Presentation by Prof Louis Sauer

Presentation by Prof Louis Sauer on his extensive work. Prof Sauer presented some of his residential and urban design work to ED2009 tutorial group, University of Melbourne, 6 May 2009.
Presentation by Prof Louis Sauer

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Louis Sauer: an architectural statement
Focus: The Low-rise Housing Work of Louis Sauer, Toshi Jukatu Journal of Urban Housing,
(Kajima Institute, Tokyo), pp 6 – 7, January 1980 (monograph)

Architecture is a process and a product of civilization for solving specific man-environment problems. As a process, it is an intrinsically cultural and economic action, involved with complex issues and varied participants, to achieve political purposes through technology. To the extent that the interactions of these forces, issues and participants are understood, one can become more effective in predicting and modifying the outcomes of the designed environment. By understanding the separate goals and disciplines of the individual participants in each aspect of housing, architects can intervene for greater influence upon the quality of housing and its environment.

ARCHITECTURAL BELIEF

The values and attitudes of architects are the most powerful determinants of their work. The open door to change is to understanding and working with these values and their resultant accountabilities. In order to make design choices, one must advocate a particular set of values and thus, architecture is a political process and product.

DESIGN: A PROCESS AND PRODUCT

For the architect to be in control, to be able to modify his work for predictive results, he should understand the nature of the various participants, their power and the incremental goals and resources for each of them and for each phase of the work. Design programming is dynamic and is directly linked to formal design — each design tool (site plan, elevation, detail, etc.) is in fact a synthetic statement of program and solution. This should be seen as a contingent process. Evaluative criteria are rarely explicit for those very areas most essential to the quality of architectural form. Architects are aware and highly sensitive to the values of their clients and peer group, and to the extent that these represent larger societal interests, to this extent will these larger interests be incorporated into the design program.

ARCHITECTURAL PRECONDITIONS

Normally a people develop homogeneous traditions, forms and infrastructure that satisfy their shelter needs. But when populations change and or become heterogeneous in terms of lifestyle and cultural expectancies old traditions no longer satisfy needs, and an architect's implicit understanding of the environment no longer solves the problems.

In these situations man-environment architectural relationships need to be made explicit, in order to predict the user’s fit with the final designed artefact. One problem today is that many architects understand the values of the programmer and are not sensitive to when the user’s value differ from those of the programmer. But substantial social knowledge is available to help the architect and programmers. The need for this is understood. What is not understood are the non-architectonic conditions necessary for the successful creation and use of architecture.

The final product of the architect is not under his control. To produce a lasting architecture the inter-relationship between land, finances, users, management and architectural form should be understood; however, architectural form is perhaps the least necessary to regulate – to control.

BUILDING TYPOLOGIES

Cultures produce traditions of building that efficiently solve shelter problems. This tradition, in the form of building typologies (site, building and unit), is generally given to the architect. It is only the abnormal and non-generic situation that allows the architect to produce forms outside of the tradition (e.g. Habitat by Moshe Safdie).