a thorough analysis on the birth and the evolution of thepolykatoikia type in
the 1920s and 1930s see Dimitris Emmanuel,The Growth of Speculative Building in
Greece: Modes of Housing Production and Socioeconomic Changes, PhD Thesis,
London School of Economics and Political Science, London 1981.
4. See "The General Building Regulation of the State" (April 3rd 1929) and the
3741/1929 law "On Horizontal Property Divisions and other provisions".
5. On the particularities of this economic model (in Greek): Panos Kazakos, Between

50 
 
State and Markets: Economy and Economic Policy in Greece, 1944-2000, Patakis,
Athens 2009.
6. Dimitris Emmanuel, Housing Public Policies in Greece: The Scale of an Absence,
National Centre for Social Research, Athens 2006.
7. This particular process and the political implications of this economic project were
thoroughly discussed and described in a fundamental text of 1951, the report "On the
Economic Problem of Greece", by the Greek economist Kyriakos Varvaressos. The
report foresaw and analysed the particularities of this major reform. Recently
republished (in Greek): Varvaressos, Kyriakos,Report on the Economic Problem of
Greece, Savalas, Athens 2002.
8. N. X. Rousanoglou (in Greek), "84.6 is the Percentage of Home Ownership in
Greece", Kathimerini, 04/01/2006, figures from the General Report on the Activities
of the European Union-2005, European Commission Brussels, Luxembourg 2006.
9. As an example, we refer to the essay by Paolo Virno, "Virtuosismo e Rivoluzione",
in Mondanità, Manifesto Libri, Rome 1994.

51 
 
 52 
 
 53 
 
 54 
 
 55 
 
VISIONS, PROJECTS AND REALISATIONS

EL LISITZKY, SKY HOOK

56 
 
KARL EHN, KARL MARX HOF

57 
 
archizoom-parallele-districts-in-berlin-1969

58 
 
dogma-stop-city-2007-08

59 
 
rem-koolhaas-espace-piranesian-tgv-rr-station-lille-1993-96

60 
 
wewerka-housing-estate-ruhwald-berln

61 
 
 62 
 
 63 
 
dogma_pier_vittorio_aureli_theory_and_ethos

64 
 
THE POSSIBILITY
OF AN ABSOLUTE ARCHITECTURE  
 

 
 
 
 
(…) One of Koolhaas’s obsessions in New York City was the Waldorf-
Astoria Hotel, which housed such a variety of services that
the building itself was a veritable city.40 Koolhaas’s fixation with
the typology of the metropolitan hotel—to which OMA devoted
its early projects—resembled Ungers’s focus on metropolitan
superblocks like those he proposed for Tiergarten Viertel. For
example, the superblock made of six towers placed atop a gigantic
plinth, for which Koolhaas sketched an early proposal, was
later recast in OMA’s proposal for Welfare Island. In both cases,
the metropolitan hotel becomes an assembly of programs and
functions, to the point that the buildings themselves no longer
have a specific program or function. Both Ungers’s and OMA’s
projects were organized as two-part buildings: a plinth that
contains public facilities and organizes access to the subway and
trains, with towers for apartments and hotel rooms on top of the
plinth. This composition was also tested in several projects done
by Ungers’s students (for example, Wolf Meyer-Christian’s proposal
for a multifunctional housing slab on Kaiserdamm, done in
1966), and has a precedent in the concept of the Hochhausstadt
(vertical city) elaborated by Ludwig Hilberseimer in 1924. In his  

65 
 
“ideal” project for a capitalist Groszstadt, Hilberseimer proposed
to superimpose the main functions of the city within mixed-use
city blocks rather than separating them in different zones of the
city. The result was a city made by endlessly repeating a single
building type consisting of vertically stacked programs. Hilberseimer’s
proposal, with hotel rooms as the main metropolitan living
cell and a grid of transportation systems, accommodated the
main driver of the capitalist metropolis: the mobility of workers.
For Hilberseimer, mobility was more than a functional problem:
it also embodied the radical process of social and cultural uprooting
that created anonymous and generic space. Consequently, the
architecture of the Hochhausstadt was a generic form made by
the endless repetition of the same elements.
A similar formal and programmatic vocabulary is present in
many of Ungers’s own projects and in those done by his students
in Berlin, including the proposals presented in his 1968 course,
“Berlin 1995.”41 Yet for Ungers, and later for OMA, the concept
of the “vertical city” was conveyed not by the horizontally extensive
and repeatable system of Hilberseimer’s Hochhausstadt, but
rather by islands of intensity—collective forms of living—that
pierced the endlessness of the individualized metropolis. The
tension between the uprooting forces of the metropolis and an
architecture that accommodates these forces characterizes both
Ungers’s and early OMA urban design. This theme is expressed in
two OMA projects that, while they can be interpreted as an outgrowth
of Ungers’s architecture, are the starting point of Koolhaas
and Zenghelis’s “metropolitan architecture”: Zenghelis’s Hotel
Sphinx (1975) and Koolhaas’s Welfare Palace Hotel (1976).42
Both of these projects developed the typology of the hotel as
the ultimate carrier of “cityness” within the agonized urbanity of
1970s New York. In both cases the building consists of a two-part
composition: a base containing collective facilities, and towers 
containing hotel rooms and more private shared facilities. For
OMA, this composition was meant to replicate, at a “miniature”
scale, the form of New York City with its repetition of towers and
their endless fenestration. Following Ungers’s method, in which
the most controversial aspects of a site are idealized as the main
drivers for a project, both the Hotel Sphinx, a social housing
project proposed for the then-derelict Times Square, and the
Welfare Palace Hotel, a social housing hotel proposed within a
larger competition entry for the renewal of Welfare Island (now
called Roosevelt Island), addressed New York’s period of crisis by
exaggerating and compressing into finite architectural projects
the two faces of the capitalist city: extreme individual anonymity
and a seemingly limitless potential for encounter.
Following in Ungers’s steps, these two projects embraced the
city even in its most wild and dangerous manifestations. Reacting
against Rowe’s skepticism toward modernist urban design, the
OMA projects, like Ungers’s Tiergarten Viertel and Lichterfelde,
took on the modernist project’s optimism at the prospect of
designing the city, yet departed from modernism’s comprehensive
planning to propose a strategic retreat into a composition
of finite, limited forms. The artifacts that dominate the derelict
landscapes of the Tiergarten Viertel, Times Square, and Welfare
Island predate Koolhaas’s summary of this approach, which is
contained in his most important theoretical manifesto, “Bigness”
(1994). 
 
 
 

66 
 
  
5.12
Wolf Meyer-Christian, student project for an apartment
building in Kaiserdamm, Berlin, 1966 (from O. M.
Ungers, Schnellstrasse und Gebдude, Berlin, 1966). 

67