Making the City: The Immeuble Cité

In recent years complex form, parametric systems of design and diagrams have become the norm in architecture. If these devices promise endless differentiation and adaptability to multiple situations, identities and performances, the results in fact contribute to a mono-tonous landscape of (value-free) diversity. Against this landscape, Diploma 14 proposes a return to simple forms – not as retreat into the vacuum of self-referentiality (as in the glossy minimalism of contemporary architecture), but as a polemical way to confront (and understand) the insurmountable complexity of the city. Instead of naively mimicking urban complexity with architectural complexity, the unit proposes to critically understand urbanity as something that provides architecture with its very raison d’être, while being itself irreducible to architectural form. For this reason the unit encourages a rigorous (but not cause-and-effect) relationship between enquiries on the nature of the contemporary city and the development of architectural forms based on the composition and estrangement of physical space’s most literal attributes, such as walls, rooms, openings, connections and obstructions.

The aim of the unit is to define an intelligible vocabulary of forms as a basis for rethinking the form of the contemporary city. Consequently, the use of diagrams, gratuitous iconic gestures and parametric complexity is strongly discouraged.

The theme for this year will be the design of an ‘Immeuble Cité’ – a large-scale building with a critical mass comparable to that of the city. The simple premise for such a building will be to reduce the footprint to a minimum impact on the ground, thus countering the sprawl of urbanity. The Immeuble Cité must go beyond the commercial form of towers or any facile iconic or utopian gesture: instead, it is to be conceived as a radical (architectural) test for a number of spatial and political issues such as the relationship between living and work space, new forms of welfare and systems of bio-political government, the will to community or segregation, urban government and the possibility of conflict. The impulse behind this design problem is twofold: on the one hand it aims at a critique and revision of architecture and its specific history, on the other it challenges the present state of architectural form vis-à-vis the politics of the city. The context for this exercise will be the North-Western Metropolitan Area (NWMA), a region of 137 million inhabitants encompassing the old core of the EU (France, Belgium, UK, Germany and The Netherlands). The unit will consider this region as one city and, as such, the framework for the Immeuble Cité.

Bios
Pier Vittorio Aureli is an architect and educator. After graduating from the Istituto di Architettura di Venezia, he obtained masters and PhD degrees at the Berlage Institute/Delft University of Technology. His theoretical studies focus on the relationship between architectural form, political theory and urban history. He currently teaches at the Berlage Institute, where he heads the ‘City as a Project’ PhD programme. Together with Martino Tattara he is the co-founder of Dogma, a prize-winning architectural collective focusing on the project of the city.

Barbara Campbell-Lange has taught at the Royal College of Art, the Bartlett and the AA. A graduate of the Bartlett, the AA, Cooper Union and Cambridge University she has practiced, written on, taught, governed and examined design since 1988. She is a registered architect, a director at the Campbell-Lange Workshop (www.campbell-lange.net) and is currently exploring relationships between space and story.

Fenella Collingridge has taught architecture at the Royal Collage of Art for the last seven years, first with David Adjaye and Domenico Raimondo and latterly with Barbara Campbell-Lange. She has also taught with Peter St John. Fenella’s teaching, writing and work has looked at patterns of inhabitation and urban design at both large and small scales. She published essays with William Owen, ‘Mapping an illustrated guide to graphic navigational systems’, and ‘Architextiles’ with Mark Garcia and the RCA textiles department. For the past two years she has been working with Peter Salter on his four houses in west London and, in complete contrast, with Sue Konu of Project 35 on large-scale social housing schemes. Fenella studied painting at Camberwell and architecture at the AA.