The Middle Typology: Public Housing for China’s New Generation
Hanwen Xu
TERM II
SCALES: FROM THE ROOM TO THE CITY
Re-configuring Territories
Alison Bartlett
Watery Threshold
Amy Brar
Rural Dream: Spatial Translation of Open Space and Community Autonomy
Kaiwen Chen
Between Urban Planning and Megastructure Utopia
Fiorenza Giometti
Domesticity from Left to Right
Sahba Mansourardestani
Societies Against the State / Cooperation vs Fragmentation
Kayen Montes
Culture, Creativity, Rebirth
Daixue Shen
Centralized Form and the Rebuild of Collective
Hanwen Xu
TERM I STUDIO PARTS, UNITS AND GROUPS: ANALYSIS OF ARCHITECTURAL PRECEDENTS
Taught MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design (Projective Cities)
In Term 1 of Projective Cities, students investigate different organizational, formal, programmatic, and material particularities that define the Architecture of Collective Living through series of historic and contemporary case studies, allowing the framing of a design approach and development of. A common theme is established as a starting point for each individual research agenda.
The different political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions are reflected in a number of parameters that emerge by a series of conflictual aims and ambitions. Different concepts of social, familial and gender relations, management and decision-making protocols, procurement models, public and private development strategies define the diagrammatic and formal relations of how we live together. All these points define a network of diagrammatic relations that emerge in a series of conflicts and their interrelated scales through which housing and the city are conceptualised: the scale of architecture, its specificity and typological analysis, the urban scale, its configuration, limits, and centralities but also the political and socio-economic realities that organise it, the national scale and the establishment of a citizenry, and finally the regional scale and its economic and geopolitical realities.
Architecture of Collective Living therefore opens up a discussion of how the urban can be understood through specific architecture and its design, and how its effect as an urban armature is not only of spatial importance, but equally organised by larger political and social discourses.
The spatial organization of the Architecture of Collective Living is reflected on a series of informal and formal relations between subjects, spaces, structural and non-structural elements, objects, and protocols of use and occupation. Any form of collective living is characterised by this multiscalar network of power relations that is specific and particular to each social group and collective that lives together. A series of asymmetries and conflicts emerge that require a resolution framework or at least protocols of conduct. What architecture does is to set up some of these parameters, mainly the definition of units, the relations between parts and the way groups of spaces and people are organised.
Architectural typologies of collective living are shaped by these distinct social diagrams but could vary spatially and formally.
Typically, collective living organises part to whole relations that set levels of interaction between individuals: rooms, dwelling units, horizontal and vertical circulations, spaces of collective activities and programmes, complexes, and larger groupings. Distinct types such as courtyards, towers, linear blocks and composite and hybrid types organize the ways and the spaces these different interactions could occur.
Collective living and its politically, historically, socially, economically, and culturally specific characteristics have the capacity to challenge the fundamental diagram of modernity: domesticity. The domestic is a spatial and social diagram that sets very specific hierarchies and relations :gender, age, and programmatic. Today, the single-family dwelling is challenged by the realities of contemporary urban environments. New subjectivities have emerged: many live outside family structures, a younger generation shares housing and working spaces, an increasingly precarious and migrant working force requires short term, serviced accommodation, elderly population has become more present and active in cities across the world.
The reality of the real estate market, the available design tools and building methods and standards are not necessarily reflecting upon the above transformations. Often, the challenges of new forms of collective living are tackled as a financial problem, or an issue of density and lifestyle. However, historically collective living and forms of living together has had the capacity of opening up social and spatial imagination. Today, there is an array of incredibly interesting experimentation in collective living protocols and architectural configurations, such as new forms of cooperatives that have proposed new types of collective living units, such as the ‘cluster apartment’. Moreover, public administrations and private stakeholders are seeking new ideas that would allow for an imaginative transformation of how people live in cities, in urban and rural areas across the world.
Thus, one of the challenges arising from the Architecture of Collective Living is how architecture can respond to changing political, cultural, economic, and urban contexts and how to propose new effective design ideas and models. What is the agency of architecture? How do we develop a pedagogical model that
allows for a more effective relation between academic institutions and practice?
Based on the studied type, the identified formative diagrams, and typological transformations, a short design exercise is proposed by each student. Learning from the case studies, each has selected his/her own target site and will formulate relevant research questions, to address a project for a (new) form of collective living for specific subjects. The synthesis of historical analyses, their embedded social and familial relations, modes of production, and forms of association, in relation to specific sociopolitical context of the chosen site, have generated a frame of relations, and organizational diagrams that are developed into a series of projective drawings, models, writings, and moving images.
What Once Was Monumental
Alison Bartlett
The Act of Obelisking explores the territoriality of the obelisk by, firstly, shifting the conceptual interrogation from the obelisk-object to the obelisking-process; and secondly, by means of a combined method of writing, re-writing and re-drawing specific references as evidence of obelisk-ing as figures of territory.
Formally, the obelisk can be defined as a standing stone, a monolith — a single quarried stone of Aswan granite. In objective historical terms, the obelisk is burdened with appropriation. They are objects of monumental colonization and immigrants in their own right, seeking refuge — seeking an existential grounding — in places that are not their own. It must be emphasized that in conceptualizing the obelisk as an affectual-thing, which serves as an intermediary in the process of recalibration, its history of appropriation is critically considered as not to undermine the integrity that collective memory holds in connecting temporal boundaries within a single (and assembly of) urban artefacts amongst the city.
While honouring the obelisk’s history, this project explores a further appropriation of the obelisk, albeit this time semantically, into a verb: To obelisk (v.) is the process of negotiating and recalibrating territory — transcending its confines as a 3-dimensional object — into an affectual-thing, what Heidegger describes as concrete space, allowing one to identify with the environment as meaningful in the figuration of territory.
Right: Connecting Axes in Rome
ESQUILINO LATERAN
QUIRINAL SALLUSTIANO
SOLARE MATTEIANO
MONTE PINCIO DOGALI
POPE PIUS
POPE
POPE
POPE PIUS
POPE PIUS
RODOLFO LANCIANI
QUIRINAL SALLUSTIANO
SOLARE MATTEIANO
MONTE PINCIO DOGALI
POPE PIUS
POPE
POPE PIUS
POPE PIUS
RODOLFO LANCIANI
Bathing Reformation
Amy Brar
CONTROL & CLEANSE: AN ANALYSIS OF PUBLIC BATH HOUSES IN NEW YORK CITY (1890-1915)
The municipal bath house typology of New York City was a catalyst for the shower apparatus to permeate the domestic realm. Prior to public baths in New York, Austria and Germany, the shower or ‘rain bath’ was primarily used in prisons, mental asylums and military barracks on an organized scale. With the grid of Manhattan as its stage, the rain bath, i.e. shower, proved its spatial, temporal and technological efficiency. The standardized model of the New York public bath, with its stripped down interiors, ordered and policed space, was aimed at economic and behavioral efficiency. Through normalizing hygiene protocols, the bath house project was an oppressive tool in regulating the health of the working class through propaganda and moral pressure. By ensuring the collective health and sanitation of the working class, the bath houses were a means of safeguarding productivity of the metropolis.
Alternatively, the municipal bath house type can also be viewed as a social equalizer. Through the provision of this bathing apparatus, a shift in hygiene rituals and needs became inevitable. As a result, showers and toilets were being rapidly retrofitted inside domestic space that previously lacked such facilities – bringing levels of privacy regarding hygiene across socio-economic classes to a more equal footing.
The municipal bath project reached its peak from 18901915, after which the structures went into disuse. The ephemerality of the type might recede its existence to the shadows
of collective memory, however, the Municipal Bath Houses of New York played a key role in the transformation of bathing rituals in the lives of the working class in the modern metropolis, having rippling effects on domesticity.
The design exercise in Barcelona extracts formal and functional aspects of the bath house typology and transforms them for the context of the 21st century on Mont Montjuïc, in an attempt to re-imagine long established protocols and forms of collective bathing.
50’X100’ Model Typlogy for Municipal Bath Houses in New York City
Pitkins
DESIGN PROPOSITION
POOLS MT. MONTJUIC BARCELONA
Pool B:View to Changing and Shower Areas
PROPOSITION
DESIGN
PUBLIC POOLS MT. MONTJUIC BARCELONA
Pool B: Changing and Shower Areas
Kaiwen Chen
THE CITY'S PERPETUITY
Historically, urban planning was viewed as a top-down definition of life patterns, and was viewed as an objective instrument for the manifestation of kings' power in ancient times. This approach to urban planning evolved into a modernist view of cities as machines. Jane Jacobs claimed that "Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody." However, with the concept of sustainability increasingly being applied to contemporary cities, it is debatable whether urban planning has become completely out of step with the current context of urban development.
This research argues that the concept of The City's Perpetuity(sustainability) is still based on traditional planning approaches, in which spontaneous and continuous growth within a defined framework is a critical factor in determining urban continuity.
Therefore, focusing on the group life of hutongs in traditional Beijing neighbourhoods, the study examines the relationship between residents' lives and the original neighbourhood form in the archive of historical trajectories. The dual socio-spatial evolution reveals the typological links of group continuity. One could argue that the daily life of groups are another factor that influences contemporary urban planning.
The Barcelona design makes an attempt to apply the evolutionary typology of multi-group interaction to the contemporary neighbourhood framework. Thus, a community mixer is used to examine how spaces framed through the lens of daily life can serve as a bridge between different scales of community organisation.
Hutong Evolution: Mixed Collective Living
STAGE 1 COMPLETE COURTYARD (1700)
Feudal Ritual - Guozijian Block
STAGE 2 "DANWEI" COURTYARD (1960)
Commune - Fangjia Hutong Factory
STAGE 3 FRAGMENTED NETWORK (2018) Elder's Community - Fangjia Hutong
DESIGN PROPOSITION
Community condenser in Barcelona
SCENARIOS FOR DAILY RITUAL
Threshold in different space
Profitable Rituals of the Body
Fiorenza Giometti
Necroeconomics is the process of putting death in economic terms, and it just so happens to be one of the main agents of contemporaneity. In terms of space, the research focuses on the Rural Cemetery of the 19th Century identifying in this model the historically first large-scale answer to the semantic couple mortality / monetary. Moreover, the act of disposing of death is deeply interrelated with notions of profit and urban, it is a mirror of speculative and lucrative models that had led to the creation of the first public parks, and the perception of green as affordable leisure.
The Rural cemetery was a strategy aimed to abandon the overcrowded European church graveyards of the city-center, one of the principal causes of lack of urban hygiene and spread of disease. The operation was in favour of a healthier urban environment, and the increasing population number required to take possession of big plots outside the city walls, privileging pre-existent lands (former fields or private parks) for the new buryal grounds. Therefore, the topography of the Rural cemetery is naturally undulating, and this characteristic was exploited by architects for creating hills and suggestive views of the city. Because of this, the enclosure had the function of containing walls, but also the scope of isolating the viewer from the context, visible just from the top of the hills. The artifice of designing views and paths, creating a heterotopia with its own rules, determined the hierarchy of the internal distribution.
The initial lines of these parks were curvy, inspired by the English Garden, but growing in the next century, a more straight and functional line, adaptable to the overfilling of burials was developed. Nowadays these spaces are mainly overdensified by graves, mausoleums, and memorials, the main streets are paved, the secondaries and thirds are extremely narrow and muddy, while
trees are less than the original design.
However, the original idea was that every citizen would have had the right to be buried regardless of race, religion, and class. The first Riral Cemetery, Pére Lachaise in Paris, was wanted by Napoleon, and from an administrative point of view, the cemetery is still public, but profit-oriented.
Analyzing grids, units, walls, and green areas of eight Rural Cemetery examples, the attempt is the one of identifying a repeatable typology, later challenged and applied with the design of three gymnasium projects in Barcelona. In fact the modern gymnasium and the Rural cemetery are historically born simultaneously, during the analytical research ubderlines hidden similarities, while the project challenges the typology by proposing a different function but a common process of Ritualization converging into the body unit.
The investigation questions the notions of open and public spaces, limits, and bodily rituals. Rethinking collective death systems as a model for collective living systems is the principal aim of the design proposal.
Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart, Pére Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, France, 1804
David Bates Douglas, Green-wood Cemetery, New York, USA, 1838
Ambrosio and Bernardo O’Higgins, General Cemetery, Santiago, Chile, 1821
Mezarje Stadion, Sarajevo, Bosnia ed Erzegovina, 1992
Charles James Blomfield, Highgate Cemetery, London, UK, 1839
Niiza Shiei Boen, Municipal Cemetery, Saitama, Japan
1.
1:5000
MORPHOLOGY OF DEATH _ Nolli Plan of Pére Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, France
Réunion
Porte Gambetta 1866
Portesdes Amendiers 1855
1:50
ARCHITECTURE OF GYM _ Walls and Portals, Barcelona 3 Design Proposals
SPORT CENTER
Trading Spaces or Space-Building Trade?
Sahba Mansourardestani
Trade was one of the first peaceful human interactions. Man’s need for a social life led him to interact with other human beings for survival. Centuries ago, humans sometimes traveled great distances to supply daily needs. The misplaced nature and place of this supply and demand were gradually incorporated into the fixed structure of architecture, and the life of human interaction flourished. The “Eastern Bazaar” is one of the first typologies that arose from the need to continue human trade in a safe environment. Eastern Bazaars gradually captured and expanded the heart of the cities.This architectural typology became intertwined with the lives of its inhabitants and shaped their needs, such as education, worship, hygiene, and justice. The Eastern Bazaar, with its inclusion of various sub-typologies, such as mosques and schools, is embedded in the rituals of human life. The following pages are a collection of typological research on early trading space and the creation of permanent trading space. The Isfahan Bazaar is also examined, one of the most important examples of the Eastern Bazaar, as well as design proposals based on the Bazaar concept.
Right: Typological Study
Typological Study of Isfahan Bazaar
Kayen Montes
discotheques, which is done mainly through a typological research, which has provided this essay with insight into physical evidence, in the context of Italian radical designs, on the initial moments of the architectural typology as such. Second, by looking at the body from a sociological perspective, as a non-verbal form of communication, by studying it as a ritual in relation to the spaces where the performance takes place in and creating a bridge with the technological mediators that allowed for these to happen. But most importantly, it became essential to look at the constant evolution of the notion of body(ies), as a result of its interaction with the discotheque. Disco Rules OK
The discotheque is visualized as a container of enjoyment for the reproduction of subjectivities and later administration of the communities they serve. In a similar fashion to any normative cultural centre, social club, sports clubs, etc. A new genre of leisure architecture made its appearance–during the late ‘60s in northern Italy–would create a spatial-creation logic that would repeat itself in the following years. The discotheque, a space-event that is produced using different mechanisms; some via spaceenhancing tools and devices, others purely by means of social contracts, put in place to regulate the thresholds and the audiences that make use of such spaces. These night “clubs” would become a platform at the threshold of normalized social conventions, not entirely detached from these, but always functioning as a forefront platform where communities could reinvent themselves. I will therefore argue that the discotheque in- troduces a new utopian space where social conventions can be disregarded–if only for a night–giving way to explore new ways of living, relating with each other, and transforming the way we experience our bodies in relation to the physical world that surrounds us.
Ultimately, the encounter of instances where dance venues acted as an outlet for self and collective expres- sion–particularly in moments of collective crises or socio-political reactions to the normative structures in place–prompted a series of questions: Why do we dance collectively?Why have marginalized communities gravitated towards joieusse spaces of dance? What is the correlation between these performances, the architectural or urban condition in which they take place? Is there an underlying musical genre that links them? Ultimately encouraging to approach the act of collective dancing from two separate perspectives.
First, by looking at the architectural elements around
DEVICES
L’Altro Mondo - Rimini
COVA
Barcelona.
Coexisting with the current programme on site—the parking lot—the project provides a single structure, a point of access that establishes the beginning of the journey into the disco.
This structure doubles in function and appearance, on the outside it is presented as a public restroom but works also as a threshold from where users access the disco.
Its disguise acts as a metaphor for its main function, which is to provide a buffer between exterior and interior, a safe gate where users can decide who and how they will enter this space
use diagram
Movies show us a frame of experience which appears as close as possible to the reality by craft making, stage setting, cutting and re-editing, we as the audience can understand how film studio works in the historical time from the film scenery in Hugo, but beyond that is the reality of the actual production process happening inside Shepperton Studio. By studying film studios, the exploration will start looking for the relationship between the real and surreal, architecture and film sets, city and film production, and people and cinema.
“Behind every moving images of architecture there is an image of real life” The process of filmmaking brings a new mental production which only settles in personal experience, or a logic of emotion. (Pallasmaa 2007)
The design iterations provide a new form to hold public events and also uses as a city infrastructure. Each of the designs consider the time and movement following the previous conclusion of film studios study, and trying to re-define the daily activity happening in the design to apply to other types of building. Additionally, the design is performing different senses of collective living according to the unique working schedule of a film studio for both the citizens and tourists, local students or global investors.
Film Studios as the Portrait of the City
Daixue Shen
Spatial Analysis of film studio and designed space
ATOMIZED INDIVIDUAL
Unlike their parents, Chinese youth who did not experience the collective living of the planned economy show individualistic tendencies after leaving university in the 2000s. At the stage of transformation from students in university to humans in society, they are separated from the original collective. The youths are in the process of joining a new collective (this collective may be their company, family, and friends, rather than the collective of the temporary social housing), making them more similar to atomized individuals. Therefore, the public activities in such social housing are restrained and moderated in the design.
On the other hand, this typology of social housing was conceived as a temporary dwelling from the beginning of design. In the case of Longnan Garden, the designer even considered the possibility of converting social housing into other types of buildings after 20 years.
Thus, the social housing is considered by designers, managers and residents as a transient living machine designed to help the residents through a crisis state in their life (i.e. the transition from student to social person). In Michelle Foucault’s Of Other Spaces, such social housing can be regarded as a crisis heterotopia. The purpose of this machine (the housing project) is to build bonds between these youths and the society, rather than collective bonds within the transient collective.
The Middle Typology: Public Housing for China's New Generation Hanwen Xu
Right: Design Proposal of Public Housings for New Generation in Barcelona
Two-bedrooms Unit, Floor 2, 5
Floor 3, 6
Floor 3, 6
Two-bedrooms Unit, Floor 4, 7 the Cooperation
TERM II STUDIO SCALES:
FROM THE ROOM TO THE CITY
Taught MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design (Projective Cities)
The assumption underlying architectural urbanism is, that an interdisciplinary relation between architecture, urban design, and urban planning can be understood through multi-scalar reasoning. Furthermore, the analysis of architecture’s formative diagrams in Studio I is seen as a prerequisite to an operative understanding of built forms within the city through a typal and typological analysis.
Thereby questions emerging from the Architecture of Collective Living, provide a typological and intellectual framework to study this relationship in Term II. Consequently, Term II builds on the previously introduced concept of formative diagrams in relation to fundamental types as the basis to analyse models of collective living and forms of sharing, while the idea of type and typology is expanded to the study of the city.
Studio II also introduces students to the conventions of urban planning, its parameters, processes, and limits. Understanding fundamental types as providing basic organisational, structural, and tectonic elements of the city, and by drawing a deliberate relationship between the scales of building types and city, architectural design becomes operative at different scales. This means that the hierarchies, limits, and differentiations of building types and their structural and organisational diagrams can be seen to partially control urban development. In this sense, architectural and urban plans are intelligible as formal and theoretical products of disciplinary activity as much as the collective outcome of socio-political forces.
The city, in other words, is defined by typological conflicts and transformations that arise when types encounter a specific context, become materially realised. By uncovering these conflicts and transformations of built form and the necessary scalar negotiations and translations, a specific idea of the city emerges that has intrinsic formal, spatial, and social relationships.
The studio begins with the selection and analysis of an existing or proposed urban plans for a contemporary city or a region in which the building types chosen in Studio I play a significant and formative role.
Following the basic analysis of the urban plan, the relationship of
housing types to its conceptualisation, organisation, and formation is studied. How does the generality of type adapt to socio-cultural, economic, and political contexts? Within this study, the question whether a typological transformation results from a typological conflict, created by an insertion into a context, or a strategic argument and its possibilities within a context is emphasised.
Finally, the design exercises aim to explore cross-scalar relationships between the living units, urban compound (block), neighbourhood, and the city. Therefore, the two fundamental parameters are selecting a reference city and identifying a subject group, responding to which the formative diagram of the design exercise would be generated. The designs not only respond to the limitations, and constraints, but also inform the projects; addressing inherent conflicts, power-relations, social challenges, and environmental issues. The briefs are positioned within the historical and contemporary case studies that have been thoroughly researched by each student.
Re-configuring Territories
Alison Bartlett
Re-configuring Territories is an investigation into thresholds –specifically their socio-spatial consequences, analyzed through the architectural artefacts of the master urban and building plans of Hansaviertel. Our conception of ‘space’ is often generically divided into that of public and private – that respectively carry the appendage of territorial claims – propagated by architectural interventions, symbolic of the corresponding ideologies and systems of economy. The following study seeks – not clarity – but further entanglement, to loosen this dichotomy with the purpose of re-conceptualizing thresholds (and therefore territories) not as a bounded, static and profit-exploitive outcomes but as a mutable and questioning process of elusive gradients over consequential lines.
Where a territory is not defined by boundaries, nor is it a product of territoriality – that which insinuates maintenance or control of territory – it achieves not a product but a means, that of territorializing: a mutable and fluid perpetuity transcending static, politically-profitably-calculated, bounded and defined space. Territorializing the urban through individual or collective behaviour enables territory to be mutated, transformed, questioned and re-territorialized through the actions of states and people. Pre-war neighbourhoods reinforce an idea, rather of territoriality: defining boundaries, such as that which divides public and private space into nested hierarchies of inner-cities. Hansaviertel however in the now anxious but hopeful post-war era, desired the radical (epistemologically, a return to the root –the origin).
Founded on a curated selection of histories that enabled a clean slate, a tabula rasa of the consequential WWII destruction, the urban planning of Hansaviertel came to symbolically represent a new set of societal values and ideologies of self-management,
autonomy – what Lefebvre would call territorial autogestion, in the pursuit of progress and freedom potentiated in The City of Tomorrow.
Right: ANALYSIS _ Hansaviertel Masterplan Studying The Ground Floor Plan Relationships
inner-courtyards
ANALYSIS _ Urban grain of north-west Kaisariani 1:6000
PROPOSAL IN-SITU
Connecting Surface That Re-conceptualizes Private & Public Spaces
PROPOSAL AS AN OBJECT
Connecting Surface That Re-conceptualizes Private & Public Spaces
Watery Threshold
Amy Brar
AN INQUIRY INTO THE POLITICS OF WATER INFRASTRUCTURE
The Regent’s Canal, constructed between 1812-1820, was proposed purely as a means of transporting goods between two terminals, the Paddington Basin and Limehouse on the Thames River. It was meant to serve as a catalyst in the pre-existing industrial trade routes between England’s midlands, London and the British Colonies. However, warehouses and factories emerged along the edges of this canal, resulting in a specific liminality associated with the Canal’s edge, producing a gradient of sociospatial relationships in its vicinity and the wider territory. Similar to store fronts on main avenues, gaining facade space along the canal became desirable for industrial companies, so they could access raw material and goods from the narrowboats directly, but also dispose of waste generated into the canal flowing towards the Thames. The canal became the industrial backyard of the city, characterized by pollution, noise, factories, resulting in an undesirable watery edge.
By studying the Regent’s Canal in the 19th century, this study aims to demonstrate how the construction of a controlled urban spine of water functions as a key ordering device in the sociospatial relations of a city, producing a specific urban plan in 19th century London. Following Bruno Latour’s ‘actor-network’ theory, the canal is viewed as a crucial actor in the dialogue of sociological layers of the city.1 Through a tripartite lens of analysis: ownership, ecology and perception around water infrastructure, the research provides a foundation to springboard towards reimagining spatial conditions and human interaction with existing water systems in the 21st century through the design exercise for Kaisariani in Athens.
1. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford Univ. Press, 2008).
HYDRO-FOLLIES
Design proposal across Polykatoikias in Kaisariani, Athens.
SECTION THROUGH THE CITY ROAD BASIN OF REGENT'S CANAL (1890s) middle-class
POVERTY LEVEL ANALYSIS AROUND THE CITY ROAD BASIN OF REGENT'S CANAL (1890s)
LAND USE ANALYSIS
THE CITY ROAD BASIN OF REGENT'S CANAL (1890s)
LAND
ALONG THE REGENT’S CANAL (1830)
Kaiwen Chen
Rural Dream investigates the organisation of rural settlements in urban contexts, with the central aim of redefining how collective community space is appropriated, completing the translation of rural imagery in different contexts. The research reveals the cognitive transformation of privatisation in the development of urbanisation, moving beyond the idyllic pastoral imaginary to demonstrate the shared ownership patterns of privatisation in the context of collective living. Therefore, starting from the English enclosure and garden city movements, the research explores the ideal community model sought by the Hampstead Garden Suburb in the industrial cities of the late 19th century, emphasising the right to use open space, a central element of housing, for the social activities of different classes of inhabitants; then, applying the concept of community settlement In the neighbourhood of Kaisariani, a neighbourhood in Athens, the sustainability of collective private space in the community is tested in response to the strengthening of private boundaries and the contraction of the community in the transition from refugee community to private housing development.
Ultimately, the research asserts that private property rights need to be revisited in a community context, not only from a speculative perspective but also with a focus on the possibilities of collective private space. This challenges the rigid boundaries between the private and the public, especially in urban planning models based on functional divisions, and thus broaden the discourse - a new view of community self-governance planning to read the city.
Rural Dream: Spatial Translation of Open Space and Community Autonomy
TYPOLOGY OF OPEN SPACE
Building Groups in Hampstead Garden Suburb
Culs-de-sac for artisan
Collective courtyard for middle class
Collective structure for single women
COLLECTIVE PRIVATE SPACE USE SCENARIOS Cooperation models for private territories
Type I. 1-storey housing block (H-block)
Type II. 2-storey building blocks (enclosed blocks)
Type III. Public Housing Block
Between Urban Planning and Megastructure Utopia
Fiorenza Giometti
The research intention started with the desire to depict a constellation of architectonical answers, or spatial reactions, to the change of the council housing regulations in Italy.
The parallelism between policy and architecture, focuses firstly on the study of Italian legislative history of Urbanism, especially from the point of view of administration and scale of planning. Then it cross-reads the regulations collecting examples of Italian public housing in the decades of the Past- war. In the 80s Italy faced a progressive slow down in terms of public housing construction, while the ones realized are anonymous, in terms of architecture, and urban settlement.
The research questions the topic of the periphery, correlated with the one of mass housing, Studying two settlements: Corviale in Rome, and Fossolo in Bologna.
The former one, in particular, has been identified by the critic as Megastructure, apparently against Manfredo Tafuri’s belief. The research frames a discussion about the role of the utopia in the construction of public housing, as well as the role of the architect in the development of the project.
With the Design proposal, an infrastructural system inserted on the fringes of Hymmetus Mount, the aim is to push borders and definitions of Megastructure’s notion, working on an expandable system rather than a fixed cluster. While imagining the future Athens expansion, the design proposal mainly considers Mount Hymettus, reconizinf its anthropomorphic identity.
Instead of separating, the design operates through connections. Instead of imposing mass, appropriating an already existent one.
No preexistent value is neglected, but rather potentiated. From the megastructure research, I adopted repetition of units, plug-in elements, and mixed uses, although I openly avoided identifying a specific function in any of the spaces.
Right: Mario Fiorentino, Corviale, Rome, Italy, 1972
1KM UTOPIA
Section, Perspectives
Main Structure:Retaining Walls
3. Plug in: Monorail
2. Plug in: Loggia
1. Plug in: Water Pipes
DESIGN PROPOSITION
Topography Adaptation
Domesticity
Iranian society, and especially Tehran as its capital, was experiencing a period of rapid modernization between the 1940s and 1970s. Different political and economic currents influenced this move towards modernity. Powerful political currents in society, sometimes influenced by socialism and American capitalism, played an essential role in transforming society and shaping the urban life of the people in Tehran. The conflict between the two super powers of the world at that time in the form of the Cold War spread different political and social ideas in the society of Tehran at that era; these ideas in the form of architectural and urban planning projects defined the shape of the city and lifestyle for the modern era of Tehran. This study examines the effects of these political forces on the formation of those projects and the way of life that took place in them by examining five of the collective housing projects in that historical period.
“The home is the first brick of society building. A good home is the center of family and the first training area for children. A good home is comfortable and beautiful; it is the place of education. A good home is a modern house with large windows to absorb the sun in order to maintain healthy citizens. A good home makes intimate families. The person who owns a good home has more passion for his country. A good home is a generous house which gives happiness and health to its residents. If you build a modern house today, it will be an investment for the future of your children.”
– Mohammad Ali Sheybani, Majjale-ye Arshitekt 1, No 4 (1974))
from Left to Right
Sahba Mansourardestani
Right: “What is a good home in the time of hasty modernisation”
Kuy-e Naz i Abad
Kuy-e Chahar om-e Aban
Saman 2 Complex Ekbatan Complex
Kuy-e Farah
Societies Against the State / Cooperation vs Fragmentation
Kayen Montes
This chapter is an attempt to bring together the different sources, by analysing a series of rituals the Selk’nam community exercised until their dissappearance. The starting hypothesis, if we base our understanding on the existing material, is that these rituals organize and structure these communities, generating a division in relation to gender, territory, and knowledge, only when scrutinized through a western ‘civilized’ lens.
Therefore, if we part away from the understanding of primitive societies as a pre-condition to a civilized one, we might be able to understand different notions of time, where instead of a linear structure, time becomes cyclical, relying on everyday rituals that engage the communities as well as the “natural” elements around them (if such distinction can be made). If we understand that these alternative societies are not societies of subsistence but of balance, we begin to see that their symbiotic relationship is not only between themselves but with their environment as well. And how, although without a predator, we can’t consider these communities anthropocentric, as they act as a cog within a larger – undisturbed – ecology. Moreover, stepping away from an economy of subsistence, allows us to break with the power relation constructs that attempt to understand the organization of communities (at least in the Eurocentric imaginary of those that have studied the Selk’nam) and see how activities such as communication, cooperation, and relations between individuals becomes primordial.
Cooperation vs fragmentation in the the greek polykatoikia Kasariani, presents a seemingly organic and heterogeneous growth, where self-building and organization between families and neighbors has been the norm for many decades. But as it has been argued before, the legislative scheme behind the organizing structure of ownership and re-development have led to a drastically subdivided space, and produced a subjectivity based on individualism in which the household itself became a
source of economic speculation. Where everything “public” is neglected both by users and authorities. As common ownership becomes unclear, this project then aims to discuss the social frag- mentation, in relation to public space and promote a reconstruction of the collective action whether that be a public or private endeavor.
The project engages the neighbourhood through two different time frames. The first acts within an urban design approach, where a series of legal frameworks and urban mobility plans are proposed. The first act should be taken as an example, a placeholder even, that occupies the speculative space of any project of relevance to the site-inhabitants.
Moving on, the project begins to ask: how can these proposals be validated? How can designers, inhabitants and representatives interact and exchange knowledge in lieu of any architectural project? What is the correct process to engage not only with inhabitants of a sample space, but when and if change is intended, how to promote it? How to incite discussion through an architectural technique that in turn will lead to an urban transformation?
The second part engages with these questions. Approaching the problem by suggesting a series of devices that move around the neighbourhood, engaging with locals in order to gauge the interest between proposals, and receive input on the more “formal” proposals. Moreover, the devices speak with time. They are enabled only through successful participatory interactions of local inhabitants.
Territory
Ethnographic Representation
HAIN Patriarchal Ceremonial Structure
Interventions: Selected
kessariani - overal plan
travelling circus foúrnos oculus common garden
Foúrnos: TempraryTravelling Structure
Culture, Creativity, Rebirth
Daixue Shen
STUDY OF CULTURAL CITY-LED REGENERATION AND ITS RELATION WITH THE WATERFRONT
Culture is defined as a particular system of art, thought and customs of a society. It strengthens the identity of a city, enhances the value of the location and entertains, educates and boosts local creativity. The natural element of water has become a tool to connect the city from the waterfront and create a creative social space with multiple functions, from commercial uses to educational themes—attracting people from both local and elsewhere.
Such waterfront transformation echoes many social, environmental and economic aspects and provides management to fit the city’s demands. Water provides more opportunities for the designers to rethink the area concerning the local cultural assets to enhance the city’s cultural identity, increase the population flow, and create social networks.
The series of cultural structures provide different scenarios for the area and revitalise the area by creating a new network that connects the site to the significant cultural areas. Each iteration can also expand across the city to strengthen the value of authenticity and the city’s connection. Making the area the centre of knowledge, the relationship between natural elements and newly established institutions will efficiently affect the development. A new walking tour will allow interaction with the installation and the building fabric, with sceneries of human habitation and environments conceived as perspectives of a multicommunicational platform.
Axometric Drawing of Tate Liverpool Gallery Entrance
City scenery with design proposal
City scenery with design proposal
WORKERS’ NEW VILLAGE: THE SPATIAL SAMPLE OF CITIES IN PLANNED ECONOMY CHINA
The workers' new village is the main body of urban housing construction from the 1950s to 1990s in China, and also the utopian collectivist living form established in the age of scarcity. The word "workers' new village" is not only the spatial sample in the era of planned economy China but also an important tool to construct the identity of workers (and most of the Chinese) through collective living. In addition, the workers' new village practice also directly led to the birth of the modern Chinese public housing system and the establishment of China's grass-roots social management system. These systems are still profoundly affecting the urban context of China today.
In the case of Caoyang new village, it can be clearly found that different levels of spatial sharing establish the centralized collective life, allowing residents to bond in the special relationship beyond neighbours or co-workers.
The design exercise uses a similar strategy in Kaisariani, Athens. According to the reorganization of three levels: architectural elements, living units and blocks, a flexible and centralized form of living is constructed. This collective living fits the history and urban context of Kaisariani and rebuilds the collective in this unique region.
Bird view of Caoyang new village, 1950s
Ceremony to celebrate the move in of workers, 1953
Indian delegation visits Caoyang new village, 1950s
The Soviet Union delegation visits Caoyang new village, 1950s
Centralized Form and the Rebuild of Collective Hanwen Xu
Caoyang
The planning structure of Caoyang new village
1. housing
2. living unit
school, canteen or open space
Public service space: communal bathrooms, markets and grocery stores...
Large public service space: cultural center, hospital, bank, cinema...
3. "Xiao qu"
4. residential district
Design Strategy: Three Layers of Collective Living
Element 2. Living Unit
1. flexible board
Design Strategy: Three layers of collective living
Design Strategy: Three layers of collective living
Projective Cities — Taught MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design
