ACTIVISMAT HOMEArchitects’ own housesas sites of resistance

15-16 January 2018The University of Manchester, UKIsabelle Doucet & Janina Gosseye

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Programme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 05

Abstracts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 09

session 1 / tension domesticity - public life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

session 2 / collaborative/communal practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

session 3 / embodied experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

session 4 / paving the way . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

session 5 / not in my backyard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

session 6 / resisting institutions and systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

session 7 / naturism & ecology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

session 8 / theory into practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

Biographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Practical . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSThis symposium has been made possible thanks to generous financial support from the University of Manchester’s Social Responsibility in the Curriculum Fund, the Manchester Architecture Research Group at the Manchester Urban Institute, the Centre for Architecture Theory Criticism History at the University of Queensland’s School of Architecture, and the Manchester School of Architecture.

Cover: 48’ House by Interloop Image provided by Scott Colman

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Programme

NOTES

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MONDAY 15 JANUARY 2018

09.00 — 09.30 / WELCOME & INTRODUCTION

09.30 — 10.30 / SESSION 1: tension domesticity - public life Living as Guest: The Hospederías of Ciudad Abierta Chile Oscar Andrade Castro & Patricio Cáraves Silva X Square, London NW, London, 1845-59 Nicholas Boyarsky

10.30 — 11.00 / coffee break

11.00 — 12.30 / SESSION 2: collaborative/communal practices Housing the Farmers of Enlightenment Lee Stickells Cortile and Stöckli, Between Commonality and Autonomy: Flora Ruchat Roncati’s Live-work Complex in Riva San Vitale, Ticino, from 1967 Irina Davidovici & Eliana Perotti ‘Critical Regionalist’ Mythologies of Resistance on 118 Benaki St Stylianos Giamarelos

12.30 — 13.30 / lunch break

13.30 — 15.00 / SESSION 3: embodied experiments A Secret Life: Emerging from an Urban Bolt-Hole Robert Riddel The CECA House by Willy Van Der Meeren and Leon Palm: A Policy Whispering Praxis Through Affordable Domesticity Peter Swinnen The Balloon House: An Intense Experience of Inhabiting a Real-life Experiment Nel Janssens

15.00 — 15.30 / coffee break

15.30 — 16.30 / SESSION 4: paving the way Objecting Mainstream: The Architect-Designed House in Contemporary Japan, 1950s-2010s Cathelijne Nuijsink Shaping Modernism in Brussels: Victor Bourgeois, Adrien Blomme & Paul-Amaury Michel and their Personal Residences Linsy Raaffels, Inge Bertels, Stephanie Van de Voorde, Barbara Van der Wee

17.00 — 18.00 / KEYNOTE 1: Sarah Wigglesworth

TUESDAY 16 JANUARY 2018

09.30 — 10.30 / SESSION 5: not in my backyard Those Who Live in Glass Houses Shouldn’t Throw Stones Isabel Rousset The House of a Modern Woman in São Paulo Silvana Rubino

10.30 — 11.00 / coffee break

11.00 — 12.30 / SESSION 6: resisting institutions and systems A Non-Conformist Garage Christina Gray Pliable Praxis House Scott Colman Resisting from Within: The House of Hsieh Ying-Chun as Site of Institutionalized Resistance to Institutionalized Norms Valeria Federighi

12.30 — 13.30 / lunch break

13.30 — 14.30 / KEYNOTE 2: Hilde Heynen

14.30 — 15.00 / coffee break

15.00 — 16.00 / SESSION 7: naturism & ecology Architecture and Naturism: Designing for a New Lifestyle Helena Mattsson Activism at Home: A ‘Barefoot-Architect’ Version Xiang Ren

16.00 — 16.30 / coffee break

16.30 — 18.00 / SESSION 8: theory into practice Charles W. Moore: Body, Memory and the Architect’s Houses Richard Hayes Between Sparta and Sybaris: Rudofsky’s Critical Home Researches Pierre Chabard Activism seen in Jørn Utzon’s own house in Bayview, Australia Chen-Yu Chiu

19.00 — ... / conference dinner (at own expense - prior registration required)

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Abstracts

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session 1: tension domesticity - public life

MONDAY 15 JANUARY 2018 / 9.30 — 10.00 Living as Guest: The Hospederías of Ciudad Abierta ChileOscar Andrade Castro / TUDelft, The NetherlandsPatricio Cáraves Silva / Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile

In 1970, the professors of the School of Architecture and Design at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso founded the Ciudad Abierta (Open City). Located on a 270-hectare terrain 16 km north of the city of Valparaíso, Ciudad Abierta is a place free of any institutional constraints, where to creatively explore the productive relation between poetry and architecture under the unity of life, work and study.

The occupation of the Ciudad Abierta terrains started by accommodating public life, under the fundamental idea that ‘to live publicly is to talk. And talk is before anything to have the capacity to hear another. May in this way, someone truly be the host of other. This hospitality, simple but radical, demands architecture, as demands the splendor of any trade’. Accordingly, the principle of Hospitality is a fundamental practice and core

generative idea in the architecture of Ciudad Abierta. That is why the first constructions were the Agoras, the place of the public word, and together with them the first dwellings, in which the open citizens could reside in order to receive others and exert Hospitality. Even those who live permanently on the Ciudad Abierta grounds, are considered guests, which is why the dwellings were not called houses, but Hospederías (lodges).

This paper aims to analyze the Hospederías as a spatial incarnation of the principle of Hospitality practiced by the architects of Ciudad Abierta. Conceived as a space open to receive others in order to hear them and be heard, the Hospederías seek to accommodate the public realm along with the intimacy of domestic life. This attempt has produced particular social practices, the impersonality of spaces, the rejection of private property and the rotation of the inhabitants occupying the Hospederías. Furthermore, particular spatial and programmatic characteristics have arisen from this experience. For instance, the conception of the table as an architectural element, and the living room as a public interior square assuming the role of the origin and programmatic core of the project. Aspects such as unsettled-ness, and the tension between intimate and collective life will be explored in this text. The analysis of this particular case study has been done through archival research, interviews and site analysis.

Hospedería del Errante, Ciudad Abierta, 2004. Archivo Histórico José Vial Armstrong

MONDAY 15 JANUARY 2018 / 10.00 — 10.30X Square, London NW, London, 1845-59Nicholas Boyarsky / Boyarsky Murphy Architects, UK

This paper will describe the evolution of a London terrace house over fifty years. Beginning as a site for experimental living in the early 1960s, it became a hub for radical architectural pedagogy in the 1970s and 1980s, and since 1991 the house has been the site for structural and interior experimentation and an evolving research archive of architectural drawings and books, documents and ephemera from the 1960s onwards. The paper will chart how internal changes to the house have reflected and responded toarchitectural discourse over this period and explore through original documentation how these changes have continued to leave their traces. It will also speculate on domesticity in the context of two particular sets of family dynamics and how this was expressed spatially.

A Brief Chronology:

1. Experimental Living 1963-1972Robin Middleton, Technical Editor of AD magazine 1964-72, director of General Studies at AA,1972-1987, Librarian and Lecturer at Cambridge, later renowned architectural historian at Columbia University;Ruth Lakofski, architect, artist, sister of Denise Scott Brown,1933-2008;Billy Walton, artist, died 2004.

BasementPatrick Duncan & partner Madeleine, graphic designer for covers of AD magazine in 1970s. Later tap dancer.

The house was fully refurbished in the early 60s by Robin who was working alongside the Archigram Group and, I believe, Theo Crosby for Taylor Woodrow on Euston Station. It featured submarine doors, extraordinary bathrooms and fittings, industrial and emergency light fittings, rubber, tiles etc. We believe that Ron Herron worked on some of the details. Drawings from 1960s.

2. X Square/Bedford Square - Sites for Radical Pedagogy 1972 - 91Alvin Boyarsky, founder of IID, Chairman of AA 1927-1991;Elizabeth Boyarsky, verbatim reporter 1928-1990;Nicholas & Victoria Boyarsky (children).

BasementPatrick DuncanNicholas Boyarsky

The house was further adapted and this paper will describe this process together with its role as a site for architectural discourse and for collecting. Photographs from 1970s.GardenDesigned by Alvin Boyarsky and Dale Benedict. Site of plants from Coop Himmelblau’s

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nearby installation ‘House with a Flying Roof’ of 1977.

3. INTERIORS: not inspected1991- present:

Nicholas Boyarsky and Nicola MurphyElizabeth & Benjamin Boyarsky (children)

1993 - 95: Boyarsky Murphy ArchitectsBasement1995 - present:Boyarsky Murphy Architects1999: Listed Grade IIINTERIORS: not inspectedThe house has been a site for architectural experimentation and for the production of architecture. It has been a site to challenge the constraints of listing and a site of erasure, removal and disposal. It has become an archive and a library.GardenNicola Murphy

session 2: collaborative/communal practices

MONDAY 15 JANUARY 2018 / 11.00 — 11.30Housing the Farmers of EnlightenmentLee Stickells / University of Sydney, Australia

In 1979, a demolition order was placed on the home of the architect Peter Hamilton. In fact, the order covered almost all the houses at Bodhi Farm, an intentional community on Australia’s east coast. At the time, the farm was the site for around fourteen unauthorised, hand-crafted dwellings, arrayed amongst 60 hectares of rainforest. Drawing on Buddhist principles, community members practiced an ethic of voluntary primitivism, communal land-sharing and deep ecology – sometimes referring to themselves as ‘farmers of enlightenment’. The local government authority’s decision to place the order was seen by many as a response to the community’s prominent environmental activism, particularly itsinvolvement in an intense battle over rainforest logging in nearby Terania Creek.

Beyond the impact on Bodhi Farm, though, the demolition order also imperilled thousands of other houses. The surrounding region had become home, since the late 1960s, to a concentration of unauthorised rural settlements connected to the counterculture’s back-to-the-land movement. They had been accommodated uneasily

by the surrounding ‘straight’ communities, and their unsanctioned building suspiciously tolerated, but now the prospect of wholesale destruction loomed.

Peter Hamilton, and his house, became pivotal in the subsequent struggle to resist the Bodhi Farm demolition order and, beyond that, gain legislative recognition for the regions’ communal living experiments. In that process, the rudimentary, offgrid architecture of the counterculture’s settlements found itself at the heart of conflicts over ways of living, property regimes and institutional recognition. This paper will explore that historical episode. It will focus on the creative negotiation of regulatory change involving progressive architectural practitioners, educators and students, self-builders, politicians, planners and building inspectors. The process highlighted architecture’s significance for the materialisation of alternative ways of life, as well as a distinctive mode of architectural activism.

MONDAY 15 JANUARY 2018 / 11.30 — 12.00Cortile and Stöckli, Between Commonality and Autonomy: Flora Ruchat Roncati’s Live-work Complex in Riva San Vitale, Ticino, from 1967Irina Davidovici & Eliana Perotti / ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Most buildings of Swiss Ticinese architect Flora Ruchat-Roncati (1937–2012) were the result of collaborative endeavours. A fluid mode of working, based on an extensive professional and social network, allowed her to navigate the monolithic positions of her (predominantly male) colleagues, bridging between the various sites of her practice and teaching in Ticino, Rome and Zurich. Ruchat-Roncati’s own home in Riva San Vitale, a live-work complex that she worked on intermittently over three decades, was a central component of this operative network. Her interventions, in a traditional Cortile and on its grounds, comprised both restauration and additions, including, alongside the family-home and detached studio (Stöckli) for her writer husband, work and residential spaces sublet to architects of different generations. Additionally, part of the garden was sold to architect Giancarlo Durisch, whose autonomous home and atelier, built in 1974, became a sculptural counterpart to Ruchat-Roncati’s discrete interventions. Her work in Riva San Vitale, including the school and nursery built with Aurelio Galfetti and Ivo Trümpy, extended to the masterplanning of the historical nucleo, which she undertook in collaboration with her professional tenants. Dealing with the site on an urban scale thus reflected not only a cultural or affective attachment to a native, provincial territory, but also the understanding of architecture as shared political task.

This paper will address the architect’s home as a site of primarily social and professional, rather than formal, experimentation. Here, the architectural fabric sustained the formation of a multi-family, multi-generational model of semi-communal living, firmly entrenched

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in the post-1968 cultural landscape. The argument is articulated by the duality between the contemplative Stöckli as a site for solitary intellectual production, and the existing Cortile as a social and urban space. This unique, still functioning complex was conceived by a woman architect constructing not only a social milieu for her family, but also a professional community around herself.

MONDAY 15 JANUARY 2018 / 12.00 — 12.30‘Critical Regionalist’ Mythologies of Resistance on 118 Benaki StStylianos Giamarelos / The Bartlett School of Architecture UCL, UK

The apartment building on 118 Benaki Street (1973-1975) is the home, office, and most celebrated project of the ‘critical regionalist’ Greek architects Suzana and Dimitris Antonakakis, and their collaborative practice, Atelier 66. Local and international architectural historians have repeatedly described this work in terms of architectural ‘resistance’ (to ‘postmodernism’) and activist ‘defiance’ (of the Greek junta of the 1970s). Based on archival research and original interviews with the architects, engineers, craftsmen and residents involved in the fourty-year-long life of the building, this paper works against the mythologisations entailed in these interpretations.

In 1983, Kenneth Frampton posited that 118 Benaki Street offered a way out of the crisis of modern architecture. In the eyes of its architects, however, the project embodied more specifically a critique of the Athenian apartment building typology, and its commodified modes of production. 118 Benaki Street was the product of a collaborative practice that subverted the established hierarchies from design to inhabitation. The building was effectively an experiment in collective living for four families. Working like a household economy, they were all involved in the project, each contributing their land, labour, or capital. Tailored to the needs of its tenants, the bespoke design of each apartment was the two Antonakakis’ personified reply to the ‘anonymous’ production of the Greek developers. The social bonds between the parties involved were crucial for the success of the project. It was only through the connective glue of these social relations that ‘traditional’ ways of life could be retained in the transition from the rural to the urban environment.

However, the unconventional aspects of communal life were short-lived. Today, 118 Benaki Street functions more like a typical Athenian apartment building. In the final instance, the architectural design hierarchy was not practically challenged. Suzana and Dimitris Antonakakis’ reluctance to approach their work in business terms also meant that their alternative mode of production (that rested on strong personal bonds) remained an exception that could not be easily generalised.

session 3: embodied experiments

MONDAY 15 JANUARY 2018 / 13.30 — 14.00A Secret Life: Emerging from an Urban Bolt-HoleRobert Riddel / University of Queensland, Australia

This paper explores the possibilities of a subversive existence. It documents an experiment in urban living, carried out while I was a student at the RCA in London between 1972-73, when one to two people (myself included) occupied a highly serviced compact space, which was essentially invisible, mobile and self-contained. The project was conceived as a ‘motorhome’ that masqueraded as a delivery vehicle, to conceal its habitable status. While living on the street was technically illegal, it was quite feasible if discretion was observed, waste contained and parking restrictions followed.

The idea was born in response to the difficulty of finding suitable accommodation in London. Having studied architecture and then pursuing furniture design encouraged me to seek better solutions and to test them at full-scale. My belief in designing furniture as an architectural element which could transform any space for habitation, led me first to occupy derelict industrial buildings which proved difficult, cold and expensive.

Several contemporaries were touring Europe from within the ubiquitous Kombi van. They were, however, quickly moved on if caught camping on a city street. The search for a suitable vehicle that was compact but had headroom, led to French front-wheel drive delivery vans without windows. Used versions were quite affordable. Within the available space, a bed was fixed to facilitate both sleeping and sitting. Work surfaces could be slid and secured, and a stove, shower, sink and toilet were fitted as if in a yacht.

The project was exhibited in model form in the RCA Degree show of 1973, and the full-scale prototype was lived in on the streets of London for a year – a subversive existence, as this paper will demonstrate.

Plan and elevation of the van in its original condition. Private collection, Robert Riddel.

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Design for the interior of the van. Private collection, Robert Riddel.

MONDAY 15 JANUARY 2018 / 14.00 — 14.30The CECA House by Willy Van Der Meeren and Leon Palm: A Policy Whispering Praxis Through Affordable DomesticityPeter Swinnen / KULeuven, Belgium

In 1954 architect Leon Palm delivered a lecture at the Brussels Chamber of Commerce entitled ‘Immorele verkwisting bij de bouw van “goedkope woningen”’. Palm’s claim for a radical change in post-war housing policy was as clear as it was naive: in an era in dire need of affordable housing, he asserted that he could build a 250 m3 house for the price of a Ford car, i.e. delivering a worker’s family dwelling up to 40 % cheaper than the then average market price. Less than one month after his seminal lecture, Palm teamed up with architect Willy Van Der Meeren, producing a 1/1 scale model baptized the CECA house (Communauté Européenne du Charbon et de l’Acier). Palm and Van Der Meeren’s economical ‘attack’ on the regular housing market was however cut short by the veto of the National Housing Company, falsely claiming the steel structure did not comply with regulations, this despite the fact that in less than six months more than 4.500 potential clients had signed up for a CECA house. In the end only ten CECA houses were built, eight of which were collectively realized as the small-scale housing community Clos des Quatre Vents in Tervueren, comprising both Willy Van Der Meeren’s personal dwelling (house no.6) and the partially re-used steel framed prototype (house no.7). CECA’s projected mass-production failed radically, as did its policy whispering potential. The Clos des Quatre Vents, and Willy Van Der Meeren’s own house in particular, however remain important interpretative witnesses of a radical social experiment, requiring further evaluation of their experimental financial and domestic economy as well as their intrinsic tendency for community enhancement. The unique opportunity of owning both houses no.6 and no.7 (since May 2017) and the subsequent ongoing ‘embodied experiment’ of living and working at the Clos will be at the heart of this paper, critically revisiting the unfulfilled game changing ambition of CECA’s equitable housing strategy.

MONDAY 15 JANUARY 2018 / 14.30 — 15.00The Balloon House:An Intense Experience of Inhabiting a Real-life ExperimentNel Janssens / KULeuven, Belgium

In this paper I will tell the story of a real-life experiment that I participated in during my childhood years. I inhabited a family house that was built in 1973 by my father, the Belgian architect Lode Janssens. This house was unconventional in both its set-up as a temporary experiment in research in architecture (officially authorized to last ten years) and in its appearance as a large balloon-like pneumatic structure with tent-like annexes. The project intended to create a conditioned milieu: ‘a gently guided piece of nature that would offer maximal freedom of development (evolution, growth) and the necessary

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metabolic attendance to the life of a family’. The building consisted of nothing more than a millimeter-thick, transparent membrane. This membrane used not walls but nature to demarcate the living space; and was believed to offer neither an interior mirroring established cultural patterns nor a façade reflecting status symbols. The project was a matter of ‘taking distance’ (from architectural establishments; from dominant social norms); of refusing to capitalize on earth (settling, claiming ground, generating profit through property value growth); and of reinforcing the nomadic and metabolic essence of human kind. The architect had a deep distrust of normative architecture and therefore tested the relevance of architecture to shape an altogether different life world by means of a real-life experimental practice. This experimental practice was grounded in Janssens’ life-long premise that ‘thinking’ demanded ‘doing’, that ‘ideas’ needed to be ‘practiced’ and that, therefore, reflection and action had to be brought into a symbiotic relationship.

This particular experimen-tal milieu eventually turned out to be the breeding ground for my own invest-ment in research by design, and more particularly, uto-pia-driven projective re-search.

Moonlander, 1975. Copyright A.J. Lode Janssens

session 4: paving the way

MONDAY 15 JANUARY 2018 / 15.30 — 16.00Objecting Mainstream: The Architect-Designed House in Contemporary Japan, 1950s-2010sCathelijne Nuijsink / TUDelft, The Netherlands

House design has played a crucial role in the portfolios of ‘atelier’ architects in Japan ever since the reconstruction period after the Second World War. So much so that the design of the single-family house became a shared topic of discussion and took the form of a discursive debate within Japanese architecture culture. This intense theoretical

examination of what makes a ‘good house’, in turn, is what drove the production of a series of radical design experiments. This paper examines the architect-designed house in Japan from the 1950s to the present with a particular focus on the architect-client relationship. First, it sets out to illustrate that the early experiments architects conducted in their own houses and that of affluent clients contributed to the contemporary success of architect-designed houses for (an entirely new clientele of) ordinary salaried workers. Next, it demonstrates that the decades-long housing debate under discussion is representative of a changing self-perception of the architect. By the mid-1990s, the architect was no longer a ‘hero’ designing a ‘monument’ for a patron who cared more about the perfection of spatial compositions than the demands of actual clients, but rather a casual neighbour who carefully responded to his customer’s requirements and preferred way of living. By identifying how architects have actively proposed alternatives to mainstream housing, this study not only exemplifies the architect’s role in introducing lifestyles diametrically opposed to the ones implied by the existing housing stock. It also presents the argument that architects (and their clients) viewed the design of the private container as the embodiment of a larger sociopolitical challenge: to indicate new ways of living not just for its owners, but also for others – indeed, for everyone.

MONDAY 15 JANUARY 2018 / 16.00 — 16.30Shaping Modernism in Brussels: Victor Bourgeois, Adrien Blomme & Paul-Amaury Michel and their Personal ResidencesLinsy Raaffels, Inge Bertels, Stephanie Van de Voorde / VUB, BelgiumBarbara Van der Wee / Barbara Van der Wee Architects

The patrimony of the Brussels Capital Region includes about 300 architects’ houses built between 1830-1970. Many of these remain unexplored. Yet several architects deployed their house to invigorate theoretical concepts of a new architectural style, to make a statement towards conservative policymakers or to implement innovative design concepts in practice. But often it is only when theory, policy and practice are combined that the necessary basis for the breakthrough of a trend is set. In that regard, the following three modernist architects’ houses (constructed during the interwar period) deserve further study: the personal residence of Victor Bourgeois, the apartment of Adrien Blomme and the so-called ‘Glass House’ of Paul-Amaury Michel.

First, the residence (Koekelberg, 1925) of Victor Bourgeois (1897-1962), designed as a manifest within the modernist movement, was intended to house the Brussels headquarters of Modernism. Thereby, the architect generated a broader support for the theoretical development of Modernism in Brussels. Secondly, the building permit for the residence (Brussels, 1928) of Adrien Blomme (1878-1940) was initially declined by the City Council as the strongly articulated modernist facade would not fit the existing streetscape. Blomme however, supported by his prominent colleagues, managed to

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convince the urban policy of the qualities of the innovative architectural style. Lastly, Paul-Amaury Michel (1912-1988), devotee of Le Corbusier, experimented with the extensive use of glass elements in the facade of his own ‘Glass House’ (Ukkel, 1935).

Apart from the individual qualities of these houses, this paper investigates the added value of architects’ personal houses with respect to commissioned work through the question: To what extent and how did these three houses clear the path for Modernism in Brussels? To assess this question, all three cases are investigated in detail within the broader framework of Brussels Modernism. Therefore, contemporary literature, as well as archival and in-situ research, are indispensable.

session 5: not in my backyard

TUESDAY 16 JANUARY 2018 / 09.30 — 10.00Those Who Live in Glass Houses Shouldn’t Throw Stones Isabel Rousset / University of Western Australia, Australia

A source of much complaint amongst architects is the client’s fondness for luxury and ostentation, especially when such inclinations hinder the higher aesthetic and/or lifestyle ideals of the architect. Polemical architects such as Hermann Muthesius and Adolf Loos, for example, spent their careers launching tirades against the decadent lifestyles that characterized bourgeois dwelling culture. When such architects design their own houses in order to act as sites of resistance against such lifestyles, they leave themselves vulnerable to similar criticisms.

This paper examines architect Walter Gropius’ private villa, which he designed and constructed at the Dessau Bauhaus in 1923. Gropius also rallied against the ‘drab, hollow and meaningless fakeries in which we live’. His pedagogical vision called for standardized housing types, which he promoted through the construction of a workers’ estate in Dessau. While Gropius’ own house was not intended to generate further commissions, it nonetheless was vital to promote the Bauhaus vision in order to maintain the school’s (already fragile) relationship with its most important patron – the Dessau municipality. Composed of abstract, interlocking white cubes, Gropius’ own house aimed to promote the aesthetic possibilities of mass prefabrication, as well as promote a new culture in which standardized dwellings, as ‘machines for living’, would create a more democratic society.

Shortly after its construction, however, its apparent ostentation was noted. In a piece titled ‘The Problematic Glass House’, perhaps in subtle reference to a well-known

proverb, a German newspaper noted the hypocrisy of Gropius’ own ‘technical marvel’, compared to the soulless workers’ estate constructed nearby. Gropius’ own house, in other words, embodied all the class pretensions that he had once criticized.

In this sense, Gropius’ house failed to materialize as a site of resistance. This paper uses the case study to consider historical tensions concerning the class values that form an architect’s oeuvre, which become illuminated when analysed in the context of the houses they design for themselves – especially when that oeuvre is built on championing not just a design aesthetic, but a complete lifestyle.

TUESDAY 16 JANUARY 2018 / 10.00 — 10.30The House of a Modern Woman in São Paulo Silvana Rubino / State University of Campinas, Brazil

In 1951, the House of Glass by the Italian architect Lina Bo Bardi (Rome, 1914 – São Paulo, 1992) was inaugurated in São Paulo, Brazil. Lina arrived from Italy in 1946 with her husband Pietro Maria Bardi and designed the São Paulo Art Museum (MASP). When her house was done, she published an article in the Habitat journal, in which she stated: ‘The problem was to create an environment that was “physically” sheltered, ie, that offered protection from the wind and the rain, but at the same time remained open to everything that is poetic and ethical, even the wildest of storms.’

The house is situated at Morumbi, a peripheral wealthy neighbourhood, which Pietro Bardi suggested could become a showcase for good architecture, and the House of Glass should be a kind of initial example.

In 1958, Lina published a long article, ‘The house, its organization and arrangement’ which she wrote in the language of women’s advice literature, suggesting how one should place furniture, the kind of objects that could be acceptable, and some interdictions and taboos as well: Lina advised other women to avoid decorative objects, mirrors and ‘bad’ art, conducting the lector to choose simple objects of popular culture and photography instead of bad-taste works of art. As illustrations of the text, her own House of Glass and herself operating her home appliances and showing herself as the model modern women as much as the house was presented as the model modern dwelling.

This presentation aims to analyze this article and the house itself as a kind of bourgeois activism for modernity in a growing metropolis in the third world, as well as its contradictions, like the presence of domestic servants in the modern house.

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session 6: resisting institutions and systems

TUESDAY 16 JANUARY 2018 / 11.00 — 11.30A Non-Conformist Garage Christina Gray / University of California Los Angeles, USA

Canadian architect Arthur Erickson lived in a converted garage, what he liked to refer to as a ‘non-conformist garage’. As a young, pinched practitioner Erickson had purchased an empty lot with only a garage built upon it with the hope of building himself a showcase house. Erickson maintained the property until his death, never building the house and instead continuing to renovate the garage as his home. With this unorthodox arrangement, Erickson came into conflict with both his neighbours and city officials on numerous occasions over the non-compliance of his non-conformist home with a number of city ordinances and zoning by-laws. The fact that Erickson enthusiastically flaunted the rules, raising the profile of his unconventional living arrangement by throwing lavish parties for potential clients, only increased the notoriety of the home. The living situation served Erickson well in reinforcing important personal narratives that surrounded his career. In public accounts, the garage-home was often a touchstone that reinforced Erickson’s identity as a man who currently lived a cosmopolitan and bohemian lifestyle but who remained rooted in a modest past and therefore was able to identify with a broad range of clients. Furthermore, the modest quarters were often characterized as a pied-a-terre, the smallest footprint required of an architect who maintained a constant world-travelling schedule and who merely needed to touch down and refresh himself from time to time. For an architect in such a state of motion, a house was not necessary – a garage would suffice. As an architect who spoke often of his identification as a modernist who allowed a site to generate the design, here was a telling case from a period when this identification as a modernist faced some pressure. The case of Erickson’s own home tells a story in which the most potent and productive relationship between a site and an architect’s own home was perhaps one which always remained tantalizingly unrealized.

TUESDAY 16 JANUARY 2018 / 11.30 — 12.00Pliable Praxis House Scott Colman / Rice University School of Architecture, USA

In the wake of Postmodernism, the re-articulation of architecture’s disciplinary processes was conceived as an operative means of engaging the increasingly disruptive neoliberal political economy. In the writing and teaching of Dawn Finley and Mark Wamble, and their experimental architectural practice, Interloop––Architecture, this notion has

been explored with such clarity that their work constitutes an exemplar of avant-garde architectural thinking in the past two decades. This paper will consider the architects’ home, office, and workshop, the 48’ House (2004-06) and the 54’ Addition (2015-17), designed and partly-constructed by the architects themselves, as transitionary moments in their developing practice. For Finley and Wamble, the factors affecting the design and fabrication of buildings are no longer as clearly delimited or stable as they were assumed to be in the twentieth century. In an increasingly volatile political economy, in perhaps the most neoliberal of cities, Houston, the architects have sought to develop a pliable praxis in which the procedures of architectural production are contingent and the relationship between the design, fabrication, use, and context of buildings is open to constant re-articulation. The result is a particular aesthetics, congruent with the contemporary development of ‘applications’, in which the architectural object is conceptually ‘disarticulated’ to produce a choreographed assemblage of discrete knowledge-objects, each possessing an autonomy that allows them to circulate in the architect’s own practice and, potentially, the rapidly transforming building components market. Originally conceived as a repeatable design for the Hometta website, the house demarcates a threshold, wherein the relationship between the cohesiveness of architectural design and the independence of a building’s component parts and spaces becomes salient. As an aggregate of applications, in its hybrid programming and innovative siting, and as a tool for and product of architectural invention, the house reconceives its twentieth-century suburban context, recasting the imbrications of life, work, and material culture in the contemporary service economy.

48’ House by Interloop.

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TUESDAY 16 JANUARY 2018 / 12.00 — 12.30Resisting from Within: The House of Hsieh Ying-Chun as Site of Institutionalized Resistance to Institutionalized Norms Valeria Federighi / Politecnico di Torino, Italy

After the 1999 Jiji earthquake razed most of Sun Moon Lake’s built environment, architect Hsieh Ying-Chun prompted the Ita Thao tribe to resettle on their original site, from which they had been forcibly removed fifty years earlier. Here, the architect applied a construction technique he had been studying, involving bamboo sidings and a very light steel post-and-beam structure that allowed unskilled labor as well as women and children to partake in the construction. Hsieh’s own house sits at the far end of the settlement and was among the first to be completed. Now the formal headquarters of Atelier-3, the bamboo-sided, three-room house acts as a physical mediator – providing, among other things, electricity to the whole settlement – between the tribe and the local authorities that have repeatedly attempted to remove the tribe from the lakeside settlement to be able to develop it for touristic purposes. The Ita Thao village has become a symbol of resistance to the governmental mistreatment of aboriginals. For architect Hsieh Ying-Chun it has offered a home where he has lived for almost twenty years, as well as a testing ground for what is now an extensive design-build practice specialized in post-disaster housing and settlements across Taiwan and China. Hsieh Ying-Chun has successfully resisted institutional authority and regulations by exploiting the normative slack space offered by the particular conditions of post-disaster reconstruction. He has done so from a position which is itself institutionalized, tactically balancing himself between the spheres of formal and informal activity and exploiting professional knowledge towards the purposeful subversion of norms. This paper looks at the way in which the architectural profession performs alternative interpretations of its agency, and the way in which it intertwines with social activism, by analysing the practice of Atelier-3, and starting with the case of the Ita Thao tribe.

session 7: naturism & ecology

TUESDAY 16 JANUARY 2018 / 15.00 — 15.30Architecture and Naturism: Designing for a New Lifestyle Helena Mattsson / KTH School of Architecture, Sweden

In 1960, the Swedish furniture designer Bruno Mathsson built a small one-level summerhouse for himself and his wife Karin at Frösakull in southern Sweden. The house was an experiment and was also dubbed the ‘House of Tomorrow’. Even though not

internationally renown today, the house was praised for its innovative architecture at the time and, as Martin Friedman writes in Design Quarterly in 1965: ‘Constructed over sand dunes and tucked into a forest of dwarf pines, it is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable buildings in modern Sweden.’

Frösakull reveals a tension between elegant, sleek American mid-century modernism and brutalist anti-aestheticism. The large, illusory window sections and the undulating, transparent ceiling co-exist with recycled steel rafters, wood slats nailed on slightly askew, and the most basic steel draining board. The building oozes pragmatism rather than aestheticism, and the builder underlines this with his affirmation that Frösakull was not built according to the drawing board, but that a great deal was left to the handymen to solve. The design and the solutions are usually the simplest and cheapest possible, and they do not consistently adhere to predetermined notions of measurements, proportions or aesthetics.

Alongside the emergence of Swedish functionalism, another vital movement evolved: the fitness culture. Already at the Stockholm exhibition in 1930 a new anti-consumerist body culture centring on hygienism, outdoor sports, and nudism was presented in parallel with the new media and consumer culture. Bruno Mathsson was a veritable ‘health architect’ who converted the plans of the health programme into a lifestyle. This paper will discuss how the summerhouse in Frösakull is a realization of Bruno Mathson’s lifestyle as naturist and it will be shown how fitness and naturism involve a disciplining self-practice that, combined with innovative architecture, both allows and prevents extravagant living.

TUESDAY 16 JANUARY 2018 / 15.30 — 16.00Activism at Home: a ‘Barefoot-Architect’ version Xiang Ren / Sheffield Hallam University, UK Weizhong Ren is an ordinary resident who originated from Jianshan village of rural Anji in Zhejiang Province, China. Today, he is also known as the ‘barefoot-architect’ — an activist for ecological construction and innovation in rural housing.

Ren started to design-build his lodges (including the first one as his own house) from 2005, and subsequently completed his series nicknamed ‘Anji Eco-lodges’. A clear contrast to the normal residential practice which put people in uniforms, Ren’s house

Elevation of one of Weizhong Ren’s ‘Anji Eco-Lodges’ in Zhejing Province, China.

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scheme started and developed with the absence of an overall masterplan, towards a more progressive, time-based, and problem-driven approach. Without a written brief, Ren adapted the basic programme of the local vernacular house and ancestral hall, but gave it new spatial meanings through innovatively reclaiming locally-sourced raw materials such as earth. Designing and budgeting were phased, not in the contemporary professional meaning of phasing under strategic planning, but in a resilient mode of interacting with uncertainties and contingencies. In essence, Ren’s architectural activism in rural China, reflected in his own home, worked with the very specific condition to the place: the given.

Intermeshing the roles of architect-developer, user-architect and architect-builder, Ren is not only a barefoot-architect but also an activist practitioner in the village. On the one hand, Ren’s self-build home and house-series were not driven by norms and regulations, but he did address the political requirements of institutions through interacting with local and even higher-level politicians. On the other hand, it is a minor type of ‘oral architecture’ built from below, which resiliently confronted the drawing-based, visual-dominated architectural production in rural China. His own home is a manifestation of his design position from the bottom-up, and his ‘barefoot architectural practice’ is a hybrid mode of activist practice, which highlights craftsmen’s individuality while bringing the difference together in a coherent scheme. Design and construction overlapped and even ran in parallel on site, through getting down to earth, getting hands dirty, and getting something done by learning by doing; all were communicated through oral instructions, through an aesthetically challenging but socially received gesture of ‘planting’. In relation to those professional expert-architects’ own home/house in architectural history, arguably the more layered and much more messy/engaged production model in ‘Anji Eco-lodges’ reproduces an image of a heroic architectural activism: the barefoot-architect practised as a radically ‘other’ in search for an alternative resistance, both as a means and as ends in itself.

session 8: theory into practice

TUESDAY 16 JANUARY 2018 / 16.30 — 17.00Charles W. Moore: Body, Memory and the Architect’s Houses Richard Hayes / Independent Scholar, USA

Charles W. Moore (1925-93) was one of the leading architects of the Postmodern Movement who conceived of buildings as receptacles of human energy. For Moore, design was an opportunity ‘to gather into structures the energy of people and places’. Architectural historian Eve Blau highlighted this aspect of Moore when she wrote, ‘Open, impermanent, transforming and transformative, the spaces Moore created … empower their inhabitants and users’.

This paper seeks to verify Blau’s interpretation by analysing the three houses Moore designed for himself when he was a faculty member at three different universities: Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut; UCLA, in Los Angeles, California, and the University of Texas in Austin. Moore taught for a decade at each school and he designed a distinctive house in each university town. As experimental works, the houses evince Moore’s interest in the role of memory, the importance of the sensing body, and contrasts between high art and mass culture. These formal themes embody acts of resistance to prevailing architectural orthodoxies and societal trends.

Beginning in 1967 with his radical transformation of an existing Greek Revival cottage in downtown New Haven, Moore explored the degree to which interiors can sustain a variety of symbolic and historical references. Notable for the visual humor that Moore introduced, the design conflated bold spatial cut-outs with pop accoutrements including neon lighting, vivid graphics, and saturated colors. Such unexpected, if not jarring, combinations were intended to provoke responses by students and faculty who were invited to dinners and social functions in Moore’s house.

In 1975, while teaching at UCLA, Moore designed a house focused on a continuous interior staircase bordered by shelves for his collection of architectural books alongside of niches holding toys, Kachina dolls, ceramic

tchotchkes, and Mexican curios: his household gods. This domestic interior was a mash-up of Sir John Soane and Toys-R-Us: from the English Regency architect, Moore learned lessons in the role of the fragment in architectural space at the same time he undercut the solemnity of the historical reference by his emphasis on toys and toy-like objects. Moore countermanded distinctions between high and low, popular and elite, serious and whimsical, space and object in a manner that would become central to Postmodernism. Concurrently, the concept of the interior as staircase forefronted Moore’s interest in haptic experience and the role of the active body, a theme explored in his influential book of 1977 Body, Memory and Architecture.

Finally, in his house and studio in Austin, Texas, Moore took advantage of the region’s temperate climate by centering the compound about an outdoor stairway leading to a pool, in a way that places the sensing body at the center of domestic design. In tandem with this privileging of sensory experience, Moore introduced the theme of memory by combining vernacular sheds with references to baroque architecture. In so doing, Moore

Interior view of Charles Moore’s own house in New Haven (1967).

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sought to demonstrate how the everyday landscape and high-art architecture could be synthesized in a work that stands as a testament to the idea of the architect’s house as bulwark of cultural memory and heightened physical experience.

TUESDAY 16 JANUARY 2018 / 17.00 — 17.30Between Sparta and Sybaris: Rudofsky’s Critical Home ResearchesPierre Chabard / ENSA Paris, France

The changes in time or in climate, the trajectory of history or of a day, the cycles of human societies or natural seasons, with their climatical and latitudinal variations: the architect Bernard Rudofsky (1905-1988) never stopped integrating highly temporal preoccupations into his thinking of architecture. Generally defined as an art of space, he always subordinated it to a true art of living, of which he detailed the various facets throughout his writings, and he embodied the principles himself in his traveling existence. In the ways of seating or of sleeping, the practice of cooking or of bathing, the making of clothes or of shoes, the Viennese architect, aware of the lebensreform movements, methodically tried to subvert the cultural and material stereotypes he attributed to the capitalist and techno-industrial civilization. A skilled mediator, he developed this critique through almost a dozen books, half a dozen exhibitions and a hundred articles. However, all throughout his life, Rudofsky also tried to materialize his ideas in the form of houses, especially for himself. From the ‘manifesto’ project for a patio-house in Procida Island (Italy), which he designed for his wife and himself in the winter of 1935 (and which he published in Domus during the brief period when he was its editor) to ‘la Casa’ which he finally built at the end of his life in Frigiliana, near Màlaga, Espagna (1969-1971), the several Rudofsky’s projects for his own home illustrated the way he considered house: as a site (or scale) where a critical alternative is possible; as an architectural island of resistance against the capitalist and techno-industrial standardization of lifestyle; as a paradoxical bastion of emancipation where architecture can at the same time protect the body from modernizing arraisonnement and open him to the true modernity.

TUESDAY 16 JANUARY 2018 / 17.30 — 18.00Activism seen in Jørn Utzon’s own house in Bayview, AustraliaChen-Yu Chiu / Bilkent University, Turkey

Jørn Utzon’s (1918-2008) own house (1963-66) in Bayview, Australia, is one of Utzon’s most important projects, which was never realised. Its designs gave Utzon the opportunity to explore and experiment with the prototype of the plywood elements for the Sydney Opera House project (1956-66), and beautifully illustrates the maturation of Utzon’s architecture. However, the scholarship on Utzon’s Bayview House design is scattered and few, because it was never realised, and also because Utzon rejected academic study of

his work until he passed away. This paper is the first to critically assess the design process of Utzon’s Bayview House by surveying The Utzon Archives and the collection of the Utzon family. The paper will shed light on the two tensions outlined in the call for papers for this symposium: radical experimentation versus the quest for commissions on the one hand, and the designer versus client / inhabitant of the house on the other. The paper will be composed of four thematic sections.

The first section includes comparative analyses of the design of Utzon’s Bayview House and his other housing schemes, including his own house in Hellebæk (1952), the Middelboe House (1953), courtyard houses at Kingo (1957) and Fredensborg (1963). These analyses reveal the continuity and discontinuity in Utzon’s perception of the ideal home and his design principles within the evolution of his architectural philosophy. The second section focuses on the design process of Utzon’s Bayview House with four sequential schemes to reveal the different design intentions and artistic visions, especially stimulated by his study of Japanese and Chinese architecture in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The third section explores the relationship between Utzon’s Sydney Opera House and his Bayview House to clarify the role of the latter project in the building design, production and construction of the former project. The final section compares Utzon’s Bayview House design with few key projects from his Platforms and Plateaus (1962) and Additive Architecture (1970) to explain why and how the architect transformed his thematic approach to design and to identify the important role of his Bayview House design in his late career.

Plans, sections and elevations of Jørn Utzon’s Bayview House in Australia.

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Biographies

NOTES

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Nicholas Boyarsky is a partner of the London based Boyarsky Murphy Architects. He studied architecture at the Architectural Association. He received his PhD in practise based research from RMIT University in 2016. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at RMIT and he teaches a Fifth Year studio at Oxford Brookes University.

Óscar Andrade Castro is a PhD candidate at the Chair of Methods and Analysis of the Department of Architecture TU Delft, and Assistant Professor at the Escuela de Arquitectura y Diseño de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso. He has lived, worked and studied as a guest at the Ciudad Abierta of Amereida.

Pierre Chabard is an Associate Professor in the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris La Villette. A member of the laboratory AHTTEP, he is responsible for the research axis ‘Social and cultural history of architectural mediation’. Chabard is also a founding-member of the french journal Criticat.

Chen-Yu Chiu (Cho) graduated from Chung Yuan Christian University, Taiwan, and obtained a Masters degree in Urban Design from Columbia University, and a PhD at the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, The University of Melbourne. His primary research interest is in the cross-cultural/national relationships within the field of architecture.

Scott Colman is an Assistant Professor at the Rice School of Architecture in Houston, Texas, where he teaches history and theory and directs the M.Arch. Design Thesis program. Specializing in modern and contemporary architecture and urbanism, Colman’s research focuses on changing interrelationships between creative, theoretical, and historical production.

Irina Davidovici is postdoctoral researcher at the gta Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zurich and part of a team researching Flora Ruchat-Roncati. Trained as an architect, Davidovici worked for Caruso St John and Herzog & de Meuron, and completed a doctorate in history and philosophy of architecture, which was published under the title Forms of Practice: German Swiss Architecture 1980–2000 by gta Verlag in 2012.

Isabelle Doucet is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on the relationship between (urban) politics, aesthetics, and social responsibility in architecture, which she examines through historical and contemporary cases. She is the author of The Practice Turn in Architecture: Brussels after 1968 (2015) and co-editor, with Nel Janssens, of Transdisciplinary Knowledge Production in Architecture and Urbanism (2011). Her current research focuses on counter-cultural architectures of the 1970s.

Valeria Federighi is a research fellow in Architecture at the Politecnico di Torino. She holds a PhD from the same school, and a Master of Science in Design Research from the University of Michigan. She is part of the CeNTo (Chinese New Towns) research project, staff member of the South China–Torino Collaboration Lab and editor of Ardeth journal.

Stylianos Giamarelos is a Teaching Fellow in Architectural History & Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture UCL and the University of East London, an Associate Lecturer in Research-Led Design at Oxford Brookes University, and a General Editor of Architectural Histories, the open-access journal of the European Architectural History Network (EAHN).

Christina Gray is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of California, Los Angeles. Previously she has worked for architecture firms in Vancouver, Rome and Los Angeles.

Janina Gosseye is currently a Research Fellow at the University of Queensland, School of Architecture (Australia). She has a special research interest in the notion of collectivity in post-war architecture. Her work has been published in several leading journals, including the Journal of Architecture, the Journal of Urban History, and the International Journal for History Culture and Modernity. She has edited and authored several books, including Hot Modernism: Queensland Architecture 1945-1975 (London: Artifice, 2015) and Shopping Towns Europe, 1945-1975 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).

Richard W. Hayes is an architect and architectural historian, educated at Columbia and Yale universities. His research has focused on two different periods: American architectural culture of the 1960s and the Aesthetic Movement in 19th century Britain. In 2007, he published The Yale Building Project: The First 40 Years (Yale University Press), a comprehensive history of an influential educational programme. He has also published essays on Charles Moore in Scroope: Cambridge Architectural Journal, the Journal of Architectural Education, and Rome: Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape. His publications on the Aesthetic Movement include a chapter in E.W. Godwin: Aesthetic Movement Architect and Designer edited by Susan Weber Soros (Yale University Press). The book received numerous awards and was selected as ‘one of the most notable books of the year’ by the New York Times Book Review. Hayes has received grants and awards from the American Institute of Architects, the American Architectural Foundation, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, European Architectural History Network, the New York State Council on the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. A visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge in 2009 and 2013, he is now a life member of Clare Hall.

Hilde Heynen is Professor of Architectural Theory at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. She researches modernism, modernity, and gender in architecture. Heynen is the author of several books and publishes regularly in architectural journals such as the Harvard Design Magazine and The Journal of Architecture, of which she is a member of the editorial board. She is also a board member of the European Association of Architectural Education (EAAE) and the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH).

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Nel Janssens is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Architecture, KU Leuven, Campus Sint-Lucas, Belgium. She holds a MSc in architecture and spatial planning, and obtained a doctoral degree at the Department of Architecture, Chalmers University of Technology. Her research interest is directed to the link between critical theory and research by design.

Helena Mattsson is an Associate Professor in History and Theory of Architecture and Head of department at KTH School of Architecture. She is the co-editor of Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption, and the Welfare State and the forthcoming Neoliberalism: An Architectural History. She is a member of the editorial board of Journal of Architecture.

Cathelijne Nuijsink graduated in architecture from Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands and the University of Tokyo, Japan before embarking on a PhD in East-Asian Languages & Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania in the Unites States (graduated August 2017). Her research sits at the nexus of Architecture History, Architecture Theory and Japan Cultural Studies, and focuses in particular on the discourses and culture within which buildings are imagined and produced. Currently, she is working on the construction of a new historical narrative that aims to offer an understanding of architecture history that differs radically from existing narratives.

Eliana Perotti is Senior Researcher at the Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich. Trained as an art historian, she has worked in the field of the history of town-planning since 1998. Perotti is co-director of the research project ‘History of Urban Design’ (2000-2014) at the Department of Architecture, published as Anthologie zum Städtebau. She works on topics of history of urban design theory, highlighting the history of ideas, social and cultural aspects, with focus on aspects of urban sustainability, colonial urbanism, as well as on the impact of representative technologies on urban design. Her current foremost interest is the discourse on city and gender (Theoretikerinnen des Städtebaus, Berlin: Reimer, 2015, 2018). Perotti is an initiator of Interest Group ‘Gender in Architecture and Urban Design’ (EAHN). Her new research includes a research project on ‘Saffa 1958’ (Swiss Women’s Work Exhibition) and the SNF Project ‘Flora Ruchat-Roncati at ETH Zurich, 1985-2002: Professor, Architect, Theorist’, which she leads as PI.

Linsy Raaffels graduated in Architectural Engineering at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel where she started a PhD in January 2017 in collaboration with the architectural office Barbara Van der Wee Architects. Throughout her research, she identifies the characteristics and qualities of architects’ houses in Brussels and develops qualitative restoration and re-use strategies for these houses.

Xiang Ren completed his doctoral research in 2017 at the University of Sheffield, and now lectures in architecture at Sheffield Hallam University. His research has been shortlisted for the RIBA President’s Awards for Research in 2014 and 2016, and has been published in Architectural Research Quarterly, Architecture and Culture and Heritage Architecture.

Robert Riddel graduated from the AA London in 1976 after commencing studies in Brisbane in 1976. During this period he also completed a Masters degree at the Royal College of Arts in Furniture Design. He began Riddel Architecture in Brisbane in 1982 which continued until 2012 when it merged with Conrad Gargett. Riddel gained a PhD from the University of Queensland, where he is currently an Adjunct Professor.

Isabel Rousset is a scholar whose interests concern the relationship between architecture, visual culture, and politics. She recently completed her PhD dissertation at the University of Western Australia, which explored historical intersections between housing design and social theory in nineteenth-century Germany. Her most recent work has been published in the Journal of Architecture and she has a chapter on the Bauhaus in a forthcoming edited book titled Fashioning Professionals.

Silvana Rubino is an Associate Professor at the History Department of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (State University of Campinas) in Brazil. She obtained a PhD in Social Sciences in 2002, and completed post-doctoral studies at EHESS in Paris in 2007 (Social Anthropology) and in 2013 (History). In 2014, Rubino was Curatorial Assistant of Roger Martin Buergel for the exhibition ‘Lina Bo Bardi 1914 in Rom geboren’ (Lina Bo Bardi born in Rome 1914), which was held at the Johann Jacobs Museum.

Patricio Cáraves Silva is Professor of Architecture at the Escuela de Arquitectura y Diseño de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (Chile). He is a founding member of the Ciudad Abierta of Amereida since 1972, where he currently lives, works and studies.

Lee Stickells is an Associate Professor in Architecture at the University of Sydney. His research is characterised by an interest in the potential for architecture to shape other ways of living, particularly its projection as a means to reconsider the terms of social life – of how we live together.

Peter Swinnen is a Brussels based architect. He practices architecture at CRIT., conducts PhD research on the political praxis of architecture (at KULeuven in Belgium) and runs the ETHZ architecture studio on ‘Policy Whispering’. Between 2010 and 2015 Swinnen engaged in public practice as State Architect for the Flemish Region. In 1998 he founded the architectural practice 51N4E.

Sarah Wigglesworth founded Sarah Wigglesworth Architects in 1994. Her practice has a reputation for sustainable architecture and an interest in using alternative, low energy materials. Wigglesworth was Professor of Architecture at the University of Sheffield from 1999 to 2016. Her academic work often blended with her ‘live’ projects and she describes her research focus as ‘revealing the workings of practice. Early in her career Wigglesworth, together with Till, was the first architect to be awarded the Fulbright Arts Fellowship. Wigglesworth was appointed MBE in 2004 and in 2012 became the first woman to receive the prestigious Royal Designer for Industry award for architecture.

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VENUESAll paper presentations will take place in the Humanities Bridgeford Street Building room 1.69-1.70, University of Manchester, School of Environment Education and Development.Number 1 on map opposite.

The keynote address by Sarah Wigglesworth will take place in the Manchester School of Architecture, Benzie Theatre.Number 2 on map opposite.

The keynote address by Hilde Heynen will take place in the Humanities Bridgeford Street Building room 1.69-1.70, University of Manchester, School of Environment Education and Development.Number 1 on map opposite.

CONTACTSIsabelle Doucet / isabelle.doucet@manchester.ac.ukJanina Gosseye / j.gosseye@uq.edu.au

Oxford Road

Higher Cambridge St

Lower Chatham St

Higher

Chatham St

Cavendish St

Lower Orm

ond St

Higher

Orm

ond St Jenkinson St

Boundary St W

Rosamond St W

Booth St W

Rosamond St W

Booth St W

Bridgeford St

Oxford Road

1

2

towards the city centre

CALL FOR PAPERS

Architects are, on the whole, idealistic people. Many of them believe that better buildings will make better lives for the people who live and work in them. Architects’ own homes embody their real passions, on a scale which is comprehensible.

With this statement Miranda H. Newton challenges, in her 1992 book Architects’ London Houses: The Home of Thirty Architects since the 1930s (p. viii), the mockery by certain critics, including architect Léon Krier, of architects’ distinction between their experimental creations for others, and their own homes. A long tradition indeed exists of architects designing experimental houses for themselves. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin homes and Frank Gehry’s exploded bungalow in Santa Monica, are well known examples from the US and find British counterparts in Walter Segal’s double house, Neave Brown’s terrace of five houses at Winscombe Street, and Michael and Patty Hopkins ‘high-tech’ house. All these examples demonstrate how architects challenged (or resisted) accepted forms and practices within the discipline of architecture through the design of their own home.

With this symposium, we are looking for examples of architects’ own houses that not only aimed to challenge the status quo within the discipline, but also articulated broader social, political and cultural critiques. We seek to explore how the unique set of conditions typical of an architect’s own home, allows for different, perhaps more radical, forms of experiment in living than is possible through commissioned work. The architect’s own home is hereto instructive because it intensifies several tensions that are present in the practice of architecture in general. In their own house, where the architect operates as designer and user, aesthetic objectives, ideology, and the promotion of the architect’s business become inseparably entwined with the personal. Acknowledging that many architects see themselves as social engineers, the architect’s own home invites to unpack the complex entanglement between resistance, experimentation, aesthetics, marketing, and living.

This symposium follows on from the ‘Private Virtues or Vices? Architects in Search of an Aesthetics of Resistance’ symposium, which took place at the University of Queensland (Australia), in July 2017. In this symposium, we seek to focus on two tensions in particular. First, the tension that the desire for (radical) experimentation versus the quest for commissions generates and, secondly, the tension that is produced by the architect assuming a double role, as both the designer and client/inhabitant of the house. We welcome papers that explore such tensions through case studies, preferably but not solely architects’ houses that have not yet been ‘canonised’ and clearly demonstrate how a socio-political statement is expressed through the design of the (personal) home.

www.aestheticsofresistance.com