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If the term architects of reason

has any meaning, I believe it must
relate to the experience in architecture (and hence in building, the
city, its assessment in the light of
history and so on) that specifically
led to an analysis and construction
of architecture in rational terms, in
other words making use of techniques peculiar to reason.
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9 789461 865861
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DELFT
LECTURES ON
ARCHITECTURAL
DESIGN
2015 / 2016
I NTRO D U C TIO N
13 Susanne Komossa
Introduction Different
architectural positions,
process as a common
ground
I.
D E PA R TE M E NT O F
A R C H ITE C TU R E
A R C H ITE C TU R AL
C O M P OS ITIO N &
PU B LI C B U I LD I N G
27 Michiel Riedijk
Raw steak on the drawing
board; On conventions and
identity in Architecture
43 Susanne Komossa
Whos afraid of red, yellow and
blue? Colour and identity in
architectural design
A R C H ITE C TU R E &
D W E LLI N G
75 Dick van Gameren
Revisions of space; Positioning
and repositioning space in and
around buildings
105 Dirk van den Heuvel
As Found Aesthetics; Notes on
the formation of the (British)
context debate in architecture
A R C H ITE C TU R E O F
TH E I NTE R IO R
131 Mark Pimlott
Fiction and significance
in the public interior
C O M PLE X
PROJ E C TS
157 Kees Kaan
The Building site of modern
architecture; On Louis Sullivan
in Chicago
179 Henk Engel
The rationalist perspective
Reader Architectural Design
M E TH O DS &
AN ALYS I S
197 Tom Avermaete
From Unit to Jussieu;
The Public Realm as
Frame, Substance and Goal
of Architecture
221 Klaske Havik
An introduction to literary
methods in architectural design
TH E W H Y
FAC TO RY
237 Susanne Komossa
Interview with Winy Maas
D E PA R TE M E NT O F
A R C H ITE C TU R AL
E N G I N E E R I N G AN D
TE C H N O LOGY
H E R ITAG E &
253 Paul Meurs
Building in the stubborn city;
Design with history
N O N -S TAN DAR D
& I NTE R AC TIV E
277 Kas Oosterhuis
Towards a New Kind of
Building; a designers guide
to nonstandard architecture
Table of content
II.
Delft Lectures on Architectural

Design 2015/2016
Editors: Susanne Komossa, Esther
Gramsbergen, Eireen Schreurs,
Lidwine Spoormans, Hans Teerds
Reviewers: Patrick Healy and
Cor Wagenaar
We thank Frank van der Hoeven for
his support and Dirk van der Heuvel
as a former editor.
Design: Hans Gremmen, Amsterdam
Edition: academic year 2015/2016
Publisher: TU Delft Open
ISBN 978-9461865861
Copyright 2015 the authors
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution
4.0 International License.
The idea of this lecture series is to enable various full professors,

associate professors and researchers to present the main positions held in architectural design within the facultys master track
in architecture. Apart from their collaboration in the actual lectures,
which are organized as little debates, the Faculty staff each has
handed in a contribution to this reader, in which the lecturers upon
both contemporary key problems within the field of architecture,
and/or their own sources of inspiration and illumination.
The introduction of the reader illuminates the way in which certain

approaches to research and design evolved at the Delft Faculty
of Architecture as a consequence of student revolts after 1968.
It traces the roots of what today might be considered part of the
Delft DNA and as such, could be considered specific for the Delft
approach to architecture if compared to other schools across Europe.
We arranged the text sequence in this reader according to the
Facultys of Architecture and the Built Environment departments,
which have been involved in the lecture series so far. At the moment these are the Department of Architecture and the Department of Architectural Engineering and Technology. Within these
departments we distinguish the chairs, headed by professors representing a specific field. So, for architecture there are 6 chairs:
Architectural Composition & Public Building, Architecture & Dwelling, The Architecture of the Interior, Complex Projects, Methods &
Susanne Komossa, Esther Gramsbergen, Eireen

Schreurs, Lidwine Spoormans, Hans Teerds (eds.)
Hence, the audience and target group of the lecture series and
reader are MSc1 students. Since this student group has diverse
educational backgrounds, like bachelor students from Delft, college students, Erasmus students and International Master students from all over the world, this series offers what actually
forms the Delft Master program on architecture for both an informed and un-informed public. For the students the series renders thus an introduction to the MSc architecture programs & design studios, which are offered by a variety of architecture chairs
located within the Department of Architecture, but also at the departments of Building Technology and Urbanism. For the outside
world other architecture faculties, professional practice and interested laymen the reader might be of interest as well, because
it provides insight into the current stances of the Delft school vis-vis architectural design, building technology and urban design.
Preface
Preface Delft Lectures Series on Architectural Design
Analysis and The Why Factory. From the Department of Architectural Engineering Heritage & Architecture and Non-Standard and
Interactive (by Hyperbody) are involved. For each chair you will find
a short introduction addressing the chairs main field of research
and education, the position taken and methods followed. Considering that the students just enter their master education we hope
this structure will help them to orient themselves and to provide
insights that facilitate the choice of design studios.
The full professors, associate professors and researchers of the
Delft Faculty of Architecture address in the texts that are collected
in this reader key contemporary topics, investigating historical
models and theoretical arguments while discussing the latest architecture projects as well prototypical cases. Moreover, diverse
contributions present contemporary positions in architectural
practice and theory against the background of the modern era
(1750-today) as characterised by the conditions of the historical
avant-garde, (post)modernity, and its various moments of crisis
and critique. Through the series of articles presented here a broad
range of questions and themes thus is addressed and explored.
In the academic year 2015-2016 the lectures series is composed
around two key topics of the current debate on architecture. Next
to lecturers from the Department of Architecture and the Department of Architectural Engineering and Technology, lecturers from
the Department of Urbanism are invited. The first theme that will
be addressed is architecture as collective art, which questions
the role and responsibilities of the architect regarding the larger
context in which projects are placed. Secondly the theme architecture between local identity and global practice will be emphasized,
which questions the local and global circumstances and contexts
of the architectural project today.
The lecture series is organized in the form of a series of debates,
which challenges the students to see the possibility of positions
that could be taken within the field and how they affect the actual
(design) approach to architectural projects. Both sections first
are addressed from an academic perception, by giving the floor to
two more or less theory-oriented lecturers. The two subsequent
lectures than offer the floor to professors who are extensively involved in design practice, in order to reflect upon the theme using
their own practice as exemplary.
The editors August 2015
FO R M AT FA LL 2 014 :
7 Lectures (2 x 45 minutes)
held by full professors, associate professors, researchers
and guests from architecture
practise. The lectures are
concentrated in the first half
of the semester. Generally,
the lectures start with introducing the issue, after which
the positions are discussed.
The coordinators are present
to introduce the speakers and
the topic, and subsequently
to moderate questions and
debate..
E X A M I N ATI O N :
Written exam with open questions based on the content of
this reader and recordings of
the lectures on collegerama
.Examples of the kinds of questions and correct answers
expected are provided on the
blackboard section accompanying the course. The exam will
betaken halfway and at the end
of both fall and spring semester
AR1 A 060 Delft Lecture Series
on Architectural Design.
We thank the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment and all lecturers for their
efforts and contributions. In
particular we would like to
thank Dirk van den Heuvel
who is a former editor, Anna
Golubovska as our student
assistant who compiles all
necessary materials and Hans
Gremmen who designed this
edition.
Susanne Komossa, Esther Gramsbergen, Eireen

Schreurs, Lidwine Spoormans, Hans Teerds (eds.)
Beyond these issues a few key questions can be traced in the texts
in this reader as well as in the lectures:
Where do architects stand, why and how did they develop their
particular position and what are their means of acting as a profession/professional?
What kind of specific knowledge, tacit or explicit, do architects
render with their research and design work?
What kind of methods, strategies and approaches were and are
relevant, what is their history and what are the future prospects?
Preface
Facilitating and stimulating the debate amongst practitioners will

make students aware of the urge to reflect upon their own position, taken towards the world and the role of design within it. Underneath this approach is the conviction that reflection is a necessary part of architecture: without discussion there only is building,
no architecture!
10
INTRODUCTION
11
12
i introduction
Susanne Komossa
13
Introduction Different architectural positions,

process as a common ground
Susanne Komossa
Different architectural positions, process as

a common ground
14
3
The term refers to Ulrich,
the main figure in Robert
Musils famous novel Der
Mann ohne Eigenschaften
(1930), who because of too
many possibilities is not
able to dedicate himself to
a single one.
4
Vinex is the abbreviation of
Vierde Nota Ruimtelijke Ordening Extra, a document
dating from 1993 in which
the Dutch Government
decided to allow provinces
and municipalities to define
extension areas for new
building within the vicinity
of the existing cities. Basically the Notas focus is on
the planning of dwellings
and new neighborhoods.
The ambition was to build

in total between 1993 and
2015 up to 635.000 new
dwellings, preferably low
rise housing in high density.

a common ground
1
See also: Henk Engel,
Susanne Komossa, Erik Terlouw, Architectuurfragmenten 2; De vraag naar stijl,
Publikatieburo Bouwkunde,
TUD, Delft 1995
2
Jacobs, Jane; Systems of
survival; A Dialogue on the
Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics; Vintage/Random House, New
York 1994
This open, process-oriented approach could be

regarded as leading to a architecture without
qualities3. It carries a double-faced nature. On
one hand it made it very easy to relate teaching
architectural research and design to practise
heading for several aims. For example, during
the 1980s, findings developed within the
Architecture faculty were directly implemented
into the planning and design practise of urban
renewal in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Districts
(or neighbourhoods) like the Oude Westen in
Rotterdam were considered as laboratories,
where a variety of methods and approaches could
be tested in terms of typo-morphological research
in particular and based on the rediscovery of the
historical city as the actual body of architectural
knowledge and instruments. Later on, during the
1990s municipalities working on the restructuring
of former harbour and industrial areas, but also
in the case of the development of suburban Vinex
sites4 , also carried out this tradition of experiment
and renewal, as represented by the work of Dick
van Gameren for the Vinex site of Ypenburg
for instance. Moreover, within this framework,
other commissioners, like school boards and
professional real estate developers acted likewise
having an eye for experiment and innovation.
Additionally, this whole development during
the 1980s and 1990s was accompanied by broad
discussions in public and architectural magazines,
architectural and urban design competitions
organized for example by the Rotterdamse
Kunststichting resulting in the Architecture
International Rotterdam, AIR competition for De
Kop van Zuid and the Mller Pier in Rotterdam,
and the Oostelijke Havengebieden in Amsterdam.
Susanne Komossa
The Faculty of Architecture, Delft University of

Technology is renowned around the world for its open
and innovative approach to architecture in general
and architectural design especially. Considerable
numbers of Erasmus and International students join
every year the masters programme.
Due to student revolts of the early 1970s (and the
facultys engineering background) studio teaching
focuses foremost on the design process within the socalled project education, which the student and
later on, the practising architect, subsequently and
decisively follows. Within this process the consistent
argument is considered more important than the
actual architectural form. Or in other words, style of
whatever master architect is not the central issue, but
instead the question how the student of architecture is
able to develop a coherent position based on a working
method of relentless enquiry and investigation,
elaborating this into attractive and challenging
design proposals and ultimately how to find ways
in which s/he is able to link this to developments in
society and the actual practice of architecture1. The
focus on process also enhances the idea of continuous
change, innovation and transformation. Starting
with this assumption architectural models and design
are not fixed or static entities but subjected to an
ongoing process of questioning and change. In the
words of Jane Jacobs Truth is made up of many bits
and pieces of reality. The flux and change in itself
is of the essence. Change is so major a truth that we
understand process to be the essence of things.2
A P R O C E S S O R I E N T E D A P P R OAC H
AS A COMMON GROUND
introduction
15
INTRODUCTION
16
The results of these discussions, competitions,

experiments and voluptuous program of
extending the existing housing stock rendered
the Netherlands, i.e. Dutch architecture and
specifically its architects once again5 important,
if we think of the architectural practises and
designs of OMA/Rem Koolhaas, Neutelings
Riedijk, KCAP, MVRDV, Mecanoo and their
colleagues.
On the other hand, being so practical,
operative and applied, methods of architectural
research and design were never extensively
theoretically underpinned and assessed in a
comprehensive and critical way during the last
two decennia.
One might state that this consistent and free
and open-ended approach to architectural design
seems to be challenging. However, in order
to keep up the Delft and Dutch architectural
design reputation in an international, even global
academic environment, practising architects,
researchers and educators at the Delft Faculty
or Architecture need to write theory6, in order
to underpin and make their approach in a
theoretical and methodological sense more
explicit.
ARCHITECTUR AL POSITIONS ;
C U R R E N T D E L F T A P P R OAC H E S
This short historical overview forms the

background of the current architectural design
positions to be distinguished at the Delft Faculty
of Architecture. In fact, the architectural
approaches outlined within this introduction have
highly influenced architectural theory, history
and design at the faculty not only during the past,
but also as we can register them today. If we look
at and study the architectural positions presented
in Delft Lecture Series on Architectural
Design it becomes evident that the Faculty of
Architecture has panoply of approaches with
regard to its research and education in the design
studios of the Bachelor and Master program.
THE MODERNISTS
To begin with, we can distinguish the group of

researchers and designers who intend to critically
investigate the Project of Modernity. The Twentieth
century avant-garde has gained a central role in
the facultys history of teaching architecture. This
tradition started with the appointment of Jo van
den Broek, representing pre- and as well post-war
Modernism, as a professor from 1947 to 1964.
Combining this initially functionalist/modernist

approach with the Architecture facultys
engineering tradition matched well. Subsequently,
Jacob Bakema in 1964 and in 1966, Aldo van
Eyck, Herman Hertzberger et-al. followed him.
They were members of Forum and TEAM X
who had entered from the 50s onward into a
critical evaluation of CIAM principles. Van Eyck
and Hertzberger developed during these years the
Structuralist approach to architecture.
Additionally, during the 1970 and 1980s Max
Risselada (and Bernhard Leupen) re-evaluated
these legacies for example with studies like
Raumplan versus Plan Libre7, books on Hans
Scharoun, the Smithons & Team X, the famous
Plannenmappen and exhibitions on the work
of architects, which were considered to represent
central positions in modernist architecture and
its revision. Risselada developed plan analysis as a
technique for selecting, documenting, describing,
analysing and interpreting architectural designs.8
Plan analysis as a method of documentation and
analysis allows designs to be compared. Usually
it focuses on prototypical designs or oeuvres of
specific architects. Plan analysis as developed
in Delft usually centers on those aspects of the
architectural design that also arise during the
actual design process as relatively independent
layers of design because they can be developed
as separate layers within that process. These
coordinated layers together are assumed to
form the architectural design. Aspects that form
part of the design are: the nature and ordering
of the functional program; the material ordering of
the design in relation to systems of measurement,
strength and tactile properties of materials, routing
and spatial sequences. Additionally situation
analysis seeks to determine how the design is
embedded in a specific location, as well as how
interaction between the specific location and the
design is shaped.9
As said, this distinct line of thought in the Delft
tradition of plan analysis represented by Max
Risselada and Bernard Leupen10 mainly focuses
on the constituent layers in architectural
designs. In the 1970s and 1980s this group
devised a variety of techniques for unraveling
designs and making them readable not only
drawing techniques,11 but also construction of
scale models, exhibition concepts and layout
T H E ( N E O ) R AT I O N A L I S T S

a common ground
1953/2003;SUN, Amsterdam 2003

11
See the various files of
plans and Raumplan versus
Plan Libre (1987), compiled
and published by Max Risselada, often in collaboration with students or student assistants.
12
Though not educated at
DUT, but at KU Leuven, Tom
Avermaetes work fits this
program well, for example
his PhD thesis (Another
Modern, the post-war architecture and Urbanism of
Candilis-Josic-Woods, Rotterdam, NAI 2005.
13 Revisions: Changing
Ideals and Shifting realities
in: TUD Research Portfolio
Architecture 2005 2011, p.
44 -51 and 62-64 and 71-73.
14
(currently all emeriti professors of the res. Chair of Design Methods, Typology
and Architectural Composition)
15
In 1984 Henk Engel initiated and wrote the postscript
for the Dutch translation of
Jean Castex, Jean Charles
Depaule, Philip Panerai,
Formes Urbaine: de llot
la barre, Paris, Bordas 1977
under the Dutch title De
Rationele Stad, Van Bouwblok tot Wooneenheid,
Nijmegen, SUN 1984. As a
member of the Vakgroep
Woningbouw en Stedenbouwkundige Vormgeving
and the Sectie Architectuurtheorie of the Projectraad,
Faculty of Architecture in
Delft he worked together
with Henk Hoeks and Jan
Hoffmans (editors/translation). The study was initially
conducted at by the authors
within the framework of
Association de Recherche
de lEcole dArchitecture en
dUrbanisme de Versailles
(ADROS-UP3) that focused
on the relation between
spatial organisation and societal practises (ruimtelijke
organisatie /maatschappelijke praktijk) p. 8. Including this relationship
was new at the time and
was later further developed
in Susanne Komossa, Han
Meyer, Max Risselada, Sabien Thomaes, Nynke Jutten,
Atlas van het Hollandse
Susanne Komossa
Two other distinct lines of thought fuelled the

second Delft position. On one hand, there is the
group that establishes a (neo)rationalist position
under influence of Italian thinking of Manfredo
Tafuri, Aldo Rossi and Georgio Grassi focussing
on the relative autonomy of architecture by
applying typological research of basic building
and typo-morphological studies for urban
analysis. Instead of proto-typical designs and
oeuvres it addresses the paradigmatic architectural
and urban models. In Delft this line centres
in the research and teaching of Carel Weeber,
Leen van Duin, Umberto Barbieri14 and Henk
Engel15. At the end of the 1970s Leen van Duin,
formerly related to the sector design methods
and functional analysis, introduced the notion
of typology and typological research into
studio teaching. This approach16 also focuses
on the various layers of the architectural design
in the sense of analysis and design(ing), but
follows Tafuri17 by including typology (the way in
which the design is linked to similar plans and
predecessors and, for example, large and small
spaces are ordered, the architectural knowledge
carried by types and the like), the architectural
composition of the parts of the building and
spaces, the tectonics, i.e. the image projected by
the building into the situation and urban analysis,
in fact the morphological research18 on the form
of cities, buildings and blocks.
Context in the broad sense of the term was
never part of classic plan analysis. However,
in order to devise architectural theories and
concepts, as well as to develop operational
criticism the rationalist school takes also into
account the socio-economical and political
context in which theory and design arise and
are put into practice. By doing so, Operational
criticism has given university research a new sociopolitical and critical dimension and platform for
acting.
5
After the local rationalism
of Berlage, the Modern
Movement during 1920ties
and the 1950/60ties of van
Eyck, Bakema and van Tijen
6
Faced with this huge tsunami of unknown urban
substance, the most important thing architects can do
is to write new theory, Rem
Koolhaas, In search of authenticity in: Burdett, Ricky,
Deyan Sudjic, The Endless
City, The Urban Age Project
by the London School of
Economics and Deutsche
Banks Afred Herrhausen
Society, London / New
York, Phaidon 2007, p.320
7
Max Risselada, Raumplan
versus Plan Libre, DUP,
Delft 1987
8
Max Risselada, Voorwoord
in: Frits Palmboom, Doel en
Vermaak in het Konstruktivisme, 8 Projekten voor
Woning- en Stedebouw
OSA-Sovjet Unie 19261930, Nijmegen, Sunschrift
142, SUN, 1979, p. 8. In
his Voorwoord Risselada
lists Henk Engel, Jan de
Heer, Frits Palmboom and
Anna Vos as students (student assistants) that collaborated with him in the
Werkgroep (seminar), which
developed the initial Delft
approach to plan analysis.
9
The idea of division into
various design layers was
further developed at Delft
University of Technologys
Faculty of Architecture by
Leen van Duin, Henk Engel
and others, and applied
during the 1980s and 1990s
in a series of lectures and
publications entitled Architektuurfragmenten (Architectural Fragments) and
Architectonische Studies
(Architectural Studies).
10
For example, Leupen, later
Grfe et al., Ontwerp en
analyse, 1993 and see also:
Heuvel, Dirk van den, Madeleine Steigenga, Jaap van
Triest; Lessons: Tupker/
Risselada; a double portrait
of Dutch architectural education 1953/2003 lessen:
Tupker/Risselada, dubbel
portet van het Nederlands
architectuuronderwijs
introduction
17
techniques. In architecture practise Erik van

Egeraat (EEA), Francine Houben (Meccano)
and Dick van Gameren are off-springs of this
school. In the academic setting Christoph Grafe,
Tom Avermaete12 and Dirk Van den Heuvel
subsequently continue Risseladas work within
the architecture research program Revisions:
Changing Ideals and Shifting Realities, The
European Welfare state Project13.
18
On the other hand, the second line of architectural thinking within this group is influenced by a
very special approach to architecture. Within this
line, especially Vincent Ligtelijn and Rein Saariste have to be mentioned. As former assistants of
Jacob Bakema and Aldo van Eyck they took the
Revision of Modernism into a different direction
than Max Risselada et al. by not re-evaluating
the historical avant-garde of the 1920ties and its
after-war heirs, but by turning back to the early
modern of the nineteenth century and begin of
the twentieth. In a way they can be depicted as
the Dutch followers of Colin Rowe as a former
student of Rudolph Wittkower. Within this approach, which dates back to the speculative19
tradition of the Warburg Institute, the past is
critically questioned with regard to its relevance
today. Unlike Rowes approach as presented in
Collage City20 , architectural composition, as such
and the material qualities of architecture were especially stressed in publications, excursions and
weekly studio lectures and the like. These activities, which centred on the work of early modern
architects like Gaudi, Jujol and Plecnik, Greene
& Greene, Goff addressed foremost the specific,
a-typical, sometimes idiosyncratic of the project.
Looking back one could say that Ligtelijn and
Saariste used the phenomenological approach of
van Van Eyck to move out of structuralism in
order to enter into a broader and more international approach. Additionally they paved a way
to a postmodern position, which founds itself on
regional material cultures and political identities
developed within the Arts and Craft Movement /
Jugendstil at the beginning of the 20th century.
This unorthodox postmodern position of Saaristes
and Ligtelijns21 was for Delft avant-la-lettre.
It was their group of students that invited Rem
Koolhaas in the early 1980ties via the history
department, Jan van Geest, to lecture on his
book Delirious New York and operate as their
graduation tutor. With his lectures, Koolhaas
additionally introduced Dalis Paranoid-critical
method to the Architecture faculty. Created in
the early 1930s by Dali himself, the ParanoidCritical method is a Surrealist method used to
help an artist tap into their subconscious through
systematic irrational thought and a self-induced
paranoid state. By inducing this paranoid state
one can forego ones previous notions, concepts,
and understanding of the world and reality in
order to view the world in new, different and

more unique ways. 22 And so they did.
Usually students that were subject to Saariste
and Ligtelijns design education would end
their Architecture Masters before actually
graduating in the studios of Leen van Duin and
later Umberto Barbieri, which acquainted them
with the neo-rationalist position. This amalgam
of speculative and rationalistic is still informs part
of the architectural design education in Delft. In
a certain sense Michiel Riedijk and Winy Maas
can be considered a followers of this school. In
architectural practise this amalgam informed the
education of currently well known architects like
Kees Christiaanse (KCAP), Frits van Dongen
(ArchitectenCie.), Paul de Vroom/Herman de
Kovel (DKV), Joris Molenaar (Molenaar & Co),
Lars Spuybroek and others.
In both positions within the faculty23 the
development of plan analysis and the latter typo
and typo-morphological research coincided
with the period in which re-examination of
the relative autonomy of the discipline of
architecture was a key part of the fundamental
criticism of functionalism. There was a wish to
emphasise the independence of architecture as
a profession with rules all of its own. Moreover,
in the university setting the development of
architectural theories, concepts and plan analysis
were both very much in line with efforts to treat
architecture as an objective science.
The studio and design teaching during that
period was paralleled by architecture history and
theory courses of Kees Vollemans who introduced
French critical thinking, for example Michel
Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Luce Irigaray to
the Faculty of Architecture in Delft. In fact,
this enhanced the approach the rationalistic and
speculative approach, which could also be labelled
deconstructive and phenomenological at the same
time.

a common ground
However, the reason to study architectural precedents and architectural models, let say the prototypes and paradigms, is the assumption that we
cannot look at the future without looking back,
without knowing about the architectural models
and their qualities of the past. Or to put in other
words, architects cannot produce satisfactory designs for the future without knowing their precedents. This also implies that architectural models,
together with the various associated typologies,
are understood as the vehicles and the core of
18
For morphological analysis
techniques in the fields of
landscape and urban planning, see Reh, Arcadia en
Metropolis, 1996, and Hooimeijer, Meyer et al., Atlas of
Dutch water cities, 2005.
19
In Latin the Nome speculator enhances the guardian,
messenger, look out, spy,
but also the investigator
and explorer. The verb to
speculate in English means
to see, to meditate on a
subject and to engage in a
course of reasoning based
on inconclusive evidence,
Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 2006.
20
Rowe, Colin, Fred Koetter,
Collage City, Cambridge
Mass., MIT Press 1978.
Initially Collage City was
published as a special issue
of The Architectural Review
in 1975.
21
See for example: Ligtelijn,
Vincent, Rein Saariste; Josep M. Jujol; 010, Rotterdam
1996
22
(http://www.tufts.edu/
programs/mma/fah188/
clifford/Subsections/Paranoid%20Critical/paranoidcriticalmethod.html)
23
Whichs developments can
be traced in the thematically shifts and focuses of
OASE, Tijdschrift voor
Architectuur / Journal for
Architecture from 1980 till
today.
24
Jean Castex, Jean Charles
Depaule, Philip Panerai,
Formes Urbaine: de llot
la barre, Paris, Bordas 1977.
Translated into Dutch under
the title De Rationele Stad,
Van Bouwblok tot Wooneenheid, Nijmegen, SUN 1984.
The English edition: Urban
Forms: The death and life
of the Urban block, was
published under the title
London, Architectural Press
2004
25
ibid. Dutch edition p. 222
Susanne Komossa
The word precedent is generally understood

to mean a prior (preceding) example of best
practice. Architectural precedents are usually
architectural models, from a recent or distant past.
Castex et al., 24 define the architectural model as
the actual architectural project, based on specific
rules, concepts and techniques. Various projects
may share the same rules and techniques resulting in distinguishable architectural or urban
planning models. One could say, in each plan and
design, forms and operations are expressed that
structure their composition, which refer to a set of
concepts, references and specific techniques that
serve as the basis for the design. Subsequently
with regard to the relation between social and
societal aims, the architectural model and history Castex et al. state: The term architectural
model makes clear that the development of form
is not directly related to the translation of a social aim, but that during the development of the
design form mediations are used that are specific
to architecture and whose history has yet to be
written. In the distance between this specific history of mediation and the more general history of
society lays the potential input of the discipline of
architecture, but also its limits.25 This implicates
that studies of architectural or urban models are
not architectural history studies, for they do not
set out to construct (or reconstruct) history in
the sense of establishing causal links on the basis
of written sources and archive material. Nor are
they architectural theory studies of the coherence
and development of various design theories and
ideas. Basically, they form the collective memory
of the discipline of architecture, which contains
its body of knowledge and experiences. It forms
the stuff to work with.
maatschappelijke praktijk)
p. 8. Including this relationship was new at the time
and was later further developed in Susanne Komossa,
Han Meyer, Max Risselada,
Sabien Thomaes, Nynke
Jutten, Atlas van het Hollandse Bouwblok (English
edition: Atlas of the Dutch
Urban Block,) Bussum,
Thoth (2003/2005) and Susanne Komossa, Hollands
Bouwblok and Publiek Domein, Model, regel en ideal
(English edition: The Dutch
Urban Block and the Public
Realm; Models, Rules, Ideals, Nijmegen, Vantilt, 2010.
16
See Barbieri and Boekraad,
Kritiek en ontwerp, 1982,
Van Duin and Barbieri, A
hundred years of Dutch
architecture 1901-2000,
2003 (originally published
in Dutch as Honderd jaar
Nederlandse architectuur
1901-2000, 1999), and the
journal OverHolland, edited
by Henk Engel and published by SUN Publishers
in Amsterdam (since 2000
this has appeared in cahier
form).
17
The development of the
plan analysis technique at
Delft University of Technologys Faculty of Architecture coincided with the
reception and Dutch translation (in 1978) of Tafuris
Progetto e utopia, 1973
(translated into English as
Architecture and utopia in
1976). The intended purpose was operative criticism: a form of architectural or urban research that
was an attempt to actualise
history, to turn it into a
supple instrument for action
(i.e. design) (from Tafuris
Theories and history of architecture, 1980, originally
published in Italian as Teorie e storia dellarchitettura,
1968, and quoted in Claessens, De stad als architectonische constructie, 2005,
p. 42)
introduction
19
ARCHITECTUR AL PRECEDENTS
& M O D E L S , D E S I G N A N D H I S TO RY
20
architectural knowledge. Additionally, by carrying knowledge and the history of mediation, they are
not value-free.
At the end of this postscript to the reader of the
Delft Lecture Series on Architectural Design; Different architectural positions, common approach it
does not come as a surprise that when addressing
the question how the history of the precedent is
linked to the present, or even future, once again
different positions can be distinguished.
tion.28 Though recognising the complex thought

underlying this argument, it becomes clear within
the typo-morphological approach that the notion
of historical continuity and constant transformation holds a central position. Basically it assumes,
there is only history and therefore architectural
models transform continuously, differ and are
distinct but are always carrying elements from
the past. Consequently, within this approach to
history and design the tabula rasa, here called
contrast or the completely new referred to as abstractions, is not an option.
Z E I TG E I S T
Kees Kaan and Henri van Bennekom are following Ludwig Mies van der Rohes use the idea
of Zeitgeist, which assumes that every period in
history carries a specific idea(l) that has to be
incorporated and expressed by works of art and
architecture. According to the Encyclopedia Brittannica this notion derives from Hegels philosophical reflections on aesthetics The stages of
art were identified by Hegel with various stages
of historical development. In each art form a
particular Zeitgeist (i.e. Spirit of the time) finds
expression, and the necessary transition from one
art form to its successor is part of a larger historical transformation ...26. In the work and position
of Kaan and van Bennekom the notion of Zeitgeist is linked to the notion of context. According
to them, each epoch has own ways of producing
architectural designs and building technologies of
constructing edifices. It is the architects role to
express this context through his/her work.
W O R K I N G H I S T O RY
The typological and morphological approaches,

of Henk Engel et al. use the idea of la storia operante literally working history, which assumes that the past realises itself in the present.
To cite again Castex reflecting on the designs and
morphological research of Saverio Muratori27 :
The concept of la storia operante was borrowed
from the ideas of Benedetto Croce, no longer proclaiming the strength of contrasts but the need to
allow distinctions. In contrast to the excesses of
abstraction, this called for a transfigured intuition, a way of thinking that linked up the distinct elements. Perhaps la storia operante could be
rendered as history at work in the present, the
analysis (reading) and the design being identical. Muratori was an absolute historicist; like
Croce, he thought of history as thought and as ac-
P H E N O M E N O LO GY
Last but not least, with reference to the

phenomenological and more speculative approaches
to architectural design Walter Benjamins notion
of past and present comes to mind. His notion
especially appeals to architects fascinations as
gatherers and hunters of ideas and inspirations,
as collectionneurs and bricoleurs at work with the
divinatory gaze of the collector. The afterlife of
works . is Benjamins central term for the
historical object of interpretation: that which,
under the divinatory gaze of the collector, is taken
up into the collectors own particular time and
place, thereby throwing pointed light on what
has been. Welcomed into a present moment that
seems to be waiting just for it actualized,
the moment from the past comes alive as
never before. In this way the now is itself
experienced and preformed in the then...
The historical object is reborn as such into
the present day. This is the famous now of
recongnizability (Jetzt der Erkennbarheit), which
has the character of a lightening flash. Here
is the ur-historical, collective redemption of
lost time, of the times embedded in the spaces
of things.29 Basically Benjamin uses mimesis30 ,
not the notion of analogy like Aldo Rossi, in
order to mirror past and present, and vice versa.
Benjamins notion potentially describes the way
in which architects pick up things and objects,
ideas from all kinds of fields including art, but
also architectural precedents and models. By
doing so, they select, document and interpret
the objects of the past and shed new light upon
them. In that sense, architectural design means
that at every time something new is recognised,
collected, experienced and accordingly to the
collectors fascination, reworked and reshaped
and therefore rescued from the redemptory
I N C O N C LU S I O N
To end, the purpose of this overview is as

already noted, to acquaint the outside world,
our guests and Masters students of Architecture
with the different Architectural Positions held
at Delft Faculty of Architecture and the Built
Environment. Moreover, it attempts to encourage
students as future architects to be critical of the
ideals implicit in particular positions, approaches,
precedents & models, prototypes and paradigms.
In essence, architectural models, precedents and
history do not automatically provide starting
points for new designs. The architectural position
must be reformulated and researched afresh
for each new design within the context of the
specific project and the associated questions
and formulation of new ideals, in order generate
knowledge and information for the design process
leading to adequate designs.
introduction
21
of lost time never disappearing from history,

but mirroring it again and again. Today, for
this approach the architectural position of
Mark Pimlott and Klakse Havik serve as an
example. Additionally we can recognise the
phenomenological tradition in the work of the
Saariste/Ligtelijn/Koolhaas descendants, who
focus in their designs on the material character of
buildings, for example on colour and ornament.
Susanne Komossa

28
Ibidem: From Pigafetta, G.,
Saverio Muratori architetto:
teoria e progetti.
29
Translators Foreword in:
Benjamin, Walter, (Howard
Eiland, Kevin McLaughlin
transl.); The Arcades project; Cambridge, Harvard
University Press 2002, p.XII
30
Die hnlichkeit (ist) das Organon der Erfahrung (Resemblance (is) the Organon
of Experience Walter Benjamin, The Arcades project;
Cambridge, Harvard University Press 2002, German
edition: Das Passagenwerk,
Frankfurt a. M. 1982. See
also Mimesis, imitatie, spel:
esthetische denkfiguren
in de architectuurtheorie
in: Hilde Heynen, Andr
Loeckx, Lieven de Cauter,
Karina van Herk (eds.), Dat
is architectuur, sleutelteksten uit de twintigste eeuw,
Rotterdam, 010 2004

a common ground
26
http://www.britannica.com/
EBchecked/topic/656301/
Zeitgeist
27
Jean Castex Saverio Muratori (1910-1973), The
City as the only model, A
critical study, a century after
Muratoris birth, unpublished manuscript Muratori
Centennial / EAAE-ISUF
New Urban Configurations
Conference, Delft, October
2012, p.16
I.
22
DEPARTMENT OF
ARCHITECTURE
23
Departement of
Architecture
ARCHITECTURAL
COMPOSITION
& PUBLIC
BUILDING
24
The program positions the architect as a crucial agent in the

conception and production of
buildings as public constructs.
The studios focus on how we can
conceive and develop new models, typologies, programs, and
design strategies of architecture
in order to meet public needs and
challenges on different levels
The design studios offer a variety

of research and design methods,
both conventional and experimental, in order to provide enriching
design strategies and investigation. The Chair implements and
augments the public position
through specific attention to the
techniques, instruments, and
contents of architectural research
and design.
I Departement of Architecture /
Architectural Composition & Public Building
25
The Public Building design studios examine and address the present and future of public territory
and places of (ex)change in an urbanized society, where strangers
meet. In this, the chair focuses
on the processes and transformations of modernisation in regard
to their impact on the design of
public buildings and places.
26
Michiel Riedijk
Michiel Riedijk ( Geldrop, 1964)

and Willem Jan Neutelings are the
founders of Neutelings Riedijk
Architects, Rotterdam. Since
the founding in 1992 Neutelings
Riedijk Architects has realized
multiple iconic private and public
buildings like the City History
Museum MAS in Antwerp, the
Netherlands Institute for Sound
and Vision in Hilversum, the Shipping and Transport College in
Rotterdam and recently the Rozet
Culturehouse in Arnhem and the
Eemhuis in Amersfoort.
Neutelings Riedijk is currently
working on various projects including the Spuiforum Concerthall
in The Hague and the Naturalis
Biodiversity Museum in Leiden.
Projects by Neutelings Riedijk
have been published in numerous
architectural magazines around
the world. Books about the office
include At Work 2006 and monographs by El Croquis from 1999
and 2012. The office has been
awarded with several international
awards including the Oeuvre
Award of Excellence of the Dutch
Architectural League.
Michiel Riedijk lectures and
teaches regularly at universities,
academys and cultural institutions worldwide. In September
2007 he accepted professorship
at the Chair of Public Building &
Architectural Compositions of the
Architectural Faculty of Delft University of Technology.
He published Architecture as
a Craft (2010) and together with
Willem Jan Neutelings, Neutelings
Riedijk 2003-2012, Convenciones
e identidad, conventions and identity (El Croquis 159, 2012). Michiel
Riedijk heads and teaches in the
masters program of the Chair of
Architectural Composition / Public Building.
Michiel Riedijk
27
Raw steak on the drawing board;

On conventions and identity in Architecture
Michiel Riedijk

28
1
Claude Lvy-Strauss, La
pense sauvage, Paris,
Pron, 1962.
2
Robert Musil, Der Mann
ohne Eigenschaften, Berlin,
Rowohlt, 1930.
29
Michiel Riedijk

C O N V E NTI O N S
Claude Lvy-Strauss1, the celebrated French
thinker, once asserted that raw steak on a coffee
table would offend our social and cultural conventions, whereas the same piece of meat on a butchers block would surprise no one. The perception
that raw steak does not belong on a coffee table
derives from our ingrained sense of hygiene and
with customs that impart certain obviousness and
structure to daily life. The example confronts us
with the power and self-evidence of conventions.
Antitheses like the coffee table versus the butchers block, smooth or rough, elegant or coarse,
fresh or rotten, raw or cooked, reveal the many
conventions in daily life. The firm handshake,
the jovial slap on the shoulder, the charm of the
compliment, the buttoning up of your shirt or the
knotting of your tie, are all conventions that say
something about manners, character or upbringing.
Conventions embody social codes. The way
people greet one another reveals a lot about the
background of people who have just met for the
first time. Familiarity with conventions makes
it possible to recognize social codes or to interpret behavior. It gives structure to our daily life,
without being immediately aware of this. Even
deliberate flouting of everyday conventions is a
conventional code: it signals that we are dealing
with an independent spirit. Conventions are an
inextricable part of our functioning and shape the
way we treat one another. Conventions offer an
appropriate form for many situations in which a
person may find himself. Conventions provide the
contemporary city dweller with room to behave
like a chameleon: sometimes he plays the business partner in formal attire, at other times the
flamboyant bon-vivant in a loud floral shirt, all
depending on the situation and the expectations
within a specific social context.
Conventions are in part an expression of your
identity: should the flamboyant behavior and
clothing of the architect as inspired artist cease
to work, you can present yourself as a sound and
reliable architect behind the cool professionalism
of a grey suit. Conventions help the architect, our
Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften2, to navigate the
complex world.
30
N E C E S S IT Y
Architecture, thanks to its millennia-long existence, has many conventions, implicit customs
and ingrained habits. These conventions are visible in the profession, in the craft of designing, in
the buildings and in the position of the architect
within the design and construction process. Over
the many centuries of building production, conventions provided certain givens. Window openings should be one above the other, and columns
in a straight line. The central paradigm of architecture appeared to be the pursuit of the most
efficient realization of spaces with the available
means and techniques. The role of the architect,
his relation with his client and the position of the
designer within the division of labor in building production for centuries based on a direct
relationship of trust between architect and client
was embedded in the aforementioned conventions. The architect drew only what was strictly
necessary: the overall scheme and the important
exceptions in the architectural design. All the
other details were worked out on the job, without
any direct instruction from the architect, based
on tradition and customs. The profession of architect and the craft of building were still closely
connected.
A B S TR AC TI O N
In the profession there are a number of conventions and habits so deeply rooted that we are
scarcely aware of them. Every design task calls
for abstraction and encoding: because a life-size
building simply does not fit on a manageable
sheet of paper, we are used to abstracting every
design decision to a smaller scale and to a set of
codes, line thicknesses and hatching, which indicate for example whether something should be
in stone or in glass. This process of abstraction
and encoding creates a distance from the eventual
sensory sensation of the material on the building
site. In the design drawing, the physical reality is
pared back to a determination of place and size,
encoded with a line thickness. Smell, texture,
reflections or the warmth of the stone surface in
the midday sun cannot be and are not conveyed
within the evolved conventions of the architectural drawing. At most, the model may conjure up
a fraction of the spatial experience of the future
building in all its richness and variety.
Through the reduction of the task to a very
much smaller scale, the future design is made
manageable and literally tangible in study models.
This enables the architect to comprehend colossal quantities of cubic meters as a demand for the
beauty of the little object in his hand. The seductive little models that balance on the palm of your
hand can, through the jump in scale, turn the
quantitative demand for built volume into a qualitative demand for simple compositions. The scale
model has no details; it does not show reality, but
represents an abstracted and encoded future reality. Only the elements that matter in the design
are visible at this scale. The request for a building
of staggering size becomes a qualitative desire for
an elegant image, a future that has yet to become
reality, encapsulated in a jewel, cradled in your
hands.
The reduction renders the task comprehensible and enables the designer to form a qualitative judgment about the design. Reduction and
encoding are architectural conventions whereby
the complexity of reality can be converted into
elegant principles and simple solutions to which,
during the execution of the design, new details
and layers of meaning can be added. The convention provides for a search for principles whereby
the design process progresses from general to specific, from overall scheme to detail.
3
Adolf Loos, Ornament und
Verbrechen (1908), Smtliche Schriften 1887-1930,
Wien/Mnchen, Herold,
1962.
31
Michiel Riedijk
REVERSAL
The precision of computer drawing has radically
reversed the architectural convention of reduction and encoding in the design process. To begin with, it is even more difficult to apprehend
the size and scale of the building on a computer
screen, simply because screens are many times
smaller than the old drawing boards. Furthermore, the system of the drawing programs imposes a merciless precision on the designer; everything has to be laid down with millimeter accuracy within a system of coordinates with X, Y and
Z axes, even if virtually nothing is as yet known
about the design. This has led to a complete reversal of the design process, as we once knew it.
The design no longer evolves from general to specific, from main outline to detailed elaboration,
but starts from the specific detail, from an intangible, tiny digital point in a virtual space, reproduced on a gently glowing picture plane.
The consequences of this reversal in architectural conventions should not be underestimated.
It entails a thinking process in which the specific
and exceptional precede the general and the everyday. Furthermore, the weight of a block of granite is more intangible than ever in the illuminated
rectangle of the computer screen. The convention
of digital drawing has increased still further the
distance from the physical structure and appears
to have initiated new customs: only the exception
counts. The reversal brought about by computer
drawing has pushed the order and logic of architectural thinking into the background. First
comes the exception and only then the rule. The
paradigm of architecture, the making of a logical
composition based on an economy of means, has
shifted to the trade in images on the market of urban seduction.

32
MIMESIS
The computer has introduced a new convention: architectural projects all over the world are
presented in a similar manner. Dazzling, slick
renderings of buildings with lively twenty-some
things in the foreground, preferably on roller
skates, in the radiant splendor of a digital sunny
spring morning, represent our built future. The
buildings appear glassy, transparent and translucent, as if there is nothing to hide anymore. The
images are redolent of a Potemkin village: a homogenized facade behind which the true reality
must be concealed. The designs are presented as
realistically as possible, the implication being that
the representation of the design is real and true.
This simulation of reality denies the projective
power of the architectural project. The design is
after all a projection of a future that has yet to become reality, rather than a simulation of a known
petit bourgeois Arcadia. Bad weather, local identities, the distinctiveness of culture or climate are
given no expression by this new global convention. The film noir of the modern metropolis, the
surrealism of the everyday vanishes from thinking because the representations of new projects
convey only the oppressive predictability of the
already known. The computer presentation is the
new convention to which everyone seems inevitably to conform. An attempt to elucidate one of
our offices designs by means of small Styrofoam
models, met with blank amazement on the part of
various clients, as if we had put a raw steak on the
table instead of a beautiful proposition encapsulated in a lucid study model.
Buildings start to resemble one another because of the software used to generate the images.
The renderings look like the result of global group
pressure as to how buildings should manifest
themselves, so that the architectural presentations
seem confined to expressing the marketing identity: the dazzling seconds of an advertising video.
The idea that the architectural project will bring
about a transformation in the near future disappears because of the simulation of the known behind a panacea of uniformity. With the computerconferred illusion of authenticity, we try in vain
to reconcile the productive tension between the
architectural project, which exists solely in drawings and models, and the built reality.
O R N A M E NT U N D V E R B R E C H E N
In 1908, Adolf Loos wrote his much-quoted essay Ornament und Verbrechen23 , in which he
explicitly hypothesized the relation between architectural expression, social conventions and
identity. Loos developed an argument around
conventions, based on analogies with the tattooed
savage and the decadent aristocratic degenerate
versus the modest well-dressed gentleman. Following on from this, he discussed the architectural expression of his own day. First of all, Loos
argued that every right-thinking person is aware
that tattoos detract from the beauty of the human
body and are an expression of a lack of refinement. Modern human beings dress simply and
plainly because they are so self-assured that they
do not need to express themselves through their
clothing. In short, refinement needs no ornament
in order to stand out. A second argument used by
Loos is of an economic nature. Products, from
writing desks to shoes, are made unnecessarily
expensive by ornament and decoration that the
consumer has not asked for. The absence of ornament and decoration as a model of good taste and
inner refinement is linked to the economic argument of efficiency and logical production. Looss
double argument functions as a two-edged sword.
When you use an ornament it is both a sign of a
lack of refinement and an unnecessary waste of
money. This position led to a paradigm shift in
architecture: all buildings designed by refined
people were stripped of ornament and decoration,
otherwise the architect in question was either a
dgnr or a spendthrift.
The effect lives on in architecture today: architects are no longer capable of using an iconographic element to express the nature and meaning of the building. Whereas up until the nineteenth century there was an iconographic system
whereby the nature and importance of a building
could be conveyed in friezes and architraves, on
wall planes and piers, after Loos this became well
nigh impossible. The distinction between office
buildings, law courts, factories or schools could
no longer be made on the basis of ornament or
iconography, but only through volumetric differences. It was left to the composition, the silhouette and the expression of the basic shape of the
volume to convey the essence of the building. The
many wall surfaces remained bare and empty,
stripped of effigy or signification. Loos rejected
the Viennese conventions and the architectural
expression of his time; yet, as a consequence, his
paradigm became the new convention of the architectural profession.
33
Michiel Riedijk

G LO B A LI Z ATI O N
In contemporary architecture the demand for an
appropriate form or for an expression of the architectural volume is still relevant, even if it appears
that there is no longer any shared convention to
guide the expression of our buildings. Some contemporary buildings look like train crashes, space
ships, fragments from a meteor shower or organically curved drops. The buildings try to ignore
the architectural conventions; the coding behind
these outward manifestations seems to be saying
that these are truly exceptional buildings.
However, the purpose or the function of the
building is not clear from the unusual shape. Indeed, these buildings often house nondescript
office-like functions which all, the world over,
under pressure from market conformity, converge
in the same mediocre working conditions. The
triumph of artificial lighting and air conditioning
is celebrated with these iconic buildings. Buildings with an expressive shape or a spectacular
silhouette are popping up all over the world. From
Amsterdam to Abidjan, from Seattle to Shenzhen,
buildings are being constructed that are characterized by their iconic, spectacular appearance,
which is more readily described in sculptural
terms than in the language of architecture.
The ostensible triumph of City Branding leads
to a paradox: by articulating the identity of a particular place with the same kind of icons all over
the world, everything becomes the same. The
quest for a specific identity turns back on itself
and leads to global uniformity. The buildings are
part of a global visual culture that seems to be
detaching itself from specific circumstances. Climatic characteristics such as the position of the
midday sun in the heat of summer, the prevailing
direction of the cooling evening breeze, or the
depth of the winter snowpack are systematically
denied in many iconic contemporary buildings;
the air conditioning is just turned up another
notch. The distinctiveness of local production
conditions no longer seems to figure in architectural thinking: in many parts of the world, the
Siren call for transparency means that only a
thin curtain wall, an insubstantial and vulnerable
membrane, forms the meager transition between
outside and inside, public and private. The architectural layering of the transition to the interior
world, which results in an appropriate staging of
the passage from public life to the private domain,
is becoming ever poorer under the pressure of
market conformity: in the world of curtain wall
34
buildings with an expressive shape, the selection

of the revolving door will soon be the only thing
left for the architect to do. Transparency is an
alibi for indifference. Since everything is visible,
there is no need to add anything to the public
domain. The glass shell, as a hard impenetrable
screen around the interior, leads to the erosion of
the public. In the absence of any articulated difference between public and private, both aspects
vanish into meaninglessness. The curtain wall
and mirror glass seem to spell the end of urbanity
as we know it; buildings no longer form a public domain but swim in the nondescript residual
spaces generated by the exuberant shapes of the
built mass and parking lots.
U R BA N IT Y
Architecture cannot be seen in isolation from the
city and city life. The place and role of a building
in its immediate context should also reveal something of the nature of the building in question.
The architecture of public buildings gives expression to the collective and shapes public life. However, these ambitions are less and less self-evident:
law courts and town halls are housed in rental
office buildings, as if we might not have any need
of them in the future. Both types of buildings
are conceived with a neutral grid of columns and
any expression of monumentality or collectivity is
avoided because this would compromise the market conformity and incur the wrath of voters.
Because everything is subject to the demands of
retail, it will soon be impossible to distinguish a
supermarket or a library from a department store.
The general publics dissatisfaction with the present-day built environment can be traced in part
to this programmatic homogenization. It seems
that people can no longer identify with the built
environment of smooth transparent buildings that
populate our public domain like Fremdkrper.
The position and form of the building in the
city should abide by the conventions we attach
to it: our public buildings stand on squares and
special places within the urban fabric. The conventions ensure that you can relate to the building and its immediate surroundings; it creates a
meaningful place and space in the public domain.
The increasing alienation and disengagement of
the public can be partly traced to the lack of a
communally experienced public space in the city.
35
Michiel Riedijk
I D E NTIT Y
Our offices designs can be understood in terms
of a desire to shape public life. They constitute
an attempt to create identity for a place, an institute or even a community of users, neighbours
or city dwellers. Monumentality and ornament
are the ideal means by which to represent the
significance of a building. The overall design, iconography and materiality are instruments in the
construction of a local identity.
The hollows and gardens from deep ravines
to monumental ponds with steel calyxes in
the heart of our buildings, are a continuation of
the public space. Familiar types of buildings are
crossed with characteristic forms of public space:
the museum combined with a public arcade, or
the necropolis with a large inner courtyard. The
designs offer both space and a counter form for
the public domain. Unburdened by programmatic
connotations or intentions, these voids can be
understood as sanctuaries for public life. These
monumental sanctuaries are our provisional
response to the social quest for buildings with
meaning and identity at a time when the collective
meaning of buildings can no longer be defined in
a self-evident way. Around these hollows we construct buildings that are not smooth but on the
contrary haptic, strokable and bound to the specific place where they are built. The buildings are
conventional in the sense that they attempt to inscribe themselves in the urban culture of the place
through their color, materiality, form or iconography. Depending on the nature of the task, they are
clad in colorful vests, crisply chequered shirts or
distinguished striped suits. For each building we
test the legibility of the iconographic conventions.
At the same time, upon completion each building
constructs a new convention.

36
O R N A M E NTATI O N
Sprayed concrete grooves like tectonic scars over
sloping elevations, figured knobbly glass overlaid
with coloured shapes, robust stone slabs with medallions and little hands, wrap-around lettering
and poems, all create an identity for the building,
the visitors and the users. They impart scale to
the detail, relief to the volume and ensure a selfevident integration with the surrounding area.
The decorations give the buildings an appropriate monumentality in which the differentiating
capacity of the cladding can be separated from
an expressive iconic shape. At the same time,
little hands, poems, pictures and lettering enable
visitors to relate to the building and enter into a
relationship with it, to become familiar with the
newly constructed convention. As a genuine contemporary chameleon, the visitor takes part in the
newly constructed identity of the place.
R AW S TE A K O N
TH E D R AW I N G B OA R D
The provisional identity sets the local against the
global, heterogeneity against homogeneity, diversity against uniformity, layeredness against superficiality. We look explicitly for an architecture
that is tectonic and tangible, with rough plankconcrete, oversized parquet, a glass that is not flat
but bumpy and colourful, or that undulates in a
silicate embrace around visitors enjoying the view.
The ornament is a conscious craftsmanly
intervention in the production of semi-finished
articles, before they are finally assembled on the
building site. The ornament creates an anchor
point against the homogenization and uniformity
of contemporary building production. Ornamentation makes it possible to respond directly to
local production conditions, to geographic or cultural particularities. Looss adage is abandoned:
the materiality and the iconography offer identity
because they can be understood both as opposing
conventions and as conforming to conventions.
The layeredness whereby a design is both conventional and non-conformist, both gentleman
and savage, both smooth and rough, both modern
and classical, is a quality we consistently look for
in all our designs, based on the firm conviction
that architecture must be able to shock and to
please, to cherish and to reject in order to remain
meaningful within the film noir of urban society.
Our quest in Architecture endeavors to represent
the surrealism of the everyday, like raw steak on a
drawing board.
37
Michiel Riedijk

01. Museum aan de Stroom

(MAS), Antwerp,
Belgium, by day / photo:
Sarah Blee, copyright
Neutling Riedijk
Architects

(MAS), Antwerp,
Belgium, by evening
/ photo: Sarah Blee,
copyright Neutling
Riedijk Architects
39
Michiel Riedijk


(MAS), Antwerp,
Belgium, public gallery
copyright Neutling
Riedijk Architects
40
Lvi-Strauss, C. (1962). La
pense sauvage. Paris:
Plon.
Loos, A. (1962). Ornament
und verbrechen.
Smtliche Schriften
1887-1930. Wein &
Mnchen: Herold.
Musil, R. (1930). Der Mann
ohne Eigenschaften (Vol.
2). Berlin: Rohwolt.

(MAS), Antwerp,
Belgium, public gallery
copyright Neutling
Riedijk Architects
41
Michiel Riedijk


(MAS), Antwerp,
Belgium, exterior at
night / photo: Sarah
Blee, copyright Neutling
Riedijk Architects
42
Susanne Komossa
Susanne Komossa (Bochum,

1956) graduated from the Delft
University of Technology (1984),
Faculty of Architecture where
she also received her Ph.D. From
1984-2004 she worked as a practising architect and founded the
Rotterdam based firm Komossa
Architecten BNA. Currently she is
appointed as an associate professor of architectural design, Chair
of Architectural Composition /
Public Building at the Faculty of
Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology. Since 2004 she is the leader
of the PhD & MSc. architecture
research program Architecture
and the City, which is focussing
on the role of the changing public
realm within contemporary cities.
Subsequently she investigates
extremely condensed hybrid urban blocks. Additionally she acts
as the facultys ambassador of
Research-by-Design and works
internationally as lecturer and reviewer.
As a (co-) editor she published

The Atlas of the Dutch urban
block (2005), Colour in Contemporary Architecture; Projects,
Essays, Calendar, Manifestoes
(2009), The Dutch Urban Block
and the Public Realm; Models,
Rules, Ideals (2010), and De
transformatie van het schoolgebouw (2011), GROOT/GREAT,
Tekenboek stadsgebouwen,
functiestapelingen, publieke binnenwerelden, in n blok (2011).,
and published together with colleagues the proceedings of the
2012 EAAE-ISUF conference New
Urban Configurations (2014).
At the moment she prepares
the publication of Delft Lecture
Series on Architectural Design
(2015) and an international PhD
program elaborating typo-morphological research in Europe.
Bachelors and Masters Teaching

AR1A060 Delft Lectures on
Architectural Design (ed.)
AR3AP130 Seminar Resarch
Methods Public Building Graduation studios
AR4AP100 Public Building
Graduation Studio: Architecture & Public Buildings
AR1AP011 Public Building
MSc1 Design Studio: Architecture & Public Building
AR1AP030 Seminar Architectural Studies
AR1AP040 Seminar Architectural Reflections
AR0034 PB MSc2 Design
Studio On Site: Design Research in Emerging Contexts
Susanne Komossa
43
Whos afraid of red, yellow and blue?

Colour and identity in architectural design
Susanne Komossa
Whos afraid of red, yellow and blue?;

44
01. Painting 'Who is afraid
of red, yellow and blue?',
Barnett Newman, 1968
Susanne Komossa

TH E D O U B LE - FAC E D
N ATU R E O F C O LO U R
The issue of colour in architecture is complex and
becomes even more complicated if we consider
theories dealing with architectural polychromy.
There have been a wide variety of architectural
theories on the use of colour or coloured materials over the past two centuries. They range from
Semper and his followers enthusiastic appreciation of painted polychromy as a path to a new
style in architecture, 2 to its rejection as applied,
not structural, and in fact dishonest or fake by
the heirs of the Modern Movement during the
1950s and 1960s.
The discussion of whether architecture should
be polychrome or not, started during the 1830s,
after architects had discovered that the Greek
temples of antiquity had been painted. Addressing
this period of architectural history, art historian
David van Zanten distinguishes between painted
polychromy as a non-structural coating of paint
and structural polychromy as the use of naturally
coloured materials. If we consider contemporary
polychromy in architecture, this definition appears to be too limited. Todays broad availability
1
Title of a painting of Barnett
Newman 1968
2
David Van Zanten, The architectural Polychromie of
the 1830s. New York / London, Garland 1977
45
I NTR O D U C TI O N
The double face of ratio and emotion, of the formal and the informal characterizes the nature of
colour in architecture. Colour has always evoked
extensive discussion and continues to do so today.
You either believe that colour, through the use of
paint or coloured materials, offers a panoply of
opportunities for architectural design, or you do
not. At the same time architectural knowledge of
the spatial effects of colour in the built environment is not very strongly developed if compared
to other aspects of architecture, like the study of
programme or typology. Neither side of the double-faced nature of colour in architectural composition is easily systemised or classified. However,
Whos afraid of red, yellow and blue? 1 Colour and
identity in architectural design elaborates the hypothesis that colour is architectural designs most
powerful tool to establish identity. This will be
underpinned by plan analyses and close-reading
of three precedents. The first dates from the period of Arts and Craft/Jugendstil and is an offspring announcing early modernism, the second
characterises the period of revision of the modern
movement during the 1970s - 1980s and the third
is an example of the way in which colour plays a
mayor part in recent postmodern architecture.
46
of naturally and artificially coloured building

products fits almost every thinkable purpose and
offers an unlimited range of coloured materials
that can be applied to buildings in either a structural or a non-structural way. The currently very
common practice of using two-shelled faades
also means that al-most every building inevitably
ends up being dressed. Todays question should
be: does the application of natural or artificial colour paint or any other coloured material form
an independent layer of the architectural design,
or not? Independent in this context means: not
connected to programme, internal programmatic
organization or volumetric composition, but consciously applied and not reducible to any other
aspect of the design of a building.
Very different from the distinction made in
the 1830s between painted polychromy and the
natural monochromy, some contemporary architectural projects are deliberately monochrome
because of the availability of artificially coloured
materials. For example SANAAs New Museum
of Contemporary Art in New York is whiter than
white. The range of white-coloured materials on
the faade appears extremely artificial and is used
to unify and contrast the buildings volume within its colourful urban context.
The difficulty of systemizing the position of
colour within architectural design starts with the
fact that the perception of architectural colour
is a very complex phenomenon. The perception
of colour is not only influenced by architectural
form and the colour applied to it as paint or coloured material, but also by the texture and translucency of the coloured surface, the layering of
materials, light and shadow, alternating natural
and artificial light, the colours and reflections of
the surrounding buildings, the combination of
colours and their simultaneous effect.3 Therefore,
theories of colour perception developed in laboratory conditions, for example tracing psychological
impacts do not necessarily apply to the reality of
architecture. Because of this complexity, discussions on the perception of colour and judgments
on colour in architecture often tend to remain in
the realm of abstract colour theories or personal
taste.
02. SANAA, Museum of

Contemporary Art, NY,
2007
7
Kees Rouw, The archeology of colour, in: Susanne
Komossa, Kees Rouw, Joost
Hillen (eds.), Kleur in de
hedendaagse architectuur:
projecten / essays / tijdlijn
/ manifesten / Colour in
contemporary architecture:
projects / essays / calendar
/ manifestoes, Amsterdam,
SUN 2009, pp. 249/250
Susanne Komossa

3
Eugene Chevreul and Johannes Itten based on Johan Wolfgang von Goethes
Zur Farbenlehre: Simultaneous contrast: when we
see a given colour, our eye
simultaneously calls up the
complementary colour. A
small neutral grey square
in a larger space with a
clear colour will take on the
colour that is complementary to that of the larger
surface. This is an illusion.
Kunstkring De schuine
boom, Zoersel, Belgium.
See http//users. Telenent.
be/werner.dewree1/1%20
kleur.htm.
4
http://www.ilsegnalibro.
com/weblog2/2007/02/
italian-minister-defendsred-building.
5
With regard to colour theory
relevant for modern art and
architecture Johan Wolfgang von Goethes Farbenlehre dating from 1810 cannot be left unmentioned. He
focused on the perception
of colour, for example the
contrast between light and
dark in his Farbenpsychologische Betrachtungen and
introduced the double triangle of the primary colours
red, yellow and blue, and he
secondary colours orange,
violet and green as, which
form together the renown
colour circle. Admittedly,
though by differing interpretations, his theory was
a guiding principle as well
for the Bauhaus teaching
as the distinction between
primary colours and noncolours of the De Stijl and
Van Doesburg.
6
Mark Wigley, De nieuwe
verf van de keizer, in: Oase
47, Nijmegen, SUN 1997,
pp. 20-25 is an excerpt
and translation of The emperors new paint in: Mark
Wigley, White walls, designers dresses. The fashioning of modern architecture,
Cambridge / London, MIT
Press 1995
47
In addition, colour has cultural implications

and associations that can vary widely from one
country or continent to another. Gae Aulentis
design for the Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo, 4
for example, was rejected because it was too red
in its green setting, too much in contrast with the
spirit of nature. Actually, this perception differs
from the European perspective, where the contrast of green and red is perceived as balanced,
because the colours are complementary and evoke
each other.
Last but not least, colour forms an interface
between art and architecture. Especially during
the 1910s and 1920s, art and architecture had a
direct influence upon each other. Without Expressionism and Constructivism the Agit-Prop
designs of kiosks and market stalls in Moscow and
Bruno Tauts experiments with colour in his private house and housing projects would have been
unthinkable. The Bauhaus provided an extensive
curriculum, which was led by artists like Johannes
Itten, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, which
studied the relation between colour and form5.
Purism had an acknowledged influence on Le
Corbusiers treatment of colour during the 1920s.
De Stijl literally attempted to achieve the solution of colour and the synthesis of the arts in the
Maison dArtiste Paris house design by Theo van
Doesburg in collaboration with Cornelis van Eesteren. But strangely enough, despite these famous
experiments colour did not acquire a permanent
position in architectural design or education.
This is partly due to two historical misunderstandings, which have contributed even more to the
unstable status of colour in architecture. One is the
disregard of nineteenth-century architectural theories and their influence on the Modern Movement.
The followers of Modernism opposed nineteenthcentury architectural thinking and it was therefore
neglected for a long time, until the 1950s and 1960s.
Studies like Marc Wigleys De nieuwe verf van de
Keizer,6 which explicitly discusses the continuity in
architectural thinking from Semper to Adolf Loos
and the influence of Loos on Le Corbusier, are fairly
recent. And even today, awareness of these historical
continuities and transformations often seems to be
absent in architectural thinking and education.
The second misunderstanding is the myth of a
white Modern Movement, caused by pre-colour
photography or more correctly, consciously leaving aside the availability of colour photography7
for promoting Modern Architecture in architectural magazines in the beginning of the twentieth
48
century. Moreover, this myth of a white modern

was continued during the 1950s by some heirs of
the Modern Movement, who advocated ideas of
material honesty and disapproved of the application of colour as pure ornament. This idea of
material honesty led to a form of chromophobia
in architecture, which is still traceable.
In his book Chromophobia, David Batchelor
comments on the rejection of colour in general,
but also in architecture: In the first, colour is
made out to be the property of some foreign
body usually the feminine, the oriental, the
primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or
the pathological. In the second, colour is relegated
to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary,
the inessential or the cosmetic. In one, colour is
regarded as alien and therefore dangerous; in the
other, it is perceived merely as a secondary quality
of experience, and thus unworthy of serious consideration. Colour is dangerous, or it is trivial, or
it is both.8
As a result, today, we still wait for the serious
consideration of colour as an independent layer
of architectural design. This consideration should
lead to a fruitful theoretical foundation on which
discussions and coherent architectural theories
about the relationship between colour and architecture can be based, including architectural colours quality to establish identity in a globalizing
world.
03. Theo can Doesburg,

Contra-Composition
Maison d'Artiste, 1923
04. A. M. Rodchenko,
Design for a Kioskm
Moskou, 1918 / S.K. e.a.,
'Colour in contemporary
Architecture, projects,
essays, calendar, manifestoes' p.14
05. Le Corbusier, Interior

Galery, Villa La RocheJeanneret, Paris, 1923
49
8
David Batchelor, Chromophobia, London, Reaktion
Books 2000 pp.22-23
Susanne Komossa

07.
Book cover 'Colour in
contemporary Architecture, projects, essays,
calendar, manifestoes'
07b.
Book cover 'White Fashioning of Modern Architecture'
Book cover 'Chromofobia'

Cover Orial Bohigas 'Arquitectura Modernista'
Barcelona 1973

06. Bruno Taut, Facade

Bloc V, Wohnstadt Carl
Legien, Berlin 19181930, Drawing Colour
reconstruction, W.
Brenne, 1994
50
A R C H ITE C TU R A L C O LO U R
A N D I D E NTIT Y
Usually the relationship between the colours used for
public and private buildings and local identity9 i.e.
the fact of being who or what a thing is, the characteristics determining this is understood as having
grown over time. In such cases, colour is connected
to notions like authenticity and tradition, to something that expresses the assumed real character of a
city, a region or a country, or that reflects its natural
environment by applying local materials and colours.
Were all familiar with books and studies that describe
the way colour is used on the island of Burano in Venice10 for example studies that classify cities according to colour, Paris as the white city, for instance, that
speak of national colours or develop historical colour
schemes that are meant to restore a supposedly lost
identity, as Canella and Cupilillo did in their work on
Turin.11
What is less well known is that the exterior and

interior colours of public and private buildings
can also have a political or socio-cultural significance, which is deliberately used to express the
struggle for political recognition or socio-cultural,
local identity sometimes independence of
a particular region, area or nation at a certain
moment of history. When people are seeking to
establish a new identity, special applications of
colour and material are developed. These applications are constructed as it were, in order to
reinforce a political and cultural position. In such
a process, colour communicates the new (self)awareness within the public domain in a way that
is clearly visible, as if it were a fait accompli. The
deviating colour and material application, and
its striking appearance, stands out immediately
emphasizing the new political and cultural consciousness, and as a side-product, a new architectural era.
The most interesting European examples of
such use of colour date from the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was
a time of massive economic, cultural and political change and upheaval on the eve of the First
World War. Some regions, such as Catalonia in
Spain, underwent rapid economic and cultural
development and sought to achieve a new status
in the modern world.
A whole series of these regional attempts to

exhibit a new local and political self-awareness
is connected with particular style variants of the
Jugendstil and the Arts & Crafts12 movements.
Good examples of this strive for a local identity
is the work of architect Josef Ple nik in Ljubiljana, Slovenia and Eliel Saarinen in Helsinki,
Finland. In Brussels the projects of Victor Horta,
and in Barcelona the work of the Modernista
movement (18801915), in which the architects
Antoni Gaudi and Llus Domnech i Montaner
played a prominent part, set an example. In a
certain sense, Berlages neo-rationalistic stock
exchange13 in Amsterdam also belongs to this
series.
Subsequently, having roots and relationships in
the Jugendstil movement made it difficult to place
these expressions of agitprop architecture avantla-lettre dealing with the local identity within the
canon of the internationally orientated modern
architecture during the 1920s and 1950s14. The
propagandists of the Modern Movement called
these examples not-modern, an insignificant
local phenomenon, and the standard twentiethcentury works on architecture simply passed them
over. It was not until the post-war period during
the1950s to 1970s, when the Modern Movement
came under revision,15 that architects and architectural students began to show renewed interest in the oeuvre of the supposed dissidents. In a
quest to find the undamaged roots of early modern architecture, projects and excursions were organized at various places to study this work once
again and bring it to public attention. For example, the Department of Architecture at the Delft
University of Technology16 undertook such a project and started to work on the issue of colour.
Looking back today, one might say, this critical retreat to the Arts and Craft/Jugendstil and
its off springs of early modernism during the period of revision of the modern movement during
the 1970s 1980s, already announces the way in
which colour will play a mayor role again in todays postmodern architecture. Here I would like
to discuss three projects, the Palau de la Msica
Catalana in Barcelona 1980, Neue Staatsgalerie
in Stuttgart 1983 and Mercat de Santa Caterina
in Barcelona 2005, which illustrate this development and its specific techniques to establish identity in architecture by the use of colour.
Susanne Komossa

08. Church of the Archangel

Michael on the Marsh
(Sveti Michael na Barju),
near Ljubljana (19251939) / Photo: Joseph
Plecnik
14
Leonardo Benevolo, Storia
dell architettura moderna,
Bari, Editori Laterza 1960.
German edition: Geschichte
der Architektur des 19. Und
20. Jahrhunderts Band 1
+ 2, Mnchen, DTV 1978.
Only 60 pages of the 1000
are dedicated to Lart nouveau addressing the work
of Victor Horta, Henri van
der Velde, Charles Rennie
Mackintosh, Otto Wagner,
Joseph Maria Olbrich, Joseph Hoffmann, Adolf Loos,
Hendrik Petrus Berlage and
discussing the geographical spreads and influence of
Lart nouveau in 5 pages.
Benevolo refers to Antonio
Gaudi in a few lines of text,
admitting that he is a brilliant architect but more or
less inexplicable/positonable in the discourse of
Modern Movement in architecture. Benevolo opens the
chapter by stating that the
stylistic and local diversity
of Lart nouveau make it
difficult to systematize its
products (p. 317). He ends
the chapter by concluding:
Die moderne Bewegung,
die mit der Absicht entsteht,
jene Verschiedenheit zu
einen, bedient sich ihrer (i.e.
Lart nouveau).
15
Heinrich Klotz, Die Revision
der Moderne. Postmoderne Architektur 1960-980;
Mnchen, Prestel Verlag
1984
16
Exhibition Kleur en Architektuur (Colour and
Architecture) chaired by Jan
de Heer, Museum Boymans
van Beuningen Rotterdam
and Groninger Museum,
1986, and book Kleur en Architektuur, 010, Rotterdam,
1986. See also: Vincent
Ligtelijn and Rein Saariste,
Josep M. Jujol, Rotterdam,
Uitgeverij 010 1996
51
9
Identity: The fact of being
who or what a thing is, the
characteristics determining
this, Concise Oxford English Dictionary 2006.
10
Martina Dttmann, Friedrich
Schmuck and Johannes
Uhl, Color in townscape,
London, The Architectural
Press 1981.
11
Nino Canella and Egidio
Cupolillo, Dipingere la
citt, il piano del colore:
Lesperienza pilota di Torino,
Turin, Umberto Allemandi,
1996.
12
Next to Jugendstil and
Art Nouveau, which can
be regarded as regional
equivalents, other local
movements like the Austrian Secession, the English
Liberty style, the Catalunian
modernista, and the Russian stil modern share the
historical period and formal
aspects.
13
Umberto Babieri, Leen van
Duin (editors), Honderd jaar
Nederlandse architectuur,
1901 2000; Tendensen,
hoogtepunten, Nijmegen,
SUN 1999 p.78 (English
edition: Hundred years of
Dutch architecture, 2003)
52
09. Exterior Palau de la Musica Catalana, manifold
of colours and materials in combination with
plain brickwork surfaces
Susanne Komossa
17
For a detailed description,
see: Manfred Sack, Llus
Domnech i Montaner, Palau de la Msica Catalana,
Barcelona, Axel Menges,
Stuttgart, 1995.
18
Majolica is the name of a robust, brittle kind of ceramic
painted in bright colours.
The name majolica is a
corruption of the Spanish
Mallorca, an island in the
Mediterranean Sea and
the production centre for
that type of pottery during
the Middle Ages. The technique comes from North
Africa and the Middle East.
Source: Dutch Wikipedia.
19
For more detailed documentation, a timeline and
the original texts of Gottfried Semper, John Ruskin and Owen Johns, see:
Susanne Komossa, Kees
Rouw, Joost Hillen (eds.),
Kleur in de hedendaagse
architectuur: projecten / essays / tijdlijn / manifesten
/ Colour in contemporary
architecture: projects /
essays / calendar / manifestoes, Amsterdam, SUN
2009, p.316-333, p.333-339,
p.345-349.
53

PA L AU D E L A M S I C A C ATA L A N A
I N BA R C E LO N A
One of the most surprising but lesser known examples of architecture in which colour and a special use of materials were put to work in pursuing
the cause of political and cultural autonomy is the
Palau de la Msica Catalana by Llus Domnech,
which was opened in 1908.18 Catalonia had undergone a period of turbulent industrial development during the second half of the nineteenth
century, and its struggle for political and cultural
independence went back even further.
In its genesis and function as a concert hall as
well as in its architecture, the Palau embodies the
new self-awareness of the local bourgeoisie. Many
of them were industrialists who jointly commissioned the building of the Palau and financed its
construction. The use of new industrial products
and rationalized construction methods is also
striking. Not only were these products and methods aimed at driving the costs down. In fact, the
building materials were actually supplied by companies in the Barcelona area, often owned by the
new elite.
The Palau itself is rather tightly squeezed into
a corner of a city block on a side street of the
Via Laietana in the centre of Barcelona. Most
of the exterior is red brick and is decorated with
sandstone elements, majolica mosaics19 and a few
sandstone sculptures. The tile decorations on
the exterior and interior of the building are a colourful mishmash, if not collage of materials and
production methods. Most of the tiles are painted
with lavish flower motifs, some of them aflame,
and they vary from tiles made especially for the
Palau to leftovers and shards that is, rubbish.
Theres a comparable freedom and virtuosity in
the stained glass, which is used throughout the
building: from ordinary clear service glass to
magnificent cobalt blue, everything is effortlessly
combined in decorations that always strike a balance between regularity and spontaneous variation.
Its almost impossible to take in the concert
hall in its entirety from the adjacent narrow lanes.
So a great many of the decorations are located
on the plinth and the underside of the balcony,
and in the loggia on the first floor. The corner of
the city block, which can be seen from a greater
distance, is expressively accentuated. Construction and cladding, regularity and exception blend
together seamlessly in both the exterior and the
interior. In some places the lack of space is dealt
54
10. Side facade Palau de la
Musica Catalana, rationalism pure 'sang'
11. Detail Palau de la Musica Catalana, 'street

view': tiles underneath
balconies
12. Side facade Palau de

Musica Catalana, detail:
balusters made of prefabricated, en masse
produced, cylindrical
glass elements
13. Exterior palau de la Musica Catalana, ticket sale

in a column
55
Susanne Komossa

14. Columns outer facade

Palau de la Musica Catalana, majolica mosaics
and terracotta ornaments alluding to nature
56
15. Section Palau de la musica Catalana showing
the ingenious use ot the
available space
57
Susanne Komossa

16. Concert hall Palau de

la Musica Catalana,
evoking the idea of a
free standing building
by bringing daylight in
from all sides. The roof/
ceiling is constructed
of iron T-sections with
pre-stressed concrete
elements
58
with ingeniously. For example, the box office for

ticket sales is housed in one of the heavy brick
entrance columns. Another space-saving idea was
to move the concert hall, with its large volume, to
the first floor, so the foyer could occupy the street
floor. Every effort was made to compensate for
the lack of space by letting in the daylight from
the surrounding lanes and installing strategically
placed skylights: the daylight, which enters the
building from all sides, creates the illusion from
within that the building is freestanding.
The level floor of the concert hall is constructed by means of vaults, giving the foyer below a somewhat crypt-like and bodenstndig,
down-to-earth character. This is reinforced by
the natural brown and beige tones of the tiles,
the natural stone floor and the unpainted brown
wooden door and window frames. The baroquelooking balusters on the balconies, the stairways
and in the concert hall are made of prefabricated,
cylindrical glass elements produced industrially en masse. They wouldnt be out of place in a
technical installation.
The colour scheme of the interior unfolds vertically upward, from earth tones to a multitude
of colours on the top floor. The motifs usually
refer to elements in nature, which puts them in
the nineteenth-century colour tradition such as
the one developed by Semper in his Vorlufige Bemerkungen ber bemalte Architektur bei den Alten of
1834 and later by Ruskin in his The Seven Lamps
of Architecture (1849) and Owen Jones in The
Grammar of Ornament (1856).19
Despite the profuse decoration, the Palau
building is extremely rational, modern and efficiently constructed. The floor above the concert
hall, for example, which forms the roof, is a relatively light combination floor consisting of iron
T-sections containing pre-stressed concrete elements about 60 cm in width.20 The roof structure
spans the entire width of the hall and looks quite
light in the tectonic sense of the word. The concrete elements and the iron T-sections are faced
with ceramics, but the structure as a whole has
been left fully visible. Some of the prefabricated
majolica roses were applied as ribbons, but others
form a pattern in which they seem to have been
freely scattered around the capitals of the columns. They form a cheerful addition that tones
down the utilitarian character of the ceiling but
doesnt negate it. Fitting the roof with a trimming
joint made it possible to install a large skylight,
which, along with the light from the two facades,
17. Auguste Perret, Facade

Apartment Building, 24
Rue Franklin, Paris, 1904

C O LO U R A S D R E S S I N G
As said, the typically 19th century tradition of
colouring and ornamentation with reference to
nature, the Palaus colouring and ornamentation
bring to mind the theories of Semper, Ruskin and
Owen Jones.
Gottfried Semper developed the theory of
using paint or coloured materials as cladding
or dressing, 23 which was later re-interpreted by
Adolf Loos. Semper developed his theories of
Stoffwechsel (metabolism) and Bekleidung
(cladding) by analyzing the colour traces of antique temples and Moresque architecture. In his
book The Four Elements of Architecture from 1851,
Semper identifies four elements that are all related
to materials but also to the metaphysical dimensions of architecture: masonry work (serving as
the foundations), carpentry (the wooden structure
of load-bearing walls and floors), moulding (the
hearth and the earth as platform) and weaving,
the infilling panels and walls of woven mats or
textiles.24 In Sempers theory the cladding or
dressing was much more important than the
other elements. Dressing in this theoretical con-
21
Eugne Viollet-le-Duc, Entretiens sur larchitecture
1870/1871. Cited by Robert Middleton, Farbe und
Bekleidung im 19. Jahrhundert (Colour and cladding in
the nineteenth century) in:
Gerhard Auer e.a., In Farbe
/ In Colour, Themanummer
Daidalos Architektur Kunst
Kultur, nr. 51 (March 1994)
p.84
22
Robert Middleton, Farbe
und Bekleidung im 19.
Jahrhundert (Colour and
cladding in the nineteenth
century) in: Gerhard Auer
e.a., In Farbe / In Colour,
Themanummer Daidalos
Architektur Kunst Kultur, nr.
51 (March 1994) p.86
23 Gottfried Semper, Vier
Elemente der Baukunst. Ein
Beitrag zur vergleichenden
Baukunde. Braunschweig,
Vieweg 1851. English translation: The four elements of
Architecture and other writings, RES monographs in
anthropology and aesthetics, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press 1989.
24
51 (March 1994) p.87
Susanne Komossa
S TR U C TU R A L P O LYC H R O M Y
The way in which colour and coloured materials are
applied in the Palau de la Msica Catalana relates
to the structural application of colours and coloured
material that at the end of the nineteenth century
was directed at structure and filling, or both. Viollet-le-Duc was the first to advocate this approach
and called for a structural rationalism with reference
to Laugiers ideal hut and Gothic architecture. In
his interpretation of Laugiers hut, the structure is
the primary element and fillings are secondary.21
His approach can be described as structural rationalism or structural functionalism. Anatole Baudot
, a pupil of Viollet-le-Duc, inversed this approach.
He decorated the structure and left the filling undecorated. Auguste Perret favoured an architecture
that ornamented both, the structure and the panelling or filling. In his famous house at Rue Franklin
25 in Paris, built in 19021903, the concrete skeleton of the building is covered with ornamented
materials.22 The ceramic fillings display a flower
pattern that contrasts with the rational cladding of
the structure.
20
The early use of an iron
support structure alone is
important. Indeed, the Palau appears to have been
the first European building of this type one not
strictly for industrial use
along with the Ritz Hotel
in London, which dates
from 1905. Oriol Bohigas,
Resena y catalogo de la
Arquitectura Modernista,
Lumen, Barcelona, 1973;
from the Dutch translation
by Karen Rombout and Rien
Pico, Delft, typescript Architecture library, 1978, p.
38. When the author of this
article first visited in 1975
Barcelona was groaning
under the yoke of General
Franco and many architects,
including Oriol Bohigas,
were under a professional
ban. Notwithstanding, the
Catalan national anthem
was still being sung before
every performance in Palau
de la Msica Catalana.
59
bathes the hall in coloured light during the daylight hours. Along with the flower motifs, this
reinforces the sense of being outside, being in
nature even more.
60
text relates to everything that can be seen, felt or

smelled on the surface and can thus be perceived.
Semper, developing from Hittorfs25 theories,
conceived that the patterned and coloured cladding of a structure should incorporate as well as
reveal all the spatial and architectural significance
of the whole.26 And because of that, cladding had
indeed become in his estimation the prime feature in architecture, the Urmotiv.27 The idea of
Bekleidung derives from the theory of Stoffwechsel. Stoffwechsel (literally metabolism) means
that the forms and decorations of the painted
Greek temples were interpreted as transformations of building forms and methods used even
before antiquity. As David van Zanten28 explains:
[Stoffwechsel] was simply the idea that decorative motifs, though structural in origin, were set
from primitive times and retained their original
patterns when translated into other materials.
In other words: they were transformations and
abstractions of a former primitive reality and because of their history, they mainly refer to motives
to be found in nature. Semper, like Owen Jones,
especially admired the abstraction and geometric
construction of flower motifs in the decoration of
the Alhambra specifically and Moresque architecture in general. Jones documented this fascination
extensively in his Grammar of Ornament (1856)
in order to show and, together with Semper, even
teach about how the abstracted flower motifs were
geometrically constructed.
Besides the fact that they allude to nature,
Sempers theories have two other strong points.
Firstly, they are dynamic, if not Darwinist, because they encompass the idea that civilization
transforms and progresses. In search of a new
style, the idea of change is essential. Secondly,
Sempers theory incorporated the art of painting,
through colour and sculpture, in building design.
That was intended to re-establish architecture
as a realm where all the arts come together in a
Gesamtkunstwerk. We have seen that in Sempers
thinking, the theory of Stoffwechsel leads to the
notion of Bekleidung. In his articles Prinzip der
Bekleidung29 and Ornament und Verbrechen31
Adolf Loos re-interpreted Sempers theories. In
Loos interpretation i.e. his plea that the cladding or dressing of structures and walls should
never resemble the original colour or material
underneath Semper and Owen Jones typical
nineteenth-century reference to nature has disappeared. At the beginning of the twentieth century, with his coloured walls in private houses, Loos
paved the way to a modern, abstract application
of colour in architecture, which was derived from
painting, especially the Expressionism of Oskar
Kokoschka.
18. Adolf Loos, Guest

Sleeping Room, Country
House Khuner, Payerbach, 1930
19. Venturi Scott Brown,

Facade BEST Product's
building, Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania alluding
to paintings of Henri
Matisse and Any Warhol
10-SK Perret
20. Cover Collage City

says / tijdlijn / manifesten /

Colour in contemporary architecture: projects / essays
/ calendar / manifestoes,
Amsterdam, SUN 2009, p.
350-354
30
Adolf Loos, Ornament und
Verbrechen, Vienna, Prachner 2000, original edition:
1908
31
Collage, from the French
verb coller, to glue. A
collage is made from an
assemblage of different
forms, thus creating a new
whole. http://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Collage
32
Examples: Robert Venturi,
The Appel, competition
entry for a building at Time
Square, New York, 2000,
inspired by Claes Oldenburg, the early example of
Lucy the Elephant folly in
Margate City (US) by James
Vincent de Paul Lafferty
1881, the Tail OThe pup hot
dog stand in the form of a
hot dog in Los Angeles by
Milton J. Black, 19381945
or the influential preliminary
study and painting Promenade of Merce Cummingham by James Rosenquist,
1963. See also: Michiel
Riedijk, Giant blue shirt at
the gasoline station, Pop
art, colour, and composition in the work of Venturi,
Rauch and Scott Brown
and Colour calendar in:
architectuur: projecten / essays / tijdlijn / manifesten /
Colour in contemporary architecture: projects / essays
/ calendar / manifestoes,
SUN, Amsterdam, 2009, pp.
144-171 and p.p. 289-313.
33 James Stirling, Architectural Aims and Influences
in: Robert Maxwell (ed.),
James Stirling, Writings on
Architecture, Skira, Milan,
1998, p. p.138-140. The text
was originally published in
RIBA Journal, September
1980. Address given at the
ceremony of the presentation of the 1980 Royal Gold
Medal.
Susanne Komossa
N E U E S TA AT S G A LE R I E
I N S TUT TG A R T, JA M E S S TI R LI N G
197719 8 3
The Neue Staatsgalerie of James Stirling in Stuttgart, Germany is probably on of the most impressive examples of using form, material and colour
to establish a new socio-cultural identity of the
institution of the museum. Stuttgart is a German city which was heavily bombed during World
War Two. After the war it developed an increasingly affluent automobile industry represented by
the headquarters and factories of Daimler-Benz
and Porsche. After World War Two and the subsequent Wirtschaftswunder Stuttgart is a city,
like Barcelona, which searched for a new sociocultural identity due to its exceptional economical
success.
Situated next to the Alte Staatsgalerie the
building combines a classical set-up of a museum
with wings adjacent to a frontcourt with architectural features derived from the route architectural, a concept developed by Le Corbusier, and the
25
The architects Jacques
Ignace Hittdorf and Karl
Ludwig von Zanth discover
traces of polychrome decorations on the temple of
Empedocles in Agrigento on
the island of Sicily during
18221824.Subesequently
Hittdorf actively participated in the discussion of
polychromy in architecture
by his reconstruction drawings of a coloured antiquity.
In 1849 he published the
text Restoration of the
temple of Empedocles at
Selinonte or Polychromatic
architecture among the
Greeks, Dutch and English
translation in in: Susanne
Komossa, Kees Rouw, Joost
Hillen (eds.), Kleur in de
hedendaagse architectuur:
projecten / essays / tijdlijn
/ manifesten / Colour in
contemporary architecture:
projects / essays / calendar
/ manifestoes, SUN, Amsterdam, 2009 p.293 and
p.340-345
26
51 (March 1994) p.88
27
51 (March 1994) p.87
28
David Van Zanten, The architectural Polychromie of
the 1830s.New York / London, Garland 1977, p. 54
29
Adolf Loos, Das Prinzip der
Bekleidung, in: Neue Freie
Presse, Vienna, 4 September 1898. For the English
and Dutch translation see:
architectuur: projecten / es-
61
P OS T- M O D E R N C O LO U R
The post-modern use of colour has a collage-like
character31. The technique of collage, literally
meaning gluing things together was successively
developed in art, especially in Cubism during
the 1910s, afterwards it was further developed by
Dadaism and Surrealism in the 1920s, and later
by Pop Art in the 1950s and further on. Basically,
this character is not entirely new if we take the use
of material and colour of the Palau de la Msica
Catalana in Barcelona into account and in fact,
over lapses in time.
However, under the influence of (American)
Pop Art within post-modern architecture, references came from everywhere, not only nature.
Forms and colours could allude to a made-up
architectural history of antiquity, the nineteenth
century or the Modern Movement at the same
time. But they can also incorporate the world of
objects of everyday life, like advertisements, photographs, graphic design, soup cans and so on.33
Materials and paint, natural and artificial colours,
are mixed. Faade styles and patterns can also be
mixed, combining elements from every historical
period, the natural or artificial environment, media and the local vernacular.
All of these colour efforts have just one objective: to enable architecture to again produce
meaning and identity, even monumentality, and
most of all, to communicate.
62
22. Site areal Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart
23. Ramps leading upwards

to main entrance
63
Susanne Komossa

24. Floor plan lower entrance level, upper level,

longitudinal section and
front facade Neue Staatsgalerie 1977-1983
64
25. Inside the Rotunda
65
Susanne Komossa

26. Detail steel baluster

rails and red wine
66
topography of the building site, a sloping hillside.

But differing from Le Corbusier, for example the
Villa Savoye in Poissy (19281931) in which he
perfected his idea of a unifying route architecturale,
the architectural route in Stirlings design creates
picturesque moments and surprises contrasting
the overall composition.
The buildings overall composition is divided
in two: a formal part, the rooms-en-suite of the
museum wings on the top floor, and the informal
route lingering through the buildings interior
and through its exterior court. The same can be
said about lower and upper floors: the lower floors
show a bricolage-like character assembling an array of different shaped rooms, while the upper
floor, at least in drawing, tries to reduce the plan
to a U-shaped classical court within a rotunda
in its middle. The use of sand stone and the
prominent position of the rotunda as structuring element call Friedrich Schinkels Altes Museum (1830) in Berlin to mind. Or, using James
Stirlings words: The new building (the Neue
Staatsgalerie) maybe a collage of old and new elements, Egyptian cornices and Romanesque windows, but also Contstructivist canopies, ramps
and flowing forms a union of parts from past
and present. We are trying to evoke an association
with museum, and I find examples from the 19th
century more convincing than examples from the
twentieth.33
The idea of collage and later bricolage understood as a construction made of whatever materials are at hand; something created from a variety
of available things34 is also mirrored in the use of
materials and colours. On the one hand Stirling
uses ochre and brown flamed sand stone and travertine in a brick-like structure to clad the main
volume, but also the rotunda and deviating elements like the entrance hall, ramps and other free
shaped volumes. The overall classical cladding
is contrasted by additional elements in bright
colours and materials, like Stirling apple green
for window frames, red and blue for constructivist
steel canopies and revolving entry doors, yellow
for a typical Stirling concrete column on a corner
and plasterwork of an adjacent wall, and pink
and light blue on the oversized steel rails of the
ramps. This artificial colour range is completed
with the colours of the vegetation on rooftops and
planted in the rotunda: the green and red of diverse climbing plants and wild wine. The bright,
artificial colours are continued in the interior of
the building, especially the entrance hall on the
lower level with its apple green rubber flooring

and yellow walls. The continuation of colours and
materials from the outside to the inside and vice
versa form originally a very British feature developed during the 19th century. Later Adolf Loos
brought this feature to perfection in his shop designs, like for Knize Mens Outfitters in Vienna
(1913), in the beginning of the 20th century. Furthermore, the bright, glaring colour range evokes
associations of the tradition of British interior
decoration in the past but also today.35 On the upper floors in the actual exhibition spaces, again
a more classical use of colours, light yellow and
burned sienna is used to close the circle of tradition and innovation by returning to the early 19th
century architectural earthy and nature orientated colour range of Friedrich Schinkel.
Thinking of the influence of Pop Art upon
Stirlings design for the Staatsgalerie, basically
neither Venturis Complexity and Contradiction in
Architecture (1966) nor Learning from Las Vegas
(1972) are of much help to understand his approach. In fact, it was Colin Rowe (and Fred
Koetter) who addressed the theme of bricolage
within architectural composition in 1975 with
their book Collage City.36 If we take into account that Colin Rowe was the teacher of James
Stirling in Liverpool University who sent his
students to the library not to study but to crib
ideas37 during the 1950ts, that the famous exhibition Roma interrotta, which made (bri)-col(l)
ages within Romes Nolli map an edge-cutting
issue and in which James Stirling participated,
took place in 1978, we can assume that Stirlings
Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart is one of the first
coherent, built examples of postmodern bricolage within architectural history and that material and artificial colour form a constitutional
part of its design. To cite Stirling: We hope that
the Staatsgalerie is monumental, because that
is the tradition for public buildings, particularly
museums. We also hope that it is informal and
populist hence the anti-monumentalism of the
meandering footpath, the voided centre, the colouring and much else.38
Post-modern bricolage of colour, materials
and forms enable the building to establish a new
rapport, an identity in regard to peoples appreciation and the citys recaptured pride by combining the formal and the informal and by placing
narrative and evocation above the modernist unitary model, which carries the burden of utopia.39
67
Susanne Komossa
34
bricolage. Dictionary.
com Unabridged. Random
House, Inc. 30 Nov. 2011.
35
This tradition and also the
juxtaposition of panoply of
styles and approaches can
be traced from 1981 onward
on monthly bases in volumes of the British magazine The World of Interior.
36
Colin Rowe, Fred Koetter,
Collage city, Cambridge
Mass., MIT press 1975.
37
Robert Maxwell (editor),
Architecture, Milan, Skira
1998, p.102. Maxwell also
writes, though not surprisingly: During his student
years Stirling developed a
crush on Mackintosh, Hoffmann, as well Bailley Scott
and Vosey. And Asplund.
p. 9
38
Robert Maxwell (editor),
Architecture, Milan, Skira
1998, p.25.
39
see: Colin Rowe, Fred Koetter, Collage city, Cambridge
Mass., MIT Press, 1975,
p.87.

26. Interior
68
27. Front facade Mercat:
former facade structure
with new roof and window frames
28. The tiled roof scape

as artificial garden set
within its surrounding
buildings
29. Roof scape Mercat

Santa Caterina
30. Skylight within the roof

scape
40
Robert Venturi, Steve Izenour, Denise Scott Brown,
Learning from Las Vegas;
the forgotten symbolism of
architectural form. Cambridge Mass., MIT Press
1972.
69
Susanne Komossa

M E R C AT D E S A NTA C AT E R I N A
I N BA R C E LO N A
For the restoration and transformation of the Santa Caterina market in Barcelonas Barrio Gtico,
completed in 2005, architects Enric Miralles and
Bernadetta Tagliabue (EMBT) drew on the colour
and materials of Catalan early modernism. Right
up to today, the four Catalan provinces (including the Balearic Islands) emphasize their language
and culture as important aspects of their autonomy within the Spanish system of government. In
fact, autonomy was officially granted in 1932 to
Catalonia. One aspect of that culture is Catalan
cuisine (culinary products are on sale everywhere
in the covered markets of Barcelona), and the
people of Catalonia are immensely proud of it.
Part of the faades and wings of the old Santa
Caterina market are still standing. The roof, however, with its undulating tiles and steel support
structure, is new. The tiles are suggestive of the
parabola-shaped structures that Gaud developed
for optimal weight distribution based on his hanging chain models. The tile pattern on the roof
reveals a collage of magnified fruit, in fact a magnified photograph, with the undulating surface as
the garden on which the inhabitants of the surrounding residences can gaze. Once again, nature
and its fruits, with their profusion of colours and
forms, are the source of inspiration combined
with Pop Arts tradition of magnifying everyday
objects.
In his book Learning from Las Vegas (1972) 40
Robert Venturi distinguishes between the decorated shed, which could be a simple box with a
completely independently developed faade, and
the duck, the grand form. Both decorated shed
and duck help to explain the colour concept and
aim of the Mercat de Santa Caterina in Barcelona, designed by Enric Miralles and Bernadetta
Tagliabue. Also in the design for the Mercat the
coloured faade or form of the building volume is
actually developed without relation to the functional or spatial organization inside the building. Decorated faade, here the roof top, and the
grand form carry foremost symbolic signs, referring to meanings, which are located outside the
actual realm of architecture: in this case a fruit
garden. This is comparable to Venturis approach,
i.e. the faades of Best Products Building in
Philadelphia, where he applied the painting series
Flowers, which refer to paintings and graphic
work of Henri Matisse, and were produced by
Andy Warhol between 19641970.
41
Richard Sennett, The fall of
public man, New York, Norton 1992
42
Michiel Riedijk, Raw steak
on the drawing board, in:
Ferdinando Mrquez Cecilia
and Richard Levene, Neutelings Riedijk, 20032012.
Convenciones e identidad conventions and identity. El Croquis 159 2012, p.
210
Bibliography:
Susanne Komossa
David Batchelor, Chromophobia, London, Reaktion Books 2000.

Heinrich Klotz, Die Revision
der Moderne. Postmoderne Architektur 1960980; Mnchen, Prestel
Verlag 1984
Rouw, Joost Hillen
(eds.), Kleur in de hedendaagse architectuur:
projecten / essays /
tijdlijn / manifesten /
Colour in contemporary
architecture: projects /
essays / calendar / manifestoes, Amsterdam,
SUN 2009.
Michiel Riedijk, Raw steak
on the drawing board,
in: Ferdinando Mrquez
Cecilia and Richard Levene, Neutelings Riedijk,
20032012. Convenciones e identidad conventions and identity. El
Croquis 159 2012
Colin Rowe, Fred Koetter,
Collage city, Cambridge
Mass., MIT Press 1975.
Mark Wigley, White walls,
designers dresses. The
fashioning of modern architecture, Cambridge /
London, MIT Press 1995.
Robert Venturi, Steve Izenour, Denise Scott Brown,
Learning from Las Vegas; the forgotten symbolism of architectural
form. Cambridge Mass.,
MIT Press 1972.
III Architectural positions
70

I N C O N C LU S I O N
It can be argued that the use of colour and materials in the Palau de la Msica Catalana brilliantly
expresses the spirit of the age: its a symbiosis of
modern and classic, of traditional methods and
novel industrial production, of local and international, of stylistic freedom and architectonic discipline. As architects, we can only look on it with
admiration and envy: will we ever be capable of
creating such a successful embodiment of societys ideals? Theres one thing we know for certain:
in such an enterprise, colour is one of the most
powerful architectonic tools.
James Stirling uses for his design of the Neue
Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart the technique of bricolage which allows him to juxtapose in a post
modern way architectural elements, forms and
colours from very different periods of architectural history in order to evoke a new present according to Benedetto Croce who states that the
past is realised in the present. In the case of the
Staatsgalerie this approach renders a building,
which is very complex in its composition, but at
the same time easily understood, recognized,
identified and literally accessible for its visitors,
combining art and comfort, old and new.
EMBT successfully make use of the concept
of collage to fit the Santa Caterina market in its
actual surroundings and tradition of Barcelona,
while adding at the same time the completely new
feature of an artificial roof garden to be looked
upon by the adjacent dwellings.
In that sense, Stirling and EMBT set valid examples for todays architectural design practise,
which has to deal with issues like the construction
of identity and community under a global, multicultural condition. A multitude of interrelations
between the everyday life, the need for a wellfunctioning public realm in the contemporary
European city as physical place where strangers
meet41 and the need to combine top-down and
bottom-up, the formal and the informal become
more evident, so not urgent.42
Studying and using colour in architectural design, addressing its perceptive, structural and theoretical aspects, still appears to be an undertaking
and fascination of individual architects who suffer
from serious cases of chromo-philia. However,
these architects from past and present do not fear
the unstable, dangerous and superficial character of colour in architecture, but explore its possibilities to the full.
71
Susanne Komossa

31. Sketch/Collage of the

roof and the building
site Mercat Santa Caterina, Barcelona
ARCHITECTURE
& DWELLING
72
The study of historical precedents

forms a natural component of our
research work, since we assume
that most questions of today and
tomorrow originate from the long
processes of modernization, to
which our cities and society have
been subjected. Together with
contemporary practices, the historical production thus represents
a vast body of knowledge for the
architecture discipline.
Parallel discourse analysis allows
us to trace the development of
concepts and ideas involved and
how these have been and are still
interacting with the material practices of architectural design.
Architecture & Dwelling
73
The chair aims to investigate the

architecture of dwelling against
the background of changing
lifestyles and new technologies,
which make up our everyday environment. Topical issues which are
addressed in both our research
and education programmes are
the creation of diversity by the
mixing of functions, research into
high density schemes, sustainability in relation to spatial configurations, the rethinking of the
quality of our suburbs and the
interrelations between the private
realm of dwelling and the public
spaces of the city.
74
Dick van Gameren
Over the last 20 years, Dick van

Gameren (Amersfoort, 1962) has
initiated a wide range of projects,
varying from exhibition buildings
to urban master plans. Winning
the Archiprix in 1989, the international Europan II competition
in 1991 and the Charlotte Khler
Award of the Prins Bernard Cultuurfonds in 1995 proved to be
the start of an impressive career
in architecture. Van Gameren
started his own firm in 2006,
which resulted in winning the Aga
Khan Award in 2007 for his design
for the Dutch Embassy in Ethiopia
and the title of BNA Building of
the Year in 2012 for the sustainable transformation of Villa 4.0 in
Naarden. Alongside his career as
an architect, Dick van Gameren
became professor at the TU Delft
in 2006, leading an internationally orientated education and
research network, focusing on the
problems and possibilities of affordable housing.
Recently he joined Mecanoo
architects in Delft as a partner/associate architect. He published
with Bjarne Mastenbroek: Prototype > experiment (2001), Revisies van de ruimte, Gebruiksaanwijzing voor architectuur (2005,)
Obstakels en Openingen (2006)
and is member of the editorial
board of Dash, Delft Architectural
Studies of Housing. Theme editions were for example De woningplattegrond / The Residential
Floor Plan Standard and Ideal
(2010) Het woonerf leeft / The
Woonerf Today (2010).
AR3AD132 Dwelling Graduation Studio: Global housing
studio
ARB203 Thesis Preparation
Lecture Series
BK 7800 Project house of the
future
Dick van Gameren

75
Revisions of space; Positioning and repositioning

space in and around buildings
Dick van Gameren

76
Dick van Gameren

Mass allows space, and space enables movement.

Never the less it might be a commonplace that
architecture arises from this interaction between
mass, space and movement, but the design of
the movement seems to play a minimal role in a
considerable number current designs, resulting in
buildings that are little more than a sculpture or a
three-dimensional functional arrangement.
The history of architecture is usually not considered from this perspective either. Within the
discourse of architectural history, attention paid
to the form of the mass generally prevails above
elaborations on the form of space. Notwithstanding, taking a serious look at the actual movement
through space, allows us as architects insights
into buildings that are otherwise valued for other
reasons or even ignored.
Addressing movement through a building can
be used in the design(process) as the basis for
a clear coherence between spatiality and functionality. Additionally, designing the circulation
within and around the future building carefully
enables us to structure the relation between a
building and its immediate surroundings. Similar
principles of connection and separation appear
to be operative here too, except that not the link
between the circuit and the rooms is primary, but
the link between public and private, outside and
inside.
Basically and crucial for the connection and distinction between the building and its surroundings are the nuances and complexities that arise
in case the distinction between inside and outside
does not coincide exactly with the distinction between public and private. The issues of visual and
actual accessibility of a building, the continuation
of the inside outside and of the outside inside the
building, all touch on elementary issues of privacy, diversity and density.
Within the framework of this research topic a
series of buildings, from medieval times till the
1980s, was studied to understand how movement
is able to define the positioning of a building in
its surroundings. Most prominent are buildings
from the heydays of post-war Modernism. Modernist Architects were actually trying to reconcile
the vision of a pure, freestanding building in a
continuous landscape with a completely new idea
of the meaning of context and of local traditions.
Central to this architectural position was the
idea to structure and connect the future building
through the precise design of movement, often
developed in innovative and brilliant ways.
77
The relation between space and movement in

architecture, like the relation between mass and
space, should not be understood as opposites, but
as a complementary one. Although Adolf Loos
claimed that the origin of architecture is the creation of space only, he was of course right when he
said that more attention is usually paid in architecture to the form of the mass than to the form
of the space. Loos criticised architects who, in his
view, only created mass.
79
Dick van Gameren

6. Side facade
5. Main entrance with

staircase for parking
garage
4. Entrance of the
conference hall
81
Dick van Gameren

12. Foyer
11. Auditorium
10. Facades of the foyer and

terraces
83
Dick van Gameren

17. Birds eye view
85
Dick van Gameren

20. Atrium
87
Dick van Gameren

25. Route on
backside
24. Rotunda view

from museum
23. Frontside
building
88
C A S E S TU D I E S
A compelling first example of this period is
the Trade Union Congress Memorial Building
(TUC) from 1956 1957, located in the heart of
London close to the British Museum. The architect Richard du Rieu Aberdeen won the design
competition for this building eight years before
with a concept that is a combination of a trade
union congress building and a war memorial. The
courtyard, above the roof of the sunken auditorium, contains a sculpture by Jacob Epstein on a
base and pedestal in front of a high wall covered
with green marble.
The TUC is built in a pre-war, Corbusian style.
Thanks to the meticulous composition of the
volumes and the use of a variety of durable materials (granite, bronze frames, ceramic tiles), the
TUC, which renders three facades facing adjacent
streets, fits almost imperceptibly into its surroundings of big, introverted neo-classical buildings. The
ground floor is almost entirely designed in a transparent way. This transparency is perfectly in line
with the democratic ideals of the trade union, and,
additionally allows a view from the street of the
large courtyard with the war monument. Between
the glass fronts and the street a complex transitional zone is introduced in which stairways, ramps
and landings visualise the movement towards and
inside the building. The most striking feature is
the large semicircular staircase that emerges in
the side street, between the entrance and exit of
the underground car park. This zone can be interpreted as a twentieth-century interpretation of the
pavement zones of London during the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, in which sunken intermediate areas with stairs separated the formal entrance of a house from the entrance for domestic
use. In the design for TUC building transparency
and a strong sculptural quality are used to address
the question of the distinction between inside and
outside.
The distinction is even more blurred in a
building that was constructed at roughly the
same time: the Tokyo Metropolitan Festival Hall
(19571961). An earlier design by the architect
Kunio Maekawa consisted of a number of pavilions linked by passages. When the available
surface area was considerably reduced in size, he
combined the series of pavilions underneath a
large roof, recalling traditional Japanese temple
roofs. At ground floor level one can find a farreaching intertwining of the public space around
26. The Economist Building, St. James Street,
London, UK, Architect:
Alison and Peter Smithson, 1959- 1964. Sketch
urban complex
27. The Economist Building,

St. James Street, London, UK, Architect: Alison and Peter Smithson,
1959- 1964. Birds eye
view
90
31. The Bank of England,
John Soane, 1788- 1833.
Birds eye drawing

John Soane, 1788- 1833.
interior 1920

John Soane, 1788- 1833.
view through two courtyards
92
follow the building line of the block and combine with the adjoining Boodles Club to form
the corner points of an open intermediate space
that is linked to the neighbouring streets. This
intermediate space is slightly raised, and mediates
between the different street levels on both sides of
the complex.
In The Economist building, the newly formed
public space is a means of achieving density. The
sixteen-storey office block towers rises way above
the surrounding buildings.
The Economist adds public space of the city
without disturbing the continuity of the street,
but by establishing new links. In this respect the
complex differs from the way in which public
space was added to cities in the US during the
same period by designing plazas in front of buildings. One of the most famous examples of the
American approach is Mies van der Rohes Seagram Building. His plazas are virtually autonomous loci in spatial terms, and they break up
the block structure of the grid city. In the case of
The Economist, the space around the buildings
is not autonomous, but forms a part of the street
areas surrounding the complex. Sketches and
photomontages indicate that the designers viewed
The Economist as a prototypical fragment of the
separation of pedestrians and car traffic. Such a
separation of traffic might work on a large scale
(although there are countless examples from the
1960s and 1970s in which raising the pedestrian
level has led to unfortunate and only moderately
functional solutions), but The Economist is too
small for that. Still, as a monumental empty space
among the crowded streets of London, this raised
area does provide a welcome relief.
Another project in which the introduction of
new intermediate spaces has enabled a densification of the building is Luigi Morettis complex
beside the Corso Italia in the centre of Milan
(19491956). The sculptural complex, that replaces a number of destroyed buildings, contains
shops, offices and apartments. It consists of several volumes, which are precisely aligned with
the existing buildings and the original building
lines. Slightly bringing back the building line
beside the Corso where several streets intersect
has produced a small square. A sharp overhang
six metres above the pavement still indicates the
building line. This canopy is the pointed tip of a
highly articulated volume, which balances upon a
lower section like a battleship.
The main intervention is to the right of this

battleship: a partly roofed street has been created
at right angles to the Corso Italia which makes
the tall volume behind it on the plot both visible
and accessible. An enormous incision that divides
the top seven storeys of this volume into two
marks this new street, which continues beneath
the building on columns to the gardens behind
the building. Ramps on the left and right side
lead down to the car park, thereby detaching the
large volume even more from the ground level.
The formal and functional complexity of Morettis building is not an isolated phenomenon, but is
closely connected with the desire to turn the design of the complex into a part of the network and
let it add to the space and activity of the city.
An unusual, much earlier example of a building as active part of the urban network is the
Bank of England complex, which was created
between 1788 and 1833 as the result of a series
of renovations and renewals designed by John
Soane. Except the outside faade, all of these interventions and additions were brutally replaced
around 1920 by a less complex and rather dull
new building.
Soanes Bank occupied an entire block in the
City of London. It comprised a labyrinthine complex of buildings, linked by corridors and courtyards. A continuous outer wall held the labyrinth
of fragments together. Four gateways, one in each
street wall, gave access to a system of connections
that pervaded the entire building. The passages
and courtyards had an unprecedented complexity,
deliberately designed by Soane to allow persons
traversing the complex by passing a constantly
changing array of spaces and light.
As the national bank, the building had to express the solidity of an impregnable fortress, but
behind the closed walls an open structure was
inserted and in which the citys network of streets
and squares was continued.
The principle of understanding buildings not
as isolated elements, but as spatial and functional
parts of a larger whole, was elaborated in different
ways in two large-scale housing complexes from
the 1920s and 1950s: the Rabenhof in Vienna,
and the Conjunto Juscelino Kubitschek in Belo
Horizonte. The design of these complexes provided a large degree of differentiation, which has
been achieved by intertwining the building and
public space and to add besides public outdoor
spaces, also collective ones.
93
Dick van Gameren
The Conjunto Juscelino Kubitschek (1951), a

plan by Oscar Niemeyer, extends over two blocks
in the characteristic diagonal grid of Belo Horizonte: a regular square block, and an irregular,
smaller block, situated at one of the large intersections. Initially the idea was to include a large
number of commercial and cultural facilities in
the complex as well as offices and apartments, but
the final result was based on a much simpler programme.
The articulation of the building is organised
vertically. By making use of the difference in gradient of topography, Niemeyer has designed three
ground levels on top of one another, each of which
is connected with the city surrounding it.
The lowest, ground level is directly adjacent to
a square and contains shops in a number of freely
formed clusters. The clusters are roofed by an
enormous surface that resumes the contour of the
block. This roof is a large collective outdoor area
for the apartments. The form implemented is furnished with vegetation and tennis courts. Again,
the programme was is less extensive than in the
original design.
The entrance hall to the building is also situated at this level. The roof of the entrance forms
a third level, which is public and consists of a
square offering a view of the city, overseeing the
collective outdoor area.
Rabenhof (19281930) by the architects Heinrich Schmid and Hermann Aichinger, is one of
the famous superblocks of Vienna. The complex
contains 1,100 apartments, 38 shops, and a large
number of collective facilities. The plan differs
from many other blocks, such as the Karl-MarxHof by Karl Ehn, because it is not an isolated
complex, but is linked to the existing buildings
and road patterns. Rabenhofs blocks closely follow the existing building lines, but gradually
change shape to form a successive series of public
and collective areas. The distinction between
street and courtyard is thereby abolished: all of
the space is part of a continuous network that,
in spite of the large scale of the new buildings,
brings differentiation and articulation to the city.
Rabenhof resembles the network of the Inns
of Court in London, which display a particularly
successful example of the intertwining of public
space and building, and of collective and public
areas. The Inns of Court, which was developed
between the fourteenth and the twentieth century,
mark the transition from the City of London to
the City of Westminster. They consist of a num36. Rabenhof, Vienna,
Austria, Architect: Heinrich Schmid; Hermann
Aichinger, 1928- 1930.
Ground floor plan

35. Rabenhof, Vienna, Austria, Architect: Heinrich

Schmid; Hermann Aichinger, 1928- 1930. Street
intersect the court
94
Juscelino Kubitschek Complex, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, Architect: Oscar Niemeyer, 1951.
10
25m
37. Section
38. First Floow with

collective
95
Dick van Gameren

40. Birds eye view

builded work
39. Model of the

design
96
41. The Inns Court, London,
UK, since 14th century.
Gray's Inn, the Walks
97
Dick van Gameren
ber of complexes of buildings with a typology

virtually identical to the colleges of Oxford and
Cambridge, but which in this case accommodate members of the legal profession. The Inns
are situated in an almost uninterrupted series,
concealed behind the buildings that line the city
streets with a predominantly east-west orientation. The buildings of the Inns are grouped
around internal streets, squares and gardens,
making it possible to reconcile diverse programmes with one another in a high density.
The streets and squares of the Inns are directly
connected to the city around them, but they can
be closed off from it too. These closable public
areas in turn contain closable collective areas: in
many cases the green lawns in the Inns are fenced
off and are only open to the public for a part of
the day at most. The route from Grays Inn in
the north to the bank of the Thames in the south
comprises a diverse and changing series of spaces,
although at many points one has to turn a blind
eye to the mass of (often very expensive) lawyers
cars parked there in order to appreciate the variety of spatial nuances to the full.
0 25 50
100
200m

42. The Inns Court, London, UK, since 14th

century. Overview plan
with Gray's Inn, Staple
Inn, Lincoln's Inn, Law
Courts, the Temple.
98
C O N C LU S I O N S
A N D A P P LI C ATI O N S
A building, which is not linked to its surroundings, will form an obstacle. Spaces and movements establishing a link between a building and
its surroundings are essential. Public spaces,
areas that are accessible to the public, or collective areas that are carved out of the building
mass enhance the interface between the building and its surroundings and prevent the city
from being reduced to uniform public space and
equally uniform closed building masses. Besides
forming a spatial link between the building and
its surroundings, such transitional areas and intermediate spaces absorb different -potentially
conflicting- functions and enable higher building
densities. The connecting space organises the
relation between the building and the city, just as
the space for circulation regulates the relation between the areas and rooms inside a building.
The introduction of these spaces, and the architectural articulation of the movement through
them, is a constantly recurring theme in my own
projects.
Such a connecting area can render itself in a
variety of guises. In several apartment buildings
collective open spaces establish a link between
home and public space. In larger housing ensembles a more complex transition from public
to private is developed; a succession of open and
covered spaces define a system of public routes
through the ensemble, and collective routes leading to the private spaces of the dwellings. A careful juxtaposition of these routes makes the buildings accessible without disturbing the privacy of
the residents, and links them simultaneously to
the surrounding city or territory. Similar strategies have been followed to design buildings and
groupings of buildings with mixed programs.
Four examples, with different programs and

on different scales illustrate this.
For a competition for the central part of a new
housing district in Huizen, east of Amsterdam,
we proposed an ensemble of three buildings with
mixed typologies. Garden walls link the three
volumes to form a whole. Three gateways in the
garden walls provide access to a path that is open
by day and can be closed off at night. This path
forms a link right through the block, connecting the dwellings to the collective gardens inside
the block, and the surrounding neighbourhood
outside. Despite the limited building height of
three storeys, a density of seventy housing units
per hectare has been achieved, which is twice as
much as conventional in expansion districts.
In the residential care centre in Diemen, the
big linear hall with adjacent terraces and patios
functions as a mediator between the different
departments and services in the building, on the
one hand, and between the building and its setting, on the other hand. The Laakhaven office
and apartment complex in The Hague has a virtually entirely open ground floor level. It contains
a variety of public spaces and areas that are open
to the public, which regulates the accessibility of
the complex itself and the surrounding area.
The master plan for a large development in the
IJ-River in the heart of Amsterdam translates the
theme to a larger scale. Five large volumes with a
variety of functions are positioned in such a way
that they act together as one coherent ensemble
of buildings, at the same time making links to the
surrounding city by taking up existing patterns
of open spaces and view lines. A route for pedestrians and cyclists is carved out of the ensemble,
creating an amazing space for movement in an
around the buildings.
Woningbouw Huizen
100
eerste verdieping
tweede verdieping
situatie
48. Dwellings Huizen, Netherlands, Own work, Dick

van Gameren Architecten 2006. Ground floor
plan
49. Dwellings Huizen, Netherlands, Own work, Dick

van Gameren Architecten 2006. Scheme
Dick van Gameren
Richardson, M., & Stevens,

M. (1985). John Soane,
architect; master of
space and light. London:
Royal Academy of Arts.
Rodiek, T., & Krase, W.
(1984). James stirling,
die neue staatsgalerie
stuttgart. Stuttgart:
Hatje.
Santuccio, S. (1994). Luigi
Moretti. Bologna: Nicola
ZAnichelli Editore.
Smithson, A., & Smithson,
P. (2001). The Charged
Void; Architecture. New
York: The Monacelli
Press.
Stirling, J., & Wilford, M.
(1994). James Stirling,
Michael Wilford and
Associates; buildings
and projects 1975-1992.
London: Thames and
Hudson.
van Gameren, D. (2009).
DASH Delft Architectural
Studies on Housing
#2. The Luxury City
Apartment. Rotterdam:
NAI Publishers.
van Gameren, D. (2011).
DASH Delft Architectural
Studies on Housing
#5. The Urban Enclave.
Rotterdam: NAI
Publishers.
103

T.U.C. Memorial Building

London, UK: David du R
Aberdeen and Partners
1956-1957. (1957). The
Architectural Review,
CXXII(731).
Adachi, M., Maekawa, K.,
Adachi, M., & Maekawa,
K. (1984). Kunio
Maekawa: sources
of modern Japanese
architectute. Tokyo:
Process Architecture
Publishing.
Blau, E. (1999). The
Architecture of red
Vienna, 1919-1934.
Cambridge, Mass: MIT
Press.
Bucci, F., & Mulazzani, M.
(2002). Luigi Moretti:
Works and Writings.
New York: Princeton
Architectural Press.
Cherry, B., & Pevsner,
N. (1998). London 4:
North; The Buildings
of England. London:
Penguin Book.
Grube, D. W., & von Seidlein,
P. C. (1973). 100 Jahre
Architektur in Chicago;
Kontinuitt von Struktur
und Form. Mnchen:
Neue Sammlung.
Hara, H., Futagawa, Y.,
Kevin Roche, J. D., &
Associates. (1971). Kevin
Roche, John Dinkeloo
and Associates: The
Ford Foundation
building, New York 1967.
The Oakland Museum,
California l969. Tokyo:
ADA Edita.
Jencks, C. (1980).
Skyscrapers-skycities.
New York: Rizzoli.
Jones, E., Woodward,
C., & Harrison, W.
(1983). A Guide to the
Architecture of London.
London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson.
Papadaki, S. (1956). Oscar
Niemeyer; Works in
Progress. New York:
Reinhold Publishing
Corporation.
Papadaki, S. (1960). Oscar
Niemeyer. New York:
George Braziller.
Reynolds, J. M. (2001).
Maekawa Kunio and the
emergence of Japanese
modernist architecture.
Berkeley: University of
California Press.
104
Dirk van den Heuvel
Dirk van den Heuvel (Apeldoorn,

1968) graduated as an architect
from TU Delft, 1994. Dirk van den
Heuvel is an Associate Professor
at TU Delft with the chair of Architectural Design and Dwelling. His
expertise is in the field of postwar modern architecture and his
dissertation investigated the work
of the British architects Alison
and Peter Smithson, especially
their ideas on the city, housing
and the everyday. He also heads
the Jaap Bakema Study Centre
at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, a collaborative research
intiative between TU Delft and Het
Nieuwe Instituut. Van den Heuvel
was curator of the Dutch pavilion
to the 14th international architecture exhibition at the Bienale di
Venezia in 2014, Open: A Bakema
Celebration. He also curated the
exhibition on Dutch Structuralism:
An Installation in Four Acts. Education, Ideals, Building, the City,
which was on show last fall at Het
Nieuwe Instituut.
His publications include the
books: Architecture and the Welfare State (Routledge 2015, with
Mark Swenarton and Tom Avermaete), Team 10. In Search of a
Utopia of the Present 1953-1981
(NAi Publishers 2005, with Max
Risselada) and Alison and Peter
Smithson. From the House of the
Future to a House of Today (010
Publishers 2004, with Max Risselada). Together with Madeleine
Steigenga and Jaap van Triest he
authored Lessons: Tupker / Risselada. A Double Portrait of Dutch
Architectural Education (2003).
He is an editor of the publication
series DASH. Delft Architectural
Studies on Housing (nai010publishers) as well as of the online
journal for architectural theory
Footprint. He was also an editor
of the Dutch journal OASE (19931999).He has worked as an architect for the offices of Neutelings
Riedijk Architecten and De Nijl
Architecten.

AR1AD030 Seminar Architectural Studies
AR3AD020 Tutorial Graduation
Studio
AR1AD040 Seminar Architectural Reflections
AR3AD010 Research Seminar
Graduation Studio
AR3AD131 Dwelling Graduation Studio: Dutch Housing
Studio
Dirk van den Heuvel

105
As Found Aesthetics;
Notes on the formation of the context debate
in architecture
Dirk van den Heuvel
As Found Aesthetics; Notes on the formation of the

106
01. 'Parallel of Life and Art'
isntallation, Alison and
Peter Smithson together
with Nigel Henderson
and Eduardo Paolozzi,
1953
02. 'Patio & Pavilion' installation, Alison and Peter

Smitshon together with
Nigel Henderson and
Eduardo Paolozzi, 1956
Dirk van den Heuvel

A N OTH E R S E N S I B I LIT Y
In 1972 Peter Smithson delivered a lecture at
Cornell University at the invitation of Team
10 fellow Oswald Mathias Ungers.3 Smithsons
lecture was titled: Architecture as Townbuilding. The Slow Growth of Another Sensibility, 4
addressing issues of historical continuity and renewal and the way technology transforms cities
and their communities, and hence the premises
for city planning. One of the key notions he used
was that of context, by then in the 1970s quite a
fashionable topic, and until then not quite explicitly used by the Smithsons in their writings. Yet,
Smithson claimed:
When I was teaching in a school of architecture in the mid-fifties the schools syllabus was
reorganised in a very simple way to induce what I
then called context thinking that a new thing
is to be thought through in the context of the existing patterns. In the context of the patterns of
human association, patterns of use, patterns of
movement, patterns of stillness, quiet, noise and
so on, patterns of form, in so far as we can uncover them; and it was taught that a design for a
building, or building group, could not be evolved
outside of context.5
1
In a lecture at the Faculty of
Architecture, Delft University of Technology, as part
of a series on the theme
of context, 20 September
2007.
2
For an excellent discussion
of the issue of context see
Adrian Forty, Words and
Buildings. A Vocabulary
of Modern Architecture,
Thames & Hudson, London,
2000.
3
Team 10 was a group of
younger European architects who disbanded
the CIAM organisation in
1959; see also: Max Risselada, Dirk van den Heuvel
(eds.), Team 10. In search
of a Utopia of the present
(19531981), NAi publishers, Rotterdam, 2005. Oswald Matthias Ungers was
the chair of the School of
Architecture, and during the
winter and spring of the academic year 19711972, he
organized a very extensive
Team 10 seminar.
4
Typoscript from the Smithson archive, most of which
is integrated in the Smithson publication Without
Rhetoric of 1973.
5
Ibidem; Smithsons claim
is substantiated by a one
page statement in the
Architectural Association
Journal of January 1961,
called Education for Town
Building which described
assignments for context of
building studies.
107
I NTR O D U C TI O N
Context is a hotly debated issue within architecture. The usual complaint is that architects dont
consider the context of their designs, that their
buildings dont fit their context, that they are an
intrusion and disruption of the existing cityscape.
The Hungarian-Swiss theorist kos Moravnszky
has stated that the context debate in architecture
is paradoxically preoccupied with the forging of
identities and fictional narratives, and not with
an empirical investigation of the actual reality in
which architects are operating.1 This essay aims
to unravel some of those narratives and to demonstrate the paradoxes at play. Usually, the context
debate and its origins are situated within Italy, but
Id like to shift the focus to the British discourse
as developed there from the late 1940s onward,
most notably to the positions of the architects
couple Alison and Peter Smithson and the historian Colin Rowe.2 The 1970s and the rise of Postmodernism are also part of the web of exchanges
to be mapped. In so doing some of the paradigmatic tensions at work within the discourse on
modern architecture will become clear, tensions
which are still unresolved and haunting current
architectural practice and its critique.
108
Yet, it must be noted, too, that the term context in those early years didnt imply quite the
same, as it did when it re-appeared in the writings
of the Smithsons in the early 1970s. In the 1950s
the idea of context was connected to the biological idea of environment, to an idea of ecological urbanism, and of course, to the concept of
Habitat, which haunted the CIAM debates and
ultimately led to its demise.6 By the 1970s, however, context had come to mean historical context in the first place, whilst being re-fashioned
as typo-morphological orthodoxy. It was linked
to the new issue of urban renewal that grew to
dominate the agenda of politicians, architects and
town planners, and it was appropriated by antimodernists who would soon advocate the advent
of postmodernism from the mid-1970s onward.
Historical context was to be the medicine against
the perceived loss of identity and sense of place.
However, fierce dispute about the issue of loss
of identity and a sense of place under the threat
of modernization was not new in itself. Already
at the reunion congress of CIAM in 1947, Aldo
van Eyck famously launched his attack on routine
functionalism and the pseudo-rationalist dogma
of the Functional City, which were then about to
be deployed to build the large scale welfare state
projects in Western Europe. Alison and Peter
Smithson too, would consistently emphasize the
importance they attached to the issue of context,
speaking of specificity-to-place, and the buildings first duty is to its context.7 They themselves
would date this concern for context as early as the
Doorn Manifesto of 1954, also known as Statement on Habitat.8 In retrospective notes on Team
10 and the manifesto, notes which Peter Smithson
kept revising between the years 1993 and 2001,
we find his characterization of this emerging sensibility:
A long-after-afterthought on this Manifesto
reveals what I now believe to be the main direction of Team Xs effort, in a word, towards particularity. The Doorn Manifesto which, seen
retrospectively, is the founding statement of Team
X shifts the emphasis away from the fourfunctions of C.I.A.M. onto human associations. In its second paragraph the Manifesto says
To comprehend these human associations we
must consider every community as a particular
total complex. The word underlined in the manuscript was total, but it was the particular that
was to be critical to Team X thought.9
This balanced attempt to revise the history of

Team 10 gives a succinct indication of the trajectory travelled by the Smithsons with regard to the
relation between architecture and urban planning as developed by them over the years. Among
other things this trajectory meant a continuously
moving back and forth between the quality of the
whole and the specific, and leaving behind the
totalizing and unifying concepts of CIAM and
the generation of modern architects of the heroic
period. However, in the case of the Smithsons,
and Team 10 in general, the value attached to
specificity-to-place and context-building leads
to quite the opposite of an historically grounded,
typo-morphological orthodoxy. It would bring a
re-appreciation of functionalism, an expanded
functionalism that aimed to include existentialist
notions of identity and belonging.10
A S FO U N D
As mentioned, the post-WWII discourse in Great
Britain was one of the formative moments in
the context debate, next to the Italian discourse.
Blessed with the possibility of looking back, one
can already detect in the 1940s and early 1950s
the various positions that will grow to dominate
the debate in the 1970s: such as the ones of the
specific British version of populism and interest
in low culture and local vernacular, and the neoPalladian and Picturesque revivals, which seem to
foreshadow the later postmodernist turn. Many
of those elements, if not all, could be found in the
pages of The Architectural Review, where they
were to be blended with the functionalist tradition as redefined by its editor Nikolaus Pevsner,
who together with J.M. Richards aimed to arrive
at a specific British version of the Continental
avant-garde experiments of the pre-war period,
suited to the British identity. Pevsner and Richards called this approach the New Empiricism,
which recognized in the Swedish welfare state a
planning model for the British post-war future.11
Gordon Cullens idea of Townscape should be
mentioned here as well. It would supersede the
New Empiricism in the late 1940s and direct the
many campaigns of The Architectural Review
to arrive at a better planned built environment.
Cullens drawings were didactic in teaching The
Reviews readers to view the chaotic landscape
of historic cities, the suburbs and the industrial
revolution of the nineteenth century as an intricate web of Picturesque accident and variation
with a special role for urban decoration such as

ed to Nikolaus Pevsner, Allan Lane the Pinguin Press,

London, 1968, pp. 265-273;
see also Alan Powers, The
Re-conditioned Eye, Architects and artists in English
Modernism, in: AA Files, no.
25, Summer 1993, an illuminating piece on the wider
debate in Britain around
WWII. Powers mentioned
the magazine Punch as one
of the re-defining platforms
for such concepts as Englishness, the popular and
the vernacular.
12
Gordon Cullen, Townscape,
The Architectural Press,
London, 1961; much better
than the widely distributed,
abridged re-edition: The
Concise Townscape.
13
TSee for a history of the
Independent Group: David
Robbins (ed.), The Independent Group: Postwar
Britain and the Aesthetics
of Plenty, The MIT Press,
Cambridge / London, 1990.
14
Dirk van den Heuvel, As
Found: The Metamorphosis of the everyday. On the
Work of Nigel Henderson,
Eduardo Paolozzi, and Alison and Peter Smithson
(19531956), in: Oase, nr.
59, 2002, pp. 52-67; Dirk van
den Heuvel and Max Risselada (eds.), Alison and Peter
Smithson from the House
of the Future to a house of
today, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 2004.
15
Alison and Peter Smithson,
The As Found and the
Found, in: Robbins, 1990,
pp. 201-202.
Dirk van den Heuvel
6
For a history of CIAM see
Eric Mumford, The CIAM
Discourse on Urbanism,
19281960, The MIT Press,
Cambridge / London, 2000
7
It should be noted that
these are retrospective
statements made in the
context of the ILAUD summer schools organised by
Giancarlo De Carlo, and
published in the ILAUD
year book series and other
ILAUD publications. A first
compilation of these Smithon texts in English is: Italian
Thoughts, Stockholm, 1993.
8
Published at various places,
among others: Alison
Smithson (ed.), The Emergence of Team 10 out of
CIAM, The Architectural
Association, London, 1983;
reprinted in: Joan Ockman
(ed.), Architecture Culture
19431968, Columbia
Books of Architecture, Rizzoli, New York, 1993, 2005
edition, p. 183.
9
Peter Smithson, Team X
in Retrospect, manuscript,
dated 1 October, 1993, revised March 1994, October
1995, April 1999 and May
2001, 10 pages. Underlining
and italics are as in original.
10
See for instance the interview with Aldo van Eyck in:
Risselada, Van den Heuvel,
2005.
11
Related key publications are
J.M. Richards, The Castles
on the Ground, The Architectural Press, London,
1946, with illustrations by
John Piper, and Nikolaus
Pevsner, The Englishness
of English Art, The Architectural Press, London,
1956. The 1951 Festival of
Britain and its exhibtions
played a crucial role, see for
instance: Reyner Banham,
Revenge of the Picturesque: English Architectural
Polemics, 19451965, in:
John Summerson (ed.),
Concerning Architecture,
Essays on Architectural
Writers and Writing present-
109
iron fences, neo-Victorian advertisements and

shop windows. Englishness and regionalism were
domineering ingredients of this re-appropriation
of the modern tradition.12
The younger generation of British architects,
among which the Smithsons, but also James Stirling and Colin St. John Wilson, both absorbed
and contested the policies of The Architectural
Review. Together with artist-friends and critics they would gather as the Independent Group
at the London Institute of Contemporary Arts.
The ICA enabled the group to organize lecture
series and exhibitions to investigate its own interests, which included a wide array of topics: from
popular culture, sci-fi novels, film, cybernetics
and early communication theory to advertising
and fashion to the continuation of avant-garde
practices such as those of Dada (Schwitters), Surrealism (Duchamp), and Bauhaus (Klee and Moholy Nagy). The New Brutalism and British Pop
Art in particular are said to be born from those
contestations.13 It was here that Alison and Peter
Smithson collaborated with their artist-friends the
photographer Nigel Henderson and the Sculptor
Eduardo Paolozzi on the exhibitions Parallel of
Life and Art (1953) and Patio & Pavilion as part
of the This is Tomorrow-show of 1956.14 From
these collaborations the Smithsons developed
their idea of an As Found aesthetics, which one
might argue held the seeds for their contextual
approach to architecture and city planning.
The Smithsons would go as far as to state that
Nigel Henderson in particular taught them a
whole new way of looking at things around them.
He did so with his photographs of street life, his
collages and the walks they undertook together in
the working class neighbourhoods of East London, where Henderson resided because his wife
Judith was involved in a sociological project Discover your Neighbour to survey the lives of the
working class. The Smithsons in 1990 said:
In architecture, the as found aesthetic was
something we thought we named in the early
1950s when we first knew Nigel Henderson and
saw in his photographs a perceptive recognition of
the actuality around his house in Bethnal Green:
childrens pavement play-graphics; repetition of
kind in doors used as site hoardings; the items
in the detritus on bombed sites, such as the old
boot, heaps of nails, fragments of sack or mesh
and so on.15
110
03. Alison and Peter Smithson, Economist Building,
London 1959- 1964, under construction

London 1959- 1964, under construction

London 1959- 1964, after completion
111
Dirk van den Heuvel


London 1959- 1964,
St James Street

London 1959- 1964, view
from Bury Street
112
08. Alison and Peter Smithson, Economist Building, London 1959- 1964,
plaza

London 1959- 1964, interior of Bank
113
Dirk van den Heuvel


London 1959- 1964, situation
sketch
114
model of first design
street view
115
16
I Ibidem.
17
Ibidem.
Dirk van den Heuvel
And explaning the As Found as both critical

and generative, they stated:
the as found was a new seeing of the ordinary, an openness as to how prosaic things
could re-energise our inventive activity.16
The trauma of war, the austerity of the 1950s
when food was still rationed just as building materials were short in supply, the socio-anthropological approach to the built environment against
the background of the promise for a new, more
egalitarian consumer society, this was all behind
the Smithsons lifelong interest for the ordinary
and everyday life. This interest also covered their
view on the notions of place and identity as the
outcome of historical processes and events:
Setting ourselves the task of rethinking architecture in the early 1950s we meant by the as
found not only adjacent buildings but all those
marks that constitute remembrancers in a place
and that are to be read through finding out how
the existing built fabric of the place had come to
be as it was.17
plans of street level and
plaza

C O LL AG E C IT Y
To better understand the Smithsons interest in
the ordinary as a source for inspiration and their
idea of context thinking we might look at another, most articulate position within the British debate, namely the one of Colin Rowe, who was not
quite part of the Independent Group circles, but
who was certainly close to Stirling, Sandy Wilson
and Alan Colquhoun. With regard to the unresolved predicament of context and its paradigmatic tensions, a comparison between the positions
of Rowe and Smithson is rather illustrative. The
couple and the critic seem to occupy the far ends
of the context debate: the Smithsons saw the issue
of context and context thinking as the natural
extension of the tradition of modern architecture,
whereas Rowe used the idea of contextualism for
his devastating attacks on that very same tradition. The difference is even more striking, since
looking from the outside the three seemed to have
shared similar interests and attitudes: among others a candid and fierce criticism of the failures of
modern architecture, combined with a lifelong
admiration and love for the work of Le Corbusier
and Mies van der Rohe, Scandinavian modern
architecture as represented by Aalto, Asplund and
Lewerentz, as well as a passionate interest in the
history of architecture, especially of ancient Rome
and Greece, and Renaissance ideals.
116
Rowe developed his argument for contextualism through among others his teachings at
Cornell University.18 The publication of Collage
City in 1975 as a special issue of The Architectural Review, and in 1978 as a book, can be
regarded as the most condensed summary of the
ideas developed within the Urban Design studio.19 Rowe, together with Fred Koetter, starts
off with a frontal attack on the idea of utopia as
a programme for actual social reform, as proclaimed and supported by modern architects, as
well as on the idea of architecture being subjected
to Zeitgeist and Hegelian telos. The second chapter paints a succinct overview of positions of the
postwar decades. Then, in the third chapter, tellingly called Crisis of the Object: Predicament of
Texture, Rowe and Koetter launched their attack
on modern architecture for being responsible for
the disintegration of the street and of all highly
organized public space, partly due to the rationalized form of housing and the new dictates of
vehicular activity, and partly due to the fixation
of modern architecture on the ideal of a building
as a free standing object without any impact on
the continuum of free flowing, open space that
was characteristic of the modern city.20 They reproached modern architects, with Le Corbusier
as the most prominent one, and their vision for
an absolute detachment, symbolic and physical, from any aspects of existing context which
has been, typically, envisaged as a contaminant,
as something both morally and hygienically leprous.21
From here on Rowe and Koetter founded their
argument for a Collage City on a combination
of two elements. First, their appropriation of the
figure-ground phenomenon from Gestalt theory
resulted in the now famous, black-and-white
analyses of urban space. These diagrammatic
drawings quite simply consisted of reducing the
complexity of the city to the opposition of solid
and void: Rowe and Koetters version of the classic example of the Nolli-map of Rome, as developed within the Urban Design studio. The strong
rhetorical power of the diagrams served to demonstrate how traditional cities provided a rich and
versatile supporting texture or ground, unlike
the modern city, which was diagrammed by way
of black spots of free-standing solids drifting in
a white sea of void designating undifferentiated
space. Le Corbusiers plan for St. Di (1945) was
strategically placed opposite the inner city of Parma, and a double spread of the modern masters
sketch by Gordon Cullen
Dirk van den Heuvel
18
See Forty, 2000, and for
Rowes teachings: Colin
Rowe, As I Was Saying, The
MIT Press, 1996 (Three Volumes).
19
Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City, The MIT
Press, Cambridge / London,
1978.
20
T Ibidem, pp. 56-58.
21
T Ibidem, p. 51.
22
I Ibidem, 1978, pp. 62-63,
and 74-75.
23
FThe distinction between
neo-Palladianism and neoClassicism is not always
easy to make; Colin Rowe
seems to have a clear preference for the more generic, imperial neo-Classicism,
whereas Rudolf Wittkower
seems terribly fond of the
more British inclined neoPalladianism; see for more
on this: Rudolf Wittkower,
Palladio and English Palladianism, Thames & Hudson,
London, 1974.
24
Ibidem, p. 83.
25
Ibidem, pp.102-103..
26
Rowe, 1996, Vol. III, p. 2.
27
Rowe and Koetter, 1978,
p. 151.
28
Ibidem, p.154.
117

Plan Voisin (1925) communicated at a single

glance the horrid disaster that would have hit
Paris if the plan had ever been executed.22
The second element of Rowe and Koetters argument for a collage city was related to the nature
of the texture that constituted the city. Referring to the examples of imperial and papal Rome,
London squares and terraces, and the Munich of
Leo von Klenze, this texture, or ground, was defined by Rowe and Koetter as a multitude of fragments of (neo-)Classical architectural models.23
This texture was the outcome of cross-breeding,
assimilation, distortion, challenge, response, imposition, superimposition, conciliation,24 in short
a process of bricolage mediating and negotiating
between the platonic ideal, technological progress
and the pragmatic situation at hand.25
Looking back in his 1995 introduction to the
documentation of the work of the Urban Design
studio, Rowe described the studio atmosphere as
follows:
If not conservative, its general tone was radical middle of the road. It believed in dialectic,
in a dialectic between the present and the past,
between the empirical and the ideal, between the
contingent and the abstract. (...) Its ideal was a
mediation between the city of Modern architecture a void with objects and the historical
city a solid with voids.26
However, re-reading Collage City, as well as
considering other writings by Rowe of the 1970s,
such as his introduction to the English translation of Rob Kriers Urban Space, of 1979, this
paradoxical proposition for a radical middle of
the road seems hardly credible. Collage City
concluded with a collection of poetic and inspiring examples, an abridged list of stimulants,
a-temporal and necessarily transcultural according to the authors.27 Yet, this Excursus actually
reads as a collection with a rather clear, cultural
bias, namely a desire to resurrect the finest of
Western humanist tradition, which also becomes
evident from the positioning of Michelangelos
Piazza del Campidoglio as the final image to the
Collage City argument, and opening the collection of selected examples. Modern Architecture
apparently does not belong to this tradition at all.
Of the fifty-five projects included there is only
one that can be classified as Modern, namely
Van Eesterens design for Berlins Unter den Linden, under the category of Memorable streets.28
Moreover, going through the collection of architectural stimulants, the objets trouvs ready to
118
16. Alison and Peter Smithson, Upper Lawn weekend home, Tisbury,
1959- 1962, after completion, garden view
1959- 1962, after completion, exterior
119
Dirk van den Heuvel

1959- 1962, the old cottage

1959- 1962, the new
house is build around
old chimney and on the
existing garden wall
120
be used for a practice of urbanistic collage, Rowe

and Koetters preference for the (neo-)classical
is all too obvious. It seems fair to say that Rowes
pursuit of neo-Classicism is also dominant in the
Collage City argument, rather than the radical
middle of the road.
This assumption is supported by the (re-)publication of Rowes seminal double essay on NeoClassicism and Modern Architecture in 1973,
in the first issue of the Oppositions journal, a text
which was already written in 19561957.29 Here,
Rowes second main contribution to the revision
of the discourse of modern architecture must be
stipulated, namely the concept of autonomy of the
architectural discipline.30 The revisiting and propounding of neo-Classical ideals by Rowe served
the forging of what he called the architectural
equivalent of the rule of law, an autonomous authority transcending the modernist claims that
architecture was to be subordinated to the imperatives of Zeitgeist, programme and technology.31
To elucidate his case Rowe strategically used the
development and shifting position of Mies van
der Rohe.32 Rowe reached a superb level of analytic and rhetorical genius, here, taking a modern
master and the development of his ideas over the
years all in order to dismantle some of the central
tenets of the beginnings of the modern tradition,
in particular the ones of early functionalism.
Considering Rowes writings of those years, the
1970s, it becomes apparent that he succeeded in
firmly establishing the concept for an autonomy
of architecture, quite paradoxically by building
his argument on internal developments within
modern architecture itself and on the idea of urban contextualism.33
Yet, it is also here, both at the issue of architectural autonomy and neo-Classicist idealism, and
at the reconstruction of the tradition of modern
architecture, that Alison and Peter Smithson took
a principally different position with regard to context and town building, or urban design. It is here
I believe that we start to understand the profound
differences between the British contemporaries.
In the already mentioned 1972 lecture Architecture as Townbuilding, after having stated that
a design for a building or building group could
not be evolved outside of context, Smithson explained why this idea would be such a major distinction that one could speak of another sensibility, he said: This sounded easy. But it cut against
all inherited post-Renaissance tradition.
A tradition of ideas, a tradition of abstraction,
a tradition of buildings as simple mechanisms,
and it cuts against the simple force of fashion.34
Unlike Rowe, Smithson understood context
thinking as fundamentally opposed to the neoClassical tradition and any attempt at its resurrection. To him the neo-Classical tradition was not
unlike the International Style, a detached tradition of pattern books and forms to be imitated
without consideration of local specifity. To the
Smithsons context thinking was part and parcel
of an architecture which was the result of a way
of life, a rough poetry dragged out of the confused and powerful forces which are at work, 35
something the Smithsons had started to understand as the unfolding of long term processes, of
what they called the slow growth of another sensibility.36 It is also in this sense that the Smithson
position and the New Brutalism must be understood as an attempt to regenerate the idea of functionalism, of design as a finding process, that is
a working method free from any predetermined
idea regarding form, quite like Hugo Hrings
idea of Form Findung. Form was to be derived
from first principles only and not pattern books,
from the specific context and assignment. To find
the appropriate form always concerned an ethical
imperative to move beyond any sort of formalism.

21. Alison and Peter Smithson, St Hilda's College

Dormitory Building, Oxford, 1967-1970, exterior
Dirk van den Heuvel

Dormitory Building,
Oxford, 1967-1970, situation
121
29
Reprinted in: Colin Rowe,
The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays,
1976, pp. 119-158.
30
TThe autonomy concept
was of course already prepared for by Emile Kaufmann in his 1933 book Von
Ledoux bis Le Corbusier.
31
The phrase architectural
equivalent of the rule of law
comes from Rowes analyis
of Mies van der Rohe development, see: The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and
Other Essays, p. 132.
32
INext to Rowes analysis
of Mies van der Rohes
position, Fritz Neumeyers
groundbreaking study into
Mies van der Rohes writing
Das kunstlose Wort should
be mentioned.
33
The rise of the autonomy
concept was a specific
strand within the postmodernist discourse, concurring
with the idea of so-called
neo-rationalism, which
would unite such diverse
positions as those of Aldo
Rossi, Peter Eisenman, and
Oswald Matthias Ungers.
34
ISmithson, typoscript of
1972 lecture.
35
These Smithson quotes
originate from the beginnings of the New Brutalist
debate see their editorial
statements in: Architectural
Design, January 1955, and
their untitled comments in:
Architectural Design, April,
1957, p. 113.
36
The phrasing points to an
affinity with Raymond Williams, in particular his 1961
The Long Revolution, which
discusses the long term effects of the Industrial Revolution on British society.
122
AC T S O F C O NTI N U IT Y A N D
R E G E N E R ATI O N
So, at the time, in 1972, twenty years later, when
Peter Smithson came to Cornell to deliver his
lecture Architecture as Townplanning, and reappropriated the issue of context as he thought
fit, his proposition might be considered a provocation. Context and contextualism had been rediscovered as a new topic then, as demonstrated
by the publication of one of Rowes students,
Thomas Schumacher, in Casabella, only one year
earlier. Under the heading of Contextualism:
Urban Ideals + Deformations the essay discussed
many of the ideas that would later be fully elaborated by Rowe himself in Collage City.37 On
the other hand, there is no record of any debate
surrounding Smithsons visit and his ideas on
context may be due to the fact that Smithson
was invited by Ungers and not Rowe, or may be
simply because the postmodernist polemic hadnt
fully started yet.38
Smithson illustrated his argument for context
thinking by relating it to his and Alisons own
practice, he said:
In our own design work the context is a
main centre of effort. It is not exactly a question
of fitting-in, but of re-materialising, re-focusing
the words are difficult. The context may demand a totally invisible building or no building,
a counter-geometry or a continuation geometry. In a way like decorating, re-arranging and
preparing a room, for a real homemaker, a real
restaurateur or inn-keeper it is more than a question of taste: it is an act of both continuity and
re-generation.39
To Smithson this combination of continuity
and regeneration is key for a context-responsive
architecture. The difficult task for architects
would lie in the bringing together of the qualities of continuity and newness. Peter Smithson
mentioned the Economist building (19591964)
as an example for the struggling with the idea of
continuation and re-generation. He also showed
the projects for St.Hildas college in Oxford
(19671970) and their weekend home, the Upper
Lawn pavilion (19591962).
The Upper Lawn pavilion was the Smithson
weekend home in the region of Wiltshire, a 150
km southwest of London. It entailed the transformation of a dilapidated cottage and its walled
garden into a modest, balloon frame box that
rested on the existing wall and a Corbusian concrete support of two free-standing pilotis. One of
the old chimneys of the partly demolished cottage

formed the core of the box thus clearly defining
the spaces on both the upper ground floors. The
outside terrace too, derived its size and dimensions from the former cottage, thus continuing
the specific scale of the place, making it tangible, while adding new spatial qualities. Existing
windows of the cottage were also integrated into
the design, creating new relationships between
the way of living that comes with a weekend
home and the surrounding landscape. The material qualities of the old, natural stone wall were
combined with the usage of bare concrete, the
aluminium clad timber box, pine timber on the
inside and on the ground floor the teak doors that
can open up completely to the walled garden.40
The dormitory building of St.Hildas college
could also be described as a pavilion in a garden.
It is a simple volume with the student rooms organized around a core with service facilities. Its
contextual qualities concern the organization of
the back and front of the whole complex of college
buildings that was the result of accidental planning. The specific ambition of the Smithsons was
to enhance the qualities of the existing gardens.
Therefore, the Smithsons inserted the new dormitory between the two existing main buildings
and added a garden wall that connect the buildings with a passage-way while separating the garden from the service alley thus ensuring its quiet
and picturesque character. All student rooms
look out over the gardens. A monumental copper
beech tree was preserved, and the faade design
mimicks the pattern of its branches by way of an
oak timber lattice frame added to the volume,
which also veils the rooms from too much exposure. At the alley side the faade is made of yellow
stock brick, the local, ordinary clay brick typical
of southwest England.41
In many ways St.Hildas dormitory building
was a variation of the earlier Economist project of
Alison and Peter Smithson in the chique district
of St.Jamess in London. The Economist is an ensemble of three volumes on a slightly raised plaza.
At the time, it was built to house the Economist
offices, a bank building and a dormitory building that served the neighbouring Boodles club.42
The bank building sits on the corner of the plot
at St.Jamess Street; it continues the row of faades, including the height variations and the
facade materials. The bank is entered from the
corner where an escalator takes you up to the
proper bank lobby for its clients and transactions,
123

Dormitory Building,
Oxford, 1967-1970, axonometric
39
I Peter Smithson, typoscript
of 1972 lecture
40
The Upper Lawn pavilion
is documented quite extensively by the Smithsons
themselves, see: Upper
Lawn Solar Pavilion, 1986
and Changing the Art of
Inhabitation, 1994; see also
Van den Heuvel, Risselada,
2004.

37
Tom Schumacher, Contextualism: Urban Ideals
+ Deformations, in: Casabella, no. 359-360, 1971, pp.
79-86.
38
As is well-known Ungers
and Rowe were not on
speaking terms. Rowe mentioned the incompatibilit
des humeurs in the introduction to As I Was Saying,
Volume Two Cornelliana,
1996.
Dirk van den Heuvel
which is an extra high inner space as a piano nobile, in order to emphasize the public character of
the banking hall, which is flooded with daylight
through the immense glass facades and its then
state of the art illuminated ceiling. The higher
office tower is situated at the back of the plot and
hence, hardly has an impact on the streetscape. In
addition to this, the Economist buildings are all
clad in Portland stone. Thus the whole ensemble
more or less merges into the historical, predominantly nineteenth century streetscape. In contrast
with this, when approaching the project, the plaza
visually opens up the block and creates new vistas,
not monumentally axial ones, but more informal sightlines that indicate the entrance of the
main tower block of the Economist offices. The
plaza also creates a new informal route connecting St.Jamess Street with the narrow Bury Street
at the back. Just as in the other two projects the
manipulation of seize, scale, movement patterns
and materialization are key in striking a balance
between continuity and regeneration.
At the time, Kenneth Frampton criticized the
Economist for being an American appropriation
while pointing out the influence of the architecture of SOM and Mies van der Rohes work in the
USA. The Smithsons acknowledged this influence
in their many writings. During the late 1950s Peter Smithson travelled twice to the States to visit
precisely the architecture of SOM and Mies van
der Rohe. But quite remarkably, Smithson always
discussed these projects in terms of local culture
and context. In his Cornell lecture he also included the American work of Mies van der Rohe in his
argument for a context-responsive architecture,
calling the New York Seagram building a clear,
simple and easily read context-conscious urban
form. It is remarkable to us, since we have come
to understand the Seagram as the apotheosis of
the ideas of negation, absence and autonomy after
the Italian and American post-structuralist readings of Mies van der Rohes work.43 Yet, to Smithson Mies context-consciousness was a clear
question of sensibility:
... it is not a question of continuing Mies
space and meanings that I am talking about it
is being aware of his space and meanings when
making further buildings and spaces. A question
of sensibility. As Mies was sensible not only of the
Racquet Club, but of the flanking buildings, the
net of New York, the nature of Park Avenue
as an urban chasm all as parts of his decision
on how to build in that particular place. Miess
124
architecture at its marvellous best for example

at Lake Shore Drive or the early buildings on the
IIT campus, to use American examples of his
work, is itself a sign of the growth of a sensibility
about cities.
As I have said elsewhere there has been, in this
Century, a slow-growing sensibility of the machine-served city. A seeing that its very existence
and continued and continuous maintenance is a
miracle, and that how delicate is its fabric.44
To recapture: for the Smithsons the newness
of the machine-served society the technology
and market driven consumer society, the alleged
resulting loss of sense of place and community
was a central and constitutive part of the problem of a context-responsive architecture. This
was quite unlike Colin Rowes proposition, even
though Rowe would start from an observation
similar to that of the Smithsons that modernization, modern planning and modernist ideology
exercized a disregard for context, distrust of social continuum, used symbolic utopian models
for literal purposes, and held the assumption
that the existing city will be made to go away.45
Rowe aimed to solve the problem with an autonomous apparatus containing formal strategies of
typology, composition and transformation to be
deployed in a bricolage way in order to revitalize
the existing city fabric. Apparently, a contextualist architecture as proposed by Rowe did not
consider newness, machines or other aspects of
modernization to have a particular relevancy to
architectural discourse and the development of
any architectural language or tectonics. On the
contrary, the two single references to contemporary technology that were included in the Excursus, the selection of inspiring examples for the
Collage City practitioners, were ironically positioned under the heading of Nostalgia-producing
instruments.46
VI
Naturally, there are many more things to say on
the issue of context and the historic development
of the discourse. The whole context debate and
the idea of a context-responsive architecture is
phenomenally riddled with paradoxes, and perhaps that is why it seems dormant now, or simply
a hopeless ambition think of Koolhaas exasparated Fuck context statement.47
Within the field of architecture, the 1970s
context debate was eventually won by historicistformalists, not by a new generation of environmentalists or ecologists, sociologists, structuralists et cetera, let alone the generation of Team 10.
It was James Stirling, rival of the Smithsons and
student of Rowe, who would be hailed as the ultimate champion when his competition entry for
the Stuttgart Neue Staatsgalerie (19771983) was
chosen to be built. A clever exercise in mixing
pop art techniques with typological transformation and historic quoting, the building became
the ultimate expression of the postmodernist
fashion of the time, quite in the vein of Rowes
plea for a new mannerism, of cross-breeding,
assimilation, distortion, challenge, response,
imposition, superimposition, conciliation. Surprisingly, it was Kenneth Frampton who would
recognise and praise the contextualist tendencies
in Stirlings work, already in 1976, when he discussed Stirlings competition entry for the Dsseldorf Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen
while highlighting the neo-classical intent in the
work.48 It was not before 1983 when Frampton
formulated an alternative to Postmodernism when
he made a plea for a Critical Regionalism a term
he borrowed from Alexander Tzonis and Liane
Lefaivre, but which may be also considered a late
fruit of the English discourse on the New Brutalism, neo-Palladianism and the Picturesque.
However, it would be the other student of Colin Rowe, Peter Eisenman, who thought Rowes
project to its ultimate consequence. In the work
of Eisenman the process of bricolage, imposition, superimposition and so on, was elaborated
from post-functionalism into deconstruction, and
one might add, de-contextualization. More than
anyone else Eisenman succeeded in radicalizing
Rowes ideas, thus not only demonstrating the
paradox of Rowes project to construct an universal, humanist tradition that actually seems quite
a-historical and detached from historical context,
but also by moving beyond that same humanist
tradition. Whereas Eisenman thus opened a new
25. James Stirling, Neue

Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart,
1977- 1983, axonometric
of public route

24. Colin Rowe and Fred

Koetter, Collage city,
1978, comparative urban
diagrams of Parma and
St Die
Dirk van den Heuvel

23. Colin Rowe and Fred
Koetter, Collage city,
1978, comparative urban
diagrams of Parma and
St Die
125
41
For an excellent review
see Robin Middleton, The
Pursuit of Ordinariness, in:
Architectural Design, nr. 2,
1971, pp. 77-85.
42
Both the Boodles club and
the Economist make still
use of their building, the
bank building is rented out
for different programmes,
among others a restaurant.
43
II am thinking here of the
writings of Francesco Dal
Co and K. Michael Hays, in
particular.
44
Smithson, typoscript of
1972 lecture; the elsewhere he is referring to was
Berlin, where Peter Smithson was invited, again by
Ungers, to lecture for students; the topic was technology and the machineserved society, the title of
the lecture Without Rhetoric an implicit criticism of
Archigrams futuristic fervour, and Banhams preference for Italian Futurism
45
Rowe and Koetter, 1978, p.
38.
46
Ibidem, pp. 172-173; Cape
Canaveral, and an unidentified oil rig.
47
IIn S,M,L,XL when discussing the design of the TGB,
Paris.
48
Kenneth Frampton, Stirling
in Context. Buildings and
Projects 19501975, in:
RIBA Journal, March 1976,
pp. 102-104.
Dirk van den Heuvel
26. Peter Eisenman, La

Vilette, Paris, Competition entry 1987, exploded axonometric
As Found Aesthetics; Notes on the formation

of the context debate in architecture
49
Alison Smithson, The
Smithsons ...... gone swimming, typoscript dated 2
July 1978, from the Smithson archive; a typical line
reads: Now it is the era of
the ragpickers and the antique dealers. So be it; it is
no joy to fight the zeitgeist.
50
Kenneth Frampton, Prospects for a Critical Regionalism, in: Kate Nesbitt (ed.),
Theorizing a New Agenda
for Architecture. An Anthology of Architectural Theory
19651995, Princeton Architectural Press, New York,
1996, p. 482.
III Architectural positions
126
discourse, very different from the English one on

modern architecture, Alison and Peter Smithson
had moved into the margins of the international
debate gone swimming as they themselves put
it.49 There they would develop their idea of a
conglomerate order, a redefinition of the New
Brutalism and Team 10 urbanism aimed at the
creation of inviolate fragments as safe havens in
the larger fabric that is the modern, global society. Looking back it reads as quite in the vein of
Framptons plea for a Critical Regionalism, one
of its characteristic being: Its salient cultural
precept is place creation; the general model to
be employed in all future development is the enclave that is to say, the bounded fragment against
which the ceaseless inundation of a place-less, alienating consumerism will find itself momentarily
checked.50
The emphasis on enclaves and fragments is
perhaps the most lucid demonstration of one of
the most paradoxical propositions in the context
debate: that it would be possible to be both contextual and critical. Criticality, or critique is a key
modern concept that belongs to the core of Enlightenment philosophy and its positivist ideology.
It presumes an outsider position by definition, or
at least an outsiders look. Although hardly new,
this might be still the key question for architecture practice: how to negotiate between autonomy
and full engagement?
Dirk van den Heuvel
van den Heuvel, D.

(2002). As Found: The
Metamorphosis of the
Everyday. On the Work
of Nigel Henderson,
Eduardo Paolozzi
and Alison and Peter
Smithson (1953-1956).
Oase, 59.
van den Heuvel, D. (Ed.).
(2005). Team 10: in
Search of a Utopia
of the Present (19531981). Rotterdam: NAI
Publishers.
van den Heuvel, D., &
Risselada, M. (Eds.).
(2004). Alison and
Peter Smithson - from
the House of the
Future to the House of
today. Rotterdam: NAi
Publishers.
Wittkower, R. (1974).
Palladio and English
Palladianism. London:
Thames&Hudson.
127

Cullen, G. (1961).
Townscape. London: The
Cullen, G. (1990). The
Concise Townscape.
London: Architectural
Press.
Forty, A. (2000). Words
and Buildings: A
Vocabulary of Modern
Architecture. London:
Thames&Hudson.
Frampton, K. (1976). Stirling
in Context: Buildings
and Projects 1950-1975.
RIBA Journal, March,
102-104.
Frampton, K. (1996).
Prospects for a
critical Regionalism.
In K. Nesbit (Ed.),
Theorizing a New
Agenda for Architecture:
An Anthology of
Architectural Theory
1965-1995. New York:
Princeton Arhitectural
Press.
Koolhaas, R., & Mau, B.
(1995). S,M,L,XL. New
York: Monacelli.
Middleton, R. (1971). The
Persuit of Ordinariness.
Architectural Design, 2,
77-85.
Pevsner, N. (1956). The
Englishness of English
Art. London: The
Richards, J. M. (1946).
The Castle on the
Ground. London The
ARchitectural Press.
Rowe, C. (1976). The
Mathematics of the Ideal
Villa and Other Essays.
Cambridge/London: MIT
Press.
Rowe, C. (1996). As I Was
Saying. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Rowe, C., & Koetter, F.
(1978). Collage City.
Press.
Schumacher, T. (1971).
Contextualism: Urban
Ideals + Deformations.
Casabella, 359-369,
78-86.
Smithson, A. (Ed.). (1983).
The Emergence of Team
10 out of CIAM. London:
The Architectural
Association.
THE
ARCHITECTURE
OF THE
INTERIOR
128
An architect with expertise in the

interior is increasingly important
in the making of contemporary
architecture, given the characteristics of the economy, the
emergence of new building programmes and the need to adapt
existing structures. Graduates will
be familiarised with and trained in
understanding essential aspects
of complex interior environments,
and made familiar with the diverse
issues, agents and strategies involved in their making.
The course considers architecture
of the interior, its spatial qualities
and historical and social contexts
in detail. It provides education
regarding the processes and
involvement of the many varied
disciplines, agents and partners
involved in a complex interior
architectural project. Studios are
supported by courses in history,
design analysis, technical studies
and research studies that provide
knowledge and experience of
technical issues, research methods and skills of practical implementation. Subjects: historical
design studies, social and anthropological research on users and
user behaviour, architectural and
technical studies regarding the
transformation of existing structures, construction, environmental
(climate) design, interior materials
and detail, and interior-specific
design.
Architecture of the Interior
129
The Architecture of the Interior focuses on the public interior: those

interior spaces whose scale, complexity, positions and uses within
the extended urban environment
render them part of the public
realm. These spaces can be made
for the benefit of a conscious,
self-aware public and society, and
furthermore, can be sustainable,
well functioning, user-oriented
and beautiful.
130
Mark Pimlott
Mark Pimlott (Montral, 1958) is

an artist, architectural designer
and writer. Mark Pimlotts practice
encompasses installation, photography, film, art for public spaces and interior design. He studied
architecture at McGill University,
Montral and the Architecturual
Association, London, and visual
arts at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Notable works
include Neckinger Mills interiors,
London (1988; 1994); Red House
interiors, London (2001; 2004;
2011; 2013); Guinguette, Birmingham (2000); La scala, Aberystwyth (2003) and restaurant Puck,
The Hague (2007). World, a public
square at BBCs Broadcasting
House in central London (2013).
Solo visual arts exhibitions include Studiolo and 1965 (Todd
Gallery, London (1995; 1998); Ich
bin der Welt abhanden gekommen, (NAi, Rotterdam, 2005)
and All things pass (Stroom, The
Hague, 2008). The installation Piazzasalone (in collaboration with
Tony Fretton) was shown in the
section curated by Kazuyo Sejima
at the 12th Biennale internazionale di Architettura di Venezia
(2010). He curated the exhibitions
Continental drift (RIBA, London,
1993) and Not nothing (Todd Gallery, London, 1997).
He has taught architecture
and visual arts since 1986. He
was appointed Professor in relation to practice in Architecture at
Delft University of Technology, the
Netherlands (2002-2008), where
he is now assistant professor in
Architectural Design/ Interiors,
and Leader of the course The
Architecture of the Interior. His
articles and essays have been
published in numerous journals
of architecture. He is the author
of Without and within: essays on
territory and the interior (2007)
and In passing: Mark Pimlott photographs (2010).
He has recently written Modern

anachronism: Trades Union Congress Memorial Building, London
for the forthcoming publication
Twelve Public Buildings (Tom
Avermaete, Salomon Frousto, Max
Risselada, eds.). He is currently
writing a PhD dissertation The
heart of Montrals ville intrieure:
prototype for the very large, extensive, complex interior at Delft
University of Technology.
AR1AI035 The Architecture of
the Interior Msc1 Fundamentals 2
the Interior Msc3 Graduation
Studio
the Interior Msc3 Studio Specific research 1
the Interior Msc4 Graduation
Project
ARB104 Design Master Class
(Berlage)
Mark Pimlott
131
Fiction and significance in the public interior
Mark Pimlott
132
This lecture is one of a series about attitudes and

approaches to architectural design. Architectural
design is a much more complex matter than the
organisation and distribution of programme, the
arrangement of space, articulation of materials
and light, mastery of techniques of construction
or the composition of appearances into functional
(or expressive) entities. Architectural design has
the capacity to articulate ideas about the world
and being in the world. The interior is especially
concerned with this, for it is at once set apart
from, and simultaneously situated within the
world, a condition integral to its very constitution,
its history, its language and its ideas.
This lecture concerns public interiors in particular and the proposition that they have been
and continue to be driven by fundamental ideas
embedded in culture. By understanding such ideas and their origins, it is possible to arrive at more
profound understandings of the environments we
imagine and construct, and how we, as designers,
might make work that is more completely embedded in our world, our culture and its ideas.
When I speak of the public interior, I refer
to that constructed place or environment that is
used by many, and taken to be public by its users. It is an environment shared by people who
feel as though they are able to be themselves in
public, and conscious of themselves and others both like and unlike themselves as individuals all together, as a public.1 Historically, the
public interior has provided the most compelling
environments in Modernity, offering what may
be described as an ideal state of association, and
simultaneously, individual freedom through expanded consciousness of the environment and
others. This state is found in stories of our origins, in which ideas about our place in the world
are central. The interior begins, therefore, with
the assertion of place.
01. Cutting the sulcus of a

Roman settlement (from
The Idea of a Town) British Museum, London
02. Sixtus V's plan for Baroque Rome from Pier

Vittorio Aureli, The possibility of an absolute
architecture
One begins to define a place, an interior, a somewhere:

that somewhere is a piece of ground, a clearing, that
has been demarcated, claimed from and set apart from
the World, accorded special status and rendered significant, both within the World and surrounded by it. Joseph Rykwerts The Idea of a Town (1976) 2 describes
the making of Roman settlements, and the separation
of the space of a town from everything else: transforming a field or campus into a templum
: a significant clearing, demarcated by the act of
ploughing the earth for the foundations of a wall distinguishing the space of the town (its interior), from
the World. The interior embodies the act of its distinction from and setting within the World. (Illustration 1)
Mark Pimlott
The architect, and the architect of the interior,

must be willing to approach the appearances, arrangements and artefacts of environments with
the most complete attention possible, so that they
may be met, in order to allow them to speak of
themselves. Architecture contains this aspect
of meeting or mediation in its formation and
constitution, speaking consciously or unconsciously about ideas of its beginnings and its
relation to the World: ideas that, superfluous to
necessity, are manifest through the history of our
Western culture, its music, art, literature and philosophy. The interior, particularly characterised
by its distinction from the world, engages these
ideas repeatedly. These ideas are likewise essential to the making of public interiors, embedding
their spaces into the fabric and the culture of their
settings, rendering them legible, communicative,
potent and significant.
The city is perpetually involved in the act of
making itself, and so, beginning. This act is related to those of the origins and rituals of foundations of towns, which set ritualised procedures in
relation to environments that were not yet known.
The making of the city is necessarily a reflective
process that requires constant modification of its
organisation, forms and expressions. Consciously
and unconsciously, the city deploys fictions as it
arranges, builds and represents, recounting the
story of its coming into being, and drawing images and references from external influences and
other places that allow it to imagine itself to be
both itself and some other city, elsewhere. This
way, Rome as it built itself in the baroque period
imagined itself to be a re-embodiment of imperial
Rome (illustration 2); at the turn of the twentieth
century, Chicago imagined itself to be Hauss-
1
Stanford Encyclopdia
of Philosophy, http://
plato.stanford.edu/entries/
arendt/#ActPowSpaApp,
consulted 04/03/2014:
The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state
in its physical location; it
is the organization of the
people as it arises out of
acting and speaking together, and its true space
lies between people living
together for this purpose,
no matter where they happen to be (HC 198) Thus
the famous motto: Wherever you go, you will be a
polis expressed the conviction among the Greek
colonists that the kind of
political association they
had set up originally could
be reproduced in their new
settlements, that the space
created by the sharing of
words and deeds could
find its proper location almost anywhere. For Arendt,
therefore, the polis stands
for the space of appearance, for that space where
I appear to others as others
appear to me, where men
exist not merely like other
living or inanimate things,
but to make their appearance explicitly.
2
Joseph Rykwert (1976),
The Idea of a Town: the anthropology of urban form in
Rome, Italy and the ancient
world (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press): 65
The boundary was significant in the act, or rite that
made it. Essential to the
founding ceremony of the
settlement of the town was
the cutting of the boundary
furrow or sulcus by an ox
and cow yoked to a bronze
plough, the ox to the outside, the cow to the inside.
133
CONSCIOUSNESS,
P L AC E A N D I NT E R I O R
134
mannian Paris; or, the 1960s, a piece of d in

Poland imagined itself to be some international
city, a Manhattan. (illustration 3)
Throughout the city, such fictions are found
in the representations of architecture, places and
interiors. The citys public interiors can be regarded as stages upon which the citys fictions are
played out; where the city uses imagery to tell its
stories fact, fantasies, myths back to itself and
its citizens.
03. Lodz PL 1994 (Manhattan) / Photo: Mark

Pimlott
135
Mark Pimlott
F I C TI O N S O F
TH E P U B LI C I NT E R I O R
There are various frameworks through which one
can look at the public interior: one might look at
them in terms of function or type or typology; as
spaces of display, sociability or instrumentality
(interiors that instruct or form peoples behaviour); or in terms of fundamental ideas, motifs or
themes. This last framework reveals how manifestations of architecture gather around particular,
resonant themes useful fictions regardless of
the historical period in which they are made, and
point to how we as designers might find deep material to draw from in our designs for even modest
tasks.
In consideration of a broad range of exemplary
public interiors, it is apparent that there are few
essential themes or motifs that run through the
culture of their design: I suggest these themes as
the Palace, the Garden, the Ruin, the Shed, the
Network, and the Machine. This is a personal assessment: by no means authoritative nor exclusive,
its categories are useful. The Palace, Garden and
Ruin are openly lyrical and romantic as frames of
reference for describing, imagining and making
the public interior, particularly suited to the period leading to Modernism; while The Shed, Network and Machine share rather more pragmatic
or functional aspects that reflect typical tendencies within Modernity toward process, systemisation and instrumentality. (Even these have long
and substantial histories.) Rather than attempt
to describe and characterise all public interiors,
I shall concentrate on one particularly potent
theme, which I will use to stand for the consideration of them all.
In addressing the notion of essential themes,
one inevitably turns to the moment of their appearance, and their origins, wherein their significance resides. The interior begins at the
moment when a space (within) is set apart from
the world (without); the interior comes into being through the making and representation of
this space now a place within the world. The
origins of the interior, and the public interior as
whole, are particularly present in the theme of the
Garden.
136
TH E G A R D E N
A public interior we might all recognise is the
Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, designed
by Giuseppe Mengoni, and built in 18651877.
(illustration 4) Straightforwardly, it appears to be
a street crossing under glass and iron vaults. The
buildings that compose this crossing are delicately
decorated; the ground is not an ordinary crossing
of cobbled or asphalted roads and pavements, but
a floor covered with an elaborate pattern of mosaics. The material realisation of walls and floor
is enabled by the glass roof, which preserves the
idealized urban scene proposed in the Galleria in
the manner of a specimen under glass. The Galleria is a hypertrophied conservatory whose own
architecture depends on references to pergolas,
arbours, bowers and the arcades of trees provided
by nature and managed by man to form primitive
shelters against the elements. (illustration 5) From
the sheltered and brilliantly illuminated scene of
the Galleria, one looks out to the city beyond:
to the Piazza del Duomo, a large clearing to the
south; to the Piazza della Scala, another clearing
gracefully introduced by the Gallerias structures
to the north; to adjacent streets to the east and
west, exposed to the sky, sun, wind and rain. The
Galleria is a realised image a stage set of an
idealised city scene poised in the midst of the real
city, which it regards, and, to some extent, resembles. The public interior here represents the city
as it dreams itself: a fabulous specimen (buildings and citizens alike) at the centre of the world.
Inscribed in this image is the architecture of the
conservatory and its sylvan legacy.
In the public interiors I describe as forged with
the idea or theme of the Garden, one is asked to
imagine that one is not really inside at all but
that the interior has miraculously absorbed or assumed the attributes of the garden, and specifically, the original garden.3 This is nature as it lives
in the ideas of Man: a garden whose deep history
is found in the biblical Garden of Eden, depicted
throughout the history of literature and art, resplendent with animals, trees, fruits and flowers.
Every creature, including Man, lives there in
harmony. Edens bounty represents the completeness of creation on Earth, its perfect state. It
represents the original place of Man, the place of
knowledge and language, 4 the site of Mans original state of grace, and that perfect condition from
which he is cleft and exiled. (illustration 6) Mans
Fall or the idea of such an event initiated a
never-ending search for redemption, and recovery
of this ideal condition and state of being.
The return to this original garden, completeness with creation and a state of complete consciousness is a motif that arises again and again in
the fictions of architecture and the public interior.
The Garden is an ideal that is sought reconstructed and called upon so that a kind of redemption
might be imagined.
TH E P R I M ITI V E H UT
( M A R C -A NTO I N E L AU G I E R )
The original place, the Garden representing our
complete, redeemed being, is perpetually one
to which we try to return, through allusions,
representations and environments that attempt
to reconstruct it. This impulse affects our first
shelters and dwellings, and pervades the first
conscious constructions, the first architecture.
These first acts, or origins, are the bases for the
fictions regarding architecture and its role in mediating between ourselves and the World; a world
which has come into being at the moment of the
expulsion from Eden, the Garden. Our environments have tried to bridge that gap between the
World and Eden, in order to redeem ourselves.
Architecture begins fictionally as a kind of
defense against the World, hewn out of the living material provided by nature, suggesting those
elements that will form the basis of architectural
language. For example, we have the story of the
origins of architecture in the Abb Marc-Antoine
Laugiers (17131769) Essai sur larchitecture
(1753) encapsulated in its frontispieces depiction of a primitive hut. The setting is a primval
wood; constituent elements of a seminal architecture, such as columns, beams, rafters and roof,
are formed or coaxed out of the material of the
forest. These are set against the same elements
as formed in constituent parts of classical architecture, set at the feet of an attendant goddess, as
ruins. Laugier suggests that nature is embodied
in the forms of classical architecture, as is seen in
depictions of the origin of the Corinthian order
and the acanthus leaf; and that the dwelling itself
is entwined with this condition of the Garden,
and that it is bound to recall it in its overall form
and its elements. (illustration 7)
06. Nicolas Poussin, Et in

Arcadia EGO 1637-38,
Louvre, Paris
05. Jan Breugel the Younger, Paradise on Earth

c1620, Prado, Madrid
Mark Pimlott

04. Giuseppe Mengoni, Galleria Vittorio Emanuele
II, Milano 1861-1877 /
Photo: Marius Grootveld
137
3
Mark Pimlott (2007), Without and within: essays on
territory and the interior
(Rotterdam: Episode publishers). The nineteenthcentury city, the burgeoning
metropolis and fortified
town alike, embraced the
idea of the promenade
along larger urban infrastructures: along the tops
of decommissioned fortifications and alles emanating from the centre to
the woods, and the grands
boulevards, separating
and joining one part of the
city to the next (cf Paris).
By making an urbanized
nature, whether in linear
promenades or naturalistic
parks (cf Central Park, New
York), a supremacy over
nature the space of the
other could be imagined.
The incorporation of nature
was the ultimate mastery,
inspiration and tool in selfjustification.
4
One of biblical Edens
most important aspects
was knowledge, language
and names: in particular,
God assigned to Adam the
task of naming the beasts.
(Barker-Banfield, Bodleian
Library Oxford); By disobeying God, and eating the
forbidden fruit of the tree
of Knowledge, Adam and
Eve acquire wisdom against
Gods word (for all knowledge was to reside in God)
and so are cast out of Paradise and into the World, to
weave and delve (to plough
the earth).
138
A R C A DY, A R C A D I A A N D G A R D E N S
In pre-Christian Western culture, the wilderness carries connotations of being the realm of
both the unknown and of knowledge. In ancient
Greece, Arcady in Pelopnnisos was the home of
Pan, whose name signified everything: Pan was
the keeper of knowledge. The word panic derives
from Pan: his realm is that of panic, of uncontrollable everythingness. Its inhabitants were considered to be the original people or autochthons,
grown from the Earth, and older than the Moon.5
Its legacy is its image as Arcadia, which, particularly in painting, came to represent pastoral innocence, peace and simplicity, and the fecundity of
Nature. (illustration 8) Such a garden is original
and wild: it is simultaneously a world that might
be returned to, or a domain of original, primal
others that must be controlled.
We should note how frequently the control of
the hinterland of wilderness and autochthonous
otherness has been essential to the exercise of
power, and how this was represented. In Baroque
gardens such as at Versailles (16641789), or
Vaux-le-Vicomte (1661), nature was subdued by
clearings through the woods, marked with geometrically arranged paths, planting, pools and
fountains and allegorical statuary. These clearings were projections representing hegemonic
culture (embodied in individuals) that distanced
the wilderness and its otherness, keeping its uncertainties and terrors at an entertaining distance,
and supplanting them with its own achievements,
miracles and entertainments. Re-stagings of this
confrontation with nature were frequent, assuming forms as diverse as terrifying, wild Arcady
such as the private parks of Bomarzo, near Viterbo (1552) and Dsert de Retz (17721784)
(illustration 9); as exotic Edens, such as the landscape of Stoke Park (1792) by Capability Brown
and Humphry Repton in England; or as playful
artificial landscapes, as in the Vauxhall Pleasure
Gardens in London (c16601859). It is worth
noting that Laugier refers to the the city as a kind
of forest, and its streets as paths cut through it.6
The streets bear the imprint of nature that they
have banished, which is kept present as antagonist
and protagonist.
07. Abbe Marc-Antoine

Laugier, Frontispiece to
Essais sur l'architecture
08. Desert de Retz, outside

Paris 1772-1784
09. Baron Georges Eugene

Haussman, plan fot the
routes through Paris
1850- 1875
5
Simon Schama (1995),
Landscape and Memory
(London: Harper Collins)
6
Manfredo Tafuri (1973),
Architecture and Utopia:
design and capitalist development (Cambridge MA:
MIT Press)
139
Mark Pimlott
TH E G A R D E N
A N D TH E M E TR O P O LI S
The fascination with the Garden intensified in
European cultural life at a moment precisely coincident with the onset of modernity, from the
mid-eighteenth century through the entire nineteenth century: the period when the idea of the
enfranchised individual as opposed to a feudal
subject was being articulated and developed.
That new individual emerged in parallel with the
rise of the philosophy of science, the flowering of
the study of the natural sciences, and, of course,
in advances in technology that yielded new structures, new spaces, and the new metropolis. (illustration 10)
In the metropolis, itself a nineteenth-century
phenomenon, the Arcade was a constructed parallel to private and public parks and pleasure
gardens. Johann Friedrich Geist describes their
development taking as his example the arcades
or passages of Paris as derived from the bazaars
of the middle East; but the principle of making little shopping streets that connected other
busy streets depended on their difference from
normal streets and their artificiality, an effect
achieved by placing the streets under glass roofs
and harmonizing their architectural expression.7
A perfect interior architecture was sustained
under glass, which, due to its double layering, offered studio lighting conditions for the interior.
The arcaded space, as an architectural device,
is derived from a structural interpretation of a
pergola: an open frame that is made to accommodate climbing flowering or fruiting plants, in
order to evoke a natural bower, and induce a state
of peacefulness and pleasure. The word derives
from Latin, indicating a bow or arch. The image of the pergola immediately calls to mind the
image of the primitive hut provided by Laugier.
The first of these arcades (the Galrie de Bois, or
Wooden Gallery, in Paris) (illustration 11) appear
at the end of the eighteenth century, and develop
through Paris, as little interior streets running
through city blocks, connecting to other streets
like an informal, natural system; and then all
over Europe, particularly in metropolitan centres,
right through the nineteenth century, (illustration
12) arriving at monumental scale after the singular event of the construction of the Crystal Palace.
The architecture of the arcade allowed a kind of
perfection and contained a quality of artificiality,
that, however distant from the natural bowers that
inspired them, related them to both natural shelters and an interiorised nature.
10. Galerie de Bois, Paris

from Johann Friedrich
Geist, Passagen, en
Bautyp des 19. Jahrhunderts
140
The atmosphere of the arcade was reinforced,

complemented and extended by contemporary developments of the conservatory, itself inspired by
explorations of faraway lands colonies of European powers in Africa, the Americas and Asia,
which excited the fashion for the importation
and conservation of exotic plants. The gathering
and cultivation of exotic plants in conservatories
signified an Eden brought home. The plants signified the reach of colonial Empires redeemed by
their claims upon Eden. The plants in effect,
trophies were be sustained in artificial environments, greenhouses, glass houses and conservatories at various scales, from little glass caskets
that could sit in a room, with a small collection
of plants, to larger structures attached to houses,
properly known as conservatories, to garden
structures such as greenhouses and then freestanding monumental structures, Palm Houses
and the like attached to botanical gardens institutions of the natural sciences that would
become public interiors. The collection of exotic
plants became common, and the specific forms
that accommodated them transformed architecture. A delicate architecture of glass and iron
emerged that sustained totally artificial interior
environments in the city and fantasies of Eden at
home.
12. Galerie Saint- hubert,

Bruxelles / Photo: Marius Grootveld
13. Sir Joseph Paxton, The

Crystal Palace, London
1851, Victoria and Albert
Musem, London
7
Johann Friedrich Geist
(1978), Passagen, ein Bautyp des 19. Jahrhunderts
(Mnchen: Prestel)
8
Siegfried Giedion (1941),
Space, Time and Architecture: the growth of a new
tradition (Cambridge MA:
Harvard University Press)
141
Mark Pimlott
TH E C RYS TA L PA L AC E
The greatest manifestation of the arcade and
conservatory fused into a single, significant figure was the Crystal Palace (1851), designed by
the gardener Joseph Paxton (18031865), which
was situated within Hyde Park in London, which
had just been made completely accessible to the
public by decree. Britains imperial power was
represented in a monumental conservatory the
largest ever built that was continuous with the
landscape of the park. Nature was pictured, possessed, contained and controlled; Hyde Park, a
public realm, was incorporated within the construction in the form of a giant oak tree. The
figure of the Crystal Palace, capable of accommodating the fantasy of elsewhere, became the preeminent figure of public interior architecture. Its
structure suggested indefinite extendibility, broad
wide adaptation and universal application, industrially produced, which could include or infer
nature. In parallel with the development of largespan glass shelters for railway stations and markets, it became representative of the metropolitan
project as a whole. (illustration 13)
The Crystal Palaces construction likened
to an iron and a glass tablecloth by Paxton inspired further speculations about the origins of architecture. Gottfried Semper (18031879) wrote,
among other things, about the crafts attendant to
the making of building and their representation in
architecture. A Caribbean hut displayed in the
Crystal Palace confirmed his thesis about the fundamental elements of architecture, their making
and their meaning, the nature and constitution of
building and its representations contained within
the first primitive constructions, which would
become represented in architecture. (illustration
14) His Four Elements of Architecture (1851)
proposed the making of architecture as a series
of acts, each of which was associated with a craft,
and made in response in relation to the World.
We are meant to understand this primitive hut as
occupying an original condition, one hewn out of
nature. In this narrative, architecture is contingent upon the condition of nature, which becomes
the garden through mans transformative presence. One can appreciate how the convergence of
architectural theory and certain exemplary projects would have profoundly affected the culture
of architecture in this period. The Crystal Palace
has been rightly singled out for its wide impact on
many other building types, ranging from the train
station to the museum, 8 all of which are imbued
14. A Carribean hut, exhibitet at the Crystal Palace

1854 from Gottfried
Semper, Der Stil 1851
142
with the image of the garden. It was through its

influence that arcades grew in dimension and
scale. Exemplified by the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, entire street networks could be
understood as conserved specimens of metropolitanism under glass vaults, and part of the great
complex chain of mans creations hewn from the
natural world. Paxton elaborated this idea in his
proposal for a roughly circular arcade around the
periphery of urban London a megastructure, in
effect forming a continuous interior boulevard
that would share associations with promenades
around decommissioned ramparts that had become common in fortified European centres from
the early part of the nineteenth century. (illustration 15)
The motif of the monumental conservatory
was transformed and applied in the design of museums. The Natural History Museums of London
and Oxford are examples, by Alfred Waterhouse
(1867) and Deane and Woodward (1860) respectively: their glazed courtyards, evoking nature
through their filigree structures, were appropriate
devices for museums studying life and the work
of Creation in evolution. The same motif directly
inspired the first department stores grands
magasins that elided acts of consumption with
those of wandering through gardens of earthly
delights, such as Aristide Boucicaults Au Bon
March in Paris (1874) designed by Louis Auguste Boileau and Gustave Eiffel. (illustration 16)
The theme carried on to the conservatory-based
salons of grand hotels another nineteenth-century phenomenon such as the Ritz in London
(1901) by Mews and Davis; and was useful for
spaces of exchange and trade, such as the Beurs
in Amsterdam designed by Henrik Petrus Berlage (1903), as well as great train stations in Europe and America, such as Pennsylvania Station
(1910), designed by McKim, Mead and White. It
is worth noting that these epic glass conservatories frequently relied upon a supporting or framing architecture of masonry and iron, whose style,
whether gothic or classical, evoked the ruins of
great works of earlier (sometimes imagined) civilisations.
A G A R D E N E V E RY W H E R E
The motif or theme of the great glass conservatory as the ultimate public interior seems to reach
its apotheosis in Ebenezer Howards thesis for
The Garden City of To-Morrow (1901), a network of cities imagined as completely integrated
with the countryside, at the centre of each was to
be a torus-shaped Crystal Palace a continuous
shopping arcade surrounding a Central Park.
Here, as in so many projects that follow probably unconsciously the suggestion of Howards
idea, the opposition between man and nature is
simultaneously negotiated and reconciled, thereby
legitimating the metropolitan project. The monumental conservatory, bearing the message of the
Garden, was therefore burned upon the consciousness of the metropolis, its interiors and its
citizens. (illustration 17)
143
Mark Pimlott
15. Sir Joseph Paxton, The

Great Victorian Way,
London 1855 Victoria
and Albert Museum,
London
16. Louis Auguste Boileau;

Gustave Eiffel, Au Bon
Marche, Paris 1874 from
Sigfried Giedion, Space,
Time and Architecture
144
TH E G A R D E N , E D E N A N D
TH E U N ITE D S TAT E S
The suggestion of Howards network urbanism,
effectively replacing nature with its fusion of
Garden and City was ultimately realised in the
United States, at the end of a long period of confrontation, and ultimately, conquest over original
nature and its indigenous inhabitants. The idea
represented in Baroque gardens was realized,
violently, on a continental scale. The inadvertent
realisation of Howards Garden City network was
concomitant with the dispersal, standardization
and repetition of urban equipment across the
continental interior; an achievement whose effects
have been extended and transmitted far beyond
the territory of the United States. In other words,
the public interior of the dispersed American
city the public interior of suburbia has profoundly influenced the architecture of the public
interior that we experience today throughout the
world. One might refer to it as the pre-eminent
motif of an American colonial architecture to
which we all conform.
The absorption of the huge continental interior, occupied by myriad aboriginal tribes, was
achieved through armed conflict and legislation:
a projective programme of territorialisation called
the Land Ordinance (Thomas Jefferson, 1785),
which drew an abstract grid over all unknown
and unseen domains. Those domains were dangerous, the place of hostile autochthonous peoples
(we may recall Arcady, Pan, and Panic). The first
attempts at making territory in this domain were
modest. An engraving of the colony of Savannah,
Georgia in 1735 shows a series of houses that we
might think of them as primitive huts in a clearing, set apart from the World in the regimented
manner of a Roman settlement, 9 and typical of
a colonial settlement.10 The houses show themselves to each other; they are distinct, discrete
units, gathered together against the unknown and
hostile World, a domain of otherness and others.
(illustration 18) There is an aspect of this that
should be important to our thinking about places,
interiors, their fictions and their significance, and
that is this clearing. In America, by the time of
the complete domination of the continent, rendering it the American interior, this clearing occupied the entire space of the continent. The clearing was all the space; it was all interior; there
was only within. In Martin Heideggers notion
of the clearing11 we are presented with a space
wherein there is heightened consciousness of the
Other, who must be approached and met, causing

the Self to come out of the Self, to surrender to or
meet the Other. One can see that this is a space
within which we appear to the Other and to each
other, as a public; or in Hannah Arendts phrase,
a space of appearance.
The American continental interior was gradually absorbed territorialized by legislation,
armed confrontation and urban dispersal. This
process, begun at the end of the eighteenth century, accelerated in the middle and concluded
at the end of the nineteenth century, enabled in
the nineteenth century first by wars and then
by trains and the distribution of working parts
of the city along its lines, was consolidated at a
completely new scale in the two decades following
the conclusion of Second World War, when the
American landscape was thoroughly networked,
in conjunction with the continuing scattering of
the city and its reconstitution as regional phenomenon, enabled by an expansive motorway
system in which roads called parkways bent
and wound their way through a hinterland observed through the windows of speeding cars; it
was accompanied by the construction of remote
and very extensive suburbs, and figured by tract
housing, a mass-produced housing type that occupied the vast territories, with each plot of land
representing a fragment of the continental interior
upon which a homestead staked its claim. (illustration 19) The first settlers assumed the place of
the other, and replaced the other. The original
nature of the West had fallen into their hands, as
had its idea: Eden. The suburban dwellers that
followed occupied that idea.
145
9
Rykwert, op. cit
10
Leonardo Benevolo (1968),
The Architecture of the Renaissance (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul)
11
Martin Heidegger (1971),
The Origin of the Work of
Art (1935), in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York:
Harper & Row)
Mark Pimlott
17. Ebenezer Howard,

Garden Cities of
To-Morrow 1901
18. Foundation of Savannah,

Georgia 1735 Library of
Congress
19. Tract housing, southern

California, 1950 / Photo:
William Garnett, Getty
Center
146
E D E N , W ITH I N
This Eden was alluded to in the design of special
enclaves, the early suburbs, such as Llewellyn
Park, Orange NJ 1853: a suburb with the Edenic
dream presented both as landscape and as public
space. Its fiction was ultimately reinforced, with
great power, in the discovery of a valley in California, near some mines: Yosemite (photographed
by Carleton Watkins, Edweard Muybridge and
others) (illustration 20) was a place of such extraordinary beauty, that it was used to justify the
American settlers claim to the whole continent,
as though God had ordained it. The ideology of
Manifest Destiny not only banished, ideologically,
the indigenous people from the landscape; it took
Eden into the firm possession of the nation, with
Yosemite as its mandate and its symbol, and legitimated every aspect of the American expansionist
project. Yosemite naturally became the subject
of protection, and became the first National Park
(1865), through a campaign led by the manager
of the Mariposa mine, Frederick Law Olmsted
and Mariposa mines. Olmsted became Americas
pre-eminent landscape and urban designer, and
with Calvert Vaux, the designer of Central Park,
New York (18581873). (illustration 21) He went
on to design many parks in American cities, in
which he reconfigured fragments of nature to perform as natural infrastructures, visibly tying each
city to its nature (its own fragment of Eden), and
legitimating the urban project within the great
American project. Eden was conscripted as the
sign of America and its cities, and gave image to
its public interior.
The suburbs of the post-War years continued

to draw upon fictions of occupying the frontier
and the sacred American interior. Their development was complemented by the invention of a
new kind of public interior the shopping mall
situated at the nodes of motorway networks and
notional centres of regional populations. The garden the mall was set in was not Crystal Palaces
Hyde Park or the rural idyll of Howards Garden
Cities but the Garden of suburbia, which, of
course, was more mythical than substantial. The
first indoor, air-conditioned mall was the Southdale Center (1956), designed by Victor Gruen.12
It was the prototype for many shopping malls to
follow, in its organisation of shoppers and goods,
and its interior, which elided imagery of village
square (like one found on a television stage set)
with that of the garden conservatory and the corporate office lobby. (illustration 22) This imagery
was important: it was consistent with the network
of complementary representations of all aspects
of American life mythologized and legitimated in
advertising, television and film in order to establish a common order of behaviour, expectation
and consumption in American society, a significant feature of American domestic economic and
social policy in the years following the War.
147
12
Alex Wall (2005), Victor
Gruen: from urban shop to
new city (Barcelona: Actar
2005); and Victor Gruen
(1965), The Heart of our
Cities: The urban crisis: diagnosis and cure (London:
Thames and Hudson)
Mark Pimlott

21. Frederick Law Olmstead; Calvert Vaux,
Central Park, New York
1863. photograph Geoffrey James, from Viewing
Olmsted (Canadian Centre for Architecture)
20. Carleton Watkins, view

of Yosemite Valley from
the Mariposa Trail 1865
1866. Getty Center.
148
TH E D I S P E R S E D C IT Y A N D
TH E P U B LI C I NT E R I O R N O W
The evocation of Eden in America at
least has continued to be a powerful force in
shaping the image and representational motifs
of the dispersed city from the second half of the
twentieth century until now, yielding perceptions of the landscape, the city and its interiors
that in turn have produced new kinds of interiors
that have been exported worldwide. Grafted onto
forms and patterns developed in Europe, these
American propositions have benefitted from a degree of familiarity and recognition.
The suburban fata morgana of Eden was adopted within American city centres in attempts to
revive them as they were abandoned in the great
exodus of white workers to the suburbs from the
1950s onward, yielding another kind of public
interior, the downtown atrium. The atrium was
glazed and planted, and related, to our eyes, to
the glazed courtyards of the nineteenth-century
grands magasin. The Citicorp Building atrium
(1974), designed by Hugh Stubbins, fused the
imagery of corporate headquarters lobby with
quasi-public space (it accommodated a farmers market and a church), offering a suburban
realm green, bucolic and friendly dressed in
city attire to users of the city centre. (illustration
23) The imagery of the Citicorp atrium constituted a return to imagery ideal that constituted a
kind of reverie about occupation of the American
territory, a fiction about a relation to the World:
perhaps a necessary fiction. The notion of the
Garden-inspired public interior being a kind of
antidote to the effects of the realities of the laissezfaire American urbanized environment was put
forward by the Irish-born American architect
Kevin Roche in his commentary upon the design
of the Ford Foundation (1968) in New York, an
office building for a charitable foundation. (illustration 24) It was intended to be a public realm,
an extension of the space of the street, a peaceful environment for workers, and a suggestion of
how, despite the urban conditions, what a place of
association might be. The garden of this atrium,
as enclosed as it is, carried along with it the fiction of the garden as the natural home of the citizen, the natural place of association, that original
clearing in which there is no self and other, only
all, reconciled and redeemed. The fact that this
motif was deployed in office interiors in the rather
debased form of Brolandschaft of the 1950s and
later, (illustration 25) and used as a tool to criti-
cally reflect upon the state of our environment

in a period of global capitalism I refer here to
Archizooms No-Stop City (1967) (illustration
26) demonstrates that there remains something
telling to our continual return to the Garden, as a
place: of association, and of our origins.
The motif, theme or fiction of the garden as it
has been realised in these last public interiors may
be far away from those Edenic inspirations that
filtered through the public interiors of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless the theme persists,
and we can see that all these interiors promise a
fiction of a return to an original state of existence
or consciousness, at whose root is dwelling in the
World, and being at one with the other and the
World. This is an impulse that runs deep, and is
significant. The public interiors shown point to an
ideal condition, offered in the form of illusions.
The significant fictions of the public interior, of
which the Garden is pre-eminent, help us accept
our experience of the city, and legitimate the city
as a project to be continually believed in, as difficult, problematic, and fictional as it may be.
149
Mark Pimlott
22.Victor Gruen. Southdale

Shopping Centre, Edina
Minnesota 1958
150
23. Hugh Stubbins and Associates. Citicorp Building atrium, NY 1976-1978
/ Stubbins Associates
24. Kevin Roche & John Dinkeloo. Ford Foundation,

NY 1968 / Photo: Richard Estes/ ESTO
151
Mark Pimlott
26,. Archizoom. No-Stop

City 1967
25. Quickborner: Burolandschaft 1958 / From Van

Shaik, ed. Exit Utopia
152
Benevolo, L. (1968). The

Architecture of the
Renaissance. London:
Routledge&Kegan Paul.
Benjamin, W. (2002). The
Arcades Project (H.
Eiland & K. McLaughlin,
Trans. R. Tiedermann
Ed.). New York: Belkanp
Press.
Friedrich Geist, J. (1978).
Arcades:a nineteenthcentury building typoly.
Berlin: Prestel.
Giedion, S. (1967). Space,
time and architecture:
the growth of a new
tradition. Cambridge
MA: Harvard University
Press.
Gruen, V. (1965). The heart
of our cities; the urban
crisis; diagnosis and
cure. London: Thames
and Hudson.
Heidegger, M. (1971). The
Origin of Work and Art.
New York: Harper&Row.
Schama, S. (1995).
Landscape and Memory.
New York: Knopf.
Tafuri, M. (1973).
Architecture and Utopia:
design and capitalist
development. Cambridge
MA: MIT Press.
Wall, A., & Gruen, V. (2005).
From Urban Shop to New
City. Barcelona: Actar.
153
Mark Pimlott
COMPLEX
PROJECTS
154
The Chair Complex Projects is a

culture saturated with intensity,
energized by an environment
that demands a suspicion that is
manifested through debate, rigor,
humor, curiosity, and youthful optimism. Our expectations are not
obtainable, however, the return is
high for those who attempt the
Odyssey like journey. Informed
by a contemporary and historical
understanding of its discipline
and location, Complex Projects
ventures to liberate and demand
a fundamental critique in the very
concepts we take to be true...we
demand suspicion and critical
thinking.
A nonlinear trajectory of integrated design studios and seminars
will expose the multiple layers
that define complex projects. Employing forensics, analysis, and
documentation, one will develop
a methodology to separate and
examine the elements that define
the layers. Complex Projects is
structured to produce graduates
able to think, negotiate, and collaborate through all scales and
mediums of intervention.
Complex Projects
155
Complex Projects (CP) has eliminated the antiquated and linear

roles, which define the building
process: Planning, Urban Design,
and Architecture. Architecture is
largely a practice of organizing
information, of identifying and
deploying patterns in our built
environment. CP prepares its
graduates to transcend and perhaps even ignore the scales, of
these spatial and organizational
patterns through the systematic
development of critical thinking as
well as strong vocational understanding of our profession. Architecture is of all scales.
156
Kees Kaan
Kees Kaan (Breda,1961) Studied

architecture at Delft University
of Technology. As founding partner of the firm Kaan Architecten,
he has built up an international
range of projects among which
the Netherlands Forensic Institute in The Hague and the Royal
Netherlands Embassy in Maputo,
Mozambique are well known.
Kees Kaan takes part in many
commissions: He was a member
of the Quality Team Kop van Zuid
in Rotterdam and a teacher at the
Academy of Architecture, Amsterdam/Rotterdam from 1994 to
1998. He is a member of the professional Advisory Group of the
Scott Sutherland School of Architecture in Aberdeen and is now
professor at the Delft University of
Technology. Kees Kaan is a board
member of the Architecture Institute Rotterdam (AIR foundation)
and has been a juror for many international architectural competitions. He lectures in cities all over
the world, under which Barcelona,
Berlin, Dublin, Madrid, Mexico
City, Paris, Vienna and Tokyo.
AR3CP040 Antropocene
AR2CP010 Studio USA
AR3CP010 Complex Projects
Graduation Studio
AR4CP010 Complex Projects
Graduation Studio
Complex Projects
Kees Kaan
157
The building site of modern architecture;

On Louis Sullivan in Chicago
Kees Kaan

158
Kees Kaan
01. Sullivan Picture / Nancy

Fraziet (ed.), Louis Sullivan and the Chicage
School, NY, Knickerbocker Press, 1999
02. Lakefront of Chicago

1894 CCC dinner invites
Burnham / Carl Smith
(ed.), The Plan of Chicago: Danier Burnham
and the Remaking of
American City, Chicago,
University of Chicago
Press, 2006

Z E ITG E I S T;
TH E S P I R IT O F TH E TI M E
It is difficult to evaluate the importance and value
of contemporary work. We tend to appreciate the
new, we innately appreciate innovation; however
it is difficult to measure contemporary work and
its long-term relevance as a critical development
of architecture because with the contemporary we
simply lack perspective. The historic perspective
allows one to objectively observe current events
independent from the influence of todays fashion
and trends. Consequently the historical perspective will help us to be more critical and aware
when evaluating contemporary issues. Forensically examining the past helps us understand the
now better. Moreover, it exposes to us the inherent weakness of the Zeitgeist to which we are
confi ned. It makes us more critical towards our
contemporary heroes.
The concept of Zeitgeist played a role in Voltaires, Herders and Hegels writings at the very
beginning of the modern age. It is originally an
expression in German. The spirit (Geist) of the
time (Zeit). In Georg Hegels works Lectures on
the Philosophy of History (1805) the philosopher
argues no man can surpass his own time, for
the spirit of his time is also his own spirit (der
Complex Projects
159
19TH C E NTU RY
The 19th century must have been fantastic. From
Karl Friedrich Schinkel in Berlin in the fi rst half
of the 19th century to Louis Sullivan and Daniel
Burnham in the second half of the 19th century
in Chicago. These 100 years have been of great
importance in our profession for both architecture
and urban planning. Driven by industrialization, architecture was dramatically reinvented
during the 19e century. It was the work of Louis
Sullivan, which made me study more closely the
Chicago School from 1870 till around 1910 and
Daniel Burnham. I believe the 19th century deserves more credit than just being perceived as a
prelude to the manifestos of the modernist heroes
of the 20th century. It had its own dynamics and
there were enormous changes in society, which
propelled the development of Metropolitan life as
a completely new phenomenon. Basically, this had
a profound effect on both architecture and urban
planning. Understanding ones history allows a
unique perspective on continuity in architecture;
the continuity of change. We are by necessity permanently inventing and reinventing our profession.
160
Geist seiner Zeit). Hegel believed that art reflected, by its very nature, the time of the culture
in which it is created.
Culture and art are inextricable because an
individual artist is a product of his or her time
and therefore by default brings that culture to any
given work of art. Furthermore, he argued that
in the modern world it was impossible to produce
classical art. He believed classical art represented
a free and ethical culture, which depended
more on the philosophy of art and theory of art,
rather than being a reflection of the social construct, or Zeitgeist in which a given artist lives.
Z E IT W I LLE ; M I E S VA N D E R R O H E S
TH E W I LL O F TH E TI M E
The imperative of the Zeitgeist became an accepted standard of modernism. The Zeitgeist imposed itself through style. In modern architecture
it degraded to unwritten rules, telling the modern
architect what he could not do, which was most
things. Paradoxically, it also demanded that he
should be original.
Inspired by this Hegelian definition of the spirit of the time or the spirit of the age, Mies states that
the emerging of technology and aesthetic modernism embodied the promise of culture suited to the
age, one in which form and construction, individual
expression and the demands of the times, as well as
subjective and objective values would converge
into a new identity. This concept will reappear
later in this paper when I will explain the famous
one liner of Louis Sullivan Form follows Function.
In the interviews that Mies gave at the end
of his life he clearly opposed his contemporaries
with regard to their obsession with the present.
He emphasized that his constraint in this clear
projection of the Zeitgeist (the spirit of the time)
was the conscious selection, insofar as their best
work is concerned (as Werner Graff put it) of the
leading figures of the new building art. This is
not to be interpreted as the clearly defined reality that Gropius attempted to demonstrate in a
quantitative fashion.
In his manifesto of 1924 Baukunst and
Zeitwille! form as aim and the will to style,
Mies rejected most categorically the will for a
new form. He always saw architecture as the
expression of Zeitwille (will of the age). I found
similarities in Louis Sullivans writings when he
is talking about Architectural Style in 1901 he
states: Architecture is an expression rather than
a style and is the outcome of certain conditions in
a certain civilization.
In the publication G2 of 1923 Mies presented
the Concrete Country House project, the most
radical expression of his view of architecture at
that moment. Titled simply Bauen, it is concerned with an understanding of this concept,
nmlich Bauen (namely Building), outside
all aesthetic speculation, in terms of the most
direct possible relation of problem and solution.
The building problem and the task stand
on one side, while the most elementary expression of its solution stands on the other. What
remains, as form is not the goal, but rather conditional and the result of our work?
Complex Projects
161
Kees Kaan

04. Louis Sulllivan Buffalo
Guaranty Building 18941895 / Nancy Fraziet
(ed.), Louis Sullivan and
the Chicage School, NY,
Knickerbocker Press,
1999

03. Home Insurance Building, Chicago William Le

Baron Jenney / Nancy
Fraziet (ed.), Louis Sullivan and the Chicage
School, NY, Knickerbocker Press, 1999
162
Complex Projects
163
Kees Kaan

0.5 Ludwig Mies van der

Rohe, Chicago, Lake Shore
Drive Apartments under
construction, 1949 1951
164
Great architecture and individualism are in the

end mutually exclusive. Only when the outstanding creative personality is the bearer of common
ideas do his hands bring forth timeless buildings,
as Walter Muller Wulckow formulated in 1919.
It concerned questions of the building art
that touch precisely on the relation between the
individual performance and the whole, where this
whole is understood as the expression of an entire
epoch, and the epoch, in turn, is conceived not as
formal synthesis and harmonization, but as
something spiritual demanding universal validity. For Miess point of view, terms as universal, valid and ideas shared by community raise
the question of the role and significance of the
individual achievement. Of far greater importance
than the question of the (resulting) style is the individuals contribution to the Zeitgeist.
The question of formalism was posed once
again in Otto Schuberts Architektur and Weltanschauung in 1931 (Architecture and Worldview):
If the new forms are based solely on the selfassertive efforts of a few strong personalities, the
sum total of their works, though certainly reflecting the struggle and inner turmoil of their time,
will never reflect a unified will of the age. For
all formalism is null and void insofar as it stems,
as the embodiment of vanities, solely from the
self-advertising ambitions of a few individuals,
however strong these may be, without being the
expression of the spiritual struggle of an age.
The manifestoes, which colour the history of
architecture, are not indicative of the everyday
work. The Villa Savoy and the Unit dhabitation
of Le Corbusier, Farnsworth House of Mies van
der Rohe, Fallingwater of Frank Lloyd Wright, all
these monuments of modern architecture have to
be understood as exceptions, not as the rule. They
represent the extreme prototype of manifest ideas.
These projects reflect the personal motives of the
Architect. Though often intriguing and inspiring
they dont represent the generic conditions of
their time, they are too specific. They show the
extraordinary, not the normal.
Normal projects represent a mix of private and
public interests. The everyday reality of the architect is to be part of a society that produces those
buildings. Projects that can strictly be mobilised
as a means for personal experiment are rare. Most
normal projects have benchmark programs with
subsequent targets and precise budgets, the margins are very narrow and most clients are professionals. As such, these projects mirror the culture
that produces them and they are the witnesses of

our society, resulting as a cocktail of economic,
political, technical and cultural ingredients within a certain timeframe. The question remains if
these normal projects are architecturally reflecting Zeitgeist? According to Mies only those
that are coming from of the conscious selection
of the leading figures of that time. This brings
us back to the problem of evaluating the works of
our own time.
A N E W WO R L D
By the end of the 19e century cities were booming, both in Europe and in the US. Personally the
study of a period like the Chicago School not only
offers insights in pure architectural aspects but
also and perhaps more importantly in social and
cultural conditions. Understanding the enormous
boom, which took place in Chicago in the 2nd
half of the 19th Century, enables me to develop a
unique perspective regarding the current trends
in globalization. Enormous changes took place
due to the achievements of the Industrial Revolution. New building typologies were necessary
and have been thus created by architects and engineers. Architects were searching for innovative
ways to express the new needs of society and
to give the new buildings a proper architectural
identity. Architects were also fighting for their
position within the field. Moreover, during this
boom, it was customary for engineers to lead the
building process.
The new buildings were much bigger than
ever before and had to be constructed at a speed,
which the world had never witnessed. Public
buildings, such as theatres, stations, stock-exchange buildings, retail warehouses, corporate
office buildings and generic office buildings,
skyscrapers, hotels, newspaper headquarters,
academies, hospitals, industrial plants, urban infrastructure were erected, often stacked next and
on top of each other.
The projects were not only bigger and taller;
they were constructed extremely fast; employing new building techniques allowed providing
unique programs. The rapid change in technology and typology demanded a fundamental
change of the architects thinking. This massive
boom required new approaches, new ideas, essentially questioning the elements which defined the
architect. This questioning led to a fundamental
change in the role of the architect. The changes
of the profession of the architect were not simply
Complex Projects
165
in regard to architectural aesthetics, but also directed to a buildings actual place and its relation
and impact on the public domain, the city, and
these new concerns affected the functionality of
the buildings and vice versa.
Architects struggled with the new demands.
The new typologies and scales, coupled with their
classical training produced a confused style. A
Classical approach by itself could not negotiate
the new demands. Very often this situation caused
the production of weird propositions. Palazzos
were stretched; architectural styles were mixed
and literally stacked on top of each other.
Kees Kaan

166
S U LLI VA N A N D TH E S K YS C R A P E R
Looking for the new style
The Home insurance of William Le Baron Jenny,
built in1884, was the first example of a new
construction technique: a steel frame cladded
with terracotta. The building was partially, from
the second floor up, constructed like this. The
ground floor level however was still done the conventional way, its looks remained rather conventional. In fact, the building is a stretched palazzo.
The Home Insurance building is a dinosaur compared to the Wainwright building, constructed
only 8 years later in St. Louis in 1892. This building of Louis Sullivan is generally regarded as the
first skyscraper with an authentic architectural
style. The appearance of the building emphasizes
its verticality; it really wants to be a skyscraper.
Though the building bears features of classical architecture, like base, shaft and pediment,
it clearly moves away from the simple technique
of stretching or sampling an existing style and it
seeks to truly be a tall building. Sullivan defined
a new language for the high-rise. He completely
broke away from historical styles regarding overall conception and ornamentation. He used the
ornament to emphasize his objective, in this case
verticality. The building is soaring towards the
sky.
Sullivan does it again four years later with the
Guaranty building in Buffalo 1896. The skin of
this building is totally ornamented. The exterior
is lathered in dcor, like a full body tattoo.
It was the Guaranty building, which caught
my attention and propelled on the quest to truly
understand Sullivans notion: Form Follows
Function. In Delft I was taught to interpret that
slogan as a functional imperative. I was confused
because I was taught to believe that by applying
a functionalistic approach towards the program,
the result would be a pure, objective architectural
form: I have to admit I was rather naf.
As a young student I was first of all attracted
by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, intuitively
I loved it. It was through Wright I found Louis
Sullivan. I did not instantly appreciate Sullivans
work. It did not naturally appeal to me: I was not
able to understand it contextually and formally it
did speak to me. To appeal to me buildings had to
look modern. My perception of architecture was
constructed via modernism. For me, architecture history began in 1920s. Only years later did
I come to realize the actual revolution that took
place during the 19th century.
05. Louis Sulllivan Buffalo

Guaranty Building 18941895 detail / Nancy Fraziet (ed.), Louis Sullivan
and the Chicage School,
NY, Knickerbocker
Press, 1999
Complex Projects
167
Kees Kaan
C H I C AG O
I went to Chicago to find the traces of Sullivan.
Because Chicago is a city of architecture, with a
strong tradition and well organized institutes, it
is easy to be quickly introduced to the period of
the Chicago School and become acquainted with
Sullivans contemporaries and clients, especially
Daniel Burnham, founder of Burnham and Root,
and in essence, Sullivans rival.
Chicago burns down in 1871 and within twenty years it has been rebuilt. The fire was a catalyst
for the cities economic boom. The city builds and
builds and builds. If one imagines the amount
of buildings constructed in the Loop during this
period, it actually must have been looking like
a huge building pit for those twenty years. The
Loop is the old city centre, the area that is circled
by the metro on the level of the first floor of the
buildings. There was no doubt in the minds of the
Chicagoans that they were developing one of the
largest and most powerful cities in the world.
The centre of the city is a system of avenues
and streets with small alleys and a underground
street network for maintenance and supply. Chicago is building enormous large-scale complexes:
large stations, skyscrapers, retail buildings, theatres, and the Chicago Stock exchange.

06. The great fire in Chicago

in 1871 / Nancy Fraziet
(ed.), Louis Sullivan and
the Chicage School, NY,
Knickerbocker Press,
1999
07 + 08 Visiting Chicago
Railway Exchange (Santa Fe), Chicago (1903) /
Photo: Kees Kaan
168
Tribune tower competition

The Chicago Tribune tower competition in 1922
illustrates in a convincing manner, the way in
which the formerly mentioned quest led to a new
expression for the new programs and demands of
a rapidly changing metropolitan society at the end
of the 19th century.
Newspapers were becoming increasingly important and powerful in the new democracies
at the end of the 19th and of the early twentieth
century. Perhaps one of the most powerful newspapers was the Chicago Tribune. They were offering a huge competition reward, 100,000 USD
(2.5 million USD today) coupled to a brief which
still would be a dream commission for ANY architect, designing the project for their new headquarters. This was not a sign of modesty. It was
the first ever, world widely organized architectural competition. The newspaper wanted to identify
itself with new innovative vigorous architecture.
Even more, the competition was a success. Designs for the new Headquarters were submitted
from all over the world. Each entry serves, even
today as a comprehensive snap shot of the current state of architecture in the early 1920s. One
will find many very extreme and hilarious examples. They illustrate in a humorous way the struggle of the designers with the new typology, both
in scale and form. One does not have to be architect to see how hilarious some proposals were.
Clearly, modernism was already emerging in
Europe, and some European submissions were illustrating the new international style. Loos used
the competition to deliver a clear critique.
Winner, however was the New York based firm
of Howell and Hood with a beautiful neo-gothic
tower, a real Gotham City project. They had
clearly understood that gothic style was at that
time the most suitable form to express the highrise ambitions of the Tribune.
Louis Sullivan commented on the results of
Tribune Tower competition. He said that the project of Raymond Hood and John Mead Howell
was based on old ideas, while the project of Eliel
Saarinen was a priceless pearl. Sullivan manufactured an extensive exposure to this fact and
stated, that if the objective was to make the most
beautiful office building in the world, the ruling
of the jury should be reviewed and the first prize
should have gone to Saarinen.
Gazprom 2006
The economy of Russia, which is currently transforming itself from an industrial and agrarian
economy into an economy of commodities, was
looking for a project that announced this to the
world, an icon for Gazprom on the bank of Neva
River in St. Petersburg. In 2006 it also launched
a not modest competition and was rewarded with
the state of the art of todays architecture.
The Gazprom proposition for St. Petersburg
by Libeskind is as hilarious as some of the proposals for the Tribune Tower were. It seem as if
history had repeated itself, architects then and
now both seem unequipped to deal with the new
demands of their times. The Libeskind was not
rewarded.
The winner of Gazprom is a conventional tower designed by RMJM like the project by Howell
and Hood was for the Chicago Tribune. Apparently winners of innovative competitions tend to
be the conservative and safe choice.
So we see that often the winning projects are
not the most visionary but the ones that confirm
accepted notions of the state of the art, they confirm knowledge that is already widely accepted,
they mark the end of periods, rather than the beginning of a new era.
09. Tribune Towen

Competition / Tribune
Company, Tribune
Tower Design Competition. The International
Competition for a New
Administration Building
for the Chicago Tribune
MCMXXII [Hardcover],
(introduced by Louis
Sullivan), Chicago, 1923
Complex Projects
169
Kees Kaan

10. Gazprom 2006 by Libeskind / Http://www.stigherrian.com/artsott_architecture_for_gazprom
170
Dream of metropolis;
Rockefeller Centre
After the booming years of Chicago, the significant advances made in the development of the
skyscraper took place in Manhattan; it was Manhattan, where the dream of the metropolis vertical city became a reality. In the competition of
Chicago, Hood is representing the office. At that
time he is 41 years old and he wins the project.
Years later, after a long design process with many
revisions, Raymond Hood gets to build the Rockefeller Centre in New York. The project becomes
the sublimation of the Manhattan dream. The
looks of the final project remind me of the Saarinen proposal for Chicago Tribune Tower.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century
New York became the most booming city in the
world and it would maintain this position till
9/11/2001.
Finally, we can conclude, that all of this was
the result of a worldwide boom in urbanization as
a consequence of the 19th century industrialization of western economies.
Cities in Europe and the US grew from
100.000 inhabitants to millions of inhabitants.
The growth began in the first half of the 19e
century, but it was the 2nd half of the Century
when it really took off. The notion of metropolis
became a reality: as said, new typologies of buildings were needed; train-stations; ware houses;
offices; factories hospitals; infrastructure; metrolines; everything the metropolis contains, one
must realize never existed before, a new typology was demanded and needed and it was this
demand which propelled the innovations. Many
world-expositions were held; cities were growing
fast; architects, politicians, developers, and the
like were heavily involved with the question, how
to cope with these issue.
In New York Hugh Ferris sketched his dreams
of the metropolis. In an artistic way, one of his
series of sketches is the non-architectural representation of the Urban Zoning Laws of 1916, the
future envelope of the metropolis.
The sketches are beautiful, visionary, futuristic
and optimistic. He presents us a future that never
happened, a strange mix of Futurism and Realism.
If Blade Runner presents us a future in a dcor
of the past, Ferris presents us a past in the dcor
of an imaginary future. People are living in enormous tower bridges; he shows monumental boulevards and enormous buildings.
The future will always be different than we

imagine it, but at the same time looking at how
the future of today was dreamt a 100 years ago is
endlessly fascinating.
Famously elaborated by Rem Koolhaas in his
book Delirious New York, the Downtown Athletic Club of 1931 contains a super hybrid, mix
of program. The serenity of the outside hides
the apotheosis of the Skyscraper as instrument of
the Culture of Congestion. The Club represents
the complete conquest -floor by floor- of the Skyscraper by social activity.
11. Raymond Hood Manhattan 1950 1931 / Rem

Koolhaas, Delirious NY:
A retroactive Manifesto
for Manhattan, Academy
Editions, London, 1978;
republished, The Monacelli Press
Complex Projects
171
Mies and the Modernist tower

Between 1949 and 1951, 860880 Lakeshore
Drive were built. The two towers purely represent the new steel-glass tower. The envelope is
no longer an articulation of setbacks. The towers
have the same section from bottom to top, they
have a strong verticality, and the faade is a curtain of steel and glass. The project becomes the
prototype for a large array of modern glass towers.
The skyscraper building becomes more and more
an industrialized product, made of glass and steel,
it escapes the zoning laws by simply having a pure
shape, slim and slender, optimized and highly repetitive floor plans around an efficient core.
Today such slenderness could not be feasible:
the cores have become much larger and clients require much larger floor plates as well.
FO R M FO LLO W S F U N C TI O N
Kees Kaan
12. Hugh Ferris 'Appartments on bridges' / Ferris, Hugh. The Metropolis of Tommorow, with
essay by Carol Willis, NY
Princeton Architectural
Press, 1986, Reprint if
1929 edition

Timeline
Chicago was a key city in the development of
the US transforming into a world power. This
city was a laboratory for architecture and planning. Not only large quantities of buildings were
produced, but also everything was really new in
terms of program, size and typology. There was
no precedent. This building boom coincided with
the invention of many new technical possibilities
that became available for application. There was
the invention of electric light, the elevator, new
water pressure systems and later HVAC.
The Auditorium building of Adler and Sullivan
was already on the drawing board when electricity
had become available, Adler had anticipated the
use of electric light in the building, imagine the
effect of this on the opening night.
Finally it was a freak fire which caused the
city to burn exactly at a moment it started to
boom, coinciding with an enormous economical
pressure, and the invention of new techniques,
cultural optimism and entrepreneurial drive. Architecture did not create these opportunities, but
was able to capitalize on them.
The tool of the timeline shows how events
and people interacted and may have influenced
each other. The Chicago school did not become
a world famous and strong architectural style
due to the genius of a few great architects, it was
born out of this fruitful cocktail of circumstances,
which become visible on this timeline. It is important for me, to precisely follow the order of events
to understand how the influences can be traced
back to the results.
172
13. Collage if soectrak radio
city in Midtown / Rem
Koolhaas, Delirious NY:
A retroactive Manifesto
for Manhattan, Academy
Editions, London, 1978;
republished, The Monacelli Press
Complex Projects
173
Kees Kaan

14. Inventions in the 19th
Century

15. Adler and Sullivan,

The Auditorium Building, Interior / Donald
Hoffmann, Frank Lloys
Wright, Louis Sullivan
and the Skyscraper
[Paperback], NY, Dover
Publications, 1998
174
The influence of Sullivan is not only important

for purely architectural reasons but also to learn
about the role of the architect in society, as Mies
argues: What remains in the way of form is thus
not the goal, but rather conditional and the result
of our work. This is how we can come to understand Zeitgeist, Architecture as the expression of
the spirit of the time.
Sullivan
After my first visit to Chicago I began to investigate Sullivan as I was intrigued by the apparent
contradiction between his most famous statement Form Follows Function and the work he
created.
Why did he make this statement? What does
he mean stating it? Why does he say it and subsequently creates work, which is so overly decorative? Is it deliberate? Is the decoration functional?
Or was it just the way things were done? He was
an architect that was decorating his buildings in
an extremely ornamental way. In Europe Adolf
Loos wrote Ornament und Verbrechen in 1908.
We were taught that functionalism rejected ornamentation. So the question raises, how can the
most influential architect in the US, the godfather
of the skyscraper, the inventor of Form Follows
Function, the Lieber Meister of Frank Lloyd
Wright, be so decorative? This was a mystery to
me, according to my modernist European way of
looking. I always assumed that Form Follows
Function was about modernism and functionalism, about austerity and pureness. Most teachers
explained when I was a student the Form Follows Function as the slogan of functionalism.
The shape of a building is the result of the optimal organization of the program. We were told
that by analysis of the program and organization
of space based on proper understanding we would
find a form and this functionalist approach would
generate a solution with architectural quality. I
believed this for a long time. However I still did
not understand why so many ugly buildings were
made according to this modus operandi. Buildings had no longer ornament, which was considered sinful and not honest. Functionalism was
about honesty and straight forwardness, a building had to follow the program and be functional.
It seemed more like Form Follows Program was
in fact the doctrine that was preached to us.
15. Louis Sullivan, St. Louis
Wainwright Building,
1890 / Donald Hoffmann, Frank Lloys
and the Skyscraper
Publications, 1998
16. Louis Sullivan, St. Louis

Wainwright Building,
1890, detail / Donald
Hoffmann, Frank Lloys
and the Skyscraper
Publications, 1998
FUNCTIO (IDEA,SPIRIT)
AND FORM THE
MASTER:
I am endeavouring to
impress upon you the simple
truth immeasurable in
power of expansion of
the subjective possibilities of
objective things. In short, to
clarify for you the origin and
power of BEAUTY: to let
you see that it is resident in
function and form.
Complex Projects
175
THE STUDENT:
So is ugliness, isnt it?
THE MASTER:
To be sure.
Louis Sullivan, Kindergarten Charts
Font: John Szarkowski (ed.),The Idea of
Louis Sullivan, London, Thames&Hudson, 2000
Kees Kaan
Personality and character

Did Sullivan mean something else, and was
his slogan misunderstood? Why would he have
made this extreme decoration on the skin of the
Guaranty Building? This was not because it was
usance to decorate, it was a deliberate act, he
wanted it, he wanted to express something with it,
the ornamentation is part of the concept; it has an
intrinsic meaning.
The Wainwright is regarded as the first ever
built skyscraper according to the definition of
Sullivan. It really expressed in its architecture
the character of the type. It has the looks of a tall
building with its soaring pilaster cladding the steel
frame structure. Though this is not literally true,
half of the brick pilasters in the faade are empty;
they were applied to emphasize the verticality
and to stress the height of the building. Sullivan
expressed the tallness via vertical ornamentation
and for him there was no moral dilemma to add
extra pilasters without a load bearing function.
Wainwright is a very clear message about his
work. Proportion of faade is very important. The
faade expresses the tallness of the structure; this
is sustained by the decorations and materialization. This expression of character is regarded as
a functional aspect. Form follows function implies here to use these means to make clear, what
the building wants to be.
Sullivan strife for authenticity and clarity is
about what the CHARACTER of a structure is,
not just to follow arguments of technique and
economy, but about the expression of the function
in its BEAUTY.
I would like to conclude with an extract from
Kindergarten Charts by Louis Sullivan:

176
Castex, J. (2009). Chicago

1910-1930; le chantier
de la ville moderne.
Paris: Editions de la
Villette.
Ferriss, H. (1986).
The Metropolis of
Tomorrow, with
essay by Carol Willis.
New York(Princeton
Architectural Press).
Frazier, N. (Ed.). (1999).
Louis Sullivan and the
Chicago School. New
York: Knickerbocker
Press.
Frei, H. (Ed.). (1992). Louis
Henry Sullivan. Zrich:
Artemis Verlags-AG.
Hoffmann, D. (1998).
Frank Lloyd Wright,
Louis Sullivan and the
Scyscraper. New York:
Dover Publications.
Jacobson, C. (Ed.). (1993).
Burnham and Benner
Plan of Chicago. New
York: Princeton Press.
Koolhaas, R. (1994).
Delirious New York: A
Retrospective Manifesto
for Manhattan. New
York: The Monacelli
Press.
Maniera Elia, M. (Ed.).
(1997). Louis Sullivan.
New York: Princeton
Schaffer, K., & Rocheleau,
P. (Eds.). (2003). Daniel
H. Burnham: A visionary
Architect and Planner.
New York: Rizzoli.
Siegel, A., Condit, C.
W., Duncun, H. D., &
Carson, J. (Eds.). (1966).
Chicagos Famous
Buildings a photographic
guide to the citys
architectural landmarks
and other notable
buildings. Chicago:
University Press
Chicago.
Siry, J. M. (Ed.). (2002).
The Chicago Auditorium
Building Adler and
Sullivans Architecture
and the City. Chicago/
London: University of
Chicago Press.
Smith, C. (Ed.). (2006).
The Plan of Chicago,
Daniel Burnham and the
Remaking of American
City. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Sullivan, L. H. (1947).
Kindergarten chats
(revised 1918) and other
writings. New York:
Wittenborn, Schultz.
Szarkowski, J. (Ed.).
(2000). The idea of
Louis Sullivan. London:
Thames&Hudson.
The Tribune Company.
(1923). The International
competition for a new
administration building
for the Chicago Tribune
MCMXXII Tribune tower
competition. Chicago:
Tribune Company.
Twombly, R. (Ed.). (1988).
Louis Sullivan; the
public papers. Chicago:
Press.
Wolfe, G. W. (Ed.). (1996).
Chicago in and around
the loop: walking tours
of architectural history.
New York: McGraw-Hill.
177
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Kees Kaan

178
Henk Engel
Henk Engel (Den Helder, 1949)

graduated as an architect from
Delft University of Technology in
1981. He is at present co-director
of the architecture office De Nijl
Architects in Rotterdam, with
three partners. In 1998 his office
had an exhibition on their work
at the Netherlands Architecture
Institute, accompanied by the
publication Als we huizen bouwen, praten en schrijven we (As
we build houses, we talk and we
write, NAi Publishers, 1998). Engel is an emeritus associate professor of architectural design at
Delft University of Technology and
teaches at several architecture
academies in the Netherlands. He
has been a visiting lecturer in Liverpool, Milan and Pescara. He has
written extensively on various topics concerning modern and urban
architecture and worked on several exhibitions. He is editor of the
journal Overholland and published
Franois Claessens and Henk Engel (ed.), OverHolland, Nijmegen
(SUN), 2009, 20110 and 2011.
Complex Projects
Henk Engel
179
Henk Engel
180
01. Cantafora
The Analogue City,
1973
02. Anonymous
The Ideal City,
ca. 1475
03. Le Corbusier
La Ville Contemporaine,
1922
Henk Engel
TH E P R E S E N C E O F TH E PA S T
The return to rationalism in architecture after
World War II grew out of the discussions about
a new start for Modern Architecture in 1950s
and 60s. In the 1950s the debate was most lively
in CIAM and in the architectural magazines in
England and Italy, especially The Architectural
Record and Casabella continuat. The role of
monumentality, what to do with the historic
city centres, the question of regional traditions;
in short, the relation of Modern Architecture to
history became the main topic of the debate and
would, in the end, strike at the very root of the
discourse of modern architecture.3 By the end of
the 1970s a complete turnover in the appreciation
of Modern Architecture had taken place, summarised by the precarious concept of Postmodernism. Modern Architecture had definitely come to
its end and found its final resort on historys pile
of rubbish.
In this process of decomposition the combined effort of architectural professionals, critics
and historians alike neo-rationalism had its
own peculiar place. It is good to remember that
as Charles Jencks in 1977 transferred the concept
of Postmodernism from the field of literary criticism to architecture, he decidedly excluded neorationalism from this category.4 In The language
of Post-Modern Architecture, Jencks aimed at a
radical eclecticism, which he placed in contrast
to the purism of Aldo Rossis design of the housing project in Gallaratese (19691970).5 Although
Heinrich Klotz, in The History of Postmodern
Architecture, proposed a broader scope for the
concept, he too made a clear distinction between
the stylistic pluralism of American architects like
1
G. Grassi, La costruzione
logica dellarchitettura. Torino (Umberto Allemandi &
C) 19982, pp. 24-25.
2
Ibid, p. 15.
3
Eric Mumford, The CIAM
Discourse on Urbanism,
1928-1960. Cambridge
Mass./London (MIT Press)
2000. See also: Henk Engel,
Team X revisited, in: OverHolland no. 5. Amsterdam
(SUN) 2007, pp. 115-126.
4
Ihab Hassan, The Question of Postmodernism, In:
Performing Arts Journal 16,
1981.
5
Charles Jencks, The language of Post-Modern
Architecture. London (Academy Editions) 1977, p. 20
Complex Projects
181
If the term architects of reason has any meaning, I believe it must relate to the experience in
architecture (and hence in building, the city, its
assessment in the light of history and so on) that
specifically led to an analysis and construction
of architecture in rational terms, in other words
making use of techniques peculiar to reason.1
Precisely because of the special significance of
the analytical choice in this case, in the openly
stated purpose of arriving at criteria of certainty
and of expressing constant and general elements,
precisely because of this characteristic coincidence of analysis and design in a common cognitive goal, architecture is seen here as a construction, in other words as a procedure that follows a
logical series of choices.2
182
Robert Venturi and Charles Moore, and the return to the rationalism of Aldo Rossi and Oswald
Mathias Ungers. According to Klotz, these two
tendencies should be seen as two poles in the development of Postmodernism, an American and a
European one.6
Nevertheless, the 1970s had provided for a
growing international exchange and in 1980, under the direction of Paolo Portoghesi, representatives of the two poles happily joined together in
the ironic setting of the Strada Novissima at The
Presence of the Past, First International Exhibition of Architecture of the Binnale in Venice.7
Aldo Rossi was predominantly present with his
Teatro del Mondo and the Entrance Portal to
the exhibition site. By then, Rossi had reached
the top of international fame. Already in 1964,
with the bridge and outdoor exhibition spaces at
XIII Triennale in Milan, he had given the world
a glance at the metaphysical architecture he was
looking for. In 1966, his book Larchitettura della
citt had been published and, as Rossi wrote later,
the book was bang on target.8 Translations had
appeared in Spanish (1971), German (1973) and
Portuguese (1978).
Neo-rationalism had been launched in the international arena at the exhibition of the Sezione
Internazionale di Architettura della XV Triennale in Milan 1973. Under Rossis direction, the
exhibition had been taken as an opportunity to
fit the work of a group of young Italian architectteachers into the international context of modern
architecture. Architettura Rationale, the book
published after the exhibition, had been received
as a manifesto of what since then has come to be
known as the architecture of neo-rationalism.9
And certainly, among the many designs which illustrated the aspirations for a new architecture,
Rossis designs for the square in Segrate, the
housing project in Gallaratese and the school in
Fagnano Olona were best qualified at that moment to show the intentions which were formulated by Massimo Scolari in Avangardia e nuova
architettura (Avant-garde and the new architecture).10
1973 can be seen as the turning point in Aldo

Rossis career. The Milan exhibition brought
him an international breakthrough. At the same
time however, the perspective of neo-rationalism
changed. Rossi had taken the exhibition as an
opportunity to show the work of Tendenza as a
continuation of the rationalist approach in modern architecture and in contrast with expressionist tendencies. He also showed a broad spectrum
of related efforts outside Italy, represented by
work of Ungers, Leslie Martin, Stirling, the Krier
brothers and The New York Five (Eisenman,
Graves, Gwatmey, Hejduk, Meier). Even work of
Robert Venturi was present at the exhibition, although excluded from the book.11 Certainly, this
whole entourage was meant to be the background
against which the profile of Italian Tendenza
could be articulated. However, this was done in a
rather academic manner. Once picked up outside
Italy, the Krier brothers gave neo-rationalism a
more radical outlook. The tone of the discourse
changed from reflexion to sheer declaration.
In 1975 Rob Kriers Stadtraum in Theorie und
Praxis (Urban Space in Theory and Praxis) was
published and in London the exhibition Rational
Architecture was organised by his younger brother Leon. The exhibition travelled to Barcelona,
Vienna and Darmstadt. From its material a book
was composed: Rational Architecture Rationelle 1978.12 The Kriers came from Luxembourg. Rob had studied in Munich and worked
with Ungers in the mid-1960s on the project
Grnzug-Sd; the first design by Ungers on the
basis of morphological urban analysis. At that
time Leon began his studies in architecture at the
University of Stuttgart, but gave it up in 1969, in
order to join the office of James Stirling. There
he worked on the projects Siemens AG Munich
and Derby market place. 19731974 he continued
working in the office of Josef Paul Kleihues and
subsequently started a practice in London.
13
This position was first put
forward in the debate on
Citt Territorio. See Aldo
Rossi, Nuovi problemi, in:
Casabella continuit no.264
(1962). English translation
in: Ekistics no.87 (1963);
Gianugo Polesello, Aldo
Rossi, Luca Meda, Locomotivo 2, competition entry
for the business centre of
Turin (1962). Casabella continuata 278, aug. 1963. See
also: Carlo Aymonino, Citt
Territorio: Un Esperimento
Didattiico, Bari 1964. The
position is fully articulated
in: Aldo Rossi, E. Mattioni,
G. Polesello en L. Semerani,
Citt e territorio negli aspetti funzionali e fugurativi
della pianificazone continua, in: Atti del X Congresso
INU, Trieste 14-16. 10. 65.
Also in: Rossi, Scritti scelti,
see note 13, pp. 289-297.
14
Leon Krier, The Reconstruction of the City, in: Krier, see note 12, pp. 38-42.
15
For the concept of architectural model, see: Philppe
Panarai, Jean Castex, Jean
Charles Depaule, Ivor
Samuels, Urban Forms:
The death and life of the
urban block. Oxford (Architectural Press) 2004, pp.
134-136. Original: J. Castex,
J. Ch. Depaule, Ph. Panarai,
Formes urbaines: de llot
la barre. Paris (Dunod)
1977.c
Henk Engel
6
Heinrich Klotz, The History
of Postmodern Architecture,
Cambridge Mass. / London
(MIT Press) 1988, pp. 210213. (originally: Moderne
und Postmoderne Architektur der Gegenwart, Braunschwieg und Wiesbaden
(Vieweg) 1984)
7
G. Borsano (Ed.), The Presence of the Past. Venice
(Electa) 1980. Catalogue,
with essays by Paolo Portoghesi, Vincent Scully,
Christian Norberg Schulz
and Charles Jencks. See
also: Paolo Portoghesi,
Postmodern. The Architecture of the Postindustrial
Society. New York (Rizzoli)
1983.
8
Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City. Cambridge
Mass. (Opposition Books /
MIT Press) 1982. Original:
Aldo Rossi, Larchitettura
della citt. Padova (Marsilio
Ed.) 1966.
9
E. Bonfanti, R. Bonicalzi, A.
Rossi, M. Scolari, D. Vitale,
Architectura Rationale. Milan ((Franco Angelli Editore)
1973; Controspazio, V no. 6
(Dec. 1973). Special issue
on La Sezione Internazionale di Architettura della XV
Triennale.
10
Massimo Scolari, Avangardia e nuova architettura, in:
Architectura Rationale, see
note 9, pp. 153-187.
11
Rob Krier, Stadtraum in
Theorie und Praxis. Stuttgart 1975.
12
Leon Krier c.s, Rational
Architecture Rationelle
1978. Brussels (Archives
dArchitecture Moderne)
1978.
Complex Projects
183
Contrary to Rossi and Ungers as well, the

Kriers made public space the main focus of
neo-rationalism. Urban analysis on the basis of
typo-morphology had been introduced to establish a critical distance with respect to the new
discipline of territorial planning and give ground
for the claim of autonomy for the architectural
significance of the singular project. The singular
architectural project is always limited and well defined with respect to time and place.13 The Krier
brothers, however, aimed at the total dissolution
of late capitalist planning and the resurrection of
Urban Design in the spirit of Camillo Sittes Art
of Building Cities: The revolutionary element of
the new architecture does not lie in its form but in
the model of its social use, in its coherency, in the
reconstruction of the public realm. Neo-rationalism, in their view, had to be seen as a critical
attempt at the Reconstruction of the European
city.14
The shift in focus, from reflection on the singular architectural project and the discipline of
architecture to the postulation of restrictive rules
for urban design, had serious consequences. Any
continuity with the Rationalism of the 1920s
was denied. Like earlier in Team 10, CIAM and
especially the Ville Radieuse of Le Corbusier were
blamed for having provided the architectural
model for the actual destruction of inner cities
and the desolate suburbs built after WO II. This
position, first articulated by the Krier brothers,
got substantial reinforcements at the end of the
1970s through publications as varied as Formes
urbaines: de llot la barre (Urban Forms: The
death and life of the urban block) by Castex, Depaule and Panerai (School of Versailles, 1977),
and Collage City, the contextualist credo of Colin
Rowe and Fred Koetter (Cornell University,
1978).
In the end, all of these publications simply
aimed at replacing one architectural model by
another. And they did so with the same forms of
propaganda and apocalyptic views on the development of the city as Le Corbusier used to do.15
Tendenza, on the contrary, aimed at breaking just
this vicious spell on architectural praxis and education.
184
TH E P R OJ E C T O F T E N D E N Z A 16
The work of Rossi is crucial for an understanding
of neo-rationalism. At the same time it is exactly
the shift of perspective of neo-rationalism after
the Milan exhibition, which makes it difficult to
reconstruct the academic and didactic project
Tendenza initially stood for. Besides, with respect
to Rossi, we have to differentiate between the
scholar and the artist.
Along with his growing international reputation as a designer, Rossis discourse became more
and more personalized, culminating in the publication of A Scientific Autobiography as Opposition Book no. 1, in 1981.17 Subsequently, even
Larchitettura della citt was framed as the testimony of an unique artist. For Peter Eisenmann,
editor of Oppositions and director of the New
York Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), the relevance of the American edition
was not so much the book itself, its prime interest
was the Rossi that this book anticipates.18 In his
words: Ultimately, The Architecture of the City,
notwithstanding its attempt to place itself within
a certain scientific writing about the city, is a
very personal text.19
In reconstructing the Project of Tendenza, and
neo-rationalism in general, it is just the attempt
to place itself within a certain scientific writing, which should be taken seriously. As Scolari
formulated in Avangardia e nuova architettura,
the aim of Tendenza was no less then a re-foundation of architecture as a discipline.20 Moreover,
from his retrospective in 1985 we learn that on
a didactic level Tendenza intended to provide a
new design method, rational and transmittable
in its articulations. As such Tendenza had failed
in his opinion. It turned into the most undesired
but also most expectable results: formal imitation. In se, imitative processes are not particularly
reproachable; major schools adopted it, and most
successfully too. But in our case this was not a
conscious didactic decision, but the result of a
difficult personal poetics.21 For Scolari, both the
success and the failure of the Project Tendenza
are strongly connected with Rossis career. Even
seen in this way, it is obvious that Larchitettura
della citt had its primary raison dtre in the
academic world of architectural education and research in Italy.22
The book was based on the typological and

morphological studies of the city of Padua and the
lecture series started at the Istituto Universitario
di Architettura di Venezia (IUVA) after Carlo
Aymonino had become professor for the field of
Caratteri distributivi degli edifici (Distributive
characteristics of buildings) in 1963.23 Jointly with
Aldo Rossi and Costantino Dardi, Aymonino developed a theory in which the typology of buildings, the field of study of the chair, was related
to the morphological study of the city.24 Up until
then, these two areas of study had solely been
examined separately. Aymonino and his team formulated a logical relationship between these two
areas and used it as a starting point for their programme: Each of these two disciplines studies a
class of homogeneous facts. However, the building types that are realized are in fact the buildings of which the city is made up.25
As a first synthetic result of the work done in
Venice, Larchitettura della citt was intended to
be no more then a sketch of a theory of the city,
a theory which understands the city as architecture. At the same time, the book presented no
small ambition in clearing the ground for the development of a science of the city.26 Also in1966,
Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by
Robert Venturi was published and just as Rossis
book has been crucial in the formation of European Neo-Rationalism, as Venturis book has been
in the formation of American Post-Modernism.27
Although both books have been received as a
critique of Modern Architecture, they operate in
a completely different way. Venturis book opens
with a straightforward attack on the puritanically
moral language of orthodox Modern architecture and can be seen as typical for the way this
European phenomenon was introduced in the US
under the banner of a style: The International
Style.28
Rossi and Tendenza choose as their key-concept not style but the architecture of the city,
just as Oswalt Mathias Ungers, and subsequently
the Krier brothers and the French research group
at the School of Versailles. Generally, this choice
for the city as point of reference is considered to
be the prerogative of Neo-Rationalism, but in fact
it shared this choice with Pre World War II Rationalism. Rationalism, and CIAM in particular,
had made the city prime issue on the agenda of
architecture and so the discipline had made itself subservient to the processes of economic and
social planning. This sounds like old stuff, but
in Italy of the early 1960s exactly this became a
serious question again in the debate on territorial
planning.29
28
Ibid, p. 22; Henry-Russell
Hitchcock, Philip Johnson,
The International Style:
Architecture since 1922.
New York (Norton & Co.)
1932. About the deformations resulting from this
tour the force: R. Sierksma,
INDRUKwekkend Over het
codificeren van regels in de
architectuur Ook wel: een
alternatieve lezing van The
international Style (1932),
in: OASE Tijdschrift voor
architectuur No 42 (1995),
pp. 61-86.
29
Manfredo Tafuri, History of
Italian Architecture, 19441984, Cambridge Mass./
London (MIT Press)1989.
24
Carlo Aymonino, ber Aldo
Rossi, in: Aldo Rossi, Die
Suche nach dem Gluck.
Frhe Zeichnungen und
Entwrfe. Mnchen (Prestel) 2003, pp. 21-25.
25
Aldo Rossi, Considerazioni
sulla morfologia urbana e
tipologia edilizia, in Aspetti
e problemi della tipologia
edilizia. Documenti del
corso di Caratteri distributivi degli edifici. Anno accademico 1963/64. Venice,
1964. Republished in: Scritti
scelti, see note 13, p. 209.
26
Introduction: Urban Artifacts and a Theory of the
City, in: Rossi, see note 8,
pp. 20-27. The studies of
the city of Padua were only
completed and published
in 1970 with remarkable essays of both Aymonino and
Rossi: Carlo Aymonino, Lo
studio dei fenomeni urbani
and Aldo Rossi, Carrateri
urbani delle citt venete. C.
Aymonino, M. Brusatin, G.
Fabri, M. Lena, P. Loverro,
S. Lucianetti, en A. Rossi,
La cit di Padova, saggio
di analisi urbana. Rome
(Officina)1970. The text by
Rossi is also in: Scritti scelti, see note 13, pp. 379-433.
For an evaluation of the
urban analyses in La cit di
Padova see: Massimo Scolari, Un contributo per la
fondazione di una scienza
urbana, in: Controspazio
no. 7-8 1971, pp. 40-47. See
also: Giovanna Gavazzeni,
Massimo Scolari, Note metodologiche per una ricerca
urbana, with an introduction by Aldo Rossi, in: Lotus
7, 1970, pp. 40-47. For the
state of the art in urban
history around the middle
of the 1960s, see: Oskar
Hndlin, John Buchard (ed.),
The Historian and the City.
Cambridge Mass. 1963; H.J.
Dyos (ed.), The Study of Urban History. London 1968.
27
Robert Venturi, Complexity
and Contradiction in Architecture. New York (The Museum of Modern Art) 1966.
Henk Engel
17
Henk Engel, Aldo Rossi,
The Architecture of the
City, Review of the Dutch
edition in: The Architectural
Annual 2001-2002. Rotterdam (010) 2003, pp. 18-22.
See also: Umberto Barbieri,
Franois Claessens, Henk
Engel, Giorgio Grassi en
Tendenza gezien vanuit
Nederland, afterword in:
Giorgio Grassi, De logische
constructie van de architectuur. Nijmegen (SUN) 1997,
pp. 212-228.
18
Aldo Rossi, see note 8, Editors Preface.
19
Ibid, p. 11.
20 - Scolari, see note 10,
p.162 and p.170.
21
Massimo Scolari, Impegno
tipologica / The Typological
Commitment, in: Casabella
no.509-510 (special issue
on I tereni della tipologia),
1985, pp. 42-45.
22
Carlo Aymonino, Facolta di
Tendenza?, in: Casanella,
no. 287 (March 1964); Danielle Vitali, Presentatione
di alcuni progetti, in: Architectura Rationale, see
note 10, pp. 253-265. See
also: Controspazio, IV no.
5-6 (March-June 1972) and
Controspazio, V no. 1 (June
1973).
23
The lecture series were
published in: Aspetti e
problemi della tipologia edilizia. Documenti del corso di
Caratteri distributivi degli
edifici. Anno accademico
1963/64. Venice (CLUVA)
1964; La formazione del
concetto di tipologia edilizia. Atti del corso di Caratteri distributivi degli edifici.
Anno accademico 1964/65.
Venice (CLUVA) 1965; Rapporti tra morfologia urbana
e tipologia edilizia. Atti del
corso di Caratteri distributivi degli edifici. Anno accademico 1965/66. Venice
(CLUVA) 1966. Five lectures
of Aldo Rossi were republished in: Scritti scelti, see
note 13.
Complex Projects
185
16
La Tendenza and neo-rationalism were proclaimed
by Aldo Rossi at the exhibition of the Sezione Internazionale di Architettura della
XV Triennale in Milano in
1973. The exhibition and the
book Architettura Rationale
offered the chance to position the work of a group
of young Italian architects
within the international context of modern architecture.
Carlo Aymonino, Costantino
Dardi, Gianugio Polesello,
Aldo Rossi, Giorgio Grassi,
Agostino Renna, Ezio Bonfanti, Massimo Scolari, Adriano di Leo, Antonio Monestiroli and Gianni Braghieri
had already, in changing
combinations, worked
together on projects and
competition entries. Additionally, with writings in
magazines and journals
they had contributed to
the architecture debate.
But most of all they were
architecture teachers. Their
work was presented as continuation of the rationalism
of the inter-bellum, which
opposed expressionism.
At the same time the work
of Oswald Mathias Ungers, Leslie Martin, James
Stirling, Bruno Reichlin,
Fabio Reinhart, the Krier
brothers and the New York
Five (Eisenman, Graves,
Gwathmey, Hejduk, Meier)
a broad spectrum of related
initiatives outside Italy was
brought to attention. See:
E. Bonfanti, R. Bonicalzi,
A. Rossi, M. Scolari, D. Vitale, Architettura Rationale.
Milano (Franco Angelli
Editore) 1973 and, Controspazio, V no. 6 (Dec. 1973),
special edition addressing
La Sezione Internazionale di
Architettura della XV Triennale.
186
At the 10th congress of the National Institute

for urban development in Italy (INU, 1965) the
Venetian researchers turned against the then
prevailing obsession with the problem of the
whole; the overall master plan of the city. In
their view, architecture and urbanism had lost all
sense of the singular intervention.30 Needs, political requirements, the entirety of affairs are of
course the basis of every transformation process;
however, the tangible reality of the transformation
process, the moment of formalization, is in the
preparation and in the design of the project. In
the context of the most up to date open planning
methods the master plan has become obsolete
and, as ever before, prime significance should be
given to the singular project. The work is the sign
of the actual transformation, tangible and completed in edged time.
From this backdrop Larchitettura della citt
was conceived. In the preface of the second Italian edition of his book (1969), Rossi states: the
main interest of the book is to focus on the
meaning of the individual project by analysing
the way in which it becomes an urban fact.31 The
legacy of Modern Architecture is also confronted
in this way. The book not simply turns away from
it. In fact the theories of the Modern Movement
have a major place in Larchitettura della citt
and even more in Grassis La costruzione logica
dellarchitettura. However, by taking into consideration the legacy of architecture as a whole and
how it has acted as an autonomous force in determining the form of the city, Modern Architecture
is seen as one episode among others. The notion
that Modern Architecture is fundamentally different then all architecture before, is abandoned,
just as its moral and political claims beyond the
Heroic Period.
When speaking of the two fundamental townplanning models of Modern Architecture, the
English Garden City and Le Corbusiers Ville
Radieuse, their ideological outlook on the city
as a whole is of little importance. What counts is
their real impact on cities.32 As two competing
forms of typological critique, strongly related to
the social question and housing in particular,
both models are firmly rooted in the history of the
European city and have become part of its architecture, if only in residential areas. Therefore in
Larchitettura della citt, special attention is given
to individual cases, mainly in Central Europe: Vienna, Berlin, Hamburg and Frankfurt am Main.
The projects of Modern Architecture realised

in these cities during the Interbellum, are concrete architectural manifestations of the municipal strategies to tackle the speculative practice of
the Mietskasernen. As such, these projects are
linked with the political struggles in these cities
and have to be analysed as concrete transformations of their architecture.33 For Larchitettura
della citt these projects are a confirmation of the
general rule of urban growth and transformation,
expressed in the notion of the city of parts. This
means that the architecture of a city cannot be reduced to a fixed model.34 Over time, the architecture of a city is settled by means of a succession
of small or large projects in which each completed
work is, so to speak, an accomplished fact, which
the subsequent works have to deal with.
Postulating a science of the city a science
of the construction of the city over time and its
processes of transformation and permanence as
Rossi did in Larchitettura della citt, shows here,
in confrontation with the legacy of Modern Architecture, its critical value. It was of great help to
create a point of view, which keeps the ideological
content of its operative models at a distance and
concentrates on the architectural syntax of the intervention. The reasons and considerations of an
intervention can be manifold, but it always ends
up with a work, a definite part of the architecture
of a city. As such it should be valued in the first
place. A science of the city would be the right instrument to do so and in that sense, postulating
a science of the city was also an attempt to overcome the dominant role of art history in modern
architectural critique.
35
Rossi first introduced the
notion of the analogous
city in connection with
Canalettos capriccio of
the Rialto Bridge area in
Venice. Rossi had seen
Canalettos painting for
the first time in 1964, while
working on the design for
the Paganini Theater in
Parma. Only after finishing
Larchitettura della citt,
he used the painting as an
example to demonstrate the
concept of the analogous
city in Larchitettura della
ragione come architettura di
tendenza (1969), in: Scritti
scelti, see note 13, pp. 370378.
36
Aldo Rossi, Architettura per
i musei (1968), in: Scritti
scelti, see note 13, pp. 323339.
Henk Engel
30
Aldo Rossi, E. Mattioni, G.
Polesello and L. Semerani,
Citt e territorio negli aspetti funzionali e figurativi
della pianificazione continua, in Atti del X Congresso
INU. Trieste, 14-16. 10. 65.
Also included in: Scritti
scelti, see note 13, p. 297.
This position was first put
forward in Locomotivo 2,
the competition entry for
the business centre of Turin
by Gianugo Polesello, Aldo
Rossi, Luca Meda. (1962)
Casabella continuata 278,
aug. 1963. See also: Aldo
Rossi, Nuovi problemi, in:
Casabella continuit no.264
(1962). English translation
in: Ekistics no.87 (1963);
Carlo Aymonino, Citt Territorio: Un Esperimento Didattiico, Bari 1964.
31
ranslation H.E., deviating
from that in: Rossi, see note
8, p. 165.
32
Ibid, pp. 82-86.
33
Ibid, pp. 72-82. See also:
Giorgio Grassi, Introduzione a L. Hilberseimer, in:
L. Hilberseimer, Un idea di
piano. Padova 1967; Giorgio
Grassi, Das Neue Frankfurt
et larchitecture du nouveau
Frankfurt, in: Texte zur
Architektur. Zrich (E.T.H.)
1973.
34
Ibid, p. 64.
Complex Projects
187
TH E A N A LO G O U S C IT Y
The leitmotif of the Milan exhibition was represented by a big capriccio, a scenic view of an
imaginary city, painted by Arduino Cantafora.
It was the first visual representation of the Analoguos City. The painting shows some of Rossis
designs in the elect company of the Roman Pantheon, the Tower of Pisa, Giovanni Antolinis
design for the Foro Bonaparte in Milan, a small
pyramid by Friedrich Weinbrenner in Karlsruhe,
Alessandro Antonellis Mole in Turin, the AEG
Turbine Hall by Peter Behrens in Berlin, the
Chemical Factory by Hans Poelzig in Luban,
the House am Michaeler Platz by Adolf Loos
in Vienna, the Housing Block by Mies van der
Rohe at the Weissenhof Stuttgart, Giuseppe Terragnis Casa del Fascio in Como, two designs by
Etienne Boulle the Municipal Palace and a
Cenotaph and some slabs from Ludwig Hilberseimers Vertical City in the background.
Of course the painting could be seen as an
actualization of the ideal city, represented in
the famous perspective view by Piero della Francesca ca. 1550. However, taken into account the
reconstruction of the Project of Tendenza so far,
such an interpretation doesnt really fit. The programmatic significance of the painting becomes
evident when placed next to the scenic view of the
central area in Le Corbusiers Ville Contemporaine (1922). Instead of a pastoral landscape with
glazed skyscrapers, Cantaforas painting gives a
view of the new architecture amidst the tumble
of works from the past. It doesnt propose an
ideal model of the city to leave history behind. In
the context of the Milan exhibition, the message
seems to be that Rational Architecture, now as
ever before, can only be founded on the tangible
experience of architecture in history.
Rossi introduced the concept of the analogous
city after Larchitettura della citt was finished.35
With this concept, the focus was shifted from
urban analysis to design theory. In this respect
Architettura per i musei (Architecture for the
Museums), a lecture given in 1966 at the seminar
Teoria della progettazione architettonica (Theory
of architectural design), is a programmatic text.
It deals with different aspects of the way in which
design as an individual activity, including its inherent subjective element, can be thought of in
relation to architecture as a collective entity, with
its own history deposited in cities and their monuments, but also in unrealised designs, treatises
and manuals.36
188
No school of architecture can do without a

theory of design, but most of the time design
theory is treated as no more than the post-facto
rationalisation of particular design activities.
Contrary to that practice, Rossi states that a design theory must be seen as part of a theory of
architecture: Before we can talk about a theory
of design, we have to ask ourselves what we understand by architecture and provide a definition
of architecture. Then we need to consider the
criteria, which an architectural design needs to
satisfy, and the relationship between design and
the history of architecture. In short, we have to
concentrate on the things that provide us with a
concrete understanding of architecture, namely
the city, its history and its monuments.37
This exactly was the subject matter of The
Architecture of the City, but the relationship
between design and urban analysis as such is
not dealt with in the book. Impulses for a design
theory were only elaborated in the period after
its completion. In 1965 Rossi became professor
at the Politecnico in Milan where, in conjunction
with Giorgio Grassi and other members of his
staff, a new research group was formed, which
functioned until he was sacked in 1971. Two key
essays by Rossi from this period are Introduzione
a Boulle (1968) and Larchitettura della ragione
come architettura di tendenza (1969), in which
he introduced the concept of analogy.38 The
studies of other members of the Milan group,
however, are of equal interest, most of all Giorgio
Grassis La costruzione logica dellarchitettura
(The logical structure of architecture, 1967).39 In
the forewords of the new editions of Larchitettura
della citt, Rossi consistently refers to the new
developed notions of the analogous city and the
logical structure of architecture.40
Most important is the joint publication of

the research group: Lanalisi urbana e la progettazione architectonica (Urban analyses and architectural design, 1970) with two fundamental
essays by Aldo Rossi and Giorgio Grassi, focused
on the question How architectural analysis can
be seen as part of design?41 In Lobiettivo della
nostra ricerca (The goal of our research) Rossi
states: What we look for in the study of the city
is the attempt to put together an analogous city,
in other words to use a series of elements linked
together by the urban and territorial context, to
form the basis for the new city. The analogous
city uses places and monuments whose meanings are derived from history and it builds itself
around those meanings while it defines its form.42
In Il rapporto analisi progetto (Analysis and design) Grassi investigates in depth the methodology implied in this statement.
By implication of the choice of a rationalistic
approach, the selection and classification of the
architectural elements make them part of a logical construction, which shows their value in the
formal syntax of the architectural project. A logical construction allows only analytical judgment;
its bond with reality is only secured by the input
of architectural forms and the meanings they incorporate by virtue of convention. In this sense,
the re-foundation of architecture Tendenza aimed
at cannot simply be seen as a return to origins
or archetypes. It summons to stick to the operational rules of architecture as a cognitive process,
which provide the only ground for any speculation. Structured as a genealogy of references,
the analogous city would bridge the gap between
analyses and architectural design, between the
collective corpus of architecture and individual
action.43
and formally defined, but

where the significance that
springs forth at the end
of the operation would be
the authentic, unforeseen,
and original meaning of the
work. Aldo Rossi, Prefazione, in the second edition
of: Larchitettura della citt.
Padova 1969. English translation in: Rossi, see note 8,
p. 166.
43
Scolari, see note 10, pp.
182-184. From this perspective, it is no wonder that in
the first edition of Architectura Rationale a second
book by Aldo Rossi was
announced: La citt analoga
(The analogous city). The
book would have complemented Larchitettura della
citt, but never appeared.
Rossis I quaderni azzuri
1968-1992, however, give
a fair indication of how the
initial plan to write La citt
analoga changed in the
course of time and finally
resulted in the publication
of A Scientific Autobiography in 1981. Aldo Rossi, I
quaderni azzuri 1968-1992.
Milan/Los Angelos (Electa/
The Getty Foundation)
1999.
44
Scolari, See note 10, p.160.
45
Ibid, p. 162.
46
Rudolf Carnap, Der Logische Aufbau der Welt.
Leipzig (Felix Meiner Verlag) 1928. English translation: Rudolf Carnap, The
Logical Structure of the
World. Pseudoproblems in
Philosophy. Berkeley (University of California Press)
1967.
47
Ludovico Geymonat, Saggi
di filosofie neorazionalistica. Torino (Einaudi) 1953.
48
Ibid, p.24.
Henk Engel
37
Ibid, p. 323.
38
Aldo Rossi, Introduzione
Boulle, in: Etienne Louis
Boulle, Architettura. Saggio sullarte. Padua 1967;
Aldo Rossi, Larchitettura
della ragione come architettura di tendenza, a
contribution to the catalogue of the exhibition Illuminismo e architettura del
700 veneto. Castelfranco
31-8 / 9-11 1969. Both texts
also in Scritti scelti, see
note 13, pp. 346-364 and
pp. 370-378.
39
Grassi, see note 1.
40
The introduction to the
Portuguese edition is most
informative in this respect.
Aldo Rossi, Introduzione
alledizione potoghese de
Larchitettura della citt, in:
Scritti scelti, see note 13,pp.
443-453. English translation
in: Rossi, see note 8, pp.
169-177.
41
Giorgio Grassi, Il rapporto
analisi progetto, in: Gruppo
di ricerca diretta da Aldo
Rossi, Lanalisi urbana e la
progettazione. Contributi
al dibattito e al lavoro di
gruppo nellanno academico
1968/1969. Milano (Clup)
1970. Also in: Giorgio Grassi, Larchitettura come mestiere et altri scritti. Milano
(Franco Angeli) 19895, p.
52.
42
Aldo Rossi, Lobiettivo della
nostra ricerca, in: Gruppo
di ricerca diretta da Aldo
Rossi, Lanalisi urbana e la
progettazione. Contributi
al dibattito e al lavoro di
gruppo nellanno academico
1968/1969. Milano (Clup)
1970, p. 20. Translation
from: Micha Brandi, Aldo
Rossi, in: A+U Architecture
and Urbanism no. 11, 1982,
p. 20. See also Rossis
preface to the second edition of Larchitettura della
citt, where he defines the
concept of the analogous
city as a logical-formal
operation in which the elements are pre-established
Complex Projects
189
Finally, Massimo Scolari must be mentioned,

who in fact gave the only concise formulation of
the project of Tendenza in his afore mentioned
Avangardia e nuova architettura. Scolari defines
the project first and for all as a process of clarification.44 He states that Tendenza aims at a refoundation of architecture as a discipline in terms
of its autonomy as a cognitive process. Thats why
it refuses to see interdisciplinary work as a remedy
for its actual crisis. Tendenza doesnt ponder over
accidental political, economical, sociological and
technological questions to mask its own creative
and formal sterility. It only takes these contingencies into account in order to enable a clear intervention, not in an attempt to determine these, but
neither to become their victim.45
All this makes clear that, besides its appeal to
the rationalist tradition in architecture, the main
reference of the rationalism of Tendenza was the
philosophy of science initiated by the Wiener
Kreis. It provided the ammunition to confront
the dominant position of Benedetto Croces philosophy in Italian culture. By allusion to Rudolf
Carnaps Der Logische Aufbau der Welt (1928)
the very title of Grassis La costruzione logica
dellarchitettura attested of its polemical intension in this respect.46 Special attention should
be given, however, to the exceptional Marxist
philosopher Ludovico Geymonat (19081991)
who introduced the so-called New Rationalism in
Italy.47 From 1956 till 1979 he held the first chair
of philosophy of science in Italy at the University
of Milan. Geymonat argued that under the actual
conditions of scientific work it makes no sense
to talk about one uniform method and therefore
philosophical rationalism can no longer pretend to
reduce all human knowledge to one absolute system. It can only analyse the historical formation
of the different forms of knowledge at our disposal
and clarify the presuppositions of each of them.48
190
T Y P O LO GY 4 9 A N D M O R P H O LO GY
The publication of Architettura razionale in 1973
can be seen as the end of the Milanese period.
Scolaris Avangardia e nuova architettura was
not only the statement of a doctrine, but also
a precise demarcation with respect to the neoavant-garde tendencies of that time, like Archigram and the Florentine groups Superstudio and
Archizoom. In his view, the legacy of Modern
Architecture left the young generation of architects a fundamental choice: prolongation of the
utopia of the avant-garde or re-foundation of the
discipline. In contrast with the revived utopianism of the neo-avant-gardes, Tendenza choose
the second option.50. Instead of producing new
environmental models for the salvation of humanity, Tendenza initiated a rigorous reflection on the
competence of architecture, its limits and unique
capacity as well. In line with the New Rationalism
in the philosophy of science Tendenza focused on
the forms of knowledge specific to the field of architecture and town planning.
From this perspective, Tendenza should
be placed in the wider field of academic studies in
architecture and town planning during the 1960
and 70s. Its subordination under the umbrella
of Post Modernism has blurred much of its position in this respect. Besides, an effort to clear
up this position is confronted with some special
difficulties because of the style of the writings by
Aymonino, Rossi and Grassi. Contrary to most
of the discourse at that time, especially in the
field architecture, theirs is seldom of the sort of
a straightforward polemic to make their point.
Their primary aim is to construct a line of architectural studies from what is already done and not
to burn down related efforts in other disciplines.
In doing so, they deal with a wide range of academic studies. That is the second difficulty. To
follow their argument, at least some more than
superficial knowledge of other disciplines is needed.
To conclude this introduction, there is only

place to give some hints to focus further study.
The first is directly related with the choice to reflect on Tendenza as an academic and didactic
project in this introduction. As far as I can see,
this is the only point of view from which the supposed critique on Modern Architecture in the
discourse of Tendenza can be affirmed and shows
any relevance, even today. The central problem
Tendenza dealt with was the scientific claim of
Modern Architecture and how it was implemented, after World War II, in the Faculties of Architecture at the Universities. As this scientific claim
was identified with the concept of functionalism,
Logical Empiricism became the guardian of scientific respectability in the field of architecture
and town planning and a serious challenge to the
common conception of how to study and design
architectural form.51
In this context neo-rationalism can be seen as
a reflection on what was left over to the competence of architecture in relation to the growing
number of specialist empirical sciences, which
invaded its domain. Two publications from the
early 1960s are of special interest in this respect:
Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (1960) and
Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis
of Form (1964).52 These two studies the first
on environmental perception of the city and the
second on design methods were received as
hallmarks of the new scientific approach and
discussed as such, respectively, in Rossis The Architecture of the City and Grassis La costruzione
logica dellarchitettura.53 Although the studies
of Lynch and Alexander are only touched upon,
together they show the epistemological problems
in arriving at a method of description that is not
only adequate with regard to the city as the context in which architecture has to operate, but also
to architecture itself.
The logical way to construct such a method
seems obvious. Just as the other disciplines, architecture should define the city in terms of architecture, which means as an artefact built up in time,
and architecture as the art and science of building
the city. That is exactly what Rossi proposed to
do in The Architecture of the City; he labelled
the city as the research object of architecture
and did an effort to fix the concepts with which
to describe the physical form of the city and the
mechanisms of its transformation.
52
Kevin Lynche,The Image of
the City, Cambridge Mass.
(Harvard Un. Press) 1960;
Christopher Alexander,
Notes on the synthesis of
form. Cambridge Mass.
(Harvard Un. Press) 1964.
53
Rossi, see note 8, pp. 112114; Giorgio Grassi, see
note 1, pp. 208-212.
54
Aldo Rossi, Un giovane
archittetto tedesco: Oswald
Mathias Ungers, in: Casabella no. 244 (oct.1960), pp.
22-35. English translation,
p. VI.
55
Saverio Muratori, Studi per
una operante storia urbana
di Venezia. Rome 1959. For
the further development of
the theory and method of
Muratorian urban analysis:
Gianfranco Coniggia, Gian
Luigi Maffei, Architectural
Composition and Building
Typology. Interpreting Basic
Building. Florence (Alineo
Ed.) 2001. (First Italian edition 1979).
56
Giorgio Ciuci, Gli anni della
formazione / The formative years, in: Casabella no.
619-620 (Jan.-Feb. 1995,
special issue on Manfredo
Tafuri), p. 21.
57
Reinhard Gieselmann / Oswald Mathias Ungers, Zu
einer neuen Architektur,
reprint in: Ulrich Conrads,
Programme und Manifeste
zur Arrchitektur des 20. Jahrhunderts, Berlin / Frankfurt
a.M. / Wien (Ulstein) 1964,
pp.158-159; O.M. Ungers,
Zum Projekt Neue Stadt
in Kln, in: Werk 1963 nr.7,
pp. 281-284. English translation from: Joan Ockman
(ed.), Architecture Culture
1943-1968. A Documentary
Anthology. New York (Rizzoli) 20003, pp. 362 and 363.
58
O.M. Ungers, Zum Projekt
Neue Stadt in Kln, see
note 56; Herman Srgel,
Einfhrung in die Architektur-sthetik, Prolegomena zu einer Theorie der
Baukunst. Mnchen (Piloty
& Loehle) 1918.
Henk Engel
49
With regard to typology the
crux of the Italian research
on architectural and urban
form is established by the
reuse of the method of typological analysis. Typology
is an instrument focussing
upon the description and
classification of what is
depicted or designed. On
the contrary, style analysis
tries to define the how, the
distinctive characteristics
of form as a result of an artistic procedure. Hence, typological analysis is based
on the recognisability and
communicative potential of
forms based on (historical)
experience, which forms the
collective background and
is shared within a specific
culture. In the avant-garde
milieu, where experiment
and originality were considered of highest value,
the style critical method
surpassed typological
analyses completely since
the beginning of the twentieth century. See: G.C.
Argan, Het concept van
architectonische typologie,
in: Leen van Duin, Henk
Engel (red.), Architectuurfragementen, Delft 1991, pp.
65-70. Oorspronkelijk: G.C.
Argan, Sul concetto di tipologia archtettonica, in: G.C.
Argan, Progetto e destino,
Milano 1965.
50
155-158. For a recent evaluation of Tendenza and the
Florentine groups, see: Pier
Vittorio Aureli, The Project
of Autonomy. Politics and
Architecture within and
against Capitalism. New
York (Princeton Architectural Press) 2008. For an
assessment of the Florentines use of architectural
drawings as instruments of
critique, see: Emre Altrk,
Drawing Architecture Theory on the City. Dissertation,
Delft 2009.
51
For a short history of Logical Empiricism and the concepts involved: J.O. Urmson,
Philosophical Analysis. Its
development between the
two world wars. Oxford (The
Claredon Press) 1956.
Complex Projects
191
As a second hint, I suggest to we pay more attention to the role of Oswald Mathias Ungers in
the formation of neo-rationalism in architecture,
not so much because Ungers developed a special
brand with an impact on younger architects unlike the Krier brothers, Rem Koolhaas and Hans
Kollhoff, but because of the impulse some of his
early statements might have given to the discourse
of Tendenza right at the beginning. Although
Klotz has marked Ungers as one of the protagonists of neo-rationalism next to Rossi, up till now
the relationship between these two architects in
this respect is only touched upon. Generally it
is restricted to Casabella in 1960 being the first
international magazine to publish some of Ungers works with an introduction by Aldo Rossi.54
There is, however, a lot to be curious about.
It is generally accepted that the approach
of Tendenza to architecture and the city must
be seen in direct line with the work on urban
analysis done by Saverio Muratori.55 This seems
highly questionable, however, because at that
time Muratori was seen as rather conservative by
the younger generation of Italian architects.56 At
least it is worthwhile to take also into account two
publications of Ungers: Zu einer neuen Architektur (Towards a New Architecture, 1960) and his
notes on the housing project Neue Stadt (1963).57
Reading these texts you will find some of the key
notions around which Rossis The Architecture of
the City is composed: the city as a work of art,
the analogy of the house and the city, the genius
locus and, most important, the city of parts.
A more detailed comparison of these short
texts of Ungers and the elaborate book of Rossi,
however, also shows a significant difference with
respect to the concepts, which generally are taken
to be basic for the discourse of neo-rationalism:
morphology and typology. Whereas morphology
is central to the argument of Ungers about the
specific kind of architectural knowledge, this term
is completely absent in the book of Rossi. In his
argument for a morphological approach, Ungers
made special reference to Hermann Srgel, Einfhrung in die Architektur-sthetik (1918).58
192
By way of Srgel, Ungers concept of morphology linked up with the German Kunstwissenschaft (Science of Art), which had played a significant role in the early development of Modern
Architecture. It is true, most modern architects
spoke of their work in terms of functionalism, but
when it came to questions of form and cultural
value, one way or the other, all of them resorted
to terms of the German Kunstwissenschaft.59
Rossi instead resorted to the concept of type, defined by Quatremre de Quincy as a regulating
principle, prior to form and constituting it.60
My third and final hint is, that only with caution can the reflections of Tendenza on analysis
and design be associated with Structuralism in
other fields of study at that time. Rossi did refer
to the Structural Linguistics of Ferdinand de
Saussure and to Claude Levi Strau who gave
Anthropology a new direction on basis of the
methods stipulated by De Saussure.61 Besides,
Scolari pointed to the relevance of Wiktor Sjklowskij and Russian Formalism for understanding the artistic techniques used in the designs of
Tendenza.62 Rossi, however, stated clearly that
he didnt envisage a systematic development of a
program of this type. Instead, his main interest
was in the historical problems and methods of
describing urban artefacts and in the identification of the principal forces at play in the formation and development of the city.63
If one wants to look for a vital connection
with Ferdinand de Saussures Course in General
Linguistics, one should not dive so much into
the parts concerned with synchronic linguistics,
but into those parts concerned with diachronic
linguistics. The parts on synchronic linguistics
deal with language as a static system of signs and
have become one of the sources from which structural analysis in other domains have been developed towards a general science of Semiotics.64
Diachronic linguistics studies the evolution of
language. Although De Saussures Course spent
many pages on this subject, it had no impact on
the foundation of Semiotics.65 It is just there,
however, one will find the concept of analogy,
which for Rossi became the key to an understanding of the relation between the individual architectural project and the architecture of the city.66
According to De Saussure, analogy belongs

to the normal functioning of language. In the
use of language analogy plays an active role in
the conservation of language as a collective sign
system, but it is also the creative force par excellence in the evolution of the system. Although
speaking is a rule-based practice, in fact words
and sentences are created anew in every individual act of speaking.67 Innovations are the result of
changes in the practice of speaking, that is: the
general activity that singles out units for subsequent use.68
In every act of speaking different associative
series are involved. Analogical innovations can
be seen as symptoms of changes in interpretation.
In this sense every architectural project should
be understood as an event. If I understand him
well, Giorgio Grassi goes even further. Logical
analyses can clear up the possible rules of the
game, but the rule as norm, as principle, shows
itself only in the act of design.69 Maybe, only by
making such a clear distinction between analyses
and design it is justified to speak of a new rationalism in architecture.
59
Henk Engel, Jan de Heer,
Cityscape and Mass Housing, in: OASE no. 75. Rotterdam (NAi Publishers)
2008, pp. 33-57. Original:
Henk Engel, Jan de Heer,
Stadsbeeld en Massawoningbouw, in: O ontwerp,
onderzoek, onderwijs. no.
7 (Spring 1984), pp. 10-22.
The main issue of the German Kunstwienschaft
was to define a set of underlying principals Grundbegriffe, as August
Schmarsow (1853-1936)
and Heinrich Wlfflin (18641945) called these by
which the art historian
could discriminate between
different historical styles in
the visual arts.
60
Rossi, see note 8, pp. 35-41.
61
Ibid, pp. 112-114 pp. 22-23
and pp. 33-34.
62
184-185.
63
Rossi, see note 8, p. 23.
64
Umberto Eco, Opera aperta.
Milan (Ed. Valentino Bompiano) 1962; Umberto Eco, La
sruttura assenta. Milan (Ed.
Valentino Bompiano) 1968.
65
Perry Meisel, Haun Saussy,
Saussure and His Context,
Introduction to the new edition of English translation of
Cours de linguistique general (1916) by David Baskin,
in: Ferdinand de Saussure,
Course in General Linguistics. New York (Columbia
University Press) 2011, pp.
XV-XLVIII.
66
Vittorio Savi, Larchitettura
di Aldo Rossi. Milan (Franco
Angelli Ed.) 1976, pp. 107108.
67
De Saussure, see note 63,
pp. 171-173.
68
Ibid, p. 166.
69
Grassi, see note 1, pp. 97125.
Henk Engel
Krier, R. (1975). Stadtraum

in Theorie und Praxis.
Stuttgart: Krmer.
Lynche, K. (1960). The
image of the city.
Cambridge Mass:
Harvard University
Press.
Mumford, E. (2000). The
CIAM discourse on
urbanism, 1928-1960; .
London: MIT Press.
Muratori, S. (1959). Studi
per una operante storia
urbana di Venezia (Vol.
1). Rome: Libreria dello
Stato.
Panerai, P., Castex, J.,
Depaule, J. C., &
Samuels, I. (2004).
Urban Forms: The death
and life of the urban
block. Oxford: The
Rossi, A. (1960). Un giovane
architetto tedesco:
Oswald Ungers.
Casabella, 10(244), 2235.
Rossi, A. (1962). Nuovi
Problemi Casabella, 264.
Rossi, A. (1967).
Introduzione a
Boulle. Scritti scelti
sullarchitettura e la
citt, 346-364.
Rossi, A. (1982). The
Architecture of the City.
Press.
Tafuri, M. (1989). History
of Italian architecture,
1944-1985. Cambridge
Mass/London: MIT
press.
Ungers, O. M. (1963). Zum
Projekt Neue Stadt in
Kln. Werk(7), 281-284.
Ungers, O. M., &
Gieselmann, R.
(1964). Zu einer
neuen Architektur.
In U. Conrads (Ed.),
Programme und
Manifeste zir Architektur
des 20 Jahrhunderts.
Berlin/Frankfurt/Wien:
Ulstein.
Venturi, R. (1966).
Complexity and
contradiction in
architecture (Vol. 1).
New York: The Museum
of modern art.
Complex Projects
193
Aldo, R. (1975). Scritti scelti

sullarchitettura e la
citt. Milan: Libreria
Clup.
Aymonino, C. (2003).
Aldo Rossi: die Suche
nach dem Glck: frhe
Zeichnungen und
Entwrfe. In A. Becker
& I. Flagge (Eds.).
Mnchen: Prestel.
Bonfanti, E., Bonicalzi,
R., Rossi, A., Scolari,
M., & Vitale, D. (1973).
Architettura Rationale.
Milan: Franco Angelli
Editore.
Borsano, G. (Ed.). (1980).
The Presence of the
Past. Venice (Electal)
1980. New York: Rizzoli
Publications.
Carnap, R. (1928). Der
logische aufbau der welt.
Leipzig: Felix Meiner
Verlag.
Ciuci, G. (1995). Gli anni
della formazione/
the formative years.
Casabella, 1(619-629),
21.
Eco, U. (1962). Opera
aperta. Milan: Valentino
Bompiano.
Engel, H., & Heer, J. d.
(2008). Cityscape
and Mass Housing.
OASE(75), 33-57.
Geymonat, L. (1953).
Saggi di Filosophie
neorazionalistica. Turin:
Einaudi.
Grassi, G. (1967). La
costruzione logica
dellarchitettura. Padova:
Marsilio.
Grassi, G. (1980).
Larchitettura come
mestiere e altri scritti.
Milan: Angeli Franco.
Hassan, I. (1981).
The question of
postmodernism.
Performing Arts Journal,
16, 30-37.
Jencks, C. (1977). Language
of Post-Modern
Architecture. London:
Academy edition.
Klotz, H., & Donnell, R.
(1988). The History
of Postmodern
Architecture.
Press.
Krier, L. (1978). Rational Architecture - Rationelle.
Brussels: Archives
darchitecture moderne.
METHODS &
ANALYSIS
194
The late-capitalist economy of

unlimited growth and ever accelerating flows seems to be making
way for another perspective: one
of limited resources and modesty.
Simultaneously, the increasing
dynamism of contemporary societies and cultures engenders complex processes that shape our
territories as a novel mixture of
private and public spaces. Hence,
architects and in our education
the students are challenged to
find other ways of doing; more
informed, cultured and engaged
methods of thinking and practicing architecture.
Methods and Analysis aims to
be a laboratory for students who
want to explore pioneering ways
to analyse, understand and intervene in the built environment.
These design studios and seminars explicitly question todays
rapid changes, which scrutinize
our existing architectural approaches. Studios and seminars
ask questions such as: Which
methods are appropriate to analyse our present urban condition?
What approaches and instruments
can inform contemporary design
intervention? Can we develop a
new architectural toolbox to act
in the urban territory of the 21st
century? And how does the increasing cross-cultural character
of architectural practice influence
our approaches and tools?
Methods & Analysis
195
The aim of the Methods and

Analysis education is to understand architecture, more than a
response to program or problem
solving, as the development of
distinct approaches and tools. The
education therefore challenges
the students preconceptions
about architectural methods and
instruments inspire the advancement of inventive approaches,
while enabling critical action in
the built environment.
196
Tom Avermaete
Tom Avermaete (Antwerpen, 1971)

is professor of architecture at the
Faculty of Architecture and the
Built Environment of Delft University of Technology (TU Delft, the
Netherlands) and holds a special
research interest in the public
realm and the architecture of the
city in Western and non-Western
contexts. In recent years he has
been focussing his investigations
on the way that professionals in
the fields of architecture and urbanism have been main actors in
the articulation of notions of welfare and modernity.
Avermaete is the author of
Another Modern: the Post-War
Architecture and Urbanism of Candilis-Josic-Woods (2005) and of
Casablanca -Chandigarh: Reports
on Modernity (with Casciato, Park
Books, May 2014). He is an editor
of Architectural Positions (with
Havik and Teerds, 2009), Colonial
Modern (with von Osten and Karakayali, 2010), Structuralism Reloaded (with Vrachliotis, 2011) and
Architecture of the Welfare State
(with Swenarton and Van den
Heuvel, Routledge, June 2014).
Tom Avermaete is a member
of the editorial board of the peerreviewed journals OASE Architectural Journal and the Journal
of Architectural Education (JAE).
He initiated several exhibitions,
amongst others Wonen in Welvaart/ Dwelling in Welfare (Antwerp, Belgium, 2006). Together
with Maristella Casciato he curated the exhibition How architects,
experts, politicians, international
agencies and citizens negotiate
modern planning: Casablanca
Chandigarh (CCA, Montreal, Canada, 2013-2014).

AR1MET010 Ways of doing
AR1MET040 Roles of the Architect
AR3AD132 Dwelling Graduation Studio: Global housing
studio
AR3MET010 Seminar Research Methods: Probing into
Precedents
AR3MET020 Tutorial Research
Methods: Fieldwork
Methods & Analysis
Tom Avermaete
197
From Unit to Jussieu; The Public Realm as

Frame, Substance and Goal of Architecture
Tom Avermaete

198
1
Hannah Arendt, The Human
Condition. Chicago/London (University of Chicago
Press) 1994 (1958), p.2
2
Michael Sorkin (ed.), Variations on a Theme Park, The
New American City and the
End of Public Space. New
York (Hill and Wang) 1992,
p.XV
3
Rem Koolhaas Generic
City, in: Rem Koolhaas and
Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL, Rotterdam (010) 1995, p.1251
Methods & Analysis
199
Tom Avermaete

Since architects deal with the world, they always

hold a responsibility vis--vis the public realm.
The world, according to the philosopher Hannah Arendt, is that what we, as human beings,
construct in order to make human life possible
on earth.1 We share this world, it is accessible to
us and we have the possibility to democratically
partake in the discussions about its present and
future construction: it is our common ground, or
in the words of Arendt a public realm. Architects
intervene in this public realm. No matter if they
design public buildings or housing, architecture
intervenes by necessity in this wider common
matrix that can be labelled as public. As a result
the architect is by default a public figure (even
a public intellectual some claim) and his projects
are public actors within a wider urban condition.
Against this background, it comes as no surprise that in the last two decades a fierce debate
on the public realm roused within the field of
architecture. The American architect and theorist
Michael Sorkin, for instance, argues in his well
known book Variations on a Themepark, that in
the contemporary American city, characterized
by its segregation in walled areas like the Shopping Mall, the Historic District, the Theme Park,
and the gated community, public space is in danger. Especially the democratic character of public
space is in decline according to Sorkin: many
places in our cities are no longer freely accessible to everyone, they are no longer stages where
strangers meet and can discuss about the ways
that we construct our world; they are no longer a
public realm.2
Sorkin and other authors have criticized this
loss of the political dimension of public space;
they have lamented the decrease of public spaces
were people can freely enter, meet and discuss.
They have sketched doom scenarios in which entire cities become privatized and only those who
can pay can enter public life. Also Rem Koolhaas
entered this debate and provocatively claimed
that we are currently experiencing a worrisome
evacuation of the public realm.3 But why this
interest of architects in the public realm? Can
architects with their designs for buildings, infrastructures and neighborhoods affect what is happening in public spaces and with the public realm
nowadays? Are architects just observers of these
phenomena or are they active agents that can influence the course of events?
200
In this article we will probe into the longstanding engagement of architecture with the public
realm. The first part of this article shows how the
notion of the public has been conceptualized and
theorized since the mid 20th century in a larger
societal debate, while the second part clarifies
how concepts of the public understood in a variety of ways have constantly challenged modern
and contemporary architecture. This mapping
will allow us to overcome the quite negative view
that dominates the architectural debate and to
suggest, as a conclusion to this article, an alternative perspective on the relationship between
actual design approaches and perspectives on the
public realm.
I.
TH E M O D E R N P U B LI C R E A LM :
A NEW MODE OF SOCIAL
O R G A N I Z ATI O N
The emergence of modern public realm is inextricably linked to the need to cope with the
social ambivalence arising from modernity.4 The
American author Marshall Berman, writes in his
book All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience
of Modernity: To be modern is to find ourselves
in an environment that promises us adventure,
power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves
and the world and at the same time threatens
to destroy everything we have, everything we
know, everything we are.5.Modernity thus always
consists of the twofold experience of longing and
loss longing for a promising future as well as
unconsciousness about the loss of a guiding history. Specifically this latter experience of loss leads
to a condition of social uprootedness that has
been conceptualized by well-known sociologists
such as Ferdinand Tnnies, Emile Durkheim,
and Max Weber. Each in their own way, they illuminate the profound social changes wrought
by modernity: individualization, fragmentation,
differentiation, and rationalization. They describe
how modernity drastically alters interpersonal
relationships and patterns of social cohesion and
thus installs certain ambivalence. Resisting social
ambivalence seems one of the principal concerns
of modernity. The Polish sociologist Zygmunt
Bauman writes that the effort to exterminate
ambivalence is a typically modern practice, the
substance of modern politics, of modern intellect,
of modern life.6 The control, domestication, and
regulation of social ambivalence are main features
of modern life. Also the Canadian sociologist
Michel Freitag describes modernity in comparable terms, as a new way of regulating society.7 He
characterises modernity by a new mode of social
reproduction. Social codes and messages are no
longer confined to traditional symbols, but are
also generated and transmitted through new communications media, like newspapers, radio, television, and so forth. Modernity, in Freitags view,
moves beyond the cultural and symbolic realms
that regulated the reproduction of traditional societies, creating a political and institutional realm
alongside them. Within this public realm that
is situated in coffee houses, learned societies, and
associations, in pamphlets and periodicals citizens debate the proper organization of society and
the proper form of community. Authors like Bauman, Freitag, and also the German philosopher
Jrgen Habermas, who has influenced the debate
in architectural theory mostly, agree that this new
public realm is the most characteristic element of
modernity.
JRGEN HABERMAS :
A NEW MODE OF SOCIAL
R E P R O D U C TI O N
A variety of thinkers have attempted to describe
the characteristics of the modern public realm.
Without a doubt, the Jrgen Habermas is one of
the most important. His well-known book Strukturwandel der ffentlichkeit is devoted entirely to
this subject.8 Habermas defines the term ffentlichkeit, the public sphere as this German term
consistently is translated into English, but that
generally spoken has the same meaning as the
above used term public realm, as a realm of social life in which something approaching public
opinion can be formed . . . and in which citizens
can confer in an unrestrictive manner.9 He describes this realm as a social domain alongside
the state and the commercial domain in which
rational discussion takes place between citizens
on matters of general interest. The public opinion
emerging from this rational debate formally and
informally influences the organization of society.
In Strukturwandel der ffentlichkeit, Habermas
summarizes the developmental history of the public sphere, which he links to the rise of capitalist
society in Europe. His argument stated briefly, is
that the advent of the stock exchange, as a result
of the march of capitalism, led around 1550 to
the emergence of trading organizations that obtained political power. The result was a domain
of ffentliche power, in which the state and the

1. Le Corbusier, sketch
on 'il faut truer la
rue- corridor'
8
Habermas, The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into
a Category of Bourgeois
Society, Cambridge (Mass.)
(MIT Press) 1989; For a detailed discussion of the concept of the public sphere in
the work of Jrgen Habermas, see Peter Hohendahl,
Jrgen Habermas: The
Public Sphere (1964) , in:
New German Critique, no. 3,
Autumn, 1974, pp.45-48.
9
Jrgen Habermas, The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia
Article (1964), in New German Critique, no. 3, Autumn,
1974, p.49
10
Transformation of the Public
Sphere, p.27
Tom Avermaete
4
For an introduction to the
term public realm, see Arthur Strum, A Bibliography
of the Concept Oeffentlichkeit, in: New German
Critique, Winter 1994, no.
61: Special Issue on Niklas
Luhmann, pp.161-202.
5
Marshall Berman, All That
is Solid Melts into Air: The
Experience of Modernity.
New York (Penguin Books)
1982, p.15.
6
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence. London (Politity Press) 2004
(1991), p.7.
7
Michel Freitag, Dialectique
et socit. Vol. 2: Culture,
pouvoir, contrle. Montral
(Les editions Saint-Martin)
1986
Methods & Analysis
201
dominant economic class were in charge. Those

who did not belong to this domain had no access
to it. As capitalism continued to expand and intensify, however, a new bourgeois class of doctors,
lawyers, and scholars emerged, which developed
a critique of ffentliche power. Hence, in the eighteenth century a bourgeois public sphere was born
in which the organization of society was subject to
critical examination: The bourgeois public realm
may be conceived above all as the realm of private people who come together as a public; they
soon claimed the public sphere regulated from
above against the public authorities themselves,
to engage them in a debate over the general rules
governing relations in the basically privatized but
publicly relevant realm of commodity exchange
and social labor.10
According to Habermas, in this new order,
debates on how to organize society took place
in personal discussions and in print media. The
press was one medium that played an important
role in the formation of public opinion (ffentliche
Meinung), because it functioned as a forum in
which citizens could discuss important social issues. Books, pamphlets, and newspapers circulated among the literate, serving as vehicles for theses, analyses, arguments, and counterarguments
that referred to one another or contradicted one
another. The new public spaces also included
physical forums such as salons, cafs, and clubs,
where members of different classes met to engage
in debate, verbal sparring, and displays of rhetorical sophistication.
It would all have been unthinkable before the
eighteenth century: the newspapers and periodicals, the printed evidence of the new freedom of
expression that was soon to be enshrined in the
law, along with the freedom of association. For
Habermas the Enlightenment was the radiant,
inspiring dawn of modernity, and the creation of
the public sphere was one of its greatest achievements, if not its very essence. The opportunity for
the public to form their own opinions, he repeatedly emphasizes, is a necessary condition of human freedom and emancipation.
According to Habermas, the bourgeois public
sphere is the backbone of Western democracy,
where all the public debates take place that serve
as the basis for political decisions, debates that are
entirely open to all citizens. ffentlichkeit is the
realm in which ideas can be freely expressed, exchanged, and criticized. This active formation
of public opinion differs strongly from the
2.
202
3.
4.
2. Le Corbusier, sketch
on allotment street and
Unite / Candilis Archive
IFA, France
3. Aerial view of Unite /

Candilis Archive IFA,
France
4. Le Corbusier, section of
Unite with different 'interior streets' / Candilis
Archive IFA, France
Tom Avermaete

TH E TR A N S FO R M ATI O N O F
TH E P U B LI C S P H E R E
Jrgen Habermas title Strukturwandel der ffentlichkeit refers to the changes that the public realm
has undergone since the eighteenth century.
Habermas believes it has been in decline. In late
capitalism, Habermas says, the public sphere has
degenerated into a manipulated realm. The institutions that were supposed to foster and protect
the public sphere voluntary associations and
the mass media have gradually been recuperated by state and economy. Civil-society organizations and associations that previously worked
to develop informed public opinion no longer
have the critical distance that is indispensable to
public debate. In short, large organizations strive
for political compromises with the state and with
each other, excluding the public shpere whenever possible.11 The communications media that
citizens are meant to use to air their opinions,
arguments, and criticism are, to a growing extent,
in the service of private, commercial interests.
What could have been an institutional pillar of
the public realm has degenerated into an instrument of publicity. The world fashioned by the
mass media, Habermas says, is a public sphere
in appearance only.12 The content disseminated
through the media is not longer critical and argumentative in character, but reflects the promotional character of the culture of consumption.
The infiltration of market principles into the mass
media has, according to Habermas, transformed
active, rational public debate into passive cultural
consumption. As a result, the sounding board of
an educated stratum tutored in the public use of
reason has been shattered; the public is split apart
into minorities of specialists who put their reason
to use non-publicly and the mass of consumers
whose receptiveness is public but uncritical. Consequently, it completely lacks the form of communication specific to the public.13
11
Jrgen Habermas, The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia
Article (1964), p.54.
12
Transformation of the Public
Sphere, p.171.
13
Ibid., p.175.
Methods & Analysis
203
traditional situation, in which public opinion was

primarily characterized by its unconsidered character as well as that it was not subject to discussion and criticism. What went on in traditional
communities was more like passive transmission
of ideas on the social from generation to generation.
204
C O U NT E R- P U B LI C S P H E R E S
The public sphere extends much further than the
bourgeois sphere described by Jrgen Habermas,
a fact that has been brought forward by the German philosophers Oskar Negt and Alexander
Kluge. In ffentlichkeit und Erfahrung, they emphasize that one of the essential features of the
public sphere is that it always contains Gegenffentlichkeit, counter-public spheres.14 Negt and Kluge
demonstrate that at the same time as Habermas
liberal, bourgeois public sphere came into being,
populated mainly by literate white men, so did
proletarian, plebeian, and female public spheres.
They claim that the public sphere is not an expression of the discourse within a single social
class, but that more typically a variety of social
groups lend their contrasting voices to the debate.
The two authors stress the plurality of the public realm, in which new forms of public life are
constantly emerging: These new forms seem to
people to be no less public than the traditional
bourgeois public sphere. Here and in what follows
we only understand the public sphere as an aggregate of phenomena that have completely diverse
characteristics and origins. The public sphere has
no homogeneous substance whatsoever.15
As Negt and Kluge see it, one of the hallmarks
of the public sphere is that it makes it possible for
individuals to interpret social reality and express
those interpretations. In this sense, the public
sphere is a central element in the organization of
human experience.16 A similar view is expressed
by the contemporary social theorist Nancy Fraser.
She too emphasizes that Habermas notion of
the public sphere excludes a variety of publics.
These subaltern publics or counterpublics, as
Fraser calls them, include such diverse groups as
women, workers, peoples of color, and gays and
lesbians, who are barred from the public sphere
because of their class, gender, status, or race.17 In
Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Realms,
Catherine R. Squires advocates an elaborate typology of the public sphere, with categories such
as enclave, counterpublic, and satellite public
realms.18 New vocabulary of this kind will make
it possible, she argues, to distinguish among a
wide range of counterpublic spheres on the basis
of how they respond to dominant social pressures, legal restrictions, and other challenges
from dominant publics and the state.19
A number of authors have also pointed out
the importance of the new mass media in the
5. View of 'interior street'

with delivery boxes /
Candilis Archive IFA,
France
6. Double-high interior
street with public
furniture / Candilis
Archive IFA, France
19
Ibid., p.457.
20
Craig J. Calhoun, Social
Theory and the Politics of
Identity. Cambridge, Mass.
(Blackwell Publishers)
1994.
21
John Downey & Natalie
Fenton, New Media, Counter Publicity and the Public
Sphere, in: New Media
Society, 2003, no. 5, pp.185202.
22
Theodor W. Adorno, Meinungsforschung und Offentlichkeit (1964), in: Theodor
W. Adorno, Soziologische
Schriften I, Frankfurt
(Surhkamp) 1972, pp.532537; English trans.: Theodor
W. Adorno, Opinion Research and Publicness, in:
Sociological Theory, March
2005, vol. 23, no. 1, pp.116123.
Tom Avermaete

H A N N A H A R E N DT:
TH E P O LITI C A L D I M E N S I O N O R
TH E S PAC E O F A P P E A R A N C E
Although it can be argued that it is the
perspective of Jrgen Habermas that influenced
the discourse in the realm of architecture on
the public mostly (it was the translation of his
Strukturwandel der ffentlichkeit in English
in 1989 that roused the debate amongst
philosophers, sociologists, political theorists, a
discussion that was embraced in the early nineties
into the perspective of the city and public space
as well), it is quite clarifying to investigate a
few other takes as well. The Jewish-GermanAmerican philosopher Hannah Arendt, who we
already touched upon in the introduction of this
article, for instance, links in her book The Human
Condition (1958) the concept of the public realm
to political action. By the way, different than
Habermas, Arendt uses both the term public
realm and public space throughout her work.
What she actually meant with the terms indeed
has a spatial component, although it cannot be
understood as the public space as architects
and urban designers use that term regularly. For
Arendt, who never addressed the change of urban
spaces as a tangible consequence of the topic
14
Oskar Negt & Alexander
Kluge, ffentlichkeit und
Erfahrung. Zur Organisationsanalyse von brgerlicher und proletarischer ffentlichkeit. Frankfurt a.M.
(Suhrkamp Verlag) 1972;
English trans.: Oskar Negt
& Alexander Kluge, Public
Sphere and Experience:
Toward an Analysis of the
Bourgeois and Proletarian
Public Sphere. Translated
by Peter Labanyi et al., Minneapolis (University of Minnesota Press) 1993. For an
introduction to the thinking
of Negt and Kluge, see Fredric Jameson, On Negt and
Kluge, in: October Autumn
1988, vol. 46: Alexander
Kluge: Theoretical Writings,
Stories, and an Interview,
pp. 151-177.
15
Negt & Kluge, Public Realm
and Experience, p.12.
16
Ibid.,p.12; See also Eberhard Kndler-Bunte, Sara
Lennox, Frank Lennox, The
Proletarian Public Sphere
and Political Organization:
An Analysis of Oskar Negt
and Alexander Kluges The
Public Sphere and Experience, in: New German
Critique, Winter 1975, no. 4,
pp.51-75.
17
Nancy Fraser, Rethinking
the Public Sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy,
in: Craig Calhoun (ed.),
Habermas and the Public
Sphere. Cambridge, Mass.
(MIT Press) 1992, p.123.
18
Catherine R. Squires, Rethinking the Black Public
Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public
Spheres, in: Communication Theory, 2002, vol. 12,
no. 4, pp. 446468, at p.446.
Methods & Analysis
205
formation of a counterpublic sphere. Craig Calhoun, for instance, has asserted that the mass
media are not entirely negative and there is a
certain amount of room of manoeuvre for alternative democratic media strategies.20 John Downey
and Natalie Fenton have expanded on this idea
in their article New Media, Counter Publicity
and the Public Realm, in which they give various
examples of how the Internet has made counterpublic realms possible for instance in the Zapatista and McSpotlight campaigns -through small,
alternative, non-mainstream, radical, grassroots
or community media.21
These perspectives echo the article that the
Meinungsforschung und ffentlichkeit that the
German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno published in 1964 in which he highlighted the importance of the mass media in the modern public
Sphere.22 Adorno points out that the mass media
plays a dual role, as both forums and organs of
public opinion. His analysis of the mass media as
simultaneously inculcating a normative concept of
the public realm and acting as vehicles for public
practices still seems important today as we seek to
understand new counter-public spheres.
7.
206
8.
7. Roof of Unite
d'Habitation / Candilis
Archive IFA, France
8. Alison and Peter Smithson, Golden Lande

Housing on bombed
London site, 1952 / NI
Collection, Rotterdam
Netherlands
23
Hannah Ahrendt, The Human Condition. p.198.
24
Ibid., p.7
25
Ibid., pp.28-37; 192-199
Methods & Analysis
207
Tom Avermaete

she was concerned of, the term public realm has

a philosophical significance. The public realm,
Arendt says, is a place where people act rather
than work. This perspective she bases on an
Aristotelian distinction between three forms of
human activities: labour, work and action. For
our perspective specifically the third is important.
In opposite to labour, that is characterized
by necessity and compulsion, the latter is
circumscribed by freedom and self-realization.
On work we will come back soon, but first our
attention need to go to the activity of action. By
acting and speaking Arendt immediately adds
speaking to the category of action, since acting
without speaking cannot be understood, and
speaking without action makes no sense in
public space, we appear to one another as free
and equal individuals, and politics becomes
possible, Arendt claims. She writes: Action and
speech create a space between the participants,
which can find its proper location almost any
time and anywhere. It is the space of appearance
in the widest sense of the word, namely the space
where I appear to others as others appear to me,
where men exist not merely like other living or
inanimate things but make their appearance
explicitly.23
The essence of the public realm, as Arendt
identifies, is to allow us to relate to one another
despite our plurality, with the aim of creating a
common world: Action, the only activity that
goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to
the human condition of plurality, to the fact that
men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the
world. While all aspects of the human condition
are somehow related to politics, this plurality is
specifically the condition not only the conditio
sine qua non, but the conditio per quam of all political life.24
The space that Arendt associates with this condition and activity is public space, and she harks
back to the concept of the agora, the marketplace
of the ancient Greek polis (city-state).25 In other
words, Arendt argues that there is a specific place
where people, in all their diversity, can and
must be seen and heard. Out of this perspective, the public space is the stage on which people
perform. Hence, Arendt clearly does not simply
equate the public realm with the agora, or with
any other particular public space, urban or otherwise. She believes that the public realm can take
many forms. Building on a republican tradition,
208
9.
9. Alison and Peter Smithson, Street in the air

with Merilyn Monroe and
Joe Dimaggio, 1952 / NI
Netherlands
10. Alison and Peter Smithson, Golden Lane Housing section with 'streets
in the air', 1952 / NI
Netherlands
Methods & Analysis
209
Tom Avermaete

10.
210
she sees a highly developed civic public culture as

one in which citizens participate energetically in
numerous associations of all sizes that offer them
opportunities for action. The media can potentially do a great deal to support this culture, she
says. They contribute information, creating their
own little public spaces in newspapers, for example where citizens can think about public
themes together.
For Arendt, the term public realm has two
closely connected, but not identical, meanings.
Firstly, she sees the public realm as essential to
human existence. What appears in the public
realm must be genuinely visible and accessible to
everyone. Reality is constituted by this process
of entering the public realm: It means first that
everything that appears in public can be seen
and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For us, appearance something
that is being seen and heard by others, as well as
by ourselves constitutes reality.26 Only that
which is brought into the public realm and can
be discussed by a broad public makes a contribution to society. Only a life lived in public can be
meaningful, Arendt says. The second meaning
that Arendt assigns to the term public realm is
the world itself, insofar as it is common to us all
and distinguished from our privately owned place
in it.27 She states that this world is constituted
by the world of things which is the human artifice and which is the produce and concern
of the second human activity she distinguished:
work. In other words, the human work, the production of things that last, creates a durable
world, which is the stage for action, for public life.
Undoubtedly, Architecture is part of this world of
things and is as such a premise for public life.
Arendt, too, refers to a decline in the public
realm. She sees a loss of commonality resulting
from the rise of mass society. What concerns her
is not that there are so many people, but that the
world between them can no longer connect and
divide them.28 According to Arendt, without this
type of commonality, each individual remains
suspended in his own individuality, in his own
purely personal experience.29
R I C H A R D S E N N E T T:
TH E R I S E A N D FA LL O F C I V I C N E S S
Where Arendt defines the term polis as the locus of the public realm, the sociologist Richard
Sennett places the public clearly in the context of
the rising city. In his 1977 book The Fall of Public
Man, Sennett describes the modern citys public
realm or public domain, as he now and than
calls it as the space in which anonymous individuals interact.30 The concept of the public
is closely connected to the emergence of modern
urban life. Within this context public space was
understood as the social space in which strangers
meet. This space included boulevards and city
parks, as well as the cafs, theatres, and opera
houses where the public congregated. Whoever
took a stroll on the boulevard or went to the theatre was venturing out among unfamiliar people.
Until that time, the theatre and opera-going public had been a relatively close circle of people who
knew each other well, and when they gathered to
see a performance, it was usually by invitation.
In modern urban life, however, the public had
increasingly become an assemblage of strangers,
and tellingly, performances no longer required an
invitation but the purchase of a ticket.
As encounters with strangers became more
frequent, society needed new social conventions
to bring order to the new domain of the public.
Sennett uses the notion of civicness to describe
the urban social conventions that emerge in the
eighteenth century. Civicness permeated every
aspect of public interaction, such as language,
dress, and, above all, attitude: Playacting in the
form of manners, conventions, and ritual gestures
is the very stuff out of which public relations are
formed.31
In eighteenth-century Paris, London, or
Rome, Sennett writes, the public domain was a
realm of regulated sociability. It was quite normal for passers-by in public spaces to greet one
another, even if they were complete strangers.
The patrons of cafs and ale houses freely debated matters of general interest without being
acquainted. Personal remarks were avoided. The
public domain was a safe haven, where people
could trade in their private concerns for a publicly
oriented cosmopolitan life.
What was true of interaction in parks and
theatres was also true of public debate; whoever
took part in it was entering the public domain and
had therefore to obey the rules of public appearance. As dress and courteousness were to inter-
26
Ibis., p. 50
27
Ibid., p. 52
28
Ibid., p. 60
29
Ibid., p. 57
30
Richard Sennett, The Fall of
Public Man. New York/London (W.W. Norton & Company) 1992 (1977), p.4
31
ibid., p.29.
Methods & Analysis
211
Tom Avermaete
action with strangers in the park, so eloquence

and argumentative skills were to interaction in
public debate. Argument was part of civicness,
as were courtesy, tact, and charm. It was the
most suitable way of ensuring that disagreements
between strangers did not get out of hand. Just
as citizens dressed in a certain way in public to
conform to social norms rather than to express
their personalities, arguments were a means of
persuading ones audience rather than a mode of
self-expression. In this climate of tolerance and
sociable interaction with strangers, public debate
could flourish, says Sennett, whose argument in
this respect resembles that of Habermas. Not only
urban space, but also politics became public. No
longer were government affairs discussed only in
the select circle of the nobility and the administrative elite; instead, they became political issues,
that pertained to everyones interests and about
which people formed their own opinions.

212
II.
TH E P U B LI C R E A LM A N D
A R C H IT E C TU R E : AC C O M M O DATI N G
A N D R E P R E S E NTI N G TH E P U B LI C
The people want the
buildings that represent
their social and community
life to give more than
functional fulfilment.
They want their aspiration
for monumentality, joy,
pride, and excitement to
be satisfied. The fulfilment
of this demand can be
accomplished with the new
means of expression at hand,
though it is no easy task.
Sigfried Giedion,
Jos Luis Sert,
Fernand Lger,
Nine Points on
Monumentality,
in: Harvard
Architectural Review,
1943
S H A P I N G TH E P U B LI C R E A LM
Although it is clear that in these philosophical,
political, and sociological voices real spaces
are present in Habermas the coffee-house,
in Arendt the Greek and Roman City State, the
agora, and in Sennett the city it also is clear
that the relationship with these spaces are rather
vague, not to say, lacking. The specific architecture of these spaces is not the point of attention, it
even seems to be ignored. Only Sennett speaks of
dead urban spaces when he imagines the spaces
of the modern city, characterized by an abandonment of public life. This simultaneously urges
the problem at the core of their arguments: the
vanishing or changing public practices, the loss of
communal space of gathering, the loss of a shared
understanding of (urban) life, the loss of a common world.
One might question whether this indeed is a
problem of architecture as well. Architecture creates the possibilities of meeting, not the meeting
itself. While the practices change, how can architecture offer alternatives? However, that precisely
is what architecture has practiced in the last century. Long before the philosophers and political
theorist urged the notion of the public realm, the
idea of the public was already the concern of architects and urban designers. This second part of
the article actually shows through a few examples
how in Western society, envisioning the public
realm by means of architectural and urban form,
has one of the chief aims of modern architecture.
This immediately becomes clear in the housing
projects developed by German architect Ernst
May for Das Neue Frankfurt. During Mays term
as city architect from 1926 to 1930, Frankfurt
gained an international reputation as the centre of
Neues Bauen, symbolized by the public housing
projects that May and his staff developed around
the existing city. Within five years, May had not
only provided new housing for one quarter of the
population, but also arrived at a new definition
of the modern public realm. The landscape and
the transitions between architecture and landscape play a key role in this definition. This is illustrated in Mays plan for the Nidda river valley,
which he developed in collaboration with landscape architect Lebrecht Migge.32 In response to
the request to develop several new housing estates
(Siedlungen) for the city of Frankfurt, May first
designed a large landscape project between the
new Siedlungen and the existing villages. This
park is a continuous system of public gardens and
paths, which subtly merge with the semi-private
areas and gardens of the housing estates. Mays
politics of parkland not only provides a framework for the entire public housing programme of
Das neue Frankfurt. Above all, it offers the expression of a modern public realm characterized by
leisure time and recreation and intended to result
in a neues Leben: This newly created public arena
reiterated many of the movements heroic themes
at the same time that it depoliticized them. It was
a modernist landscape composed of two realms:
the playing fields and stadia for collective games
and the spectacle, and the private allotment garden.33 The Nidda Valley is the embodiment of a
modern pastoral conception of the public realm: a
realm that is meticulously designed and therefore
brings about a new form of society, typified by
personal autonomy and leisure.34
Towards the end of the 1920s, the idea that
architecture should give shape to the public realm
gained general acceptance among the adherents
of Neues Bauen. Bruno Tauts 1929 book Modern Architecture succinctly expresses this point of
view: The architect . . . becomes the creator of
an ethical and social character; the people [will]
be brought to a better behaviour in their mutual
11. OMA, Jussieu Libraries,

Paris, 1992. General
overview / NI Collection,
Rotterdam Netherlands

32
Susan Henderson, A Setting for Mass Culture: Life
and Leisure in the Nidda
Valley, in: Planning Perspectives, no. 10, 1995,
pp.199-222.
33
Ibid., p.199.
34
For a discussion of pastoral
and counter-pastoral reactions to modernity, see:
Hilde Heynen, Architecture
and Modernity: a Critique,
Cambridge, Mass. (MIT
Press), 1999, specifically
Chapter 1.
35
Bruno Taut, Modern Architecture, London (The
Studio) 1929, as quoted
in: Paul Greenhalgh (ed.),
Modernism in Design. London (Reaktion Books) 1990,
p.48.
36
Il faut tuer la rue-corridor Le Corbusier, Prcisions sur un tat prsent
de larchitecture et de
lurbanisme. Paris (Editions
Altamira) 1994 (1930).
37
La maison ne sera plus
soude la rue par son
trottoir, Le Corbusier, La
Charte dAthnes. Paris
(Minuit) 1941, p.21.
Tom Avermaete
TH E U N IT D H A B ITATI O N :
L AY E R S O F P U B LI C N E S S
As a protagonist of the modern movement Le
Corbusier kept its end up in the debate on the
architectural articulation of the public realm. Especially in his design for the Unit dHabitation
(1947-1952), a multi-family residential housing
project for the people of Marseille that were dislocated after the Second World War, the French
master develops an innovative definition of the
public realm. Two sketches are instrumental to
understand this definition. The first is Le Corbusiers depiction of a 19th century street in Paris
that is given the caption the corridor-street
must be killed.36 In the drawing the traditional
street is emphatically crossed out. This sketch illustrates how Le Corbusier wanted to depart from
a 19th century bourgeois form of the street. In
the words of the 1933 Athens Charter, one of the
most important manifestos produced by CIAM
it reads: Houses will no longer be soldered to the
street by the pavement.37 The other sketch depicts an allotment settlement and illustrates how
Le Corbusier regarded his investigations as an
attempt to overcome the dispersed urban model
and its lack of public space.
It is in the spectrum between the concisely defined traditional European corridor-street and
the more loosely aligned allotment street that
Le Corbusier positions his innovative definition
of public space in the Unite dHabitation. Three
layers of public space are activated. A first layer
consists of the landscape. Le Corbusier had already illustrated in his prewar urban projects that
he considered the landscape as the public space
par excellence; a civic field that was freely accessible to all individuals of modern society and that
offered the possibility for diverse and uninhibited
public encounters. Hence, in the Unit the living
quarters begin only on the first floor and are set
on huge concrete piers, turning the ground floor
in an open sheltered plaza and securing the continuity of the public landscape.
A second layer consists of the so-called internal streets of the Unit. Most of the 337 apartments are double height units that wrap vertically
around horizontal streets that occur on levels 2,
5, 10, 13, and 16 of the building. Le Corbusier
gives these internal streets a generous dimension
Methods & Analysis
213
dealings and relationship with each other. Thus

architecture becomes the creator of new social
observances [Gesellschaftlicher Formen].35
214
Paris, 1992. Model with
warped boulevard. / NI
Netherlands
13.
216
14.
15..
13. Alison and Peter Smithson, Cluster of Golden

Lane Housing projected
on existing urban tissue
of London, 1952 / NI
Netherlands

Paris, 1992. Compositional principle of folded
public landscape / NI
Netherlands

Paris, 1992.Unfolded
section / NI Collection,
Rotterdam Netherlands
Tom Avermaete

TH E G O L D E N L A N E H O U S I N G :
C LU S TE R I N G TH E P U B LI C
The relation between the different sorts, scales
and hierarchies of public space would become a
main point of attention for the English architects
Alison and Peter Smithson. Their well-known
project for the Golden Lane (1952), a housing
estate on a bombed neighborhood of London,
is a clear criticism of the modern typologies for
larger housing blocks that were developed during
the post-war period, most notably Le Corbusiers
Unit dHabitation. The Smithsons criticize the
Unit typology in several ways. They position
their streets in the air on the perimeter of the
building and thus connect them visually to the
larger public urban landscape. In such a way they

comment the internalized position of the interior
street in Le Corbusiers typology that deprived
every connection to the surrounding city. In addition, the Smithsons introduce a threshold between street and dwelling in the form of a little
loggia, pointing to the abrupt transition between
public street and private dwelling in Le Corbusiers approach. And finally, they also propose
connections between the different streets in the
air into a new urban system of clusters. Thereby
they criticize the isolation and disconnection of
the interior streets in the original Unit. In other
words, the Smithsons use their project for the
Golden Lane in order to transform the Unit and
thereby offer a sharp criticism of one of the most
canonic architectural typologies of recent architectural history.
However, the Golden Lane project was not
only a comment on the developments in recent
architectural history, but also of the political,
economical and social characteristics of the urban condition of London. Indeed, the Smithsons
proposal for the Golden Lane can be seen as a
comment on the existing structure of London
that consisted of clear socio-spatial distinctions
between different neighborhoods. The Smithsons literally juxtapose their clusters of internal
streets on the existing structure of the city. On
top of the present urban tissue and public spaces
a new system of interrelated streets in the air
is projected. The Smithsons believed that this
combination of old and new urban tissue would
engender a new spatial system that in its turn
would accommodate new forms of collectivity and
public domains. These would offer the possibility
to encounter, even in the most popular neighborhoods, as well close neighbors as the cosmopolitan inhabitants of London. Hence, they visualize
in their collages streets in the air that are populated by playing kids, but also by Joe DiMaggio
and Marilyn Monroe. They all are part of a new
collectivity; they all participate in a new urban
realm. Out of this perspective, the Golden Lane
appears as project that is critical of the classstructure that was still present in London of the
1950s. The Golden Lane talks back as well to
the field of architecture, as to its urban condition.
It is in the relation between both that the project
gets its full critical capacity.
Methods & Analysis
217
and articulates the different entrance doors to

the apartments as full-fledged entrance portals
with large doors and special delivery cases for
the milkman and baker. At one instance the internal street is moved towards the perimeter of
the building envelope: at the 7th floor were the
double-high street is no longer the public domain
of close neighbours, but of the entire vertical
garden city. At this level Le Corbusier designs
public furniture; the same benches and lamp
posts as can be found on the public landscape
of the ground floor. Along this public street the
services for the entire neighbourhood are located:
a 24 unit hotel with restaurant and bar, as well
as a variety of shops including a laundry, bakery,
butcher, salon, pharmacy, and real estate and
commercial offices.
A third layer of public space is located at the
very roof of the Unit dHabitation. At this top
floor of the building, and with the view on both
the mountains and the Mediterranean, an artificial public landscape is designed. Le Corbusier
articulates a sculpturous topography of public
spaces that is almost entirely related to leisure and
well-being: a swimming pool with childrens play
area, a gymnasium, a nursery school, a solarium,
an open air theater and a running track. Le Corbusiers threefold definition of public space can
be understood in a variety of ways, but it surely
illustrates an understanding of public space as
a matter that is multiple and that is composed
of different layers and hierarchies. The Unit
dHabitation articulates these three different hierarchies and layers of public space in a figure of
distance. It defines the characteristics and dimensions of the various layers without really relating
them.
218
T W O LI B R A R I E S FO R J U S S I E U
U N I V E R S IT Y: A C O NTI N U O U S
P U B LI C S C E N A R I O
In the project for Two Libraries at the Jussieu
University Complex in Paris by OMA (19921993) the continuity of the public realm is taken
one step further. In this design for two new libraries of sciences and humanities the main compositional principle is based on an understanding
of the public surface of the city as malleable and
pliable, so that it is no longer specifically related
to the ground and can partake in a vertical continuum. In a series of photographs Koolhaas illustrates how the composition of the project follows
a strategy of lifting up of the citys fabric and its
infrastructure. The surface of the city is subsequently folded into a large public topography
composed of urban hills and valleys, of crossings
and caves, on which the different programmatic
elements can be projected. Plazas, parks, cafes,
reading rooms and shops inhabit the landscape
and simultaneously create an extension and intensification of urban public space.
The unfolded section of the Jussieu Libraries
competition entry can be understood as a critique
of the separate public layers in the Unit of Le
Corbusier and the connected public elements in
the Golden Lane by the Smithsons, and produces
an entirely new diagram that focuses on the internal continuity of public and collective surfaces.
The library is an uninterrupted but diversified
public domain that accommodates the different
functions and programs, while offering an endless
stroll through a city of books to the visitor: In
this way a single trajectory traverses the entire
structure like a warped interior Boulevard. The
visitor becomes a Baudelairean flaneur, inspecting and being seduced by a world of books and
information and the urban scenario. Through
its scale and variety the effect of the inhabited
planes becomes almost that of a street, a theme
which influences the interpretation and planning
of the Boulevard as part of a system of further
supra-programmatic urban elements in the interior: plazas, parks, monumental staircases, cafs,
shops.38
But the warped interior boulevard is more
than an innovative accommodator for the public
program of the libraries; it also plays a central
role in the representation of the public realm of
the building. Indeed, OMA decided to give the
building a thin and transparent envelope, so that
the silhouette of the boulevard with its dif-
ferent programmatic entities and its users becomes the main outside feature of the building.
By turning the combination of public topography
and public use into the main representational
feature Koolhaas and his team introduce a new
notion of monumentality in which the representation of the public realm is not achieved through
an elaborate symbolic language, but by simply exposing the public domain and its use.
A R C H ITE C TU R E A S R E S P U B LI C A
This short excursus into recent architectural history illustrates how a complex and layered cultural notion as the public realm has been a major occupation for architects and urban designers, long
before it attracted the attention of philosophers
and theorists. It might be remarkable that also architects took interest the public realm, since public space regularly is seen as the concern of urbanism. The public realm, however, is much more
than just the public space: it also evokes questions
of accommodating, presentation, representation
and monumentality as well. All these questions
were important concern throughout the twentieth
century, and did give shape to actual buildings
and building blocks from the Unit to Jussieu.
Surely also today the public realm is changing.
New layers of publicness amongst others related to digital encounters and exchange, but also to
new forms of working and living recalibrate the
public realm. Once again the question for architects remains how to accommodate and represent
this augmented public reality an issue that demands new theories, concepts and projects. The
public realm continues to challenge architecture
as a profession that constructs the world the
world that is of our common concern.
38
www.oma.eu/projects/1992/jussieu-twolibraries (accessed on July
5th 2012).
Strum, A. (1994). A
bibliography of the
concept ffentlichkeit.
New German Critique,
61, 161-202.
Tom Avermaete

Heynen, H. (1999).
Architecture and
Modernity: a Critique.
Press.
Kndler-Bunte, E. (1975).
The Proletarian Public
Sphere and Political
Organisation: An
analysis of Oskar Negt
and Alexander Kluges
The Public Sphere and
Experience (S. Lennox
& F. Lennox, Trans.).
Winter: New German
Critique.
Koolhaas, R. (1995). The
Generic City S,M,L,XL.
Rotterdam: 010.
Meisel, P., & Saussy, H.
(2011). Saussure
and His Context,
Introduction to the
new edition of English
translation of Courts de
Linguistique general.
In D. Baskin (Ed.),
Ferdinand Saussure,
Course in General
Linguistics. New York:
Columbia University
Press.
Negt, O., & Kluge, A.
(1972). ffentlichkeit
und Erfahrung: zur
Organisationsanalyse
von brgerlicher
und proletarischer
ffentlichkeit. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp Verlag.
Negt, O., & Kluge, A.
(1993). Public Spere
and Experience:
Towards an Analysis
of the Bourgeois and
Proletarian Public
Sphere. (P. Labanyi,
Trans.). Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota
Press.
Savi, V. (1976). Larchitettura
di Aldo Rossi. Milan:
Franco Angelli.
Sennett, R. (1992). The Fall
of Public Mann. New
York/London: W.W.
Norton&Company.
Sorkin, M. (1992). Variations
on a theme park: The
new American city and
the end of public space.
New York: Hill and Wang.
Squires, C. (2002).
Rethinking the Black
Public Sphere:
An Alternative
Vocabulary for Multiple
Public Spheres.
Communication Theory,
12(4), 446-468.
Methods & Analysis
219
Adorno, T. W., Perrin, A.,

J, & Jarko, L. (2005).
Opinion Research
and Publicness.
[Meinungsforschung
und ffentlichkeit
(1964)]. Sociological
Theory, 23(1), 116-123.
Arendt, H. (1994). The
Human Condition.
Chicago/London:
Press.
Bauman, Z. (2004).
Modernity and
ambivalence. London:
Penguin Books.
Berman, M. (1982). All
that is solid melts into
air. The experience of
Modernity. New York:
Simon & Shuster.
Corbusier, L. (1941). La
Charte dAthenes. Paris:
Miniut.
Downey, J., & Fenton, N.
(2003). New Media,
Counter Publicity and
the Public Sphere. New
Media Society(5), 185202.
Fraser, N. (1992). Rethinking
the Public Sphere: a
Contribution to the
critique of actually
existing democracy.
In C. C. Habermas
(Ed.), Habermas and
the PUblic Sphere.
Press.
Freitag, M. (1986).
Dialectique et socit.
Vol 2: Culture, pouvoir,
contrle. Les modes
formels de reproduction
de la socit. Montral:
ditions Saint-Martin.
Habermas, J. (1989). The
structural transformation
of the public sphere; An
Inquiry into a Category
of Bourgeois Society.
Press.
Habermas, J., Lennox, S.,
& Lennox, F. (1974).
The Public Sphere: An
Encyclopedia Article.
New German Critique(3),
49-55.
Herderson, S. (1995).
A Setting for Mass
Culture: Life and
Leisure in the Nidda
Valley. Planning
Perspective(10), 199222.
220
Klaske Havik
Klaske Havik (Haren, 1975) is associate professor of Klaske Havik
(Haren, 1975) is associate professor of Architecture, Methods
& Analysis at Delft University of
Technology. She has developed
a distinct research approach
relating architectural and urban
questions (such as the use, experience and imagination of place)
to literary language. Her book Urban Literacy. Reading and Writing
Architecture (nai010, 2014), based
on her PhD research, developed a
literary approach to architecture
and urban regeneration, proposing the three notions description,
transcription and prescription.
She initiated and organised the
2nd international conference on
architecture and fiction: Writingplace. Literary Methods in
Architectural Research and Design (2013). Havik is editor of
the Dutch-Belgian peer reviewed
architecture journal OASE, she
recently edited OASE#91 Building
Atmosphere with Juhani Pallasmaa
and Peter Zumthor (2013), OASE
#89 Medium. The Mid-Size city as
an European urban condition and
strategy. (2012) and OASE#85,
Productive Uncertainty, (2011).
With Hans teerds and Tom Avermaete, she co-edited the anthology Architectural Positions: Architecture, Modernity and the Public
Sphere (2009). As a practicing
architect, Klaske Havik has been
involved in the redevelopment of
ship wharf NDSM in Amsterdam.
Haviks literary work appeared in
Dutch poetry collections and literary magazines.

AR1MET010 Ways of doing
AR3MET020 Tutorial Research
Methods: Fieldwork
AR2MET010 Transdisciplinary
Encounters
AR3MET100 Methods and
Analysis Graduation Studio:
Positions in Practice
BK4GR4 Grondslagen 4 De
Europese Metropool
Methods & Analysis
Klaske Havik
221
An introduction to literary methods

in architectural design 1
Klaske Havik

in architectural design
222
This paper proposes a literary view on architectural design. First, evocative literary descriptions
of spaces, whether in novels or poetry, often reveal an inclusive understanding of architectural
experience. While in architecture the visual and
the formal tend to be dominant, literature allows
us to describe other sensory perceptions of spaces
with great detail and intensity. In addition, other
aspects of lived experience that remain largely
untouched in architectural discourse, such as atmosphere, mood or memory, come to the fore in
literary descriptions. Second, literature provides a
way to deal with the use of architecture. Especially
when describing urban places, literary narratives
often reveal the social aspects of architecture. The
active relationship between writer and reader, as
well as between the activities of characters and
the spatial setting of the novel, deserves closer
study by architects. Third, novels can be seen as
sketches of another world, balancing between reality and imagination. Literary worlds can be critiques and speculations based on the existing reality, as well as explorations of possible futures. If
novels present constructions of another world, architectural designs are much alike: they prescribe,
as it were, a not yet existing situation. By studying
the tools that writers employ in constructing their
spatial imaginations, we can learn new ways to
imagine architecture.
Steven Holl, Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas are architects who have, in different ways,
used a literary point of view in their architectural
work. In this essay, I will give a discuss some of
the scriptive aspects present in their work. I will
conclude with a brief overview of some literary
tools for architectural design.
01. Competition entry for a

museum at Ile Seguin in
Paris
02. Knut Hamsun Center,

Hamaroy, Norway, 2009,
This museum is dedicated to the Norwegian
writer Knut Hamsun. /
Photo: Iwan Baan
03. Steven Holl, the central

hall of the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary
Art in Helsinki. / Photo:
Paul Warchol
1
This text is an excerpt from
Havik, K (2014) Urban Literacy. Reading and Writing
Architecture. Rotterdam:
nai010 publishers.
2
Holl, S, Pallasmaa, J, PrezGomez, A (1994), Questions
of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture, (Tokyo:
A+U)
3
Holl, S (2007) Architecture
Spoken (New York: Rizzoli
2007), 46
4
Holl, S, Pallasmaa, J, PrezGomez, A (1994), 41
5
Stphane Mallarm,
Un coup de ds jamais
nabolira le hasard, [A throw
of dice will never abolish
chance]1897
6
Such graphic experiments
in poetry later appeared in,
for instance, the work of the
Belgian poet Paul van Ostaijen 18961928.
Methods & Analysis
223
Klaske Havik

S TE V E N H O LL ;
E M B O D I E D E X P E R I E N C E O F P L AC E :
A P H E N O M E N O LO G I C A L A P P R OAC H
In the 1990s, architects Steven Holl, Juhani
Pallasmaa and Alberto Prez Gomez together
wrote the book Questions of Perception, in which
they presented their phenomenological inspiration
to an audience of architects.2 With Questions of
Perception, Holl intended to explain the moment
when you walk through a space when the texture,
when the light, when it all merges into a single experience.3 Drawing on phenomenological themes
such as bodily experience, intertwining and chiasmatic relations in both his written and architectural work, Holls buildings evoke in the visitors
perception sensitivity for light, materiality, and
color. In his view, sensory perception is the core of
the work of an architect:
Architecture, more fully than other art forms,
engages our sensory perceptions. The passage of
time; light, shadow and transparency; color phenomena, texture, material and detail all participate in the complex experience of architecture. . .
. Only architecture can simultaneously awaken all
the senses all the complexities of perception. 4
While watercolors rather than text are the
material in which Holl crafts his evocative descriptions of places and the first ideas of projects, in many cases it is literature that inspires
them. The competition entry for a museum at Ile
Sguin in Paris [fig 1], for instance, was inspired
by both the form and content of the nineteenthcentury poem Un Coup de Ds5 (A throw of dice)
by French poet Mallarm. The poem, which
addressed the issue of chance, was graphically
designed in a, especially for that time, remarkable way, leaving meaningful white spaces on the
page, contributing to the rhythm of the text.6 The
competition entry is conceived as a throw of dice,
causing an unexpected, slightly disordered organization of spaces. Second, the pauses in the poem,
represented by the white in its graphic design,
were translated to similar openness in design as a
series of voids, patios in the continuous fabric of
the building.
For the Knut Hamsun Center in Norway, realized in 2009 Steven Holl took literature as its
very point of departure [fig 2]. The design for this
museum, devoted to the writer who depicted Oslo
and the Norwegian landscape around the turn
of the twentieth century, is anchored as much in
its scenic site in the far North as in the oeuvre
of the writer. Empathizing with the conflictive
224
personality of the writer and of his characters,

like the protagonist in Hunger 7 who views the
city from his troubled mental and physical state,
the architecture offers conflicting perceptual
moods from deep dark corners, to light, open
rooms with wide and open views of the Norwegian landscape. With its uncertain posture not
quite straight, slightly unbalanced its grassy
haircut and its balconies sticking out as hesitating
arms, the building can be read as a body in itself,
a personality. As Juhani Pallasmaa suggests in his
description (evocative, indeed) of the project, the
dark tower in the remote Norwegian landscape
can be seen as an architectural portrait, a description without words.8
The Kiasma museum for contemporary art
[fig 3, 4] is situated at the exact point in the city
of Helsinki where the urban structure seems to
fall apart in fragments: the early twentieth century city extension Tl and the Tl Lake on
the North, while south of the site are the two different grids of the inner city. Steven Holls design
for the museum is carefully positioned in this
field of urban forces. The different directions of
the city structure are absorbed in the main composition of the building. Steven Holl speaks of a
line of culture, pointing from the city centre to
Finlandia Hall through the Kiasma building, while
a line of nature responds to the landscape and
the lake 9.
Inside the museum, the entrance hall is the
place where both volumes, and all narratives,
come together. The ramp, next to the inner wall
of the curved volume, has an almost landscapelike quality, as if running in a natural curve between two mountain ridges. The filtered light
coming from above, strengthening this effect.
Meanwhile, the entrance hall is one of the most
urban interiors of Helsinki. This hall, formed by
the encounter of the two volumes, can also be
seen as the encounter between the formal and
the informal. The contrast between formality
and informality is reflected in the formal, imposing spaces in the museum, like the entrance hall
and some of the large exhibition spaces, and then
again the more informal moments in the composition: the freely shaped staircase, the window
facing north, and the caf that presupposes an
informal relation to the public. In this way, the
museum has anchored itself in the city, and made
the site a place of encounter, not only of volumes,
but an encounter of conflicting urban forces, and
of inhabitants and art. Indeed, in Kiasma, details

evoke an embodied experience of space. The
strength of Holls approach might be found in
this evocation, in acknowledging that architecture
actively calls upon the perception of its users and
visitors to become a lived part of its environment.
The museum itself evokes reversibility, vulnerability and incorporation it incorporates the narratives of the site and its history; it is reversible in
its very character, both formal and informal, both
urban and natural; and it is vulnerable in that
it invites visitors to participate in its experience.
Visitors of Kiasma are challenged to experience
the differences in light, the sequence of perceptual frames, and to reverse the relation between
formal and informal, landscape and nature, active
and passive, subject and object. They are guided
in this challenge by light and material, by spaces
of silence and spaces where art and city speak.
7
Hamsun, K. (2001[1890])
Hunger, Edinburgh: Canongate Books Ltd.
8
Pallasmaa, J. An Architectural Portrait. between
the literary and embodied
metaphor, in: Langdalen,
E.F. et al (2010), Hamsun,
Holl, Hamary, Baden: Lars
Mlller Publishers, Baden,
243.
9
Holl, S (2007[1996] ) Intertwining. Selected projects
19891995, New York:
Princeton Architectural
Press, 88-90
10
Hays, K.M. and Damiani, G
(2003), Tschumi, London:
Thames&Hudson, 111
11
Tschumi, B (1994 [1981])
The Manhattan Transcripts,
London: Academy Editions,
7
Methods & Analysis
225
Klaske Havik

BERNARD TSCHUMI ;
A R C H ITE C TU R E A N D E V E NT:
TH E M A N H AT TA N TR A N S C R I P T S
Bernard Tschumis approach is an experimental
one, continuously questioning the limits of the
field of architecture. He uses concepts from other
disciplines such as literature and cinema in order
to arrive at new architectural perspectives. In
Tschumis work, the idea of interactivity between
writer and reader, between the architectural design and its use, plays an important role; the user
of architecture is given an active role, even to the
extent of violation.
Bernard Tschumi has explored how architectural spaces need events and movements in order
to achieve a genuine architectural experience.
Instead of aiming for a fixed image, Tschumi argues that the city only then becomes interesting
when spaces, movements and events meet, and
even contradict each other. Tschumis interdisciplinary investigations have lead to an architectural
approach that deliberately takes into account the
inherently public nature of architecture and its
role as something that offers a place to public
events.10 In The Manhattan Transcripts [fig 5],
Tschumi experiments with the relation between
spaces, movements and events. Literary techniques such as narrative, sequences and experiments with the characters and spaces in the story
result in an alternative theory of architecture.
In The Manhattan Transcripts, Tschumis concern as to how architectural spaces need events
and movements in order to achieve a genuine
architectural experience is addressed in architectural terms. In this project, Tschumi illustrates
that it is necessary to mobilize a new set of instruments to study the rhetorical relation between
the social and the built. By means of a notational
system borrowed from cinema, The Transcripts
try to offer a different reading of architecture, in
which space, movement and events are independent, yet stand in a new relation to one another.11
The Manhattan Transcripts combine architectural
drawings, abstractions of newspaper photographs,
maps of parks and streets, sections of towers and
the movement of people and objects in order
to offer an alternative reading of the relation
between the social and the built in Manhattan.
In four episodes (the park, the street, the tower/
fall, and the block) a story about a murder is told.
Whereas the first part starts off as a linear narrative in which the story is told in a seemingly
rational manner, the following episodes eventu-
04. Bernard Tschumi, First

chapter of the Manhattan Transcripts: 'The
Park' Scans from the
Manhattan Transcripts
1994
226
ally lead to more and more conflicting situations,

dislocations and confrontations between architectural spaces, the programmes and events taking
place and the movement of the people involved.
The project for Parc de la Villette in Paris
[fig 6] allowed Bernard Tschumi to bring the
concepts developed in his theoretical explorations
and experimental projects, such as The Manhattan
Transcripts, into practice. The competition brief
for the Parc de la Villette in 1982 was already
an invitation for new approaches regarding the
park as a public urban space for interaction. Programme, rather than form, was a dominant issue
in the competition brief. It had to become an urban park for the 21st century with a complexity
of public functions: education, leisure, gardens,
culture. For Tschumi, the competition was an
opportunity to bring his dynamic defi nition of
architecture into practice: creating a dynamic,
unstable place that allows architectural narratives
to unfold through events. Tschumis design for
Parc de la Villette is radically different from the
traditional, picturesque idea of a park as a part of
nature in the city. The design, characterized by
a super-imposition of three systems (lines, points
and surfaces), resulted in a new kind of public
space, in which encounters and events are actively
generated. The folies, red architectural objects
spread through the park, work as what Tschumi
calls common denominators, providing public
recognition.. It has to be noted that with the folie,
Tschumi plays a word game: the English Folly12,
for the separate object, becomes the French folie
which means madness. Here, the reference to
Barthes and Batailles aspects of pleasure and
erotics come again to the fore. Tschumis architecture has to provoke unexpected connections:
violence of space, erotics, madness.13 As Tschumi
himself noted:
La Villette promotes programmatic instability, functional Folie. . . . the endless combinatory
possibilities of the folies give way to a multiplicity of impressions. . . . La Villette is a term in
constant production, in continuous change; its
meaning is never fi xed but is always deferred,
differed, rendered irresolute by the multiplicity
of meanings it inscribes.14 This multiplicity of
meanings also means that the narrative is subject
to change; that it is constantly re-interpreted and
re-written by the visitors of the park.
Also in more recent projects, Tschumis ideas

about architectural experience have developed
into operational design concepts, which all have
in common that they actively generate movements
and events. The school of architecture in Marnela Valle, for example, is organized around an
un-programmed, event-oriented large central
space . . . activated by the density around it . . .
A social and cultural space. 15 In cultural centre
Le Fresnoy in Tourcoing [fig 7], the most important space is the left-over space between the
existing buildings and the enormous roof placed
above them. This in-between space is where all
infrastructure is organized and where users and
visitors meet.16 Bernard Tschumis theoretical
investigations have thus lead him to an approach
in architectural practice that is not focused on
form, but on the possibilities of space to generate
extraordinary experiences, to transgress limits of
expectation and to allow for encounters between
people and space.
05. Bernard Tschumi, Cultural Center le Fresniy,

Tourcoing.
Klaske Havik
13
The article Madness and
the combinative, written
in 1984 (when the project
of Parc de la Villette in
Paris was at the core of Tschumis practice) deals with
bringing together the unexpected and the aleatory,
the pragmatic and the passionate, and would turn into
reason what was formerly
excluded from the realm
of architecture because it
seemed to belong to the
realm of the irrational. in:
Tschumi, B (1996) Architecture and Disjunction, Cambridge, Mass./ London: MIT
Press, 172-189
14
Tschumi, B Abstract Mediation and Strategy, in:
Tschumi, B (1996), 201
15
Tschumi, B, Ibelings, H
(1997) Architecture in/of
Motion, Rotterdam: NAI
Publishers, 57
16
For Tschumis reflections
on this project, see for
example the interview
Le Fresnoy with Enrique
Walker, in: Walker, E (1994),
Tschumi on architecture,
conversation with Enrique
Walker, New York: The
Monacelli Press, 115-122.
Methods & Analysis
227
12
In architecture, a folly is a
building constructed primarily for decoration, but
either suggesting by its
appearance some other
purpose, or merely so extravagant that it transcends
the normal range of garden
ornaments or other class of
building to which it belongs.
In the original use of the
word, these buildings had
no other use. 18th century
English gardens and French
landscape gardening often
featured Roman temples,
which symbolized classical virtues or ideals. Other
18th-century garden follies
represented Chinese temples, Egyptian pyramids, ruined abbeys, or Tatar tents,
to represent different continents or historical eras.
Sometimes they represented rustic villages, mills and
cottages, to symbolize rural
virtues. http://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Folly

06. Bernard Tschumi, Competition for Parc de la

Vilette, Paris. Scheme of
superimosed layers
228
R E M KO O LH A A S ;
C R ITI Q U E A N D I M AG I N ATI O N :
URBAN SCRIPTS
Koolhaas was trained as a scriptwriter in Amsterdam before starting his architectural education,
and worked as a journalist, editor and scriptwriter
in the late 1960s.17 Asked about the parallels between scriptwriting and architecture, Koolhaas
states: In a script, you have to link various episodes together, you have to generate suspense and
you have to assemble things through editing,
for example. Its exactly the same in architecture.
Architects also put together spatial episodes to
make sequences.18
Koolhaass scriptive approach informed his
explorations of New York in the 1970s. In Delirious New York, published in 1978 perhaps his
most extensive urban script, and the one that gave
him wide international acclaim Koolhaas calls
himself Manhattans ghostwriter.19 According to
Roberto Gargiani, in his extensive study on the
work of Koolhaas and OMA, Delirious New York
is in itself a conceptual-metaphorical project, a
script where the skyscrapers are the actors and
Manhattan is the stage.20 In fact, Manhattan
is the main character, a personality rather than
a stage, while Koolhaas himself is the director,
bringing the scenes, located in the past, present
or imaginative future of the movie star Manhattan in an overarching urban script.21 By doing
so, he attempted not only to describe the city, but
also to prescribe it, as if to reveal a secret scenario
hidden below Manhattans skyscrapers: the doctrine of Manhattanism, a doctrine that not only
tells the history of Manhattan, but that could
also guide future developments as a conscious
doctrine whose pertinence is no longer limited
to the island of its invention.22 The book presents a number of fictive projects for Manhattan,
design studies made by Koolhaas and his early
OMA co-founders Elia Zenghelis and Madelon
Vriesendorp. If Delirious New York is a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan, then the projects
presented in the fictional conclusion of the book
are the results of a retroactive imagining of what
Manhattan could have become if only its doctrine
were practiced to the very limits. [fig 7] In Delirious New York, metaphors23 play an important role.
Koolhaas argues that the metaphor could serve as
a new way of urban planning: a vocabulary of poetic formulas that replaces objective planning in
favor of a new discipline of metaphoric planning to
07. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious
New York as a scriptive
project by Rem Hoolhaas. / Cover drawing by
Madelon Vriesendorp
08. OMA, The competition

entry for the 'Binnenhof'
Parliament headquarters
deal with a metropolitan situation fundamentally

beyond the quantifiable.24
09. Rem Koolhaas/ OMA,

Kunsthal, Rotterdam
(1992), montage along
internal and public
routes / Photo: Philippe
Ruault
Architecture) (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2011). See
also Gargiani, Rem Koolhaas/OMA, op. cit. (note 1),
45-46.
In Manhattan, each block
functions, according to
Koolhaas, like a separate
island, independent of its
neighbours. Other metaphors present in Delirious
New York are the buildings
like mountains, and the
skyscraper as a city within
a city.
24
Ibid.
25
Programmatical text at the
founding of OMA, in: Lotus
International no. 11 (1976),
34.
26
OMA, Koolhaas, R and Mau,
B (1995) S.M.L,XL, Rotterdam/New York: 010/
The Monacelli Press, 926,
originally published at the
founding of OMA, in Lotus
International no. 11 (1976),
34.
27
It is Roberto Gargiani who,
in his work on Koolhaas
and OMA, uses the term
merveilles as a common
denominator for Koolhaass
projects. Gargiani (2008)
28
A known painting, which
resulted from this work,
was Cadavre Exquis, made
in 1929 by Andr Breton,
Paul Eluard, Valentin Hugo
and Tristan Tzara, collection
Moderna Museet Stockholm.
Klaske Havik

17
Koolhaas was involved
with the Dutch magazine
Haagsche Post as writer
and editor. As a scriptwriter,
his most notable works are
those made with his fellow
students in Filmgroep 123,
some members of which
later became successful
cinematographers or directors. See also Gargiani, R
(2008) Rem Koolhaas/OMA:
The Construction of Merveilles Lausanne: EPFL Press/
Routledge, 3.
18
Evil Can also Be Beautiful, interview with Rem
Koolhaas in: Der Spiegel, 27
March 2006. The interview
was conducted by editors
Matthias Matussek and
Joachim Kronsbein. Available online at http://www.
spiegel.de/international/
spiegel/0,1518,408748-2,
00.html (accessed 27 October 2009).
19
Koolhaas, R (1994 [1978])
Delirious New York. A
Retroactive Manifesto for
Manhattan, New York: The
Monacelli Press, 11.
20
Gargiani (2008), 62.
21
Movie stars who have led
adventure-packed lives
are often too egocentric to
discover patterns, to articulate or express intentions,
too restless o record or
remember events. Ghostwriters do it for them. In the
same way, I was Manhattans ghostwriter. Koolhaas,
(1994[1978]), 11.
22
Ibid., 293.
23
A recurring metaphor is
that of the archipelago. The
term archipelago derived
from earlier discussions
with German architect Matthias Ungers, with whom
Koolhaas closely collaborated. The use of the notion
archipelago in the work of
Ungers and Koolhaas has
been discussed in Pier Vittorio Aurelis dissertation,
The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (Writing
Methods & Analysis
229
In Delirious New York, Koolhaas thus wrote

Manhattan on multiple levels by means of a number of scriptive tools: the use of characters, interpretations of surrealist methods like the paranoid
critical, the use of metaphors, and the montage of
fragments. For Koolhaas, literature is not only a
source of inspiration, but also a mode of looking
at the world. It is no coincidence that Koolhaas
named his office after the metropolitan condition in which the real and the imagined take new
positions. The metropolitan condition, states
Koolhaas, stands for reality shortage.25 The aim
of OMA, then, was to embrace aspects of the maligned metropolitan condition with enthusiasm,
and [which] restore mythical, symbolic, literary,
oneiric, critical and popular functions to large urban centers.26 Indeed, OMAs projects frequently
address such issues, critically producing new urban forms and programmes. The rational modern
approach is changed for a literary one, making use
of fragments, metaphors, characters, playing with
the real and imagined in search of architectural
and urban merveilles.27
Already in the early design projects of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), Koolhaas combined his experience with such scriptive
techniques with a deep interest in the methods of
surrealism. Indeed, early architectural projects,
such as the Exodus project, conducted with Elia
and Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Vriesendorp
during his study at the AA, can be seen as an urban script; reacting to the real, exaggerating the
observed reality, imagining future scenarios. The
Exodus project imagined an extreme future for
London in which part of the historical city would
be replaced by a megastructure, a huge strip in
which various programmes were placed. Fictive
characters (voluntary prisoners) would take part
in rituals and events. The Strip is composed as
a sequence of squares, like different scenes the
characters pass through during the course of the
narrative.
The surrealist game of the cadavre exquis,28 in
which each participant draws a part of a creature
without seeing the previously drawn parts, was a
model for teamwork in the early days of OMA, for
example in the competition project for the Binnenhof Parliament headquarters in The Hague,
19771978. [fig 8] In this project, according to
Koolhaas, the transformative nature of both the
historical Binnenhof site and democratic institutions in general, asked for a radical gesture, a
transformation that confronts the existing amal-
230
gam of historical buildings with a radical modernity. OMA proposed a horizontal slab, breaching
the existing complex, while connected to this
axis, a number of volumes with different characters were added. Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis and
Zaha Hadid independently developed these volumes, which were then assembled by Koolhaas.29
In later works, Koolhaas also makes use the
assemblage of fragments seemingly randomly
in a cadavre exquis or consciously composed in a
montage comes back in a number of projects.
The Kunsthal in Rotterdam (1992) consists of
the montage of the exhibition spaces, auditorium,
restaurant and other functions along two public
routes on the site and the internal route in the
building. [fig 9] While at first sight the building
may look like a simple box, it is the scenographic
assemblage of different spaces a sloping auditorium, a dark exhibition space with trees, a glazed
gallery, an open brightly lit hall by means of
sloping surfaces that generates an experiential
complexity quite opposite to the initial box appearance.
In Koolhaass world, buildings can be characters, such as the New York skyscrapers as depicted by the paintings of Madelon Vriesendorp
in Delirious New York: sharing a bed, taking part
in a scene of love and betrayal. Some OMA-designed buildings, like the terminal for Zeebrugge
(competition, 1989) or the Casa da Msica in
Porto (2004), seem to be personalities, through
their sculptural form proudly taking their place
as strangers, just arrived in a city or at the shore.
About the sculptural form of the Zeebrugge terminal, Koolhaas writes that it should provoke one
to free-associate with successive moods the
mechanical, the industrial, the utilitarian, the abstract, the poetic, the surreal.30
LITE R A RY TO O L S
Looking at architectural and urban design
through a literary point of view, a set of techniques thus arises. First, the receptive attitude of
the poet offers ways to pay attention to perceptual
details. Written notes and sketches that take into
account the multisensory experience of a site, its
temperature and light, the age and haptic characteristics of its materials, are simple but effective
tools to note the otherwise unnoticed aspects that
constitute the very atmosphere of a place. With
such observations, both in writing and in drawing, the subject-object relationship is challenged
and evoked. The watercolours of Steven Holl are
products of such a poetic receptivity to sensory
perceptions.
The analogy, or more specifically the metaphor
as a particular form of analogy, can be a powerful
literary tool creating a clear conceptual point of
departure for a project, which can guide design
decisions. Steven Holl frequently uses metaphors
in his work, which offer guidance for design as
well as recognition for the perceiver of the building. For Holl, the metaphor is closely tied to perception: he states that perception is metaphorical
in the sense that it renders associations, correspondences and meaning. Rem Koolhaas proposed the application of metaphorical planning
on an urban level in Delirious New York. The
metaphor thus offers a critical and artistic tool for
both analysis and design.
The literary character can be used in several
ways. Not only can buildings be conceived as
characters, in a metaphorical way as several projects by Holl and Koolhaas have shown, character
is also a very productive tool to include the users
perspective in architecture. For instance, a possible technique is to take on the perspective of another character, so that the designer for a moment
experiences the spatial composition and materiality of the design as if he or she were a future user.
From this perspective, such aspects as materiality,
routing, programmatic organization, colour or
sound are seen in a different light, and design decisions can be critically evaluated.
A narrative can be brought into play to confront a design with its very use. The narrative,
seen as a connected sequence of events, helps to
see a design in time, by exploring the possible
programmes and events that it may accommodate. In the analysis of locations, existing local
narratives provide insights in the ways places
are lived, used and remembered by inhabitants valuable information for the designer who
29
Gargiani (2008) Project description by OMA in: OMA,
Koolhaas, R and Mau, B
(1995), 278-303.
30
Ibid., 584.
Methods & Analysis
231
Klaske Havik

is dealing with the regeneration of existing sites

and neighbourhoods. A narrative can thus serve
as a base for architectural composition, while it
can also be a mode of investigation. For instance,
through the use of narrative in The Manhattan
Transcripts, Bernard Tschumi attempted to bring
together spaces, movements and events.
Scenario is a literary tool that helps to imagine
multiple possibilities by means of posing what if
questions in regard to future developments. One
can, for instance, use scenarios to test the resilience of an architectural design to accommodate
different activities, or confront the design with
changing circumstances. Scenario is frequently
used as an instrument in urban planning as an
alternative to traditional master planning, since
it provides the possibility to develop multiple alternatives. Rem Koolhaas also used scenario as a
tool in their urban and architectural imaginations.
The use of literary methods can be closely
linked to other modes of working. Doing so more
traditional tools of architecture such as plans and
sections, models, collages and diagrams are used
in close connection to the narratives, characters
and scenarios. Hence, the literary is not merely
focused on the production of text, but rather on
the awareness of experience, use and imagination
that literary techniques can raise. By developing storylines, by shifting perspective from one
timeframe to another or from one character to
another, students become aware of the narrative
qualities of a place, the role of time, and of the
complexity of architectural experience. Literary
modes of observation allow for a more focused
and perceptive reading of a site, while narratives
and scenarios provide ways to develop possible
new situations. When used in design practice, literary tools thus allow us to engage with a broader
set of architectural dimensions; poetic and experiential, social and programmatic, critical and
imaginative.
232
References
Gargiani, R (2008) Rem
Koolhaas/OMA: The
Construction of Merveilles Lausanne: EPFL
Press/Routledge
Hamsun, K (2001[1890])
Hunger, Edinburgh:
Canongate Books Ltd.
Havik, K (2014) Urban Literacy. Reading and Writing
Architecture. Rotterdam:
nai010 publishers.
Hays, K.M. and Damiani, G
(2003), Tschumi, London: Thames&Hudson
Holl, S, Pallasmaa, J, PrezGomez, A (1994), Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture, (Tokyo: A+U)
Holl, S (2007) Architecture
Spoken, New York: Rizzoli
Holl, S (2007[1996]) Intertwining. Selected projects 19891995, New
York: Princeton Architectural Press
Koolhaas, R (1994 [1978])
Delirious New York. A
Retroactive Manifesto for
Manhattan, New York:
The Monacelli Press
OMA, Koolhaas, R and Mau,
B (1995) S.M.L,XL, Rotterdam/New York: 010/
The Monacelli Press
Pallasmaa, J. An Architectural Portrait. between
the literary and embodied metaphor, in: Langdalen, E.F. et al (2010),
Hamsun, Holl, Hamary,
Baden: Lars Mlller Publishers, Baden
Tschumi, B (1994 [1981])
The Manhattan Transcripts, London: Academy Editions
Tschumi, B (1996) Architecture and Disjunction,
Cambridge, Mass./ London: MIT Press
Tschumi, B, Ibelings, H
(1997) Architecture in/of
Motion, Rotterdam: NAI
Publishers
Walker, E (1994), Tschumi
on architecture, conversation with Enrique
Walker, New York: The
Monacelli Press
Fig 1.
Steven Holl Competition
project for Ile Seguin, Paris
2001, inspired by Mallarms
poem Un Coup de Des.
Fig 2.
Knut Hamsun Center,
Hamary, Norway, 2009.
This museum is dedicated
to the Norwegian writer
Knut Hamsun. (photo Iwan
Baan)
Fig 3.
Early sketch (1992) by Steven Holl, showing the position of the museum at the
hinge of various urban and
natural forces.
Fig 4.
Steven Holl, the central hall
of the Kiasma Museum of
Contemporary Art in Helsinki. (Photo Paul Warchol)
Fig 5.
Bernard Tschumi, First
chapter of The Manhattan Transcripts: The Park.
Scans from The Manhattan
Transcripts 1994.
Fig 6.
Bernard Tschumi, Competition for Parc de la Villette,
Paris. Scheme of superimposed layers
Fig 7.
Bernard Tschumi, Cultural
Center Le Fresnoy, Tourcoing.
Fig 8.
Rem Koolhaas. Delirious
New York as a scriptive
project. Cover drawing by
Madelon Vriesendorp
Fig 9.
OMA, The competition entry for the the Binnenhof
Parliament headquarters,
19771978, was conceived
as a cadavre exquis
Fig 10.
Rem Koolhaas / OMA, Kunsthal, Rotterdam (1992),
montage along internal
and public routes (photo
Philippe Ruault)
233
Methods & Analysis
Klaske Havik

THE
WHY
FACTORY
234
In present day society there is a

tendency that describes a huge
collective desire. The intriguing thing now is how that kind of
desire effects individualism, and
how it affects our cities, and if
that will lead to other kinds of cities, and if that will lead to other
kinds of organizations, and so on.
Architects need to start looking
forward again. Even the most cynical architect on the planet cannot
deny that his or her architecture
is constructing alternatives and
that no matter how small they
are, how modest they are, how
local they are, even how mediocre they are, they must have an
ingredient of optimism. We need
to take that optimism and reclaim
the future of our cities.
Education and research of The

Why Factory are combined in a
research lab and platform that
aims to analyse, theorise and
construct future cities. The Why
Factory investigates within the
given world and produces future
scenarios beyond it; from universal to specific and global to local.
It proposes, constructs and envisions hypothetical societies and
cities; from science to fiction and
vice versa. The Why Factory thus
acts as a future world scenario
making machinery. The research
projects are positioned in a classical research tripod of models,
views and software; of model cities, applications and storage. The
model City Program speculates
on possible theoretical models
in the model city program. Model
Cities concentrates on the conceptualization and modeling of
cities, each within its own limited
set of parameters that allow for
maximal exploration of a specific
subject in order to engage with
possible futures. The applications program makes counter
proposals for existing cities.
The Software program stores its
knowledge through an evolutionary gaming program.
The Why Factory
235
The Why Factory (T?F) is a global

think-tank and research institute,
run by MVRDV and Delft University
of Technology and led by professor Winy Maas. It explores possibilities for the development of our
cities by focusing on the production of models and visualisations
for cities of the future.
236
The Why Factory
Susanne Komossa
237
Profession architect: insight into the spatial

consequences of building and the capacity to
dream the future with a technical understanding.
Interview with Winy Maas,

Rotterdam fall 2013
Susanne Komossa

consequences of building and the capacity to dream
the future with a technical understanding.
238
Winy Maas
Winy Maas (Schijndel, 1958) is

a Dutch architect, landscape architect, professor and urbanist.
In 1993 together with Jacob van
Rijs and Nathalie de Vries he set
up MVRDV. Early work such as
the television centre Villa VPRO
and the housing estate for elderly
WoZoCo, both in the Netherlands,
have brought him international
acclaim and established MVRDVs
leading role in international architecture
He completed his studies at
the RHSTL Boskoop, graduating
as a landscape architect, and in
1990 he got his degree from the
Delft University of Technology. He
currently is visiting professor of
architectural design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
and is professor in architecture
and urban design at the faculty of
architecture, Delft University of
Technology. Before this he was
professor at among others Berlage Institute, Ohio State and Yale
University. In 1993, together with
Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de
Vries, he founded the MVRDV studio (an acronym of the initials of
the names of the three founders),
which produces designs and studies in the fields of architecture,
urban studies and landscape design. The studies on light urbanism for the City of Rotterdam, the
headquarters of the Dutch Public
Broadcasting Company VPRO
and the Wozocos senior citizens
residences in Amsterdam, which
won the J.A. van Eyck Prize of the
Dutch Architects Association,
have brought MVRDV to the attention of a vast collection of clients,
giving the studio international renown. Today, the studio is actively
involved in numerous projects in
various parts of the world. MVRDV
designed the Dutch pavilion for
Expo 2000 in Hanover, the Logrono Eco-City in Spain, the
Gyre building in Tokyo and many

others. Winy Maas presented a
keynote address New solutions
for new challenges at the inaugural Holcim Forum, Basic Needs
at the ETH Zurich in 2004.As
addition he designs stage sets,
objects and was curator of Indesem 2007. He is member of the
research board of Berlage Institute Rotterdam, president of the
spatial quality board of Rotterdam
and supervisor of the Bjorvika
urban development in Oslo. He
is director of the Why Factory, a
research institute for the future
city he founded in 2008 which is
connected to the Faculty of Architecture of the Delft University of
Technology.
AR1TWF010 The Why Factory
Design Studio: Design lab I
Actualities Workshop
AR1TWF030 The Why Factory:
Future Models I
Future Models II
Future Views
Graduation Studio
Could you tell us something about your

education in Delft, your background
and your teachers?
The faculty was a rich environment

of interesting figures. The first day I
entered the school, I saw two persons
presenting their graduation project on
Rotterdam housing, with a full audience. It turned out that they were called
Francine Houben and Erik van Egeraat,
who co-founded the architecture firm
of Mecanoo. They were graduating that
day. I was intrigued. The second day
Aldo van Eyck gave a lecture and he had
a sack over his head, so you could only
hear half of what he was saying, but I
found it highly amusing and I was sure
I went to the right place. Later he went
away and Herman Herzberger took over.
To maximise my shopping experience
I worked with different people and used
their different qualities, both in school
as in practice.
To others I felt less attracted. I was
never attracted to the polemics of Leen
van Duin, Henk Engel or Carel Weber.
Max Risselada in my opinion was too
much connected to Le Corbusier and
Adolf Loos. In the end I experienced
the polarity between Herzberger and
Koolhaas. Some critics tell me that this
polarity is still very visible in our work
by making the conceptual slightly more
humanitarian. It could also be the other
way around: to make the humanitarian
more conceptual.

Secondly, which is important to understand how I looked at Delft, is the fact

that I could skip my Propedeuse (First
Years Program) of the Bachelor in Urbanism and Landscape because of my
previous study in Boskoop. Later I could
also convince the dean to skip the first
year of Architecture because of the way
I was working, though in the beginning
this seemed difficult because my technical skills would not be sufficient. So at
that point I was very pleased to have the
possibility to shop around in the architecture and urbanism departments of
the faculty since I was always fascinated
to mix these disciplines. With this idea
of academic shopping, my intention was
to get as much as possible out of the institution.
For studios I always preferred to work in

a group, both for Urbanism and Landscape as for Architecture. We organized
our own projects, the so-called ZOPs
(Zelf Opgezet Project/Self Organized
Projects) at that time. In that way we
were able to set our own agendas. We
ended up with our own graduation studio tutored by Rem Koolhaas, and Ben
van Berkel.
Susanne Komossa
WM First of all I have done my studies at the

TU Delft always part-time. After I had
finished my studies of Landscape Architecture at the RHSTL in Boskoop I
had to pay for my own studies since my
father was rather disappointed when I
decided not to work in his garden centre
as a landscape architect. To finance my
own studies I had several jobs in between; I worked for the Municipality of
Amsterdam on the citys parks and gardens, Ashok Bhalotra invited me to work
on a project with him in India, I was
working abroad for UNESCO and in
the end with Rem Koolhaas/OMA. So I
always had the idea that I could experiment outside the university and to use
the Faculty of Architecture in its pure
essence, namely as a fantastic academic
supermarket where I could shop around
for three days a week, because what
Delft offered has been really spectacular.
I did all my courses as quick as possible
and I almost never went to lectures but
focused all my attention on studios, especially the studio of Rein Saariste and
Vincent Ligtelijn, and the work I was
doing. I was always in between practice
and school.
And with my half outside ness I became

more engaged with society, which is in
my eyes an essential role for the profession of an architect. I always encourage
students to make internships everywhere, not only to be better equipped
after graduation, but also to build up
connections and a portfolio, which goes
beyond a mere academic portfolio.
The Why Factory
239
SK
240
Within the field of Urbanism, Donald

Lambert who embraced the American
way of approaching Urbanism taught
me. The American Method is based on
data and the theory of making qualities
into zonings. The department of Urbanism had a nice mixture of characters,
which didnt talk with each other much
I guess. Rein Geurtsen was a morphologist who could stay a bit vague but in
the end he just loved to define beautiful
urban spaces. I share that with him and
with my landscape background. Peter
Dubois had sought the somehow holistic
aspect within architecture.
SK
This mix becomes apparent in our work,

the crossover of different scales from the
detail to the max scale is what we pursue
and take as a position in our office, even
when we design a house. In that sense
the blue houses in Rotterdam advocate
densification and advertise to open up
the city for middle class again. These
three professions have continued in our
practise.
In architectural terms I think the position between Herman Herzberger and
Rem Koolhaas has created an historical juxtaposition or development that
needed to be answered; where Herman
Herzberger ultimately works on the
smaller scale and becomes slightly more
emotional than scientific when he works
in the bigger scale, while Rem Koolhaas
is a master of the overview. If they come
together indeed great things can come
out.
When did you start to mix these different backgrounds of Landscape, Urbanism and Architecture?
WM In that sense, Clemens Steenbergen,

who was able to rationalise the landscape, has been a big example for me. He
did better things then he got credits for.
There are different ways to understand
the different notions of Landscape and
Urbanism. In the French school Lcole
Nationale dHorticulture everything
is about the beauty of plants and the
change of plantation over time. I think
Clemens Steenbergen was as specific
as a mathematician and showed how
morphology could become a science like
the Versailles school could tell which
plant would survive in which conditions.
He showed how infinity could be constructed in a scientific way. Infinity, as
one of the most interesting, if not most
important, issues for landscape architecture and philosophy, can also be a
tool for architecture. This goes back to
monumentality, the will of being endless
and is still relevant today since sustainability plays a very important role in architecture. Infinity could be an aim or a
field of study that goes beyond the space.
We can also look at the way in which the
route architecturale has been developed
by Le Corbsusier and Adolf Loos. This
shows one of the possible mixes of urbanism, landscape and architecture.
SK
What is your position vis--vis history,

present and future?
WM There is a true treasure to be found in

the past. People have given their lives
over the past 3000 years to architecture.
To disrespect these milestones of quality
they have laid before us would be rather
stupid. So it helps to know them and to
refer to them when needed. Sometimes
when we are convincing the client of the
level of abstraction and quality you want
to achieve in certain projects. Sometimes
the past serves as a base for development. Sometimes as an echo of the monumental and heroism. These theories
are dredged throughout our work. We
learned from Schinkel how to position
our building the most appropriate in the
landscape and how it could have the best
overview over the Elysian Fields. We
learn how Pompeii and Troy positioned
themselves as a prototype to accept the
past. We were fighting the battle of the
over-simplicity and reductionism of
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the rest
after that. We can learn from Boulles
ball that 24/7 hours architecture can exist.
When does a prototype become a

paradigm? Or maybe stacking different
paradigms produces a new prototype?
Being more aware of this mechanism
could help us to understand how architects work?
WM Your observation is correct, but that can

also be an endless killer. The dichotomy
between those two terms (although
correct) doesnt mean it can help to innovate yet, in reality it is more complex.
Anyway, architecture can be already a
beautiful science if innovation follows
the repertoire of this dichotomy. It can
be for instance about super-mixing,
maximising everything. Or the opposite:
a hyper reductive method to test one parameter and its values in a way. It could
also be by maximising parameters. All
these are attempts to evoke innovation
by showing how far we can go by requesting escapes: it is almost a law that
we have to change in order to innovate,
to arrive at different techniques of innovation.
SK
Do you have to break the circle to bring

in something new or to stress a certain
aspect to move this couple a bit further?
WM Yes. Clearly history has shown 90 %

of the built mass has been formulated
through compromise. The mix of budget, taste and modesty has led to this 90%
loss. There are techniques to escape
from that and it can be important to
warn for the dangers.
SK
Are future and innovation each others

equivalents?

But the future is not only about that obviously; it is very wide. We (should) want
to install new prototypes as well, which
can be complicated, since lots already
have been done. We want and are able
SK
Susanne Komossa
The idea is to improve prototypes, which

have proven some of their qualities in
the past. Taking from the past into the
future but maybe in new combinations,
and in different contexts. Like we used
the Plan Obus of Le Corbusier, which
was never built, as a prototype for Celosia in Madrid. However, now we had to
build it for 800 euro per m2. With the
help of computer technologies we suddenly were able to make it possible. That
is in itself is an innovation. We made
four gardens, which are affordable nowadays. Plan Obus was a wonderful idea
so lets see how it can be realised in current conditions. At the same time Plan
Obus has never been built and often
criticized because of its repetition factor, its monotony. Our attempt to make
one road urbanism in the north of Spain
in Legroo was the simple result of the
lack of money; more infrastructure than
this one road was just not affordable. It
forced us to make high-rise along this
one road. So Plan Obus of Le Corbusier
as a larger plan is gratuity realised in
the hills of northern Spain. This is also
a way to use, develop and overcome the
past. You can call it innovation.
to stack more landscapes now, ten years

after the World Expo 2000 pavilion. Additionally, also then we had a reference
to Reyner Benham, to certain examples
from America, to fantasy worlds, etc.
So at the one hand we have developed
a prototype with that building, at the
other hand this was also after other inventions had been made. The pavilion
formed a part of an evolutionary chain.
It could become itself a prototype on
certain aspects.
The Why Factory
241
Somehow we can say that by referring to

earlier inventions and improving or developing them, one can become scientific. In the nineties there was a tendency
to not refer to precedents or prototypes,
but to aim at being totally original, authentic, and autonomous, and there was
a super culture of newness. It didnt
prove to be completely successful. Too
many architects actually became the
same. More blobs than ever. Etcetera. In
fact the treasure of the past is very helpful, even when new technologies come
in or sociologists give a new perspective
on architecture. Some inventions were
so strong that they could meet current
agendas or demands and technologies. I
call it copy paste with a smiley behind it,
because it is more than literal copy pasting.
1.
242
2.
3.
1. Celosia MVRDV
2. Eco City MVRDV
3. Plan Obus
Le Corbusier
WM All are paradigmatic, as they select a

paradigmatic base. I could explain it best
within the oeuvre itself. That can be
seen as a step-by-step method based on
some paradigms. We dont need to put
everything in every building. We could
put a certain aspect in each project,
One of the big qualities of MVRDV is

the formulation of a good problem
statement and to take the statement
as a basis to work on a project. How do
you formulate a good problem statement?
WM Beside the given program, another

strong key figure is that we believe that
everybody wants the right answer. What
is a right answer? That leads immediately to many questions. It is more than
the brief. When we got the assignment
of the Flight Forum plan in Eindhoven
for instance, situated next to the airport,
the clients wanted to make an industrial
area, often characterized by fenced off
plots where a relatively low amount of

Do you have a design approach that

could be called paradigmatic? Or in
other words, do you use tools like
morphology, typology, plan analysis
or phenomenology? Do you combine
them and how? Do you have a specific
approach for every assignment?
SK
Susanne Komossa
SK
which can still be connected by shared

fascinations or paradigms that we think
that need to be investigated. Intensity
and density are such paradigms. Born
in the nineties they can be seen as an
answer to the club of Rome with their
doom about the culture of growth and
consumerism. So it can be positioned
in time. Most of our designs deal with
that subject in different ways. Of course
they come out of the clients demands
and fascinations, but sometimes because
we suggest something to sharpen that
consideration. The blue houses in Rotterdam would never exist if we didnt
had suggested that. To show to the later
clients that they could build on top,
avoiding them to move out of the city.
Another one. The Almere Oosterwolde
project is about hyper-free urbanism.
When Arie Duivenstijn was looking for
an urban designer that was able to organise this hyper freedom, I told him
that his ideas were not radical enough.
Subsequently I proposed to extend his
ideas of architecture to urbanism. Also
roads and other infrastructures can be
free, that is: maintained by the citizens
themselves. But there are more aspects
or paradigms, like the desire to work
within a so-called pop-zone, meaning
living with participation. And other paradigms like consciously living with temporality, to question conventions, which
resulted in a sort of light-urbanism. The
themes are all there. Some are very longrunning some rise from actuality.
The Why Factory
243
WM Yes for sure. I do think the future is

somehow the most interesting period
to work in. The future is unrevealed,
unknown. Architecture and especially
urbanism and landscape architecture
are about preparing for the future. The
relative slowness of these disciplines is
asking for it even. You design something
now and maybe six years later it can be
built and in urbanism this process takes
even longer. I miss it in the architectural debate how to work in the future
and being able to predict. The debate
especially in Italy, less in the US, has
been dominated by the past. We can
think about the past and develop models
how to deal with the future. So there
are certain models like the grid (both in
urbanism as well as in architecture) to
maintain neutral collective ideals. Sometimes we rely too much on those models
and I tried to discuss that in our Almere
Oosterwold plan. In this plan we dont
need a grid to facilitate hyper diversity
and (semi) individuality but we want to
distinguish and develop the space between individualism and the collective.
How can the collective emerge from
individualism? How can we deal and
develop a responsibly with and for that?
Sociologists clearly indicate that people
have two tendencies: at the one hand
people want to be free and different, on
the other they cannot be alone and need
each other. That is the beauty of that
project because it wants to specify this as
directly as possible, by developing new
design laws. It is one example to study
the future and to experiment with and
learn from upcoming behaviour.
4.
244
5.
4. Urban Plan Almere

Oosterwold MVRDV
5. Flight Forum MVRDV
The question goes hand in hand with

the potential and is an easy way to test
possible solutions quickly. After testing
them, you work on the level of nuances
so it can become a strong figure. Such
a gesture can cover more aspects. A site
wish, how can you see in the projects
more problems and challenges.
SK
Another Delft term: Speculation reasoning with inconclusive evidence. How

do you speculate and how do you deal
with the lack of evidence?
WM Good one. In our projects it is clearly

visible. It is one of the techniques in the
attempt of revealing the future. Many
people criticize speculation and see it as
a negative non-scientific term but it can
be immensely useful when predicting
or testing the future. In fact the popu-
Also comparative scenario thinking and

writing is still a useful source to make
incredible unknown landscapes, drawings, buildings; the what-if-zone as an
eye-opener. The mixture of scenarios is
another one. The evolution of a scenario
is yet an additional one. Yes, scenario
thinking is an important tool for speculation.
SK
There is a book called Unpacking my

library in which renowned architects
present their favourite books. Which
books would be your 5 favourite ones?
WM Until now I always refused to answer

that question. Because you have many of
these kind of questions in magazines and
newspapers like this. Actually it is an
impossible question to answer. We were
probably the last generation to compile
a library. I love the books I have read
and I will never throw any of them away,
both novels as technical books. So I can
and will not pick one. Recent books are
the ones that are just influencing you the
most.

Details are in that respect important

premises in our work. Details can make
a strong figure, they make the project
recognisable and understandable and
can turn it into a success. You started
the question with phenomenology and
terms, which were very popular in Delft
at the time. With this answer, I wanted
to create some clarity in the debate, offer
some mark stones, within this vague terminology, which I did not understand in
those days,
Susanne Komossa
lar data analysis program as SPSS, and

especially the latest versions, are able to
forecast future trends. SPSS statistics
can analyse how certain data transgresses within time and using Gauss
curves they can already (dis)cover the
close future. This can be seen as a highly
advanced form of speculation. Moreover speculation can deepen knowledge
that cannot grow yet at the moment. For
example when you are thinking about
a city where you can reach everything
within say 4 minutes, you can ask yourself how to achieve that. That can be
clearly developed and designed. It can
show the costs and the impossibilities.
Such fantasies help to speculate about a
fast city. You could make a model, which
makes that possible and at that point it
would become part of our knowledge.
People recognise speculation as a potential problem solver, which is capable of
shifting stagnating agendas. However
you have to isolate things due to the
complexity of todays issues to be able to
speculate on them and then they could
come back in the design.
The Why Factory
245
land is actually occupied by buildings.

Only the first row has a high ground
price and the ones behind are relatively
cheap and worthless. Do you really
want something like that? we asked. We
could also see the potential of that site,
namely the fact that we could re-design
the given of the planned highway. What
happens if all buildings have an address
on that highway and are directly accessible? Then there would be no backstreets
and you achieve more quality. How to do
that? This led to proposals for changing
the design of the highway, to split it, to
give it connections, a beautiful spaghetti.
What is the thing at hand? The recipe is
to fire back questions towards the commissioner, to test potential qualities and
to build up a shared argumentation for
improvement. And keep asking the right
questions within the office.
246
6. Evolution of agriculture
(b), infrastructure (a)
and housing (c)
MVRDV
Is the tradition of engineering, which is

present in Delft important for you?
The Why Factory
247
SK
Susanne Komossa
WM It was my dream to find that in Delft,

but I was very disappointed after 6 years.
The relationship between the Faculty of
Architecture and the rest of the university is so incredibly poor. There was no
connection with ICT, there was no connection with Chemistry to learn more
about materials and material visualisation, there was no connection with Civil
Engineering to learn from constructive
design, even though we were neighbours.
Not only the Faculty of Architecture is
accountable for the lack of collaboration,
but also the other faculties have created
a certain distance. The roles of the rectors were over-concentrated on some key
factors and in my opinion not advanced.
The philosophy professor Doorman was
the only one in that time who wanted to
span the enormous gaps, he was fantastic
and was ready to cross that border.

If I would be the rector, my aim would

be to connect better within the faculty
and the rest of the university and make
use of engineering capacities around us.
Technologies are and will be one of the
major drivers of innovations. People are
very focussed on competing while better
collaboration methods would enhance
the collective knowledge. Eventually
collaborations could even get more financial subsidies to test the different
elements of the research. The task is to
simply change temporarily curricula and
make those kinds of research groups that
would be so much more exciting. In fact,
at the moment there are such clustered
experiments, but they are not visible
enough. There is a lot to win from that.
Besides that, maybe it seems contradictory that, specialisation is hyper needed
because of complexity. Having said that,
you sit in front of one of the most generic
architects in the world. You cannot cover
everything as a generalist. You need the
specialist. In the end specialism needs
to have a generic component in order to
understand each others specialisation.
Draw up text: Linda de Vos, Stephanie Snellenberg
II.
248
DEPARTMENT
OF
ARCHITECTURAL
ENGINEERING
AND
TECHNOLOGY
II Departement of Architectural Engineering and

Technology
249
Departement of Architectural Engineering and Technology
HERITAGE &
ARCHITECTURE
250
Heritage & Architecture focuses

on design projects in which the
past strongly determines their future development. Re-use of existing structures will be the most
important architectural assignment in the coming period. In the
last decades, the relation towards
our built heritage has changed
from an attitude of preservation
and musealizing of objects into
much more dynamic and more development-oriented approaches.
Heritage is seen as a factor
that vitally contributes to the
quality of the living environment.
Heritage often gives direction
to new developments and is in
that sense not only an important
cultural but also an unmistakable economic force. Even for
objects that have great value
as monuments, the accent has
shifted from back to the past to
onward with the past.
The chair focuses on the architectural design of heritage with
scientific research as a starting
point. Program, design concept
and elaboration of the design are
the result of thorough analyses
of the original building and its
context from an architectonic,
cultural-historical and technological viewpoint. The chair prioritizes
the research questions and is
sensitive to the research results.
The expertise of the chair lies in
the architectural design as end
product.

Technology / Heritage & Architecture
251
The past plays a role in all design

projects that operate within an existing context. The Heritage & Architecture (former RMIT) section
focuses on the design of the built
heritage. Heritage is interpreted
in the broadest sense and should
be distinguished from a particular
objects or ensembles monumental status.
252
Paul Meurs
Paul Meurs (Doorn, 1963) is full

professor of Heritage & Cultural
Value at the faculty of Architecture
and the Built Environment, Delft
University of Technology. He concentrates on the transformation
of existing cities, in particular how
the past can be accommodated in
the future. What is the quality of a
given building? How do you maintain the soul of a city? And what
does the future hold in store for
Cultural Heritage Agencies? The
main theme running through his
work is the idea that we should
not preserve quality the result of
that would be museum cities but
to include it in the development
of cities. Meurs researches how
we can depict existing values at
different levels of scale (from city
to building). Meurs has his own
company, SteenhuisMeurs, that
focuses on research and advice
for urban and architectural transformations. In 2000 he gained his
doctorate from the VU University
Amsterdam for his research into
inner city transformations in the
Netherlands between 1883 and
1940. He has also published extensively on Brazilian architecture
and urban architecture. Meurs is
supervisor of the Oosterpark in
Amsterdam and three residential
neighbourhoods in Leiden. He is
also a member of the supervisory
team for Strijp R (Eindhoven) and
advisor to the Supervisory Board
of the non-profit realestate developer Boei. He published with
Marie-Thersee van Thoor, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam: Restauration and transformation of a national monument, Rotterdam 2013
and Zonnestraal Sanatorium, The
History and Restoration of a Modern Monument, Rotterdam 2010.
With Marinke Steenhuis he published: Herbestemming in Nederland, nieuw gebruik van stad en
land, Rotterdam 2011. He teaches
Masters students and supervises
students in their graduation phase
and also PhD students.

Paul Meurs
253

Design with history
Paul Meurs

Design with history
254
01. Beemster: large scale
heritage. The entire
municipality has become
world heritage
1
Een cultuur van ontwerpen, Visie Architectuur en
Ruimtelijk Ontwerp, architectuurnota 2009-2012, The
Hague 2008
2
Marinke Steenhuis and Paul
Meurs, Herbestemming in
Nederland, nieuw gebruik
van stad en land, Rotterdam
2011, 6-16
3
NAi Publishers, Architecture
yearbooks in the Netherlands, Rotterdam 20002012; Robert Klanten and
Lucas Feireiss, Build-On,
converted architecture and
transformed buildings, Berlin 2009

255
Paul Meurs

Design with history
The current building production in the Netherlands and other countries in Europe is not so
much based on urban growth and expansion, but
rather consolidation and redevelopment of the existing building stock.1 This means that the architect of today has a very different task to the one he
had in the previous century. In the last century,
architecture was based very much on functional
analysis and generic concepts on construction
and use. This is how archetypes were developed
for schools, hotels, residential buildings, etc., that
can be found all over the world. Over the years,
the ambition to create projects with a spectacular and recognizable identity gained importance,
for example for placemaking and city marketing.
The majority of architectural projects today starts
with a different ambition and requires a different design approach. The typical question now is
what can be done with an existing building, such
as a rundown office, an old school, an abandoned
factory or a redundant church. Another starting
point in current practise is the question where a
suitable place can be found for a new function,
somewhere in an existing building or on a location within the existing city. Matching supply
(locations and buildings) and demand (function)
has become a field of expertise in itself. It is no
longer taken for granted that the architect can
provide added value to the renovation and transformation process. It turns out that there are few
ready-made solutions, however there are plenty of
opportunities for unconventional arrangements of
programme, space and architecture.2 Unexpected
opportunities for functional combinations and
synergy arise when the existing urban landscape
is redesigned and reprogrammed. The city can be
reinvented with high quality and innovative urban
spaces, remaining its soil and character.
The transformed buildings continue to reflect what they were, but their new functions are
concealed. For example, Groningen now has a
supermarket in the historic korenbeurs (grain
market). In Winschoten, a dilapidated factory
has been converted into a theatre. Mosques are
created in old school buildings and huge defunct
factories seem to be able to house half of a citys
populace. It is striking that the Architecture
Yearbook of recent years contains more and more
reuse, redevelopment and restoration projects.
More than ever before, architecture is focussed on
the redesignation of and interventions in historic
buildings.3 The building production has in effect
become a rebuilding production. The collapse of
256
the housing and office markets has resulted in an

epidemic of vacant buildings and spaces in the
Netherlands. There are millions of square metres
of empty office space, factories, churches, monasteries, farms, shops, residences above shops and
residential areas in regions with declining populations.4
The challenge to convert existing building
and cities for new types of use requires architects
with specific skills and talents. The most important are: knowledge and expertise, creativity,
social skills and the ability to serve the context.
Knowledge is part of the craftsmanship that is
indispensable to be able to build sustainably in
an existing environment, by taking a smart approach to building techniques, building systems
and building rules. Knowledge of the latest building installations is important, but so too are the
skills of the craftsman and the attention to detail.
Expertise is required to be able to analyse and
understand the existing city and its buildings; not
based on preconceived ideas or superficial observations, but building on a real understanding of
the aspirations, potentials and limitations that led
to the creation of the spaces concerned. Of course
creativity is indispensable in design. It is needed
to give outdated spaces a boost, to translate potentials into actual quality and to bring out the
best of the combination of old and new. The designers social skills are more important than ever,
because the existing city is inhabited by assertive
citizens, and when areas are redesignated then
alliances will need to be forged between a great
many stakeholders involved in the transformation
processes. Finally, the architect has to be able to
serve the context. This means that the architect
has a sensitivity for historical, spatial and social
context. The designer needs to have a sense of
the qualities and meanings that are already there:
the identity and soul of a space, that one would
hope would survive an architectural intervention
(either in contrast or blended in). The ability to
serve the context in the architectural sense is revealed in the design itself, but also in the design
process; being open to the creative suggestions
of the other stakeholders. Redevelopment is a
prime example of a process of co-creation and coauthorship.5
It is a misconception that the redevelopment of

cultural heritage automatically leads to historical
or retro designs. On the other hand, the idea that
adding contrast is always the right solution as
with the glass protuberances of the 1970s and
1980s is nonsense too. It all comes down to
what the space itself requires: retro, reconstruction, simulation, contrast or continuity of shape,
composition, materialization or detailing. It is
the task of the architect to define his position on
the basis of an open-minded vision of the space.
A city centre, that may have arisen over many,
many centuries, with major differences between
the buildings and at the same a morphological
and typological melting pot requires different architectural interventions than homogeneous areas that date back to just one construction
phase. A small addition to an already complete
composition will generally have less impact than
newbuild projects intended to bring harmony to
a fragmented district, or new construction in a
highly diverse region. The analysis of the city and
its buildings is fundamental to making the right
design choices. The challenge here is to be able to
describe the essential cultural values of a space.
Such studies develop into specialisations in their
own right, where architects and cultural historians work together.
When designing for a heritage site or historic
environment (which labels are quickly assigned to
property in the Netherlands of today), it is important to be able to explain what the consequences
of the intervention are for the existing space and
why certain choices have been made. Will a historic building survive this intervention? Will the
heritage value be overwhelmed or concealed by
the new addition? And another question: has
every opportunity been taken to increase quality
or make connections, for example with the environment? 6 The made-to-measure solution that
the historical context requires can be found by
examining the existing qualities and describing
the essential characteristics of the site, and then
creating the design on the basis of these qualities.
This will also result in an architectural narrative
that the local community, the heritage specialists
and the politicians can recognise and understand.
Redevelopment almost always implies that the designer leaves certain parts of a space untouched:
the art of heritage preservation is literally based in
part on doing nothing. Of course, new meaning
and social relevance can only be created if there is
also space to enhance, renew and make new connections.
Paul Meurs
4
Nationaal Programma Herbestemming, Akte van Herbestemming, Amersfoort
2011
5
Steenhuis and Meurs 2011,
14-16
6
RCE (et al), Richtlijnen bouwhistorisch onderzoek, The
Hague, 2009
7
Jukka Jokilehto, A history
of Architectural Conservation, Oxford 1999; Stephan
Tschudi Madsen, Restoration and Anti-Restoration,
a study in English restoration philosophy, Oslo 1976;
W.F. Denslagen, Omstreden
herstel, Kritiek op het restaureren van monumenten,
Zeist and The Hague, 1987;
J.A.C. Tillema, Schetsen
uit de geschiedenis van de
monumentenzorg in Nederland, The Hague 1975.
8
A Monuments Inventory
Project was carried out in
the Netherlands between
1986 and 1995. The inventory examined 154,943 objects from the period 18501940; 9% was subsequently
listed as heritage building.
Source: RCE, Erfgoedbalans, Amersfoort, 2009
9
Erfgoed Nederland, Jaaroverzicht Monumenten, archeologie en Cultuurlandschap 2010, Amsterdam 2011

257

Design with history
TH E N E TH E R L A N D S
A S A H E R ITAG E S IT E
The long history of heritage based design has
been characterised by various trends and slowly
but surely evolving insight.7 A century ago, the
focus was on maintaining exceptional buildings in
the cities, such as churches and town halls. Typically, the surrounding area which might consist
of medieval houses was demolished to ensure a
good view of the church or other building in question. The building itself then ended up rather isolated in a huge empty space, like an archaeological
find in a showcase. Later, the realisation dawned
that the great historic buildings were in fact best
preserved in their natural environments, in other
words in conjunction with the surrounding, albeit
insignificant buildings. It was not until after the
war that the city as a whole (the entire area within
the former defensive walls) came to be seen as a
historic entity: a fabric forming an urban whole
that could be broken down into a structure (the
urban fabric), limits, contour, silhouette, morphological composition, buildings (architecture) and
a system of public and open spaces. Then it was
realised that the more recently built areas in the
villages and cities had cultural and historical value as well.8 Alongside the historic ensembles (like
country estates), these concerned industrial areas,
urban expansion dating from the 19th, early 20th
and post-war periods and green developments.
Thus, almost imperceptibly, the entire country
came to have potential heritage value. The figures
speak for themselves. The Netherlands has 50,000
national heritage buildings, 50,000 municipal
heritage buildings, 500 provincial heritage buildings, 450 protected historic village and cityscapes,
1400 archaeological sites and 9 World Heritage
Sites (including the Wadden Sea and Willemstad
on Curacao).9 There are also a number of valuable landscapes (once known as the Belvedere
areas) and an extensive system of national parks.
The consequence of the scaling-up of the
heritage conservation effort (both in extent and
in number) is that the sector no longer focuses
only on the exceptional highlights which are
then elevated above the mundane reality of daily
life but instead concentrates on the historical
stratification and the spatial quality of the everyday living environment. That means a change in
thinking about heritage, whereby the goal will become to contribute to the quality of developments
and changes. The transformation of old buildings
and other heritage sites is the order of the day,
258
02. Reconstruction:
Frauenkirche, Dresden
Paul Meurs

Design with history
DESIGNING IN A
H I S TO R I C A L C O NT E X T
The current building and rebuilding production,
with its countless historical contexts, poses many
challenges to the designers. Sometimes it will be
something old that needs to be made suitable for
modern use, sometimes it will require interventions or additions to existing structures, sometimes a completely new development is planned
which is to incorporate existing (historic) components. And sometimes the brief is to design a
completely new development in an old part of a
town, with its own character and spatial logic. A
look at some of the recent redesignation projects
reveals a multitude of design solutions that lean
on only a handful of guiding principles. The approach is in general a choice between a) preserving or restoring the former glory of the space (traditional restoration); b) the intervention design:
the architectonic design using all the tricks for
combining old and new (contrast, assimilation,
composition, etc.); or c) the intervention nondesign which focuses on programme, sustainability and integration. Today, radical architectural
interventions are difficult to realise, and more
and more bottom-up projects are being developed
in which the programmatic mix and the temporary or permanent layout are the most important
aspects of the design. In these projects, architectural engineering appears to be losing importance
to technical, social and process engineering.
10
Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, Beleidsbrief Modernisering van
de Monumentenzorg, The
Hague 2009
11
Gerard Marlet and Clemens
van Woerkens, Atlas voor
Gemeenten 2012, Utrecht
2012

259
and in fact, cultural historians are joining the discussion on how to define heritage renewal within
the bounds of context and location. Preserving the old versus designing the new is being
replaced by an integrated approach whereby old
and new together result in a new quality, experience and coherence.10 Atmosphere, character and
identity are the major selling points of our urban
areas, as is revealed every year in the Dutch municipal atlas. For example, thanks to its attractive,
historic city centre, Den Bosch is one of the most
successful cities in the country.11
260
1. R E TU R N I N G TO FO R M E R G LO RY
The history of heritage conservation is full of
interventions whereby scientific or creative methods were used to return a historic building or old
town to its former glory or in any case this was
the intention of the design.12 This was strongly
noticeable in the devastated city centres after the
war, some of which were rigorously modernised
(Rotterdam) while in others an attempt was made
to restore the historic structure (Middelburg in
the Netherlands and Rothenburg and Warsaw
abroad). Tens, if not hundreds of historic buildings destroyed during the 20th century were restored, such as the Lakenhal (cloth hall) in Ypres
(19141918), Leiden city hall (fire in 1929), the
Frauenkirche in Dresden (bombed in 1945) and
the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow
(demolished in 1931). It is a misconception that
only old heritage buildings are rebuilt. In fact,
heritage buildings with modern architecture dating from the previous century are among the
most reconstructable heritage.
The reconstruction of the Barcelona Pavilion
and the restoration and reconstruction of Zonnestraal sanatorium in Hilversum (Duiker, 1931)
are two examples. Caf De Unie in Rotterdam,
designed by the architect Oud and destroyed in
the war, was rebuilt at a new location. The temporary site office he built for the Oud-Mathenesse
district building project was even rebuilt twice; in
Rotterdam and Sassenheim.13
During the 20th century, some of the destroyed heritage buildings found a new home
in open air museums, where they were reconstructed and added to a museum collection (such
as the collection of farm buildings amongst a forested landscape in Arnhems open air museum).
The Zuiderzee Museum in Enkhuizen, with all
its reconstructed buildings, grew to become a
kind of collage city, in which scenes from various
Zuiderzee cities can be experienced in a historically accurate setting. Zaanse Schans went one
step further; it is a simulated village with authentic monuments in an urban simulation, that was
made in the authentic landscape. This village is
freely accessible and inhabited, just like a typical
historic district in a town.14 Comparable developments and reconstructions also took place in cities that had lost their main historic features, such
as fortifications. In the 1970s, for example, huge
construction projects took place to return fortified towns like Heusden and Bourtange to their
former glory, with the main goal of attracting
more tourists. The result was a lot of demolition

and even more new development; all in the name
of restoring the original townscape. These operations were accompanied by very complex and
creative design processes, for example to make
a new retirement home, school or garage appear
as if it were an abstract part of the 18th century
townscape.15
Today, the hunger for identity and familiarity
is so great that sometimes a history that never actually took place is re-enacted in new design: tabula rasa history.16 It illustrates the degree to which
heritage buildings and history itself have become
makeable. This is illustrated by some forms of retro building in the historic towns and is even more
apparent in a number of recent urban expansions
that have a simulated or stylised historic facade.
The resort town of Esonstad (owned by Landal)
gives a good idea of what is possible in this respect (Lanfermeijer Seelen Weijer Architects).17
This a compact and modern bungalow park in
the guise of an old fishing town on the shores of
Lauwers Sea. The houses all look different on the
outside, but on the inside they are all identical,
from the furniture and tableware down to the bed
linen. The mother of all simulated Dutch cities
is the city of Huis ten Bosch nearby Nagasaki in
Japan.18 In the 1990s a very plausible example of a
historic Dutch town was built here, complete with
its own history with origins in the 12th century
, growth and development, and then the current
facade of an important town (Heeling Krop Bekkering).
The only area where it fails to mirror the developments in the Netherlands is in the simulation of the 20th century: major thorough roads,
large scale demolition, clearances and urban
renewal are all lacking. The end result is the perfect idyll of the Dutch city; the ideal backdrop
for the Japanese to spend their free time tasting
Dutch culture and visiting the many museums,
restaurants and shops. One of the cleverest things
about the design is the way an authentic cityscape
has been recreated down to the finest detail, combined with the logistic and functional layout of
a post-modern holiday resort, jam-packed with
modern comforts and with the capacity to process
large numbers of visitors.
Esonstad and Huis ten Bosch are examples of
how history has become makeable. We can design
and build a historic townscape any place on earth
that is so plausible that even Dutch architects
sometimes think they are ordinary old cities. In
Paul Meurs
12
Winfried Nerdingen, Markus
Eisen and Hilde Strobl,
Geschichte der Rekonstruktion, Konstruktion der
Geschichte, Mnchen 2010;
Jan Friedrich Hanselmann,
Rekonstruktion in der
Denkmalpflege, Texte aus
Geschichte und Gegenwart,
Stuttgart 2009
13
Paul Meurs, Vormgeven
aan de herinnering; restauratie en bewaarzucht, De
Architect 1992-5, 52-59
14
SteenhuisMeurs, Beeldkwaliteitsplan Zaanse
Schans, Schiedam 2010
15
Paul Meurs, Bouwen aan
een weerbarstige stad /
Building in the stubborn
city, Delft 2007, 19-20
16
David Lowenthal, The past
is a Foreign Country, Cambridge 1985; David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade
and the spoils of history,
Cambridge 1997
17
Paul Meurs, Veilig verpozen
in de illusie van een Friese
vestingstad, Blauwe Kamer
(2007) 6. 78-83
18
Paul Meurs, Nederland als
utopie, Holland Village in
Japan, De Architect 19927/8, 22-33
19
20-25 en 36-39

261

Design with history
such projects, the architectural form is separated

from the buildings function and possibly also
from the buildings structural and interior design,
such as in Japan, where the historic Dutch houses
function as a brickwork curtain wall enclosing
huge spaces designed to accommodate mass tourism and survive earthquakes. Japan is an extreme
example, but not an exception. Our city centres
are full of new building developments going on
behind preserved historic facades.
Restoration and redesignation projects often
also involve a conscious or unconscious choice
between the architectural appearance on the one
hand (preservation) and the technical (modernisation) and functional (transformation) design
on the other. Then the famous modernist adage
form follows function is sometimes changed to
function follows form. However this is only ever
partly the case, because form and function are
developed in relation to each other, while in the
meantime function has been attributed its own
unique dynamic. There are plenty of examples
where facades have been restored to their authentic state while the interior has been completely
redesigned for a new purpose, such as the Van
Nelle factory in Rotterdam (converted into offices
for the creative sector; Wessel de Jonge Architects), the Schunck department store in Heerlen
(converted into a cultural centre; Wiel Arets
Architects, Bureau Bouwadvies and Jo Coenen
& Co Architects) and the Ascension Church in
Schiedam (converted into terraced houses; GelukTreurniet Architects).19 The architects of these
interventions had to work with complicated design
briefs. Firstly, the old facade has to be restored to
its former state; sometimes using other materials
and techniques than used in the original design,
and subject to the current building standards and
regulations. The second part of the design project
is to make the space suitable for modern usage
and meet contemporary usage requirements as
inconspicuously as possible. This is the perfect
example of serving the context: the architect has
the ability to create a high-quality technical design while at the same time remaining invisible.
At the same time, this approach is an example of
the maximum appropriation of the historical design; the architect literally transforms the subject
into their own creation.
262
03. Sanatorium Zonnestraal,
Hilversum: the
restoration practicaly
meant a reconstruction
20
Nederlandsche Oudheidkundigen Bond, Grondbeginselen en voorschriften voor het behoud, de
herstelling en uitbreiding
van oude bouwwerken,
Bouwkundig Weekblad, 37
(1916) 5, 50-55; ICOMOS,
IInd International Congress
of Architects and Technicians of Historic Monuments, Venice, 1964.

263
Paul Meurs

Design with history
2 . P R E S E RV I N G BY D E S I G N
The history of interventions reveals that periods
of rampant historical falsification are followed
by periods of purist restorations, where heritage
buildings are dusted off and repaired, but no additions to the historic character are permitted.
In response to the proliferate reconstructions of
the late 19th century and following the devastation caused by the First and Second World Wars,
the conservation specialists typically adhered to
a strict principle, namely that the existing heritage had to be carefully conserved, but that the
changes and additions made to these buildings
had to be done openly and honestly, so that they
would be clearly visible as new additions, rather
than faked historic.20 This approach led to many
misunderstandings in architecture, particularly in
the second half of the 20th century, for example
the idea that contrast is the only way to build in
a historical context. This was based on the perceived existence of a fissure between the architecture of the past and the present that could only be
bridged by the use of stark contrast. This resulted
in dogmatic solutions and the disappearance of
location specific designs. There are thousands
of examples of this almost autistic architecture
around the world, whereby in some cases important heritage has been changed into a decor for
conspicuous, discordant additions such as dormers and annexes. Although the historic building
fabric (all the physical features of the building
that were still present) may well have been perfectly preserved and conserved, the question remains whether such authentic heritage buildings
still retain any liveability, integrity or credibility.
Architects have since delved deeply into history,
and this is reflected in designs that take account
of the context, whereby the entire spectrum of
techniques from simulation and reconstruction
to symbiosis and contrast has become available.
Concepts such as authenticity or integrity prove
to be very elastic, because practically any intervention can be presented as such, for example in
authenticity of form, concept, substance, building
tradition or artistry.
The increased attention for location, place, tradition and identity is reflected in the creative ways
in which designers try to find harmony with the
existing architecture, by following architectural
proportions, mirroring architectural features or
continuing in the same architectural style. The
result can be that, though the architecture of the
new design may be very conspicuous, it still re-
264
04. Zaanse Schaans:
urban simulation with
authentic monuments
21
60-65
22
Steenhuis and Meurs, 2011,
30-35
23
Rik Nys and Martin Reichert
(ed.), Neues Museum Berlin, 2009
24
Rosa Artigas, Paulo Mendes
da Rocha, So Paulo 2000,
206-213

265
Paul Meurs

Design with history
tains a certain coherence with the existing design.

Old and new are in a dialogue as the commentators describe it or they merge together into
something new. Again, examples abound, such as
TU Delfts own BK City (Braaksma & Roos, Octatube, Fokkema & Partners, Kossmann.deJong,
MVRDV).21 In Rotterdam, Jobsveem was converted from a warehouse into an apartment building (Mei Architects). The old was meticulously
restored, but the new asserts itself in the form of
three radically large holes sawn out of the facades,
bringing daylight into the stairwells and homes.
The architecture was new, but at the same time
the warehouse retained its identity.22
Some designers go to great lengths to become one with a space, to completely redesign a
building while at the same time ensuring that its
history and heritage remain omnipresent. The
Neues Museum in Berlin (David Chipperfield) is
contrast and symbiosis combined.23 The intervention involved the completion and restoration of a
museum that was shot to bits during the war. The
new building is undeniably new, but at the same
time clearly entirely inspired by the old: the grammar and syntax date from 1855. The building
has been completed, but not restored. It forms a
whole, but tells three different stories: a story of a
historic building, a story of destruction and a story of a new age. The ambition of the architect was
not to preserve the existing situation; some spaces
were completely restored or reconstructed, others were left untouched. The result is a sequence
of different atmospheres, some created by design
and some by history, in which the museums exhibits ancient Egyptian art fit amazingly well.
The Pinacoteca in So Paulo was another such
heritage building to be thoroughly overhauled
(Paulo Mendes da Rocha).24 Mendes da Rocha
had this museum stripped down to its naked essentials. The many layers of stucco were removed
from the facades and courtyards to reveal the old
masonry, including repairs and putlog holes. The
courtyards were covered with a glass roof, bridged
with steel members and stripped of windows and
doors. The main entrance to the museum was
moved to the side of the building and the central
axis was rotated 90 degrees. The result was that
a logistically and functionally completely new
museum was created within the old building,
where the past is perceptible in every space. The
monument has been incorporated in the new museum has in fact become part of a new monument, with an equally tangible and visible past. A
266
05. Van Nelle, Rotterdam:
invisible intervention
25
26-29

267
third example is yet to be implemented; the flour

mill on the ramparts of Leiden (Peter Zumthor).25
The architects stance is that the load-bearing
structure is the essential feature of this industrial
composition. He sees the facades as little more
than a worn coat covering the structural frame
and the installations. As far as he is concerned
this coat is superfluous. The monument will be
restored by demolishing all the facades and fitting
a completely new building over the old structural
frames (back to the bones, as Zumthor calls it).
It will be difficult for heritage institutions to take
a standpoint on this building; precisely because
history is omnipresent in the new here, and more
than ever before.
Paul Meurs

Design with history
268
06. Jobsveem, Rotterdam:
careful restoration
with three radical
itnerventions to bring in
daylight
07. Pinacoteca, Sao Paolo:

makeover monument
26
138-143
27
130-132, 90-93, 100-105
28
Luiz Trigueiros and Marcelo
Ferraz, SESC Fbrica da
Pompia / SESC Pompia
Factory, Lina Bo Bardi 19771986, Lisbon 1998

269
Paul Meurs

Design with history
3 . A R C H ITE C TU R E W ITH O UT
A DESIGN
Whether it comes from the lack of money and
the financial crisis, or from the trend towards
purity and authenticity; fact is that there have
been many high-profile projects in the past few
years that have had very little to do with design
in the architectonic sense of the word. And so
the designer Piet-Hein Eek was able to conclude
that the dilapidated ceramics factory on Strijp R
was beautiful enough as he found it, to accommodate his workshop and showroom. His approach
to the factory is the same as his approach to his
scrap wood furniture: even imperfect products
can be beautiful and satisfy our sense of aesthetics and functionality.26 You will encounter the
same thinking in the Volkskrant building in Amsterdam (creative incubator and nightclub for the
next 7 years; Stichting Urban Resort), the NDSM
site in Amsterdam (former shipyard now used by
the creative industry; Dynamo Architects) or the
tram workshop in Winschoten (theatre; KAW
Architects and Consultants): a recognisable place
and a stage for unexpected urban creativity and
cooperation is created by actually not designed.27
The innovation lies in the type of use, the programme and the furniture, and this results in a
cheap and flexible way to give cities, districts or
buildings a new soul and a new economic perspective. Raw and real.
This does not entail that redesignation is little
more than doing a few minor repairs and then you
can move in. Even though the budget is limited
and the interventions are small, the intervention
is essential for giving the building a wake-up call
or setting processes in motion that will eventually
see an old building discovered, opened up and redeveloped by a new group of inhabitants or users.
Redesignation in this sense becomes more and
more a process of minor changes, with major consequences for the usability or visual appearance
of a building. An example is the SESC Pompia
leisure centre in So Paulo which is housed in an
old factory.28 The story goes that when Lina Bo
Bardi received the assignment to design a brand
new cultural centre at this location, went to visit
the site in the weekend and concluded that the
project was already there. The local residents had
climbed over the walls and did everything that
you would expect of a cultural centre in the ruined factory: relax, eat, play and meet. Her design
was limited to facilitating this use and connecting
the factory complex to the rest of the city. She de-
270
08. Pinacoteca, Sao Paolo:
makeover monument
09. Factory/ Atelier Piet

Hein Eek, Eindhoven
29
Ulrich Borsdorf and Heinrich Theodor Grtter, Ruhr
Museum, Natur, Kultur, Geschichte, Essen 2010, 16-61

271
Paul Meurs
signed an entrance gate, bleachers and large concrete furniture. The result was a natural urban
oasis in the city, packed full of customers, passersby and local residents seven days a week.
The Ruhrmuseum in the Zollverein World
Heritage Site near Essen is another example of
restrained intervention.29 The restaurant is little more than a collection of plastic chairs and
tables placed on a raised platform in an old and
dilapidated factory. A far cry from design. The
main difference with the pre-museum period is
the buzz of people, resembling a busy city square
on a Saturday afternoon. The design focussed
mainly on streamlining the flow of visitors. OMA
designed a routing for the visitors inspired by the
transport of coal in the days of the mines: slipways and escalators convey the visitors into and
throughout the building. The museum entrance is
shrouded in darkness highlighted by softly glowing lights a reminder of the furnaces that once
consumed the coal.
The construction crisis has turned redevelopment into the major building challenge of today.
Unoccupied buildings stimulate individuals and
groups of people to be entrepreneurial; to join
forces and develop successful business cases, with
or without architects. This form of cooperative
development leads to new approaches to housing
(e.g. in abandoned office buildings), commercial
buildings, communal living places and shared studios. There are good opportunities for the designers of the future to contribute their expertise and
creativity to these bottom-up processes. However,
these will be a different breed of architects than
those of the past.

Design with history
272
10. Strijp R, Eindhoven:
the beauty of the
imperfection
11. Tram workshop

Winschoten: decades of
decay

273
Paul Meurs

Design with history
13. NDSM Amsterdam:

social engineering
12. Tram workshop

Winschoten:
programming as
intervention
NON-STANDARD
& INTERACTIVE
ARCHITECTURE
(BY HYPERBODY)
274
Non-standard Architecture (NA)

is defined as an architecture that
departs from modernist, repetitive, mass-production principles in
order to address complexity, variation, and mass-customization.
Furthermore, interactivity in architecture (IA) is addressed at the
level where building components
and buildings become dynamic,
acting and re-acting in response
to environmental and user-specific needs.
At MSc 1&2 level students are introduced to the basics of NS&IA,

while at MSc 3&4 level they advance their expertise in parametric and scripting-based design for
NS&IA. Furthermore, Rapid Fabrication and Prototyping sessions
are held in protoSPACE in order
to enable students to build scaled
models and 1:1 components of
their projects.

Technology / Non-standard & Interactive Architecture
275
Hyperbodys MSc specialisation

in Non-standard & Interactive
Architecture (NS&IA) aims to implement innovative architecture
with state-of-the-art material and
information logistics.
276
Kas Oosterhuis
Kas Oosterhuis is professor at the

Faculty of Architecture and the
Built Environment, Delft University
of Technology, as well as director
of Hyperbody and the Protospace
Laboratory for Collaborative Design and Engineering. His teaching and research is in the areas
of interactive architecture, real
time behaviour of buildings and
environments, living building concepts, collaborative design, file to
factory production and parametric
design.
Born in 1951 in Amersfoort,
Kas Oosterhuis studied architecture at the Delft University of
Technology. Afterwards, he taught
as unit master at the AA in London. From there, he worked and
lived one year in the former studio
of Theo van Doesburg in Paris,
together with visual artist Ilona
Lnrd. In 1989, he founded Kas
Oosterhuis Architekten in Rotterdam (renamed to Oosterhuis
Lnrd, or ONL, in 2004). Since
2000, Oosterhuis has been professor of digital design methods
at the Delft University of Technology in Netherlands.

Kas Oosterhuis
277
Towards a New Kind of Building;

a designers guide to nonstandard architecture
Kas Oosterhuis

278
01. Mass production
esthetic, Seagram
Building, NY, architect
Mies vand der Rohe
1958
Kas Oosterhuis

TH E I N FO R M E D P O I NT C LO U D
As the world keeps turning we will need to redefine the foundations of architecture from time to
time. Now more then 20 years have passed since
the introduction of the PC, since the emergence
of the global Internet, since embedding miniaturized information technology in our consumer
products. Today we have become familiar with
remote control, wireless internet, with intelligent agents active on the internet, with intelligent agents embedded in consumer products
like printers, cars and computers, but we have
not seen much change in the very building blocks
of the built environment, as of yet. Neither have
we seen much change in the way we design and
build our environment. We have indeed developed computer programs to simulate otherwise
traditional building materials like concrete, steel,
glass, composites in a Building Information
Model [BIM]. Often the BIM is used to improve
known designs, largely because most designers do
not take advantage of the BIM to develop new design methods, with the aim to realize designs that
are not possible with the traditional design techniques. In a BIM the simulated building components are tagged, the tags containing information
on their qualitative and quantitative properties.
It sure is an opportunity missed that most architects do not use digital design tools in the early
design process. Even on respected universities the
students are often told not to use the computer to
design. It is my explicit opinion that students in
architectural faculties should play in the very design process with all kinds of new digital and social media, as from day one. Sketching in itself is
fine, but do express yourself on your touchscreen
tablet, use your smart phone to interact and participate as I conducted some experiments with
interactive lectures at Hyperbody translate
your design concept immediately into a [Grasshopper] script, such that you can play with the
parameters and open up your design process to
others. The actual emphasis on the drawing as
advocated at the TU Delft by Michiel Riedijk is
conspicuously counterproductive in this respect.
In my view the drawing and the section are nothing more then a flattened derivate from the
3d model. The drawing and the section should
never be the starting point for any spatial design.
Building 3d models must belong to the core skills
that students in our era are taught. The 3d model
contains all information, while the drawings and
the section only allow for a poor restricted view

279
A S TH E WO R L D TU R N S
The world is changing. So is architecture, the art
of building. Since the world is evolving its communication and manufacturing methods drastically and with increasing speed, architecture will
never be the same. It comes down to the provocative assumption that in the end all building
components must be designed to be active actors.
Based on 20 years of practice of nonstandard
architecture I have come to the conclusion that
buildings and their constituting components no
longer can be seen as passive objects. This assumption revolutionizes the way the design process is organized, the way the manufacturing
process is organized, and the way we interact with
the built structures. The new kind of building is
based on the invasion of digital technologies into
the building industry and into the design process,
such as parametric design, generative components, file to factory production process of mass
customization, embedded intelligent agents. I investigate the effects the paradigm shift from mass
production to mass customization may have for
the designers mind. When the designer is open
for this new reality, architecture will never be the
same. I will give here one example to visualize the
consequences of a truly mass production esthetic.
The Cockpit in the Acoustic Barrier project that
was finished end of 2005 features 40.000 different pieces of steel, and 10.000 different pieces
of glass. Not a single building component is the
same in this structure. The radicality of this
mass-customized specimen of nonstandard architecture equals that of the 50+ year old Mies
van der Rohes Seagram building, which is the
ultimate esthetic expression of mass produced
architecture. Mind you, the Seagram building
is beautiful, but I would never fancy to strive
for such esthetic again, now it is time to find the
proper architectural expression for the actuality
of industrial mass customization. I predict that
within 50 years customization in any form not
necessarily in the form of double curved geometry will be the dominant language of [inter]
national architects.
280
of the spatial conditions. Using new media makes

the design process transparent, verifiable and
participatory, and allows for a stronger individual
expression at the same time. New media will not
replace the old media of language, thinking, conceptualizing, and sketching, but what new media
do is to facilitate you to work inside evolution,
such that you will participate as an active player
in our evolving society. With this writing I want
to show a possible way forward, forward to the
basics of the profession of architecture.
To take that step forwards I imagine the built
structure to be represented by a point cloud of
floating reference points, reference points that
move all the time like the birds in the swarm.
The points of the point cloud are continuously
informed to behave. The points receive streaming information, the points process the streaming
information, the points produce new streaming
information. Indeed like the birds in the swarm.
Complexity based on simple rules. The crux
of the new kind of building is that all reference
points will be informed in a streaming fashion
both during the design process and during its
subsequent life-cycle. Even if we are commissioned to design for a static environment, we must
set up the BIM in such a way that all constituting
components potentially can receive, process and
send streaming information. The BIM will understand its deeper meaning as Building In Motion. Imagine a sound barrier that unfolds only
when there is an actual noise source. No noise,
no barrier. The noise informs the barrier to unfold and to form a sound insulating shell around
the noise source, for example around a train that
passes through the city. A wave of the unfolding
shell travels along with the speed of the passing
train. When there is no train, and that counts
for most of the time, there is no need for a barrier. Everyone despises the ugly fences along our
highways and along our train tracks. The strong
logic of facilitating streaming data to inform built
structures makes me confident that this concept
of Building In Motion is completely realistic and
will become a dominant framework for buildings
within 50100 years. Lets be prepared for this
future, let us make designs as to feel its ultimate
logic and seductive beauty. It is the beauty of
complexity based on simple rules. Think of pieces
of steel, concrete, glass, composites with embedded RFID tags to begin with, with microcomputers later, and with a variety of actuators to come.
With the Hyperbody group and various groups
02. Mass customization

esthetic features 1000
unique windows, Al
Nasser Headquarters,
Abu Dhabi, Architect
ONL [Oosterhuis_
Lenard] 2012
03. Parametric CNC

produced building
blocks, Hyperbody 2010

281
Kas Oosterhuis

04. Programmable
interior for Space
Station, Architect ONL
[Oosterhuis_Lenard]
2000

of students at the TU Delft I have designed and

built several prototypes during the last decade
showing the enormous potential for a dynamic
architecture. With the Barrier In Motion concept
we have identified a functional application for
the theory of informed point clouds, promising
to become the basic building blocks for a streaming connectivity between all constituting building
components. Informed building blocks become
the actors in an ecology of interacting complex
adaptive systems, in the Internet of people and
things.
282
FO R WA R D TO BA S I C S
The underlying message of this essay could very
well be: Forward to Basics. The implicit assumption is that the basic building blocks of architecture need to be redefined. It is not bricks and
mortar, neither is it bits and bytes exclusively. It
is rather the merge of bits and atoms which we
are concerned about. It is the merge of the old organic real and the new real, the virtual real. One
merges into the other, and vice versa. The new
buildings blocks are informed components, hardware augmented with software, mapped on each
individual building block. Each individual building block will communicate in a streaming fashion via embedded tags [RFID] with other buildings blocks, anywhere, anytime, anyhow, anyway.
Thus driving our profession into the vibrant era
of synthetic architecture. Synthesizing architecture means redefining the very building blocks
and building up a new language from scratch.
Synthetic architecture has since been subject
to a sequence of evolutionary steps: from liquid
architecture [Marcos Novak 1991] via transarchitecture [Marcos Novak 1995] and Programmable
Architecture [Kas Oosterhuis 1999] to the notion
of nonstandard architecture [Frdric Migayrou
/ Zeynep Mennan 2003]. Nowadays it is known
practice among advanced students and young
digitally educated professionals to use Generative
Components [Robert Aish / Bentley Systems],
Grasshopper [Rhino plugin], Digital Project
[Gehry Technologies], Processing, or similar
parametric scripting software to synthesize the
new language of architecture. ONLs pro-active
contribution in this field has been to actually built
on a larger scale nonstandard benchmark projects
as early as 1997 [Waterpavilion], 2002 [WEB of
North-Holland] and 2005 [Cockpit in Acoustic
Barrier]. ONL has effectively built the connection
between the bits and the atoms as to prove that
the direction taken on as early as beginning of the
nineties was the right choice. The forward looking approach has lead to the new kind of building,
based on thoroughly redefined genes of architecture. Forward to basics.
Forward since we do not want to look back.

Now in the deep economic depression is the
perfect time for innovation in the architecture
and construction business, it is the proper time
to rethink the basis of our society, thanks to the
internet bubble and the mortgage crisis. It is the
proper time to implement streaming nonstandard made to measure [maatwerk] strategies in all
businesses related to the building industry, from
designers to manufacturers. Forward to basics
does not mean to step back to what we knew already 20 years ago, that would be back to basics.
Forward to basics means redefining our core
business, redefining architecture, redefining the
building industry, redefining the behavior of built
structures, redefining the interface of buildings.
Redefining the very essence of our profession.
Kas Oosterhuis
TH E N E E D FO R N O N - LI N E A R
S O F T WA R E
For the design of complex and programmable buildings a basic condition is to work with
parametric software. The concept of parametric
design is in itself nothing new, it exists for more
then 30 years, originated in the shipbuilding
industry. Looking more closely into the achievements of the shipbuilding industry, where the
design and build task usually is to build large
scale one-offs, is useful for understanding the
direction where architecture will be heading for
in the coming decades. Customization will be the
buzz-word, architects will base their designs on a
variety of series of mass customized one-offs rather then relying on the outdated serial approach
of mass produced components. This can only be
achieved when we build our 3d models in a comprehensive parametric way. Parametric design
basically means building bidirectional relations,
relationships between each individual building
component, no exceptions allowed, not dead
isolated objects. Literally every seemingly soft
design decision must be modeled as a hard parametric fact, verifiable by numbers. Now suppose
the designer switches to another design rule, suppose the designer changes the rules while playing
the design game. That means that the parametric
model will need to be restructured from the beginning, which is an even more drastic feedback
loop in the evolution of the design. To work with
changing rules during the design process we need
new species of software, which must be less hierarchical, less linear, and more intuitive, more immediate instead. The relations between the components will need to be more flexible, more like
the members of a dynamic swarm indeed.

283

U N I Q U E A D D R E S S FO R
E AC H B U I L D I N G C O M P O N E NT
The very essence for the designer software I
am interested in is to see all constructs [buildings, installations, environments] as in principle
dynamic structures, consisting of a large set of
thousands of programmable components. Programmable components are individuals with an
unique identity, they have an unique address, in
the same fashion as all computers are assigned
unique IP [Internet Protocol] addresses. Only
because of this unique IP address each individual
computer can be connected as an actor and as a
receiver to the global Internet. When a building
component has an address, it can receive instructions, it can accept information either pulled or
being pushed from a database. Receiving processing and sending data means that this building
component becomes an actor, that it can change
its configuration. This has been the basis for the
pure invention that is the ONL project TransPorts imagined in 1999, and in ONLs proposal
for the programmable interior of the International
Space Station. The invention is to regard buildings as instrumental bodies, which can change
their shape and content in real time. To be more
specific, a programmable building component
could be an actuator in the form of a hydraulic
cylinder with embedded sensors, a structural
member which has the capacity to adjust its
length by becoming longer or shorter, by adjusting their stroke. In the theoretical yet realizable
Trans-Ports project it is calculated that only a
limited number of approximately 5 x 6 = 30 programmable large actuators is needed as to evoke
the behavior of the dynamic body. The skin of the
body would have to be flexible, which is realized
by introducing a folded 3d skin loosely fixed to
the dynamic structure with the capacity to stretch
and shrink. In the example of the Trans-Ports
multi-modal pavilion the skin loosely follows the
structure. From the moment one starts to think of
a building body as a dynamic construct, a wealth
of new possibilities appear at the designers horizon, seducing the designers to become pioneers
once again. Not modernist, but truly modern and
above all actual.
05. Flatland, A Romance

of Many Dimensions,
author Edwin Abott
284
06. Swarm behavior forms,
the basis for protoBIM
and quantumBIM
07. Simply complex, iWEB,

Delft, Architect ONL
[Oosterhuis_Lenard]
[First life as Web of
North-Holland], 2007
[second life as the
iWEB]
Kas Oosterhuis
Streaming in both directions, both components need to inform each other continuously
about their conditions. For example, when the
standing component 1 has varying loads due to
changing wind conditions, it needs to transfer the
real time dynamic data in a streaming fashion to
the supporting horizontally stretched component
2. For a quick understanding of the subject, think
of applying such dynamic concept to a one mile
high building. Such a high building would normally sweep several meters to left and right and
cause nausea for its users of the top floors. Now
assume that we build in a series of actuators in
the load bearing steel structure, which pro-actively resist to changing wind forces, thus leveling
out the influence of the winds. Then the one mile
high structure will stand perfectly upright without any movement in the top. It will stand like a
human balances in the wind, stressing muscles as
to counter the wind. Such a structure would need
to send updates in milliseconds as to keep track of
the changes, allowing the actuating components
to respond and reconfigure accordingly.

285

F E E L TH E FO R C E
A parametric relationship must be understood in
terms of information exchange. Condier this sentence: I place a cup on the table. The I informs
the cup to be placed on the table. Then replace
the I with the designer, the cup with component 1 and the table with component 2. The designer informs the bottom surface of component 1
to be connected to the top surface of component
2. To be able to design software for parametric
structures it is crucial to make a complete functional description a script, a scenario if you
wish of all relations between component 1 and
component 2. The two components need to share
a point of reference, separately specified for both
components. The points of reference are the active members of the point cloud. Once the points
have been defined properly, one may connect the
two points, as to share the same coordinates in
an agreed coordinate system. Once connected the
two components must calculate the area of contact they share. If the bottom part of components
is flat it will be the full surface area of the standing part which is shared. This area will be used
for the structural calculations transferring the
loads from standing to lying element. I Ultimately
it is my intention to be empathic to the force fields
between the components, as to feel the forces
while designing. Feeling the forces in an empathic
and even sympathetic way is the prerequisite to be
able to elevate parametric design towards the level
of behavioral design. As a desiigner one needs to
internalize the forces. Information exchange from
point to point, from surface to surface basically
needs to be seen as streaming information, not
just as an instance from a stream. Working with
streaming information has an emotional effect on
the behavioral designer. Streaming information
in relation to the time based instances of 3d modeling is as Spaceland in relation to Flatland, as is
the 3d model in relation to the flat geometrical
instances of the 2d drawing.
286
O N E B U I L D I N G O N E D E TA I L
One building, one detail. I have introduced this
challenging phrase in earlier writings [paper for
Nonstandard Praxis, MIT conference, 2004]. Without any reservation I declared: Mies is too Much!
Radicalizing the minimalist tendency of Mies van
der Rohe, I observed that Mies still needed many
different details to prove his point that Less is
More. His Less is still too Much. His Less is an
imposed Less in visual appearance, but still a More
in number of details. For a better performance one
single parametric detail must be mapped on all
surfaces, subject to a range of parameters rendering the values of the parametric system unique in
each local instance, thus creating a visual richness
and a variety that is virtually unmatched by any
traditional building technique. Such visual richness
has been naturally apparent in indigenous architecture, all made by hand, based on simple procedures. Now the new parametric and customization
techniques allow such visual richness on the grand
scale of large buildings, complexity based on simple
rules. Complexity is the real More, based on the
truly Less. Please be aware of the double meaning:
I do respect Mies van der Rohe to the max, which
prohibits myself to copy or vary on the original it
was deliberate violation indeed when Rem Koolhaas forced the Barcelona Pavilion to bend in the
early days of his career. Rather one should endeavor
to radicalize Mies instead, one should take the
next step forward, instead of looking backwards in
such incestuous operations. The parametrization
of the leading building detail implies an extreme
unification, it requires a uncompromising systemic
approach, thus allowing for a rich visual diversity
at the same time. Les extremes se touchent. The
coherence of parts in a parametric design system
does not necessarily lead to a harmonic relationship
between the parts as suggested by Palladio over 500
years ago, neither as suggested by Vitrivius 2100
years ago. Coherence of parts in a 3d parametric
design system covers a much larger bandwidth of
possible variations.
The parametric detail is generated just by executing a simple rule, while retrieving local data for
each individual node. Simplicity is thus intrinsically
tied to multiplicity. Its intelligence is embedded in
the swarm behavior of the node, the programmable dot of the informed point cloud. I applied the
above one building one detail strategy in the design
for the Web of North-Holland [page 10,11]. The
whole construct consist of one single but elaborate
detail. All details including the two giant doors are
members of one big family, described by one single
script [Autolisp routine] mapped on the points of
the point cloud as distributed on the doubly curved
surface of the emotively styled volume.
08. Complicated not

complex, Stata Center,
Cambridge [USA],
Architect Gehry Partners
2004
Kas Oosterhuis

TH E C H I C K E N A N D TH E E G G
What came first, the chicken or the egg? My answer to that is just as simple as it is effective: the
chicken and the egg are two instances of the same
system, meaning that in each stage of development of the chicken-egg system there was both
the chicken and the egg. Naturally neither the
chicken nor the egg were worthy that name in
their early development phase, because they were
not that much specified when they were busy
developing the earliest versions of the adaptive
chicken-egg system. Chicken was more something
like a worm, and hardly to be distinguished from
their eggs. I assume that self-copying and giving
birth were equivalent events before the chickenegg speciation process took off. There may not be
a quick and dirty translation, nor a remodeling,
which always will turn out to be a re-interpretation, and there may absolutely not be any human
intervention in the nature of the data, which is
bound to be the cause of many possible inconsistencies and inaccuracies. Nothing may be lost in
translation. The chicken can only produce and lay
her own egg herself, the egg can not be produced
and assembled by another party applying another
systemic logic. Human interventions are bound
to blur the consistency, the sloppy accuracy and
emotional logic of human measuring or counting
simply does not match with the machine logic.
Dont worry, I am not trying to exclude people
from the process, humans do play the leading role
in establishing the concept, in making intuitive
choices from a vast multitude of possibilities, in
declaring what is beautiful, basically in every aspect of the design and the building process where
the communication with other human beings is
crucial. But humans are not good at counting,
not good in complex calculations, not good in the
consistent application of procedures, not good in
working overnight. People are always tempted to
rethink a procedure while executing it, to rethink
a process while running it, typically changing the
rules while playing. Also the brains are very slow
in calculations, so much slower then the personal
number crunchers, their PC mates. In order to
catch up with the current societal complexity,
which is an ever expanding evolutionary process,
the information architect had to develop machinic
extensions, exobrains, exomemories, exohands,
exoarms and exobodies to design and execute the
nonstandard designs. That is why nonstandard
design and file to factories production are two
sides of the same coin. There would not exist a
truly nonstandard design without CNC production, there can not exist chicken without eggs,
neither eggs without chicken.

287
J U S T TH E R E J U S T TH E N J U S T TH AT
I say no to columns, beams, doors and windows
from a standard catalog. Instead of making a
tasteful selection from the building catalog, instead of becoming a elitist connaisseur of high
culture, I am in favor of designing and building
project specific building components, for every
new building a new consistent set of interlocking building components. It requires no further
explanation that the giant door in the WEB of
NH, which is basically a cut-out of the building
body, is a door in the WEB of NH only, it can
not be applied in any other design, it belongs
there, does not fit anywhere else, it forms that
intrinsic part of that design. Just there, just then,
just that. It is the logical consequence of masscustomization that an end product like a door
from the standard catalog will not fit anywhere
in the nonstandard body. In this context I seriously must criticize the buildings of Gehry. From
a distance one would be tempted to see them as
sculpture buildings, but at closer investigation
they are not like that at all, all Gehrys designs
are based on traditional spatial planning, like
arranging box-like spaces, and wrapping them
in the upper floor levels with a decomposed arrangement of loose fragments. Doors, windows,
entrances are traditional as ever, 100% based on
the technology and esthetics of mass production.
There is nothing nonstandard about it. Gehry as
many of his peers has not been able to loosen the
strings to the traditional building industry, they
have always relied on stylish catalog products for
the majority of their buildings components. They
still consider mass production as beautiful. Even
when the exteriors of their designs use the metaphor of the nonstandard, their insides are full of
column grids, beams, doors, walls and windows,
all straight from the catalog. They mistake the
complicated for the complex. The essence of the
nonstandard is that each and every building component is precisely defined in the design stage,
CNC produced, hence in principle unique in its
shape and dimensions. Each building component
possesses an unique number to be addressed by
the design and engineering scripts. A building
component typically is defined as a 3d parametric
component that lives in a spatial relationship towards its neighboring components. Mind you, the
information that is contained in a 2d drawing can
by definition not give you such information, since
the drawings does not refer to components at all,
but only to their 2d flatland shadows of their 3d
spaceland information.
288
TH E N E W R O LE O F TH E
N O N S TA N DA R D A R C H IT E C T
Every analogue intervention in the direct link
from nonstandard design to CNC manufacturing
would compromise the nature of the nonstandard
design. Examples of such compromises are seen
in the making of the Water Cube and the Birds
Nest for the Olympic Games 2008 in Beijing.
In such cases the main contractor has chosen to
weld the steel structure, hence compromising the
accuracy of the structure, and thus breaking the
logical link from the complex geometry to a possibly advantageous and consistent file to factory
production of the skin. Once compromised, once
the chain is broken, all future steps from there
onward can no longer be relinked to the CNC
logic of mass customization. The process is killed,
the egg is not leading to another life form, the
umbilical cord is broken prematurely. Needless to
say that each example where the logical chain is
broken, is representing a major threat to the practice of nonstandard architecture, since the client
might only see the blurred outcome and blame
the inaccurate compromised details to the nature
of the nonstandard design itself. But then again,
can the contractors and the project developers
be blamed to rely on their traditional experience,
which is largely based on traditional bricks and
mortar buildings? For them the nonstandard logic
may not be logical at all, they are presumably not
familiar with the advantages of the file to factory
process, since they are not mastering this process.
It is unknown territory for them. Because of the
reality of this situation the nonstandard designer
will need to rethink his contractual position as a
consultant only and will need to take on financial responsibility concerning the manufacturing
process. Since nonstandard architects as myself
have full control and full confidence that their
data are correct and accurate, they must take on
the responsibility for the engineering of the geometry, and naturally must be paid proportionally
for this responsibility. The benefit for the building industry will be huge: no more mistakes in
the correctness and transfer of the data, no more
delays in the exchange and understanding of the
concept, remodeling will no longer be necessary,
production will be clean and precise, assembly
always correct, all steps in the design and building process will be just in time, and just what is
needed. No more waste of time and materials, the
building site will be clean, while recycling can be
developed to cover all used materials. There is
one important condition though: all production
must be computer numerical controlled, all
components must be prefabricated, including all

concrete structures, including the foundations.
How sustainable can you get? It is obvious that
the nonstandard architect, who controls the efficiency of the process, must be the first to take
profit from that expertise. The appropriate way to
effectuate the new role of the architect is to take
part in the building process financially. In the
present situation architects leave the financial responsibility to project developers and contractors,
the architects themselves acting as a consultant
only, not being responsible for more then their
designers fee. I am an advocate of a new professional attitude of the architect, as to become an
entrepreneur, taking over the responsible role
of the contractor as for all components that are
CNC produced. Architects are chicken if they do
not have the guts to claim their leading role as the
responsible egg designer>engineer>builder.
2015 / 2016
2015 / 2016
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25m
Page 134
If the term architects of reason

has any meaning, I believe it must
relate to the experience in architecture (and hence in building, the
city, its assessment in the light of
history and so on) that specifically
led to an analysis and construction
of architecture in rational terms, in
other words making use of techniques peculiar to reason.
Page 181
ISBN 9789461865861
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9 789461 865861
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