An Archive of Projects on Typology in Architecture 2013-2018

Learning to construct is the objective of the architecture student, who seeks to bring sketches, sophisticated visualizations, material and component choices, and detailed plans and diagrams together in a single grand composition. Plans and Images offers insight into how architects are trained by examining the teaching and research approach of the Laboratory of Elementary Architecture and Studies of Types (EAST), of the EPFL School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC). Going beyond the traditional notion of functionally determined typologies, Laboratory EAST is concerned more broadly with the principles of typology in architecture. Richly illustrated with drawings and plans by Laboratory EAST’s students, the book also includes essays by Antje Bittorf, Tiago P. Borges, Anja Fröhlich, Martin Fröhlich, Rafael Moneo, and Marie Theres Stauffer. An interview with Rafael Moneo, discussing the research topics pursued at Laboratory EAST, and a photo essay by Swiss photographer Joël Tettamanti round out the book

On the Symbiosis of People and Building

Sytse de Maat

Controversies continue to exist between architects and the public about what is a good building. High-style modern architecture is often disliked by the public. Moreover, in everyday life people blame the architect for everything they find impractical in a building. The non-operable window is emblematic of this controversy. The kernel of the problem lies in the lack of knowledge about how people relate to their buildings. This thesis investigates the relationship between people and their buildings, a topic that lies on the interface of architecture, psychology, and anthropology. In architecture, many have attempted to create buildings that feel alive, although much of what is built today feels alien to those who inhabit it. Environmental psychology has its focus on perception and meaning, whereas in anthropology, the habitat is often observed in a cultural perspective. This thesis aims at building theory that connects the insights of these disciplines. The importance of the topic lies in the increasing alienation of people from their buildings. Although many architects work on buildings that we can better relate to, alienation and disconnection continue to exist because, to mention one aspect, the built environment is made by more people than only architects. In the multidisciplinary world, improvement of the relationship of people and building would surely benefit from the introduction of a clear focal point and an adequate conceptual framework. From literature, insights were collected that explain the relationship in four perspectives: human aspects, properties of buildings, its relation to society, and abstract systems. Together they form a model that can serve as the focal point. Next, in order to identify what is changing in the relationship, the model was used as research tool in different contexts, ranging from vernacular to modern. Fieldwork research was conducted in traditional habitats, state-of-the-art modern buildings, and settings in between: primitive housing in urban slum or informal settlement. Detailed research methods for the survey of people's interaction with buildings were newly developed in the field and combined with existing sampling and coding techniques. Architects tools like sketches, scale models, and photography were used next to interviews and participatory observation. Results are presented in several reports ranging from slum dwellings to hi-tech. Besides architecture, they describe the practice of everyday life, logic and inconsistencies in building methods, and effects on the people-building relationship. From the findings, we concluded that what happened to the people-building relationship in the transition from vernacular to modern could be described in five trends. These trends explain the current disconnection as well as the difficulties we face in creating live buildings. Thus, together with the focal point, a conceptual framework is created holding the patterns typical of the people-building relationship. This knowledge can be used as both tool and theory by the profession. The research suggests that in order to create a strong people-building relationship, the whole process of building, dwelling, and daily operation must be focused on inclusion of the end-user. Today's technology and regulations favor exclusion and therefore contribute to a built environment that is not humanly sustainable.

EPFL2015

Architecture without Content 4: Necessary Architecture

Kersten Geers, Andrea Zanderigo

The Data Center is the most definitive and yet invisible typology of our contemporary world. It is the densest spot in our digital universe, a physically invisible space virtually visited by many. In a time when the collective spirit of the net itself is more and more in peril, these privately owned devices represent, in many ways, the pinnacle of our shared infrastructure. Therefore, Data Centers are intrinsically collective infrastructures. Unfortunately the buildings themselves remain largely invisible. Subject to technical and environmental requirements, they tend to hide in the fringes of our world; fringes that are increasingly scarce. The Cloud, inhabitant of the data center, struggles with its own invisibility as the place where our valuable content is stored. Both dynamics are problematic but offer an opportunity. As in our cities, what was formerly considered collective is increasingly privatized (one thinks of schools and communal offices). It might be argued that Data Centers are amongst the few leftover opportunities that, because of their intrinsic content, have the potential to acquire collective meaning. This is not the first time we have investigated this potential. Two years ago, in the first studio at Columbia called Architecture without Content we tried to portray the absolute potential of these big boxes because of the evident impact of their sheer mass when projected in the even covered field. In this studio Architecture without Content 4 we return to the center of the city and investigate the potential of these enormous buildings if they would be located on Roosevelt Island; formerly the outskirts of Manhattan, today the very center of New York. Roosevelt Island is strategically positioned and highly wired. It has a latent potential for symbolic representation, as was recently exemplified by the posthumous execution of Kahn’s Roosevelt memorial and the numerous paper projects that preceded that monument. In parallel, it is undergoing a process of reinvention as a new center of excellence, as exemplified by the recently announced plans of Cornell University to open a new hightech campus on the island. Within all this activity, an overall project is lacking. Architecture without Content 4 reconnects to Venturi’s concept of a Difficult Whole. The Difficult Whole is not a group form, nor a mere collection of elements, but a formal strategy that seeks for a cohesive composition of parts through inflection. Each of the parts influences each other, while the parts retain their individuality. Each of the Data Centers on Roosevelt Island aspire to do the same. Their content is an alibi for architectural form whereas their position is integrally part of the overall project for the island. The immutable forms of these big boxes are able to capitalize on their invisible content to create a disposable sanctuary for our contemporary Information Age. The project for Roosevelt Island announces its very decay the day of its completion—an empty civic center.

2013

Conduit, Patio, Waste: Mapping Environmental Relations in Bairro da Malagueira

Bárbara Maçães E Costa

The ongoing ecological crisis is reframing the common binary opposition between architecture and nature and provoking us to ask what kinds of buildings we collectively want to create for the ecosystems that we inhabit. The environment is not a neutral background, a natural scenery, or a container of pre-social resources; and architecture is not a collection of objects floating in a vacuum. Buildings and landscapes constitute each other dialectically. The environmental question in Western architecture had a peak moment during the contextualism debates of the 1950s and 60s, in the UK and Italy. They equated context with ideas such as ecological urbanism and habitat, or preesistenze ambientali and continuita . But by the 1970âs there was a shift from a sort of socio-biological determinism towards a more culturalist approach. Context became synonymous with historical context, and site-specificity was to be achieved less through a dialectical interplay with material reality than through a referential, typo-morphological approach. Gradually, a rift emerged: ecology became a matter of natural fact to be technologically calculated, and context became a matter of cultural identity to be narrated and deconstructed. From this point onwards, and in tandem with the rise of neoliberal commodification and its correlate ideology of postmodernism, Western architecture lost the ability to tackle the environmental question beyond the narrow scope of the individual architectural object. Before this split, the modernist tradition had attempted to address the built environment, and housing projects in particular, as a socio-ecological totality. Backed by large-scale funding initiatives from social-democratic states, human and non-human life could be understood dialectically, with the neighbourhood scale functioning as a mediating unit between the individual and the social. Alvaro Siza's Bairro da Malagueira was one of the last projects of this generation. It emerged from the very particular conditions of the 1974/75 Carnation Revolution and the state-sponsored housing program SAAL, a dual power structure made up of construction technical brigades and neighbourhood committees. During this process, the SAAL-Norte produced a series of projects focused on reinventing the typology of the ilha, and Alvaro Siza wrote a text considering the hypothesis of the proletarian island as basic element of the urban tissue. What was taken from these islands was less their stylistic or typological configuration than the system of environmental relations that they fostered, predicated on a series of threshold spaces and open interiorities. From Bairro da Malagueira, this thesis proposes a method for mapping environmental relations in architecture. It does so by identifying a series of thresholds, namely the conduit, the patio, and the waste, understood as structures that convert space into bounded associations, mediating between inside and outside, foreground and background, architecture and nature. Each threshold acts as a time-space frame with a specific magnitude of approximation, and each internalizes sets of social relations, such as class, gender and race, with corresponding modes of environmental production, namely the hidden backgrounds of territory, domesticity, and wilderness. Bairro da Malagueira hence becomes a template through which this thesis explores a dialectical understanding of architecture as an agent of environmental history.

EPFL2021