Last week's threads...

Prompted by the presentations last Wednesday I mentioned some books and urban concepts that could assist you with your work, please find below some of these threads:

For urban public space (street project):

Gehl, Jan. Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1987.

A great website dealing with the same topics discussed in the book at: http://www.pps.org/info/placemakingtools/placemakers/jgehl

Part of the PDF book can be downloaded from this website: http://a.parsons.edu/~creanm/interface/interface_readings/gehl_lifebtnbuld.1.pdf

Also check out Jane's Walk, a website dedicated to Jane Jacobs' work: http://www.janeswalk.net/

We also discussed some top-down approaches to the development of cities--Dubai and Brasilia were mentioned as examples. I suggested that comparison of cities such as these, conceived in different historical circumstances, need to consider the different social/ecological and economic context of today and that of some decades ago. Richard Sennett has extensively discussed the effect of these conditions in society and their resulting effect on cities, particularly in regards to people engagement or capacity to engage in social processes (including solidarity and democracy). See for example: "Fighting the flexible firm" and "Capitalism and the City". See also:

http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/stories/storyReader$1513

http://mondediplo.com/2001/02/16cities

and book in www.scribd.com, "The Culture of New Capitalism"

Finally, we talked about Rem Koolhaas and (in my view) his often contradictory critique to the current social/political and economic conditions--a critique that does not prevent him from successfully using these conditions to exercise a top-down approach to urbanism. Two articles reflect his views and perhaps epitomize his postmodern approach:

Koolhaas, Rem. "Junkspace." October, no. 100 (Spring 2002): 175-190. http://www.btgjapan.org/catalysts/rem.html

Koolhaas, Rem, and Sanford Kwinter. Rem Koolhaas : Conversations with Students, Architecture at Rice University 30. Houston, Tex: New York : Rice University School of Architecture; Princeton Architectural Press, 1996. (Available from the ABP library)

See you all on Wednesday. Presentations will run for 7 minutes and 3 min. for comments from your classmates, Prof Louis Sauer and I. Find details of your presentation and essay requirements in the website under Programe.


Beatriz C. Maturana

read more...

summary only...

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

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Arts & Architecture Research high density new bauhaus

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).

read more...

summary only...

Final submission: June 3, 2009

Assignment 4 is made up of 2 parts (both are important):

1. an essay of 1500-2000-words
2. and an analysis of a project from the point of view of your research topic (6xA3 pages min.)—we will discuss the total number of pages closer to the submission date.

read more...

summary only...

Presentation by Prof Louis Sauer

On May 6th we will have Prof Louis Sauer as a guest during our tutorial session (between 1:45-3:15). The following is an extract from his biography:

Louis (Lou) Sauer (aka Louis Edward. Sauer), FAIA grew up in Oak Park, Illinois amongst Frank Lloyd Wright's houses. He is a prolific architect and design theorist whose body of work, defined by a combination of design excellence and social engagement, has won over eighty awards and been published in more than 100 international books and magazines.

"

Although there are not many American architects like Louis Sauer.....his working values seem to come directly from his American heritage: a commitment to pragmatic action, to building rather than talking about building; commitment to giving the people who use his buildings maximum freedom of choice in their daily lives; commitment to the unpredictable adventures of a pluralistic, free-wheeling capitalist society and commitment to serving the underprivileged members of that society as well.[2]

"

As principal of Louis Sauer Associates, Architects, Philadelphia, his work in the period 1961-1979 specialized in a full range of 90 residential building types in differing contexts from central city urban infill, to suburban and rural areas and new town developments at Reston, Virginia and Columbia (Maryland).

Professor Sauer will be presenting on some of his projects. This is an unique opportunity to discuss with him your own topic for the semester. I suggest to have a look at Prof Sauer's work and be prepared with some questions.

--
Beatriz C. Maturana
Architect, PhD candidate, University of Melbourne
http://beatriz-maturana.blogspot.com/

read more...

summary only...

ED2009: program

Click on image to magnify:

read more...

summary only...