Lectures Notes: Architecture and the City PDF

LECTURES – Architecture and the city LECTURE 0 : Introduction Literature : Francis DK Ching, “Introduction to Architecture” Chap 1 (pp.1-12) Texts : Paul Shepheard ; Ivor Smith (mandatory) ; Spiro Kostof What is a city ? Spiro Kostof : “The city shaped” This is what Spiro Kosto...

LECTURES – Architecture and the city LECTURE 0 : Introduction Literature : Francis DK Ching, “Introduction to Architecture” Chap 1 (pp.1-12) Texts : Paul Shepheard ; Ivor Smith (mandatory) ; Spiro Kostof What is a city ? Spiro Kostof : “The city shaped” This is what Spiro Kostof has to say about what cities are: “(...) I think we can agree,” he writes in The City Shaped, a classic piece of literature on the city, “on some simple premises about cities, regardless of their origin, their birthplace, their form, their makers. Two sensible definitions, both from 1938, would allow us a good starting point. For L. Wirth, a city is "a relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement of socially heterogenous individuals." For Mumford, a city is a "point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community." Here is my gloss on these fundamental premises….” According to Kostof : 1. Cities are places where a certain energized crowding of people takes place. This has nothing to do with absolute size or with absolute numbers: it has to do with settlement density. →Settlement density : how many people are I the city ? 2. Cities come in clusters. A town never exists unaccompanied by other towns. It is therefore inevitably locked in an urban system, an urban hierarchy. Even the lowliest of townlets has its dependent villages. As Braudel puts it, “The town only exists as a town in relation to a form of life lower than its own... It has to dominate an empire, however tiny, in order to exist.’ 3. Cities are places that have some physical circumscription, whether material or symbolic, to separate those who belong in the urban order from those who do not. Even without any physical circumscription, there is a legal perimeter within which restrictions and privileges apply. 4. Cities are places where there is a specialized differentiation of work‐where people are priests or craftsmen or soldiers…. → Cities grew from the wish to specialize and where wealth is not equally distributed among the citizens. These distinctions create social hierarchies: the rich are more powerful than the poor; the priest is more important than the artisan. Social heterogeneity is also axiomatic. The urban population contains different ethnic groups, races, religions. Even in ethnically homogeneous cities there might be slaves, indentured labourers or transient traders. 5. Cities are places favoured by a source of income ‐trade, intensive agriculture and the possibility of surplus food, a physical resource like a metal or a spring, a geomorphic resource like a natural harbor, or a human resource like a king. 6. Cities are places that must rely on written records. It is through writing that they will tally their goods, put down the laws that will govern the community and establish title to property‐ which is extremely important, because in the final analysis a city rests on a construct of ownership. 7. Cities are places that are intimately engaged with their countryside, that have a territory that feeds them and which they protect and provide services for. Often the city‐form is locked into rural systems of land division. 8. Cities are places distinguished by some kind of monumental definition, that is, where the fabric is more than a blanket of residences. This means a set of public buildings that give the city scale, and the citizenry landmarks of a common identity. Technological monuments are also important. 9. Cities are places made up of buildings and people. I agree with Kevin Lynch: ‘City forms, their actual function, and the ideas and values that people attach to them make up a single phenomenon.’ Aristotle A city is a place of buildings and people. Aristotle defined the city as a place where you come to live the good life (or at least better than where they are now). → Probably why people move to cities from rural areas. What is architecture ? It is a discipline, something we have to learn. According to Francis D.K. Ching : It is an art (we should explore all possible ways to build a city by designing good buildings) and a science (something that is learnable). Both an artistic and a technical profession needing you to understand a creative process of designing which needs to be tested against a properly conceived construction method; it is, he believes both intuitive and academic. i.e. some of it is learnable, the academic part and some of it is about exploring possibilities and ’getting it right’ without first being able to explain why. However, after the fact things must always be explained, that is what it means to learn architecture at a university, to be able to play a game of giving and asking for reasons, to be able to see what you do and place it within a network of reasons. This requires knowledge and skill and this comes together in what he calls design thinking. Nikolaus Pevsner in “An outline of European Architecture” defined architecture as an aesthetic appeal : “A bicycle shed is a building”, he wrote, “Lincoln Cathedral is an piece of Architecture…The term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal.” Paul Shepheard believes you need to ask the question over and over again. In the end he settles for the idea that architecture, or the discipline of making buildings is sort of like making landscapes, which take a long time to develop, which can accommodate many uses and which transform as you occupy them and it is also sort of like making machines, which usually have only one use, which you throw away when they break and which have a very short production time in a factory. Architecture moves from one extreme to the other he argues. Etymology of architecture : arche tecton = chief carpenter Now a chief of this or that always needs to know more than what she is a chief of. A chief knows what ends to pursue and what are the best means to that end and why. The father of the discipline of architectural theory, Vitruvius launched with his first definition of architecture the problem of architecture and the other disciplines, he recognized that architects need to have a very wide knowledge base: architecture he writes is made up of various disciplines and various forms of knowledge. As far as he was concerned an architect needed to know about history, about law, about climate, about construction of course, about philosophy, about all sorts of other crafts and even about military tactics and the stars. Now a chief of this or that always needs to know more than what she is a chief of. A chief knows what ends to pursue and what are the best means to that end and why. The father of the discipline of architectural theory, Vitruvius launched with his first definition of architecture the problem of architecture and the other disciplines, he recognized that architects need to have a very wide knowledge base: architecture he writes is made up of various disciplines and various forms of knowledge. As far as he was concerned an architect needed to know about history, about law, about climate, about construction of course, about philosophy, about all sorts of other crafts and even about military tactics and the stars. LECTURE 1 : Drawing, Design and Description Literature : Francis DK Ching, “Introduction to Architecture” Chap 8 (p.199-230) & Chap. 13 (p.329-348) Michiel Riedijk, “The drawing”. The architect’s raison d’être Concept A word is a picture, and a picture requires words to conceptualize it more fully. We often quote the truism that a picture paints a thousand words, as if that means that pictures are somehow better than words, but the opposite is equally true, a word helps describe and conceive a thousand pictures. A concept is : a word/image/mathematical formula/entity together with its meaning with which we try to understand some relationship between us and our environment through its inferential relations with other concepts. They help us understand ourselves and our environment. When things look chaotic and confusing, a concept can help establish order in that chaos by showing us how we might understand something so that is can be useful to us. Alternatively where first we might see ‘nothing much’ a concept can help us see things that we would otherwise not have noticed by identifying patterns and things. When you learn a new concept you learn to see new things in your environment, your world becomes richer with information and thus richer in possibilities. A design concept is much like a normal concept except that we use it slightly differently. With a normal concept such as the word concept itself, we have ourselves a series of definitions and examples and armed with those we organize the information we receive about the world through our eyes, ears, nose, mouth and skin. A design concept is all that, but it is something more besides. It is a word or description (in words and/or image) with which we try to illustrate the essence of what it is we want to produce (build) with our design. → We can then test each design decision against that concept. HOWEVER a single concept is never enough for something as complex as a building, we would need to test our design decisions against other concepts as well, such as the concepts defining the criteria or game‐rules of good architecture. These, according to Vitruvius at least, are Firmitas, Utilitas and Venustas.. With such criteria we can test each design decision against no less than four very important concepts: 1. Making a nice and comfortable house 2. Sturdiness 3. Usefulness 4. Delightfulness Sorts of drawings - Sketches: Parti Sketches, Analytical Sketches Generative sketches, sketch plans - Diagrams: Relationship Diagram, Process Charts, Bubble diagram, Analytical Diagrams etc. - Presentation Drawings, Plans, sections, elevations, perspectives, etc. - Specification Drawings - Working Drawings - Revision Drawings - Installation Drawings - Details Michiel Riedijk explains that designing is about drawing and conceiving. The architect’s main craft is the craft of making drawings and an architect, in fact any designer, makes many sorts of drawings. 1. Sketch The word sketch tends to be used for any drawing made by hand without the help of tools other than a pencil. They can be very simple outlines of easily recognizable features of the things we observe or very detailed, complex drawings that represent very accurately what we see. 2. Parti French name for a sketch with which we try to visualize the design concept against which all our design decisions need to be tested. (See it as a kind of compass needle, pointing North. We might not in the end want to go north, but knowing where North is will help us to get where we want.) 3. Diagram It is a kind of schematic representation of information organized in some way. It shows us how things fit together, how things work. The layered approach It is a diagram showing (with images) and explaining (with words) how you can distinguish several layers in each landscape you have to work with as an urban or architectural designer. Relationship diagram  A more abstract kind of diagram : it allows an architect to prioritise connections between rooms and spaces in the building he is designing. Such diagrams can help you assign value to certain relationships which can then be expressed in the design. Bubble Diagram It does something similar to the previous one, except that it presents its information in slightly less abstract spatial terms. For the bubble diagram to become really useful, the design brief has to become very complex. Routing or circulation diagram Shows how different users of the building are required to move through the building. 4. Situation Drawing Places things in context. 5. Plan = A drawing to scale of a horizontal section through a building taken at a given level; a view from above an object or an area in orthographic projection. Modern plans convey a lot of information and have become extremely sophisticated documents with which the client, the builder and the architect can communicate with each other. Abstraction Comes from the Latin word “abstractus”, past participle of “abstraho” (pull away) : abs = away and traho = pull. An abstraction expresses a characteristic, quality or attribute that something possesses but which we cannot experience in that form (that is exactly like the plan). It is an instrument of thought with which we try to understand our relationship with the world around us (The plan helps us see the organisation of spaces over a horizontal plane). It is a reduction of something into something else which refers to its original (the plan is a reduction of the horizontal organisation of spaces shown in two dimensions and coded with symbols). Abstractions help us understand relationships between things. 6. Elevation That completes the plan. It is less abstract than the plan, it is a simple, or simple seeming representation of the sides of the building that you can actually see. 7. Section : lateral and longitudinal The section cuts through the building vertically and shows us the way the spaces are organized in terms of vertical disposition and relative height. 8. Axonometric Attempt to deliberately represent three dimensions on a two‐dimensional field. Isometric : a particular class of axonometric drawings It represents space according to three axes. But it does that so that each axis is fixed at a specific angle. In an isometric projection the three coordinate axes appear equally foreshortened and the angle between any two of them is 120 degrees, which together makes a full circle. 9. Exploded view Another kind of abstraction of reality. It helps us see how certain elements appear by themselves and how they relate to the whole organizationally. 10. Render / presentation drawing A drawing can be both an elevation and a render at the same time. IN fact it can even be a section and a render at the same time. A render is a presentation drawing, designed to impress the client and to make him desire what you have designed. Many of the best architectural renders sometimes become true works of art. NOTE : such drawings do not represent reality but a kind of idealized transformation of it. 11. Detail It is a drawing of a bit of a building that has, as it were, been cut off from the whole to show you more information / detail. Details are amongst the most enjoyable drawings as they show you the way things are put together. 12. Model It is another kind of abstraction. It reduces the three‐ and four‐dimensional aspect of the building to a model usually made in a different material to the real thing. It serves to get an accurate idea of the spaces and how they relate.  Sketch models allow us to see how spaces behave as you move through them with your eye, giving the design that essential fourth dimension of time through movement and the parallax effect of planes shifting relative to each other as you shift your point of view by walking through space. LECTURE 2 : Paths, node, district, edge and landmark Literature : Text : Kevin Lynch The image of the city He asked children and adults to draw maps of their cities and asked them to describe them in words. What came out is that most people organize their understanding of the city they live in using a few essential characteristics; routes, boundaries, areas and notable things. So Lynch identified 5 basic elements that every city contains. Through it there are paths along which people, traffic, effluent, water, electricity, or information passes. Where paths cross, we find nodes, paths and nodes define areas we can call districts, paths, nodes and districts are demarcated by edges and districts acquire their special character with the help of landmarks, things of any size that are for some reason notable. These elements are the organized into a pattern that simulates the shape and organization of the city. This give us a map. Paths and nodes A path is any path from A to B, they are of any size. Pahts crossing other paths create nodes. Landmarks Landmarks are things of whatever size or shape that somehow bring a place together under its marker. Tall landmarks can be seen from far away and may help you orientate yourself for longer journeys, while small landmarks may just give you your position in the street. Landmarks help to give character to a place. Districts and edges Neighbourhoods are districts, that is, areas that are circumscribed by some edge and characterized by the streets and landmarks it contains. We often talk about districts on the basis of their ‘grain’ grain is a concept that refers to the size of the buildings within a district. A fine‐grained district is one with lots of small buildings speckling the map, a coarse‐grained district is one with large monumental or utilitarian buildings like factories defining it. Districts often follow the paths and edges of a city. Districts at every scale at the scale of a neighbourhood, or at the scale of the city as a whole have edges. Unclear edges : as the city expands the fringe belts are incorporated into the city and are developed, changing their character. It is important to note that the edge of the city also involves a legal dimension. As Kostof mentioned when defining the city, it is a boundary that includes and excludes. Those inside the boundary are subject to special laws. Those outside are not accorded the privileges or indeed made subject to the duties given those within the boundary of the city. Within the walls people seek safety and the good life. Outside is the wilderness and everyone is left to his own devices, at least during the period that these city walls had a function other than that of tourist attraction. LECTURE 3 : Plot and Block Literature : Francis DK Ching, “Introduction to Architecture” → Chap 6 (p.134-149) They are elements of the city which are important for the way the city is regulated by laws and privileges, duties and rights. The plot / lot / burgage = the most basic legal unit of the city. y. It stands for a piece of land owned by an owner. Ownership means that the person or institution successfully claiming the privilege of ownership, is granted a special set of privileges and duties regarding that piece of land. The piece of land needs to be carefully delineated with boundaries inside of which these privileges and duties count and outside of which they do not. So, the plot has been surveyed to establish its exact size, shape and position and is registered in the Cadaster. These duties and privileges differ from country to country but essentially, they mean that the owner can do what he pleases on his plot of land as long as he does not thereby contravene the laws and regulations applying to the nation as a whole. The lot is thus a piece of private property. Note : the word private comes from the Latin “privare” which means to steal. Private property has, as it were, been taken from the public realm. Plots come in all shapes and sizes, some of which are a little extreme (extremely small plots exist) → making as much as possible from the context you are given. Such plots (where the view is equally beautiful in all directions) are very rare and one of the best practices in architectural design is to make a site‐analysis drawing, on which all the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats are taken into consideration. Questions we can ask ourselves : - How is the land shaped? - Are there differences in height? - What is the best view? - Where does the noise come from? - What are the prevailing winds? - Where does the sun come up and where does it go down, in winter and in summer? - Where are the trees and other bits and pieces that you would want to take account of in the design? - Are other people going to build in the vicinity, and if so, what and how high?  In this way the plot is analysed and critiqued so that the architect can make the best use possible of it. Burgage : defines the legal surface of land someone owns. But because this plot is often larger than the house standing on it and because most families had a family business they ran on the plot, you see that the legal plot remains the same, while the actual arrangement of the house and outbuildings changes over time as the business grows of shrinks or when the plot changes hands and the nature of the business changes. Even though it is only a boundary laid down by law, the plot often lasts much longer than the buildings standing on it. In fact, occasionally the old buildings are removed altogether, and people start all over again. After WWII, all countries that had been involved in it, suffered a considerable housing shortage. Young soldiers were returning home and starting families. Cities expanded at an enormous rate. The only way to accommodate these people, it was felt, was to expand the cities with sub-urbs. The concept suburb comes from the Latin ‘Sub’ = near and ‘Urbs’ = city. These sub‐urbs were really just plots strung together in various patterns, creating endless fields of sameness. The analysis of American Suburbia is very interesting : you can see how what once seemed like a good idea has backfired, creating unliveable cities where people spend hours commuting to work, where it is impossible to walk anywhere forcing people to own at least two cars, where houses are fronted not by a friendly front door but by a closed garage, where the lawn is not a place to enjoy but a mere status symbol. Another tragedy related to the idea of the plot are the many shanty towns in the world. Here we see an informal aggregation of houses. They are built illegally on plots of land not owned by the people who live there. As a result, there is little planning, houses bunch up much too close to each other so that people are forced to enjoy their neighbour’s every domestic drama. Frequently the paths to these houses are narrow, dirty and hard to walk through as the shanty towns are built on the least desirable areas of the city. Dealing with these issues is one of the great challenges of local and national politics. One of the most interesting cases of plot use is the so‐called Chattel House popular in the Caribbean. With the ending of slavery, slaves were no longer housed in barracks on the plantations but had to go and find their own place to live. This was not easy as all the land was in the hands of large landowners. So instead they built houses raised from the ground to that they could be easily moved. The block Urban block is some kind of triangular or quadrangular assemblage of buildings bordered by streets or some other edge. → This form suggests all kinds of ways to develop it. As cities develop existing structures and boundaries influence the placing, shape and size of new structures and boundaries. When parts are changed or destroyed by fire, war or flooding, the whole process starts anew adding new and different conditions, this is what determines city form over time. Every city has its own characteristic block shape : Amsterdam blocks The idea was to connect the canals to the main water ‘het IJ’ on both ends so that boats taking goods from the sea‐worthy ships to the storage houses would not have to turn around and cause a traffic jam in the process. So, what is essentially a gridded city was ‘bent’ and laid out around the old city centre. That explains the strange block‐shapes you come across in Amsterdam. The result is that many houses had to be ‘fitted in’ on rather strangely shaped plots. Walking through the streets of Amsterdam you often find houses with facades parallel to the street or canal, while the parti‐walls (the side‐wall adjoining another house) are not at right‐angles to them. In this way plot and block form an interesting puzzle. Another feature of the Amsterdam context is that it was economically very desirable to have a house with storage facilities on the canal, so plots were relatively narrow, but very deep making it something of a challenge to get light into the deepest bits of the house. Paris blocks Paris has an enormous number of triangular or ‘pointed blocks’ That is due to the street pattern imposed upon it during the nineteenth century by Baron Haussman who modernized the medieval city with all its dark alleyways to make it more hygienic, more pleasant to live in as well as more controllable from the point of view of the politicians. That Parisian block structure gives us a wonderful insight into how the interior of those blocks behave as the buildings become taller and the need for light to filter down into the bottom stories more urgent. Note that in Paris, as opposed to Amsterdam, they chose to keep the parti‐walls at right angles to the façade, so that where two rows of apartments come together you get a pocket or poché of strangely shaped space. When these pointed blocks come together you get that wonderful image that is very characteristic of Paris. Manhattan blocks Manhattan is mainly made up of rectangular blocks. The size of the blocks began to determine the size of the buildings. As businessmen became more successful, they decided to display their success in trying to build ever higher buildings. To accommodate their height, they often needed a whole block to begin their ascent upwards. Soon the buildings of New York began to create an impossible Gotham-City like situation of ever darker streets where the sun wouldn’t shine. Before it could get any worse, the mayor of New York drew up the so-called zoning law which demanded that blocks could never be filled 100% over the full height of the building. As the building rose it had to step back so as to allow light to penetrate all the way down. This gave us the characteristic ‘look’ of the New York skyscraper. Plan Amsterdam Zuid, Berlage Berlage’s plan for the extension of Amsterdam is very interesting for a very different reason. He was an architect who was one of the founding members of the Dutch Socialist Party. Being a socialist for him did not mean that having money was a bad thing or morally reprehensible, he had nothing against the rich, but what he did believe was that too large a gap between the rich and poor is not desirable for a society. It causes anger and resentment, and if you look at the date of this plan you can see that the topic was hot at the time : WWI was raging, and two years later the Russian revolution would break out. This worried a lot of people in Europe and America. Berlage believed that we should raise the socio‐economic status of the poor. And he believed that we should start this process in urban planning, by giving the poor a decent and above all a dignified house that would not look all that different to the houses of the rich. So, he created a plan inspired on the Parisian and Italian Baroque with large avenues. But these were not just for the rich, they also contained palaces for the poor. And it wasn’t always easy to distinguish between them. Let’s look at one such palace for the poor. Eigen Haard Housing Estate, Michel de Klerk It was built between 1917 and 1920 when the municipality of Amsterdam subsidized the building of social housing to accord with the spirit just described. The politicians and civil servants believed it would avert revolution if they gave poor people a sense of dignity by giving them somewhere nice to live. And so it went. The church tower is not in fact a church tower at all, it is a tower to celebrate this new attitude to workers. The block was divided into various functions including a school and a post office and contained small apartments for workers and even artists. The plans for the apartments were tiny. But every house boasted something special in the form of an entrance or a window. The outside was embellished with beautiful brickwork in wonderful sculptural shapes. Rotterdam, Michiel Brinkman ➔ Another approach to the block and to social housing The architect‐engineer Michiel Brinkman tried to create a high‐density block, that is with lots of people living in it, thereby allowing the housing association to charge low rents while being able to recover the initial investment and budgeting for maintenance. He stacked two‐story houses on top of each other and decided to access the top layer of housing through broad so‐called ‘streets in the air’. The outside of the block is much more sober than the previous one. In fact, as all the houses face inwards, there are no front doors on the outside of the block, so the liveliness of the inside is achieved at the expense of the streets along the perimeter of the block. It is certainly no sumptuous artwork as in Amsterdam, but it has its own elegance as well as a number of advantages that make it attractive for other reasons. The apartments were very practical. It had been the tradition in Dutch houses for the important “front room” to border the street. But this made the front room exposed so that it was always kept as a neat room but otherwise unused room to show neighbours that the family living there were respectable people. That seemed like a waste of space. So, Brinkman moved the front room to the back creating instead a real living room where you could relax and enjoy your privacy. He put the kitchen adjoining the street so that Mum, as she was cooking the evening meal could watch the children as they played outside. The street in the air was made wide enough to properly function as a street. Galleries in later flat buildings never quite got it right. Galleries in flats are usually windy and hostile and narrow, only used to go to and from the front door as quickly as possible. Not here. Here the street was really used. Not just by the children but also by the milkman and the baker, the grocer etc. And the women would gather to have a pleasant chat. It has recently been restored to its former glory, but it has also gentrified, it is now the home to hip people who have no need of social housing. LECTURE 4 : Street and Square Literature : Texts : Spiro Kostof (2) ; Cliff Moughtin ; Jane Jacobs Kostof : “The City Assembled” Kostof speaks of the street both as a formal organization as well as an institutional organization. What is a street ? The street starts with being line to connect two points a and b. But the street is not just a static line; it is a conduit along which people, goods and other things move. In this sense a street is like a river, stuff flows along it from one place to the other. But it is not like a river in that the flows go both ways at the same time. There again, just like a river, a street has a hard edge, its banks, but in the street’s case these boundaries are usually defined by buildings. The flows become so intense that they have to be regulated : we agree to drive on the right and to pass people going the same direction on the left, at least in Europe. Now things start getting complicated. The buildings are not just an edge, they ‘plug into’ the streets. People come out of the buildings and go into them, but not everyone can go into any building, there are restrictions regarding who can go where. To enforce these restrictions, we have locks, signs and thresholds and we are taught manners about what is appropriate behaviour and what is not, while windows and balconies look out upon the street to keep an eye on things. Cars are dangerous, and streets are muddy. So, we build pavements for people to walk upon, but they also want to cross the street. And what you can’t see are the sewer pipes, water pipes, the gas pipes, the electricity cables, the internet cables and so forth.  The street starts as a simple idea, but in fact it is one of the most complex filtering and information flow systems that we know. And yet we are so used to that complexity that we easily take it in our stride. But streets are full of subtleties : The street is a fine structure of main and sub arteries, a fine sieve with larger apertures and smaller ones, some to let in light, some to let out the view some to come in by and some to show off with. And the connection of the house to the street is of the utmost importance. The street lets in light and lets out the view. This determines the placing of furniture within the house. In fact, all the daily rituals within the house were organized with reference to what happened outside, either to turn towards it, as in the case of people doing things that required good daylight, or to turn away from the noise and prying eyes. Another aspect making streets so fascinating is the fact that we’re creatures with certain bodily attributes : - Our eyes survey the horizon mostly along a horizontal axis so that vertical divisions play a different role in our perception to horizontal ones. - Our height determines the height of ceilings - The width of houses is determined by interrelated factors including the sizes of a solid beam to hold the weight of the floor above and tie the walls of the house together, as well as what a family of a certain size and certain means require to live a useful life and land prices.  Each house thus becomes the embodiment of someone’s home along the street. Tuinwijk Zuid – J.B. van Loghem It is a garden city inspired among others on the theories of Ebenezer Howard. Essentially Howard believed that in order to prevent slum‐formation in cities and in order to counter the pollutive effects of industrialization, the city and the country should be integrated. Cities should be more numerous and smaller and be integrated with greenery. He called such places Garden Cities and the idea became very popular, many variations were built. Not only did van Loghem (like Michiel Brinkman in Rotterdam) rearrange the living room and the kitchen, swapping them around so that the living and dining rooms could benefit from the garden behind the house, allowing the kitchen to be less isolated and allow the people using it to keep an eye on the street where the children played, but he also very consciously widened the streets at the centre of the little neighbourhood specifically to give children a place to come together and play. What we see are hedges low enough in the front garden to make sure the people living in the houses had a view of what was happening outside. Tall chimneys to keep the smoke away from the upper rooms and a lot of greenery about the place. It all adds up to an extremely pleasant place to live. Kadastrale Minuut, Utrecht It’s a canal in Utrecht. Two in fact. You can see them in this map of the city dating from 1825 running more or less straight through the city from the bottom to the top and each making a swing somewhere just above the middle. Why these streets are so special comes from the special geography of the place. Utrecht lies quite high relative to ground water levels. Much higher than say, Amsterdam This fact alone within the context of a water‐based economy has resulted in very interesting form. You can see it here. There is water, then there is a quayside with cellar doors opening out onto it. These cellar doors open up to cellars that run under the street above them (right under the houses they served). The trees are planted on the quay. So, with normal streets that are lined with trees, we walk among the trunks of those trees while their crowns open up at the height of the first and second floor of the neighbouring houses. Here the trunks reach to the height of the street and the crowns begin at the ground floor of the houses. That gives a very different experience especially during the summer. The trees were planted when the cellars lost their commercial significance somewhat. Now they are used from cafés and shops, making Utrecht one of the most liveable cities in the world. We often think of a street as being on ‘the outside’ but actually, you can also see the street as an interior space, with the facades of the houses forming its walls. In this way the street becomes like a corridor or a longish room. This is a good way of looking at the street because it gives the designers of facades a special duty, not just to think of the façade as belonging to the building, but also as belonging to the room that is the street. Louis Kahn’s definition Louis Kahn, an American architect, called the street a room by agreement. In our houses we might, within reasonable limits, do what we want. But in public space we agree on what we find acceptable behaviour. The way a street is designed and furnished can help determine the way people behave in a street. In fact, research conducted by our faculty investigates the role street lighting can play in controlling and even manipulating people in areas where it is common to experience aggression. A very old street in the city of Wells is a street that is shaped to get the best out of people, if there is good in them. It is nicely secluded although not gated, the houses are of a pleasant size and proportion, tall chimneys indicate where each house begins and the other ends. The whole makes for a very pleasant interior space. Generous front gardens form the hard edge of the street, but the walls are built exactly to the height of an average person leaning on their elbows. An open gutter on either side quickly gets rid of the worst rain, and the windows are far enough from their opposite to stop prying eyes. Isfahan Bazar It is a true interior street, protecting its visitors from the hot sun outside. Notice the glorious brick domes and the shopkeepers selling their wares, chatting with each other and their clients. The street becomes a microcosmos of human interaction, where the important stuff happens on the edge between the shops and the path. Kostof : The City Shaped (The Axis) Some streets are bent, some are straight and some are emphatically axial. That is the axis running through the street is of particular importance. Before getting into the description of an axis by Kostof, we need to understand the notion of the axis itself. The abstraction of a city into elements (such as paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks which are used to clarify urban structure) works at least 2 ways : - As an analytical tool : to help us understand urban structure in terms of our experience of it - As a planning tool : to help us design by taking that experience into account In this way, there are more urban elements which can help us understand and help us design. One of these is the axis, a linear element which can be used to : - shorten a distance between 2 points and to connect important nodes visually - structure and simplify a messy / chaotic part of a city - impose and emphasize power The ceremonial Axis, according to Kostof The Grand Manner is an urbanism of control. It is about empires and their capital outlets. It is about the staging of power. All cities are repositories (storehouse) of power in varying degrees and patterns. Cities designed in the Grand Manner employ conventions that make power physically manifest. They do so in the structure of the urban space and the full panoply of fittings that give it substance. Theirs is an idealized urbanism. There is much in an urban product of the Grand Manner that is real, much that is unconformable. It must be concealed. The staging of power is a matter of managing appearances. The managers have a choice audience in mind, an impression they wish to create for it, and a visual language that can display, in proper measure, regimentation (extreme control of people), pomp, and delight. The connection of this web of illusion is the ceremonial axis. It is the base for the focal point of power, the sovereign’s palace or its modern substitute. For instance, the colonnaded avenue of the Roman provincial metropolis supplies a visual model for an urban prospect that wants to be significantly entered, and traversed in ceremony. A model, for clearly any street has this potential: we can turn an everyday environment into something celebratory with temporary props and ornaments, banners, rows of guards. An example of a permanent setting for the exhibition of power is the processional route of Christian Rome. For a thousand years, the Via Papalis stretching from the Lateran to the Vatican, was in its daily existence a patchwork of streets of different width and indifferent rectitude, surrounded by a broken line of buildings, stumps of ruins, open fields and vineyards. It attempts to orchestrate the formality of ceremonial occasion. The path is straight and wide, the rituals intentional: the program is political legitimization and the management of history. The design is bound to shift, along with the meanings it plays host to, and even be overhauled (completely changed). Once past the Middle Ages, the straight line of the “royal way” was drawn from the lord’s country estate to the city palace where he sat in state. Processions and military parades marched down the length of this straight path, which in its urban stretch doubled as a fashionable commercial street patronized by the court, as well as a residential district for nobility and the wealthy bourgeois. With the failing of absolutism, institutions of the liberal state would weight the iconography (symbolic representation) toward a bourgeois culture (instead of religion), and 20th-century regimes would use the “royal way” for their dogma or would rationalize keeping what is there. Unter den Linden, the “royal way” of Berlin, illustrates this progress : Initially an outreach of the imperial palace or Schloss (formerly the castle) through open country, it was laid out as a parade ground and a processional way in the 17th century by the Great Elector, Friedrich Wilhelm, and it became a symbol of the rise of the Prussian State. In this role, Unter den Linden was the Baroque extension of the medieval triumphal route of the electors. The buildings that were raised along this axis from 1650 on had military significance. In stages throughout the 19th century, and in response to changes in the political climate, the martial character of the avenue was softened with the appearance of cultural buildings : museums, an Academy of Fine Arts, a State Library, and Humboldt University. Hitler found the grandeur of Unter den Linden insufficient and its history compromised. He planned his own royal way further west, crossing it at right-angles. Then with the division of the city after the War, the Brandenburg Gate was blocked; an impressive memorial to the Soviet army went up just outside it, attempting to colonize, as it were, the Western extension of the avenue, while within, East Block embassies and government ministries barged in among the restored shells of the historic monuments. The Western part became something of a dead end, the proud Prussian standard of victory was quickly deritualized, and the axis was linked beyond the Column to the highways of modern Berlin. And now, with the Wall dismantled and the two Germanys reunified, Unter den Linden stands ready to serve yet another purpose. What is an Axis ? An axis is an imaginary line, drawn from point A to point B → similar definition to a street. Axes become organizational principles in urban, structural and architectural design : we organize what happens in a space along axes. Sometimes axes become very obvious (ex : Champs Elysee). What do you use such spaces (strongly emphasized axes) for ? Some streets are designed for human interaction of a particular kind. Namely to show the people of the city and from elsewhere the power of the authorities. The theatre of human interaction is what all streets are about. It is about people finding ways of living together. But sometimes that is done with a clear idea of how that should work. People are united under the idea of nationhood as here in Paris, where the famous Champs Elysée connects the Louvre, where the King of France had his palace and the arc de Triomphe celebrating the glory that is the idea of France. The Champs Elysée is everything a street is, and it is also a carefully staged piece of power theatre (used to celebrate the military power of France).  They’re used to celebrate something, it becomes a political tool, they become spaces for process, for political agitations. Theatre From time immemorial streets have been used for processions. Greek theatre developed as a side show on the street. In fact the Greek word “theatron” means a place for viewing, place from which to observe. Theaters were at first little widenings at the side of the street and were no no more than viewing places for what happens on the street. Eventually people started organizing auditoriums in these places. This is a reconstruction of the general type of Greek theatre, but you can see how the auditorium is so situated as to give a view on a street faced with a building where the action could take place. Power is a theatrical business. Power is nothing if it is not made manifest in show. This is why certain regimes that need to manifest their power invest much in the theatre of the street (Ex. : Unter den Linden in Nazi Berlin (in1930’s), PyongYang Parade). The street becomes a stage of power as displayed in perfect discipline, the discipline of exact repetition and rhythm and the show of arms. These streets cane also be a theatrical space to display power by becoming places where you voice your descent or support for a power structure. Then they become a powerful power instrument. Le Corbusier, Maniere de penser l’Urbanisme Le Corbusier, a Swiss-French architect, once said “il faut tuer la rue corridor”. He saw the street as one of the great obstacles to the dream of modern life. Not all streets are nice and they certainly weren’t in his time. Many streets were poky, badly maintained, reduced to muddy rivers when it rained. Even in the early 20th century not all streets had sewage, or lighting, people would dump their stuff on the street. They were in short, often dark and unhealthy. It is only since the Second World War that we started investing on a large scale in the technology to make streets as pleasant as they often are now, with their lights, rubbish collection systems, clean water, proper sewage, etc. Le Corbusier however believed that the street was a lost cause. He thought it would be better to get rid of it altogether and instead create huge garden cities made of huge apartment buildings stacked high so that the ground that was freed by having houses on top of each other rather than next to each other, could be reserved for greenery, thus integrating town and country as Ebenezer Howard of the Garden Cities had advocated. He wasn’t the first or indeed the only one to think of such possibilities, there was a visionary Dutch architect Wijdeveld who had had the same idea. But Le Corbusier was, by far, the most persuasive. The Use of Sidewalks : safety Later Jane Jacobs would make a strong plea for the integration of sidewalks and pavements into the urban fabric. In her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she stopped modern developers killing the street and filling the city with it. She argued that streets were becoming much too much like mere channels and chasms and not enough like proper streets that were social institutions ensuring the life of the city. Sidewalks, with windows and doors opening out to them, with shows and shopkeepers involved with them would make the street a much livelier place than most modern streets had become. Square While a street is a long room, or, as Le Corbusier said, more like a corridor: it is narrow and suggests direction along an axis, the square on the other hand, is more like a living room. Square spaces do not invite direction, all directions are more or less equal and so squares tend to be places to stay and enjoy. Of course, as this diagram of some of the great squares of the world shows, not all squares are square. There are squares of all shapes and sizes. When you analyze the qualities a square offers there are many things you have to look for :  - The dimensions of the surface of the square - The relation between its size and the relative height of the buildings around it - How and where the streets join the square and what this means for the flow of goods and persons - What climate is it in, will people seek out the sun or try to escape it? - What are the materials used on its walls: the facades of the surrounding buildings, what are the patterns, materials and furniture used on the floor? - Is it flat or does it slope? - Is it filled with monuments or relatively empty? How are those monuments arranged? Here we see two very famous squares. Interestingly they were both adapted from earlier situations. The great Zoccalo of Mexico City was placed on the huge temple complex of the earlier Mayan city of Tenochtitlan, while the Piazza Amfiteatro in Lucca, as its name commemorates, is the result of the transformation of the roman amphitheater into a ring of houses. The Zoccalo is almost too large to call a square, in the previous slide it was the biggest of the lot circumscribing all the others. Whereas the one in Lucca is of exactly the right dimensions to sit and enjoy the world pass by, enjoying the shade it affords. The Piazza San Marco in Venice The history of Venice, like that of Holland, is all about water and what to do with it. The Venetians to escape the aggression that took over Europe during the slow collapse of the Roman Empire, took to the lagoon formed at the mouth of the river Po in northern Italy. There they started settling on various islands and gradually built them up to make the great city of Venice, which, during the 13th, 14th and 15th century, right up until the rise of the Ottoman Empire to the east in Turkey, was one of the richest merchant cities in the world trading with China, Africa, India, etc. The money earned had to go somewhere. And especially as the Ottoman Empire rose in power and the Venetian felt their grip on things loosen, the money was spent on showing how great Venice really was, or at least should be considered. The location for this grandeur was well‐chosen. It was the place where the two ‘hands’ of the main islands of Venice, shook each other and where the Grand canal dividing the ‘hands’ opens up into the lagoon, revealing two further islands at the bottom, The Long Giudecca and the smaller round San Giorgio. The square as it now is, developed over time, waterways dividing parts of it had to be covered over or filled in. This was mostly done in the 12th century. The cathedral of San Marco was also expanded at that time forming a stepped combination with the Doge’s Palace which was remodelled in the 14th and 15th Century near the waterfront. In the 16th Century, Jacopo Sansovino was asked to add a mint, a library and a small ‘loggetta’ to the great belfry or ‘campanile’ of the cathedral. These look like a theatre production : The Piazza San Marco, particularly the Piazzetta with its two columns of St Mark and the Dragon, form a proscenium to the podium that is the Piazzetta. The scene is made even richer by the buildings stepping out from behind each other, the cathedral steps forward from behind the Doge’s Palace and the Loggetta steps out from behind the Library. It creates a wonderful architectural backdrop to city life. The elements had been put in place by the 14th century, but it is the architect Jacopo Sansovino who brought it all together making the Library and the Loggetta mirror the action of the cathedral and the palace. And the campanile (tall tower with a bell) now forms the great hinge around which the two sections of the Piazza San Marco turn. It is the landmark projected into the air around which everything comes together. LECTURE 5 : Grid and Growth Literature : Text : Spiro Kostof This lecture is about t the way the basic elements making up the city are organized into a whole. That is what a whole is, an organization of parts that somehow makes sense as an entity. The concepts are : - The Grid, which tends to stand for cities formally planned at the macro‐ and meso‐levels of governance, such at the national, regional or municipal. - Informal growth which tends to happen because governments at the levels mentioned just now, leave things up to micro‐levels of governance, that is at the level of neighbourly interaction. Kostof, “The City Shaped” : urban shape the planned and the unplanned In this text Kostof discusses the informal growth of a city and the formal pattern of the grid. The text is especially interesting because he shows us how the simple formal logic of the grid imposes all sorts of subtle conditions which have unexpected consequences. Also, he describes how slight variations in the grid can have huge consequences for the way it behaves as a framework for buildings and streets and for the way people occupy them and move around in them. According to Kostof there a 3 kinds of cities :  - Cosmic city : organized or shaped according to some idea (about god, about democracy, justice, etc.) → an idea that transcends us as individuals and makes us part od something much bigger Ex : Manhattan grid → based on a notion of democracy : everybody got more or less the same kind of shape - Practical city : guided by an idea of practical efficiency → city that is very strongly zoned in different areas (industrial, residential, etc.) - Organically grown city : putting houses as near a crossing as possible, along the streets City growth tends to be determined by a large number of factors, the most important of which is what is there already, the situation at the start. The topographical, geographical and geological conditions of the land influence city form of course. Growth tends to occur along the paths that hold most activity and that is why many cities have a kind of star shape to them. Another factor influencing city growth is its practical organization. As more and more people and businesses crowd upon the same land, regulators start organizing the city deciding where to put the dirty and unpleasant activities and where to place the special and everyday activities. Naturally the rich tend to congregate in the nicest areas and the poor tend to pick up the crumbs that are left. Professions tend to group together so that they can make use of common resources and so a city acquires a practical organization. But equally important and in some cases even more important are the ideas we hold about where we come from, why we are here and where we hope to be going. Belief‐ systems whether they are Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Atheist, Liberal, Communist or Capitalist impose themselves on city form by emphasizing some values and norms over others and thus bringing an ideological structure to city form. You can see that in Christian countries by the placing of churches and cathedrals, in Muslim countries by the role that Mecca plays, in Communist countries the way the emphasis is placed on the power of the central state and in capitalist countries where the emphasis is on the supposedly ‘free‐flow’ of capital. Manhattan Grid Manhattan is a capitalist city organized according to a grid. The grid was seen in America as a truly democratic and fair system of land distribution. It gave each person access to similar plots of land with good access. The grid was left to the accumulation and flow of capital to determine how that grid was filled with the skyscrapers of the successful, the smaller structures of the middle classes and slums for the rest. In this map you see on the left hand tip of the island of Manhattan, the city of New Amsterdam founded in the seventeenth century, with its more informal growth with broadway or Breestraat reaching into the island at an oblique angle. In 1811 when the city had long since passed to the English in exchange for the colony of Surinam, the city planners decided to grid the whole island in preparation for the urban development they were expecting. At this time they had not accommodated any parks or public spaces. Where do grids come from ? Gridded cities were not new. In fact, most colonizers throughout history tended to expand by imposing grids on the land. After all it allowed the easiest and fairest way to distribute the land. When Spain was expanding its empire in the 16th century it did so by imposing gridded cities on the land. The city of Santo Domingo, now called the Dominican Republic, was the first of the colonizing cities in South America. The church was built at the very centre of the urban pattern (local people had to worship outside of the city but the Spanish colonialists could worship inside). Everything was to be arranged around it, including the governmental buildings to the north and east of the church, while the less pleasant activities were organized at the periphery. This pattern was repeated again and again. The Spanish employed local people to draw up maps of their various cities, which they sent back to the central government (in the form of the King of Spain) of their homeland Spain, which had a set of laws drawn up as to how he felt the colonial cities should be shaped and run. These famous Laws of the Indies are extremely detailed. What appears particularly sympathetic, and what makes Spanish colonial cities so pleasant to be in, is the requirement for shading devices such as galleries and overhangs along the main road. The gridded city is a great tradition that the Spanish had picked up from the French in the middle ages who had got it from the Romans, who had got it from the Greeks who had got it from the Egyptians. The Americans used the grid for almost all their cities. But the exact dimensions of the grids could vary. Some had wider roads, some had larger blocks. Others divided their blocks up in interesting ways. The Italians also expanded some of their cities according to the same principles. Here is the example of Turin, which had of course been a Roman city, which itself was also gridded. People often think that the Greeks (Hippodamus of Miletus) discovered / invented the gridded city, which isn’t completely inaccurate since the grid he came up with differs importantly from the grids he had as his example. However, the idea of planning streets orthogonally and letting them cross at right angles to each other certainly came to him through Egypt where architects and town planners had been experimenting for a lot longer with such patterns : they would organize a city along an orthogonal plan where people who were in charge of things got huge houses and average workers got small houses. This for example is the builder’s city erected to accommodate the people working on King Sesostris’ pyramid some 1300 years before Hippodamus was even a twinkle in his mother eye. Here is the proof that we can speak of a grid‐tradition in Egypt with the builder’s city of Tell‐ el‐Amarna from no less than a thousand years before Miletus was planned and built. Euclidian Town of Milestus In Ancient times, a city, to survive, could not be too big. If there were too many people in a city, the demand for food would’ve been too big and if the harvest failed, hunger would have taken over. Here you can see the city of Miletus on the Turkish coast and what you see are two grids of different dimensions which meet at a place where the grain becomes much courser because of the public buildings it delineates. You can see that the grid is laid out on a promontory where the land sticks into the sea. What you can also see is that the bit sticking into the sea has the finer grid, while the grid nearer the land on the other side of the public buildings is courser, with larger dimensions. Who lived where? Wars and raids were frequent during those times and the city was easiest to assault from land. There, the dwelling places of the poor and the buffer of public buildings would add extra protection. This means that the larger houses of the rich are located in the smaller grid and the smaller hovels of the poor are in the larger grid. And as an extra shield between the two we see the public buildings making a safe little enclave for the privileged who are protected not only from the enemy without, but even from the enemy within! The grid became a popular instrument for laying out new cities. Here you see the structure of Olyntos and compare it to the more informally laid out city of Athens. Informal growth tends to respond very easily to the contingencies and accidents of the existing situation whilst greater developments impose themselves on the landscape more formally. During and directly after Alexander the Great’s reign we see a veritable explosion of such cities rising all over his freshly conquered empire. Priene and Pergamon are some of the most beautiful examples where the grid is laid out over hilly terrain and you get the kind of form that you also see in modern gridded cities like San Francisco and Glasgow, rows and rows of steeply terraced houses, giving each city its distinctive skyline and feel. What is also interesting is to see how Greek cities are organized around broken axes where the public buildings were incorporated into the grid, following the block system in a loose kind of way. → The buildings obstruct the axial continuity. The true masters of the grid were of course the Romans. In their vast empire they established more than 115 cities, all of them on exactly the same pattern, differing only if the land suggested or demanded slight variations in the lay‐out or in the materials used to build them which were always local. How did they determine where to place a city ? Already in ancient Sumeria, livers of local animals were used to decide where exactly to place a new city. They cut animals from specific areas open to observe their liver. A healthy liver was the best sign to see whether a place was healthy all year round. As soon as the place was decided on the basis of healthiness and practicability, an iron set of rules were implemented, deciding the exact shape and placement of each camp. The most important elements of these gridded military camps and cities were the two main streets, the cardo and the decamanus. The cardo was the most important of the two, linking north and south and splitting the city into two symmetrical halves. The decamanus divided the city horizontally if you like, along the east‐west axis giving the city a bottom half, for the less important people and the top‐half for the more important ones. On the crossing of the two lines would be situated the more important public buildings. Florence also started as a grid city set within the greater grid of the centuriated landscape surrounding it. Centuriation was a method whereby the land could be divided among those rewarded with land for military service. Each square could hold up to 100 landholdings. This grid is identifiable at the centre of the renaissance city of Florence (1500 years after it was first founded by the romans). However, the discipline of the Romans fell away and the city was allowed to expand along its paths as smaller interested parties such as families and religious institutions such as monasteries, saw fit. Florence, in this way, is not unique. If you study most ancient cities in Italy, France and Spain you will see the remnants of the roman grid pop up exactly where you expect it, near a river, oriented along the cardinal points of the compass and bisected by two main roads crossing at right angles. Islamic and Feudal Italian adaptation of Roman city (center) In Islamic countries, where many such cities were built, these grids have often remained. As buildings collapsed, informal paths would be created and would form the organizational spine along which new houses were built, often along narrower streets in order to keep out the heat of the sun. In Italy (picture on the right), you see how streets were blocked as families ruled by a grand patriarch would claim bits of the city for themselves not allowing others to make use of it freely. The way Italians dismantled these strongholds during and after the renaissance determined the way the cities look today. Fall of the Roman Empire With the fall of the Roman Empire, the Pax Romana, the peace guaranteed by the might of the Roman Administration supported by the army, disintegrated and anarchy ensued. People became scared of roaming bandits and personal armies which made them seek out the strongest buildings of the city and take up abode in them in the first years of the Dark Ages. The population of the city that was left often jumped into the amphitheatres. Here is an example from Avignon. Grenade sur Garonne In the 13th and 14th centuries France became more and more powerful, many new towns were built (called Neuvilles) and each of them were arranged on variations of the grid. The central block (on the left in the diagram) forms an exact square and each block along the length of the city in both directions is as long as the diagonal of the previous block. Totally brilliant solution allowing blocks of different size, smaller ones for larger public buildings and large private properties, and larger blocks to accommodate more smaller properties and institutions. Barcelona Grid The cleverest grid is Spanish and it was thought up by one of the great urban designers of all time. Look carefully at the bottom left had corner where we see the old city of Barcelona and then look at the grid and notice the peculiar shape of the blocks. Barcelona was a Roman city at first and expanded to the outer line marked with an arrow by 1708. The city was not allowed to expand from the authorities in Madrid, because then as now, Barcelona had ideas of its own. So, the city was surrounded by a large area that was not allowed to be developed so that instead it could serve a military purpose in case this proved necessary. This meant that expansion of the city had to occur inside the city walls. The city became denser and denser. Streets became narrower and narrower, buildings were built in any place they could fit and expanded in all directions. And where normal cities developed factories on the periphery of the city’s edges, in Barcelona the factories had to be accommodated within the city fabric. Barcelona by 1855 had become unliveable. And after the European revolutions of 1848, the authorities in Madrid decided that they would have to allow for the city’s expansion. Ildefonso Cerda’s plan was relatively straight forward. Add a huge rectangle to the city, cross it like the British flag with diagonal avenues and then stamp the same size block all over it. That block was very cleverly conceived : the corners of the block were chamfered off because Cerda had noticed that traffic problems in cities always originate at crossings. He analysed the crossings and discovered that there was a very simple mathematical reason why crossings give trouble : the space available to each road is halved at a normal crossing. By chamfering the corners of the block, he could maintain the same area available to each street and this he believed would smooth traffic congestion. (This block shape also allowed for the characteristic buildings of Barcelona.) In the first instance Cerda wanted the blocks to be only partly built up, leaving lots of green for the city. But over time the pressure for expansion became too great and the blocks were slowly filled in and topped up, creating a very dense city in which every available space is claimed and used. And at the centre of it, the great church of Sagrada Familia designed by Antoni Gaudi. LECTURE 6 : Facilitating activity Literature : Francis DK Ching, “Introduction to Architecture” (pp. 134-164) Francis DK Ching, “Form, Space and Order” (p.178-272) Complicating activity Sometimes it looks like architects complicate activities and sometimes it is indeed the case. Peter Eisenman, House VI He is very strict in the way he designs which make you encounter difficulties : he deforms, changes the grid and because of that he sometimes end up putting a column in the middle of a kitchen, designs stairs that lead nowhere, etc. But he doesn’t care.  “He made it difficult for the users so that they would have to grow accustom to the architecture and constantly be aware of it.” Prison Chapel, London It complicates the prisoners’ activity by putting them into boxes where they can’t do anything else apart from looking forward, however it facilitates the guards’ activity because they can see every single person. Panopticon prison It’s a circular prison which is very efficient because only a couple of guards are needed to watch over the entire prison. Activity When we need to design something, we need to ask ourselves these questions : - What activities do I need to facilitate ? - What exactly will be going on in that building ? What is it’s function ? (The more precisely we know, the better) - How will that building be used ? - What behavior should (NOT) be facilitated ? (In a prison we don’t want to facilitate the bad behavior of inmates) - What kind of spaces do I need to design to facilitate (prevent) that ?  This process results in the PROGRAM OF REQUIREMENTS Sometimes we can’t put everything in the program of requirements but we also don’t have to do everything the same way, there’s always interpretation in there. Also, not everything NEEDS to be programmed. Some spaces can be unprogrammed : we might not think we need them but they can still be very useful in some circumstances. Lacaton & Vasal, Nantes It’s a school of architecture which is too big for what was required. They made an extra space which is used for different purposes (events, model making, cafeteria, etc.) and they made it because they could afford it (materials were cheap). → They gave them more then they knew they wanted and they compensated with the use of materials. What’s an architect ? Comes from “arkhi-tekton” = chief builder / carptenter SO an architect should translate the program of requirements (spatially) into a building. Herman Hertzberg, office building He designed an office building by dividing it into small environments. There were hardly any doors, windows but there were many openings inside with a lot of interactions/contact. (It is being threatened to be destroyed)  It doesn’t always facilitate activity, some people got distracted and couldn’t work there while others loved it. There were also issues with climate / temperatures. Adolf Loos’ definition “Architecture arouses sentiments (emotions) in man (=all users). The architect’s task therefore, is to make (all) those sentiments more precise”. ➔ Architects arouse sentiments in ALL users and they need to take all of those users and all their sentiments into account. What we need to know to achieve this - Who are the stakeholders / users of the building ? - What instruments / concepts do I have as an architect ? Architect’s toolbox  - Spatial organization of program (linear, radial, grid, cluster) (Ching p.134 +) - Circulation, routing (Ching p.148 +) - Order (Ching p.150 +) : Symmetry / axis – Hierarchy – Rhythm (repetition, standardization) - Other : Sequence (it’s like circulation but the element of time comes in), daylight, materialization, structure, scale, proportion, mass, shape, geometry, detail, acoustics, texture, zoning, sightlines, temperature, orientation, colour, style, analogy, datum, … Spatial organization 1. Linear organization : John Hejduk, Wall House 2 It has an elevated corridor that connects everything and there’s a wall (=plane that looks like a big line on the plan) that also serves as a private segregation (on one side there are the more private rooms and on the other side the less private ones). 2. Radial organization : There’s a center and from that on things originate. Richard Neutra, Kaufmann desert house The fireplace (living room) is the center of the house and all the “wings” are connected to it (they originate from that fireplace) : there’s a guest, service (for staff) and sleeping wing. 3. Grid organization Norman Foster, Stansted airport Grids have a rhythm, a repetition. It could have a prioritization, an order. In this case there’s a square grid which doesn’t have an order / prioritization of circulation, of direction. It makes sense to use such a grid in an airport because people are going in many different directions. Routes – circulation (close links with organization) 1. Linear route Linear organization = straight line VS Linear routes can be curved. Linear routing are used for unambiguous activities (there’s one thing you need to do there, you follow the route and you get there). Why do we design linear routes ? There’s no choice, no freedom because you need to follow the linear circulation route but on the other hand there is no confusion, you don’t need to make decisions about where to go and how to go there. (Ex : IKEA). 2. Optional Circulation They are used for optional activities. You have lots of options, lots of freedom but that also means that you have to make lots of decisions and it can lead to a lot of confusion and loss of orientation. (Ex : Musea) Therme Vals, Switzerland It’s a leisure facility. It has a cellular organization : it has all kinds of little enclosures (for different kinds of baths that need to be enclosed). Because of the function of the SPA, you don’t want to see all kinds of people, you want to have your own bubble. But it also has a clustered organization : the changing rooms, for example, are clusters of cells and there’s also a small cluster of steam baths. The function has nice solutions for circulation too : inside the SPA (in the space where the baths are) you want people feel at home and to do whatever they like so there you use optional circulation but in the entrance you don’t want to confuse people so you use linear circulation. There are openings in the roof slabs which also help with circulation : there’s a straight line of light just above the stairs which makes you prioritize that path. Tadao Ando, Water temple It is a Buddhist Temple in Japan and it has an oval shape, with water on top of it. The architect used geometry to organize and abstract his building. But the main thing he did is focus on the sentiment that a Temple is supposed to make you feel. He used circulation to achieve this goal : he used a linear circulation (there’s no choice to decide where to go) but here sequence is more important (what you see as you follow the route). First you see a path of pebbles (the only path you can follow) along the curved wall, then your view widens and you see the pond on top. After that you finally enter the building where the daylight attracts your attention and then you finally enter the temple itself. → He does all these things to bring people in the sentiment of serenity (uses daylight, color, geometry). He delays your “access” to the Temple in order to give you time to adapt from where you come from (a busy, agitated environment) to where you’re going (a peaceful, calm environment). LECTURE 7 : Providing shelter and protection Literature : Francis DK Ching, “Introduction to Architecture” (pp.79-124) Enclosure An enclosure is defined by its boundaries and its access. It’s used to separate the outside from the inside (because we want to exclude and include things) : - Exclusion of : enemies / intruders, wild animals, harsh weather, curiosity, obscurity - Inclusion of : family / friends, domestic animals, comfort, privacy, possessions, control Boundaries We make boundaries to make the exclusion and inclusion very clear. A boundary can be a wall, a roof, etc. Village West central Africa The enclosure here is a circular wall = boundary. There’s only one access, you can control that entrance therefore you can control what you include and what you exclude. → You make all the things you like inside and you leave all the things you don’t like outside. Yanomami village Watoriki – Amazon Brazil In this case, the boundary is the roof (not the wall). Everything under the roof is included. Traditional houses – Damascus (Syria) Courtyard in the middle (it has to do with climate and religion) : you leave everything out and everything else is linked to the courtyard. James Stirling – Florey building Student housing in Oxford : it’s not closed but it’s an enclosure. The outside looks very protective : very solid wall with hardly any openings and it’s centered on the courtyard → the other side is completely different, it opens up to the courtyard. Alvar Aalto – Town Hall (In Finland) It focuses on enclosure as well : the building itself forms the enclosure. It has 2 access points (2 staircases) : one leading to an elevated courtyard, and the other to a kind of hidden entrance. Idea : a townhall should be more like a house (should have a home like feeling), especially in a small town like that. Because the courtyard is elevated so you can only see 1 story : made that way to facility the uses, to take the users’ sentiment into account. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe – brick country house Do we need enclosures ? Yes but you can think in a very subtle way of boundaries and enclosures. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe said “The rooms flow into each other without clear definition of their boundaries or their separation from the exterior.” He designed a house without doors, only using walls to ensure a flow between rooms. → enclosures aren’t always as strict as their definition makes it seem. Access (entrance) Academy building Utrecht University It has an access of symmetry, it has an L-shape / funnel / concave (every line leads to a point in the middle. There’s a lot of repetition on the windows but there’s an exception in the middle one (that’s lower and curved. These elements combined make it very obvious that the middle point is the entrance. Mario Botta – Casa Bianchi (Switzerland) This has another obvious entrance (basically a bridge) but by means of color and structure. Le Corbusier – Couvent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette This is an example of a symbolic entrance. He made the real entrance very hard to see, very subtle but made a very visible symbolic entrance instead, which is a gate and isn’t actually as important. → He made this decision after consulting with priests who said that the most important entrance is the symbolic one. Frank Lloyd Wright – Robie house (Chicago) It is very strictly enclosed, the boundaries are very strict for privacy reasons. Even the sight lines are based on privacy : when you’re inside you get a nice view on the surroundings and the park but when you’re outside, your view is blocked by a balustrade so you can’t see the people below and they also can’t look in. The entrances is also hidden, hard to find because he doesn’t want any intruders. Philip Johnson – Glass House (New Canaan) Do we need privacy ? Yes, but it can be translated in different ways. All the four walls of this house are glass and there’s only one enclosure, it’s a cylinder in the middle (where we can find the fireplace, the bathroom and toilet). The rest is completely transparent. He’s just keeping the weather out, it does have boundaries but they’re outside the glass walls : they’re walls made by the surroundings. So, the boundaries here are : physical (the glass walls) and visual (boundaries that block your view, that are outside the glass walls such as the trees). LECTURE 8 : Modifying climate Literature  Francis DK Ching, “Introduction to architecture” (pp.308-320) Some solutions to modifying climate - Windcatchers, instead of air conditioning (Hyderabad – India) - Passive control of heat (dealing passively with shading, sun control and overheating) : espalier trees (Dutch farmhouse) - Active control : Glass farm (Winy Maas – Schijndel) → climate control of the Glass Farm leads to a comfort problem. The building is 100% glass and it has screening on it (screen printed images) which represent the look of a traditional farmhouse in the surrounding area. When it comes to morphology, it is a traditional farmhouse but when it comes to scale and materialization, it’s definitely not. This building is also awkward from a climate point of view : traditional farmhouses have small windows and are surrounded by vegetation for a reason but that’s all missing here. It means that where traditional farmhouses could deal with passive control, this one can’t at all so it has a very active control. Comfort was really a problem → if you’re not doing contextual design you’re asking for problems. Contextual Design According to Rem Koolhaas, if a building is big enough related to their context, they don’t need to communicate with their context anymore. So what do we need to do if we want take context into account ? Surviving cold Selk’nam – Patagonia : They’re a nomadic tribe with hardly any housing culture. Instead they have a very rich body and theatre culture developed. They have hardly any clothes, instead they used the fat and grease of lama’s as a layer of body insulation → they are basically “Wearing their own house”. Surviving heat Glenn Murcutt – Marika-Alderton House This was an assignment for an aboriginal lady and she asked to build a house. He took the climate and the comfort very seriously. There were a lot of panels that could be opened for ventilation (also closed for protection against bad weather) and there was hardly any material, it had a very lightweight structure, no thick insulation (unnecessary). The house is elevated and stands on stilts which has to do with animals but also with being airy and able to ventilate. You can open the panels on 2 sides and it gets the sea breeze because it’s next to the ocean → it can cross ventilate. Besides that, there are other small openings on the roof : as hot air rises, it’s being sucked out of the rooms. This design works very well with Australia’s humidity, the warm nights and the sea breeze. Accumulation A design for sunny days and cold nights : you can use thermal mass and the effect of accumulation. Meaning, you collect the warmth in the materials (concrete, bricks) which warm up quickly but also cool down slowly. That way you can use the accumulated heat to warm up the spaces during the night. Michael Reynolds – Earthship Micheal Reynolds put an earth wall and a gigantic glass facade facing south, using the mass of the earth as an insulation layer. Its thermal mass accumulates heat during the day which can then be used to heat up the building during the night, when it’s cold outside. Surviving heat and wind Renzo Piano - Centre Culturel Jean-Marie Tjibaou : looks like the vernacular Kanak architecture. Cultural context : This architecture is based on a natural ridge. The villages where always a linear ensemble. The elements of the villages were the “Grande Case” (grande hut) which were clustered, built in circular plans and had steep conical roofs. On top of that was an ornament which symbolized each family. They were also temporary because they used natural materials and they couldn’t withstand the harsh climate. The Centre Culturel’s design was also based on the cultural features of the Kanak villages and huts : there’s a ridge, it’s linearly organized and there are (programmatic) clusters which go from public to less public to not public. The elements have circular plans and they have a hierarchy : every cluster has a one that’s slightly bigger than the others. The access to these elements is also a recognizable cultural feature. This isn’t a temporary construction but Renzo tried to mimic that by making the buildings look like they aren’t finished. The prevailing wind direction is ESE (East South East) and it’s significant in the design. Comfort and climate : There are louvers which allow you to look through them horizontally but they block the sunlight (so it’s shaded). They also provide air that passes through them. These are the louvered windows but there is also permanent ventilation provided by permanently open louvers (ventilation grids). You can control the wind conditions thanks to these. The shape of the buildings also helps : it has its curve shape against the ESE wind direction so then the streamline of the building becomes important. Jean-Nouvel – Institut du monde Arabe He mimicked the traditional Arabe facades (moucharabieh / mashrabiya / shanasheel) which are used to control wind and heat. But he made it electricized so they can be opened and closed. Lecture 9 : Thinking about the making You get a specific architectural language simply by the place where you build things and the things that are available there. Ex: if you only have sand, cactuses and llamas, your construction materials will be sand, cactuses and llamas. Literature : Francis DK Ching, “Introduction to architecture” (pp. 249-298) Tectonics In order to make buildings bigger, higher, cheaper, smarter, lighter, elegant etc. , you have to think about making and realizing those buildings → think about making ideas real which includes thinking about construction, detail, material, structure and their relation to architecture. Not uniformly defined, depends on the author, the architect, etc. But if we look closely to all the definitions, we can identify 2 different types of words : one has to do with technology and the other with the more creative part of architecture and when these 2 come together, we talk about tectonics.  Shortest definition : Expression of materials and construction in architecture. Architecture deals with questions like : what, where and why do we build. And if we take all of this together and add “how do we build” to it, we talk about tectonics. There are significant differences in the approach to construction methods. You can build with masses (Netherlands) or we can build with frames (Japan). Gottfried Semper – Four elements of architecture While making a Caribbean hut, he discovered that in all houses there are 4 elements (at that time): hearth (fireplace) ; roof ; enclosure ; mound (platform / terrace). The balance between these 4 elements is different based on the culture and the things that are available. All elements have specific building (“making”) techniques : hearth is made with fire (moulding) ; roof with carpentry ; enclosure with weaving ; mound with masonry. Making techniques is also linked to material : hearth is linked to ceramics (pottery, metal) ; roof to wood ; enclosure to textile (fabric) ; mound to stone (earth). Dutch construction tradition (Amsterdam School) Typically earth based construction. Enclosure is almost gone because they typically clay up the wall and the wooden roof can barely be seen. Here the balance goes to the earth and stone elements. Dutch architecture is based on mass, it’s heavy and has small openings. It celebrates brickwork. The construction method is also unique : they build up the frames of windows and doors first and they build bricks around it. Japanese construction tradition (Buddhist pagoda) It is completely frame based, made with 1D elements. They celebrate woodwork, it’s very lightweight and fragile. It has to do with the materials available but also with earthquakes (these buildings are more flexible then brick based ones). The roof here is almost the entire building >< in Dutch architecture the mound is almost the whole building. Antoni Gaudi - Sagrada Familia – Barcelona Gaudi made the model of the Sagrada Familia upside down with ropes and little weights, which can only handle tensile forces (it’s based entirely on tensile forces). The ropes automatically form catenary arches. And if you turn is upside down you get exactly the opposite : a model based entirely on compressive forces. Abraham Darby III + Thomas Farnolls Pritchard – The Iron Bridge First bridge made in cast iron. → Iron was a completely new building material. Theory by Semper (change of material theory) : If you have a new material, you base your shape / appearance on the materials you do know.  They didn’t know how to make arches in iron but they did know how to make them in stone so that’s what they mimicked with the iron bridge. (It didn’t work properly, iron / steel have completely different properties than stone and wood). Later on the use of steel was optimized and people started constructing wider (Fowler & Baker - Firth of Forth bridge), bigger (Ferdinand Dutert & Victor Contamin - Galeries des Machines) and higher (Louis Sullivan - Wainwright building) buildings with it.  Louis Sullivan - Wainwright building : Although the façade is made out of masonry, the building has an iron skeleton (frame). This was the first time that the frame and the cladding were separated. They could’ve been cladded with any other material but because buildings were traditionally made out of bricks and stone, they also chose to clad it in a traditional looking way (change of material theory). Joseph Paxton - Crystal Palace - London world expo They planned the London exhibition and they were running out of time, they still didn’t have a central pavilion being designed. Coincidentally Joseph met someone who was in charge of the exhibition and Joseph Paxton was an architect and a gardener, so he was into garden design and glass houses. he borrowed all the things he learned from greenhouses (standardization of elements, lightweight construction, repetition, prefabricated elements, ect.) and used it in the design of the crystal palace. Prefabrication Making things off site and assembling them on site. Charles & Ray Eames – Eames house There were a lot of soldiers coming back from the war and they all wanted to start their families but they didn’t have much money. So, there was a big demand for cheap houses in post-war US and a magazine organized a competition for architects to design these cheap houses. The Eames couple also participated and they designed this house. It was based on catalogues (catalogues of “do it yourself” companies, so everything you could order off the shelf) so standardized materials, meaning you could interchange the elements. Richard Buckminster Fuller – geodesic domes He wanted to build lighter and smarter. These domes were based on 3D structures, with 1D elements. Very lightweight but had gigantic spans, they could still be moved around very easily. Renzo Piano & Richard Rogers – Centre Pompidou This building is also the result of a prestigious competition. According to Renzo Piano, the reason they won is that they didn’t use the whole plot for the competition (they were the only ones to do so). Instead they made a compact building, leaving space for a square which is an essential element of the design. They made the building compact by collecting and assembling all the building surfaces there. So, all pipes, plumbing and insulation were pushed to the outside of the building and they visualized it by giving it color (air = white, green = electricity, red = transportation). They made it expressive. But the building had a very simple structure : it’s a rectangular shoe box.  On the square side, we can find the circulation zone (combined all circulation on that side) while on the other side they collected all building surfaces, leaving the middle completely free (unprogrammed space). The competition was a bit embarrassing, very free and open, not yet decided by the French government what the use of the building was going to be. So these 2 architects made large, open spaces in the middle which could be used for basically anything. They could achieve this by combining all the structural elements on the outside → Exoskeleton. Detail It can both mean something very important and unimportant, relevant and irrelevant part of a building. When it comes to ‘making’ it is vital. Etymology Detail ‘part of a bigger whole’: French détail ‘small part from a whole’ -> détailler ‘cut in small pieces’, -> destaillier; dé- ‘away from’ and tailler ‘cutting, splitting’ -> Lat. taliare -> tālea; ‘a cut branch/twig’. Means : ‘cutting something big into smaller parts (details) for closer observation Hendrik Petrus Berlage - stock exchange – Amsterdam Lecture 10 : Giving Delight (small as well as larger pleasure) Literature : Text : Smithsons Pleasure Pleasure can be had in anything. The pleasure of architecture is the one of enjoying the opportunities a building affords and to become aware of all the things that make its use somehow different and special: The delight of comfort, of well‐made things, of convenience, of being able to use things well, of moving through well‐considered and richly informative spaces. The pleasure you have in something has everything to do with expectations and hope. When you return from a long journey you hope to find your house as you left it. If you walk to work along the same route everyday you may hope for something to change for the good. If you are told that the room you are about to enter is the most amazing you will ever see, your expectations are raised to such a degree that you may well