Christoph Lueder
Kingston University, London, Art, Design, Architecture, Department Member
- Architecture, Art, Art History, Diagrammatic Reasoning, Diagram understanding, Knowledge Discovery with Diagrams, and 68 moreDiagrammatic Design, Manuel DeLanda, Philosophy Of Diagrams, Diagrammatic Knowledge Acquisition, Diagrammatic Logic, Diagrammatology, Diagrams, Diagram, Causal Diagrams, Diagrammatic thought + Deleuzian images of thought, Influence diagrams, Ladder diagrams, Diagrammatics, Early Modern London, London, My main research interest is to about the representation of the human body, human anatomy, and the relationship between figuration and abstraction. I have an MA on this subject from Chelsea School of Arts and Design of London, UK., City of London, Urban Planning, Urban Studies, Urban Geography, Urban History, Sustainable Urban Environments, Urban Design, Visual Semiotics, Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, Architectural Education, Concept Mapping, Situationist International, Mapping, Architectural Representation Theory, Representation (Architectural knowledge), London Tube Map, London Tube Diagram, Archaeology, Design, Contemporary Art, Sustainable Development, Semiotics, Art Theory, Landscape Architecture, Visual Culture, Architectural History, Design Research, Critical Pedagogy, Interaction Design, Community Engagement & Participation, Curating, New Media Arts, Philosophy, Computer Science, Communication, Literature, Social Media, New Media, Technology, Cultural Theory, Visual Studies, Visual Arts, Aesthetics, Digital Media, Phenomenology, Philosophy of Art, Embodiment, Architectural Theory, Anthropology of the Body, Urban Sociology, and Environmental Sustainabilityedit
- My research engages the history and contemporary usage of diagrams across disciplinary boundaries, both in their iden... moreMy research engages the history and contemporary usage of diagrams across disciplinary boundaries, both in their identity as physical constructions and artefacts, in their usage and broader theoretical underpinnings. I am investigating the modes in which the digital workplace reformulates the spatiality of ‘artist’ to ‘drawing' at intimate scales, as well as the cognitive and functional role of diagrams at urban scales, and the phenomenological impact of urban infrastructure.edit
Le Corbusier’s multi-layered understanding of corporeality evolved through successive appropriations and dismissals of contrasting theories, experiences, and paradigms. In his unpublished manuscript La Construction des villes (1910), he... more
Le Corbusier’s multi-layered understanding of corporeality evolved through successive appropriations and dismissals of contrasting theories, experiences, and paradigms. In his unpublished manuscript La Construction des villes (1910), he enthusiastically endorsed Camillo Sitte’s conception of space as an emanation of the human body, predicated solely on its physiological effect; and he dismissed urban structures that are legible in plan but not sensorially comprehensible as irrelevant. However, in Urbanisme (1925) he polemically inverted his earlier position, deriding Sitte’s physiology and exhorting the virtues of rational planning and pure geometry dissociated from the human body. Intriguingly, Le Corbusier’s reference to the Bastide town of Monpazier (1284) in Urbanisme and the photographs that he archived suggest the third reading of corporalité, with a nuance and ambiguity that transcends either of his
earlier polemical positions. The medieval founders of Monpazier
conceived of the city as a substitute for the political body of their
king. Monpazier is experienced both as a singular, cohesive urban corpus and as an agglomeration of separate houses. Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation (1947–1952) extends this genealogy of twofold readings.
While the Unité confronts its visitors as a standing, singular corpus of a vertical city, its façade exposes a diagrammatic representation of its urban assemblage of maisonettes.
earlier polemical positions. The medieval founders of Monpazier
conceived of the city as a substitute for the political body of their
king. Monpazier is experienced both as a singular, cohesive urban corpus and as an agglomeration of separate houses. Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation (1947–1952) extends this genealogy of twofold readings.
While the Unité confronts its visitors as a standing, singular corpus of a vertical city, its façade exposes a diagrammatic representation of its urban assemblage of maisonettes.
Research Interests:
Mockery, understood as humorous or satirical mimicry, appears in Saul Steinberg’s urban cosmography on several levels. At the level of outward appearances, Steinberg’s apposite mimicry of the city and its architectures is matched by an... more
Mockery, understood as humorous or satirical mimicry, appears in Saul Steinberg’s urban cosmography on several levels. At the level of outward appearances, Steinberg’s apposite mimicry of the city and its architectures is matched by an equally perceptive caricature of its occupants, and indeed, the menagerie of outlandish characters inhabiting a Steinbergian street often upstages the panoply of architectural styles coexisting in the facades acting as backdrop. Secondly, for Steinberg a drawing is as much about drawing as it is about its subject matter; thus he mimics an expansive spectrum of drawing techniques and styles. Thirdly, Steinberg mimics ways of seeing, drawing on his architectural training and on Cubism. As such, shifting vanishing points underlie many of his compositions, including his most famous drawing, The World seen from 9th Avenue. Steinbergian mimicry and mockery usually convey empathy with their subject matter, but sharply oppose Modernism’s claim to ‘morality in architecture’ (Giedion) upheld by architects rising above society to purge it of its falsity of forms and historical wrapping paper. In Steinberg’s panoply of heterogeneous urban subject matter Modernism is reduced to yet another style.
Taking as its point of departure the series of “graph paper drawings” from 1947 to 1960, that begin with a caricature of Le Corbusier and extend to a series of collages mocking Miesian facades, this paper examines Saul Steinberg’s mockery of the city in order to understand how avant-garde modes of perception and representation compound with apperception of popular anxiety about Modernist urbanism.
Taking as its point of departure the series of “graph paper drawings” from 1947 to 1960, that begin with a caricature of Le Corbusier and extend to a series of collages mocking Miesian facades, this paper examines Saul Steinberg’s mockery of the city in order to understand how avant-garde modes of perception and representation compound with apperception of popular anxiety about Modernist urbanism.
The making and structuring of books equips architects with an alternative site of invention and knowledge production, alongside practice and theory,. The book-worlds studied here - S,M,L,XL, by Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, foa’s ark, by... more
The making and structuring of books equips architects with an alternative site of invention and knowledge production, alongside practice and theory,. The book-worlds studied here - S,M,L,XL, by Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, foa’s ark, by Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Farshid Moussavi, and 49 Cities, by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood (Figure 1) - depart from the model of the practice monograph by constructing book-contexts within which they re-situate architectural, or utopian urban projects. Their constitutive devices, namely lists (S,M,L,XL), taxonomy (foa’s ark), and typology (49 Cities), are used as instruments of cosmography, that is, as devices that organize representations of the world and articulate world-views. At the same time, they constitute instruments of cosmopoïesis, that is, inventions of new worlds that are created within the books. Each of the three books uses classification to construct new contexts, which place architectural or urban utopian projects in new relationships, through juxtaposition (S,M,L,XL), through a taxonomical tree that diagrams evolution (foa’s ark), or a typological matrix that correlates data (49 Cities). The three books adapt systems of classification to produce new meaning and associate their subject matter with new interpretations and implications.
villages, defined as ‘communities engulfed by rapid urbanization,’ often are regarded as receding phenomena, destined to gradually disappear or abruptly be relinquished as their economic base in agriculture or craft is displaced by the... more
villages, defined as ‘communities engulfed by rapid urbanization,’ often are regarded as receding phenomena, destined to gradually disappear or abruptly be relinquished as their economic base in agriculture or craft is displaced by the industrial and services sector. However, resonances in structure and modus operandi link ancestral to informal settlements and to an informal economy that provides new employment opportunities. Hence, the complex mechanisms by which urban villages and informal settlements are able to resist as well as absorb urban development, merit renewed attention. In a series of collaborations with local academic and community partners, I have documented three urban villages, each exemplary for a particular model and context of development. The diverse spectrum of strategies and formats of resilience spawned by the three communities inform methods of enquiry into how cities might learn from urban villages. I examine three communities, situated in Amman, Valparaiso and Bangkok, exploring firstly their strategic responses to context and topography, and secondly, the pivotal role of inherited or remembered spatial typologies in processes of urbanization driven by feedback obtained continuously from the actions and experience of construction and inhabitation.
The graphical method, propounded by the Russian / German / Israeli architect Alexander Klein during the late 1920, evaluates the qualities of architectural plans through a process of diagrammatic analysis following purportedly objective... more
The graphical method, propounded by the Russian / German / Israeli architect Alexander Klein during the late 1920, evaluates the qualities of architectural plans through a process of diagrammatic analysis following purportedly objective criteria. Over the course of the 20th century Klein’s proposition has been adapted, reframed, diverted and inverted. Ernst Löwitsch reinterpreted Klein’s analytical notation as choreography of domestic life; following a rupture incised by Klein’s forced emigration from Nazi Germany, Frank Gloor rediscovered the graphical method, transformed and adapted it to conceive of a scientific method classifying degrees of flexibility. Early dissemination to the English-speaking world by Catherine Bauer under the refashioned title “Functional House for Frictionless Living” ultimately led to Robin Evan’s enduring indictment of Klein’s diagrams as emblem of reductive Functionalism. Throughout its disparate reception histories, the graphical method has oscillated between methodology of scientific evaluation; choreography of everyday life; emblematic indictment of Functionalist ideology; and catalyst to new working methodologies.
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Proximity and contradiction , understood as strategic and productive devices analogous to cinematic montage, figure prominently in Rem Koolhaas’s thinking, writing, and making. He expresses them in rhetoric (oxymora), in architecture... more
Proximity and contradiction , understood as strategic and productive devices analogous to cinematic montage, figure prominently in Rem Koolhaas’s thinking, writing, and making. He expresses them in rhetoric (oxymora), in architecture (cross-programming), in graphic technique (collage), and in references (cadavre exquis). S,M,L,XL appropriates ordering systems, such as taxonomies and lists, and redirects these to produce new meaning through proximity and fertile contradiction between projects, hypotheses, essays, dictionary entries, and reference images. Antitheses are not resolved, but rather integrated into an all-inclusive book-world. S,M,L,XL strategically exploits proximity to expound on, as well as embody, Koolhaas’s complex and original conception of context, woven from its physical, temporal, epistemological, and autobiographical dimensions.
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Within a vast arsenal of architectural techniques employed by OMA in their first decade, poché occupies a unique position, for two reasons. First, unlike design techniques adopted from Surrealism, such as the paranoid-critical method or... more
Within a vast arsenal of architectural techniques employed by OMA in their first decade, poché occupies a unique position, for two reasons. First, unlike design techniques adopted from Surrealism, such as the paranoid-critical method or the cadavre exquis, or metaphors such as the medical term lobotomy, the concept of poché is drawn from the history of architecture. Second, while appropriation to architecture of techniques originating elsewhere figures prominently in Rem Koolhaas’ theoretical output, the use of poché is never mentioned by Koolhaas or Zenghelis during OMA’s first decade. Only in 1999 Koolhaas finally acknowledged ‘a fascinating condition to work for the first time with so-called poché’, on House Y2K and the Casa da Música in Porto, thereby denying the apparent role of poché in the ‘strategy of the void’ for the new town of Melun-Senart (1987) and in the project for the Très Grande Bibliothèque (1989). OMA’s ambiguous reception of poché during its first decade can be summarized as negation in writing alongside appropriation in design. It is as such a reaction to Robert Venturi’s extrapolation of the Beaux-Arts conception of poché to urbanism; Koolhaas has described Venturi as both inspiration and threat. Repudiation of Venturi’s and Colin Rowe’s contextualist definition of poché acts as a polemic protective shield which allowed OMA to amalgamate poché with its tectonic antithesis, the free section.
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To turn an object upside down or sideways up in order to spark imaginative transformation engages a primordial motive of play. Painters, composers and choreographers, associated with the New York School, such as Jackson Pollock, Earle... more
To turn an object upside down or sideways up in order to spark imaginative transformation engages a primordial motive of play. Painters, composers and choreographers, associated with the New York School, such as Jackson Pollock, Earle Brown and Trisha Brown, have appropriated this motive to inform a range of works and performances through which cardinal reorientation runs as a common thread. In 1950 Le Corbusier inscribed ‘action sculptures' on the beach, to be cast in plaster and then uprighted for display, thereby paraphrasing Pollock's phased working process. Even before and after this episode, transposition between horizontal and vertical planes constitutes a pervasive undercurrent infusing Le Corbusier's practice and writing, with the conception of the ‘vertical garden city’ as its most visible index. Cardinal transposition, which negotiates between corporeality, image and diagrammatic abstraction, resurfaces in the work of Le Corbusier's contemporaries and successors. The analysis is threefold. It first explores corporeal practices in the arts; further it traces strategic usages in architecture and urbanism; lastly it examines the inversion of its premises in architectural critique. Using Le Corbusier as a central figure, this paper makes visible a twentieth-century meshwork of practices and strategies which imagine, simulate or actualise cardinal transposition, thereby challenging tectonic certainties, and releasing new possibilities for comprehending and designing space.
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Quotidian mobility and urban connectivity become explicit in diagrams of circulation patterns, narrative tracing of trajectories, or choreographic notation of kinetic routines. However, they are also powerfully implicit in architectural... more
Quotidian mobility and urban connectivity become explicit in diagrams of circulation patterns, narrative tracing of trajectories, or choreographic notation of kinetic routines. However, they are also powerfully implicit in architectural floor plans, which, extended to urban scale in the Rossi Plan of Zürich, conjure imaginative space for suppositional wanderings through the city. An ongoing research project by the author brings such imaginative capacities to bear on diagrammatic exploration of the communities of Divale Gaon (India), Ban Krua (Thailand) and Jabal Al Natheef (Jordan), which inhabit matrixes of densely spaced houses sustaining both dynamic and plastic patterns of connectivity, and thus challenge the European syntax of public streets and civic squares.
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The community of Ban Krua has come to global attention through their successful resistance against a government proposal for a motorway that would have cut through their community on the banks of the Saen Saeb canal near Bangkok’s... more
The community of Ban Krua has come to global attention through their successful resistance against a government proposal for a motorway that would have cut through their community on the banks of the Saen Saeb canal near Bangkok’s National Stadium. While academic studies attribute their erstwhile success either to the tactics of non-violent resistance sustained by community cohesion or to the communities’ longstanding ties with senior officials in the Thai military and bureaucracy, we were interested in the dynamic interrelationships between the social fabric that sustains this remarkable level of cohesion, and the spaces produced and inhabited by the community. Buildings are sometimes self-constructed and usually transformed over time; at the urban scale of the community the network of narrow alleyways is a direct extension of domestic space, subject to continuous permutation through dynamic processes of local connections triggering disconnection at urban level and vice versa.
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The London Underground Diagram made history as the first underground transport diagram to abandon geographic accuracy in favour of legibility, but it has also become the stuff of cultural history, inviting references and comparisons to... more
The London Underground Diagram made history as the first underground transport diagram to abandon geographic accuracy in favour of legibility, but it has also become the stuff of cultural history, inviting references and comparisons to contemporaneous diagrams and works of art over the course of its evolution.
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Utopian visions and diagrams have engaged in a multitude of relationships. For example, a utopian narrative can be conceived as a diagram, or with the aid of diagrams, and understood through diagrammatic (re) annotation. This notion is... more
Utopian visions and diagrams have engaged in a multitude of relationships. For example, a utopian narrative can be conceived as a diagram, or with the aid of diagrams, and understood through diagrammatic (re) annotation. This notion is explored through an interpretation of Thomas More’s Utopia and Andrea Branzi’s Agronica. Both schemes address various structural conditions through diagrammatic operations. In More’s scheme the channel that separates Utopia from the mainland, dug by its putative founder King Abraxas, inscribes a circular boundary, reiterated in the city walls and moat; it is resonant with contemporaneous rota and volvelle schemata. Conversely, Andrea Branzi’s “mirror simulator” multiplies Agronica’s centrifugal grid to infinity, negating the “outside,” and is evocative of pervasive virtual networks.
Research Interests: Urban Geography, Social Networks, Urban Politics, Urban History, Urban Anthropology, and 49 moreUtopian Studies, Urban Education, Urban Planning, Diagram understanding, Sustainable Urbanism, Urban Regeneration, Sustainable Urban Environments, Urban Morphology, Urban Studies, Urbanism, Diagrammatic Reasoning, Urban Ecology, Philosophy of Time, Knowledge Discovery with Diagrams, Art, Place And Utopia, Urban Sociology, Utopian Literature, Landscape Urbanism, Urban And Regional Planning, Civic Engagement, Networking, Creative City, Utopianism, Urban Design (Urban Studies), Urban Development, Metropolitan Planning, Schema Theory, Rosalind Krauss, Utopia, Bauhaus, Diagrams, Urban Design, City and Regional Planning, Utopia and Science Fiction, Christopher alexander, Gropius, Walter, Teoria História e Crítica da Arquitetura e do Urbanismo, Civics, Metropolitan Governance, Utopia/dystopia, Image Schemas, Diagram, Data Flow Diagram, Process Flow Diagram, Walter Gropius, Volvelle, Metropole, Diagram Cntext, and Utopia Thomas Morus
This paper will examine two ‘ecologies of thought’, which encompass architectural theory, history, pedagogy, and practice. A lineage of ‘scientific’ diagramming originates from scientific management and the Bauhaus-inspired curriculum... more
This paper will examine two ‘ecologies of thought’, which encompass architectural theory, history, pedagogy, and practice.
A lineage of ‘scientific’ diagramming originates from scientific management and the Bauhaus-inspired curriculum introduced to Harvard by Walter Gropius; it incorporates diagrams into a problem-solving methodology, and is exemplified by the ‘bubble diagram’. This scientific emphasis is extended by Christopher Alexander’s urban analysis introducing mathematical set theory. In general, the scientific diagram emphasizes hierarchies and logical relations; it eschews visual resemblance to the subject of its analysis.
The second, post-war, trajectory privileges the semantic and syntactic potential of the diagram, and shifts emphasis from “solving a problem” to “learning a language”; it may be best understood through the ‘Nine Square Grid’ design exercise introduced by John Hejduk, resonating with positions articulated by Colin Rowe, Rudolf Wittkower, and Rudolf Arnheim.
The rendezvous of both trajectories with the digital screen sparks a new typology, diagrammatic controls.
A lineage of ‘scientific’ diagramming originates from scientific management and the Bauhaus-inspired curriculum introduced to Harvard by Walter Gropius; it incorporates diagrams into a problem-solving methodology, and is exemplified by the ‘bubble diagram’. This scientific emphasis is extended by Christopher Alexander’s urban analysis introducing mathematical set theory. In general, the scientific diagram emphasizes hierarchies and logical relations; it eschews visual resemblance to the subject of its analysis.
The second, post-war, trajectory privileges the semantic and syntactic potential of the diagram, and shifts emphasis from “solving a problem” to “learning a language”; it may be best understood through the ‘Nine Square Grid’ design exercise introduced by John Hejduk, resonating with positions articulated by Colin Rowe, Rudolf Wittkower, and Rudolf Arnheim.
The rendezvous of both trajectories with the digital screen sparks a new typology, diagrammatic controls.
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The digital workplace reformulates the spatiality of ‘artist’ to ‘drawing’. The body is in dynamic relationship with the planes of working and viewing.
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"The iconic is a quality more often ascribed to objects than to fields; in an urban context the term is used to describe buildings, which act as landmarks and, by assisting orientation and navigation in the city, guide its flows. Such... more
"The iconic is a quality more often ascribed to objects than to fields; in an urban context the term is used to describe buildings, which act as landmarks and, by assisting orientation and navigation in the city, guide its flows. Such landmarks are identified with, and used as symbolic representations of the city to both visitors and inhabitants. The iconic potential of the field has not yet been exploited to the same degree. However, conceptual representations, such as the psychogeographic maps of Paris conceived by Guy Debord and Asger Jorn in 1956-7, as well as the quotidian presence of the London Tube map, its design originally proposed by Harry Beck in 1931, have achieved iconic status.
Both maps attempt to visualize, interpret and utilize urban connectivity and flows. This paper seeks to broaden and deepen an understanding of the iconic qualities of the London Tube map and its operation as a navigational aid as well as conceptual device framing public perception of London. We will situate the London Tube map in the context of it’s own history of inception and interpretation, of Debord and Jorn’s maps of Paris, Kevin Lynch’s research on the mental image of cities, and a series of interviews conducted in London by the authors, asking participants to describe and sketch their mental image of above-ground and underground London. On the basis of these critical readings, we argue that the London Tube map operates on its users as an iconic, but also as a charged field. It is charged by the overt and implied agenda of its authors, by the history of its evolution and its adaptation to a growing network carried out by multiple authors in a negotiated and sometimes public process, and by the memories and spatial practices it is associated with by its users."
Both maps attempt to visualize, interpret and utilize urban connectivity and flows. This paper seeks to broaden and deepen an understanding of the iconic qualities of the London Tube map and its operation as a navigational aid as well as conceptual device framing public perception of London. We will situate the London Tube map in the context of it’s own history of inception and interpretation, of Debord and Jorn’s maps of Paris, Kevin Lynch’s research on the mental image of cities, and a series of interviews conducted in London by the authors, asking participants to describe and sketch their mental image of above-ground and underground London. On the basis of these critical readings, we argue that the London Tube map operates on its users as an iconic, but also as a charged field. It is charged by the overt and implied agenda of its authors, by the history of its evolution and its adaptation to a growing network carried out by multiple authors in a negotiated and sometimes public process, and by the memories and spatial practices it is associated with by its users."
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Im Wintersemester 2003/04 wurde unter dem Titel „Urbane Szenarios: Schlieren/ZH“ eine Entwurfs- und Forschungsuntersuchung am Departement Architektur der ETH Zürich durchgeführt. Eine Gruppe von Studierenden entwickelte unterschiedliche... more
Im Wintersemester 2003/04 wurde unter dem Titel „Urbane Szenarios: Schlieren/ZH“ eine Entwurfs- und Forschungsuntersuchung am Departement Architektur der ETH Zürich durchgeführt. Eine Gruppe von Studierenden entwickelte unterschiedliche Ansätze, um den Transformationskräften, die auf die Industriezone der Stadt Schlieren wirken, mit planerischen Strategien zu begegnen. Das daran anschliessende Forschungsprojekt, das im Sommersemester 2004 unter der Leitung von Holger Schurk, Christoph Lueder und Michael Martin, erarbeitet werden konnte, führte zu einer Vertiefung der Themen. Diese Studie wurde parallel auf drei Ebenen entwickelt: Analyse, Projekt und Methoden. Aufbauend auf einer Reihe von Analysen zu städtebaulichen Fragestellungen wurde ein exemplarisches Projekt entwickelt, das als Planungsstrategie für den zentralen Teil des Talraums von Schlieren benutzt werden kann. Die gesammelten Erfahrungen eröffneten einen Diskurs zur Frage der Methoden, die in Planungsprozessen eingesetzt werden können. Analyse: Die gesammelten Informationsbausteine, die das Planungsgebiet umschreiben, wurden in einer Art „Datenlandschaft“ erfasst. Somit konnten im Rahmen der Studie unterschiedliche Lesearten des Kontextes – in seinen vielfältigen Dimensionen – mit graphischen Mitteln anschaulich gemacht werden. Projekt: Während die graphische Erfassung der Situation vorerst der Analyse dient, steht sie auch im Dienste des Entwurfs. Da die „Datenlandschaft“ als Informationsträger verstanden wird, werden durch sie Strukturen festgelegt, die zur Entwicklung eines Projekts beitragen können. Dieser Prozess führt zu einem mehrfach geschichteten Produkt, das als offenes System verstanden wird. Das Projekt ist nicht in sich abgeschlossen, sondern weist auf mögliche strategische Entwicklungen des Ortes hin. Innerhalb des Industriegebiets werden sechs Themenfelder eingeschrieben. Unschärfen in der physischen Abgrenzung der Felder und zeitlichen Abfolge der prognostizierten und angestrebten Entwicklungen halten den Prozess offen. Methoden: Die methodischen Werkzeuge der Analyse und des Entwurfs – namentlich des Lesens und Schreibens der Stadtstrukturen – wurden zeitgleich in einem Katalog erfasst. Durch den Prozess der permanenten Selbstbeobachtung konnten dabei – auf spielerische Art – Instrumente zum Umgang mit der urbanen Peripherie aus dem komplexen Prozess herausgelöst und dokumentiert werden. Diese Methoden bilden einen „Werkzeugkasten“, der in Planungsprozessen angewendet werden kann.
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"The fragmented site of the University Library Magdeburg bears inscription by widely divergent political and architectural ideologies, from the thirty years' war, fascist iconography, socialist urban planning, to the more recent phase of... more
"The fragmented site of the University Library Magdeburg bears inscription by widely divergent political and architectural ideologies, from the thirty years' war, fascist iconography, socialist urban planning, to the more recent phase of rapid reconstruction following German reunification. The proposal accepts the history of the site without attempting to reverse history or reconstruct any one past. Instead, a game defined by both rules and and autonomy is played out:
A continuous plane is folded in an irregular pattern to form all
floor plates and walls, creating an exterior volume that defines streets and acts as a landmark; oscillating between a foreground and background building. Internally, the folded plane creates continuous space animated by changes in height and lighting situations. Long, unbroken edges of floor slabs establish diagonal connections through space and lead onwards to vistas of the campus and the city beyond."
A continuous plane is folded in an irregular pattern to form all
floor plates and walls, creating an exterior volume that defines streets and acts as a landmark; oscillating between a foreground and background building. Internally, the folded plane creates continuous space animated by changes in height and lighting situations. Long, unbroken edges of floor slabs establish diagonal connections through space and lead onwards to vistas of the campus and the city beyond."
Research Interests: Architecture, Diagram understanding, Design Process (Architecture), Digital Architecture, Diagrammatic Reasoning, and 11 moreModern Architecture, Diagrammatic Knowledge Acquisition, Knowledge Discovery with Diagrams, Philosophy Of Diagrams, Sustainable Architecture, Architecture and Phenomenology, 3D Modelling (Architecture), Urban Design, Diagrammatic Design, Diagram, and Architecture and Public Spaces
The asymmetrical distribution of power, political and economic opportunity in the urbanising territories of the Global South between rapid urban development and spectacular architecture driven by global financial markets on the one hand,... more
The asymmetrical distribution of power, political and economic opportunity in the urbanising territories of the Global South between rapid urban development and spectacular architecture driven by global financial markets on the one hand, and self-construction of irregular settlements by citizens excluded from an unaffordable property market, on the other hand, is inextricably intertwined with asymmetrical distribution of representation. That asymmetry is not limited to political representation but also is one of visually and verbally mediated representation. Drawing on feedback obtained continuously from the actions and experience of construction, inhabitation and improvisation, irregular settlements are inherently excluded from many key visual representations, in urban planning and policy documents, and in architectural surveys and proposals.
The varied spatial and social scenarios in which marginalized residents coproduce space in the city have become objects of fascination and attraction as well as subjects of scholarly and critical studies by sociologists, politologists, geographers, urban planners and architects. At times, enthrallment with visual phenomena of irregular urbanisation has come at the expense of analytical rigour and human empathy; for example, Tim Hecker has denounced as “Slum Pastoral” Rem Koolhaas’ aerial study of slums in Lagos. On the other hand, the reliance of other studies on exclusively or predominantly verbal narratives forgoes the potential of visual means of thinking and communication to draw in participation from the inhabitants of irregular settlements themselves.
The varied spatial and social scenarios in which marginalized residents coproduce space in the city have become objects of fascination and attraction as well as subjects of scholarly and critical studies by sociologists, politologists, geographers, urban planners and architects. At times, enthrallment with visual phenomena of irregular urbanisation has come at the expense of analytical rigour and human empathy; for example, Tim Hecker has denounced as “Slum Pastoral” Rem Koolhaas’ aerial study of slums in Lagos. On the other hand, the reliance of other studies on exclusively or predominantly verbal narratives forgoes the potential of visual means of thinking and communication to draw in participation from the inhabitants of irregular settlements themselves.
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The roundtable invites London-based urbanists, historians, architects, designers and artists who draw on Latin America as a place of biographical origin and / or site of academic inquiry to discuss research that relates across scales... more
The roundtable invites London-based urbanists, historians, architects, designers and artists who draw on Latin America as a place of biographical origin and / or site of academic inquiry to discuss research that relates across scales ranging from infrastructural to domestic. The conversation engages the shifting roles of Latin American historical identities, cultural perspectives and territorial ecologies in scenarios of rapid urbanization, linking strategy to management, improvisation or appropriation.