Building Communities
Readings


Zurich

Hans-Peter Bärtschi Industrialisierung, Eisenbahnschlachten und Städtebau, Basel-Boston-Stuttgart: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1983Aussersihl: «The labour movement of the city of Zurich has grown out of this district, and it was on its soil that the workers' movement, awakened to self-confidence, has had the greatest influence on the movement». In this research, complex technical, economic, social and political interrelationships will be illustrated by means of the urban planning, architectural development of the industrial and workers' district of Aussersihl. Inventories and typologies of residential buildings, factory, railway and infrastructure buildings are intended to broaden the interest of cultural heritage protection and to awaken an understanding of sources and monuments of technological and social history. Richard Wolff in Built Environment Volume 38, Number 1, The Five Lives of HB Südwest, Abingdon: Alexandrine Press, 2015, p. 94-108Building on top and along the edges of Zurich’s main railway station has been one of the most contested issues of urban development in Switzerland’s economic capital. Located in the very centre of the city and at the heart of both the regional and national public transport system, Zurich Main Station had long been a focus for more intense land use. The case of Zurich Main Station presents the whole range of stakeholders in the urban development process and how they used all the instruments available to them to promote or impede, respectively, one of the largest projects this country has seen. Ileana Apostol in Studies in History & Theory of Architecture, Volume 3, 2015 Urbanity and the Right to Difference, Bucharest: “Ion Mincu” University Press, 2015, p. 160-173After The Urban Revolution (1970), the following book written by Henri Lefebvre and published at Gallimard was The Differentialist Manifesto. He wrote this Manifesto with the conviction that the world of difference is another manner of thinking, acting and living, and later on he elaborated on the right to difference as a condition to provide the right to centrality in the city. To build an understanding of Lefebvre's dialectical thinking requires, nevertheless, explorations of his writings across their continuum. In this essay the insights of these two crucial works are bridged, which form the basis of an argument for affirming differences without exclusion within an ideal of civil urbanity. Bruno Fritzsche et al. Baukultur in Zürich: schutzwürdige Bauten und gute Architektur der letzten Jahre, Zurich: Hochbaudepartement, 2002-2013In a nine-volume series, the Zurich Office of Urban Planning (Amt für Städtebau) presents important buildings from the "inventory of protected art and cultural historical objects". The books document the diversity of building culture since the 15th century. Each volume in the book series is a small architectural guide in its own right - for laymen and experts alike. The third volume takes us to the Aussersihl and Industrie quarters, to the workers' city on the other side of the Sihl, and shows their eventful settlement history. In both neighbourhoods, the structural changes have intensified in recent years. Zurich West has developed into a modern district in which buildings worthy of protection are closely interwoven with a large number of successful new buildings. Andrea Helbling et al. Vertreter der Gattung Haus: Zürich 1996-2016, Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2017Zurich based architecture photographer Andrea Helbling has been photographing selected buildings in her home town since 1993. These are the buildings that are "free of all exoticism", as the literary critic Beatrice von Matt puts it. We overlook them, perhaps we find them ugly - and yet they too form the face of the city. This book is the first to present Helbling's black and white photographs in a large selection. The pictures question Zurich's inconspicuous buildings about their architectural and urban significance, their character, their emotionality and make visible a historical transformation process. Werner Huber et al. Architekturführer Zürich: Gebäude - Freiraum - Infrastruktur, Zurich: Edition Hochparterre, 2020This newly published Zurich Architecture Guide documents buildings and ensembles in the city from all eras. The main focus is on buildings from 1850 onwards are treated. The architectural guide focuses on the city core, but also looks beyond it, for example at focal points in the rapidly growing regions of the Glattal or Limmattal. The book is structured by object, arranged according to the district and neighbourhood classification of the city of Zurich. Neighbourhood-wise city maps provide geographical orientation. All of the approximately 1200 buildings, parks, squares and infrastructure buildings have been selected for their architectural quality, their significance for the urban space, but also for their role in the city's history. Simon Kretz; Lukas Kueng Urbane Qualitäten, Ein Handbuch am Beispiel der Metropolitanregion Zürich, Zurich: Edition Hochparterre, 2016Our settlement areas have changed fundamentally: Agglomerations, cities, villages and landscapes form metropolitan networks, functional connections and spatial structures have emerged. This new compass provides orientation: based on six terms - centrality, diversity, interaction, accessibility, adaptability and appropriation - it helps to identify qualities and deficits in urban areas. As a practice-oriented working tool, the book is aimed at planners, architects, students and all those who are more interested in qualities and potential than in hectare density and utilization in the current debate on urban planning and spatial development. Daniel Kurz Die Disziplinierung der Stadt Moderner Städtebau in Zürich 1900 bis 1940, Zurich: gta Verlag, 2008This richly illustrated publication examines the course and causes of the processes – among which the dynamic developed by public and motorised transport – that broke up the dense fabric of the traditional city and initiated a comprehensive separation of functions. The publication examines how these processes were implemented in the course of the interwar period and which instruments made the impressive district planning of that time possible. This research is embedded in a broad spectrum of social, economic and ideological historical developments and the reform discourses in architecture and urban planning in the early 20th century. Ruedi Weidmann; Karl Holenstein Max Vogt – Bauen für die Bahn 1957-1989, Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2010Max Vogt, as an architect for the SBB District III, realized around 200 buildings between 1957 and 1989, which are among Switzerland's architectural monuments because of their uncompromising materialization and sculptural power. The qualities of Vogt's architecture – heavy, powerful, robust and precise – are also the characteristics of the railway, which is why they have become part of the corporate design of the SBB. This monograph brings together Max Vogt's 100 most important buildings, which, as witnesses of post-war modernism, stand for a cultural opening of Switzerland and a building culture that still has an unbroken belief in progress, and describes the special conditions under which SBB built.
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Observational Cartographies

Georges Kubler The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, Yale University Press, 2008Georges Kubler’s The Shape of Time is a delicate investigation about the history of man-made objects and things under the rubric of visual forms. Facing the requirement to devise better ways of considering the whole range of man-made things, Kubler traces a way to identify human desires and thoughts through the resilience, evolution and abandon of forms. This reading and this way of considering the objects and the built environment is immeasurably useful to us as presents ways to directly interrogate things themselves, awakening an attitude that has to help us to establish methods and principles in our own work. Ryszard Kapuscinski Travels with Herodotus, London: Penguin, 2008In this captivating travel report taking place over millennia and different continents, the reader accompanies both Kapuscinski and Herodotus in their exploration of the world. Thanks to their endless curiosity, they will encounter many new cultures and people, hearing and recording their stories for the sole purpose of preserving memory. Herodotus’ Histories, Kapuscinski’s faithful companion on his journey, was written in 440 BC and is considered to be the founding work of history in Western literature. Through his expeditions and reports, Kapuscinski celebrates story-telling, the transmission of oral knowledge as the very origin of history and, as did Herodotus thousands of years ago, insists on the importance of recording it in order not to lose memory of our past. Roger Paez Operative Mapping: Maps as Design Tools, New York: Actar, 2019The book’s fundamental aim is to offer a methodological contribution to the design disciplines, both in conceptual and instrumental terms. When added to the resources of contemporary design, operative mapping overcomes the analytical and strictly instrumental approaches of maps, opening up the possibility of working both pragmatically and critically by acknowledging the need for an effective transformation of the milieu based on an understanding of pre-existing conditions. The book joins together a review of the theoretical body of work on mapping from the social sciences with case studies from the past 30 years in architecture, planning, and landscape design in the interest of linking past practices with future ones.


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Human Geography

Richard Sennett The Craftsman, London: Penguin Books, 2008In a both accurate and rigorous way, Richard Sennett investigates the different conditions that have defined the development of «craft» over the last centuries until nowadays. How come our human nature pushes us to feel the desire to «do a job well for its own sake»? Referring for instance to the conflict between the hand-drawing and the Computer-Aided-Design programs, Sennet depicts the importance of the head and the hand being deeply connected and interdependent when learning and practising skills. Through different lenses – historical, sociological, political, among others – this book explores the virtues of craftsmanship as we should perceive them today. Richard Sennett Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation, Yale University Press, 2012In Together, the sequel to his most influential work The Craftsman, Richard Sennett urges that living with people who differ – racially, ethnically, religiously or economically – is the most important challenge that we are facing nowadays, as members of a highly competitive and self-centred culture and society. Sennett traces the origins of the idea of cooperation and explores it as a tool to develop more complex and integrated societies. In this work, cooperation is defined not as an inherited value of a society but as a craft that needs to be embedded and enacted. This lecture is relevant for our studio as it presents a framework of the values that we as architects should integrate in the spaces we design.
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Ways of Living

Witold Rybczynski Home: A short History of an idea, London: Penguin Books, 1987This book proposes a walk through five centuries of homes both great and small – from the smoke-filled manor halls of the Middle Ages to today's Ralph Lauren-designed environments – on a house tour like no other, one that delightfully explicates the very idea of "home." Investigating how social and cultural changes influenced styles of decoration and furnishing, the reader will learn the connection between wall-hung religious tapestries and wall-to-wall carpeting, discover how some of the most welcome luxuries were born of architectural necessity, among many other reflections. Most of all, Home opens a rare window into our private lives – and how we really want to live. Gaston Bachelard The poetics of Space, London: Penguin Books, 2014. First published in 1958Bachelard’s seminal work brims with quiet revelations and stirring, mysterious imagery. This lyrical journey takes as its premise the emergence of the poetic image and finds an ideal metaphor in the intimate spaces of our homes. Guiding us through a stream of meditations on poetry, art, and the blooming of consciousness itself, Bachelard examines the domestic places that shape and hold our dreams and memories. Houses and rooms; cellars and attics; drawers, chests, and wardrobes; nests and shells; nooks and corners: No space is too vast or too small to be filled by our thoughts and our reveries. Robin Evans Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997Robin Evans was a historian whose writings covered a wide range of architectural concerns: society's involvement in building types; spatial relations; aspects of geometry; and modes of projection. This text brings together eight of Robin Evans's essays, including Mies van der Rohe's Paradoxical Symmetries and others that were first published in the AA Files series. Written over a period of 20 years from 1970 to 1990, the essays are representative of his diverse body of work. The essays are supported by an introduction by Mohsen Mostafavi, a survey of Evans's writings by Robin Middleton, and an annotated bibliography by Richard Difford.
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Barcelona

Berta Marsé; Ricardo Feriche; Javier Velasco Barcelona: Avedon, Cartier-Bresson, Erwitt…, Barcelona: La Fábrica, 2014It is always a voyage to approach a photographical report of a city. It transports us to another time and its people, streets, history and to a style that still reverberates in the places we can experience nowadays. This volume prepared by La Fábrica editorial is for us an exquisite compilation showing the take of Barcelona from the most recognised photographers of the XX’s century, both outsiders (Avedon, Cartier-Bresson) and insiders (Miserachs, Pomés, Català-Roca), creating an atmosphere around the topics of a vivid urban experience and defining a strong understanding of the culture about inhabiting the city of Barcelona, its richness and variety. Manuel de Solà-Morales i Rubio Ten lessons on Barcelona: urbanistic episodes that have made the modern city, Barcelona: COA de Catalunya, 2008In his Ten lessons, Solà-Morales delivers a sharp and concise description of the ten key episodes – both successes and failures – which helped define the urban character of modern Barcelona. From the laying out of decisive new streets and squares, the extension project of the Eixample to the annexation of the small towns surrounding the walled center, the reader gets a precise, accessible and extremely well documented insight in the evolution of the city. This book represents an essential introduction to the urban study of Barcelona, including historical, territorial, social and architectural perspectives. Estanislau Roca; Inés Aquilué; Renata Gomes Walking the city: Barcelona as an urban experience, Barcelona: Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2015Walking the city presents us the city of Barcelona, its people and its neighbourhoods through the lenses one obtains by wandering its streets and squares, following the wills of one’s own perception and intuition. This lecture is based on a teaching experience from the urban design department of Barcelona, using the city as a classroom and a laboratory of urban experience. This lecture is important for us as it focuses on the phenomenological experience of the urban environment and shows how different layers of perception are unfolded directly approaching architecture, urbanism, sociology and history through the experience of a city. Manuel de Solà-Morales i Rubio Cerdà / Ensanche, Barcelona: Actar, D.L., 2008Cerdà / Ensanche approaches the man and the famous plan that has defined the urban form and evolution of the city of Barcelona for the past 150 years. The book, based on a lecture, tries to understand the mindset behind a plan, its context and evolution. Furthermore, the lecture is relevant to us because it presents the plan as something alive, with its qualities and weaknesses, where urban planners and architects are still defining its final shape and utterly its character and meaning. Paco Elvira; Ignacio Vidal-Folch Barcelona vista por los grandes fotografos, Barcelona: Lunwerg, 2013This book presents a vast selection of photographs of Barcelona, from 1870 until today, including the works of famous artists such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Otho Lloyd, Robert Capa, Bill Brandt, Humberto Rivas, Joan Fontcuberta, Eugeni Forcano or Oriol Maspons. These photographs portray the different physical, social or spatial realities of a city that has been constantly evolving over the years, offering us both a precise and intimate view in the urban imaginary of Barcelona. As the anthologist of this book Paco Elvira once wrote: «when memories have vanished from our minds, photography becomes our collective memory». Joan Busquets Grau Barcelona: la construcció urbanística d'una capital compacta, Barcelona: Laboratori d’Urbanisme de Barcelona UPC, 2018Barcelona may be considered as a prototype of a European Mediterranean city with a long urban tradition. As such, it has followed a specific process of historical formation, characterised by the density and compactness of the urban form and its evolution by extension rather than by reform. This book focuses on the construction of Barcelona based on its most important planning operations and urban projects. The local scale of many of these projects contrasts with the cosmopolitan aspirations that have made some of the interventions so innovative. It is difficult to determine their spatial repercussions, but the history of urbanism in Barcelona shows that it has already overcome the great contradictions of secularism. J. Emili Hernández-Cros; Gabriel Mora; Xavier Pouplana Arquitectura de Barcelona, Barcelona: Col·legi Oficial d’Arquitectes de Catalunya, 1990 This thorough and detailed architectural guide of Barcelona with over 600 pages presents the most important and historically relevant buildings which marked the evolution of the city over the last centuries. Precisely documented with black and white pictures, drawings and plans but also descriptive texts for each building, this book offers a very complete general overview of Barcelona architecture. Montserrat Galera; Francesc Roca; Salvador Tarragó Atlas de Barcelona, Segles XVI-XX, Barcelona: Col·legi Oficial d’Arquitectes de Catalunya, 1982The Atlas of Barcelona constitutes a solid compilation of maps and drawings of the city of Barcelona from the XVI to the XX Century. Through its pages, one can trace the evolution of the city’s urban form in different periods and different scales. It is a highly relevant document as it will allow us to not only understand the morphology of the contemporary city by studying its past moments but also be able to recover and rethink spaces and forms that the city has lost or that are invisible nowadays. Another interesting topic of this document is that through the compilation of original maps will also trigger the discussion on means and technics of representation and how the reading and understanding of the city can be informed by the way we look at and represent it. Xavier Miserachs Miserachs Barcelona, Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2017The work of Miserachs presents itself like an adventure, a discovery of the city based on the experience of the most ephemeral values of people and places, trying to capture what is characteristic and meaningful of a situation. The images, fragmentary and imperfect don’t censor blemishes and feel true records of real people shown with intimacy and confidence. The compilation feels relevant to us as it enriches our view of the city and further than that defines an attitude to get closer to these less tangible human values that the city offers. Manolo Laguillo Barcelona 1978-1997, Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2007The witness of Manolo Laguillo on Barcelona between 1978 and 1997 defines the frame of a city that is still present and in transformation nowadays and constitutes a project that we will be studying with attention. His pictures, most of them taken on early morning walks together with Humberto Ribas, show both the periphery and the old town with the attitude of a wanderer, finding inherent potential and a strong sense of identity by the mere act of carefully watching: blank walls, open abandoned spaces, demolitions and wild nature evoke a strong sense of freedom and open possibility in the popular and informal areas.
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D-ARCH

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