BC architects & studies — The Act of Building

The Journal of Architecture, 2016

The place of technical discourse in studio projects has been much debated. The studio is the primary location to engage requisite construction knowledge creatively, in which assumptions about materials could be transformed into tangible investigations with the skill and freedom to reinvent and invent. The paper will investigate the relationship of the craftsmanship of familiar construction methods to a broader context of fabrication and new material possibilities, in order to discuss how construction technique could be drawn into the conceptual centre of design studio projects. How the action of challenging construction conventions with the wide range of available technical advances could converse with the specificity of construction to its local conditions of building and place. Using some case studies, it will propose the value of construction to explore the broader conditions of architecture including its physical and critical topographies. Construction teaching in the studio will be considered in terms of its interrogation and description, as the basis for a discourse, using previous studio experiments. How can construction be developed in the studio so that it is embedded in the conceptual development of student projects? How can studio construction investigations develop connections to place? In what ways can construction knowledge enable innovation without resisting the value of traditional material culture?

2022 - 'Rethinking Designing the Social. A Journey from Women's Studies in Architecture towards a Contemporary 'Vitruvius''', 2022

Prewar functionalism, postwar humanism and recent post-humanism share a belief in Designing the Social. In the 1980s, Women's Studies in Architecture, TU Delft, which arose from the second feminist wave, questioned this idea of social engineering. Architecture and urban design may offer many possibilities, but will never really fit social ambitions, let alone be socially sustainable. The exemplary history of housing and urban design in the Netherlands-showing both mainstream and experimental projects-offers us that insight. This is due to the different pace of change of the spatial and the social. Moreover, the social, the feminist demands, turned out to be rather diverse: a variety of interests is at stake. Hence the epistemological challenge was taken up to systematically consider, on the one hand, what architecture and urbanism are capable of, and, on the other hand, what is meant by women's interests. Inspired by anthropologists, historians, and architectural theorists, Women's Studies has proposed an approach in which the habitat, architecture and city, and the habitus, the doings of people in rituals that take place in the home and the city, are analyzed side by side as independent fields of science. Architectural-historical and urban-anthropological studies, of Simon Stevin's 17th century architectural treatise and the everyday events of the Roman neighborhood of Testaccio respectively, have subsequently led to the understanding that matter and empirical knowledge play a crucial role in the ways in which habitat and habitus interact. This reveals the contours of the designer as reflective practitioner, able, like a contemporary Vitruvius, to grasp the material and the cultural in their mutual dependence.

Jörg Fuhrmann M.A. / Kreuzlingen – Switzerland / independant scholar Building „objects of desire“ – workplace studies and reflections in the world of architects. Contribution for the IIEMCA conference in Kolding/Syddansk university /Denmark 8/ 2015 „LIVING THE MATERIAL WORLD“ Like all design work the creating of houses is a multifold technical-artistic task involving organized ways of designing, planning and construction in teams. The practice of architects is shown in more or less elaborated drafts, plans, models of houses, instructions, explanations and talks of the office team, in communicative exchange with clients , administrators, journalists and also in argumentative sociological interviews. The process of creating these architectonic objects can be depicted as a stepwise and reflexive enterprise. In answering the needs of the clients and in fulfilling technical and administrative regulations for the object to be designed, a process of negotiation and justification in regard to different solutions for the design problem takes place, depending on certain „conceptions“, brought to light during the ongoing work/talk. The work of design and construction is mostly executed in more or less implicit ways of routinized practices and recipes. Technical skills and judgements of taste as a result of longterm professional technical/artistic training are shown on every professional occasion (for some visible at once, for others – „lay members“ /clients not within their grasp). The making /perceiving of and speaking about objects should be conceived as intertwined activity in the tradition of Heidegger and Merleau Ponty. The detailed and exact carrying out of architectonic projects implies specific jugdements, ranging from basic concepts of nonprofessional members up to sophisticated descriptions of architectonic insiders („houses like brutal boxes“/ „ play of the light on the blank concrete “- „ these windows don’t allow any privacy“/ „the transparency of space“). Background expectancies are brought to light in discourses of conflict and in reflective talks, which is also the case in interrogative interviews. These refer to professional genres of architectonic accounting practices : i.e. when a special style has to be promoted - in architectural , lifestyle- and popular journals). Here the term of innovation as an ongoing process of emerging ideas, trends and new technical possibilities embedded in the discourse of „social change“ comes into play. In my presentation I confront the shopfloor communication concerning specific projects in architectural offices with interrogative interviews of architects searching for „core concepts“ of the respective actors and hints to latent social topics. The reflective turn towards practice stems on one hand from issues in the everyday practice (like conflicts with clients about questions of taste and questions concerning the budget, restrictions and regulations in the public sphere, competitive conflicts with colleagues); on the other hand it stems from the deep need to justify one’s own work and to ground it in the architectonic tradition. Looking back on the chain of objects so far produced is a sense- making process within the genre of the interview, where the issues are dealt with in an argumentative form. Argumentation and reflection in the dialogue depend on the „openess of thought“, which means, that two speakers are entering a platform, which enables them to share their understanding and to deepen it in ways of critical reflection of the ongoing enterprise. My analysis of the material combines/contrasts the practical work with the reflection work of practicioners and my own interpretive/intervening thoughts about the daily enterprise of creating houses as good dwellings, as objects of desire. References: Alan Blum: The imaginative structure of the city 2004, MQUP, Toronto Kenneth Liberman: More studies in ethnomethodology ( chapter 8: the phenomenology of coffee tasting, lessons in practical objectivity) 2013, SUNY PRESS, New York Eric Livingston: Ethnographics of reason 2008, Ashgate, London Peter.G. Rowe: Design Thinking,1987, MIT, Cambridge Bruno Latour: Existenzweisen 2014, Suhrkamp, Berlin Robert Mugerauer: Interpreting enviroments,1996, University of Texas Press, Austin Chr. Norberg-Schulz: Logik der Baukunst 1980, Viehweg, Braunschweig Donald Schon: The reflective practitioner,1983, Basic books, N.Y.

FOOTPRINT

Around 1968 we saw the birth of a new architectural theory as the conjunction of architectural history and politically engaged architectural criticism. Not the aesthetics of architecture, but architecture itself in its structural relations with social life became the focus of attention. As a result of this development, it is no longer possible to study architectural history without a critical reflection on the method of the study itself and without a grade of interdisciplinarity. Traditional methods of historiography and iconography have been replaced by new approaches configured by psychoanalysis, deconstruction, cultural studies etc. Appropriation has become the proof of criticality both in architectural theory and in design; however, the understanding of the concepts and methods of other disciplines is basically metaphorical. The problem for a school of architecture lies not in the ‘criticality’ of the kind of architectural theory we described as emerging from the spirit of 1968,...

2006

Perspecta 38: Architecture After All explores the ever-widening array of political, social, technological, and economic influences in architecture today. Many leading designers and thinkers have turned away from the ideological hegemony of critical theory towards a rediscovered focus on praxis as a means of conceptual positioning.

2020

Book Brief With the increasing specialisation in the process of contemporary building production, the value and the role of architects have come into question in construction discourse. From literature about architects losing leadership position in the industry to others arguing that architects must follow the more specialised members of the building team, this book is illustrating the architects' point of view in this debate, showing one important dimension of the story of building construction. The book is a story about the contemporary architectural profession, in which it acts as the protagonist in the form of an imaginary city called Practiceopolis. Practiceopolis is a fictive city-state, located within a union of states representing different members in the construction domain that together form 'Constructopolisthe Confederation of the Building Industry'. The novel narrates quasi-realistic stories that exaggerate the architectural 'everyday' and the tacit, in order to make it prominent and tangible. They depict and dramatise the value conflicts between the different cultures of practising architecture and between the architectural profession and other members of the building industry as political conflicts occurring around the future of Practiceopolis. The book uses this metaphorical world to examine different ideologies at work among architects and other members of the construction industry and provoke questions about the largely tacit assumptions which inform them. The novel ends in the tradition of dystopian worlds common in a certain strand of graphic novels with near-future speculation that extrapolates present contemporary conditions to warn against a substantial change to the architectural profession.

2009

The Journal of Architecture

2013

acknowledgements and introduction foreword hélène frichot immediate architectural interventions? peter kjaer questioning strong discourses: the liai alberto altés arlandis and oren lieberman immediate architectural interventions, durations and effects: 29 apparatuses, things and people in the making of the city and the world alberto altés arlandis and oren lieberman from berlin to the polar circle: a conversation with axel timm and francesco apuzzo from raumlabor karin berggren and alberto altés arlandis situated knowledge: the laboratory of immediate architectural intervention roemer van toorn sites, agencies and matters of concern alberto altés arlandis, oren lieberman and liai students against critical content: transversality and the intervention susan kelly rethinking public practices through collective pedagogies and spatial politics javier rodrigo montero at the edge of antagonism: exploring the possibilities and limits of dissensus in the laboratory of immediate architectural intervention aida sánchez de serdio art, or developing amphibians per nilsson sharing, displacing, caring: towards an ecology of contribution alberto altés arlandis contributors and image credits intravention, durations, effects immediate architectural interventions, duration and effects-alberto altés arlandis and oren lieberman