Construire à distance | EPFL Graph Search

Through a case study, this research aims at contributing to the historic understanding of the international architecture after the Second World War. It is based on the monographic analysis of the projects realised by the Geneva agency Addor & Julliard in Lebanon during the years 1950 to 1960. The general theme of "constructing at distance" embraces and problematizes two types of considerations: on the one hand, the challenges that international architecture of the years 1950-1960 had to face when the operations of conception and execution where realised in different contexts (i.e. functional and technical challenges due to climatic imperatives; logistical challenges linked to the characteristics of the local culture of construction ; strategic challenges in relation to the specific political and economic situation in the developing countries) ; on the other hand, the specific creative opportunities that the internationally active agencies were able to seize abroad and of which also their local production took advantage (treatment of prestige programs and ambitious operations with partners open to avant-garde experimentations). The operations realised at distance by the Geneva agency Addor & Julliard in Lebanon constitute an architectural corpus of approximately ten buildings in the urban and suburban zone. These realisations, which are not well known in the circles of researchers and architects, both locally and internationally, deserve to be analysed in detail, as they are very representative for the atmosphere of experimentation during the years 1950-1960 in Lebanon and generally in the other contexts of north-south collaboration. The work of the agency Addor & Julliard is still not well known in Geneva, with the exception of some publications on important projects like the Cayla campaign, or the Budé and Lignon blocks. Especially, the importance of the profitable interactions that the agency was able to establish between its two fields of activities in Geneva and Lebanon, and its significance for the development of this big agency, have not been stressed enough. The introductory part of our work situates the actuality of the problematic, in relation to the specific stakes of the protection of architectural and urban heritage in Lebanon. Still today, the heritage of the 1950-1960's is insufficiently understood in its cultural significance. It is also very much threatened. When it is not destroyed, it suffers from a camouflage that makes it totally unrecognisable. We then present the abundant documentation that we have gathered. This work on source material is necessary to counteract the superficial prejudice with which this architectural corpus is confronted. This part is then followed by a historical chapter on the agency Addor & Julliard before the opening of its Lebanese branch, as well as an overview of the Lebanese context between the beginning of the XXth century and 1960. These elements allow us to assert that the decisive factor allowing the agency to develop its foreign activity is to be found in the profile of particular competencies that it displayed by closely associating the architectural project and the real estate management. The apartment- and office-building realised in 1954 in Geneva the Zschokke enterprise, with its easily adaptable spatial organisation, played the trigger role : it encouraged the first Lebanese clients, the Beydoun family who had financial relations in Geneva, to mandate the agency for a project involving a multifunctional building in Lebanon. The Lebanese context of this period is characterised by a strong economic boom and a political stability conducive to investments. The real estate sector was in full growth and asked for innovative typologies and modern architectural images. This allowed the agency Addor & Julliard to emancipate itself from the still quite regionalist references that it was entertaining in Geneva and to direct itself resolutely towards the international tendencies. These elements of historic information are then followed by the detailed survey of the agency's Lebanese production. Several buildings were realised in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, but it is in Lebanon that the principal operations are concentrated, which explains that the survey limits itself to this country. The inventory concerns the ten buildings that have been spared from the destruction of the Lebanese War (1975-1991) and of which the archive documents have been preserved. The description of each object includes the history of the commission, the urban situation, the legal and regulatory situation, as well as the project variants when they exist. Then, the realised variant is analysed in detail by paying attention to the distributive, constructive and stylistic aspects. This survey then leads to a more interpretative reading that aims at evaluating the impact of these constructions on the urban development of Beirut. Addor & Julliard never had real town-planning mandates in Lebanon. But even though their realisations limited themselves to the architectural scale, they nevertheless contributed to the concretisation of a resolutely modern representation of the city, especially because they succeeded in treating orders of a considerable symbolic importance. The theme of "constructing at distance" is addressed via a comparative method that integrates the Lebanese, Geneva and international projects of the same period. This chapter also deals with the contribution of the buildings of Addor & Julliard to the local Lebanese construction culture on both the technical and expressive level. The demonstration is based on the curtain-wall that Addor & Julliard used twice in two very different buildings: the STARCO centre (1954-1962) and the Lebanese Bank (1962-1963). The in-depth analysis of the conception and the realisation of the curtain-wall, emblem of the "international style", allows to discover that in Beirut its use resulted much less from the importation of generic and abstract solutions than from a skilled synthesis between technical resources, which were locally available, and the aimed-at iconic effect. We thus perceive that "constructing at distance" is more complex than a simple knowledge transfer from one environment to another. The local differentiation of constructive elements of the international repertoire between 1950 and 1960, such as the curtain-wall, prompts us to question and complement the analysis of Hitchcock et Johnson on these phenomena in their famous publication "The International Style" of 1932, which seems too superficial. Our study finishes with an advocacy for the protection of the projects of Addor & Julliard in Lebanon. Without being exhaustive, this advocacy is based on the examination of the transformations touching these projects until today and establishes a series of recommendations for their protection. It is said that in Lebanon modern architecture of the years 1950 to 1960 constitutes the witness of the efforts undertaken in this period by the local actors in order to emancipate their country from a certain marginality in international relations. For this reason, the modern heritage fully belongs to the Lebanese history. The annexes especially contain the data bases, which we have constituted during the inventory of the projects and the archives, as well as some particularly important documents: The contract established between the architects and their first client represents the start of their work in Lebanon, whereas the minutes of the press conference of 21 March 1963, during which the Society of engineers and architects of Beirut criticizes the work of Addor & Julliard in Lebanon, symbolises the end of their Lebanese collaboration. Finally, an album exposes the photographs of the buildings of Addor & Julliard at the time and in their present state. ------------------------------ 3 Imm. Zschokke à Genève. In Werk, Bauen & Wohnen, 1957: pp. 367-368. 4 Lambert, S., STARCO Center, Beirut, Lebanon. UK, in Architectural Design, Mars 1963: pp. 138-140.

L'oeuvre de Leandro V. Locsin (1928-1994), architecte à la recherche de l'identité élusive de l'architecture philippine du second après-guerre

Jean-Claude Girard

Filipino architect Leandro Valencia Locsin (Silay1928 - Makati 1994) produced an architectural work that involved 250 projects, of which at least more than half were completed and mostly in his country of origin. A graduate in architecture of San Tomas de Manila University in 1953, his career began after the Second World War, which left the capital city all but destroyed following airstrikes by the allies that served to liberate the Philippines from the Japanese occupying forces. Following his studies, Locsin is immediately solicited with requests which leads him to open his office and give up the idea of completing his graduate studies in one of the prestigious American universities, which at the time had welcomed great masters who had sought exile from Europe to the United States in the 1930s. For a member of a privileged social class, this atypical career path makes Locsin a singular figure in the architectural landscape as he will immediately focus his interest on questioning the specificity of Filipino architecture. In a 1989 interview, Locsin confirms his career-long interest in researching the boundaries between local culture and international influences. The study of the vernacular tradition in his country will orient his work towards defining certain architectural principles to allow for the emergence of a new contemporary Filipino architecture. The post-war period, involving innovations in technical resources and favorable political and economic conditions for urban development, will serve to render all the more complex a body of work that is difficult to apprehend and qualify. In a 1964 text, Locsin refers to the elusive identity of the Filipino architectural spirit which, according to him, is the result of an assimilation of various external influences, given the geographic positioning of the Philippines and its colonial past. His work never ceased to reflect this quest for identity in built representations. While Leandro V. Locsin has been called "the poet of space" for the quality of his projects characterized by a great attention given to the sense of space, abstraction, symmetry, proportion, and materiality linked to the use of concrete and traditional materials his work has never been the subject of a complete study. Few scientific contributions exist and remain partial, in that they focus on certain specificities of his production. Further, there are no studies that offer a complete review of his office archives, a necessary step towards uncovering and highlighting the unique characteristics of a multiform production. The objective of this dissertation is to provide a complete overview of the work of Leandro V. Locsin, notably through a survey of his projects, and an analysis of the condition of their production in a local and international context, in order to render explicit the specific qualities that make this work a unique example of architecture of the period and from the Philippines.

EPFL2018

Compatibility modeling to support opportunity analysis in new product development

Julie Hohenegger

The general context of this Ph.D. dissertation is the new product development (NPD) which is the process for transforming an opportunity that is a business or technology gap in the current situation into a product available for sale. This Ph.D. dissertation focuses on the opportunity analysis in NPD. Therefore, a framework to support opportunity analyses is developed. The framework is structured in two parts: the information search and the modeling of compatibility. Opportunity analyses require a systematic approach to obtain all the information related to the identified opportunity, as well as an approach to determine whether or not this opportunity is compatible with respect to the different attributes/criteria representing the product development context. The state of the art review reveals that such approaches are not available in the published literature. Therefore, the objective of this research is to develop a comprehensive framework comprising an information search approach and a compatibility modeling approach to respond to these needs. The early phases of NPD are characterized by uncertainty that corresponds to the difference between the amount of information required to perform a task and the available amount of information. Uncertainty may have serious consequences on NPD, resulting in the worst case in a project failure. Therefore, information is crucial for the product development process. The information search approach developed in this Ph.D. dissertation allows the reduction of this uncertainty. This approach comprises four levels. The first level comprises the activities involved in NPD, such as market analysis and manufacturing. The second level proposes a classification of the different types of information required during the product development process: product-, process-, resource- and context-related. The third level represents the different sources where each type of information can be found. Two main classes are identified: the first one comprises the company departments such as marketing, and manufacturing, while the second class contains the sources from the external environment of the company, such as suppliers, customers, competitors, research communities, and governmental and non governmental organizations. The fourth level contains different methods of collecting information. Two main classes are distinguished: meetings- and documents-related. The links between the different levels are established on the basis of a thorough review of the related literature. Once the NPD activities associated with the identified opportunity are determined, the related information types, the sources where they can be found and the methods for their collections can be easily deduced from the information search approach. The compatibility modeling approach aims at evaluating the compatibility relationships for pairs of alternatives. Two types of compatibility can be distinguished: hard compatibility and soft compatibility. Hard compatibility corresponds to the notion of matching (i.e. the possibility that two alternatives coexist in a specific product development context) and is evaluated with respect to hard attributes/criteria related to the basic laws of nature or to the technical possibilities. Soft compatibility corresponds to the notion of non-degradation (i.e. the shift from a situation where the two alternatives are considered individually to a situation where they are considered together does not induce a degradation in a specific product development context) and is evaluated with respect to soft attributes/criteria such as development cost, and lead time. The core concept of the compatibility modeling approach is the compatibility structure. The crisp compatibility structure is a quadruplet of crisp relations M, C, I, and J, called mutual compatibility, strict incompatibility, mutual incompatibility and mutual incomparability respectively that satisfy a certain number of conditions. The relations M, C, C-1 and I correspond to four different situations: no degradation – no degradation, no degradation – degradation, degradation – no degradation, and degradation – degradation respectively. J corresponds to the situation where the alternatives cannot be compared using one of the relations M, C, C-1 or I. For each attribute/criterion, partial compatibility structures without incomparability are constructed from the impact that an alternative exerts on another and vice-versa. Then, relations characterizing the partial structures are aggregated into a global relation that takes into account all the attributes/criteria. By their nature, crisp compatibility structures cannot express degrees of mutual compatibility, strict incompatibility, mutual incompatibility or mutual incomparability, and are consequently too constraining in practice. Therefore, the crisp compatibility structures are meticulously extended to the case of fuzzy binary relations. A case study from the Swiss company Laurastar illustrates the framework that supports the opportunity analysis. This case study investigates the possibility to collaborate with new suppliers located in Bucharest and Hong-Kong. The compatibility between alternatives related to the supply chain activity is evaluated with respect to the various attributes/criteria.

EPFL2007

Historic Urban Landscape

Lesslie Astrid Herrera Quiroz

Within the UNESCO Recommendation of 2011, the historic urban landscape is defined as: “The urban area understood as the result of a historic layering of cultural and natural values and attributes, extending beyond the notion of “historic center” or “ensemble” to include the broader urban context and its geographical setting. This wider context includes notably the site’s topography, geomorphology, hydrology and natural features, its built environment, both historic and contemporary, its infrastructures above and below ground, its open spaces and gardens, its land use patterns and spatial organization, perceptions and visual relationships, as well as all other elements of the urban structure. It also includes social and cultural practices and values, economic processes and the intangible dimensions of heritage as related to diversity and identity.” During the session dedicated to the theoretical framework, we explored the background of this concept since the idea of ‘historical monument’, that was developed in the mid-nineteenth century and which was considered as the basis of the modern view of cultural heritage until the 2003 Convention on intangible heritage. Subsequently, we discussed the new approaches that have been developed around the concept of historic urban landscape, such as sustainability, the management of change, historic continuity and connectivity. Finally, we opened the debate on the relevance of this concept for the analysis of our various case studies.