ENGLISH TRANSLATION

Transformations are inevitable. They intervene, update, adapt, extend, and amplify: they are defined by an action, since they are a relation between parts constructed through time and by different actors. The design operates on what already exists, and the approach to the architectural project takes place far from the white page or the vacant lot; the project deals with a preexisting architecture that one decides not to dismiss or ignore. Designing on what is already built recognizes the unusual, the anachronic, the common as valuable materials for the creative process. As an encounter with the history of a specific architecture, transformation asks the building what it needs, what to take care of, what to expose, what should be demolished, hidden, recreated or continued. What already exists has to be carefully examined, evaluated, and redrawn. The ruin, the bunker, the housing block or the gaps in a dense block are not residual spaces anymore but are recognized as occupying a space and honored as proper architecture. Abstractions, reinterpretations, updates and transgressions, whether morphological, lexical, scenographic, or technological, are variables of a transformation atlas that make up a practice that is both continuous and unfinished.

This book documents the experience of students, professors, and tutors who have decided to deepen into the topic of transformations and its iterations. On two occasions they traveled to Germany, where recent history has left abandoned and neglected buildings behind, be they museums, housing blocks or underused industrial parks. The Strategies of these operations are discussed in the first chapter of the book, where the authors, Ansgar Schulz and Benedikt Schulz discuss different approaches from the professional and educational perspectives, Markus Vogl reflects on transformations as a situated practice, and Tristán Diéguez explores typologies in his “Atlas of Transformations.” The second chapter, Journeys, comprises Jaime Grinberg’s memories and a catalogue that features the buildings visited in the trips to Europe in 2014 and 2018. The last chapter, Workshops, translates into practical and architectural exercises the research topic of both intensive and short meetings in Germany and a long semester at the University of Buenos Aires.

A conversation between Ansgar Schulz, Benedikt Schulz, Tristán Diéguez, Jaime Grinberg, and Isabella Moretti

Back in 2011, Ansgar and Benedikt Schulz, both professors between 2010 and 2018 at the Technische Universität Dortmund and principals at Schulz & Schulz, visited Argentina with a group of students. They were received by Jaime Grinberg and Tristán Diéguez in the Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Urbanismo, and made a site-specific workshop dealing with Medianeras, a very Argentinian urban characteristic. Three years later, they all met again at the Zeche Zollverein in Essen to do the workshop Cole and Steel. Since then, they have started an exchange of both pedagogical and architectural concerns that actively incorporates and deals with the cultural differences between Argentina and Germany. As Grinberg likes to highlight, “without the connection between people none of this would have been possible”.

TRANSNATIONAL SCHOOL: LEARNINGS BETWEEN GERMANY AND ARGENTINA

Tristán Diéguez (TD) Transformations became a very important topic for us at the design studio we teach in the fourth year. We have done a lot of work and research around this topic. All this started in Germany, with the trip and the workshops we did in 2014. We visited many projects that combined heritage with new functions and we did the workshop with you in Zeche Zollverein (ZZ). If I remember correctly, your office did a project later in that location.

Ansgar Schulz (AS) That project is about little informational pavilions about the ZZ site dispersed in the whole area. It is not built yet but we’re planning. The construction of the first of five permanent pavilions will start in 2019.

Jaime Grinberg (JG) For us, it is very important to have a professional practice running in parallel to our teaching at the University. Tristan, for example, is now doing a school for police officers in an existing factory. And in my case, I’ve transformed an old factory into a house for the elderly, a house for senior living. The connections between practice and teaching, on the one hand, and the relation between Argentina and Germany, on the other, are big concerns for us. We want to portray how it began and evolved in time, and pinpoint the advantages of this relation for the students as well as the teachers. Benedikt Schulz (BS) When you came to Germany the first time, our idea was to work on something that the students would be unfamiliar with—something different to the Argentinian context. Therefore, we decided to go to the industrial complex of ZZ. When we came to Buenos Aires, before in 2011, the theme you proposed of medianeras was completely unknown to our students in Germany and it was very interesting. In these workshops, that only last a few days, it is crucial to find a topic that resumes and helps you understand the whole city. In Buenos Aires, it worked very well, and we wanted to do something similar. It went very well.

Isabella Moretti (IM) Did you repeat that workshop you did at ZZ? Did you do it again with other students or was it just that one time that you worked on that specific site and topic?

AS We actually never returned to ZZ with any students. If you study in Dortmund, you work so often with this industrial and cultural heritage we have in the Ruhrgebiet that it´s not so exciting for German students.

JG When we did the workshop in the building by SANAA at Zollverein we went straight to making models. Is this common for you as a teaching method, to try out different ideas in models?

AS Very common and we want to keep it like this. In the workshop here, we also worked with models.

JG I think these models were very helpful to mix students from both universities, the models functioned like a common language.

AS And it was very nice to put all these little medianeras side by side, and play with them.

TD Before we did this trip, in the design studios at the university we always worked with completely new buildings on empty sites. Now we´ve incorporated transformationS as an exercise. How is it in Germany? Is there a curricular precondition to mix the two?

AS The chamber of Architects, for example, acknowledges that more than seventy percent of all Architecture contracts in Germany are for tasks related to transformations. IM I would presume it might be even more in housing projects. If that truly is the current condition of the practice, how is it dealt with in university?

BS On the one hand is how we work at university: the didactical aspect. It is very important to teach the design of new buildings in order to understand ‘building’—to give an overview of structure, space, and all the main things of architecture. When we are talking about the practice of an architect, on the other hand, then we have to switch to designing and working in existing buildings. However, first the architect needs to have a wholesome understanding of all architectural parts because when you do work with a preexistence you have to dissect it: the construction, the circulation, the façade, the volume. Not until later, you can analyze the former and the future function and evaluate what remains, what is to be redesigned, and what to be removed.

AS To come back to university, for example, in Germany we have a very good education about cultural heritage and architectural history. The first lectures in Building Typology are given by the chairs of architectural history instead of designers. There are so many old buildings in Germany and just a few kilometers away is Italy. It’s quite normal for us to be surrounded by and design in old buildings. However, we also have to talk about the high level of protective regulations and the designation of national monuments. It’s very hard to dialog with the Denkmalpflege or the people who work for cultural heritage institutions because they are not practicing architects, and sometimes they don’t understand that you have to modify, change, or demolish something to save the building. If you don’t change it, you cannot save it. This awareness is very important for our discipline’s future. For example, the German State supports investing in cultural heritage, they give you back taxes if you work with national monuments.

TD So, regarding what Benedikt was saying, first the students need to understand the logic of construction, of the program and its distribution, the structure, and the systems in order to work in a building. Only then, they can comprehend the complex problem of bringing together two different types of organizations, i.e. old and new. I think it makes perfect sense and as a consequence, transforming existing architecture is a process that can only happen in late stages of the Education, and at the beginning of the practice. JG In Sicily, Syracuse, or Palermo, for example, when you pass a church the guide explains: from this side, you can observe the original façade; from the other, you can see the new façade done two hundred years later, which is attached. One covered the other, every time with a new technique and different materials... The other day, I heard that the University of San Martin (UNSAM) is recovering the Iglesia Medalla Milagrosa (the Church of the Miraculous Medal). In that case it is not a transformation, it is a recovery. It’s not the same. I don’t think it is an architectural position.

AS It depends—you have to reduce your architectural ambitions, that’s the thing. Look at the Neues Museum by David Chipperfield. That definitely is architecture.

JG When we did the workshop, the projects recurrently showed an opposition of the new against the existing either in colors, construction techniques, or volumes. Maybe this strategy works as a pedagogical tool as well. When you create something new in the city you are also making a transformation because you keep a dialogue between the heritage of the city and your proposition. It is also a question of understanding the cities, identifying the heritage, and then projecting your building accordingly. When we walked with Ansgar to see your office building, the Flatiron of Leipzig [laughter], he explained that your aim was to relate to Leipzig’s heritage by intervening the flow of the grid.

AS Yes. At a time, it was not allowed to make windows wide and long—all windows had to be up and small. What you’re saying is really a problem in Germany. When you build a new building in ensamble with other ones, it has to work and there are often juries or councils, who mostly deny new projects.

JG In our studio it’s always a topic of discussion this question of the relationship between the heritage and the city. Maybe Buenos Aires doesn’t have the same heritage as the European city but anyway we have our own...

TD We did an interesting exercise this year: the extension of the Beaux Arts Museum of Buenos Aires. It is particularly interesting because it wasn’t a museum in the first place; it was designed as a museum but not from scratch. First it was a water-pump building, a sort of a small reservoir.

Alejandro Bustillo, the architect, actually did a first transformation of the pump building when he turned it into the Beaux Arts Museum of the city. Now, it’s too small and it needs to be expanded. Later in the design studio, you could see two families of projects: on the one hand, projects that propose something completely separate to the existing, where two distinct parts are recognizable; on the other hand, projects where the existing and the new blend in to form a new single unit.

JG In the first year design studio we did work with a transformation of a very small project—an existing museum of 200 square meters to which thirty percent of the surface had to be added. It was a very easy exercise but we discussed the following idea: how do you add something to an existing building and how should it relate to the architecture?

TD Nowadays, there are many residential or office buildings on sites where there used to be a house or a 2 to 3-storey building. They keep the façade but rise with a really tall thing behind it. Does that happen in Germany as well?

AS Yes, it does. Today we wondered when we saw this famous building, a modern building in San Telmo, which goes over the corner on two sides: the Edificio Calmer. We asked ourselves: who built this expansion on the rooftop? That could never be original.

TD It’s the quincho!

JG Argentinian Architecture had a deep rationalist period in the forties, give or take. In the Callao avenue you have many of these examples and where I live, Vicente López, there are also many houses from that period. All of them are white, curved lines, very elegant. On another note, there is a big discussion now with the Boca Juniors Stadium. It is formed like a U and on the fourth side very thin balconies, slabs, enclose the court. There is a project now by a Slovenian architect. He did a sort of gothic structure above the street. It was in the newspapers and everybody is commenting on it. It has become a public and global discussion because the stadium was a very nice design from Gallo, a very famous engineer from the thirties. This question of adding more space to the stadium is a discussion concerning the whole city.

AS If we talk about the Bombonera, we must talk about identity. Is it still the same identity if you change one of the sides of the stadium? TD When I was at university, more than 25 years ago, the stadium used to be open on that side. In the early nineties, the office of Justo Solsona (now MSGSSS) did the renovation and added the balconies.

AS But to come back to our discussion, it is very true that an existing building has to have a certain value to be transformed. Sometimes in East Germany, there had been cases in which you are commissioned to transform or remodel a building that is a national monument not because the architecture is valuable but for historical reasons. For example, in Leipzig there is a hotel that is really ugly and is on one of the best spots of the city. It would be appropriate to turn it into apartments but you can’t tear it down because some guys from the East- and West German governments celebrated an important contract for millions of Marks in the 1980s.

TD It has a value but not architectural only symbolical. That is probably a building you can’t even transform... You have to leave it as it is…

AS Back in 2016, when we went to Chile with a group of students, we visited an old prison turned into the Parque Cultural of Valparaiso [by the architects Martin Labbe, Jonathan Holmes, Carolina Portugueis y Osvaldo Spichiger]. It’s a very good example of a transformation because it totally changed the function. It used to be an isolated space and now it’s very open to the public but without demolishing the spirit of the building.

JG There is a guy who lived many years in Tokyo, Japan. He is a rich man, a diplomatic, a businessman. He came here and created the Japanese House in Buenos Aires. He bought all the materials in Japan and built a big Japanese space in San Isidro. When you arrive, you think: “Hey, I’m in Japan!”. He bought everything abroad: the junctions, the ropes to fix the wood, etc. It is actually a museum with a very important collection—he brings Japanese artists. I went there once and I asked: “Is this Japan in Buenos Aires? Is it the same or not?’’ It’s complicated... This is also about heritage, and as an architect, when you are asked for a reproduction, you need to have an opinion.

TD It’s always surprising to me when in Germany they try to rebuild a historical building, for example the City Palace in Berlin or the Churches and Palaces in Dresden. It is a reconstruction but there is something weird about building something new today that looks exactly the way it did before.

AS I agree. I also have a conceptual problem with these buildings. 100 percent rebuilt but with new material: absolute nonsense! That has nothing to do with contemporary architectural design. However, it is slightly different when you are talking about the ensamble. For example, the Neumarkt in Dresden. It is an architectural task if you reconstruct five buildings in order to put three new ones in between.

THE STRATEGIES OF TRANSFORMATION

IM When it comes to Transformations the pioneering thought nowadays might be that we are not only building within existing structures but with existing structures. The building itself asks you to do a certain kind of research in order to propose something. How do you think the practice is adapting to this paradigm shift on understanding the building as an agent who participates in determining the kind of intervention? For example, Jaime was saying that there has to be a contrast and Ansgar was saying that it is not necessary.

AS Fifteen years ago, the philosophy of transforming was like Jaime said: to make a strong contrast. You could either work with totally different materials, to mix natural stone with glass or steel and so on... But things have changed; probably with precedents like the Neues Museum. Now, the task is to continue designing the building in the sense it was once built, to continue its story. This is how it is discussed today in Germany.

IM But the story of the building is contingent, multiple, a fiction... How do you write it? ¿Who are the characters?

AS It depends on many things. Sometimes the story of the building as a fiction is more important than the structural materials. If that is the case, you’d have to follow the spirit of the architecture. To continue the structural, material, and spatial aspects is another way, which can also be very special or typical. It depends. There’s no philosophy that works every time.

BS I’m searching for the translation of the word Überformen: to change an existing structure that results in a completely new form, shape, or design. It is an old strategy and it depends on the value of the existing building. In our project for a police station in Chemnitz, the new and the old façades coexist. If the building does not have a value, then it is probably best to demolish it. TD When we think of transformations, we imagine a wonderful train station or steel structure that we turn into a museum. But many times, you have to deal with buildings that are ugly or don’t work—I’m thinking of all the big housing projects of the seventies that were transformed by architects like Lacaton & Vassal. In these cases, it’s not about keeping what’s good because the only valuable thing is that it is built and the structure is resistant. The challenge is to change the space as much as you can but with an intervention that is as cheap as possible.

JG But when you teach this at school you always choose a building that has some value... [Laughter, all nod].

TD We thought of applying this exercise to some of the big housing complexes here in Buenos Aires but in the end we all agreed that it would be too complicated for undergraduate students. It would be a very difficult project because you’d have to go and study the place and talk to the people. It’s more about minimal interventions—less ambitious architecturally speaking but more interesting in social or economic terms.

IM Some architects suggest that the intervention—or transformation though it has the word ‘form’ in it—is not about form any longer but about strategy. Could you come up with different strategies and the resulting transformations to work on the concept?

AS There are many components to your question. Sometimes the use of the building changes and it’s hard to work with the existence without changing something.

JG However, sometimes the function remains the same but things change... Now, I’m doing a project for funeral purposes. It’s an existing building, very ugly, but the concrete structure is quite good and I have to extend it. The function is the same but maybe the concept changed: what is death?

BS I think the strategy depends on task and situation. Task meaning the reason for the change; situation meaning the existing building. I’d like to mention an example from Buenos Aires: the renovation of the Banco Ciudad by MSGSSS in downtown. It’s an old building and inside the architects used glass bricks. I don’t know anything about the history of this project but I think it’s fantastic. It’s so interesting to see it from the outside and then enter to something completely unexpected. What

you can feel inside is emotion. And, that is the task of architecture: to make people emotional. Still today it’s very interesting...

TD I liked what you said, that the strategy fifteen years ago would have relied on an addition to make something completely separated—new and contrasting. Different materials, different look, different spirit. The Kolumba Museum by Peter Zumthor, for example, is a different case. The stone and the brick, the old and the new, form one wall.

IM One last question, it has to do with the length or the means of these interventions that can be reduced in time. Reviewing the list of the buildings Jaime and Tristán visited in their trip to Berlin is the Hamburger Bahnhof, for example, which has seemingly no alteration from the outside but those blue lamps. That’s a very small but also contrasting intervention, maybe more influenced by contemporary art than architecture. The spirit of the intervention is not the contrast, it’s something else, it’s an addition, a very small addition. What is the span of the types of interventions?

TD In Germany, there are interesting examples: like Christo wrapping the Reichstag or Tomás Saraceno suspending a net in Duesseldorf. Because they are temporal, they can be much more radical as they can be easily undone. So, you could do virtually anything as long as you don’t harm the building. I think there are many examples in art that have more freedom. Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen did an intervention in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London that is interesting. It’s composed only by four columns and a viewing platform that puts you really close to the ornaments in the ceiling; a scaffolding that allows you to go to the top and see the same hall but from a different perspective. Certainly you cannot leave it there forever, because it occupies the whole room, but if you only have it for a month it’s great.

IM Maybe you can tell us how you proceeded in one of your designs. How did you encounter the existing building? How was the process in order to decide what the intervention would be?

AS At the moment we are working on a very interesting project, which is a psychiatric. It is a classical hospital with little brick pavilions inserted in a garden area because it used to be a Tuberculosis facility. The task: connect the different pavilions and the stations for economic reasons. The medical staff that worked in one certain area cannot go with medicine and everything in the middle of the winter through the park. We suggested to connect all the parts with one large building between them. We now have to work in the connection of the very long building and the pavilions without destroying the character of the park. It’s very difficult but everyone knows that the hospital cannot keep functioning without connecting the different stations. The type of the previous construction is traditional, from the last century. The pavilions are quite old and we also have to remodel them in collaboration with the Denkmalpflege. The pavilions are totally reconstructed like they were. But the new is a different thing, we tried to shape the long building according to the trees and design a continuity between the architecture and the garden. At some point we liked the exercise of thinking: what would we have done 100 years ago?

BS It depends, again, on task and situation. [BS shows something on his phone] This is the extension of a laboratory building of the University in Leipzig. They were constructions from the 19th century and we had to add a building with specialized laboratories, which you couldn’t integrate into the old structure. Therefore, we decided to design a totally new thing, without connection to the older ones but the height of the windows...

Markus Vogl

The world is turning upside down. Ultimately it is all appearance. Only an appearance of appearances. Things vanish anyway. Things used to have to be manufactured. Today they come from the factory, made by automization and robots. Work is no longer the manufacture of things. This means that the experience of making is lost. Knowledge becomes theoretical knowledge. Appearance now takes the place of experience. Things are no longer designed. Design is stuck on to them retrospectively. As design in inverted commas, as form of appearance, as a symbol. Things no longer have a purpose to fulfil, they are produced for us to consume. They exist in terms of the meaning we put on them, they have symbolic value. Otl Aicher, The World as Design1

What the prominent German designer Otl Aicher described thirty years ago should be clarified anew every day in the designing disciplines. This article pleads for the importance of the everyday in project and design as well as for our contribution as architects and urban planners in an environment that we design and build. Within this framework, a different understanding of the role of the project can help support people in arranging their daily lives in this environment, as well as assist them to settle down, to dwell, as Martin Heidegger wrote in his often quoted essay.2 Architectural theorist Achim Hahn, who made an important contribution to interdisciplinary housing research with his methodology of hermeneutics of the example, further elaborates Heidegger’s argument and includes projecting and, therefore, an argumentative socio-spatial basis for an architectural theory.3

It is not only since the celebrations for the centennial of Bauhaus, which intensively accompanied the Walter Gropius Chair (DAAD - UBA, FADU) in recent years, that I have been addressing the teaching, research and practice of the contribution of our spatial disciplines to the success of daily life. Nor did I do so solely based on conversations with the curator of the ifa exhibition “Die ganze Welt ein Bauhaus / El mundo entero es una Bauhaus,” Boris Friedewald, which was inaugurated at the MNAD in Buenos Aires in June of 2018. It was precisely the abandonment of a self-centered view on the discipline of architecture and the openness and search for collaboration with the multitude of those who are concerned with the spatial that made me realize the significance of projecting in architecture, so that “architecture as a means of life satisfies the needs related to our being in the world.”4

The exhibition “Think Global, Build Social! Building for a Better World,” curated by Dr. Andres Lepik and presented by the Walter Gropius Chair at the 16th International Architecture Biennale in Buenos Aires in 2017 in the context of several events and workshops, was intended to open up further discourses and perspectives on our discipline:

Architecture as a discipline that plans and designs space must develop new solutions for the entire population in view of the dramatic challenges posed by the global urbanization process. For this to happen, architecture must follow through with the ethical standards defined within the scope of its work, because this is the only way to prove their relevance to the society of the future.5

To what extent have we, in a world that becomes more and more globalized, established ourselves in a technical and formally superficial discourse that created its own academic platform and moved ever further away from the spatial, social, economic and ecological challenges of our built environment? It is undisputed that the “fundamental question— whether and to what extent built architecture concretely influences society’s development in the larger context of a city, or even within a single district” cannot be answered generally, nor should be. However, Andres Lepik does argue that “architecture repeatedly served as a catalyst for social processes, at least in the limited context of local communities. As a constructive discipline with effects that typically operate on groups of people over longer periods of time, architecture by no means escapes responsibility.”6 It is precisely this responsibility and social embedding that is also evident in the debates and projects of early architectural modernism, which strongly influenced both Bauhaus and CIAM, at least in their early years.

If in the last century Walter Gropius contributed from our discipline to opening and leading the debate on the cultural transcendence of the processes of internationalization that brought about the establishment of a technical civilization and its effects on architecture, city and built

environment, many problems and tasks that were formulated then are still relevant today. Social, economic and ecological crises intensify and overlap in the spatial conditions of our cities. At the same time, however, both material conditions and technical possibilities have transformed in the course of an increasingly faster globalization. The Walter Gropius Chair aims to engage in these debates from the academic environment in order to work out diagnoses, to propose practices which, in a global and contemporary context, are to face the innumerable and complex challenges that need to be taken into account in the sustainable design of architecture, city and environment at a local level. It is important to me to break the distance between the disciplines of architecture, urban planning and landscape planning and to establish the chair at UBA, FADU as the place where cross-disciplinary and cross-scale questions on urban realities and phenomena are asked, discussed, researched and projected. In doing so, a broader understanding of the German concept and term Städtebau as a discursive platform could contribute to making our spatial disciplines linguistically capable of communicating with the socio-spatial disciplines of urban geography, sociology and ethnography. This invitation to cooperation with social sciences would make us aware of the richness of everyday life and its spatial conditions. Recent publications such as the ARCH+ issue no. 238 on architectural ethnography or Der sinnhafte Aufbau der gebauten Welt [The Meaningful Construction of the Built World], by the architectural sociologist Silke Steets, confirm the overarching spatial interest in “describing people’s current living situations ... and placing them in a discourse context.”8

In our work in teaching, research and practice, this means that we take pleasure in dealing with the everyday, with architecture as a resource, and in critically questioning the authorship of and in architecture. This also includes a change in the responsibility of our disciplines in the common task of urban development.9 Processes of citizen participation do not reduce our professional field to the role of executive designers of the desires of population groups endowed with social and cultural capital, but rather require our knowledge, our experience and our intuitive assessments in order to renegotiate increasingly complex contexts not with simple superficial answers, but in a process of responsible discursive projecting. It is particularly important to recognize these complex interrelationships as a design resource and to understand their potential so as to develop new strategies for urban transformation processes.

In collaboration with colleagues and students, teaching opens up the opportunity to create a desire for discourse, a desire for the city, a desire for open space and building typologies, a desire for the daily confrontation with dwelling, and a desire to define the various teaching formats as a starting point for a joint journey into projecting with students, the teaching team and guests, so that the world is not reduced to appearance and a superficial truth, as Otl Aicher criticizes: “Admittedly, no truth is exhaustive. Behind every answer there is a question. But can we, instead of asking more questions, do without answers and be content with seeming and appearance?”10 The impartial curiosity about people and their behavior in space, the way they step in the city, the fascination for complex narratives and their manifold forms of expression, the search for the spatial conditions that allow all this to happen, form the basis of projecting. Spaces that can accommodate everyday life in its complexity, that can allow something and someone to be there, are the inspiration and the impetus for a thoughtful examination. It is not the simple solution of a spatial problem by means of architectural elements that should form the basic understanding, but the reading and understanding of superimpositions, stratifications and multiple codings, which allow spaces to become places through appropriation. The inherent motivation and fascination lead to an exploration of places, a reflection on the spatial bases of a coexistence and, subsequently, to a procedure through projection.

Städtebau as an inter-discipline in its integrating, reflective and space-shaping stance creates an inclusive discursive framework. It is not the individual building, artifact or element per se that is interesting, but rather its context and its relationship to it that makes it effective. In recent years, architectural discourse has become too focused on itself as an object. However, buildings should act as powerful, concise, beautiful architectural settings that are part of an ensemble, of the neighborhood, of the city: an urban architecture. For too long, urban planning has relied on organizational systems and regulation structures, and thus has de-spatialized them. Städtebau, on the other hand, allows us to take a more inviting and integral perspective on our built environment. It opens up a way of thinking in spatial contexts rather than in surfaces, it broadens the view from quantitative organization to the quality design of neighborhoods.

Shouldn’t we, from the discipline of architecture, always project and research with this integrative attitude and work with and within this urban complexity? The Dutch architect Herman Hertzberger describes architecture as the preoccupation with everyday situations:

When you look at one of the vast number of books on architecture that are being published nowadays and you see all those glossy photographs, taken without exception in perfect weather conditions, you can’t help wondering what goes on in the architects’ minds, how they see the world; … For

what can architecture be other than concerning oneself with situations in daily life as lived by all people; it’s rather like clothing, which must after all not only suit you well, but also fit properly. Hertzberger’s argument is based on this integrating view. Architectural creation, therefore, implies a specific attitude and an understanding of urban planning. The relationship between the polyvalence and the contingency of spaces plays an important role. Edward Soja’s Thirdspace. Journeys to Los Angeles and other Real-and-Imagined Places takes the concept of polyvalence to discuss specific qualities of spaces through their appropriability rather than their formal properties.11

In spatial disciplines, polyvalence describes the conditions of elements and spaces, which thus have the openness to react to changes and adapt without losing their conceptuality, terminology, and identity. Rather, changeability is inherently inscribed in them. However, they are not objects of generic use, but have an openness and a practicality that encompass not only spatial, but also psychological, social and economic dimensions.13 Furthermore, they have properties that stimulate commitment to them and therefore encourage their appropriation. The active taking over, the using, is not only made possible but also desired. Uses and functions but also meanings and effects can and may alter and thus open up a programmatic and semantic scope of interpretation. They are elements and spaces designed for and from the human scale. As part of our everyday worlds they are in continuous use and therefore in permanent change. Hertzberger describes this most aptly as the “inviting form.”14 From this perspective, architecture and Städtebau do not deliver optimized machines or technical infrastructures, but rather cultural events that are co-produced by the users every day. Thus, the social construction of space in teaching, research and practice of our disciplines needs to be given more attention again. “A building should ... encourage a discourse with it and ... with the world.”15 According to Valerio Olgiati, nonreferential buildings can have a meaningful effect and generate resonance. Sociologist Hartmut Rosa sees resonance between people and their environment as an approach to a solution “if acceleration is the problem.”16 Polyvalent Städtebau and polyvalent architecture enable these relationships to develop and balance in a variety of ways. The development of a sociospatial understanding of our built environment and the ability to allow different readings and authorships in space is for me the starting point for projecting inclusive, sustainable and adaptable transformation strategies for buildings, places, public spaces and neighborhoods. The fascination and observation of these complex spatial situations allows me to fall back on certain people and the historical theories they formulated decades ago. Reflecting on the texts and projects of Herman Hertzberger, Aldo van Eyck, João Vilanova Artigas, Lina Bo Bardi and Otl Aicher both inspires and depresses me. They leave me at a loss as to how little these attitudes have been and still are applied in our design practice and built environment.

Projects by younger French offices such as Muoto or Bruther, the Flemish architectural debate with Jan de Vylder and Freek Persyn, and the Dutch colleagues of Atelier Kempe Thill show, “in an age of individualistic confusion, and of the phenomenon that is widespread among architects of not being able or not wanting to see the true tasks,” the search for the definition of “objective criteria in architecture,”17 which can only allow appropriations by the users. This discourse, as well as Frédéric Druot, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal‘s attitude, which can be summarized as “Never demolish, never remove or replace, always add, transform, and reuse!,”18 has been widely published in our specialized media, but remains a marginal one in global architectural production. It seems all the more important to me to anchor these approaches and points of view in the design theory and project studios at our faculties and to convey them to a young generation of more holistic-minded architects. An increasingly built environment requires a more complex and responsible view of social processes. The upcoming transformation processes in our cities, as discussed by Jaime Grinberg and Tristán Diéguez in their project studios at UBA, FADU in recent years in teaching, as well as research and international exchange, make an important contribution to generating new knowledge, new tools and new attitudes from our discipline for the built urban heritage. Conceptual approaches and an interdisciplinary perspective create necessary discourse spaces between materiality and sociality of built spaces.19 It is a matter of an attitude and an approach whose absolute motivation is the creation of a livable, quality, inclusive and sustainable built environment: Städtebau and architecture.

1 Aicher, O. (2015 [1991]). The World as Design. Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 32. 2 Heidegger, M. (2004 [1951]). “Bauen Wohnen Denken” [Building Dwelling Thinking], in: Vorträge und Aufsätze. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger GmbH, 139–156. 3 Hahn, A. (2008). Architekturtheorie [Architectural Theory]. Vienna: Verlag Huter & Roth. 4 Hahn, A. (2008). Architekturtheorie [Architectural Theory]. Vienna: Verlag Huter & Roth, 31. 5 Lepik, A., in Emmerling, L., Lepik, A. (2013). “Think Global, Build Social!” Catalogue of the exhibition, back cover. 6 Lepik, A. (2013). “Think Global, Build Social”. ARCH+, No. 211/212, June, 4ff. 7 Steets, S. (2015). Der sinnhafte Aufbau der gebauten Welt [The Meaningful Construction of the Built World]. Berlin: Suhrkamp. 8 Kalpakci, A., Kaijima, M., Stalder, L. (2020). “Introduction”. ARCH+, No. 238, March, 5. 9 Selle, K. (2013). Über Bürgerbeteiligung hinaus: Stadtentwicklung als Gemeinschaftsaufgabe? [Beyond Citizen Participation: Urban Development as a Community Task?]. Detmold: Verlag Dorothea Rohn. 10 Aicher, O. (2015 [1991]). The World as Design. Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 32. 11 Herzberger, H. (1991). Lessons for Students in Architecture. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 174. 12 Soja, E. W. (1996). Thirdspace. Journeys to Los Angeles and other Real-and-Imagined Places. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. 13 Aicher, O. (1991). Analog und Digital [Analogous and Digital]. Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 81ff. 14 Herzberger, H. (1991). Lessons for Students in Architecture. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 174ff. 15 Olgiati, V., Breitschmid, M. (2019). Non-Referential Architecture. Zurich: Park Books, 26. 16 Rosa, H. (2016). Resonanz. Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung [Resonance. A Sociology of our Relationship to the World]. Berlin: Suhrkamp. 17 Kempe, A., Thill, O. (2012). Atelier Kempe Thill. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 24. 18 Ruby, I., Ruby, A. (2013). Druot, Lacaton & Vassal - Transformation of a 1960s Residential Highrise. Deutsches Architekturmuseum. 19 Steets, S. (2015). Der sinnhafte Aufbau der gebauten Welt [The Meaningful Construction of the Built World]. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 44ff.

Tristán Diéguez

Various processes led to the current relevance that the issue of transformations has for the discipline: changes in the production, transportation, infrastructure and defense systems, among others, have turned functioning buildings with very specific purposes into obsolete structures. On one hand, the growth experienced by cities during the twentieth century caused many of these structures -originally erected in peripheral locations -to end up in central areas. This made the problem of what to do with them more poignant. On the other hand, the existence of these vacant structures opened the economic opportunity to take advantage of them -totally or partially-, and thus substantially reduce the cost of having to house new programs.

The development of the idea of heritage and the concept of historical value endowed with symbolism these structures that were previously purely utilitarian. These are not only recognized as symbols of past times, but they are also direct samples of the use of materials and construction forms nowadays abandoned and therefore very difficult to replicate today.

Finally, the current concern for sustainability forces the discipline to think of reducing the impact of buildings on the environment. In this sense, the transformation of an existing structure to accommodate a new program meets multiple objectives in order to minimize its negative impact on the enviroment: to avoid the demolition process with the energy it requires as well as the problem of disposing of the debris; to decrease the amount of materials needed for a new building and therefore reduce the impact of transportation, construction, and assembly processes.

The combination of several of these factors determines that transformation projects occupy an increasingly relevant place in recent production. If we consider these factors -economy, heritage, sustainability -it might seem that the transformation of an existing structure implies a mere increase in the restrictions the architect must face when designing. However these conditions do enable large degrees of freedom for architectural design, in many aspects greater than those offered by an entirely new project. A very fertile field springs up from the possibility of establishing a dialogue between historical and contemporary forms of construction, between contrasting economic and material logics, between old and present geometries and dimensions. A MULTIPLICITY OF COMBINATIONS

Architecture offers multiple possibilities that result from the combination of different ways of occupying the land, of distinct geometries, materials, and structural solutions. Each project can potentially explore several combinations of all the variables involved in the process. Original, novel combinations can be formulated even if projects tend to fall within types, models, or groups that share similar features.

When facing a transformation project, the solutions multiply exponentially: implementation, geometry, structure, materiality, to name just a few, all unfold between the preexisting and the new. Hence the new building will then be the result of combining two ideas regarding space occupation, two formal logics, two structural systems, two palettes of materials. Recognizing types or models becomes more intricate as each intervention tends to be unique because of the enormous number of variables converging in it.

This Transformation Atlas seeks to illustrate this multiplicity identifying tentative typologies and intervention models of structures prone to be transformed. This preliminary classification includes only the most widespread building typologies: the universe of real structures is of course much broader and so are intervention strategies. The matrix is continuously growing and can include innumerable cases. Due to its graphic character, it focuses on morphological transformations and sets aside symbolic or programmatic operations.

SENSITIVE CALLING

In the last decades, the development of digital technologies regarding design, representation, and synthetic materials overstated sight over the other senses. In his book The Eyes of the Skin, Juhani Pallasmaa states that much of today’s architecture productions are exclusively interested in how buildings and spaces look, neglecting how they are perceived. However in the work of architects such as Peter Zumthor or RCR, architecture challenges smell, touch and hearing through textures, contrasts, sensations and temperatures. This often happens in small scale works, where the budget is generally ample.

In this sense, preexistent buildings offer a wealth of materials, textures and signs of the passage of time, impossible to achieve in a new work. A palette of patinas, markings of past uses and materials no longer used, offer the architect the possibilito to generate new spaces and climates. The transformation potential of the project rests in the posibility of valuing these qualities and contrasting them with the new constructive elements so as to arouse the senses and generate new sensations.

A NEW REPERTOIRE

Many times existing structures contain geometric, structural or constructive solutions that are different from those commonly used nowadays. The design process is then forced to incorporate elements that are atypical in the current architectural work. What preexists introduces new problems and questions into the creative process, expanding the designer’s universe.

Geometry is where this is most clearly evidenced, although we can also see it in structural and material solutions. The Jahrhunderthalle project in Bochum, for example, takes advantage of an existing cable structure to hang a new roof towards one of the sides. In the Boros Collection project, an old bunker with walls up to two meters thick, the main strategy is to generate voids to highlight this constructive feature. These examples illustrate the way in which projects follow a path proposed by the building itself instead of exclusively discussing contemporary issues or concerns.

The preexistent enables the subvertion of the economic logic that underlies any project. For every program there is a pre-established idea of the resources its resolution allows for. For example: a concert hall of a certain number of spectators, with an indicated area and a recommended volume results in a certain budget.

Nevertheless, when it comes to transformations, those built large volumes, massive structures or very expensive materials already exist, they are there already. This supposed limitation enables the freedom to work with unimaginably large volumes, with complex structural systems, and with materials or terminations that are not available anymore. What is economically absurd suddenly becomes possible.

One of the strongest axioms throughout the twentieth century, Louis Sullivan’s maxim that asserts that the form is to subordinate to the function, blurs in transformation projects. Form and function change their hierarchy in this type of projects. The form precedes the new function, which must adapt to it, adjusting, modifying, and often be rethought for its new use. The difference these two terms have in a new project and in a transformation project ahows up to what extent the design process changes.

Intervening preexisting structures allows the architect to free himself or herself for the traditional repertoire and way of working, from certain typologies and economic logics of construction, as well as from the constraints of function.

The transformation of the Oberhausen gasometer into an exhibition and events center simultaneously illustrates all three of these themes: the work with a geometry -a cylinder, in this case- unusual for an exhibition program; the presence of a gigantic volumetric space, alien to any economic logic; a place of exhibition where the displays adapt to the space -and not the other way around.

BEYOND ARCHITECTURE

Working with existing structures expands the field of architecture towards the world of visual arts. During the twentieth century, the exhibition space par excellence was the white box: a neutral space of simple geometry, evenly illuminated, and with rigorous control of temperature and humidity. A numb space where nothing stands out except for the work of art. The universality of this model allowed its reproduction throughout the world and with it the circulation of artworks and exhibitions from one museum to the next.

However nowadays contemporary visual art poses new ways of involving the viewer through space. Sometimes it requires very particular conditions of exposition: large dimensions, darkness or extreme temperatures. Works that are thought for a specific site highlight the need for very particular exhibition site.

Industrial structures converted into exhibition spaces were thus transformed into a suitable place for contemporary art – just like the traditional white box. The restrictions in size for the works of art disappear. Having a strong character, the building promotes the dialogues between the pieces and the space. The artworks are also transformed when displaced from one space to another one which beckons people to explore the differences and particularities of each exhibition place.

Contemporary art shows us, perhaps with a greater clarity, that working within a space with a clearly defined character opens up to new possibilities of dialogue, path and freedom.

Jaime Grinberg

Night falls on Munich. Markus Vogl, head of the Walter Gropius chair in Buenos Aires, leads us downtown to see the famous Biergarten. While we walk, I reflect on this experience we are living with fifteen students, travelling through Germany on an exchange fellowship granted by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

It all started in 2011, when Lars Schoening, a German friend and colleague, introduced me to Ansgar and Benedikt Schulz, who were visiting the School of Architecture, Design and Urban Planning at the University of Buenos Aires. Tristán Diéguez and I organized a workshop on the Medianeras -the sidewalls between plots- of Buenos Aires: students from the FADU and Dortmund had to reinterpret starting from models. The exercise was basically about designing a contiguous housing scheme, where neighboring units were supposed to engage in dialogue. This was the first time we worked with Ansgar and Benedikt Schulz, who were then setting up their practice in Leipzig. We realized the advantages the exchange between both countries meant, and in 2014 and 2018 we had the opportunity of travelling to Germany with our students on a very tight schedule of conferences, workshops, and outings.

On September 2014 our trip began in Berlin where we visited the Technische Universität Berlin and the Akademie der Künste with a lecture by Jean Pierre Vassal on the huge, abandoned buildings constructed during the Soviet occupation period in eastern Germany. We learnt about the two main lines of enquiry that German architecture schools follow: the technical and the artistic one. We visited the Neues Museum, refurbished by Chipperfield Architects, and the Boros Bunker, which has been turned into an art gallery. Both projects work on the idea of transforming preexisting structures, something we confirmed as we climbed the ramp of the Reichstag building by Foster and Partners.

We then had our first workshop in Dessau, a small town not far away from Berlin, at the Dessau International Architecture Graduate School (DIA), with professor Alfred Jacoby. We created an acoustic skin for the new Master House Moholy Nagy. Through process models, the students could rapidly visualize the resulting space. Later, on bus, we traveled to Hamburg to see the urban interventions of the port and the housing projects located north. Finally, we arrived in Dortmund for the workshop with students of the Schulz chair. In Zollverein, where Koolhaas famously intervened the Ruhrmuseum, we selected an empty industrial construction to house an exercise: once again, through models and in transnational groups, the German and Argentinian students had to propose a new program and intervene the building. A collective debate on how processes of transformation deal with former industrial sites.

Four years later, in 2018, the exchange brought together two experiences: one in Dortmund and another on in Stuttgart. The trip began with Michael Weichler and Fritz Keuthen, adjunct professors at the Schulz chair, who toured us around the flemish region in Belgium. During the train rides, German and Argentinian students talked lengthily about their respective universities. In the port area of Antwerp and the historic center of Ghent, we analyzed the creative use of materials and the kind and intelligent urban integration of the recent flemish vanguard in architecture.

Later, the sixties captured us. We started in Mannheim, invigorated with Frei Otto’s tense structures: a huge hyperbolic surface generated by curved, wooden units that extend well beyond the horizon. Once upon a time, these surfaces were to define a new Germany, a new geography that would construct a landscape for the country to be born once again.

We visited the Dammerstock project by Walter Gropius in Karlsruhe –with its very modern plan and in contrast with the classical urban layout of the eighteenth century. In Stuttgart, we attended several lectures on tense structures produced with carbon fibers in the robotics laboratory. Finally, in Munich, we went to the laboratory created by Frei Otto, where we could see all the process models and begin to understand the research undertaken by that center throughout the years. Later on, we visited the Olympic Stadium built for the 1972 competition.

Back in Berlin, while Tristán and I wandered along the Karl Marx Allee, we felt transported to another time. This huge avenue of incommensurable scale, with buildings over one hundred meters long and imposing entries, condense the urban history of the communist Germany. I do not recall how long we walked, while we appreciated the coexistence of the neoclassical and Stalinist parts with the modern buildings. The International cinema is

That night we dined at a Vietnamese restaurant. Berlin appeared to us in all its cosmopolitan splendor, right in the middle of the Kreuzberg neighborhood. As the dinner came to an end, the images of the Weissenhofsiedlung we had just visited started popping up in my head. The emblematic neighborhood of Stuttgart was built in the 1920s. We walked around houses built by Le Corbusier, Hans Scharoun, Walter Gropius. A few years earlier, my students had done an urban model of the complex in a course exclusively dedicated to the Bauhaus. Earlier that day I had seen Oskar Schlemmer’s puppets at the James Stirling museum.

A few days later, back in Buenos Aires, Markus and I ran into each other in the professor’s lounge. He gave me a card in an envelope. Inside it I saw big, red letters: Biergarten, it said.

Foto: Sofia Iino Cotado

Foto: Sofia Iino Cotado

Foto: Carsten Pesch

Las transformaciones son inevitables. Se posan, intervienen, actualizan, adaptan, extienden, amplían: son la relación entre partes construidas en tiempos, materialidades y por actores diferentes. Este libro documenta la experiencia de estudiantes y docentes, que en dos ocasiones se aventuraron a Alemania para investigar las transformaciones edilicias a partir de sus estrategias y proyectos.

Transformations are inevitable. They intervene, update, adapt, extend, and amplify: they are the relation between parts constructed through time, and by different actors and materials. This book documents the experience of students, professors, and tutors who have decided to deepen into the topic of transformations and study its strategies, projects, and iterations.