Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
LINA FAWCETT
Architectural Association / Housing & Urbanism
MA 2006 / 2007
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Contents
INTRODUCTION
ABSTRACT ENTITIES: THE URBAN GRID
QUESTION OF LEGIBILITY: FIGURE/GROUND
AMBIVALENT DELIRIOUS NEW YORK: THE PARTITIONED CITY
DISCOURSIVE SURFACES: THE BLOCK PARADOX
LOBOTOMY REVISITED
Fields of DeFormation:
TRACING CRITICAL BOUNDARIES IN ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE
Introduction
We dont control the city but we will find a way of working with our powerlessness
REM KOOLHAAS
experimentation.
urban conditions.
emerging urban landscapes. The faade performs as architectural material into more creative procedures
a critical surface that articulates urban affects and
as a persistent and flexible planning instrument along chapter three develops a new urban logic that
time. If the plan is not sufficient anymore, by securing investigates and compares new methods of
its spatial hierarchies the building skin becomes
difference.
CHAPTER 1
Abstract Entities:
The Urban Grid
The grid is a powerful organisational matrix within the
city that instigates the formal conception of
architecture. By abstracting this organisational
device through spatial and perceptual logics, the
grids influence on the generation of form could
provide conceptual applications that frame
innovative performances within urban systems,
peripheries, interstices and open fields. This chapter
aims at depicting the grids rationale as to reveal
notions that further contribute to design strategies.
In order to develop a spatial diagnosis of the
contemporary urban condition it is necessary to
investigate the historical significance of the grid, and
its ability to embody social, political and economical
forces into a unified complex urban order. Even
during the modernist revolutionary operations within
architectural design, classical notions of the grid
provided a nostalgic instrument that effectively
organised the conception of the built fabric and its
transformation along time, thus leaving the role of the
grid conceptually fixed. Yet modernism meant to
indicate an alteration.
practice.
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depended though on the limitation and scope settled Following Elliss argument, the exemplars shown in
within the practice itself.
becoming intensive or qualitative. Eisenman utilizes mentioned two-edged prevalent concept of the city.
a drawing of Campo Marzio, to illustrate how an
interiority of architecture is not burdened by the
change.
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Figures 2-3-4: New York readings of the orthogonal grid in Rowes early projects. (From left to right) Figure/ground fragment,
armatures emphasizing on resolution and collision elements, and armatures of site adjacencies.
PARTITIONED CITY
Contemporary to Collage City, Delirious New York is a extruded typology. Koolhaas directly explores the
retroactive manifesto that avoids discussing existing
implanted within.
Manhattan.
place that projects the fantasies of what people want, imposed unconsciousness 3 .
and reflects on some spectacular contradictions
driven by forceful economic processes, mobility and
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the World
grid.
Ibid. 93.
7
Ibid. 100.
within the city would find its start and end in a fixed
8
Ibid. 104.
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architectural surface.
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architectural procedures.
harmonic system.
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completion of a whole.
LOBOTOMY REVISITED
13
What Le
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arbitrary 18
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CHAPTER 2
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discuss how the faade represents an instance in the valid for the Parisian block, In each case, the two
process of architectural practice that has
precisely through differentiation. We must first define the totality of urbanism. But in most disciplines such
the context for this differentiation that lies not in the
reasoning.
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19
dichotomy is to be solved.
The street, for instance, has always been a positive
and legible structure of the grid. From the point of
view of the building with no back or front, the street is
not anymore the unique positive void that marks an
entry, it is also at the edge of being a mere
transportation line. If the urban block has broken up
as an entity, so is the street as its adjacent figure.
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BLURRING BOUNDARIES
As I previously mentioned in the first Chapter,
Rather than the conceptualisation of an architecture
8
9
Ibid. 57-59.
Lynn, Greg (1993). Probable Geometries: The Architecture of
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Figures 12-13-14: Front views of LeCorbusiers Carpenter Centre (top-left), Zaha Hadids Cardiff Opera House (top-right), and
sequence given by buildings rotation in Hadids Zolhoff 3 Media Park (bottom).
movement, sound, light and boundless space, has to projection and construction 11 as activities achieved
be seen as one of Le Corbusiers most significant
immaterial.
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INTELLIGENCE
configuration.
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11
Ibid. 64.
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protections.
urban organizations. 13
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Figure 15: Cardiff Opera House, auditorium and groundcondition study models.
ambiguous.
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16
Ibid. 47-48.
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Figures 16-17-18: Cardiff Opera House, fold-out external elevation (top), system of surfaces viewed from Pierhead Street (bottom-left),
and exploded aerial view (bottom-right).
progression of programmes and transitions that even main theatre, the vortex apparent between the
allow for the distortion of space as they counterpoise
are imposed in a literal way, providing no symmetry breaking the urban environment. Similar to the
and in consequence no linearity, prominent figures,
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CHAPTER 3
Urbanism:
An Architectural Field of
Reinvention
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created.
alternative.
differently rather than through direct rerepresentation of the existing, and actualising the
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understanding of continuation of the urban fabric and inside the exploration of type, meaning that the initial
contribution as a part in the completion of a whole,
organization.
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spaces.
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Figures 24-25: Federal Environmental Agency, formal arrangement of the building type, and MVRDV Housing Silo in
Amsterdam.
planimetric and sectional relationships and, opposed produce an autonomous organization. By bending
to the unity of the Agency in Dessau, the space
in regard to residential environments; it dissolves any and not breaking the required continuity of a large
fixed volumes and blurs the boundaries between
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NON-ARCHITECTURE: PREDICAMENT OF
ARCHITECTS
Another conceptual reflection is also present in
Koolhaas and Tschumis competition for Parc de la
Villette where the contextual matrix of street,
neighbourhood, block and unit is replaced by an
abstract organization given by superimpositions.
The problem was again less of design and much
more of strategic organization of a field condition,
since the surface had to be equipped and staged in
such a way as to both anticipate and accommodate
any number of changing programs.
OMA responded with the drawn superposition of four
strategic layers for organizing different parts of the
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10
incompleteness and fuzziness of the diagram itself. It the recombination of traces opens a whole range of
develops flexible systems that converge rather than
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mental operation. 1
If the described spatial mechanisms and their
The mental construct architecture has come to be
Hadid?
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Oppositions Reader.
Gandelsonas, Mario. 1999. ExUrbanism. Princeton Architectural Press, New York.
Gregory, Paola. New Scapes,Territories of Complexity. Birkhauser. Basel. 2003.
Hadid, Zaha, 1998, The Complete Buildings and Projects, London, Thames & Hudson.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 2001, Urban Architecture, Berlin, Aedes.
Hays, Michael, 1999, Points of Influence and Lines of Development, in Points+Lines: Diagrams and
Projects for the City, New York, Princeton Architectural Press.
Heynen, Hilde, 1999, Architecture and Modernity, Cambridge, The MIT Press.
Kipnis, Jeffrey, 2006. Re-originating Diagrams in Eisenman, Peter, Feints, Milano, Skira Editore.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 2004, Towards a New Architecture in Folding in Architecture, Architectural Design,
London, John Wiley & Sons.
Koolhaas, Rem, 1991, S, M, L, XL, New York, Princeton Architectural Press.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 1994, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. New York, The Monacelli
Press.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 1997, Urban Operations in GSAPP, Columbia Documents of Architecture and Theory, Vol.
3.
Kwinter, Sanford, 1998. The Genealogy of Models: The Hammer and the Song in ANY 23, New York.
LeCorbusier, 1964, La Ville Radieuse, Paris, Vincent Freal.
Lynn, Greg, December 1992, Multiplicitous and Inorganic Bodies in Assemblage 19.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 1998, New Variations on the Rowe Complex, first published in ANY 7/8. Folds, Bodies and
Blobs, Collected Essays. Bibliotheque Royale de Belgique.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 1998, Probable Geometries: The Architecture of Writing in Bodies, first published in ANY 0.
Folds, Bodies and Blobs, Collected Essays. Bibliotheque Royale de Belgique.
Panerai, Philippe et al, 2004. Urban Forms: The Death and Life of the Urban Block, Oxford, Architectural
Press.
Reiser+Umemoto, 2006, Atlas of Novel Tectonics, New York, Princeton Architectural Press.
Rossi, Aldo, 1982. The Architecture of the City.Cambridge, Oppositions Books.
Rowe, Colin / Koetter, Fred, 1978. Collage City, Cambridge, The MIT Press.
Rowe, Colin / Slutzky, Robert, 1997, Transparency, Basel, Bikhauser.
Shane, Grahame, 2005. Recombinant Urbanism, London, John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Schumacher, Patrik, 2004. Digital Hadid: Landscapes in Motion, Basel, Birkhauser.
Speaks, Michael, 2006, Architectural Association Lecture Liars, Bullshitters, Intelligencers.
Tschumi, Bernard, 1999. Architecture and Disjunction. Cambridge, The MIT Press, Cambridge.
Versioning, September 2002, Architectural Design Vol.72.
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Image Credits
Figure 1: Allen, Stan experimental design on Piranesis Campo Marzio in Points+Lines: Diagrams and
Projects for the City, New York, Princeton Architectural Press. 6.
Figure 2: Colin Rowe Manhattan figure/ground fragment in 'Type and Context in Urbanism: Colin Rowes
Contextualism in K.M. Hays (ed.) Oppositions Reader. 1998. 237.
Figures 3-4: Colin Rowe and Peter Eisenman North Bronx Project in 'Type and Context in Urbanism: Colin
Rowes Contextualism in K.M. Hays (ed.) Oppositions Reader. 1998. 239.
Figure 5: Koolhaas, Rem, The City of the Captive Globe in Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for
Manhattan. New York, The Monacelli Press. 1994. 295.
Figure 6: The New York Rockettes in Porphyrios, Demetrios, Pandoras Box: An Essay on Metropolitan
Portraits, Architectural Design, Vol. 47. 1977.
Figure 7: Eisenman, Peter, Diagrams on Ville Savoye and Villa at Garches skin-surfaces in The Formal Basis
of Modern Architecture. Lars Muller Publishers. 2006. 74, 80.
Figure 8: Eisenman, Peter, Rebstock Housing Park competition model in Written into the Void. New Haven,
Yale University Press. 2007. 16.
Figure 9-10: Pictures taken by Lina Fawcett in Hackney, London.
Figure 11: Tschumi, Bernard, Parc de la Villette competition entry in Architecture and Disjunction.
Cambridge, The MIT Press, Cambridge. 1999. 202.
Figure 12: Rosenthal, Steven, LeCorbusiers Carpenter Centre for the Visual Arts in Allen, Stan, 2000.
Practice, Amsterdam, G+B Arts International. 105.
Figure 13-14: Hadid, Zaha, El Croquis Zaha Hadid 1983-2004, December 2001. Vol. 52+73+103, Madrid.
Figure 15: Hadid, Zaha, 1998, The Complete Buildings and Projects, London, Thames & Hudson. 121.
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Figure 16-17-18: Hadid, Zaha, El Croquis Zaha Hadid 1983-2004, December 2001. Vol. 52+73+103,
Madrid.
Figure 19: Versioning, September 2002, Architectural Design Vol.72. 9.
Figure 20: Reiser+Umemoto, 2006, Atlas of Novel Tectonics, New York, Princeton Architectural Press. 246.
Figure 21-22-23-24: Drawings by Lina Fawcett, Urban Workshop, AA Housing & Urbanism, 2006-2007.
Figure 25: MVRDV Housing Silo in Amsterdam, El Croquis MVRDV, 1997, Vol. 86, Madrid. 410.
Figure 26: Hadid, Zaha, Cardiff Opera House in El Croquis Zaha Hadid 1983-2004, December 2001. Vol.
52+73+103, Madrid.
Figure 27: Reiser+Umemoto, West Side competition entry in Atlas of Novel Tectonics, New York, Princeton
Architectural Press. 2006. 61.
Figure 28: Tschumi, Bernard, Parc de la Villette competition entry in Architecture and Disjunction.
Cambridge, The MIT Press, Cambridge. 1999. 190.
Figure 29: Koolhaas, Rem, Melun Senart project in Urban Operations in GSAPP, Columbia Documents of
Architecture and Theory, Vol. 3. 1997. 32.