The Architecture Departments of Lusófona University of Lisbon and Oporto are organizing a seminar – Architecture: Design and Research – for the current academic year.
Throughout the post-WWII decades the Dutch architect Jaap Bakema (1914-1981) was inspired to build for a democratic and egalitarian society which recognized and accommodated diversity in lifestyles as a starting point for urban planning. This is evidenced by his many interventions in the CIAM discourse, to begin with his statement on behalf of young Dutch architects at the 1947 reunion conference in Bridgwater. At the Otterlo conference Bakema introduced the subject of an open society to the circles of CIAM and Team 10. He would continue the conversation on the subject throughout his lifetime, especially in his international exchanges with colleagues in the USA and Japan. To Bakema the open society implied a social project of change, contestation and communication. It was to be built on comprehensive welfare state arrangements between government bodies, citizens and the industry. At the same time, he envisaged a modernized Netherlands as the open society par excellence. From the massive planning of housing to town halls, from churches to modern-day leisure resorts, the body of work of Jaap Bakema and his office can be regarded as the crictial embodiment of the Dutch welfare state in the late twentieth century.
Biographical Note
Dirkvan den Heuvel is an Associate Professor with the chair of Architecture & Dwelling. He is also the Head of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre at Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam. His expertise is in postwar modern architecture and planning, and its related fields of architecture theory and history, cultural studies and discourse analysis.
Van den Heuvel was a Visiting Scholar at Monash University, Melbourne in 2019, and he was awarded with a Richard Rogers Fellowship from Harvard GSD in 2017, for his research project Socio-plastics on New Brutalism in architecture with regard to British welfare state politics. He was the curator of the Dutch pavilion for the 14th architecture exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2014. Van den Heuvel also curated the exhibition ‘Structuralism’ at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, together with Herman Hertzberger. For Bureau Europa, Maastricht he curated the show ‘Changing Ideals: Re-thinking the House’.
With Max Risselada he organised two international exhibitions and publications: ‘Team 10 – In Search of a Utopia of the Present’, and ‘Alison and Peter Smithson, from the House of the Future to a house of today’. Other publications include ‘Habitat: Ecology Thinking in Architecture’ (2020), ‘Jaap Bakema and the Open Society’ (2018), ‘Architecture and the Welfare State’ (2015, with Mark Swenarton and Tom Avermaete) and ‘Lessons: Tupker / Risselada. A Double Portrait of Dutch Architectural Education’ (2003, with Madeleine Steigenga and Jaap van Triest).
Bruno Figueiredo is Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture of the University of Minho, his research focuses on the use of digital tools in architecture, encompassing the development of generative and analytical computational models and digital fabrication in architectural design processes, namely the implementation and control of additive manufacturing techniques. Doctorate in Construction and Technology (EAUM, 2016), supported by a grant from the Science and Technology Foundation for studies carried out at MIT (Design Computation Group, 2012). He completed his Masters at FAUL in 2008 and a Licentiate at FAUP in 2000.
The Architecture Departments of Lusófona University of Lisbon and Oporto are organizing a seminar – Architecture: Design and Research – for the current academic year.
This week:
26 March 2021,
14:30 (GMT)
Irene Cieraad – User-centered Research: An Anthropological Perspective
My anthropological research is primarily focused on the usage of domestic spaces and therefore on the users of domestic architecture. Still in their housing designs architects also express clear-cut ideas on the intended use of spaces, the so-called program. In the case of a private commission architects will discuss with the client his or her wish list and the result will be more or less the outcome of the consultation, but in all other cases designers will project their own ideas on the intended use in their housing plans. The friction between the initial architectural program of planned use and the actual use of spaces by the inhabitants will only be a matter of time. To introduce you as architects to user-centered research I will present the method with which students of mine documented their parental homes on the actual use of the spaces.
Biographical Note
Irene Cieraad is a cultural anthropologist and affiliated senior researcher in the faculty of Architecture of Delft University of Technology. She is the editor of At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space (Syracuse University Press) and has published widely on the history of the Dutch domestic interior and a variety of other topics, like nostalgia and the Swiss chalet. Most of all she is intrigued by the interplay between architecture and culture.
The Architecture Departments of Lusófona University of Lisbon and Oporto are organizing a seminar – Architecture: Design and Research – for the current academic year.
I am interested in the convergence of space and time within the metropolis and the impact this has on our understanding and experience of urban environments. Our ideas about the function, significance and value of architecture as design and as built heritage can shift over time and are influenced by cultural, social and physical circumstances. Here I use London Bridge in all its various forms, geographical locations and historical complexities to explore how we might think about the interaction between past and present within the context of the city and how the spatial location of objects, including buildings can inflect on their meaning. In this way the intertwined nature of the practice of architecture and research in architecture is explored.
Biographical Note
My work focuses on histories of architecture and urbanism in relation to social and cultural theory. A number of my books, articles and edited volumes have made a substantial contribution to our understanding of London as a global city and as a visual phenomenon. For instance, my trilogy of monographs The Spaces of the Hospital, (Routledge 2013), Rural Urbanism: London landscapes in the early nineteenth century (MUP 2006) and Re-presenting the Metropolis (Ashgate 2000 and pbk 2018) offer theoretically informed, archivally based readings of the city as that enjoy international acclaim. I have also considered London in comparative contexts with other cities, especially Paris, and Tianjin in China. More broadly my work on the architectural dialogues between Britain, Turkey and the Middle East has explored how the built environment in all its complexities is experienced and used in the formulation of national and cultural identities and how these operate in a transcultural context.
The transnational aspects of my collaborative projects have informed my forthcoming book Architecture and Ekphrasis: Space, Time and the Embodied Description of the Past. Here I focus on the interaction between visual images and written histories of architecture. Using a broad evidence base of graphic representations of architecture, and drawing on my experience of cross-cultural dialogues, I argue that these images are in fact a form of writing that have syntactical and linguistic qualities that tell alternative histories of seeing and experiencing space.
