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DESIGN STRUGGLES: Intersecting Histories, Pedagogies, and Perspectives
No full textDesign Struggles critically assesses the complicity of design in creating, perpetuating, and reinforcing social, political, and environmental problems — both today and in the past. The book proposes to brush the discipline against the grain, by problematizing Western notions of design, fostering situated, decolonial, and queer-feminist modes of disciplinary self-critique.
In order to reimagine design as an unbound, ambiguous, and unfinished practice, this publication gathers a diverse array of perspectives, ranging from social and cultural theory, design history, design activism, sociology, and anthropology, to critical and political studies, with a focus on looking at design through the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, culture, class, and beyond.
It combines robust scholarly insights with engaging and accessible modes of conveyance and storytelling by bringing together an urgent and expansive array of voices and views from those engaged in struggles with, against, or around the design field
Gentrification and Crime: New Configurations and Challenges for the City
Full text linkThis volume is the editorial product of the project “Gentrification and Crime. New Configurations and Challenges for the City” started by a public conference held on May 6, 2019 at the Municipal Historical Archive of Palermo. This event was organized by Locus and endorsed by private and public bodies. During the conference, four presentations were given by distinguished academics of main fields investigated: Giovanni Semi, Marco Picone, Adam Asmundo, Antonio La Spina. Journalist Elvira Terranova moderated the event.
This publication was born from the desire to investigate gentrification and crime through a multidisciplinary approach. It draws inspiration from the urban sociologist Henri Lefebvre and his fundamental work The Production of Space on how the subject in its corporeality and in its interactions with the other integrates and produces spaces.
The people involved in the project stem from different fields: geographers, urban sociologists and criminologists, architects and urban planners, historians, and other representatives of civil society. That being said, given this project’s cross-disciplinary nature, contributors are given some creative freedom to flesh-out their own conceptualizations. As such, it is appropriate to cultivate an understanding of the intellectual framework and foundation underpinning this work
Foundries of the Future: A Guide for 21st Century Cities of Making
No full textThis book attempts to shed light on the ways manufacturing can address urban challenges, it exposes constraints for the manufacturing sector and provides fifty patterns for working with urban manufacturing. This book has been written as a manual to help politicians, public authorities, planners, designers and community organisations to be able to plan, discuss and collaborate by developing more productive urban manufacturing. The book is split into two parts.
We first cover an abridged history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, noting how European cities evolved rapidly by harnessing manufacturing, and then how the late twentieth century led to a radical shift in how cities work and think. We’re now at a crossroads between actors that do not see the need for manufacturing in cities and those that consider it vital for a prosperous urban future. Part of the tension comes from the fact that manufacturing is considered a ‘weak land use’ compared to activities such as real-estate development, which has been considered more financially attractive by many actors in the private and public sector. This real estate-oriented development narrative is increasingly regarded as short-sighted, but will not change without an alternative vision. We have therefore elaborated a narrative on how urban manufacturing responds to four specific challenges facing cities and how in turn manufacturing needs cities. In practice, planning and design for a topic like this is highly challenging.
The second part of the book is intended as a handbook. By synthesising our research and fieldwork conducted in a number of cities, we have encountered many similarities in terms of problems, challenges and solutions for urban manufacturing. Inspired by the seminal 1977 book, ‘A Pattern Language’ we have translated our findings into fifty patterns which help render the diversity of issues concerning manufacturing more tangible. As both teamwork and negotiation are necessary, exercises and methods are provided to use the patterns. Finally, we have set out twelve key action areas as possible starting points for supporting urban manufacturing
Reimagining Heerenstraat: Actief Erfgoed in de Historische Binnenstad van Paramaribo / Active Heritage in Paramaribo’s Historic Inner City
Full text linkIn 2016, the Government of Suriname, financed by a loan from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), launched the Paramaribo Urban Rehabilitation Program (PURP), which contributes to the socio-economic revitalisation of Paramaribo’s historic inner city. It aims to attract new residents and commercial activities to the centre of Paramaribo, to restore value to its cultural heritage, to reduce traffic congestion and to strengthen the institutional framework for managing its sustainable development. The program also aims for a climate-smart approach to infrastructural interventions.
From July 29 to August 2, 2019, Luiz de Carvalho Filho and Santiago del Hierro, from the Department of Urbanism of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at TU Delft, visited Paramaribo to explore the possible topics for a Workshop Program in support of PURP to be carried out in November 2019. This Technical Cooperation would take place in coordination with IDB and the Government of Suriname, particularly the Ministry of Education’s Directorate of Culture. The cooperation would be realised as part of the fall semester of the European Post-master in Urbanism (EMU), in parallel to a research and design studio for the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area.
In contrast to the approach to Amsterdam, students in the Paramaribo Workshop shifted in scale from a metropolitan understanding of the city, to a neighbourhood perspective where spatial justice was addressed through social participation and a local understanding of what makes urban space lively, inclusive and safe. Paramaribo and Amsterdam are cities that have a strong relationship due to a shared colonial history. Their relationship has continued to remain very active even since the independence of Suriname in 1975, when a high percentage of the population of Paramaribo emigrated to the Netherlands. In this sense, the workshop also included the perspective of Dutch-Surinamese citizens who experience both places as home. This helped us broaden our understanding of how urban liveliness is experienced in different Surinamese contexts. Input from The Black Archives, the Grote Surinam Exhibition and the Bijlmer Museum in Amsterdam was integrated into the workshop’s preliminary research.
Between 3 and 8 November, during the workshop week in Paramaribo, TU Delft students, together with local stakeholders, focused on the analysis of local conditions and possible strategies that can support a sustainable revitalisation of the Heerenstraat, a street with enormous potential to become one of the Historic Inner City’s most iconic destinations due to its inherent beauty and the public activities that the community is continuously organising.
By focusing on the interaction of various layers on an intervention at a smaller scale (the Heerenstraat and its adjacent buildings and public spaces), the workshop aimed at understanding and visualising a concrete roadmap towards a more lively, active and safe space in this specific case study within the Historic Inner City
Repositioning Architecture in the Digital
No full textSeventh Annual Conference November 2019 - Jaap Bakema Study Centre
This year’s conference of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre aims to critically explore the interplay between architecture and digital culture since the 1970s. How has the emergent data society materialized in architecture? What new typologies have been developed? And what role did architecture play in the emerging discussion about artificial intelligence?
Due to the pandemic, this year’s edition of our annual Jaap Bakema Study Centre conference has to be very different from our previous events. Usually, we announce a call for papers in the spring, but spring this year saw the first lockdown in the Netherlands and many other countries. Now, with the second wave of the virus still gaining momentum, we are in a (partial) lockdown situation once again.
With this in mind, we have decided to organise a series of online workshops and keynotes with invited speakers. Together with Georg Vrachliotis, this fall appointed as full professor of the theory of architecture and digital culture at TU Delft, we have developed a programme around current research questions that probe the interrelations between the digital and architecture. This follows up on the earlier events of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre’s Total Space programme
Who shot Le Corbusier? The architect of the century and his photographers
Full text linkWho were Le Corbusier’s photographers? The question is seldom asked yet is germane to understanding the architect’s work. Le Corbusier used photography to promote modern architecture in ways no others did. He directed the photography of his buildings, selected the images that he liked, cropped them, abstracted them, and placed them on the pages of his many books. He mediated the medium of photography manipulating visual facts in an era when “the camera never lied”. Yet always he began with images that others provided him. Photographers and advancing photo-technology were essential and when they changed, his imagery changed, and between 1922 and 1965 both changed often. Once a craft practiced by skilled technicians with large-format cameras and glass plate negatives, by the mid-1930s, architectural photography had become an art that could be executed by amateurs with hand-held cameras, faster films, and superb lenses. This altered the nature of the photograph and subsequently Le Corbusier’s understanding of his endeavor. For him, photography never simply documented a completed building, it created a new one. He saw through photography.
Dutch connections: Essays on international relationships in architectural history in honour of Herman van Bergeijk
Full text linkThroughout his career, Herman van Bergeijk built his own unique expertise on the Dutch 19th and early 20th century architectural history. He has become an inspiration for scholars in the Netherlands, Europe and beyond. The extraordinary response of colleagues when asked to contribute a chapter in this Festschrift stands as an example of Herman’s widespread influence. Invitations for keynotes and lectures or courses keep reaching him, and he will continue to teach and write. He has an open invitation to teach in China and still bubbles with ideas for yet another new publication series or journal. Several PhD students continue to rely on his guidance and will keep him engaged at the faculty. Herman thrives on lively discussions, in which he often plays devil’s advocate and tries to be as contrary as possible. I am convinced that we will continue to collaborate and battle on diverse topics, notably the role of history in the design of future architecture. Retirement is just another step in Herman’s career
Charles Prosper Wolff Schoemaker & Vincent Van Romondt: Modernism and national characteristics
Full text linkIn this booklet, the architectural theorist and Professor at York University Abidin Kusno discusses two lectures given by two influential professors in the former Dutch colony of Indonesia. The first one, ‘The aesthetics of architecture and the art of the moderns’, was given by C. Wolff Schoemaker in 1930. The second, entitled ‘Towards an Indonesian Architecture’, was delivered by Vincent Van Romondt in 1954. Schoemaker and Van Romondt held different views on the challenges of architecture in the world as well as in Indonesia. They nevertheless both sought to bring the notion of modernism and tradition into the context of their time. The lectures are published here for the first time in English
Van den Broek & Bakema: Vigorous protagonists of a functionalist architecture at the TH Delft
Full text linkThough unalike in personality, functionalist architects Johannes Hendrik (Jo) van den Broek (1898-1978) and Jacob Berend (Jaap) Bakema (1914-1981) were inextricably bound up with each other both as partners in their Rotterdam office, Van den Broek and Bakema Architects, and as professors at the Technical College of Delft. [Fig. 1] Each represents a type of Dutch functionalism. Van den Broek was one of the founders of Nieuwe Bouwen, the modernist movement in Dutch architecture and construction after 1930; Bakema was among the enthusiastic architects of the post-war period moving modernist architecture in a new direction. Van den Broek and Bakema were two outstanding and outspoken characters, invariably typified in architectural historical literature as opposites: the analyst and the idealist, the pragmatist and the philosopher, the schoolmaster and the priest. Van den Broek and Bakema Architects was a key player in the postwar reconstruction of the Netherlands. Despite the sheer size of the task and the shortage of manpower and building materials, the Netherlands had quickly mounted a large-scale operation to rebuild bombed areas with industrially manufactured mass housing and a new cityscape.
Van den Broek and Bakema Architects was known for its large-scale building projects, its problem-solving ability, and it generated new ideas about architecture, urbanism, and society. After the war, both architects were appointed extraordinary professors at the Technical College of Delft; Van den Broek from 1947 until 1964 and Bakema from 1964 until his death in 1981. Each left his mark on both architectural education and the atmosphere of the Department of Architecture.
Because of the grand scale of construction in the first decades after the war, Van den Broek and Bakema asked themselves what the architect’s role and responsibility were in an increasingly technology-dominated society. It is not surprising that this question was the main theme in their teaching and in their inaugural speeches. Van den Broek gave his inaugural speech in 1948; Bakema in 1964. These two dates mark more or less the start and the completion of the post-war reconstruction.
The Chair History of Architecture and Urban Planning publishes their inaugural speeches with a small critical apparatus, to discuss these professors at the Technical College and the work that they did with students; and to shed new light on a lesser known period in these men’s careers, as well as to contribute to the history of the Technical College in Delft, in particular of its role in architecture and planning education in post-war society
Built Utopias in the Countryside: The Rural and the Modern in Franco’s Spain
No full textAnchored by Hüppauf and Umbach’s notion of Vernacular Modernism and focusing on architecture and urbanism during Franco’s dictatorship from 1939 to 1975, this thesis challenges the hegemonic and Northern-oriented narrative of urban modernity. It develops arguments about the reciprocal influences between the urban and the rural that characterize Spanish modernity, and analyzes the intense architectural and urban debates that resulted from the crisis of 1898, as they focused on the importance of vernacular architecture, in particular the Mediterranean one, in the definition of an “other modernity.”
This search culminated before 1936 with the “Lessons of Ibiza,” and was revived at the beginning of the 1950s, when architects like Coderch, Fisac, Bohigas, and the cosigners of the Manifiesto de la Alhambra brought back the discourse of the modern vernacular as a politically acceptable form of Spanish modernity, and extended its field of application from the individual house and the rural architecture to the urban conditions, including social and middle-class housing. The core of the dissertation addresses the 20th century phenomenon of the modern agricultural village as built emergence of a rural paradigm of modernity in parallel or alternative to the metropolitan condition. In doing so, it interrogates the question of tradition, modernity, and national identity in urban form between the 1920s and the 1960s.
Regarding Spain, it studies the actuation of the two Institutes that were created to implement the Francoist policy of post-war reconstruction and interior colonization—the Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas, and the Instituto Nacional de Colonización. It examines the ideological, political, urban, and architectural principles of Franco’s reconstruction of the devastated countryside, as well as his grand “hydro-social dream” of modernization of the countryside. It analyzes their role in national-building policies in liaison with the early 20th-century Regenerationist Movement of Joaquín Costa, the first works of hydraulic infrastructure under Primo de Rivera, and the aborted agrarian reform of the Second Republic.
Inspired by the Zionist colonization of Palestine and Mussolini’s reclaiming of the Pontine Marshes, Falangist planners developed a national strategy of “interior colonization” that, along with the reclamation and irrigation of extensive and unproductive river basins, entailed the construction of three hundred modern villages or pueblos between 1940 and 1971. Each village was designed as a “rural utopia,” centered on a plaza mayor and the church, which embodied the political ideal of civil life under the nationalcatholic regime and evolved from a traditional town design in the 1940s to an increasingly abstract and modern vision, anchored on the concept of the “Heart of the City” after 1952.
The program was an important catalyst for the development of Spanish modern architecture after the first period of autarchy and an effective incubator for a new generation of architects, including Alejandro de la Sota, José Luis Fernández del Amo, and others. Between tradition and modernity, these architects reinvented the pueblos as platforms of urban and architectonic experimentation in their search for a depurated rural vernacular and a modern urban form. Whereas abstraction was the primary design tool that Fernández del Amo deployed to the limits of the continuity of urban form, de la Sota reversed the fundamental reference to the countryside that characterizes Spanish surrealism to bring surrealism within the process of rural modernization in Franco’s Spain