Technology and the City by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030523138
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

12.1 Introduction

In this chapter we analyse how computer tools for architectural design, when handed over to inhabitants, can realise a number of values of these inhabitants, of architects, and of cities. The value central to this hand-over is customisation of housing, yet the impact goes beyond customisation and involves also inhabitants’ values such as autonomy and the structural safety of their housing. A large-scale use of these computer tools can moreover realise values of cities such as the social fabric of neighbourhoods and city identity. Other values are in turn less realised or maybe even not realised, such as urban architectural innovation and the authority of architects. Computer tools for architectural design can thus have a profound impact on inhabitants, architects, and cities. Moreover, these computer tools can materialise the vision of design for values as currently explored in philosophy of technology. The analysis we present in this chapter is about these two promises of computer tools for architectural design. And we introduce shape grammar design systems as the technology that can create these computer tools.

Architects have already for decades researched possibilities for realising the value of customisation by creating diversified designs for housing that satisfy the individual needs and aspirations of inhabitants. In 1933 Le Corbusier presented his Plan Obus for Algiers which included a monumental spiralling building looking like a shell on which highways would be built on the roofs and in which houses would be constructed by the inhabitants, as in a medina. In the same period other modernist architects proposed housing solutions that were attempts to give more freedom to inhabitants. Mies van der Rohe, for instance, proposes in 1927 for the Weissenhof neighbourhood in Stuttgart a housing building that by using a long continuous glass façade enables an open and flexible use of the interior space not constrained by predefined walls. Both solutions enable inhabitants to design and redesign their apartment layouts according to their needs without having to obey to a strict common building layout. Later, during the 1960s architects reacted against the large-scale development of mass-produced homogeneous residential buildings. The architect H.P. Berlage, for instance, characterised the standardised uniform housing that comes with those buildings as an assault upon the inhabitants, upon their “personality, upon their freedom, upon their humanity; this kind of housing turns one into a herd-animal, a serf, a dependent” (Habraken, 1972, p. 2). Several attempts were made in architecture to promote customised housing diversity and the solutions presented included aesthetically appealing ones, such as the utopic cells units of Archigram and Habitat 67 by Moshe Safdie. Other attempts followed the Open Building approach by John Habraken (1972), the mobile architecture approach by Yona Friedman (Friedman, 1958; Tan, 2008), or the incremental housing approach promoted by Reinhard Goethert (Goethert, 2010) of which the Elemental solutions for social housing (Aravena & Iacobelli, 2016) are a contemporary successful example. As a more radical extreme we may find Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1958) with his Manifesto Against Rationalism in Architecture, in which he argues that the apartment-house inhabitant “must [.

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