Care. Emerging Natures

Pieter Versteegh
EPFL, 2012
Thèse EPFL

Résumé

The work addresses research by design as a subject and a method. It explores theorizations, experimentations, and verifications, all of them engaged in writing, drawing and building. It is discovery-led, and starts from a blurry "state of the arts". It oscillates between architectural processes, products and performance without considering any of them isolated as research. Its relevance emerges. It is the design process that constructs, delimits the research corpus and produces architectural insight and knowledge. The first part addresses architectural meaning. It engages interdisciplinary connections: structuralism in linguistics and philosophy, color theory, and a displacement into deconstruction. It concludes that, although an architectural design process can deliberately try to produce and uphold determinate architectural meaning, such (objective) meaning is immediately deviated, notably by the appearance of architectural usages, scale, and possibilities of appropriation. The second part investigates deviation as a substantial part of architectural creation. If noise is irreducible, it must also structure architectural creation. It connects to domains resisting to reductionist thought: complexity sciences, literary critics, archaeological processes, and theorizations dealing with the secondary such as psychoanalysis and gender studies. The work is marked by a dilemma related to empowerment: the originality and authenticity of design and its delivery at a certain moment always seem to prohibit inhabitation, appropriation. The secondary, subject to dominant, single authorship, becomes primary. Architecture seems resistant to modernity in the Kantian sense. The work re-centers on psychiatry, gender studies and (health) care: the understanding of natures rather than appearance, structure or essence. In the third part, it moves from the production of difference to inscriptions of memories and future possibilities; from design as making to design as the initiation and care of a shared transformation process, accompaniment of differance. The understanding of architectural reality shifts from the finality of object to a process beyond control, co-construction between different authors/users occurring in minor events, in a very local and specific context. The work proposes a design process driven by care, encounter of authors and users in quality, accompanying different and specific emerging natures of (territorial) identity.

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https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/170288?ln=fr

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Pieter Versteegh
EPFL, 2012
Thèse EPFL

Résumé

Official source

https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/170288?ln=fr

À propos de ce résultat

Concepts associés (18)

Concepts associés

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Publications associées (22)

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Concevoir à grande échelle

Mathieu Louis Pierre Mercuriali

Large-scale design - Mobility interface models and urban transformation strategies This research project is based on the hypothesis that the urban transformations generated by mobility interfaces constitute a key component of successful sustainable urban development. Effectively visioning and understanding these multimodal interchange hubs must therefore become a major strategic objective, in order to conceive an urban model that is compact - and networked and intelligent. With this aim in mind, this research aims to propose innovative strategies for transforming these communication interfaces into central reference points within the contemporary metropolitan landscape. Projects of this kind have already been designed and realised in most major European cities during the second half of the 20th century. These designs, characterised by their complexity and scale, formed the starting point of the major railway stations in today's cities, incorporating different forms of mobility over the course of time. Today they appear not just detached from their urban contexts - the very contexts in which they are embedded - but also unable to meet the current demand for functional mixity and communication effectively. They are undergoing obsolescence and finding it difficult to adapt to the paradigm shifts that have intervened - socially, economically and spatially. At a time when the city can no longer be conceived exclusively in terms of ex-nihilo construction, but must be viewed in terms of transforming an existing built fabric, what future can be proposed for these existing transport interfaces? What strategies can be developed to anchor them in their surrounding urban context? What capacity do they have for hosting new activities, new public and private spaces? Finally, what forms is it possible to imagine for this kind of design? Three hypotheses emerge: the development of mobility interfaces has generated specific architectural and urban forms correlating to the evolution of mobility forms themselves; the transformation and obsolescence phases of mobility interfaces offer potentials for metropolitan regeneration; and the process of producing a complex design calls for articulation and interrelation between different architectural and urban scales. To verify these hypotheses, the first part of this thesis is focused on the comprehension and analysis of these multimodal hubs, based on a review of architectural and urban theories that address the issue of how major urban projects relate to transport infrastructures. This is followed by close analysis of a series of relevant case studies within the Paris metropolitan area. The second part of the thesis proposes design tools to generate new urban and architectural design processes, derived from a process of design-based research. The final part of the thesis aims to demonstrate that this type of intervention is a design project with its own specific scale and complexity: between large building and urban fragment.

EPFL2015

Chargement

The work presented in this thesis is focused on the design and discovery of new luminescent, porous, crystalline materials for targeted applications. In particular, we focus on luminescent Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) and Organic Molecules of Intrinsic Microporosity (OMIMs), both belonging to emerging classes of synthetic materials that are particularly promising due to their porosity, modularity, and the many dynamic photophysical processes that can be exploited within them. While there is great potential for these types of materials, their relatively recent discovery, less than two decades prior to the writing of this thesis, means that they are still in early stages of development and so very few examples exist that demonstrate the potential for real-world applicability. Challenges persist in achieving targeted design, high stability, or processing for integration into devices. The aim of this thesis is consider new ways of strategically designing MOFs and OMIMs that may be carried a step closer to real-world application. With problems like excess energy consumption and the depletion of clean air and water supplies on the rise in todayâs world, applications that can have a positive impact on the environment are of particular interest. We present a luminescent MOF that is capable of detecting trace amounts of fluoride contaminations in drinking water down to the parts per billion (ppb) range. The interactions of this MOF with fluoride in aqueous solutions are simultaneously electrostatic and specific in nature because of the carefully designed structure of its active site. This allows the material to be easily regenerated and used over 10 cycles, setting it apart from most existing molecular and polymeric fluoride sensors. We combined our MOF with a portable prototype sampling device that was designed and built in-house to measure fluoride concentrations in natural groundwater samples taken from three different countries, with the results showing excellent agreement with ion chromatography analysis. The strategy that we use to obtain this reversible yet selective interaction can be applied to the design of new MOFs that work on a similar principle. In addition, we present a new OMIM that exhibits broad spectrum, tuneable white light emission. The structural components and pore environment of the OMIM contribute to it having a high quantum yield in addition to tuneability that can be controlled by guest molecules. Using this material, we obtain the highest thus-far reported value of photoluminescence quantum yield for a single-species white-light emitter, with a nearly pure-white emission colour. This has promising implications for the fabrication of new, energy-efficient Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) devices. In addition, introducing structural changes to the base ligand of this OMIM will allow us to obtain a greater range of colour tuneability as well as new features of guest-host chemistry.

EPFL2021

Chargement

Architecture, environnement et artefact total : la ville selon Reyner Banham et Oswald Mathias Ungers

Thibaut Jean Bernard Pierron

When looking at the city and the land, current architectural practices face a double limitation. On the one hand, the discipline is asked to react to its own specter: the body of authoritarian spatial devices based on a questionable tradition of which the history is well established. All the usual rules that perpetuate themselves in the name of "the good settlement, one relevant and responsive to any human context" [K. Lynch, 1981]. On the other hand, architecture, as a positive and effective strength, is called upon to demonstrate its ability to resist the most evident threat weighting on the land: can architecture - its knowledge and means - contribute to counter territorial consequences of pervasive and expansive logic of advanced capitalism? In taking up this double-task for the city, is architecture then left with only two lasting dead-ends: the dissolution of its lore within a larger ensemble of social practices or the seclusion of the last parcels of its prerogatives, those that can still be rescued? In order to trace an "other" path, our research simultaneously examines the routes taken on both sides of the Atlantic by two figures of the architecture of the second half of the 20th Century: British historian and critic Reyner Banham (1922-1988) and German architect and theoretician Oswald Mathias Ungers (1926-2007). At first sight, such a choice raises two questions: that of the dissimilitude of their respective work and that of the distance which seems to separate their positions within the intellectual field of their time. One of the goals of our research is to draw closer different modes of comprehending the city and the land. Both protagonists used a wide range of tools available - those of the architectural discipline understood as a set of practices and a collected knowledge - to render, in particular, the state of the world, of the western land, of the city and what it became. The main goal of our research is then to track a possible common ground for their positions about the city, which are contemporary to one another and regarded as being differing. Our parallel study of the works on the city of R. Banham and O. M. Ungers must lead to an actualization of our understanding of a set of trails already opened and to seize the consequences on a historiographical, theoretical and practical level. Therefore, our research tends to verify the existence of such common ground in measuring the proximity of the urban and territorial conception in their work, focusing on an interval starting at the beginning of the 1960s to the end of the 1970s. To achieve it, we formulate three hypotheses regarding the themes at the basis of their convergence: the recognition of the emergence of a new condition of the western land; the will to oppose to urbanism and planning different methods; and the definition of a critical equipment based on images.

EPFL2021

Chargement

Concevoir à grande échelle

Mathieu Louis Pierre Mercuriali

EPFL2015

Architecture, environnement et artefact total : la ville selon Reyner Banham et Oswald Mathias Ungers

Thibaut Jean Bernard Pierron

EPFL2021