Espace public comme objet per se? Une analyse critique de la conception contemporaine

The recognition during the second half of the 20th century of the essential role played by public spaces in the definition of qualitative urban life has led to a reconsideration of their design. This has occurred in many different forms, such as the emergence of new profiles of designers, the valorisation of new types of places or the awareness of new uses. But more surprising is the remarkable diversification of formal and material specificities that have emerged since the turn of the 21st century, as well as the manifestation of new design references. These evolutions seem to lead to a singularisation of public spaces in the urban fabric. Within only a few decades, the field of public space design has gone through a profound transformation. However, the impact of these evolutions on cityscapes has not been substantially questioned so far. The lack of critical studies dealing specifically with design processes is particularly striking. The aim of this research is to fill this gap by taking a critical look at contemporary public space design. To engage in the practice of a critique requires going through four essential steps that will structure this work: First, a general portrait of the contemporary production of public spaces needs to be established in order to extract main design trends. Genesis, the first part of this thesis, presents the development since the 1980s of evolving thoughts on public space design. The aim of a critique is to verify a predefined theory. Therefore, in the second part, we hypothesize the idea of a formal, material and semantic singularisation of recent public spaces, according to the theory of a public space designed as an object per se. The development of this research is dedicated to verifying this change of position. The third step consists in conducting a series of critical analyses of a corpus of fourteen study cases, in order to verify our theory. The question of design intentions is looked into by a novel method of critical analysis, comprising a genetic study of projects. Finally, the fourth step entitled comparative reading consists in identifying recurring and representative design positions. This comparative reading confirms the idea of a detachment from the urban material context in recent designs. It also reveals three factors explaining such a singularisation: (I) the consideration of public space designs as salutary projects capable of revitalizing depreciated urban contexts; (II) an extended interpretation of the notion of context; (III) the perception of contemporary public spaces as potential vectors of urban experiences. These three evolutions of thinking have direct consequences on the design of public spaces. They produce a climate of experimental freedom that designers harness with interest, leading to a strong singularisation of public spaces. These evolutions also explain the outbreak of new design idioms with a strong narrative dimension, which no longer refer to tangible and adjacent contextual elements. Finally, they lead to a decrease of site-specificity in the designs that respond to universal principles of perception and frames of reference. A tendency to singularise current public space designs and, in an almost contradictory manner, to universalise them simultaneously, seems to appear. These trends contribute, in our view, to creating public spaces as objects per se, by designing them as autonomous and transposable at once.

Sustainable Architecture for Educational Space in Africa and China

Ning Liu

Countries in the Global South are producing the most important educational needs of the 21st century. Fast-growing cities can provide the most striking examples of these current tendencies. Just over a decade after the start of the new millennium, the needs for quality-education and appropriate learning space are huge. Yet they are still largely underestimated in many countries of the Global South. With high-level demographical growth and fast-expanding urban boundaries, the developing metropolis provides a fascinating place to analyze societal mutations. School â as one of the fundamental institutions in modern society â deserves timely observation and careful analysis. The research work is dedicated to the study of educational architecture in two African cities Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) and Cape Town (South Africa) and one Chinese city: Hangzhou. Because of the fundamental relationship between school and society, learning places need to make statement of their urban positions. The hypothesis proposes to question the concept of sustainability in the framework of cultural-environmental qualities between school and city, between users and space. Conducted by an architect, this thesis is the synthesis of a research process together with the professional practice. It is benchmarked by a path of three steps: critical analysis of literature, in situ case-study and cross-cultural comparison with proposal of an assessment method that opens up for future perspectives. The thesis argues that the current time is crucial for our society to reconsider the place of educational architecture in the city. A truly sustainable architecture is transformable in the time-span of its usage and transformative in the changing urban environment. With a discursive comparative view between built cases located in these three cities, this work attempts to provide new insights on the design of the learning space in the urban future. The synthesis provides a panel of cultural-environmental quality profiles as guidelines to future design innovation opportunities.

EPFL2015

The Big Building

Marta Meira Brandão

Large hybrid objects integrating multiple functions and whose scale, over 100'000 m2, is halfway between the fragment of a city and that of a large-scale building: these are the key features of the complex projects that are triggering new debates on the subject of Design Complexity, usually referred to as Big Buildings. Recurrently bearing the predominance of housing, the paradigms of these mixed architectural forms - « cities within cities » developed either horizontally or vertically - may recall Le Corbusier's Unités d'Habitation, or even the American Hybrids, due to the multiple simultaneous conditions they succeed to accommodate within their generic envelopes. In Europe, either as a consequence of the urban densification and the resulting need for restraining the urban sprawl, or driven by political and economical dynamics of speculation and globalization, we are assisting to the echoed emergence of projects of this kind, often located nearby mobility interfaces or in old industrial areas in process of regeneration, normally with privileged connections to the city centres. The development of such projects is hypothetically becoming a trigger for the creation of new ways of producing collective housing, integrated within a more complex system of activities, bearing new strategies of articulation between housing and other programs, new models of public space, new typological experiments on the dwellings or new ways of invigorating social mix. Our intention is to investigate how effective is, then, the planning of collective housing within the massiveness of the Big Building and how can the design of housing inside this specific milieu generate new potentials and new knowledge in the architectural domain of Housing.

EPFL2017

Typologie des écoles primaires en Suisse de 1945 à 2015 et stratégies d'éclairage naturel

Jean-Denis Bernard Marie Ghislain Thiry

Following the path initiated by Britain and the United States, where the evolution of education and the importance of the architecture of schools were debated vigorously by school boards, and mainly under the influence of Germany and the Netherlands, Switzerland has gradually become a benchmark in Europe and worldwide in terms of school construction. This abundance of expertise revealed itself especially after the Second World War with the emergence of a constructive quality concerned with environmental aspects, which incorporated the needs involved in children's education and a proper amount of natural light for classrooms. But since the beginning of the 21st century, designers have not payed so much attention to sunlight or to the orientation of schools, and have instead focused on creating more versatile and scalable learning spaces, even though much of the research done in the field points to the significance of the controlled usage of daylight showing also the positive impact on the well-being of the pupils. Thus, it seems necessary again to make designers more aware of the use of effective daylighting strategies, and to convince them to stop relying on oftentimes permanent artificial lighting at substantial energy costs. Based on a desire to combine a theoretical and historical approach with a technical one to assess the level of performance of daylight in teaching spaces, the thesis is organized in two successive and interdependent parts. The first part aims to give an overview of the typological evolution of primary schools and their daylighting strategies implemented in Switzerland from 1945 to 2015. To this end, a broad survey of schools featured in four major architectural journals was conducted, namely: Werk, Bauen + Wohnen; L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui; Techniques & Architecture; The Architectural Review. The development of the formal, constructive and distributive characteristics of the projects was analyzed and compared with the daylighting strategies of class units, while demonstrating the significant impact of foreign influences on Swiss construction. Four major school « types » were identified from a total of 332 schools studied, that are, the pavilion type, the articulated type, the modular type, and the monoblock type. We then selected school models representative of the types of schools built most frequently in Switzerland and their associated daylighting strategies. The second part offers an analysis of the daylighting impact on selected schools for the purpose of quantifying the different levels of illumination, and studying the resulting lighting ambiances. To this end, several in situ measurement campaigns were undertaken applying a systematic protocol. Through iterative variation of different parameters of the modeled class units, the objective is then to identify architectural models and design principles that provide appropriate levels of illumination for students, while comparing the different school types from our initial theoretical survey. In addition to retracing the typological evolution of 70 years of school construction in Switzerland in terms of the original perspective on daylighting, this research aims to provide a collection of examples of good architectural practices, as well as objective criticism of the daylighting strategies of Swiss schools and related literature, for the purpose of having a positive influence on decisions regarding the design of the schools of tomorrow.