Archinect - Plate Life

Berlin's Alternative Modes of Practice

2012-03-31T13:58:00-04:00

Our graduate architecture studio traveled to Berlin recently with a specific agenda: to understand modes of architectural agency which fall outside of the traditional role of architecture as a practice. Often architects wait for work to come to them, staying out of the research, financing and management realms of development. It seems that after the economic collapse, architects are more intrigued by alternative ways of engaging in their work, and in Berlin they have been exploring these ideas for a long time.

One such group is Zanderroth Architekten. They have created a highly-articulated collection of living units in Prenzlauer Berg with a surprising relationship between quiet family enclave and strong urban presence along the street. Each unit is narrow, but 4-stories in height, and has a rooftop garden looking down over the street. At the base of each unit there is a room which appears like a storefront, one of the more curious elements of the building. One of the architec...

A Different Take on Agency

2012-02-27T16:55:07-05:00

We're working with a different type of architectural agency this spring. Taking examples from communities who have appropriated space in various ways; either modification of the modernist frame or the literal taking or contestation of space.

Below are some examples from our studies.

1. LeCorbusier's system of housing in Pessac, France from the 1920's:

2. Appropriation of empty urban lots in Brazil:

3. Cite Verticale in Casablanca:

The Threshold Project

2012-01-26T10:37:31-05:00

This sculptural project was the initial stage in a design studio in the fall of 2011 which focused the locks area of central Stockholm called Slussen. The studio was concerned with urban and architectural issues but the Threshold assignment served as a way to explore notions of boundary, network, and system.

This construction looks at the phenomenon of swarming flies as a starting point through which notions of space and specifically relationships of interior and exterior can be established. Digital tools and physical modeling were both iterative methods of pursuing a result which both contains space and clearly exists within a space. The departure from simply modeling a phenomenon can be read in the clear delineation between the interior and exterior of the construction. This is where it shifts from being a model of a swarm and approaches the idea of a spatial threshold.

An architecture consisting of a relationship of points, rather than a hierarchical organization of space...

Part I: New Realities

2012-01-18T16:34:00-05:00

In Manfredo Tafuri's 'Architecture and Utopia' an inherent opposition is expressed within all modern art as, "those who search the very bowels of reality in order to know and assimilate its values and wretchedness; and those who desire to go beyond reality, who want to construct ex novo new realities, new values, and new public symbols."

This blog takes this perspective as a starting point. Attending graduate school in architecture during one of the most intense economic downturns in history is daunting, but it also serves as motivation to reevaluate the position of architecture in society given the omnipresence of anxiety and doubt concerning the discipline. It is a time in which we as architects/urban theorists/intellectuals, given a brief reprieve from maintaining employment, can pursue the edges of what architecture actually is.

And so the focus, at least to begin with, of this blog will be on viewing architecture from a critical perspective and questioning the total p...