Architecture de la Renaissance

vignette|Le Tempietto di San Pietro in Montorio (Rome, 1502-1510), chef-d'œuvre de Bramante. vignette|Le temple de Vesta à Rome, édifié en 205 de notre ère. Ce temple, l'un des mieux conservés de la Rome antique, sert de modèle au Tempietto de Bramante. thumb|Château ducal de Szczecin, Pologne. Larchitecture de la Renaissance, née en Italie, gagne progressivement tous les autres pays d'Europe entre le début du et le début du . Elle procède d'une recherche consciente et de l'assimilation d'éléments historiquement authentiques de la pensée et de la culture matérielle des Grecs et des Romains. En effet, l'époque antique apparaît aux érudits italiens de cette période comme l'apogée de tous les arts. Pourtant, ils ne cherchent pas à simplement l'imiter, mais à s'en inspirer pour l'égaler, voire la surpasser. Ce retour à l'Antiquité est appelé « hellénisme » (du mot « hellène » qui désigne le peuple grec). Du point de vue de l'esthétique, l'architecture de la Renaissance succède à l'archit

Les "vestiges" de l'opération Million dans l'oeuvre de Georges Candilis - Actualités et stratégies de sauvegarde pour un patrimoine de l'habitat économique du second après-guerre

Korinna Zinovia Weber

The preservation of post-war architecture represents a complex challenge to overcome for different reasons: hesitating recognition, bad perception and a certain material fragility. Especially the economic post-war housing has difficulties to be recognized as an architectural heritage worth to preserve. This thesis analyses the phenomenon through case studies, selected within the oeuvre of a representative architect of the period, Georges Candilis, and addresses their current state. The first part of the present thesis is dedicated to the life and work of Georges Candilis and hence allows to distinguish the competition ¿Opération Million¿ as a key element of his prolific oeuvre concerning construction for the greatest number. This competition, launched by the French government in 1955 in the aftermath of the abbot Pierre¿s appeal during full on housing crises, marks the beginning of the success of the office Candilis-Josic-Woods. The second part begins with the current state of the ¿Million¿ buildings which is more than deplorable: the majority is demolished or turned unrecognizable after important rehabilitation measures in order to respond to energetic regulations being more and more restrictive. The balance of all identified buildings during this research allowed to define five intervention strategies: demolition, heavy intervention, intermediate intervention, light intervention, preservation. The following five case studies represent these five strategies: the building ¿116¿ in Persan, the cité du Bois Matar in Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, La Louvière in Rambouillet, the cité Jean-Baptiste Renoult in Ivry-sur-Seine and the cité de l¿Etoile in Bobigny. Hygrothermal simulations are set up with the goal to analyse the existing interventions and to evaluate their energetic performance in a quantitative way. The third part focusses on these simulations. This last part is concluded by a presentation of alternatives and recommendations proposing a middle ground between architectural quality and energetic requirements on the building envelope. Thus, the corpus of this work presents three very different parts that offer a global approach, started from the up-to-dateness, to an architectural heritage that is neglected and that would deserve an incontestable recognition.

EPFL2019

Architecture / Philosophy: how, why, and what the questions seek in three case-studies from the late 20th century

André Patrão Neves De Frias Martins

Architecture and philosophy are no strangers to one another. In philosophical writings, architecture appears referred to, spoken of, described, defined, categorized, and figuratively used. In architectural discourse, by theoreticians and practitioners alike, philosophy appears in syllabi, bibliographies, in the formulation of design concepts, or their critique, or broader theory, through quotes or references to philosopher’s names, works, and terminology, not to mention in the commonplace expression “a philosophy”. Architecture and philosophy, in their multiple conceptions and formulations, across authors, movements, styles, schools of thought, and epochs up to the present day, have and continue to engage one another. The very fact of this engagement, however, rarely appears as an issue in itself. Why does architecture reach out to philosophy? Why does philosophy address architecture? How does or ought this contact occur, if it ought to at all? What are the promises, potentials, and problems contained in their intersections? And what is meant by this notion that has yet to be pinned down with approximate but unsatisfactory words like “engage”, “reach out”, “address”, “intersect”, or rather by a categorical slash, both splitting and joining, affirming difference while gathering it, as “architecture/philosophy”? Grounded on a broad historical overview of both disciplines’ relation, and of their increasing but still scarce thematization in recent scholarship, this thesis analyzes three case-studies of architecture and philosophy’s direct consequential interaction in the late 20th century – a particularly intense moment of exchange, when architects’ self-critique sought out contributions from philosophical insights, while philosophers’ own self-questioning led them to tinker with architectural discussions. First, the overlaps between Martin Heidegger’s philosophical project and vital architectural issues, in Being and Time (1927), “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935/6), but principally “Building Dwelling Thinking” (1951); which historian and theoretician Kenneth Frampton carefully integrated as inalienable components of his own thinking, in the editorial “On Reading Heidegger” (1974) and subsequent texts like “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance” (1983), “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism” (1983), and “Rappel à l’Ordre: the Case for the Tectonic” (1990). Second, Michel Foucault’s incidental thoughts on architecture, coherently reassembled from “Of Other Spaces” (1967), “Space, Knowledge, and Power” (1982), and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975); and the latter’s effects, perceptible yet difficult to grasp, upon aspects of Rem Koolhaas’ renovation design for the Koepel Panopticon Prison (1979-1981), described in the text “Revisions” (1981). Third, the collaboration between Jacques Derrida, challenging and letting himself be challenged by architectural practice, and Peter Eisenman, extracting productive stimulus from deliberate misreadings of philosophy, in the design of a garden for Parc de la Villette (1985-1987), expanded upon in their book Chora L Works (1997). The unprecedented reading of each case-study brings to light heterogeneous manifestations of a consistent mutual need of architecture and philosophy to support, transform, and enrich the specific tasks of one another, while bearing witness to the necessity, pertinence, and even urgency of reflecting upon it.

EPFL2020

Stratégie versus composition

Adrien Besson

To avoid chaos and arbitrariness architects have traditionally looked for ways to structure buildings as wholes that can be factorised into parts. This approach to the nature of architecture is that of composition. After the Second World War, the world of architecture saw the development of new ways of conceiving of buildings. One of the most prominent of which appeals to strategies. This development, which first occurred in painting and sculpture, leads to a rejection of composition. In their rejection of composition, many post-war American artists abandoned the notion that there should be any equilibrium or relational properties between the parts that constitute a work of art. In architecture, rejecting composition goes by looking for strategies that are determined by the programmatic, urbanistic and cultural contexts to which a contemporary building has to adapt. Also, lack of land entails an urban density so that by necessity – by non-choice – buildings have to be shaped by contextual boundaries, which makes it impossible to conceive of these buildings according to the precepts of composition. Since the 1960s, buildings or architectural complexes have had to be able to evolve, to adapt to new usage. This requires architects to think of them in a new way, according to a logic of indeterminate – thus non-composed – planes. Further, architects abandon composition in that they start looking for arrangements that are already present in the surrounding visible world and integrate them to the projection of buildings by the strategy of transfer. The key hypothesis of this study is that composed planes came to be replaced by strategies such as non-choice and transfer that generate neutral arrangements – neutral because their parts cannot be factorised from the whole; because these parts are without intrinsic individuality. Understood as a body of actions mapping shapes to contextual parameters, these strategies also require us to rethink the notions of subjectivity and of the self-effacing of a project's author. For instance a transfer is generated by a certain automatism of the form, as opposed to a preconceived architectural intention. This study reviews and analyses these strategies, these new modes of architectural arrangements. It does so by examining recent buildings and projects and also by drawing parallels with the plastic arts. Its aim is to articulate these new complex forms so as to offer a conceptual grid of contemporary architecture.

EPFL2009