Product Description

8 MULTI-FAMILY HOUSING Editorial Pencil Books

This book presents a variety of multi-family housing, showing many different kinds of projects. With a truly global scope, a wide range of conditions and problems require a wide range of design and construction solutions. Works by Baumschlager, Neutelings Riedijk Architecten, Julien De Smedt and many more demonstrate different densities, typologies and contexts.

The exhaustive detail in this book means that buildings are examined with an intensity rarely shown elsewhere. Plans at all levels, full construction briefs and quality photography make this an essential book.

Claus en Kaan Architecten, Holanda: ‘Ter Huivra Joure’ (2004), Charles Pictet FAS/SIA, Suiza: ‘Immeuble a Vandoeuvre’ (2006), TVH Arkitekten, Suecia: ‘Double House in Danderyd’ (2005), Joke Vos Architecten, Holanda: ‘Periscopen Houses’ (2006), Baumschlager & Eberle, Austria: Achslengut Residences (2002).

Format: Book
Pages: 340
Publisher: Editorial Pencil
Date Published: Aug 2008
ISBN: 9788493598075
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TALKING ARCHITECTURE: FROM THE STANDARD TO THE PROJECT
Juan Calduch

Whenever an inhabitant of a kasbah in the foothills of the Atlas mountains, a peasant from the villages near lake Atitlan in Guatemala, a fisherman in a Polynesian island, an Eskimo in the north pole or a resident from Los Angeles in Califor- nia decides to build a home, that person knows exactly what he wants. There is no need for them to draw it or explain it in detail to the person building it if that person forms a part of their own cultural setting, above and beyond generic indications about the cost, location or more personal issues. However, the Eskimo might be unpleasantly surprised to end up with a Polynesian home, the Californian with an Eskimo home or the peasant from Guatemala with a Moroccan construction. For each one has an idea of the formal structure and characteristics of the home that will fulfil their expec- tations, which responds to the standard home that corresponds to their social environment and lifestyle.
Like a language, a standard home is something that is learned within the context of every person’s culture and belongs to the common values with which they identify, remaining dormant to a large extent. It is not necessary to know gra- mmar to speak correctly or be trained as an architect to know what type of home one wants. A gabbling child is soon able to learn about the structure of his language and is also able to draw the rough basic outline of a standard house. As Maffei and Cannigia say, that common idea of the standard lies in spontaneous conscience about the standard, which “… is not a concept of part of the object and not a functional-distributive scheme, a structure or a façade. It is all these at the same time, and all the adjectives we could apply to that same object”. For that reason, just like a linguist studying the structure of a language, an architect planning a residential building needs to know what the standard home of that collective conscience is like, if that architect is to fulfil the aspirations of the future residents. A strange situation thus arises: just as a person who wants others to understand what he is saying cannot use language at will, but based on a series of rules, an architect is not free to do what he wants, if he is to create an architecture that can be understood and accepted. He cannot let his imagination fly freely or his fantasy explore new and surprising horizons, but on the contrary, he must obey the guidelines established by the cultural setting in which he moves, moving through a well-known area that responds to the social setting in which he works. However, this does not mean he is constrained to necessarily repeating pre-existing designs, in a mechanical process of reiterated replicas.
Unlike a model in which it is necessary to make an exact copy or a prototype that serves to make a series of identical objects, the standard in architecture is not something that must be reproduced exactly, but a formal structure that lays down a guideline and establishes limits on what can and cannot be done, without closing the door to new adjustments and controlled modifications, which can extend the standard series through new links. Planning is infringing modifying, adjusting and increasing habitual solutions by means of similar proposals which are, however, different alternatives. In actual fact, the work of the architect is quite similar to that of a poet for whom the laws of language or common words used are not a burden that constrains his expressivity, but rather a trampoline that opens up new ways of giving unusual meanings to what is already known.
As indicated by the cognitive theories, all knowledge is based on repetition, on situations that have similar qualities, on recurring guidelines that give rise to the possibility of comparing and classifying, obtaining principles that can be applied to similar future occasions. We are faced with the difficult frontier and unstable balance between mere redundancy which repeats what is known without contributing any information, and total innovation which, being radical, makes learning impossible, since there is nothing that makes it intelligible. The mission of the architect consists of including in one object the building, the formal structure of the standard used and jumping from the abstract level to the reality of what is specific. For that reason, and because they are situated on different planes, architectural proposals cannot accurately reflect the standard to which they are ascribed but are always different variations of that standard. The pa- radox is that those capillary modifications made by the architect in his project, which are based on what is usual and familiar, are able to change and modify it, while consolidating and enriching that standard. As a result, understanding an architectural project takes on a different depth when we analyse it together with all those with which it shares the same typological series, revealing all those aspects that remain constant, above and beyond the specific changes made in each case. It is something like language, which grows constantly through the contributions of the poets who not only consolidate it, but amplify it.

The residential standards that reflect our contemporary world have gradually permeated it, and become inserted into our spontaneous conscience. Some have enjoyed great fortune and been inevitably converted into starting points in our work: new blocks in expansion areas, lineal blocks, terraced houses, apartment blocks, palazzina, semi-detached homes… Among these, there are certain examples in modern architecture that have become necessary milestones of reference, plethoric guides of options for the project, when we aim our work in the direction of any of these. And it is within that context that the examples contained in this book can be understood differently when considered separately. They take on a new meaning, precisely, on analysing them in the typological series to which they belong.

Taking advantage of the conditions of the site, the orientation and setting, playing with the image and skin, incorpo- rating new constructive materials, trying out different combinations in the adding process when giving shape to the building through the modules, introducing mutations into standard reference solutions by adding or subtracting pieces and elements, systemising the dimensional grids based on the shape of the terrain, using the options afforded by the urban morphology in which the building is inserted, adapting to the often rigid design conditions established by the applicable regulations, all this is what enables the architect to walk the path that goes from the generic standard to the individual singularity of his project.
But there are still more projectual tools which the authors included in this book habitually use. For standards are not watertight, but admit combinations, mergers and symbiosis. Combining apartment blocks with building blocks, corridor blocks and two-storey homes, terraced houses and palazzina are just some of the available options. And, going even further, one can establish a singular tension between residential standards and other urban standards such as offices, stores, classrooms and nurseries that are adjacent to each other or boxed inside the same units on which the actions are being carried out, for instance the student homes in Utrecht by Köther/Salman/Koedijk Architecten, which coexist alongside meeting areas and university facilities. The home for single workers and couples with shared communal services, built by Scharoun in Siedlung in Wroclaw, could be an early precursor of this testing of residential alternatives, based on typological bonds.

The specific way in which each author channels his work and the questions that take on relevance and arouse his interest, superimposed on the typological choice made as the starting point, lead to results in which each project is unique and unrepeatable, without this meaning that it is autistic, and removed from the future of architecture channe- lled by the standards that people expect to find. It is worth noting that the authors of the works contained in this book, in explaining their works, allude to some of these matters without explicitly mentioning the architectural standards on which their proposals are based. Perhaps the choice of the standard on which their designs are founded is hidden in their subconscious or perhaps it is so obvious that they do not think it worth commenting on. And, on the contrary, they think it necessary to mention all those specific aspects that add nuances, adapt or make their work unique.

In particular, terraced houses were used by some modern architects such as Tessenow or J. J. P. Oud, who was able to combine the need for quality and the standards of hygiene and comfort of modern man with the traditional form of filling low-density urban areas, in addition to using a formal experimentation component that linked his work with plastic, avant-garde proposals. To see this, one just has to compare his homes for fishermen in Hoek van Holland with the aligned fronts of the adjacent traditional homes, or the buildings surrounding the Kiefhoek district in Rot- terdam, which serve as a screen, protecting it. The houses in Groenoord-Zuid in Schiedam by NIO Architecten, or the Periscope homes in Rotterdam by Joke Vos show that this standard continues to exist beneath the formal codes and images. In turn, Alvaro Siza also uses it in regenerating the São Victor district in Porto, demonstrating that the standard, as a formal structure, survives time, with a much more parsimonious pace of transformation than the buildings that crystallise it. One cannot help recognising this project by Siza in the proposal of Charles Pictet in Geneva, despite the distance between both works, in the common typological series that they share.