063-0857-21L Subject Semester HS21 (Fachsemester) in the Field of History and Theory in Architecture (Avermaete)
| Semester | Autumn Semester 2021 |
| Lecturers | T. Avermaete, M. Delbeke, P. Ursprung |
| Periodicity | non-recurring course |
| Language of instruction | English |
| Comment | Enrolment in agreement with the chair only. Meetings as required and in consultation with the chair. A student can only register once for a "Fachsemester" during the Master studies! The application deadline is Wednesday 8th September 2021, 8 p.m. You will receive a message about acceptance or rejection for the subject semester by Thursday, September 9, 2021, 2 p.m. at the latest. Students who have been rejected have the opportunity to choose a design class. |
| Abstract | Housing Commons and the City: Zurich Focuses on the housing commons of Zurich, namely collectively owned, non-profit forms of housing ownership (e.g. cooperatives). In the ways that they have been produced, managed, used, maintained, and appropriated, housing commons offer new perspectives to think about contemporary urban challenges such as densification, housing demand, and sustainability. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Learning objective | The Research Studio has two objectives. First, to develop an ‘Archeology’ of Zürich’s housing commons. In this part, the work of the urban historian or theoretician is understood as an archaeological venture. The collective residential stock, as well as the integrated common facilities that often accompany it, will be systematically analyzed as the outcome of codes and as reliant on established practices of ‘commoning’. The result will be a catalogue of city’s cooperative and related networks, illustrating how these provide frameworks for ‘commoning’ and how, as urban figures, they are integrated into and impact upon the city fabric. Secondly, we will develop an ‘Assemblage’ of Zürich’s housing commons by scrutinizing how they are experienced, practised, and developed in the city. To this end, we will analyze the character and role of cooperative and not-for-profit housing, be they in the inner city fabric (historically so-called ‘colonies’), in the city’s fast-densifying residential and post-industrial suburbs (‘settlements’), as well as newer forms of housing ideologically indebted to the social movements of the 1980s, and exploring new forms of communal living and typological innovation through the historical legal framework of housing cooperatives. We will investigate the relations between typological definition and commoning practices, and the negotiations they entail between experts and non-experts, formal and informal agencies, the city and grassroots action groups. The result of the Research Studio will be A Retroactive Manifesto for the city of Zürich, in which the past, present and future roles of housing commons in the city will be discussed, as a more comprehensive project for the city as we know it and as it might evolve. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Content | Housing Commons and the City: The Case of Zurich This Research Studio focuses on the housing commons of Zürich. By ‘housing commons’ we mean various collectively owned, non-profit forms of housing ownership such as associations, public (municipal) housing, and cooperatives, all formats that have built up the backbone of the city’s affordable housing policy since the early 1900s. A long-standing alliance with the local government, financial subsidies historically ratified in popular referendums, and the possibility of leasing city-owned land for development have rendered housing commons prominent, in a housing sector otherwise dominated by market rental and private ownership. About a quarter of the city’s residential stock qualifies as collectively owned housing, a ratio set up to increase to a third by 2040. In a city where 1-person households still make up almost half of the entire residential stock, housing commons are exemplary as models for sustainable densification and typological innovation. In this research studio we will explore how housing commons have been produced, managed, used, maintained, and appropriated, how are they manifest themselves in the city, how they are iconographically or typologically distinguished from the housing on the market. We are particularly interested in how housing commons have contributed to ease the chronic housing shortage in the city, and might continue to do so in the future? We hold that housing commons offer us new perspectives to think about contemporary challenges such as densification, a growing housing demand, and sustainable urban living. Cities have always been places based on common resources and common practices. While designing and constructing the architecture of the city, architects, urban designers, builders, and inhabitants have had to engage with common resources located in particular places and geographies: inherited common-pool resources (water, nature, air); material common-pool resources (clay, brick, stone, wood); and immaterial common-pool resources (craft, knowledge). This understanding of the city, as related to common resources and practices, has gained renewed attention, as neoliberalism replaces ever-shrinking welfare structures, and global urbanization is accompanied by rising inequality. It is not only architects and urban designers who are again becoming interested in alternative principles of governing common resources, but also political movements and society at large. Some of these issues – generally called ‘the commons’ – have also received growing academic attention in the last decades within the fields of critical urban studies, urban history, urban geography and the social sciences. This Research Studio continues the studio’s investigations into the rich history of ‘the commons’ in the city of Zürich by focusing on its residential infrastructures. The ‘housing commons’ will be investigated from architectural, urban, typological, environmental and material perspectives. We will explore how common practices and resources have affected their development in the city, and conversely how the built housing commons enable and structure common practices. The research will unlock an alternative reading of the urban and architectural qualities of the built environment of the city. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Lecture notes | Methodology: Exploring the Tools and Knowledge of the Architect The main hypothesis of the Research Studio is that historical and theoretical research can gain from a profound use of the tools and knowledge of an architect. During the Research Studio students will employ specific architectural tools, such as drawing, writing, and model making to explore historical and theoretical realities. Students will be urged to explore various methods of composing analytical and interpretative drawings. They will reflect upon the capacity of drawing methods from the field of architecture, such as plan drawing, sectional drawings, mappings, serial visions, public drawings, diagramming and perspective representations to act as tools of historical and theoretical research. At the same time, they will be asked to investigate various analytical and interpretative modes of scale-model making. Students may work with different types of models (structural models, mass models, counter form models, landscape and territorial models) as ways to historically or theoretically explore the reality of the city. Far from being simple graphic or artefactual restitutions of the city, these drawings and models will create morphological, thematic or theoretical links between various occurrences in the city. These methods of drawing and model making will be combined with more conventional investigative techniques in the fields of history and theory such as discourse analysis, iconographic studies and compositional investigation, to support a better historical or theoretical understanding of specific occurrences and conditions in the city of Zürich. Students will also be stimulated to use their spatial, formal, material and constructive architectural knowledge to offer alternative historical or theoretical interpretations of the reality that they encounter in the archives, in the library or in the city. They will be asked to activate their specific spatial, typological, compositional, technical, material and constructive expertise to probe into the various historical layers of the architecture of the city in newfangled ways. Within the general theme of housing commons, students will be guided to identify their own subtheme, as well as explore their own different methodologies of doing research. During the Research Studio students will confront their empirical knowledge (about space, typology, composition, technique, material and construction), pertaining to the autonomy of architecture, with other types of knowledge (on politics, economy, the social and cultural) that belong to the heteronomy of architecture. In the relation between autonomous and heteronomous knowledge, a new understanding of the city will be constructed. The combination of these tools and methods will offer an in-depth mode of historical and theoretical research, wherein the students will retro-actively explore the spatial, formal, material and constructive features of a particular situation to uncover and reconstruct the logics that have led to a certain urban condition. On the basis of this research, students will be able to develop an architectural hypothesis of the developments in the city of Zürich. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Prerequisites / Notice | A student can only register once for a "Fachsemester" during the Master studies! The application deadline is Wednesday 8th September, 2021, 8 p.m. You will receive a message about acceptance or rejection for the subject semester by Thursday, September 9, 2021, 2 p.m. at the latest. Students who have been rejected have the opportunity to choose a design class. Self-dependent work. Enrollment on agreement with the chair only. Meetings as required and after consultation with the chair (Wednesdays). The collective and individual projects together will offer an alternative reading, which retro-actively traces the urban territory and architectural quality of the city of Zurich back to the local common resources and common practices. The different materials – texts, drawings, models – will be combined in an atlas, which presents this alternative reading to a larger audience. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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