The City as a Project

Housing Contemporary forms of life. Final presentation.

admin — Thu, 23 May 2013 09:45:37 +0000

The Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design
Second-year graduation studio

Housing Contemporary Forms of Life: A Project for Tehran

Final Presentation on Thursday, May 30th, 2013
BK, Zaal A
14:00-18:00

After analyzing the historical archetypes of the architecture of Tehran, and devising tactics for collective life “within and against” the market forces that produce the urbanization of the Middle Eastern metropolis, the students will present the their final projects as an archipelago of possibilities for nurturing the life the city.

Projects by
Golnar Abbasi, Mochammad Yusni Aziz, Kwang Hyun Baek, Claudio Cuneo, Lei Mao, Olivia Marra, Jooyoun Yoon.

Guest Critics
Elia Zenghelis, Pier Vittorio Aureli (AA), Bernardina Borra (TU Delft), Stefano Milani (TU Delft), Iradj Moeini (Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran).

Tutored by
Amir Djalali, Hamed Khosravi, Francesco Marullo.

Hannes Meyer: Co-op Architecture

admin — Sat, 11 May 2013 16:27:48 +0000

Hannes Meyer,Originally published in San Rocco 6 / Collaborations.
the second dean of the Bauhaus, is remembered as the one that drove the school to ruin. Supposedly his strong leftist sympathies had made the school inopportune for the German political climate of the time. ThoseCo-op theatre.
1. See Hannes Meyer, “My dismissal from the Bauhaus”, open letter to Oberbürgermeister Hesse, Dessau, 1930; and idem, “Bauhaus Dessau, 1927–1930: My Experience of a Polytechnical Education”, a survey in the Mexican periodical Edificatión, no. 34/1940.
2. Some of the biggest names include Siemens, AEG, Daimler, Fokker, and Opel.
3. The delicate relationship was also to the industrial capitalist system’s trouble handling inflation. A balance between labour and production modes could not be found, and this had already began to be apparent after 1923. It slowly led to the crisis and failure of the Weimar Republic, with the consequent seizing of power by the Nazi party. See Sergio Bologna, “Class Composition and the Theory of the Party at the Origin of the Workers–Councils Movement,” Telos, no. 13 (Fall 1972): 4-27 and Antonio Negri, Operai e stato: Lotte operaie e riforma dello stato capitalistico tra rivoluzione d’ottobre e New Deal, (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1972).
4 From the article “Die neue Welt” that Meyer published in 1926 in ABC Beiträge zum Bauen [Contributions to Building], an architectural magazine founded in 1923 by Hannes Meyer, Hans Schmidt, Mart Stam and the Suprematist El Lissitzky. in power disliked him because he openly sympathized with Marxist ideology and the German Social Democracy that had just entered the political scene in the turbulent transition from a Wilhelmine Germany to the Weimar Republic. But few know that during the very short time he was in charge of the Bauhaus – from April 1927 to July 1930 – he turned the school from an elite educational institution into a more egalitarian and productive place of learning that was directly connected to industry. The school had become financially profitable and students worked together in brigades that catered to mass industrial modes of production.[1] His goal was to transform the collective potential of co-operation in architectural production from a political concept into a functional tool as a means of rescuing the working class from capitalism. Meyer perceived architects as labour, and for him, co-operation was both a collective mode of production and the link between the product itself – architecture – and its producer – mass society.
In those years Germany was still leading in the development of industrial machinery thanks to strict collaboration between research and labour, as well as an extremely dynamic marketing apparatus.[2] A boom in skilled and educated labour had enabled the emerging working class to self-organize through labour unions, but also engendered a delicate relationship with their representative Social Democratic party.[3] Right after World War I, at the end of the German Spartacist revolution, the party took part in the government for the first time in 1919. Thanks to industry, proletarian power was growing and the working class was gradually becoming conscious of its rights and potential. A new dimension of the collective subject – backed up by intellectuals – was emerging. This was fuelled further by scientific research, which confirmed the cultural and social movement toward the collective dimension. The scale of the world was starting to decrease faith in the uniqueness of the individual: in January 1921, Albert Einstein startled Germany by postulating the possibility of measuring the universe.
In Meyer’s words, “Co-operation rules the world. The community rules the individual”.[4] He sincerely believed that co-operation was the most valuable alternative social structure, one founded not on the production of surplus value, but on the collective needs and desires of the mass society that produced it. His thought was strongly characterized by the collective aspects of producing and learning together. He strove to introduce the working class to the liberating potential of co-operation, and also used it to problematize collective work in the debate about the role of the architect in the industrial world. On the one hand, his purpose was to tune the shortcomings of functionalism – criticizing the ones who embraced technological modernization but not the social consequences of it. And on the other hand, Meyer used co-operation to counter teaching’s inability to connect with industrial production and to eliminate the artistic and authorial aspects of arts-and-crafts-style production.
Contemporary to Meyer many others were working on the same theme, and the ones who were probably closest in their thinking were Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator.[5]5. “For us, man portrayed on the stage is significant as a social function. It is not his relationship to himself, nor his relationship to God, but his relationship to society which is central. Whenever he appears, his class or social stratum appears with him. His moral, spiritual or sexual conflicts are conflicts with society.” Erwin Piscator 1929, “Basic Principles of a Sociological Drama”, in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, ed. V. Kolocotroni, J. Goldman and O. Taxidou (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998). In 1926, Brecht’s collective premiered Mann ist Mann (Man Equals Man), a play that stressed collectivity and downplayed the individual by exploring the human personality as something that can be dismantled and reassembled like a machine.  For Meyer – in the context ferment of German industry – the production method should have been closer to social needs in terms of both process and output. He believed that the goal of an architect was to organize the interpenetration of technology and the collective body by way of co-operation in order to merge the authorial action of the architect into a more egalitarian and collective process. In this way, the architect himself turns into an organizer and becomes a specialist by eliminating the paradoxical separation of the artist from other kinds of workers, thereby articulating architecture’s melding of art and life. The architect has the knowledge to improve the design process and bring together social needs and technology in order to assemble an object made up of use values and visual codes already consolidated by society. Such a process is structured by continual author-free architectural production. In other words, with the organizational support of the architect, society produces its own architecture. At this point the architect’s control is hardly discernable in the reciprocal interplay of action and potential between society and built matter. At different moments, architecture and the collective body become one another’s subject or object. This suggests a twofold interpretation of co-operation between architecture and man.[6]6. See Meyer, “Die neue Welt”.
The way in which Meyer used co-operation as an architectural design tool in the context of the mass society generated by industry can be interpreted in two ways. The first one is explicit and involves the issue of co-operation among individuals; this is the one that is consistently applied by Meyer in his teaching and his practice of his profession.[7]7. See Hannes Meyer, “How I Work”, Architektura CCCP, 6 (1933). The second is more implicit and relates to mass society. These two perspectives can be read as complementary sides of the same tool.
In 1924, Meyer designed the Swiss pavilion for the International Exhibition of Co-operatives in Ghent.[8]8. K. J. Winkler, Der Architekt Hannes Meyer: Anschauungen und Werk (Berlin: VEB Verlag für Bauwesen, 1989). The space was meant for co-operative propaganda through “popular education” using folks culture. Meyer imposes “the simplest simplicity” in the expression of abstraction to convey the message about co-operation. In this manner he could at the same time promote co-operation among the individuals comprising mass society, as well as co-operate with them through “the education of new vision and perception” to stir them to become more politically aware. At one end of the exhibition space was the co-op vitrine.Co-op vitrine. The showcase consisted of a large glass box like a shop window offering thirty-six standard items of co-operative production and co-operative trade. The collection of co-op products symbolizes a production that has grown out of the alienation of the capitalist market economy and ownership, demonstrating how co-operation can disenthral man from capital. Products are arranged in a clear spatial composition and clearly recall the form of repetition of industrial mass production, for they are stacked and arranged as if at the end of production assembly lines. No product is individually displayed; rather each is presented as part of a group with no centre while nonetheless remaining individually recognizable. People entering the pavilion could admire the vitrine at any time of the day. At night, however, at the other end of the exhibition space the curtain rose on co-op theatre.
With the “co-op theatre”, Meyer aspired to use short scenes to eliminate human emotion by displaying “body-games, glimpses of light, colours, movement, noises and music from a gramophone”. The plays were mute pantomimes that described the idea of the co-operative to demonstrate its benefits. Meyer wrote the scenes himself, touching upon the core elements of the co-operative ideology: work (private enterprise and wage labour); clothes (a man finds happiness in the co-op clothes); dream (about the possibility of different conditions); trade (cutting out the middleman). The actors’ performance incorporated life-size puppets in order to suggest the opposition of man versus dummy, co-op versus anti-co-op. By way of this simple pairing, the audience was confronted with the contrast between the real emotions and natural movement of a freed man and a puppet symbolizing a man that does not emancipate himself by means of co-operation. With the co-op theatrical performances Meyer was precociously experimenting with upcoming developments in experimental theatre, for his four pieces had a clear pedagogical purpose.
Lesiure activities had become extremely important. In Wilhelmine Germany, it had grown as the bourgeoisie’s entertainment, while in the Weimar Republic proletarians, too, started to enjoy theatre plays and movies. An example of this is the success of both theatre and cinema celebrated by Karl Krauss and Walter Benjamin, both intellectuals who regarded these arts as a form of education. And as Eduard Bernstein said: “It takes a certain breadth of perspective and a fairly developed consciousness of rights to turn a worker who occasionally rebels into a socialist.”[9]9. “A working class that is without political rights and has grown up in superstition and with inadequate schooling will no doubt revolt from time to time and conspire on a small scale, but it will never develop a socialist movement. It takes a certain breadth of perspective and a fairly developed consciousness of rights to turn a worker who occasionally rebels into a socialist. That is why political rights and education hold a preeminent place within every socialist programme of action.” Eduard Bernstein, Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie [The Preconditions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy] (Stuttgart: J.H.W. Dietz Nachfolg, 1899). English excerpts are published online as “Socialist “Revisionism”: The Immediate Tasks of Social Democracy“
Thus the education of working class was a relevant issue in socialist debate, and theatre became a useful means of exploring it once the world of theatre had been freed from the bourgeoisie.
In 1926, Bertolt Brecht started developing his idea of “epic theatre”, which was designed to provoke rational self-analysis and a critical view of the play rather than emotional identification. Since epic theatre was supposed to instruct its audience, Brecht also called it instructive theatre, and in his Lehrstücke (learning-plays) spectators were no longer in any way allowed to experience the show uncritically or without an understanding of its practical consequences through the overly simplistic means of feeling empathy for the characters in a play. Brecht’s plays were aimed to affect those engaged in the performance, mainly the actors, most of all, but also the spectators. In a Marxist way, “instructive theatre” was art for the producer, not the consumer. The production of the performance subjected the content and the events portrayed to a process of alienation. This was what Brecht called the “Small Pedagogy”: the alienation that is necessary to all understanding, or verfremdungseffekt. While the “Major Pedagogy” made the Lehrstücke turn its audience into participants during the performance process. Plays were used as operative political training. By copying the behaviour of the characters in the play, the participants rehearsed how to think and act collectively.[10]10. Bertolt Brecht, “The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre: Notes to the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny,” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (London: Methuen, 1964) Bertolt Brecht, “The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre” (1930). See also Meg Mumford, Bertolt Brecht (London and New York: Routledge, 2009).
11. These included his works of Theater Co-op, Vitrine Co-op, Lino Co-op, Photo Co-op, Interior Co-op. With Brecht, the stage became a means of instruction, and this is what Meyer tried to do with architecture. Thanks to the various co-op projects[11] of his first experimental phase, Meyer already defined co-operation as the reciprocity between modes of production and modes of perception that he will develop in what we might call “epic architecture”. In all his designs, he elaborates a new relationship between the building, its non-author – the architect and other specialists – and the collective subject. For him building is no longer an individual task in which architectural ambition is realized; rather, “Building is a joint undertaking of craftsmen and inventors . . . Building has grown . . . into a collective affair [of individuals]”.[12]12. See Meyer, Die neue Welt. See also VOPRA (All-Russian Society of Proletarian Architects), Statements #10 and #11.Plan of the Bernau school, redrawn by the author.
Meyer always started a project by drawing a diagram that reflected his assumption that architecture is part of a system of production, re-production and consumption. For him, this system exerts an influence over individuals, while the collective subject has an influence on the diagram that generates the project. This concept of a double relationship partly anticipates the distracted perception of the detached Parisian flâneur described by Benjamin. The difference is that Meyer aims to achieve a more conscious involvement with a sense of engagement powered by the collective. In fact, all of Meyer’s designs – from the Petersschule to the League of Nations to the Bernau School – are dedicated to the collective engagement of mass society. The task underlying these designs is to nurture co-operation as a means of both influence and perception. Such works best demonstrate how Meyer’s work unpacks both the explicit co-operation among individuals within mass society, and the implicit one between mass society and architecture. Among the three mentioned projects, the only one that Meyer succeeded in completing is the Federal School of the Federation of German Trade Unions in Bernau (1928–30), a project he won through a competition.
In this school,Exterior views of the Bernau school
13. Martin Kieren, Hannes Meyer: Dokumente zur Frühzeit Architektur und Gestaltungsversuche 1919–1927 (Heiden: A. Niggli, 1990). Meyer could finally flesh out his co-op ideology. The client supported Meyer’s co-operative intentions and the building construction was even funded by four and a half million members of the union, who each contributed fifty pfennings. At the time, the federation united more than eighty percent of all the unions in Germany, and the school was thought of as an institute of educational excellence for workers just as the Bauhaus was for designers. Lessons were intended to allow volunteers from the unions to benefit from further education for a short period, and the most common subjects of study were trade unions, management, economics, insurance and labour law, and industrial hygiene. Meyer worked on this project with a group of students from the Bauhaus. He had won the competition thanks to a proposal about a new form of socio-educational organization designed to stimulate comradeship based on a division of the 120 students into twelve cells of ten people each.[13] Thus the diagram at the origin of the school’s design is marked by the dialectics of internal material determinations – programme, standards, hygiene – and external socio-educational ones. It results in a linear arrangement organizing the various uses of the complex into three distinct yet interconnected components. The first building hosts most of the public functions and is connected to a residential zone of four dormitories. It terminates with a two-storey building with a wide staircase connecting a gymnasium and classrooms. A long steel-and-glass corridor slopes down, following the landscape and serving as an interior passage linking the complex’s components, and ends at the wide staircase. The steel used in the construction of this passage as well as in the winter garden and the gymnasium staircase is painted red, contrasting sharply with the gray concrete structure and buff brick of the exterior.[14]14. Winkler, Der Architekt Hannes Meyer. The vibrant red signalled the principal circulation path, but also an informal space in which to meet. It is one of the building’s most prominent public spaces and external features, and it emphasizes the underlying functional diagram. In this project the collective spaces embody a significant mass psychological factor that attains the sought-after dimension of collective life, shared production and self-valorization for the Federation’s students.
Unfortunately, the ideal context for co-operation created at the Bernau School was soon interrupted by the war. The Nazi party confiscated the institute only three years after it had opened and converted it into an SS training facility. After the war, the East German Trade Union Federation reused it again as a training facility, but later on the buildings were left vacant and eventually abandoned. Following the reunification of Germany that began in 1989, the building was found in very bad shape, and a restoration effort sponsored by the regional government of Brandenburg in partnership with a new occupant, the Handwerkskammer (Chamber of Crafts) Berlin, began in 2001.[15]15. See Morris H. Hylton III, Modernism at Risk: Modern Solutions for Modern Landmarks, an exhibition organized by the World Monuments Fund.
Analyzing how Meyer focused on establishing a relationship with the contemporary collective subject of his day – mass society – can provide insights into how to relate the collective subject of today: the multitude. In his co-op works, Meyer deconstructed architecture in terms of its material determinants and the social conditions of its making. For him, architecture had to be produced within society and disassociated from capital. It could be argued that Meyer tried to find the link between the production of architecture and Karl Marx’s concept of the production of man and society: “Just as society itself produces man as man, so is society produced by him.”[16]16. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Third Manuscript [1844], Ökonomisch-philosophischen Manuskripte, Translated by Martin Milligan (New York: Prometheus Books, 1988).
17. “The multitude is a whole of singularities and communication and co-operation are fundamental to its essence.” Antonio Negri, “Pour une definition ontologique de la multitude”, Multitudes 9 (May–June 2002). Like mass society, the multitude is a subject of production, but its co-operative power is exploited by capital.[17] In general, co-operation is an autonomous power typical of collective subjects and is a mode of production that has to be reclaimed from the claws of capitalism.
The crucial aspect of the architecture of the collective subject is that Meyer had already used material diagrammes to “organize” the potential of collective immaterial production[18]18. See Branden W. Joseph and Alessia Ricciardi, “Interview with Paolo Virno”, Grey Room, no. 21 (Fall 2005) and Maurizio Lazzarato “Immaterial Labour”. and the self-valorization of mass society, something that was largely underestimated at the time. Thanks to Meyer’s stress on co-operation, architecture was not produced by a diagram mapping only material factors. Rather, his application of both material and immaterial factors in the development of diagrams is the opposite of today’s tendency to create a “diagram of everything”.[19]19. “Maybe, architecture doesn’t have to be stupid after all. Liberated from the obligation to construct, it can become a way of thinking about anything – a discipline that represents relationships, proportions, connections, effects, the diagram of everything.” Rem Koolhaas, ed., Content (Cologne: Taschen, 2004). Opposing this co-op architecture is the organization of a non-bureaucratic process that both produces effects upon and is generated by the collective subject in ways that would not be possible without a design. In other words, co-operative architecture entails reorganizing an organized form of existence. It alternates phases of organization and of spontaneity[20]20. Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of dialectic of spontaneity and organization argued that the two are not separable or separate activities, but rather different moments in the same political process; one cannot exist without the other. See Rosa Luxemburg, The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, ed. Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004). by letting the collective subject implicitly co-operate with architecture and foster explicit co-operation among its individuals.

What an Apparatus is Not. A Seminar on Biopolitics, with Matteo Pasquinelli

admin — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 14:05:49 +0000

The Berlage,Housing nomadic forms of life: Deyr-e Gachin Caravanserai, South of Tehran, Safavid Period. second-year studio Housing Contemprary Forms of Life: A Project for Tehran.
Seminar with Matteo Pasquinelli
Thursday 28 March
Room Z, 15:00 – BK-TU Delft

What an Apparatus is Not
A Seminar on Biopolitics

Contemporary philosophy and art are crossed by a political obsession for ‘life’ originated by Foucault’s seminal works on biopower in the 1970s and expanded today in a broad interest for biotechnologies and neurosciences. ‘Life’ appears to be surrounded by a very intellectual siege, yet its definition is often left unquestioned: concepts such as bios, form-of-life and ‘the living’ are often used in almost a metaphysical or self-explanatory fashion. This seminar does not aim to clarify ‘the meaning of life’ like in a famous comedy by the Monty Python, but simply to retrace the genealogy of some of these concepts, focusing in particular on the origin of Foucault’s idea of biopower. It is interesting to see, for instance, how this genealogy is rendered by Agamben in his essay What Is an Apparatus?that inscribes Foucault under the crypto-theological influence of Hegel and Hyppolite. Contra Agamben, it will be shown how Foucault’s notion of biopolitical normativity was in fact inspired by Canguilhem’s notion of socio-organic normativity. Canguilhem himself adopted this idea from the German-Jewish neurologist Kurt Goldstein and his work on the ‘normative power’ of the brain (in a unique interpretation of the German Lebensphilosophie, in which by the way the term Biopolitk was first coined with a clear reactionary spin). Reversing a superficial fetish for ‘the living’, eventually the neurological matrix of the brain and the very living power of abstraction will be disclosed as the forgotten core of ‘bios’ and also of the Foucauldian biopower.

[link]

Beyond the Crisis: Athens as a Case Study. A Seminar with Platon Issaias.

admin — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 10:14:39 +0000

The Berlage, hosted by TU Delft.
Second year graduation studio
Housing Contemporary Forms of Life: A Project for Tehran

Thursday, February 21st.
TU Delft-BK, Room P, 14.00-17.00

Seminar with Platon Issaias
Beyond the Crisis: Athens as a Case Study

The presentation attempts to theorize the ‘informal’ urbanization that characterizes the contemporary Greek cities, classifying this as an immediate derivative of a complex political project. For our point of view, this was mainly displayed by architectural and urban typologies and protocols. As a case-study, the Greek cities and particularly Athens, offer a valid critique on this recent conceptions regarding the distinction between ‘informal’ and ‘formal’ urbanism. In the Greek case, what appears to be a spontaneous and un-planned urban typology is the result of a precise institutional and regulatory apparatus.
The discussion will follow the structure of Platon’s PhD research on Athens, particularly focusing on an alternative medium–cinema–and the way the city’s urban condition was presented in two feature films of the last decade, Matchbox (2003) and Dogtooth (2009). What makes these two projects significant in the discipline of architecture is the way the artists relate all of the above with the collapse of the domestic archetypes of the city: the typical apartment of the generic Athenian block, and the self-built suburban villa of rural Attica. In both cases, space is of fundamental importance, primarily because the plot is developing only within interior and introverted settings, with barely any reference on the surrounding city and landscape. By being ordinary and typical of their kind, they manage to further estrange the reality of the protagonists.
The presentation aims to explore the relation of these two significant films with the city’s contemporary condition. This will allow elaborating on and arguing the bond of the profound economic and political collapse of Greece with a particular spatial crisis that preceded it. In the last part, a series of projects for Athens will be discussed, among which the research studio contacted in Berlage Institute in 2011 by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Elia Zenghelis, Maria Giudici and Platon Issaias.

Housing Contemporary Forms of Life. Midterm Reviews

admin — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 16:29:15 +0000

The Berlage Center for Advanced Architecture and Urban Design, hosted by Technische Universiteit Delft
Second-year graduation studio

Housing Contemporary Forms of Life: A Project for Tehran
Midterm Reviews
February 20th, from 14.30 till 18.00
Schieblock, Schiekade 189, Rotterdam

Life in Tehran seems to proliferate almost exclusively in interiors. The category of public space as a political “space of appearance” does not seem to apply in the case of the today’s Iranian metropolis. The various political powers that ruled the city attempted in many ways to produce a public space, but they have always met the resistance of the different forms of life which inhabit the city, unwilling to be represented by state institutions. For these reasons, the studio tackles the private, enclosed interior as the center of Tehran’s political life. While the first part of the studio addressed this condition in a historical perspective, through an analysis of the urban form of Tehran according to historical maps, the second phase explores the life of present day’s Tehran, and the spaces which make it possible. The first design hypotheses exploit the structure of the building market of the city in order to unveil the possibility for a collective, yet interiorized, domestic dimension.

Projects by
Golnar Abbasi, Mochammad Yusni Aziz, Kwang Hyun Baek, Claudio Cuneo, Lei Mao, Olivia Marra, Jooyoun Youn.

Guest Critics
Binna Choi (Casco Utrecht), Platon Issaias (The Bartlett-UCL), Stefano Milani (TU Delft), Lara Schrijver (TU Delft), Tala Vaziri (American University in Dubai).

Studio tutors
Amir Djalali, Hamed Khosravi, Francesco Marullo.

The Politics of Sacred Space. End-of-term presentations.

admin — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 12:12:57 +0000

The Architectural Association’s Diploma Unit 14, led by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria S. Giudici, will hold an end-of-term presentation on Tuesday 11 December at 33 Bedford Square.

The Politics of Sacred Space

After decades of neglect within the field of architecture and urbanism we want to re-open the issue of sacred space. In architecture, ‘sacredness’ is either ignored as an irrational sphere, or it is reduced to stereotypes of spirituality and contemplation. In its attempt to reconnect architecture to the political, Diploma 14 proposes to focus on one of its most intense manifestations – the issue of sacred space. If the political concerns difference and conflict as collective phenomena, it is within the category of the sacred that this concept acquires its most potent representations. It is possible to speculate that the very origin of the city as political space was precisely the foundation of a sacred space, a sanctuary. The sanctuary was a space set apart within an open territory and as such the safe meeting point for different clans or fugitives. The sanctuary was both open to different subjects and parties and closed in order to preserve its safety and difference towards everything outside itself. The dialectic of openness and exclusion implied in sacred space is thus one of the most ancient manifestations of the political.

Therefore it is precisely by examining the issue of the sacred that we can trace back many latent conditions that still affect the city today as political body. For example, if in contemporary discourse words such as community, participation and publicness have become clichés, it is within the idea of sacred space that they reacquire an intense meaning. Moreover, it is by studying the different forms of worship inherent in each religion that we can grasp the ethos of a civilisation. The work in the unit will depart from an in-depth study of the category of the sacred from ancient to contemporary times, and will pay special attention to theological concepts and forms of worship as foundations for political and spatial organisation of the city. Above all we will study how sacred space highlights the crucial link between architecture and the city. As always Diploma 14 will address the unit project by giving relevance to drawing and writing as fundamental means of design.

The Theology of Tabula Rasa: Walter Benjamin and Architecture

admin — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 15:54:38 +0000

The Berlage, second-year studio Housing Contemprary Forms of Life: A Project for Tehran.
Seminar with Pier Vittorio Aureli
Friday 30 November
Room C, 15:00 – BK-TU Delft

The Theology of Tabula Rasa:
Walter Benjamin and Architecture

It could happen to someone looking back over his life that he realized that almost all the deeper obligations he had endured in its course originated in people who everyone agreed had the traits of a “destructive character.” He would stumble on this fact one day, perhaps by chance, and the heavier the shock dealt to him, the better his chances of representing the destructive character.

In the presentation I will address Walter Benjamin’s reading of architecture. I will focus on two texts written in 1931 “The Destructive Character” and “Experience and Poverty” I believe that these two texts not only summarize Benjamin’s approach to architecture, but they also offer the possibility of an ethical project within and against the current ethos of economic recession and austerity measures.

Readings
Walter Benjamin, “The Destructive Character,” in Selected Writings 1931-34 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 540-542.
Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” in Selected Writings 1931-34, ibid., 731-736.
Detlef Mertins, “Walter Benjamin and the Tectonic Unconscious: Using Architecture as a Optical Instrument,” in Modernity Unbound (London: Architectural Association), 114-139.

Housing Contemporary Forms of Life. A Project for Tehran

admin — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 11:34:12 +0000

AConstrcution of the Ministry of Finance on the ruins of the Qajar Palace, Tehran. Photo by Ali Khadem 1937. (Institute for Iranian Contemporary Historical Studies). graduation project for the second-year program of The Berlage, led by Amir Djalali, Francesco Marullo, Hamed Khosravi, and hosted by Technische Universiteit Delft, November 2012 – June 2013.

Housing Contemporary Forms of Life. A Project for Tehran

When life itself is put at work, any distinction between working and dwelling, production and reproduction, public and private, cease to exist. Contemporary capital parasites and makes productive any forms of life far beyond the body and the spatial-temporal coordinates of its movement, subsuming the whole complexity of relations, affects, desires as crucial driving forces of development.

The most typical domestic activities, traditionally concealed as “unproductive” and “servile” unpaid labour, have become paradigmatic forms of exploitation, to the extent that household management, reproduction, affectivity and care have become, today, the fundamental qualities of the ubiquitous field of labour precarity. In this sense, dwelling itself has been stripped out of its spatial organizations and traditional protective clichés, becoming the most profitable living performance of value production, triggering a progressive hybridization of the domestic space through a parallel and opposite feminization of labour and an internal masculinization of the Existenzminimum.

The emergence of such forms of life have progressively eroded the strict division between public and private space, blurring Hannah Arendt’s distinction between production, reproduction and political action. The city becomes at the same time a continuous field of exteriorised publicity and a sequence of autonomous, privatized interiors.

Tehran is a paradigmatic case of this phenomenon, in which collective life proliferates almost entirely in interiors. Commercial, productive and living activities are confined between the same architectural types which stretch throughout the metropolis as a continuous field of urbanization. In particular, the house is the place where all the economic, political, social, theological and class conflicts are deployed. Instead of being a “space of appearance,” the political space of Tehran is rather a walled space of concealment.

This form of organization is not entirely new in the Islamic city. Its archetype is the Medina, an inhabitable wall enclosing an internal space conceived as a ‘Terrestrial Paradise.’ As state in a state, a city in a city, the enclosure is a “micro-cosmos” recapitulating the collective organization of the political body. Thus, the Iranian house embodies many meaning: it is a theological category as well as the foundation of the Islamic state; at the same time it is the engine of production and the theatre of everyday resistance. Michel Foucault, in his famous articles from Tehran during the 1978 revolt, was fascinated by the political power of this duality, which he saw as the original contribution of Shi’ism: the possibility of “a religion that gave to its people infinite resources to resist state power.” Our project will see the dwelling as the theatre and the factory for this ever-present political constituency.

Tehran is a booming metropolitan area.Photo Hamed Masoumi 2008.
Detail of the 1889 Map of Tehran, by Abdol Ghaffar.
Meydan-e Toupkhaneh, Tehran 1890. Photo Antoin Sevruguin. (Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives) Due to the development of an extensive network of infrastructure it is constantly being densified and expanded in its periphery, shaping a linear stretch of urbanisation enclosed between the Alborz mountain range in the north and the desert in the south. The historic centre has so far lacked political attention. Suffering from pollution, inaccessibility, lack of open spaces and ageing, the centre has gradually been abandoned by its inhabitants. The historic centre which used to be the heart of social, political and commercial life of the city now has turned to a congested traffic node punctuated with the traces of the recent past such the Golestan palace, the Friday mosque, and the bazaar, which is progressively losing importance in the new economy of the city.

The centre still bears the traces of the old city of Tehran enclosed within an octagonal wall built in 1879. Fascinated by European city shapes, in order to make the ‘new city’ as his own capital, Shah Naser ed-Din ordered the demolition of the old 1554 city wall and the anachronistic construction of a bastioned wall in the French manner.

The old Tehran city fabric had been shaped based on the traditional Islamic city configuration: placement of the Great Mosque, the Palace and Bazaar around an empty core, the meydan. The project of modernization of the capital run by the king in the mid-19th century needed a fundamental re-conceptualisation of the city, in the attempt to secularize its spaces. Accordingly, the shah ordered the construction of a new meydan—the Toopkhaneh—no longer surrounded by religious institutions, but by secular equipments: banks, the municipality, the post office and the police headquarter.

The square, which in the meantime had become the epicentre of political action and public demonstrations, was demolished in the mid-60s and never reconstructed again. The centre started progressively to lose architectural definition, hosting all kinds of urban functions in relatively small inhabitable cells, while the residential units gradually became emptied and abandoned. Today, due to the resettlement of the bureaucratic and administrative centre of the city into a new location a few kilometres northwards of the city centre, rethinking the very recent future of the historic centre seems be urgent. Several architectural offices were commissioned by the municipality of Tehran to revitalise the historic centre as a habitable space. The studio will take this occasion to tackle the very problem of the city through a fundamental rethinking of new housing typologies supported by a strategic plan, and reinforced by the infrastructural development.

The work produced by this studio aims to tackle the production of the city through its architecture, taking the dwelling as a political form that embodies social, historical and political issues. Through a rigorous historical account of the political and social development of the forms of dwelling in Tehran and in the Islamic city in general, the studio aims to relate with the municipality plans for the regeneration of the historical centre of Tehran, addressing also specific problems of real estate, infrastructural equipment and transportation.

Exercises in redrawing and reconstruction will constitute the first phase of the studio. Reconstruction is a fundamental strategy through which architecture expresses itself politically. Against reconstruction as a restoration of monuments into an idealized “original” condition, as a mere recuperation of ready-made past mythologies for an ideological present use, reconstruction will be seen as a critical operation which does not efface the historical complexity but, on the contrary, takes it as its main element for the elaboration of a new project for the city.

A particular importance will be given to reading and writing. The production of theory is a central component of the architect’s job. Theory might not be necessarily explicitly reflect the outcome of design. Nevertheless, the understanding of reality through theoretical discourse is a prerequisite to construct critical thought for further architectural praxis. Thereby the participants are encouraged to search in the work of philosophers, political economists and artists not only for the content to found their own discourse, but to look for new forms of reflecting upon the architecture of the city.

In Progress Presentations

admin — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 08:09:12 +0000

“The City as a Project” PhD program
In Progress Presentations

23 November 2012
14:00-17:30
BK-TUDelft, Room P

Promotor: Umberto S. Barbieri
Supervisor: Pier Vittorio Aureli

14.00 Amir Djalali

“Architecture of Tendency: The Image of Time in Aldo Rossi’s Analogous City”

Paper from in progress dissertation:
Beyond Public Space: Collective Intelligence and the Production of Common Space

14.30 Francesco Marullo

“University Climatic System”

paper from in progress dissertation:
Typical Plan: Architecture of Labour and the Space of Production

15.00 Bernardina Borra

“Hannes Meyer: Co-Op Architecture”

from in progress dissertation:
Co-Operation as Colletive Project

15.30 Platon Issaias

“War Within Four Walls: A City in Crisis and the Collapse of Domestic Archetypes”

Paper from in progress dissertation:
Beyond the Informal City: The Lump City of Athens and the Possibility of an Urban Common

16.00 Hamed Khosravi

“City as Paradise: The Spatialization of Sovereignty in Early Iranian Cities”

Paper from in progress dissertation:
Camp of Faith: on Political Theology and Urban Form

16.30. Maria S. Giudici

“Via Giulia, or the Street as a Scene of Power, 1447-1527”

Paper from in progress dissertation:
Commonplaces: Rethinking the Architecture of the Street

17.00 Concluding Remarks

Respondants: Bernard Colenbrander, Michiel Riedjik, Tom Avermaete, Lara Schrijver

The Fourth Typology. Christopher C. M. Lee Defence Ceremony

admin — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 10:12:47 +0000

We are glad to announce our very first doctoral thesis defense, The Fourth Typology: Dominant Type and the Idea of the City, by Christopher C. M. Lee.

26 October 2012 – 10:00
Aula TU Delft, Senaatszaal

The Fourth Typology – Dominant Type and the Idea of the City
The purpose of this dissertation is to renew the understanding of type and its relation to the idea of the city. In doing so, it attempts to revalidate the theory of type and its instrumentality for architetural production in today’s globalised cities. The analysis of the history and theory of type alongside the inquiry into the developmental city, frames the research of this dissertation. Type’s relation to the idea of the city is the extension of this concern to search for a commonality in which architecture could invest itself with sociality. The city of Singapore is used as a case study to exemplify the utilization of the dominant type to figure the idea of the developmental city state. The result of this dissertation is the possibility of conceiving a fourth typology.

The commission will be composed by Prof.ir. Umberto Barbieri, Dr. Pier Vittorio Aureli (promotors), Prof.ir Michiel Riedijk, Prof.dr. Alexander D’Hooghe Prof.dr. Charles Rice, Prof.ir. Henco, C. Bekkering.

Christopher Lee is the co-founder and principal of Serie Architects London, Mumbai and Beijing. He is the Design Critic in Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design. He graduated with the AA Diploma (Honours) from the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA London) and awarded the RIBA President’s Medal Commendation Award. Lee is author of numerous publications as well, for example ‘Working in Series’ and co-authored ‘Typological Formations: Renewable Building Types and the City’, both published by AA Publications. He lectures widely and the works of Series has been exhibited worldwide.

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