Structuralism (Architecture)

The book Architecture and Structuralism — The Ordering of Space is intended as Hertzberger’s definitive text on structuralism, and is at once a synopsis of his earlier books, such as Lessons for Students in Architecture I & II, as well as an effort to enrich and bring his theoretical framework up-to-date.

This paper is an introduction into major theoretical notions and ideas born by Herman Hertzberger, whose books have not been published in Russian as yet. The basic concepts of 'architectural structuralism' are described and illustrated by exceptions from Hertzberger's texts.

This research combines multiple theoretical approaches to consider the relationship between architectural spatial configurations and spatial practices in one Camden housing estate. Two primary theoretical fields are reviewed and critiqued: semiotic and structuralism and theories of the everyday. A key focus is the way in which architecture is discussed in visual or aesthetics terms with little reference to its spatial characteristics. This is diagnosed in the literature of architectural semiotics and structuralism, history and criticism of housing and everyday accounts of architecture. Using the work of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau the argument is made that spatial configurations are intimately linked to spatial practices. This work is partly pre-figured by social and other critiques of the perceived autonomy of the architecture of the 1950s and 1960s. A review of key texts by Kevin Lynch, Jane Jacobs and Oscar Newman identify some of the potential of a socio-spatial approach to architectural criticism.
Within the field of the everyday (and others) the tendency towards privileging agency is countered by de Certeau’s balanced account of the relationship between forms and practices.
A review of some of the literature on Camden housing highlights the aesthetic bias setting up a sketch analysis of one estate focusing on the specificity of its spatial configurations and their relationship to practices. The case study looks at a few selected moments of a large estate in Camden, calling into play many of the issues raised, to show how specific configurations relate to present and historical forms, practices and interpretations. The intent is to provide a suggestive reading that reveals the weaknesses of previous reviews as well as pointing towards the development of a spatial approach to architecture which connects the specificity of forms to the way in which they are practiced thus highlighting the responsibility of forms.

"This paper addresses several ideas proposed in the conference description. To begin with the paper, based on a recently completed research project, will engage with ‘alternative readings of territory and a range of spatial practices’. It does this through the identification of ‘patterns of rituals of occupation’ identifying how ‘daily routines and activity are curtailed, moulded and adapted to a particular environment.’ It will however contest the increasingly presumed domination of human agency in spatial discourses. That is, it will test whether form is as insignificant as is suggested by James Gowan’s statement: ‘I can east a sandwich in any size of room.’
This is done through a critical reading of the work of Lefebvre, de Certeau, and others. I will propose that de Certeau’s view of the relation between spatial configurations and practices achieves a (rare) dialectical balance where neither form nor practice is privileged. As such, it identifies form as an active (but not fully determinant) participant in the formation of practices, inhabitation and meaning.
The paper will sketch out the basic premises of the above authors and will identify both the strengths and gaps in applications of theories of the everyday, space and spatial practices. The paper will also highlight the difficulty (or reluctance) in translating these ideas to concrete situations. In conclusion, by reference to a mundane space and practice – the entry sequence leading to front doors in 1970s housing estates – a case will be made for how these theories can be understood on a formal level while remaining attentive to the differences of individual practices. A comparison of contemporary and historical entry sequences and individual modifications to these will suggest an arena where everyday practices, spatial form and history intersect. The aim is to suggest a way of looking at spaces that accounts for human action while acknowledging the responsibility of form."

This article outlines the phenomenon of West Germany’s new universities for the masses. Seldom have so many universities of such size been built so quickly as in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. Nearly 40 new universities were established across the country. It is a known fact that, from a political point of view, the priority was to provide as much space as possible quickly and cheaply. Following the concept of the functional city and the logic of increased efficiency by concentration, the vast majority of the new university complexes were constructed as large-scale structures outside of historic city centers. Architects seized the opportunity and designed the publicly financed large-scale complexes as urban utopias on a small scale, as I am going to show drawing mainly on examples in Bochum, Marburg, Berlin, Bielefeld and Constance. A key consideration – beyond efficiency – was the issue of flexibility. Inspired by systems theory, architects developed megastructures and building systems that would allow the academic communities to modify its buildings according to their needs in the future. However, the expectations that these New Universities might, due to their size and complexity, develop the same dynamism as historic towns, that were perceived to have ‘grown organically’, were fulfilled to a very limited extent only. Nonetheless, the mass universities are impressive testimony to the political, technical and urban planning spirit of the 1960s.

The interpretation of architectural phenomena through the semiotic methodological approach was brought to the attention of scholars in Italy starting in the mid-1960s, when some intellectuals and historians – such as Giovanni Klaus Koenig, Renato De Fusco, Umberto Eco, Maria Luisa Scalvini, Vittorio Gregotti, and others – began to take part in the ongoing debate on the problem of ‘evaluativity’ and on the notion of ‘value’ in the aesthetic field, including the historiographical dimension. At that time, linguistics applied to architecture had become a field of study of the more general science of signs. Some architectural historians assumed that the scientific discipline devoted to cultural phenomena, seen as communication, also included architectural disciplines, destined by their nature to modify “reality on a three-dimensional level”. This paper deals with the ways in which such semiotic themes were addressed, as ‘operative criticism’, toward the foundation of a theory of architecture, increasingly intertwined with the history of architecture, also thanks to the journal Op. cit., founded in 1964. In particular, the paper offers an analysis of the writings of Maria Luisa Scalvini (1934-2017), one of the leading exponents of Italian ‘semiological criticism’, who entered the heart of the debate with the publication in 1968 of the volume Spazio come campo semantico. The semiotic themes were presented – as in many of her other writings – in a clear way, convinced as she was that the structuralist approach and the metaphorical use of linguistic analogy were fundamental to an understanding of the semantic contents and symbolic values of historical architectural signs, including those in an urban context.

The Dragvoll University Campus in Trondheim, Norway, is celebrating its 50th anniversary. On January 29, 1970, the jury for the Nordic architectural competition decided that the architect Henning Larsen’s competition draft of a campus at Dragvoll had won. In this article, I discuss the importance of Dragvoll from historical and aesthetic perspectives. The article introduces the following six themes: ‘A prehistory about city regulation’ deals with the large-scale regulation plans (from 1962 onwards) that integrated the development of the Dragvoll University Campus. ‘Dahlem and Dragvoll’ presents the development of the Free University Berlin at Dahlem, led by the architects Georges Candilis, Alexis Josic, Shadrach Wood and Manfred Schiedhelm (from 1963 onwards), as a major source of inspiration for Henning Larsen when designing the University of Trondheim at Dragvoll. ‘Both big and close’ deals with the planning of Dragvoll (from 1968 onwards) and how the huge building structure was divided into small-scale modules with in-between interior streets and bridges for fast and democratic communication (the late-1960s plan included 700,000 square metres, today the Dragvoll University Centre for the Humanities and Social Sciences has an area of 83,300 square metres). ‘Typologies in the history of universities’ introduces Henning Larsen’s historical-typological periodisation and the architectural historian Claes Caldenby’s building typology, which they used (in the 1970s and the 1990s, respectively) in order to locate university building complexes, like Dragvoll, in the history of universities. ‘Dragvoll’s analog and digital sides’ discusses how Henning Larsen and his project group incorporated both analog and digital solutions in the building structure (from the 1970s onwards) and that the University continuously has upgraded Dragvoll with new information and communication technologies. Finally, ‘Dragvoll during the next 50 years’ introduces some thoughts about how the Dragvoll University Campus may be used in sustainable ways in the coming decades (from the 2020s onwards).

Two relevant phenomena question the architectural, engineering and construction worlds today: the environmental issue as well as emerging digital trends. Timber architecture is especially representative of these transformations. The world's renewed interest in using this material, particularly in Europe, is deeply bound to an emergent serious environmental thinking. At the same time, timber construction merges with digital logic. The development of wood engineering based on an indepth knowledge of the material has led to the necessary modeling on which the software tools are based. Otherwise, the qualities of shaping, assembling, rising and dismantling have facilitated its insertion into an economy of digitized production. The byte becomes a new companion to wood by offering the latter the possibility to interfere in a data continuum that goes from integrated design in robotic manufacturing. In the framework of this reflection, our purpose will focus on one question : how the aforementioned environmental and digital transformations foster the arising of new architectural and construction vocabularies? We will particularly focus on five patterns of timber architecture : cell walls, grid shells, dense layering parametric stacking, pleated envelopes. By focusing on their structural dimension, these patterns illustrate what we call "poetic structuralism".

This article presents a theoretical discussion about the heuristic value of the descriptive instruments of the city in the research on situated ambiances, which is based on a reflection on the urban section and the epistemological model that Carlo Ginzburg named “evidential”. This reflection was carried out in the context of an interdisciplinary field research on the issue of domestic waste collection in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. First, we characterize the disperse and heterogeneous elements – related to subjects and the built space – that the section permits gathering as “clues”, which allows the visualization of an ambiance, conceived as a unity. Following that, we discuss the theoretical status of that unity, conceived as a structure. For this purpose, we introduce the distinction between real object and object of knowledge, as proposed in the beginning of the 20th century by the founder of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure. Through such a distinction, we seek to avoid a conception of space that is founded on a substantialist idea of “totality”. Based on such considerations, the urban section will not be defined as a “representation of the space” (a real object), but rather as a “registry of a view” on it (a theoretical object). Lastly, as a writing technology, the urban section will be characterized as a tool for fabricating a shared view on the city. In this sense, it could contribute to establish a common ground of debate for the various and heterogeneous disciplinary fields and registries of knowledge about the sensory experience summoned by the notion of ambiance.

8 papers from Section 16 (Asian and Oceanic Prehistory) Acts of the XIVth UISPP Congress, University of Liège, Belgium, 2-8 September 2001. Contents: 1) Circular Earthworks in East Cambodia and South Vietnam: New Results from 2000-2001 (M.N. Haidle); 2) Niveaux d'habitat et sépultures de l'âge du Fer à Ban Yang Thong Tai, province de Chiang-Mai (Thaïlande) (J.-P. Pautreau, P. Mornais, T. Doy Asa); 3) Unexplored Valleys, Potential Frozen Kurgans and Heritage Management. Belgian Archaeological Research in the Altai Republic (Russian Federation): Survey and Inventory 1996-2000 (I. Bourgeois, J. Bourgeois); 4) Ancient Hunter-Gatherers, First Sedentary Farmers and Nomad Stock Herders of Mongolia (8000-3000 BC): New Researches at Tamsagbulag (Dornod Aimak) (M.L. Séfériadès); 5) Skeletal Markers of Task Activities in Iron Age Human Remains from Tell Mishrife (Central Syria) (A. Canci, D. Morandi Bonacossi); 6) Le premier peuplement de la Nouvelle-Caledonie : Poteries Lapita et sociétés océaniennes colonisatrices (C. Sand, J. Bole & A. Ouetcho); 7) Structure, Spatial Metaphors and Landscape: A Study of the Ceremonial Marae Temple Grounds in the Society Islands, French Polynesia (P. Wallin, R. Solsvik); 8) An Early Iron Age Population Settlement System in Western Siberia (N.P. Matveeva).

Resumen
El presente artículo sintetiza la evolución de la economía del desarrollo desde el siglo XVI hasta la actualidad. Describe el enfoque estructuralista y reconstruye el proceso de desarrollo económico del Municipio de Tausa (Cundinamarca-Colombia) desde la época precolombina hasta comienzos del siglo XXI. Con base en el método histórico-estructural, analiza el problema del desarrollo económico de Tausa bajo las administraciones municipales entre 2004 y 2019. Por último, se realizan recomendaciones en relación con el desarrollo económico del Municipio.

Abstract
This article synthesizes the evolution of the development economy from the 19th century to nowadays.  It describes the structuralist approach and reconstructs the process of economic development in the Municipality of Tausa (Cundinamarca – Colombia) from the pre-Columbian period to the beginning of the 21st century. Based on the historical-structural methods, it analyses the problem of Tausa’s economic development under the municipal administrations from 2004 to 2019. Lastly, it makes recommendations regarding the economic development of the Municipality.

The technological issue of the relationship between mechanical services and structural research in the architecture of 20th century became certainly one of the most important lines for development and innovation of Modern architectural style. With respect to this topic, the paper analyses, as a key of interpretation, the role of installations to determine the relationship between envelope and structural layout in the construcitve logic of the framework. In this sense the paper highlights on the type of single-storey factories built in Italy between 1950 and 1975, analysing some built works by Marco Zanuso and Aldo Favini through the archival records. These works show how this type of building gain to paradigmatic innovations, transforming the tectonic joint into an integrated device, whose form was the result of the definition of the mechanical components as technical writing.

The paper investigates the impact of the building industrialization in the Italian architectural culture of the Second Post-war. The technological underdevelopment of the Italian scene becomes an opportunity for architects and engineers to imagine new design paradigms which stem from an artisanal way of using materials. In the North of Italy, the issue of the relationship between design and industrial culture is crucial in a part of the Angelo Mangiarotti, Gino Valle and Marco Zanuso’s work. Their ‘know-how’ deals with as much the universal and generic language of industrialisation as the archaic and anonymous rural building tradition. Focusing on the Zanuso’s experience as designer to industry, the author seeks out a Tectonics of reinforced concrete structural precast. Between Fifties and Seventies, albeit Italy embodies the metaphorical South in the European scene of technological progress, apart from the school of structural engineers by Nervi, Morandi and Musmeci, a different ‘made in Italy’ takes hold. It aims to a possible balance between the craftsman and the industrial culture.

En 1961, el arquitecto holandés Joop van Stigt recibe el encargo de realizar un pequeño comedor para personal en la Universidad de Twente. Su propuesta, que parte de un razonamiento estructural de gran precisión –tanto en términos geométricos como portantes– denota a la vez un extraordinario esfuerzo por enfatizar la dimensión más háptica del espacio construido. A medio camino entre lo exacto y lo imperfecto, lo abstracto y lo palpable, lo artificial y lo natural, este proyecto se apoya en el valor orgánico de la madera como material constructivo, reivindicando una línea de investigación alternativa al paradigma maquinista que busca redimirse de los excesos cartesianos del movimiento moderno para volver a acercar la arquitectura al hombre y a la naturaleza. // In 1961, the Dutch architect Joop van Stigt received the commission to design a small staff canteen at the University of Twente. His proposal, which takes as a point of departure a very precise structural reasoning –both in geometric and bearing terms– reveals a simultaneous extraordinary effort to emphasize the haptic dimension of the built space. Halfway between exactness and imperfection, between abstraction and a palpable condition, between the artificial and the natural world, this project is based on the organic value of wood as a building material, calling for a line of research alternative to the machinist paradigm, which seeks a redemption from the Cartesian anxieties of the modern movement, in order to bring architecture closer to man and nature.

Тази публикация разлежда конструктивните елементи на сградата. Тя ги класифицира и систематизира в матричен вид. Това е базирано на съществуваща архитектурно-конструктивна класификационна система заявена от Радоев [1], която обхваща зални покрития. Нейната математическа обработка води до извеждане на нова система от основните конструктивни елементи на сградата като разширение и допълнение на съществуващата матрица. Съществено при системата е това, че тя е архитектурно-конструктивна като тези два аспекта се разглеждат неделимо един от друг и без да се следва познавателно неестественото разделяне на конструкциите на архитектурни и инженерни (или други).
Теоретичното представяне на такъв модел дава възможност за:
 Ясно визуално и логическо подреждане на конструктивните елементите на сградата, което онагледява техния произход един от друг и от функцията им;
 Педагогически правилен и всеобхватен модел за представяне, преподаване и изучаване на елементите на конструкцията заедно и като неделима част от залните покрития; произхода и връзката им едни с други;
 Морфологичното им изследването в съответствие с избрани фиксирани и изменящи се параметри и/или конкретни случаи образувани от тези параметри;
Класификация и систематизация на елементите на сградите съществува според множество и различни критерии. Настоящата система прави разлика между елементи въобще и конструктивни елементи, т.е. такива който участват в главна носеща контрукция на сградата. Настоящата система предоставя цялостен, моментно-обозрим математички модел, който освен че придава на класификацията нагледен вид, позволява редица изследвания според множество различни критерии.

Territorial transitions are uncertain phenomena which must be oriented through the definition of new settling forms. But how can architects design for inhabitants whose identity is uncertain as well?
The experience of the Netherlands facing both the investment programmes of the welfare state and the reforms of the neoliberal turn is exemplary with this respect. In particular, the Dutch case demonstrates how territorial transitions require architects to disregard any logic of recognition between preordained building and user types and rather consider this relation as a transaction, i.e. a process of reciprocal determination between concrete environments and subjects based on a series of situated operations the latter perform with respect to the former. Even more, an initial operation of estrangement was sometimes adopted to let subjects suspend their assumptions and establish new dwelling practices on the basis of an original inquiry.
The objective of the thesis is to define a methodology which allows architects to consider the process of transaction in both the analysis of existing buildings and the design of new projects. To this end, the research draws upon pragmatist semiotics and applies it to the analysis of Dutch case studies in order to abstract a series of transactive building types which can help us manage the territorial transitions of the near future.