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Converging Fragments. Seoul: A Portrait of a 21st Century City
No full textSeoul is a city of discontinuities, a sequence of fragments that collectively converge to form an urban settlement set against a dramatic natural backdrop. At the heart of Seoul’s DNA is absence, or rather the absence of any grid. Unlike its neighboring capitals – Beijing and Tokyo, Seoul is a capital whose urban fabric expands in direct symbiosis with its topography
São Paulo: Urban Planning Efforts and Metropolitan Growth
Get PDFSão Paulo started the 20th century as a 240 thousand inhabitant town and concluded it as a 10 million inhabitant center of a metropolitan zone of 17,8 million inhabitants. The congestion and disorder disguise the planning efforts conceived since the first decade, but only partially implemented. This article highlights some of the most important urban planning proposals as the Avenue Plan (1930), the Robert Moses’s Plano de Melhoramentos (1950), the Basic Urbanization Plan (PUB, 1969) and the last Review of the Master Plan (2013-14) to São Paulo, and the challenges resulted of the pace of demographic and urban growth in that century
PREVI: The Metabolist’s first and only built Project
No full textCities in the sky, superhighways over the seas, floating layers of techno-villages. These utopic proposals for Japan were generated by a passionate and extraordinary group of young Japanese architects fueled by the futuristic vision to rebuild their nation. Parallel to their idealism, was the path of Peter Land, an Englishman by way of Yale and South America, tasked to plan housing for the poor. Incredibly, their idealism would cross and the Metabolists’ first and only project would be for a United Nations social housing development in a place very far from Japan: Peru. Eui-Sung Yi sat down with the group’s last living member, Fumihiko Maki, and the organizer of the project, Peter Land, to discuss this project and its place in modern urban design (read the interviews in pg. 65 and 68, respectively)
Paradigms of Social Housing in Buenos Aires. Lessons from Juan XXIII
No full textThe housing deficit in Buenos Aires exceeds 143,000 dwellings. Fortunately, the city has ninety years of social housing experience to draw research from. Does this problem require new ideas or can it be studied from the existing examples? The essay proposes a quick overview of ten housing projects that were built in the 20th century and that represent different models of collective housing. One of them, Juan xxiii Complex — absent in the historical revisions — stands out for its design, size and integrated vision of the community. Architects and students committed to the city and its housing deficit should study this unpublished project
El Tunal Experimental: 40 Years Later an Experimental Housing Project in Bogotá, Colombia, 1972
Get PDFAt the beginning of the 70s in Bogotá, Colombia, an experimental housing project tried to respond, with adaptable and intelligent solutions, to the challenges of an increasingly urbanized country. It utilized a Low-Rise, High-Density (LRHD) urban system that enhanced the flexibility and the incremental process of housing units cells. This paper aims first, to explain the historical background and the objectives of an experimental project in a Latin American context; then to expose its innovative architectural proposals and finally, to evaluate its evolution in its 5th decade of existence
Capital Production and Social Equity: Finding Balance in Chinese Cities
Get PDFChina’s massive capital accumulation, economic ascent and wealth production has largely been the result of their rapid urbanization effort. While it is indisputable that the country has largely succeeded in its economic reform efforts given its status as the world’s second largest economy and in that process lifted hundreds of millions of its population out of poverty, it has also, in that process, created severe social inequality and friction. This essay largely argues that Chinese cities are purpose-built financial instruments for capital accumulation, a result of the forces of globalization which could only have happened in sync with the time and space of a global economy. Though highly successful, so far the process has marginalized the objective of social integration into its performative matrix indexing. In this regard China has pursued an exploitive model of market driven urbanization and the resultant morphological and spatial attributes of the Chinese cities, while having achieved spectacular results on many levels, are nevertheless disjunctive. They are commodities of generic sameness that are mass-produced and exhibit the same anesthetizing effects of the spectacle that are ever prevalent in today’s global market production process, product and place. Recognizing that globalization and capitalism are here to stay in the immediate future, it begs the question if China, while having already undertaken extreme economic reform experimentations allowing it to now bask in its temporal success, will be able to leverage its acquired market knowledge and wealth creation to prospectively overcome the incredibly complex challenge of creating equitable cities in the future — ones that balance the demands of capital production on the one hand and social equity on the other — or rather will it sink deeper into the “neoliberal modern society” that it has already become
How to Deal with Halen Estate
Get PDFThe Siedlung Halen (Halen Estate), built in the late 1950s near Berne, Switzerland, is still visited by many architects and students from all over the world. The houses of the Estate, once sold for a moderate price, are in high demand nowadays, which leads to a higher expectation for available space and comfort. After 50 years of existence, the normal problems of long-time maintenance are not easy to resolve. Although hampered by problems of concordance among the owners, the exemplary process of planning raises hope for an equally exemplary execution
The Beginning of the Beginning: Kahn and Architectural Education in Philadelphia
Get PDFPaul Philippe Cret was one of Penn’s greatest teachers and one of the city’s greatest architects. Louis I. Kahn, the University’s most well–known teacher, was one of Cret’s students. Holmes Perkins, educated at Harvard under Walter Gropius, reshaped the School and changed its orientation. The key task of the three architects was to articulate a new understanding of what is specific to the discipline, recreating its professional and intellectual center and orientation. This would not require the replacement or elimination of what had been developed in the preceding years; instead the task was to augment it with a more focused sense of what architecture itself is all about
De-Tropicalizing Africa: Architecture, Planning and Climate in the 1950s and 1960s
Get PDFIn the mid–1950s, British architects Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew were among the leading figures behind the institutionalization of the Tropical Architecture field, contributing to the proliferation of publications, international conferences and establishment of academic centers. During the same time, the global shortage of housing and United Nations’ development agendas for the “third world” brought a shift in planning priorities. Focusing in that particular moment, the paper traces the efforts for the de–tropicalization of Africa and planning practice alike, through the research activities of the Athens–based firm Doxiadis Associates and the writings and visions of Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis
Modern Industrial Heritage in Romania: Extending the Boundaries to Protect the Recent Past
Get PDFThe term “Modern industrial heritage” is usually associated, in the Romanian context, directly with the 1920s-30s built legacy. This period is in fact commonly perceived as representative of the Romanian Modern Movement, in synchrony with the western Avant-garde. However, industrial traces even with modern influences were left on the national territory mostly by the 1945-89 Communist “forced industrialization.” The manifestation of the Communist industrial architecture was analyzed through the case study of Hunedoara Steelworks. It was also possible to investigate its destiny in the present context, dominated by a general resentment directed towards “political labeled” built environment. This analysis highlighted the vulnerability of the Romanian industrial heritage in the present context