 Subjects -> ARCHITECTURE (Total: 219 journals)
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- The House Gone Missing
Authors: Dirk Van den Heuvel, Nelson Mota
Pages: 3 - 10
Abstract: The digital turn in architecture seems to have displaced the house as a paradigm for architectural theory. Omitting the house, and with it, housing and dwelling as key sites for the reconstitution of the discipline, recent theorisations of the digital in architecture have almost exclusively focused on new methods of production and notions of materiality alongside profound changes to the urban and social dimensions of the built environment. The Covid-19 pandemic has unveiled the multifaceted dimensions of the impact of the new digital technologies on dwelling as private houses transformed into online workspaces. It calls for a reflection on the question of dwelling as formulated by Martin Heidegger in 1951, when he suggested that answers won’t be found in technology and quantitative approaches to the pressing housing urgency of the time, but rather in a rethinking of culture through existentialist philosophy. The question of dwelling after the digital turn leads to scrutiny of the history of the digitisation of the house and the shifting nature of domesticity, and to an exploration of involved motivations and values, oscillating between a techno-utopianism to a techno-capitalism. While the boundaries between real and virtual realms are blurred, the house and dwelling find a reconceptualisation in ecological and relational terms, thereby dissolving the house as a discrete object or entity. Privacy, autonomy, and physicality are in need of a rebalancing.
PubDate: 2023-09-20
DOI: 10.7480/footprint.17.1.7099
Issue No: Vol. 17, No. 1 (2023)
- Dwelling in the Digital Age
Authors: Antoine Picon
Pages: 11 - 22
Abstract: Dwelling appears as a complex entanglement of dreams and realities, mental representations, and concrete practices. Here the question of its evolution in the digital age is approached at three levels. Firstly, what are the changes that it brings to the concrete experience of the built environment that have accompanied the rise of digital technologies' The Covid19 pandemic has contributed to reveal some of them, but the full picture is still far from clear. Secondly, how are these changes related to this different understanding of the human that is often dubbed as a transition towards a ‘posthuman’ condition, Thirdly, the least evident to address: will these shifts lead to the emergence of new spatial organizations and programs' Central to the argument developed here is that there is a deep relation between dwelling and the constitution of human subjectivity. Dwelling in the digital age is thus inseparable from the question of the evolution of what it means to be human in our contemporary societies.
PubDate: 2023-09-20
DOI: 10.7480/footprint.17.1.6830
Issue No: Vol. 17, No. 1 (2023)
- The Digitalisation of Swedish Housing
Authors: Fredrik Torisson
Pages: 23 - 42
Abstract: So called ‘smart’ built environments operate in a peculiar temporal nexus: they are simultaneously just around the corner, already here, and yesterday’s news. This is usually put down to hype and hyperbole, but it may well be argued that smart built environments do indeed exist across temporal dimensions – only not in the way we imagine them to. Instead of speaking of a digital turn in housing, we would be better served by employing the plural: digital turns. In fact, once we begin to unravel the history of how the idea of what we today call smart technology has been implemented in multi-household rental dwellings since the early 1980s, a pattern emerges. The article charts how landlords and others have placed smart devices that monitor, encourage or discipline tenants to behave in certain ways. This is a parallel story to the dream of a leisure-centred technology-enabled house of the future. This parallel story is darker and centres on the transformation of the dwelling through its digitalisation.
PubDate: 2023-09-20
DOI: 10.7480/footprint.17.1.6436
Issue No: Vol. 17, No. 1 (2023)
- Rethinking Autonomous and Robotic Systems in Residential Architecture
Authors: Sotirios Kotsopoulos, Jason Nawyn
Pages: 43 - 66
Abstract: Informed by twenty years of hands-on experimentation with autonomous and robotic systems in home prototypes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this study provides insight into the motivations and values of integrating computing technologies in residential architecture. Although optimising home adaptability for energy efficiency, ergonomics, and climate control are shown to have benefits, applications intended to influence human behaviour remain questionable. The features of three home prototypes are presented to supply evidence for this claim: a Connected Sustainable Home that is a prototype of connected sustainability; the PlaceLab, a living laboratory for studying health-related home systems; and the CityHome, a series of robotically-transformable apartment prototypes. The case studies are of distinct scales, aim at heterogeneous objectives, and were implemented at different times. They are thematically linked through digital home automation. Evaluating these three prototypes enables the determination of design criteria for integrating autonomous and robotic systems in residential architecture and provokes reflection on the impact of autonomous systems on architectural practice.
PubDate: 2023-09-20
DOI: 10.7480/footprint.17.1.6484
Issue No: Vol. 17, No. 1 (2023)
- Platforms and Dwelling
Authors: Lorinc Vass, Roy Cloutier, Nicole Sylvia
Pages: 67 - 90
Abstract: Under contemporary capitalism and platform urbanism, domesticity distorts to take on new forms. Dwelling is simultaneously decentralised and re-distributed via digital and urban networks. This article argues that these new forms of dwelling necessitate new modes of critique – ones primed for this networked, spatially distributed condition. It proposes to supplement typological and topographical approaches to dwelling with the more ‘anexactly rigorous’ relational cartography offered by the field of topology. The article begins with an outline of topology, drawing on mathematics, philosophy and geography towards a reconceptualisation of architecture as a boundary-drawing apparatus. The topological condition of modern dwelling is then retraced as a genealogy of interpenetrating edifices, mediating membranes, and prosthetic equipment, which have prefigured present-day formations of domesticity. The second half of the article trains this topological lens onto three architectural tendencies in response to platform urbanism: convivial arrangements of networked living, commoning platforms and thresholds, and counter-protocols of distributed domesticity. Through unpacking these trajectories, the article illustrates the potential that a topological approach engenders via new modes of mapping, critiquing, resisting and subverting the unequally distributed agency and power underlying the circuits of platform urbanism.
PubDate: 2023-09-20
DOI: 10.7480/footprint.17.1.6172
Issue No: Vol. 17, No. 1 (2023)
- Infinite But Tiny
Authors: Georgios Eftaxiopoulos, María Álvarez García
Pages: 91 - 112
Abstract: In the midst of a new Covid-19 variant—Omega—in winter 2021, the recently rebranded tech giant Meta announced the company’s vision for the metaverse: a ‘beyond universe’ of constant connection. Only a few days later, the Swedish furniture giant IKEA shared its latest version of the project Tiny Homes: an extremely condensed and cheap micro-apartment in Tokyo's district of Shinjuku. This paper scrutinises these two events and discusses the progressive upscaling of the digital dwelling and the parallel downsizing of the physical one. It argues that beyond a deadly epidemic, Covid-19 managed to upend, overnight, not only the traditional living and working practices, but also the spaces that both determine and are determined by them. It canonised a flexible life by envisioning a new architecture of hybrid dwelling where people could shift in real-time from their tiny physical spaces into an infinite digital one. Yet, this opportunity granted by the immersive, allegedly inclusive and democratic new virtual realm hides a strangely familiar set of relations. It facilitates the establishment of a new and broader economy of continuous worldwide accumulation in which constant connectedness, creation and production construct a highly ephemeral and economised hybrid space that redefines the traditional understanding of dwelling.
PubDate: 2023-09-20
DOI: 10.7480/footprint.17.1.6482
Issue No: Vol. 17, No. 1 (2023)
- Housing for a Lonely Generation
Authors: Marija Maric
Pages: 113 - 126
Abstract: Organised around the advertising language for three co-living platforms—WeLive, Quarters (now Habyt), and the Collective—this essay frames the corporate housing model as inseparable from the digital media infrastructures that distribute its contents. Building, on one side, upon the existing research in the domain of housing, real estate, and media, and on the other, on the performative reading of the real estate advertisements of the contemporary co-living projects, it positions this housing typology as a genuine product of the 'real-estate-media complex,' referring to the close entanglements of speculative property markets, media infrastructures, and digital technologies in commodification of housing.
PubDate: 2023-09-20
DOI: 10.7480/footprint.17.1.7036
Issue No: Vol. 17, No. 1 (2023)
- Housing Migrant Workers
Authors: Renzo Sgolacchia
Pages: 127 - 142
Abstract: A flexible dwelling commonly refers to housing susceptible to modification to various functions or uses. Between the 1960s and 1970s, Architectural Design magazine published studies and prototypes of flexible architectures, such as container homes and mobile homes, as alternative options to the housing market. Temporary, mobile, modular, containerised, and prefab became synonyms of flexible.
These units proliferated to fulfil housing emergencies. The ordinary concept of flexibility, including, for instance, a dwelling capable of different customisations, shifts to a more restrictive meaning, revealing the intrinsic logistic nature of the containerised housing that, rather than goods, controls and distributes human beings. Through field research, the case study is the workers’ housing in the Rotterdam-Venlo corridor, a strategic trajectory of global supply chains. The logistical organisation goes beyond the thin enclosure of productive sites, regulating the mobility of workers and the flexibility of housing. Conceived by employment agencies to provide and discipline the workforce, workers’ housing is merely driven by efficiency criteria.
Disclosing contexts where migrant flows are less tangible and visible, this research’s crucial questions revolve around the relationship between flexible housing and rigorous logistic regimes, the corporates’ exploitative strategies and the bottom-up workers’ tactics.
PubDate: 2023-09-20
DOI: 10.7480/footprint.17.1.6905
Issue No: Vol. 17, No. 1 (2023)
- Open Architecture and its Discontents
Authors: Jorge Mejía Hernández, Esin Komez Daglioglu
Pages: 3 - 8
Abstract: The qualities that characterise open works of art have become prevalent in mainstream architecture theory. Trying to elucidate why openness appears to mean so many different things and at the same time remains an ethereal concept, it seems worthwhile to reflect on potential justifications for its use. While the notion can be effectively and persuasively used to discuss the ethics that should govern our profession, beyond that axiological role its meagre explanatory power suggests that new directions in open architecture might require that we recognise its theoretical shortcomings and start looking for new and better ways to explain exactly what we’re talking about when we talk about the architecture of our time.
PubDate: 2023-03-03
Issue No: Vol. 16, No. 2 (2023)
- Writing Open Architecture as a book on Human Rights (and against
Nation-States)
Authors: Esra Akcan
Pages: 9 - 20
Abstract: Drawing on the author’s book Open Architecture, this essay studies the relation between migration and architecture as a matter of human rights, and thereby exposes the historical roots of contemporary racisms, while giving due acknowledgment to the Black and Brown migrants in the making of even the most established European architectural projects. This analysis not only exposes the weaknesses of a world order predicated on the limited and constructed idea of the nation-state, but also outlines architecture’s ways to build resistance through the concept of openness. Defining open architecture as a new ethic of welcoming toward the immigrant, the essay alludes to the formal, programmatic and procedural aspects of latent open architecture, such as flexibility and adaptability of form, collectivity and collaboration, participatory processes, and multiplicity of meaning.
PubDate: 2023-03-03
DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.2.6423
Issue No: Vol. 16, No. 2 (2023)
- Ventotene and Gorizia
Authors: Sebastiano Fabbrini
Pages: 21 - 40
Abstract: This essay sets out to reflect on the prospective transformation of two Italian panoptical buildings that straddle the border between different places and times: the prison of Ventotene and the hospital of Gorizia. Local authorities have recently put forward a proposal to turn the former into a European school and the latter into a European prison. Both of these hermetic, unbending architectures have particular historical significance. Ventotene is the island where Altiero Spinelli was incarcerated by the Fascist regime and wrote the manifesto that paved the way for the process of European integration. Gorizia is the town where Franco Basaglia began his career, elaborating the theory of mental health that led to the closing of all Italian asylums. The proposed Europeanisation of these structures of confinement and isolation, which embody the exercise of disciplinary power in its most extreme form, speaks to the problem of opening the total institutions of modern statehood and repositioning them within the increasingly decentralised, indeterminate order of the European Union.
PubDate: 2023-03-03
DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.2.6066
Issue No: Vol. 16, No. 2 (2023)
- Spolia and the Open Work
Authors: Armando Rabaça
Pages: 41 - 66
Abstract: This article discusses the possibilities of signification in architectural interventions involving historical remnants, focusing on the notions of spolia and of opera aperta. The notion of spolia has been the province of art history since the Renaissance. In bringing it to the field of architectural design, the focus will shift from the historical realm to the conceptual possibilities opened up by spolia in architectural practice. The aim is to analyse the association between the creative reuse of and intervention in historical remnants and the multiplication of possible significations through various examples. Methodologically, the article expands the linguistic drive of the contemporary debate on spolia to the structural linguistics upon which Umberto Eco built the poststructuralist concept of open work. More precisely, the essay resorts to the notions of ‘sign’ and ‘sign structure’ as a vehicle to explore the possibilities for the semantic and syntactical openness of spolia. Toning in with Eco’s arguments on the open work, the openness associated with spolia will be seen as dependent on the loosening of the formal and typological structures of established architectural codes.
PubDate: 2023-03-03
DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.2.6076
Issue No: Vol. 16, No. 2 (2023)
- The Unbearable Lightness of an Open System
Authors: Ezgi İşbilen
Pages: 67 - 84
Abstract: One of the many ways in which architecture is conceptually opened up is by adopting systems theory in building technology. In this context, open systems denote modular design and construction; a system of standardized, mass-produced parts that can be configured in various ways opens a field of possibilities. However, there is a significant gap between the high expectations for the implication of the open systems principle and its results. This essay explores the potentials and consequences of openness in architecture through a historical case study. The Packaged House project (1941–47), designed by Konrad Wachsmann (1901–1980) and Walter Gropius (1883–1969), is a prefabricated housing system devised to meet the housing shortage in the US during and soon after WWII. It was an open spatial design system, a modular construction system and a commercial enterprise all in one. Although it was cultivated in the most favourable political and economic landscape for prefabricated building systems, the Packaged House failed to be widely reproduced. Drawing from the conflicting histories of the Packaged House, the discursive formation of the post-war dwelling, changing definitions of openness, and varied representations, this essay dissects the fantasies of the open building systems as well as their practical and symbolic features.
PubDate: 2023-03-03
DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.2.6089
Issue No: Vol. 16, No. 2 (2023)
- Free Plan versus Free Rooms
Authors: Xavier Van Rooyen
Pages: 85 - 104
Abstract: Since the 1960s, open architecture has sought to move away from fixed objects built for eternity and instead towards the development of indeterminate proposals. Today, in the midst of health and climate crises, some architects are reconsidering the need for an evolving and adaptable architecture that encourages multiple uses. Sanitary confinement has made us aware of the urgency of flexibility in housing. Climate crises, on the other hand, require that buildings can be converted in order to avoid obsolescence. This article examines how the different design processes used by Office KGDVS, MVRDV, Sanaa, and Sou Fujimoto, among others, go beyond the unitary and homogeneous models of open architecture proposed in the 1960s in order to respond to a crucial desire of contemporary society: the need for singularity. As we theorise it, the free plan wanted to be singular and specific instead of neutral, in order to absorb obsolete uses into broader programmes. The free room, on the contrary, absorbs multiple uses on the scale of the dwelling and encourages multiple reconfigurations. The confinement measures taken by many governments in response to the Covid-19 pandemic have taught us that architecture must make uses possible that will undoubtedly be even more diversified tomorrow than they were yesterday.
PubDate: 2023-03-03
DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.2.6093
Issue No: Vol. 16, No. 2 (2023)
- The Open Map
Authors: Başak Uçar, Pelin Yoncacı Arslan
Pages: 105 - 120
Abstract: Maps are preeminent ways of collecting, organising, verifying, historicising, and even mystifying territorial knowledge. They embrace a multiplicity of readings and readers, and mediate between the visible and the invisible. In constant re-definition, maps transform and maximise themselves by connecting different layers of information and initiating uninterrupted performances. Without delineating a fixed meaning, maps respond to the city’s openness via diversity, incompleteness, and unpredictability. New developments in computer science and information technologies have turned maps into grittier models that define the new granular front of the open map. This article studies open maps in terms of participation and multiplicity, part and whole relationships, and resolution vis-à-vis Jasper Johns’s paintings, Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map and the World Game, and the MIT’s Real-time Rome project.
PubDate: 2023-03-03
DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.2.6068
Issue No: Vol. 16, No. 2 (2023)
- On the Open Style of Architectural Reasoning
Authors: Konstantinos Apostolidis
Pages: 121 - 134
Abstract: This article departs from Ian Hacking’s concept of ‘styles of reasoning’ to argue that open architecture is not necessarily an ontological, but rather a methodological category, and that in order to understand open architecture we require an appropriate style of architectural reasoning. Stanford Anderson’s approach to Imre Lakatos’s methodology of scientific research programmes in architecture is used to develop the idea that a precise style of reasoning forms an explicit understanding of architectural openness, and is elaborated further using Michael Hays’s notion of critical architecture as an alternative approach to open architecture, which is free from any predetermined logic. The article concludes with an attempt to identify similarities between the work of Anderson and Hays as a basis for an open style of architectural reasoning.
PubDate: 2023-03-03
DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.2.6095
Issue No: Vol. 16, No. 2 (2023)
- Closing the Open System
Authors: Nina Stener Jørgensen, Guillaume Laplante-Anfossi
Pages: 135 - 144
Abstract: This essay looks at the algorithm written by Franco-Hungarian spatial artist Nicolas Schöffer for the Tour Lumière Cybernétique, a cybernetic light tower created for Paris’s La Défense district in the 1960s and ’70s. By revisiting the tower’s computer programme, this essay aims to understand how it was thought to operate as an open system by receiving data from its surrounding environment. The review of the programme questions how the probability distributions Schöffer included in the algorithm to ensure a random treatment of predictable city data was imagined to avoid stagnation, repetition and programmatic saturation, all elements essential to maintaining the tower’s open framework. The goal of the essay is to provide a coherent interpretation of the computer programme as well as a comprehensive description of its mathematical elements, so that future readers of La Tour Lumière Cybernétique can gain an insight into the behaviour of the tower.
PubDate: 2023-03-03
DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.2.6069
Issue No: Vol. 16, No. 2 (2023)
- Architect of Nothingness
Authors: Ecem Sarıçayır
Pages: 145 - 156
Abstract: Architect Frank van Klingeren was most active during the 1960s and 1970s in the Netherlands. In response to the social and urban challenges of the time, Van Klingeren developed various experimental architectural forms and concepts. This essay discusses his comparatively well-known community centres De Meerpaal and Het Karregat by focusing on his commitment to unfinished architecture, open plan through wall-less designs, and his insistent attempt at creating social encounters through these spatial principles. To provide historical contextualisation of these architectural principles I engage with a theoretical framework developed by Esra Akcan which provides the first full-fledged conceptualisation of open architecture. I look at archival materials such as Van Klingeren’s poems, essays, and interviews as well as the designs of his community centres and their reception in national and international journals and newspapers. In addition to extending our knowledge of Van Klingeren’s seldom studied architectural practice, this essay aims to contribute to the concept of openness in architectural studies with the case of Van Klingeren’s spatial practice.
PubDate: 2023-03-03
DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.2.6078
Issue No: Vol. 16, No. 2 (2023)
- Contextualizing Liberté D’Usage
Authors: Alberto Geuna, Claudia Mainardi
Pages: 157 - 170
Abstract: Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal have been at the forefront of European architecture for decades, as attested by numerous awards throughout their careers and culminating in the receipt of the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2021. Although much has been written and said about their relationship to the notion of openness in architecture, in this essay we explore the cultural context surrounding a particular aspect inherent in their way of working and conceiving the project: the desire to favour the maximum freedom of use, or liberté d’usage, particularly of – but not limited to – domestic spaces. Liberté d’usage is a declination of openness that brings forward the aspects of flexibility and adaptability suitable to contemporary architectural space, while engaging with its imaginative, atmospheric and emancipatory characteristics. This article elaborates on this view of freedom in architecture, pinning it against its cultural backdrop, and particularly the largely forgotten figure of Jacques Hondelatte, Lacaton & Vassal’s professor and mentor.
PubDate: 2023-03-03
DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.2.6060
Issue No: Vol. 16, No. 2 (2023)
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