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Disciplines: Urban design
Details and Totalities
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Abstract.
This paper presents a sustained reflection on two large urban design experiments. The reflection describes an emergent effect named “epistemic reciprocity”. The latter part of the paper grounds its description in a body of design theory. The design experiments were carried out in Pendrecht/Zuidwijk (Rotterdam, NL) and Hellersdorf-Süd (Berlin, DE). Both areas are post-war urban expansions that are in need of an update in terms of urban sustainability. The design experiments were devised to explore and document the spatial possibilities of urban renewal and the epistemic potentials of architectural design. The reflection for this paper deals with the oppositional interplay between details and totality; large visions and tiny details; structural decisions and local details. This dialectic between the details and their totality can be couched in epistemic terms. Between the two opposites, an emergent effect of “epistemic reciprocity” occurs. Without details, the design proposal seems void; yet, it cannot be reduced to a collection of details. Dealing with totalities and details can be done in such a way that different scales of a given proposal reciprocally support each other. Knowledge from one level triggers insights on adjacent levels. Prudently switching between detail and totality enables these moments of “epistemic reciprocity”. The movement of zooming in and out on an idea is not only useful for defining details but is indispensable for developing parallel tracks of thought.
Keywords.
design theory, architectural design, epistemology, research through design, urbanism
/…/ it follows that totality and detail exist on the same ontological plane. It also follows that knowledge production is not confined to fact-finding but can consist in other forms of insight. These insights are enabled through systematic design experimentation unfolding at multiple levels in parallel. This parallel development is a way to bring detail and totality together in ways that fit a situation. Yet, thoughtful detailing adds – at its own scale level – coherence and intelligible meaning to the totality. Designing, then, develops the many scale levels of a future world in parallel. Overall design ideas (totalities) intersect on user interfaces (details), creating insights that could not be obtained without a multi-level, conceptional process of making. In this process, in-formation becomes information. The knowledge derived from the searching process can be used for inferential reasoning, discursive practices and reflections on such topics as everyday usage, atmosphere, construction or ecology.
From Geo-politics to Geo-poetics
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Abstract.
For more than five decades, the School of Valparaíso in Chile has endeavored to develop a pedagogy and research in architecture based on the experience of building speculative works of architecture, away from traditional methods of research and theoretical production. This commitment for the Work has been materialized in projects such as the Open City and the Travesías of Amereida. However, and almost contradictory, this attitude towards architecture is based on a geo-poetic vision of the South American continent created by this School in the mid-sixties, which is postulated as a fundamental element in the development of architectural projects.
This geo-poetic vision emerged from the Travesía of Amereida in 1965, a wandering trip through the interior lands of South America, seeking to ‘unveil’ them through poetry and art in action, inquiring into the question of ‘being American’ and its correlation with the inhabited (and uninhabited) territory of the continent. From this original experience, the Thesis of the Interior Sea (1971) is formulated, taking the geo-poetic vision to the field of architecture and urbanism, and establishing a position facing the geopolitics of the seventies, particularly with the visions on the development of the South American region towards the Asia Pacific front.
However, for the School, this vision must be linked to the architecture-praxis. For this reason, since 1984 the Travesías are a direct experience of architecture carried out on the territory, whose main objective is to “unveil” the South American continent through the development of different design practices of architecture and design.
This paper aims to present the meanings of the geo-poetic embodiment of the Interior Sea and its transcription in the architectural-praxes developed in the Travesías over the last five decades, decoding how the iteration between descriptive, narrative and performative praxis allows to simultaneously build metaphorical and critical insights about the transformation of territories driven by continental urbanization and its architectural incarnation.
The presentation is based on the analysis of historical archive documents and experiences as professor at the School of Valparaíso.
Keywords.
Geo-poetic; territory; design-practice; urbanization
Ongoing research
Based on this historical analysis and experiences as professor at the School of Valparaíso, this ongoing research aims to trace and decode how the origin and deployment of the Travesías in the Interior Sea has faced the historical and current urbanization of the continent, understanding urbanization, on the one hand, as the means by which the Travesías reach isolated places of the continent, and on the other, as the current process by which new remote territories are integrated into the global, but mainly for the exploitation of natural resources, paradoxically causing the displacement or resistance of places that are virtually unknown to the world.
Mapping and re-tracing of the Inner(s) Sea(s) based on the narratives and Works of more than 250 Travesías throughout South America (1965:1984-2019) aims to open up other ways of representing -digitally- the relationship between geo-poetics and a continent in transformation, overcoming the traditional methods of descriptive geography and geopolitics. Finally, this research expects to contribute in the current discussion within the academia committed to approaching subjects –such as urbanization and territorialization– through design practices beyond the disciplinary boundaries of architecture.
The Lean.City
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Abstract.
objectives
How are cities changing? Introduction to the lean.city
The aim of this research is to demonstrates that the future of the city is already in action and it is producing spaces with new characteristics thanks to the combined use of traditional design tools and new digital opportunities (apps, platforms, social media), where the experience of designers is combined within information, opinions and needs of the people who will inhabit the spaces. A relationship that can act before, during and after the realization of the project according to a cyclic and lean process (research, project, prototype, test) supported by digital tools. These approaches can improve the general livability of the environment in indoor and outdoor interventions and allow the possibilities to have new experience of the space where online and offline spheres are part of the same augmented world.
method
A collection of best practices
The research uses a collection of examples and best practices from all over the world where designers and people are related in the transformation of the space using new forms of collaborative design. The lean.city is not an utopia, it is already around us, but in forms and uses that should be identified and related one to the other to understand how much are pervasive. The case studies identify four macro- topics. 1. DOMESTIC EXTENSIONS / Digital Nomadism and Sharing Attitude, 2. HYPER NATURE / Collective Projects for a Re-Vegetation of the City, 3. NATIVE SPACES / Activators and Experience of the Space, 4. SOCIAL HUBS / Onlife Spaces and Systems.
expected outcomes
A sharing and collaborative city
From the case studies and the data emerges a city capable of constantly changes according to the needs of its inhabitants, using the traditional tools of the architectural/ urban culture and those of the digital innovation. This scenario generates more shared and active places, co-designed within the users and they assume new characteristics that change or hybridize the traditional architectural and urban typologies, crossings the usual design scales and relationships. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, from the data set it is possible to recognize four macro-topics that can describe the new urban scenario: a city where the difference between interior and exterior is less tangible and more hybrid, a re-vegetation of the space developed together with people, new devices that re-activate underused spaces linking people’s needs together with brands and companies in a bottom-up/top-down process and vice versa, spaces that were born firstly online and then offline and create new opportunities, business models and “onlife” activities.
Keywords.
Lean; co-design; cross-scale; digitalculture; architecture; urbanspace
Communal Space and Degree of Sharing
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Abstract.
This paper reviews the regeneration project of Juer Hutong led by Chinese architect Liangyong Wu from 1987 to 1994, a dwelling research and practice for an old neighborhood with traditional courtyard houses in Beijing’s historical city. It is an early experiment of mediating historical conservation and the soaring housing demand in the late 1980s since the housing reform in Beijing. The whole research, design and implementation process of Juer Hutong project is documented in Wu’s 1994 book The Old City of Beijing and its Juer Hutong Neighborhood. Past studies of this epic housing project have been focusing on its theoretical value for conservation planning of historical cities as the biggest achievement. This paper wants to excavate another dimension of the project: how it employed the architectural design mechanisms and cultural idea of public-private relationship enclosed in traditional Chinese dwelling and created a new architectural typology, the new quadrangle, which can enable both community life and individual privacy. This paper argues that rather than being a traditional courtyard housing replica, as commonly misunderstood and criticised due to its un-traditional form, the new quadrangle stands as an interesting example of how to achieve communal living patterns in modern dwelling design, meeting nowadays requirements in terms of density and degree of collectivity.
Keywords.
Chinese dwelling design; communal space; new courtyard house; public-private gradient; urban regeneration design
Enframing the Scene
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Abstract.
This paper is part of a Ph.D. thesis. It originates in a cross-cultural observation, which is from the perspective of the contemporary architecture academic context to interpret one typical Chinese landscape spatial phenomenon: enframing the scene.
Starting from a discussion of frame1, both in contemporary architectural discourse and in retroactive research concerning Ancient Chinese landscape, this project aims to reveal certain similarities and differences in the use of frame between these realms.
Based on a cross-cultural methodological approach, we found a similarity in the use of frame in these two domains. They are both from visual habits. It is in one certain chain: ‘the way of seeing’- ‘the way to create space matching this seeing way’1. Due to the different visual habits, the cases from ancient Chinese landscape offer another way to see, and then another way to organize, the space by using frame. This “another way”, in this thesis, is defined as perceptual interaction between the users and space, happening in the user’s perception field.
In the present paper, it will discuss the possibility to employ the perception-phenomenology and visual psychology to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of this perception interaction tool in contemporary spatial design.
The adoption of phenomenology is based on the assumption that human knowledge of space includes some a priori. This means that, excluding cultural differences, there should be some spatial prototypes that can serve people of varied cultural backgrounds.
Ultimately, the research will highlight how the perception interaction, used as a “design tool”, could lead to a higher context-sensitive spatial design practice in this contemporary extensively globalized society.
Keywords.
Perceptual Interaction Design Tool; Contemporary spatial design; Ancient Chinese landscape architecture; Frame/windows and space/landscape
/…/
Conclusion
Although this is a study based on the spatial phenomenon of Chinese gardens when we talk about the perceptual cognition, that is the essential and fundamental working mechanism, we actually touched on the commonality of the human being. We believe a more in-depth analysis of it in this process, mainly employing perception-phenomenology and visual psychology, will help us return to the context of contemporary spatial design discourse. It would help to convert it into a tool using in contemporary design.