How were the concepts of the observer and user in architecture and urban planning transformed throughout the 20th and 21st centuries? Marianna Charitonidou explores how the mutations of the means of ...representation in architecture and urban planning relate to the significance of city's inhabitants. She investigates Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's fascination with perspective, Team Ten's interest in the humanisation of architecture and urbanism, Constantinos Doxiadis and Adriano Olivetti's role in reshaping the relationship between politics and urban planning during the postwar years, Giancarlo De Carlo's architecture of participation, Aldo Rossi's design methods, Denise Scott Brown's active socioplactics and Bernard Tschumi's conception praxis.
The article presents the reasons for which the issue of providing housing to low-income citizens has been a real challenge in Addis Ababa during the recent years and will continue to be, given that ...its population is growing extremely fast. It examines the tensions between the universal aspirations and the local realities in the case of some of Ethiopia’s most ambitious mass pro-poor housing schemes, such as the “Addis Ababa Grand Housing Program” (AAGHP), which was launched in 2004 and was integrated in the “Integrated Housing Development Program” (IHDP) in 2006. The article argues that the quotidian practices of communities and their socio-economic and cultural characteristics are related to the spatial attributes of co-housing practices. Drawing upon the idea that there is a mutual correspondence between social and spatial structures, it places particular emphasis on the analysis of the IHDP and aims to show that to shape strategies that take into account the social and cultural aspects of daily life of the poor citizens of Addis Ababa, it is pivotal to invite them to take part in the decision-making processes regarding their resettlement. Departing from the fact that a large percentage of the housing supply in Addis Ababa consists of informal unplanned housing, the article also compares the commoning practices in kebele houses and condominium units. The former refers to the legal informal housing units owned by the government and rented to their dwellers, whereas the latter concerns the housing blocks built in the framework of the IHDP for the resettlement of the kebele dwellers. The article analyzes these processes of resettlement, shedding light of the fact that kebele houses were located at the inner city, whereas the condominiums are located in the suburbs. Despite the fact that the living conditions in the condominium units are of a much higher quality than those in the kebele houses, their design underestimated or even neglected the role of the commoning practices. The article highlights the advantages of commoning practices in architecture and urban planning, and how the implementation of participation-oriented solutions can respond to the difficulties of providing housing. It argues that understanding the significance of the endeavors that take into account the opinions of dwellers during the phase of decision-making goes hand in hand with considering commoning practices as a source of architecture and urban planning frameworks for low-cost housing in this specific context. The key argument of the article is that urban planning and architecture solutions in Addis Ababa should be based on the principles of the so-called “negotiated planning” approach, which implies a close analysis of the interconnections between planning, infrastructure, and land.
The article examines the impact of the study for Levittown of urban sociologist Herbert Gans on Denise Scott Brown's thought. It scrutinizes Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, and Steven Izenour's ...'Remedial Housing for Architects or Learning from Levittown' conducted in collaboration with their students at Yale University in 1970. Taking as its starting point Scott Brown's endeavour to redefine functionalism in 'Architecture as Patterns and Systems: Learning from Planning', and 'The Redefinition of Functionalism', which were included in Architecture as Signs and Systems: For a Mannerist Time (2004), the article sheds light on the fact that the intention to shape a new way of conceiving functionalism was already present in Learning from Las Vegas, where Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour suggested an understanding of Las Vegas as pattern of activities. Particular emphasis is placed on Scott Brown's understanding of 'active socioplastics', and on the impact of advocacy planning and urban sociology on her approach. At the core of the reflections developed in this article is the concept of 'urban village' that Gans uses in US in The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (1972) to shed light on the socio-anthropological aspects of inhabiting urban fabric.
The article examines the reorientations of the appreciation of ugliness within different national contexts in a comparative and relational frame, juxtaposing the Australian, American, British and ...Italian milieus. It also explores the ways in which the transformation of the urban fabric and the effect of suburbanization were perceived in the aforementioned national contexts. Special attention is paid to the production and dissemination of how the city’s uglification was conceptualized between the 1950s and 1970s. Pivotal for the issues that this article addresses are Ian Nairn’s
Outrage: On the Disfigurement of Town and Countryside
, Robin Boyd’s
The
Australian Ugliness
, Donald Gazzard’s
Australian Outrage: The Decay of a Visual Environment
, and the way the phenomenon of urban expansion is treated in these books in comparison with other books from the four national contexts under study, such as Ludovico Quaroni’s
La torre di Babele
and Reyner Banham’s
The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic?.
Particular emphasis is placed on Boyd’s articles in
The Architectural Review
between 1951 and 1970. At the core of the article is the analysis of the debates around ugliness between the 1950s and 1970s within the British, Italian, American and Australian contexts.
The article examines the principles of Giancarlo De Carlo’s design approach. It pays special attention to his critique of the modernist functionalist logic, which was based on a simplified ...understanding of users. De Carlo′s participatory design approach was related to his intention to replace of the linear design process characterising the modernist approaches with a non-hierarchical model. Such a non-hierarchical model was applied to the design of the Nuovo Villaggio Matteotti in Terni among other projects. A characteristic of the design approach applied in the case of the Nuovo Villaggio Matteotti is the attention paid to the role of inhabitants during the different phases of the design process. The article explores how De Carlo’s “participatory design” criticised the functionalist approaches of pre-war modernist architects. It analyses De Carlo’s theory and describes how it was made manifest in his architectural practice—particularly in the design for the Nuovo Villaggio Matteotti and the master plan for Urbino—in his teaching and exhibition activities, and in the manner his buildings were photographs and represented through drawings and sketches. The work of Giancarlo De Carlo and, especially, his design methods in the case of the Nuovo Villaggio Matteotti can help us reveal the myths of participatory design approaches within the framework of their endeavour to replace the representation of designers by a representation of users. The article relates the potentials and limits of De Carlo’s participatory design approach to more contemporary concepts such as “negotiated planning”, “co-production”, and “crossbenching”. The article also intends to explore whether there is consistency between De Carlo’s theory of participation and its application.
The article examines the collaborations between the pensionnaires of the Villa Medici in Rome and the members of the French School of Athens, shedding light on the complex relationships between ...architecture, art, and archeology. The second half of the 19th century was a period during which the exchanges and collaborations between archaeologists, artists, and architects acquired a reinvented role and a dominant place. Within such a context, Athens was the place par excellence, where the encounter between these three disciplines took place. The main objective of the article is to render explicit how the revelations of archeology, actively disseminated by the members of the French School of Athens—the “Athéniens”—had an important impact on the approach of certain pensionnaires of the Villa Medici in Rome. Particular emphasis is placed on certain pensionnaires, who decided to devote their envois to ancient monuments of Greece. In parallel, the article intends to shed light on the methods that helped the pensionnaires-architects of the Villa Medici in Rome appropriate archaeological discoveries concerning Greek antiquities. The article takes, as a starting point, the following hypothesis: to better understand the figure of the architect-archaeologist, of whom Jacques Ignace Hittorff is an emblematic example, it is pivotal to bear in mind that before the second half of the 19th century neither the figure of Hellenic archeology nor the figure of the architect had yet acquired their autonomy. Taking into account that Johann Joachim Winckelmann, in the middle of the 18th century, forged an ideal Greek model, which was criticized during the second half of the 19th century, the article also sheds light on the fact that the revelations of archaeologists have called into question the Winckelmannian image of Greece. Another aspect that is explored in the article is Jacques Ignace Hittorff’s studies concerning the polychromy of ancient Greek monuments, paying special attention to his Restitution du temple d’Empédocle à Sélinonte ou l’Architecture polychrome chez les Grecs. The article also explores how the shifts of the status of philhellenism are related to the mutations of the meaning of travel to Greece. In parallel, it investigates the impact of Greek independence on the ideals of beauty and nature in arts, as well as how Greek independence is related to the intensification of the interest in the excavations of Greek antiquities.
This article examines Le Corbusier’s architectural design processes, paying special attention to his concept of “ineffable space”. Le Corbusier related “ineffable space” to mathematics, arguing that ...both mathematics and the phenomenon of “ineffable space” provoke an effect of “concordance”. He also argued that when the establishment of relations is “precise” and “overwhelming”, architectural artefacts are capable of “provoking physiological sensations”. For Le Corbusier, the sentiment of satisfaction and enjoyment that an architectural artefact can provoke is related to a perception of harmony. This article analyzes the reasons for which Le Corbusier insisted on the necessity to discover or invent “clear syntax” through architectural composition. He believed that the power of architectural artefacts lies in their “clear syntax”. Particular emphasis is placed on the relationship of Le Corbusier’s theories of space with those of Henri Bergson and the De Stijl movement. At the core of the reflections that are developed here are Le Corbusier’s “patient search” (“recherche patiente”) and the vital role of the act of drawing for the process of inscribing images in memory. For Le Corbusier, drawing embodied the acts of observing, discovering, inventing and creating. This article also relates Le Corbusier’s interest in proportions and his conception of the Modulor to post-war Italian neo-humanistic approaches in architecture. It intends to render explicit how Le Corbusier’s definition of architecture was reshaped, shedding light on the shift from defining architecture as clear syntax to defining architecture as the succession of events.
The article examines an ensemble of gender and migrant roles in post-war Neorealist and New Migrant Italian films. Its main objective is to analyze gender and placemaking practices in an ensemble of ...films, addressing these practices on a symbolic level. The main argument of the article is that the way gender and migrant roles were conceived in the Italian Neorealist and New Migrant Cinema was based on the intention to challenge certain stereotypes characterizing the understanding of national identity and ‘otherness’. The article presents how the roles of borgatari and women function as devices of reconceptualization of Italy’s identity, providing a fertile terrain for problematizing the relationship between migration studies, urban studies and gender studies. Special attention is paid to how migrants are related to the reconceptualization of Italy’s national narrations. The Neorealist model is understood here as a precursor of the narrative strategies that one encounters in numerous films belonging to the New Migrant cinema in Italy. The article also explores how certain aspects of more contemporary studies of migrant cinema in Italy could illuminate our understanding of Neorealist cinema and its relation to national narratives. To connect gender representation and migrant roles in Italian cinema, the article focuses on the analysis of the status of certain roles of women, paying particular attention to Anna Magnagi’s roles.
The article scrutinizes the impact of the 1968 student protests on architectural education and epistemology within the Italian and American context, the advocacy planning movement and the ...relationship of architecture and urban planning with the socio-political climate around 1968. It aims to demonstrate how the concepts of urban renewal and 'nuova dimensione' were progressively abandoned in the USA and Italy respectively. It presents how the critique of these concepts was related to the conviction that they were incompatible with socially effective architecture and urban design approaches. The article sheds light on the complexity of the reorientations that took place in both contexts, taking into consideration the impact of student protests, and the 1968 Civil Rights Action the architects and urban planners's task on the curricula of schools of architecture. It also investigates certain counter-events and counter-publications in the USA and Italy, shedding light on how they reinvented the relationship between architecture and democracy. It reveals the tensions between enhancing equality in planning process and local bureaucracy in the case of advocacy planning strategies.
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