Thesis Precedents

PRECEDENTS SMETHWICK COMMUNITY FACTORY

TOM COOPER-COCKS M.ARCH 2015

Campo Marzio - Piranesi “By 1765, Piranesi stated an argument against rigid rules in architecture. The Campo Marzio plan is seen as a precursor to these later critiques against rules, and hence the product of a free run of imagination.”

“As the culmination of Piranesi’s study of the Marble Plan and antiquarian work in Antichita Romane, for an overall plan of Rome, Campo Marzio plan can be termed as *the* palimpsest of Piranesi’s interpretive memory.”

Mnemosyne Atlas - Aby Warburg In December 1927, Warburg started to compose a work in the form of a picture atlas named Mnemosyne. It consisted of 40 wooden panels covered with black cloth, on which were pinned nearly 1,000 pictures from books, magazines, newspaper and other daily life sources.These pictures were arranged according to different themes.

There were no captions and only a few texts in the atlas. “Warburg certainly hoped that the beholder would respond with the same intensity to the images of passion or of suffering, of mental confusion or of serenity, as he had done in his work.� Mnemosyne Atlas was left unfinished when Warburg died in 1929.

SESC Pompeia - Lina Bo Bardi Key to the success of the project was the drawing up of a comprehensive and inclusive programme, and spatial solutions that would provide accessibility (bringing the street and public life into the Centre), and attract interest from all age groups and social classes, without discrimination. That is a role of architecture – indeed, one of its most noble. The open and inviting street, the exhibition spaces, the public restaurant with communal tables, cars strictly banned, the open-air activities culminating in the wooden decking area becoming ‘São Paulo beach’ in summer: all of this made SESC Pompéia a citadel of freedom, a dream of civic life made real.

Atmospheric Politics - Peter Sloterdijk Glass houses - took into account that organisms and climate zones reference each other as it were a priori. The random uprooting of organisms to plant them elsewhere could only occur if the climatic conditions were transposed along with them. An attempt to correct disallignment of organism and environment, to reestablish ‘being-in-the-world’.

‘Polis’-city or body of citizens.

Promotes the possibility for strangers to come together in one place and naturalise in a shared climate. The greek city was a greenhouse for people who agreed to be uprooted from the modus vivendi of living in seperation and instead be planted in the modus vivendi of living together.

Aristotle’s ‘dyer’s parable’or the fountain parable. The key point in both procedures is the fact that there is no discernible direct reference to political dialogue, to logical argument and to an explicit political semantics. rather, the allegories express procedures on how to direct the pre-symbolical dimension of the coexistence of citizens.

Collage City - Colin Rowe Architectural bricolage/the collision city.

Rome: a resilient jam of intentions

The Field Project - Design Research Unit The Field Project is a £3M vocational training facility for people with learning difficulties on a brownfield site at Leckwith, Cardiff. The client’s aspiration is that it will be ‘an exemplar community-based training facility which promotes social enterprise and learning through the provision of high quality places inside and outside and holds the principles of sustainable design at its core.’ Presented with a complex brief, including community café, wood workshop, horticulture centre, recycling centre, shop, incubator offices and sustainable energy centre, DRUw developed a concept informed by the pattern, scale and geometry of the adjacent allotments to bring order to the variety of spaces required.

Allotments are an anthropological collage. Who are the growers? What do they grow? The Field Project references this communal collision/composition.

Fun Palace - Cedric Price time-based urban interventions. flexible, adaptable projects that invited the user’s participation building-sized transformable machine. the project’s interest resides in its radical reliance on structure and technology, its exemplification of notions of time-based and anticipatory architecture. With Fun Palace, Price addressed social and political issues that go far beyond the typical bounds of architecture.

The Lancaster / Hanover Masque - John Hejduk A composisiton of individual stories. Hejduk plots stories instead of programs and and functions. Buildings become characters in ‘masques’ a nomadic troop. The cast presents itself to a city and its inhabitants. Some of the objects are buit and remain in the city; some are built for a time, then are dismantled and disappear;some are built, dismantled and move on to another city where they are reconstructed.

Perspective of various designs for public and private buildings executed by John Soane between 1780 and 1815, shown as if they were models in a gallery Joseph Gandy A superimposition of different architectures with different uses and intentions, creating a collage city.

Bournville Village - George Cadbury A factory built as a town, with streets churches, and parks. Bournville represented an idyllic oasis in an age of industry, a community with high regard for social values.

George Cadbury said the estate should “ameliorate the condition of the working-class and labouring population... by the provision of improved dwellings, with gardens and open space to be enjoyed therewith�

Highrise of Homes - James Wines The philosophical motivation behind this concept is a critique of the Twentieth Century tradition of homogenized and faceless multistory buildings, which eliminate the possibility for urban dwellers to demonstrate any evidence of their presence in the cityscape.

As an alternative, the High-rise of Homes offers residents a unique opportunity to achieve an individual statement of identity. The purpose is to shift the premises for aesthetic evaluation in high-rise buildings away from orthodox design continuity, in favor of the artistic merits of collage architecture, based on indeterminacy, idiosyncrasy and cultural diversity.