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April 21, 2023
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Communities of Tacit Knowledge: Architecture and its Ways of Knowing
_TACK Final Conference “Tacit Knowledge in Architecture” – Program
_Ways of Knowing Architecture: Resisting the Master’s Tools
_UNCOMMONING: Artistic Knowledge in Architecture
_Body of Knowledge: Knowing Bodies
_Busy body: living and working in urban renewal neighbourhoods
_Improvised architectural responses to the changing climate: Making, sharing and communicating design processes in rural Bangladesh
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Communities of Tacit Knowledge: Architecture and its Ways of Knowing

Tacit knowledge is a key characteristic of architecture culture. It plays a central role in the conception, design, construction and appropriation of buildings and cities. It characterizes architectural education, distinguishes the cultures of design offices and typifies the collaborations between different actors, including craftsmen, engineers and architects.

Despite this central role that tacit knowledge assumes in architecture culture, our understanding of it remains limited. Research into tacit architectural knowledge has only recently gained momentum and its specificities still need further exploration. Questions as: What are the roles of tacit knowledge in architecture culture?, How does it complement other forms of knowledge?, and how does it construct cooperative communities across disciplines? still await more nuanced answers.

‘TACK / Communities of Tacit Knowledge: Architecture and its Ways of Knowing’ is a funded Innovative Training Network, as part of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions within the European Framework Program Horizon 2020. It trains young researchers in understanding the specific knowledge that architects use when designing buildings and cities. TACK gathers ten major academic institutions, three leading cultural architectural institutions as well as nine distinguished architecture design offices. Collaboratively these partners offer an innovative PhD training program on the nature of tacit knowledge in architecture, resulting in ten parallel PhD projects.

 

The TACK Conference “Tacit Knowledge in Architecture” and Exhibition “Unausgesprochenes Wissen/Unspoken Knowledge/Le (savoir) non-dit” took place at ETH Zürich, 19-21 June 2023.

The TACK Network

Academic Partners and PhD candidates

Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment

Prof. dr. ir. Klaske Havik is Professor of Methods of Analysis and Imagination at the Department of Architecture at TU Delft. Her book Urban Literacy. Reading and Writing Architecture (Rotterdam: Nai010 2014), based on her PhD, proposes a literary approach to architecture and urbanism. Other publications include Writingplace. Investigations in Architecture and Literature (2016), “Writing Atmospheres”, in Jonathan Charley(ed), Routledge Companion to Architecture and Literature (London: Routledge, 2018) and Architectural Positions: Architecture, Modernity and the Public Sphere (with Tom Avermaete and Hans Teerds, 2009). Havik is editor of the Writingplace Journal for Architecture & Literature, and Action Chair of the EU Cost network Writing Urban Places.

Prof. Dr. ir. Janina Gosseye is Professor of Building Ideologies in the TU Delft Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment. Her research is situated at the nexus of architectural theory, urban planning and social and political history. Gosseye has edited and authored several books, including Shopping Towns Europe 1945-75: Commercial Collectivity and the Architecture of the Shopping Centre (2017, with Tom Avermaete) and Speaking of Buildings: Oral History in Architectural Research (2019, with Naomi Stead and Deborah van der Plaat).Her research has also been published in several leading journals, including the Journal of Architecture,the Journal of Urban History, and Planning Perspectives.

Eric Crevels is an architect, urban planner and craftsman his work focus on socially oriented practices, investigating the built environment by the perspective of labour and the interfaces between craft and architecture. In 2018 Eric received a Master’s degree in Architecture and Urbanism at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais with the thesis “Essays on Resistance: A practical architectural proposal from the perspective of labour”, exploring with the potentialities of crafts, tacit knowledge and manual labour in the empowerment of individuals and communities. His research seeks to connect architectural and urban studies with anthropology, sociology and philosophy, looking for ways that may bridge the boundaries between theory and practice, looking to reshape the urban experience and architectural practice in inventive and socially responsible ways.

KTH Royal Institute of Technology, KTH School of Architecture

Prof. dr. Helena Mattsson is Professor in History and Theory at KTH School of Architecture. Her research deals with the 20 th century theory on welfare state architecture and contemporary architectural history with a special focus on the interdependency between politics, economy and spatial organizations. She is the co-editor for publications such as Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption, and the Welfare State (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2010), the themed issue of Architecture and Culture, “Architecture and Capitalism: Solids and Flows”, 2017 and Neoliberalism on the Ground: Architecture and Transformation from the 1960s to the Present (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). She is currently working on a book on the neoliberalization of the 1980s welfare state (Bloomsbury Publishing). She is part of the group Action Archive and a member of the editorial board of Journal of Architecture.

Assoc. Prof. Jennifer Mack is Associate Professor in Theory and History at the KTH School of Architecture. Broadly, her work concerns equality, power, and social change and the built environment, combining approaches from architectural history and anthropology. Her current research focuses on the design, use, and renovation of late modernist landscapes. She is the author of The Construction of Equality: Syriac Immigration and the Swedish City (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) and the co-editor of two anthologies: Rethinking the Social in Architecture: Making Effects (Actar, 2019) and Life Among Urban Planners: Practice, Professionalism, and Expertise in the Making of the City (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming 2020). She has published in numerous anthologies and a range of journals, including Public Culture, American Ethnologist, International Journal of Islamic Architecture, and Landscape Research (forthcoming) and is a member of the editorial board of Thresholds.

Anna Livia Vørsel is an architectural historian, researcher, and PhD candidate in Architectural History, Theory and Critical Studies at the School of Architecture, KTH. She holds an MA in Architectural History and a BSc in Architectural and Interdisciplinary Studies, both from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Working in-between and across scientific, historical, artistic and critical inquiries, her work addresses economic, legal and bureaucratic infrastructures in discussions around identity, belonging and knowledge production in architecture.

Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Oslo Centre for Critical Architectural Studies (OCCAS)

Prof. dr. Tim Anstey trained as an architect, and took his PhD, at the University of Bath in England. He is Director of the PhD Programme at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design in Norway, and a member of OCCAS, the Oslo Centre for Critical Architectural Studies. His recent publications include Images of Egypt, edited together with Mari Lending and Eirik Bøhn (Frankfurt: Lars Müller, 2020), “Movables”, in The Printed and the Built edited by Mari Hvattum and Anne Hultszch (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), and “Economies of the Interior: Thomas Hope and Interior Decoration”, in Grey Room 78 (Winter 2020).

Mara Trübenbach is an architectural designer and researcher strongly interested in the intersection of design methods and craft in architecture. In 2018 she graduated from the Bauhaus-University Weimar, DEU with a MSc Architecture, having studied before at the Peter Behrens School of Arts in Dusseldorf, DEU and at the Technical University Vienna, AT. She has gained a wide professional horizon in well-known architectural practices across Europe and has done research on provenances and migration movement in architecture and related subjects. In summer of 2019 she was selected for the Bauhaus Lab program at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, Dessau, DEU. An accompanied collectively curated exhibition and pocketbook was published soon after. Mara gave a talk at the Isokon Gallery in London, UK and was invited to speak at the Design History Society Annual Conference at Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK both held in 2019.

Bergische Universität Wuppertal, School of Architecture and Building Engineering

Prof. dr. ir. Christoph Grafe; architect and writer; living and working in Amsterdam, London and Wuppertal. Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the University of Wuppertal. From 2011 to 2017 he served as the director of the Flanders Architecture Institute in Antwerp. Visiting professorships at University of Hasselt (Belgium) and Politecnico di Milano. His book People’s Palaces – Architecture, Culture and Democracy in Post-War Western Europewas published by Architectura & Natura in 2014. Editor of OASEand publisher/ editor of  Eselsohren. Member of the editorial board of the Journal of Architecture (RIBA) and the advisory board of the Baukunstarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen. Acted as interim city architect (with Bob van Reeth) in Antwerp in 2015.

Filippo Cattapan is an architect and researcher based between Milano, Cologne and Lausanne. He studied Architecture at the IUAV University of Venezia, where he graduated in 2011 with a design thesis supervised by Giovanni Corbellini. In the last years, he has been teaching and researching at the Politecnico di Milano, at the ETH in Zürich and at the EPFL in Lausanne, where he is currently chargé de cours within the Laboratoire des Arts pour le Sciences directed by Nicola Braghieri. His studies in the field of architectural theory and history are mainly focused on architectural and urban representation, Renaissance architectura picta, seventeenth and eighteenth century visionary engravings, 1970s collages.

Politecnico di Milano, Department of Architecture and Urban Studies

Prof. dr. Gennaro Postiglione is a full Professor in Interior Architecture at Politecnico di Milano where he acts as Head of the MSc in Architecture. Besides his research on Scandinavian Modern and Contemporary Architecture, since 2005 he started a research by design track on reuse and valorisation of minor heritage – among which also the one coming from conflicts – recurring to sustainable re-active-action strategies and stressing the relationship between collective memory, public space and cultural identity. Lately including also contemporary housing and dwelling practices, to promote innovative, up-to-date solutions capable of meeting the urgent needs of housing. Putting the resources of architecture in the public interest.

Ass. Prof. Gaia Caramellino is Assistant Professor of history of architecture at the Politecnico di Milano and member of the PhD supervisory board at Politecnico di Torino. Her research focuses on the transatlantic transfer of architectural and urban knowledge; the history of housing practices, cultures, forms and theories; terminology and the study of the ordinary. She has held several visiting fellowships (the CCA, Kyoto University, IIAS, Radcliffe) and research grants (Graham Foundation). She is the author of Europe meets America (2016) and co-editor of The Housing Project (2020), Post-war Middle-Class Housing (2015) and Storie di Case (2013). She chairs the research group Retheorizing the Architecture of Housing.

Claudia Mainardi, together with her collective Fosbury Architecture, is curator of the Italian Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. In the previous years, Claudia worked for numerous offices including OMA/AMO, MVRDV, Stefano Boeri Architetti / MultiplicityLab, and Studio Folder with whom she won a special mention at the 14th Venice Biennale. In 2019 CM was head curator of the exhibition and graphic design of UABB Shenzhen Biennale and in 2017 she was assistant curator of BIO 25, the 25th Biennial of Design in Ljubljana. CM has been teaching assistant at Politecnico di Milano, researcher at The Why Factory –the think-thank led by Winy Maas within TUDelft– and collaborator at the Nieuwe Instituut.

Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Institute for Art and Architecture

Prof. dr. ir. Angelika Schnell is Professor for architectural theory, architectural history and design at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Former editor of ARCH+, current member of the editorial boards of ARCH+ and Candide, co-editor of Bauwelt Fundamente. Numerous publications and lectures at international institutions. Dissertation on the theoretical work of Aldo Rossi (summa cum laude). Research foci on the relationship between architecture and urbanism in the 20th and 21st centuries, in particular on the criticism of modernism and its historiographical conception, on design methods and their transdisciplinary interconnections.

Dr. Eva Sommeregger is Senior Scientist at the Institute for Art and Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, associated with the platforms „History, Theory and Criticism“ and „Analogue and Digital Production“. Her research deals with models of thought related to the human body’s spatiality. Eva was Schütte-Lihotzky Research Fellow 2010, Architect in Residence at the MAK in Los Angeles in 2011 and was appointed Senior Researcher at the LMDA at the Art Academy of Latvia, Riga in 2021. She is the co-editor of „Silver Linings“ (Breite Gasse, 2015, with Mike Aling and Florian Schafschetzy) and „Entwerfen Erforschen: der „performative“ turn im Architekturstudium“ (Birkhäuser, 2016, with Angelika Schnell and Waltraud Indrist), and author of “Tupaia, Kybernetes & Lara Croft” (Breite Gasse, 2022).

Paula Strunden is a transdisciplinary artist with a background in architecture. She pursued her studies in Vienna, Paris, and London and gained professional experience at Raumlabor Berlin and Herzog & de Meuron Basel before undertaking her PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna as part of the European network TACK: Architecture and its Ways of Knowing. Her installations have been exhibited internationally at the Royal Academy of Arts London, Eye Filmmuseum Amsterdam, and Het Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam and were nominated for the Dutch Film Award “Gouden Calf” in 2020. Paula is an Associate of Store and co-founder of the educational initiative Virtual Fruits, teaching courses at the Architectural Association London, Akademie van Bouwkunst Amsterdam, and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, advocating for alternative historiographies of virtual technologies through www.xr-atlas.org.

University of Antwerp, Faculty of Design Sciences, Department of Architecture

Prof. dr. ir. Lara Schrijver is Professor in Architecture Theory at the University of Antwerp Faculty of Design Sciences. Earlier, she taught at Delft University of Technology (2005–2014) and the Rotterdam Academy of Architecture (2007–2013). She is editor for the KNOB Bulletin and has served as editor for Footprint journal and OASE. Her work has been published in various academic and professional journals. She is author of Radical Games (2009) and co-editor of Autonomous Architecture in Flanders (2016). She was co-editor for three editions of the annual review Architecture in the Netherlands (2016–2019).

Ionas Sklavounos is an architect and co-founder of the research-and-practice collective “Boulouki – Itinerant Workshop on Traditional Building Techniques.” Currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Antwerp, he graduated at the University of Patras and completed his post-graduate studies on the Epistemology of Architecture at the National Technical University of Athens, where he also worked as Teaching Assistant in courses of “Architectural Design” and “Analysis and Study of Historical Settlements and Ensembles.” His research focuses on participatory and ‘hands-on’ recuperations of cultural heritage through processes of making, repairing and building.

University College London, Bartlett School of Architecture

Prof. dr. Peg Rawes is Professor of Architecture and Philosophy at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Trained in art history and philosophy, her anthologies, Architectural Relational Ecologies: Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity (ed 2013), and Poetic Biopolitics: Practices of Relation in Architecture and the Arts (co-ed. 2016), publish architects alongside practitioners in the arts, environmental, human rights, social and medical research. Other recent publications include: ‘Insecure Predictions’, E-Flux Architecture, 24 July 2018; ‘Housing biopolitics and care’ in A. Radman and H. Sohn (eds), Critical and Clinical Cartographies (2017) and ‘Planetary Aesthetics’, in E. Wall and T. Waterman (eds), Landscape and Agency (2017).

Jhono Bennett is an architectural urbanist based in Johannesburg. He is a co-founder of 1to1 – Agency of Engagement, a design based social enterprise that has been developed to support the re-development of South African cities through addressing systemic spatial inequality post-Apartheid. In addition to this role, Jhono has held research and teaching and research positions in both the University of Johannesburg’s Design for Social Development Desis Lab and the Graduate School of Architecture; where he has been developing a focus on the inter-sectional role of design in how South African cities are seen, made and managed. Through his research he aims to explore the various contested imaginaries-in-action carried within the enforcement of urban policy in South African public space with a particular focus on the effect these value-based forces have in everyday city-making practices. Jhono holds a life-long fellowship with the Ashoka Global Changemakers Network as well as a place in the Alumni of the Young African Leaders Initiative’s (YALI) Mandela Washington Fellowship.

Leibniz Universität Hannover, Faculty of Architecture and Landscape Sciences

Prof. dr. ir. Margitta Buchert was Chair for Architecture and Art 20th/21st Centuries at the Faculty of Architecture and Landscape Sciences (Leibniz Universität Hannover). Contents focus on architectural theory, design theory, and design principles. The primary fields of research are ‘Reflexive design’, ‘Urban architecture’, as well as the aesthetics and contextuality of architecture, art, cities, and nature. | Selected publications: Bigness and Porosity, in: Sophie Wolfrum et al. (ed.), Porous City, Berlin 2018, 84-88; Margitta Buchert (ed), Processes of Reflexive Design, Berlin 2018; Margitta Buchert, Mobile und Stabile, in: Anett Zinsmeister (ed.), Figure of motion, Berlin 2011, 50–73; Margitta Buchert, Actuating. Koolhaas´urban aesthetics, in: Jale Erzen (ed.), Mirmarlikta estetik dusunce, Ankara 2010, 223-231.

Caendia Wijnbelt is an architect and researcher (doctoral candidate, LUH) with a strong interest in the many modes of perceiving/interpreting place, building upon a broad range of experiences working between disciplines and across cultures. Her project explores how reflexive approaches towards sites and localities could be conceptualised and generate practical tools for design. Before working in Lisbon at Inês Lobo Arquitectos for two years, she graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture from ENSA Toulouse, and completed a dual Master’s degree in European Architecture within the international network Reiseuni_lab in 2018. Her experience includes workshop-based design projects in Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa (MA), Tallinn University of Technology (MSc), University of Ljubljana, Haifa School of Design, Bauhaus Dessau, University of Innsbruck.

ETH Zürich, Department of Architecture

Prof. dr. ir. Tom Avermaete is Professor at ETH Zürich, where he is Chair for the History and Theory of Urban Design. Avermaete has a special research interest in the post-war public realm and the architecture of the city in Western and non-Western contexts. He is the author of Another Modern: The Post-War Architecture and Urbanism of Candilis-Josic-Woods (2005) and Casablanca, Chandigarh: A Report on Modernization (2014, with Maristella Casciato). Avermaete has also edited numerous books, including Shopping Towns Europe 1945-75: Commercial Collectivity and the Architecture of the Shopping Centre (2017, with Janina Gosseye), and is a member of the editorial team of OASE Architectural Journal and the advisory board of the Architectural Theory Review, among others.

Hamish Lonergan is a PhD candidate at the institute for the history and theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zurich. His research uses methods informed by queer theory to investigate the philosophical concept of tacit knowledge in design studio education since the 1970s. He has been a visiting researcher at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Nieuwe Institute. Before joining TACK, he studied architecture at the University of Queensland and worked at COX architecture on Indigenous cultural facilities on Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island). His writing—broadly concerned with the entanglement of architecture, philosophy, and queerness—appears in publications including OASE, Interstices, gta Papers, Footprint and Cartha.

Non-Academic Partners

Architekturzentrum Wien (AzW)

Dr. Monika Platzer studied art history at the University of Vienna. She is a curator at the Architekturzentrum Wien and heads its collections department. International curatorial activity at leading institutions such as the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) and the Getty Research Institute (GRI). Her exhibitions include: Cold War and Architecture. Contributions to Austria’s Democratization after 1945.; ‘Vienna. The Pearl of the Reich.’ Planning for Hitler; a_show: Austrian Architecture in the 20th and 21st Centuries; Lessons from Bernard Rudofsky; Shaping the Great City: Modern Architecture in Central Europe 1890–1937; and Kinetism. Vienna Discovers the Avant-Garde. Monika Platzer is editor of icamprint, the journal of the International Confederation of Architectural Museums. In 2014, she was visiting scholar at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University. Her current research focuses on transnational architectural history which was the subject of her latest publication on ‘Cold War and Architecture. The Competing Forces that Reshaped Austria after 1945. ’ by Park Books in 2019.

Nieuwe Instituut (HNI)

Dr. ir. Dirk van den Heuvel is an Associate Professor of Architecture at Delft University of Technology. He heads the Jaap Bakema Study Centre, the research collaboration between the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment of TU Delft, and Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. The Jaap Bakema Study Centre develops a public research programme of exhibitions, books, events and PhD projects in connection with the Dutch national collection of architecture and urban planning, held by Nieuwe Instituut. Van den Heuvel received a Richard Rogers Fellowship from Harvard University in 2017, and was a Visiting Scholar at Monash University in Melbourne, in 2019. He was curator of the Dutch national pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014. Other exhibitions include Changing Ideals. Rethinking the House (Bureau Europa, 2008) and Art on Display 1949–69 (Calouste Gulbenkian Museum 2019). Publications he (co-)authored include Habitat: Ecology Thinking in Architecture (2020), Jaap Bakema and the Open Society (2018), Architecture and the Welfare State (2015), Team 10: In Search a Utopia the Present 1953–1981 (2005), Alison and Peter Smithson: From the House the Future to a House Today (2004).

Dr. Fatma Tanış is the coordinator of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre at the Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam and lectures at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft. Prior to Delft, Tanış trained as an architect in İstanbul and Stuttgart. She holds Master’s degrees in Architectural History (ITU) and Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage (MSFAU). Having a particular interest in the in-between realm, she has explored the specificity of port cities through the notion of cosmopolitanism in her doctoral dissertation titled ‘Urban Scenes of a Port City: Exploring Beautiful İzmir through Narratives of Cosmopolitan Practices’ (2022). Her other publications include ‘Spatial Stories of İzmir’ (2020); ‘Space, Representation, and Practice in the Formation of İzmir during the Long Nineteenth Century’ in ‘Migrants and the Making the Urban-Maritime World: Agency and Mobility in Port Cities, c. 1570–1940’, eds. Christina Reimann, Martin Öhman (New York, London: Routledge, 2020); and a themed issue ‘Narratives #1: Mediterranean and Atlantic Cities’ (2021).

Vlaams Architectuurinstituut (VAi)

Dr. Sofie De Caigny is director of the Flanders Architecture Institute since January 2018 and Lecturer at the University of Antwerp in Architecture Critique at the Faculty of Design Sciences. She holds a Ph.D. (2007, University of Leuven) in architectural history and a Master degree in Cultural Management (2001, Universitat de Barcelona). She coordinated of the heritage department of the Flanders Architecture Institute since 2006. In this position, she manages projects on the conservation, digitization, dissemination and publication of digital architectural records. She was in charge of the integration of the architectural archival collection of the Province of Antwerp into the Flanders Architecture Institute. Sofie De Caigny has actively collaborated on enriching the intellectual scope and depth of the Flanders Architecture Institute. The results of this can be seen in two editions of the Flanders Architectural Review (2016 and 2018) and the exhibition Maatwerk that De Caigny curated for the German Architecture Museum, Frankfurt. Since 2014, she is Secretary General of ICAM – International Confederation of Architectural Museums. Sofie De Caigny is commissioner of the entry for the Belgian Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennial in 2021.

CITYFÖRSTER

CITYFÖRSTER was founded in 2005 as an interdisciplinary partnership of architects, engineers, and urban planners that operates internationally, with employees from more than 10 countries. The team, led by eight partners, is spread across offices in Berlin, Hamburg, Hannover, and Rotterdam. They conceive, plan, and implement buildings, urban structures, and open spaces for cities that are compact, socially and functionally mixed, multimodally networked, productive, organized around circular economies, and capable of adapting to climate change.

Architecten Jan De Vylder Vinck

Jan De Vylder, born 1968, is a Flemish architect based in Ghent and Brussels, Belgium. He has worked under his name since 2000. In 2005 together with Inge Vinck jan de vylder architecten was founded. Later on in 2010 architecten de vylder vinck taillieu was founded together with Inge Vinck and Jo Taillieu. And more recent architecten jan de vylder inge vinck was founded with Inge Vinck. In this divers constellations Jan De Vylder has realized several works in Belgium and abroad and has been exhibited in galleries like MANIERA (BE), FRIEDMAN BENDA (US), TOTO MA (JP) and biennials (Venice 2010, 2014, 2016, 2018; Chicago 2014, 2016; Lisbon 2019 and Sao Paolo 2019).

One Fine Day architects

Holger Hoffmann is a registered architect and founder of ‘one fine day. office for architectural design’, based in Düsseldorf, Germany. He holds a professorship for ‚Techniques of Representation and Design‘ at the University of Wuppertal since 2011. From 2007-2011 he led the ‘Department for Digital Design’ at the University of Applied Sciences in Trier, Germany. Holger gained professional expertise at UNStudio, Amsterdam, (2002-2008) and Bolles+Wilson, Münster (2000-2001). He received a postgraduate diploma in 2004 from Städelschule (SAC), Frankfurt, as he holds a professional degree in architecture from Münster School of Architecture (MSA), Germany. Before studying architecture, he was trained as a journeyman mason.

De Smet Vermeulen architecten

Paul Vermeulen is architect and partner in the Ghent-based office De Smet Vermeulen. He is also a professor in Urban Architecture at Delft University of Technology. In 2011 he received the Flemish Culture award (architecture) for his contributions to architecture critique and culture.

Haworth Tompkins

Dan Tassell joined Haworth Tompkins in 2007. He has delivered strategic masterplans for some of the UK’s leading institutions, including the Royal College of Art, Kingston University, Queen Mary UoL and the V&A. He has worked on the delivery of three new buildings at the RCA’s Battersea Campus, a major retrofit and extension for the Warburg Institute, University of London, and a range of projects for Kingston University including the BREEAM Award-winning retrofit of Kingston School of Art. In recent years Dan has been working with universities on their decarbonisation goals.

Onsitestudio

Onsitestudio is an architectural practice founded in Milan in 2006. The studio is headed by Angelo Lunati and Giancarlo Floridi. At this moment it employs 25 architects. They are interested in the intriguing relationships between the individual object and the city, between the need and specificity of the forms of a building and the collective character of the urban space, between the idea of ​​modernity and the temporal depth inherent in the construction of places. They believe that these relationships can significantly inform the qualities of the architecture and that the city is still the privileged place of these possible resonances. On a number of different occasions, the projects confront reality, trying to amplify the already existing characters of the places and investigating new combinations between the complexity of contemporary life and the urban dimension.

SOMA Architecture

soma is an Austrian practice run by Stefan Rutzinger and Kristina Schinegger. Since 2007 they have been working on a wide range of international projects, from implementation of innovative cultural buildings to award winning competition entries, from urban master planning and social housing to exhibition design and installations. Completed projects include the Theme Pavilion for the Expo 2012 in South Korea, the travelling Art Pavilion for the Salzburg Biennale and the Austrian headquarters for the German firm TECE.

Spridd

Spridd is an architecture office based in Stockholm since 2005. It has established itself as one of Sweden’s most innovative architectural offices in urban development and architecture through success in competitions , research, debates and completed projects. The projects range in a wide field from interior design to urban development as well as from conceptual thinking to construction drawings. Spridd currently consists of ten architects with a network of established partners.

Korteknie Stuhlmacher Architecten

Korteknie Stuhlmacher Architects was founded in 2001 by Mechthild Stuhlmacher and Rien Korteknie. The Rotterdam-based agency has realized a range of projects that, despite their initially limited scale, gained much appreciation and attention in the domestic and foreign press and have been awarded multiple architectural prizes.

Advisory Board

Boris Brorman Jensen is an independent consultant and practicing architect with a background in research and teaching from schools of architecture and universities throughout Denmark and abroad. He has authored and edited numerous articles, papers and books on architecture and urban development. Over the years Boris has served on a large number of committees and boards, most recently as a member of the Danish Arts Foundation’s Committee for Architecture Grants and Project Funding. His practice involves strategic consultancy and concept and idea development within architecture, landscape design and planning. He has been involved in a wide range of exhibition, including the Danish contribution to the 2016 International Architecture Exhibition in Venice.

Caroline van Eck studied art history at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris, and classics and philosophy at Leiden University. In 1994 she obtained her PhD in aesthetics (cum laude) at the University of Amsterdam. She has taught at the Universities of Amsterdam, Groningen and Leiden, where she was appointed Professor of Art and Architectural History in 2006. She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Warburg Institute and the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art at Yale University, and a Visiting Professor in Ghent, Yale and York. In September 2016 she took up her appointment as Professor of Art History at Cambridge, and in 2017 she gave the Slade Lectures in Oxford on Piranesi’s late candelabra: ‘The Material Presence of Absent Antiquities: Collecting Excessive Objects and the Revival of the Past’. Her main research interests are art and architectural history and theory of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century; classical reception; the anthropology of art; Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Gottfried Semper and Aby Warburg.

Françoise Fromonot is an architect and critic based in Paris, currently Professor (design, history and theory) at the ENSA Paris-Belleville. A contributing editor to l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui (Paris), then a joint editor of le visiteur (Paris), she was in 2008 a founding member of criticat (www.criticat.fr), and the editor in 2016 of selection of articles from the first ten issues, Yours critically. She is also the author of numerous books and essays, including Glenn Murcutt-Buildings and Projects (Electa, 1995 / 2003), Jørn Utzon and the Sydney Opera House (Electa, 1998), La Campagne des Halles (La Fabrique, 2005), a critical account of the renovation of central Paris followed in 2019 by a second volume, La Comédie des Halles. Her latest monograph deals with the large-scale projects of Michel Desvigne (Transforming Landscapes, Birkhäuser, 2020).

Hilde Léon is a full professor at Leibniz University in Hannover, since 2019 dean of the Faculty of Architecture and Landscape Science. After graduating at TU Berlin and at the architecture school of Venice IUAV Léon established an architectural office in Berlin together with Konrad Wohlhage († 2007). Léonwohlhage Architects design a wide range of projects, such as housing, public buildings and offices, i. e. the Indian Embassy in Berlin and the extension to the Maximileaneum, housing the Bavarian state government. Her academic career started at the Universität der Künste Berlin in 1990 and continued at Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg as visiting professor. Since 2000 Hilde Léon is full professor at the Leibniz University Hannover. She acts as jury member in national and international competitions apart from giving lectures and publishing in various architectural magazines.

Stefan Anspach (*1978) has been chairman of the Montag Stiftung Urbane Räume gAG since November 2017. It is his conviction that acting for the common good requires entrepreneurial expertise if projects are to have a sustainable impact. As a graduate industrial engineer and a graduate engineer of architecture, he links passion for planning with business management expertise. After studying at RWTH Aachen University, he worked as a strategy and management consultant for over 10 years. Since 2014 he was a partner in a medium-sized management consulting agency focusing on the real estate sector. In March 2017 he joined the Montag Foundations Group. Until September 2018 he was Managing Director of the Carl Richard Montag Foundation.

Wivina Demeester (*1943) became in 1967 an Agricultural Engineer and post-graduate in teaching University of Ghent. From 1974 to 2004 she was MP for the Christian Democratic party in Belgium, State Secretary for Public Health and Handicapped Care, State Secretary for Finance, Minister for Budget and Science, Flemish Minister for Finance and Budget, Health Institutions, Welfare and Family, MP in the Flemish Parliament and Chairperson of the Committee for Public Works, Transport and Energy. From 2004 to 2014 she was president of the Task Force for the deepening of the Westerschelde and Ghent-Terneuzen Canal. She was also president and member of the board of different Welfare, Health and Financial organisations Since 2004 President of the Board of deSingel (www.deSingel.be) and VAi (www.vai.be). Since 2004 she is member of the High Counsil of Finance and since 2005 member of the Board BAM/LANTIS (www.Lantis.be). Since 2010 she is president of School Invest en and member of the board of DBFM SvM (www.scholenvanmorgen.be).

Coordinators

The TACK project is coordinated by Prof. Tom Avermaete, Prof. Janina Gosseye, Korinna Zinovia Weber and Laura Trazic.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 860413.

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TACK Final Conference “Tacit Knowledge in Architecture” – Program

presented by

TACK Network

● Monday 19 June 2023

11:00 – 12:45
Registration desk open

12:45 – 13:15
Welcome and introduction by Tom Avermaete, Janina Gosseye, Christoph Grafe & Lara Schrijver

13:15 – 14:15
Opening lecture by Elke Krasny
Moderated by Helena Mattsson, with Françoise Fromonot, respondent

14:30 – 17:00
Paper session NATURE(S)
Chaired by Caendia Wijnbelt, Paula Strunden & Jhono Bennett

  • Uncommoning: Artistic Knowledge in Architecture, Valerie Hoberg
  • Body of Knowledge | Knowing Bodies, Katharina Voigt
  • Busy body: living and working in urban renewal neighbourhoods, Soscha Monteiro
  • Improvised architectural responses to the changing climate; making, sharing and communicating design processes in rural Bangladesh, Tumpa Husna Yasmin Fellows
  • ID – Integrated Processes of Reading and Creating Post-Objects in Digital Design, Angeliki-Sofia Mantikou and Athanasios Farangas

17:30 – 19:00
Tacit Knowledge in Architecture
Book presentation by the TACK ESRs
Moderated by Margitta Buchert & Klaske Havik
With Wivina Demeester & Christoph Grafe, respondents

19:30 – 20:30
Unausgesprochenes Wissen/Unspoken Knowledge/Le (savoir) non-dit
Exhibition opening with a statement by Tom Avermaete and Janina Gosseye, the exhibition curators
Statements by Kees Kaan, Elli Mosayebi, Mara Trübenbach and Angelo Lunati, exhibition contributors

20:30 – 22:00
Apéritif

● Tuesday 20 June 2023

9:30 – 11:15
Object session SITE
Chaired by Hamish Lonergan, Caendia Wijnbelt & Ionas Sklavounos

  • Chozos, Houses of Nomadic Shepherds, Alba Balmaseda Domínguez
  • Maintaining a Wetland, Johanna Just
  • Unpacking HERMIA, Mara Trübenbach
  • Embodied Knowledge: Eilfried Huth’s Eschensiedlung in Deutschlandsberg, Styria, 1972–1992, Monika Platzer
  • City as Forest, Verena Brehm
  • Clay landscape, Klas Ruin & Ola Broms Wessel
  • Cylinders of Soap, Mud, and Pottery: On Cultures of Making Beyond Architecture, Nadi Abusaada

11:15 – 12:00
Extended Break to visit TACK Exhibition

12:00 – 13:15
Lunch

13:15 – 14:15
Keynote lecture by Harry Collins
Moderated by Lara Schrijver
With Caroline van Eck, respondent

14:30 – 17:00
Paper session VECTORS
Chaired by Eric Crevels, Anna-Livia Vørsel & Mara Trübenbach

  • (Un)Programming the factory: weaving panopticon stories, Fernando Ferreira
  • Constructing tacit planning knowledge: political commitment and architectural practice, Elettra Carnelli
  • Rooms: Architectural Model-Making as Ethnographic Research, Ecaterina Stefanescu
  • Embodiment takes command: Re-enacting Hannie and Aldo van Eyck’s homelife, Alejandro Campos
  • Revealing the tacit: a critical spatial practice based on walking and re/presenting, Nilsu Altunok

17:30 – 19:00
Object session LINEAGES
Chaired by Paula Strunden & Ionas Sklavounos

  • Luc Deleu & T.O.P. office, Sofie de Caigny
  • Tesseln and Bâtons à marques: Early records of customary law, Nicole de Lalouvière
  • Architectural photography as conduit for tacit knowledge: The Helfenstein archives at gta, Irina Davidovici and Ziu Bruckmann
  • Forêt DesCartes, Filippo Cattapan
  • The B-Sides. Tupaia, Kybernetes & Lara Croft, Eva Sommeregger

20:00 – 22:00
Conference dinner

● Wednesday 21 June 2023

9:30 – 12:00
Paper session ACTORS
Chaired by Claudia Mainardi, Filippo Cattapan & Hamish Lonergan

  • Paperwork and Wordcraft: Institutionality at IAUS, Alex Maymind
  • Understanding the Roles of Tacit Knowledge in the Collaboration Between AEC: a case study approach, Laurens Bulckaen
  • Architecture, Design and Judgment, Hans Teerds
  • In Quest of Meaning: Revisiting the discourse around ‘non-pedigreed’ architecture, Vasileios Chanis
  • Dissemination of Architectural Culture: A View on Turkish Architects’ Journeys in the Pre-Digital Age, Hamiloglu Ceren

12:00 – 13:15
Lunch

13:15 – 14:15
TACK Web-publication presentation by Helen Thomas
With Gaia Caramellino, respondent

14:30 – 15:45
Object session SHAPERS
Chaired by Eric Crevels, Mara Trübenbach & Ionas Sklavounos

  • Tactiles, Katharina Kasinger
  • Infra-thin Magick: An Extended Reality (XR) Ceremony, Paula Strunden
  • Material Chariot, Paul Vermeulen
  • Playa Blanca, Bankers and the Pivotal Point, Holger Hoffmann
  • Concrete Column, Pirelli Learning Centre, Angelo Lunati

16:00 – 17:30
Roundtable and concluding discussion
Moderated by Jennifer Mack & Angelika Schnell
With Paula Strunden, Mara Trübenbach, Hamish Lonergan & Ionas Sklavounos, session reporters, and with Boris Brorman Jensen, respondent

Venue
ETH Hönggerberg
Stefano-Franscini, Platz 5
8049 Zürich

 

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Ways of Knowing Architecture: Resisting the Master’s Tools

Speaker

Elke Krasny

This is the keynote for the TACK Conference on 19 June 2023, 13:15-14:15 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

What does architecture know? How can this knowledge of architecture be made accessible and what does this knowledge tell us about our relations to each other, to other sentient beings, to land and resources, to the planet at large? What are the tools that shape ways of knowing architecture? Starting from these questions, and acknowledging that knowledge is never singular, never neutral, and always situated and that tools are implicated in the master’s power, this lecture places ways of knowing architecture at the intersection of dimensions of tacit knowledge, hegemonic power knowledge, epistemic violence and myriad ways of rendering ways of knowing otherwise silent and invisible. In order to work towards ways of knowing architecture otherwise and to become more fully aware of how epistemic violence operates in tandem with economies based on the paradigms of extraction, exploitation, and compulsory growth, knowledge needs to become plural. Learning to listen to plural knowledges that matter to architecture, knowledges that come from the ground, the air, the water, humans and other sentient beings, will require more complex ways of engaging with what architecture knows. Learning how to listen to such plural knowledges in architecture, requires tools and methods that make such learning and listening possible. Insisting on this possibility links ways of knowing architecture to ethical and political dimensions of interdependencies, which are materialized and spatialized in designing, building, and constructing architecture. Ultimately, this lecture asks how ways of knowing architecture otherwise will and can enter into architectural education and curricula as well as into the architectural profession.

Elke Krasny is Professor for Art and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is a feminist cultural theorist, urban researcher, curator, and author. Her scholarship addresses ecological and social justice at the global present with a focus on care in architecture, urbanism, and contemporary art. With Angelika Fitz, she edited Critical Care. Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet together (MIT Press, 2019). With Lara Perry, she edited Curating as Feminist Organizing (Routledge, 2022). Her forthcoming book Living with an Infected Planet. Covid-19, Feminism and the Global Frontline of Care offers a cultural feminist analysis of the rhetoric of war and the realities of care in pandemic times and an introduction to feminist recovery plans for Covid-19 and beyond.

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UNCOMMONING: Artistic Knowledge in Architecture

Author

Valerie Hoberg

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Abstract

While art and architecture share many characteristics, artistic knowledge offers some specific possibilities for contemporary architectural practice. Based on a theoretical framework around the artistic tacit knowing and with a focus on artistic reflexivity and its potential for knowledge production, the article explores artistic knowledge examples in the work of the Chilean architect Smiljan Radić. They mainly occur in accompanying practices like writing, collecting or photographing, but which are intertwined with and have an effect on the built. A light is shed on the imaginative, critical and transformative potentials of the artistic knowledge. These potentials especially come to play regarding the complexity of contemporary and future challenges for architecture. An outlook uses artistic works by Gordon Matta-Clark to raise approaches to action and thought for potential future architectural practice. The specific potential of art and artistic knowledge to address complex problems through focused, reflexive, contextual thinking is highlighted as a way to overcome the known and inadequate – here: uncommoning.

This paper will be presented at the TACK Conference in the paper session NATURE(S), 19 June 2023 between 14:30 – 17:00 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Valerie Hoberg studied architecture and urban planning in Hanover and Paris. She worked as a competition architect and as a research assistant at a_ku, LUH. Today, she works in urban development and as a freelance illustrator. In her doctorate with Prof. Dr. Buchert she researched on artistic reflexions in architecture.

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Body of Knowledge: Knowing Bodies

Author

Katharina Voigt

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June 19, 2023
Abstract

This contribution addresses tacit knowledge as an embodied form of knowing and traces the potential of the body to inform and explore, contain and convey, obtain and express architectural knowledge — in the experiencing, designing, creating, and living of architectural space. If, as framed by Polanyi, »we know more than we can tell«, focusing on the body and its immanent knowledge allows to access immediate forms of architectural knowledge. Experience, memory, and the capacity for anticipation are equally rooted in the body; corporeally anchored, contained in, and inscribed to the body. Respectively, creative imagination in architectural design relies upon the body. Through knowing how we experience architecture, we are eager to anticipate future perception in architectural design. Following my doctoral thesis, entitled “Impulses and Dialogues of Architecture and the Body”, I present the knowledge of the body as a contribution to the body of knowledge of architecture: Using the example of the working method and oeuvre of Sasha Waltz & Guests – which I investigate against the background of my own artistic practice, especially in in-situ and site-specific performances, as well as my attempts at the including of somatic practices into my academic teaching in the field of architecture – I exploit the body as a medium of spatial research, and as an immediate form of conveyance and expression in the discipline of architecture.

This paper will be presented at the TACK Conference in the paper session NATURE(S), 19 June 2023 between 14:30 – 17:00 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Katharina Voigt addresses the interrelation and reciprocal influences of architectural and physical thinking in her artistic practice, academic teaching, and scientific research, working in the field of architecture and contemporary dance. Her doctoral thesis “Impulses and Dialogues of Architecture and the Body” addresses different modes of the body and their potential influence on the architecture discipline. She works at the Chair of Architectural Design and Conception at the Technical University of Munich and is one of the Lead Editors of “Dimensions. Journal of Architectural Knowledge”.

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Busy body: living and working in urban renewal neighbourhoods

Author

Soscha Monteiro de Jesus

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June 19, 2023
Abstract

Participatory urban renewal reinforces the isolation of working-class women. This was concluded in the 1983 publication “Zoiets maak je toch niet, ik zeg altijd, dat doen mannen…”. This booklet criticizes 1980s participatory urban renewal of the Staatsliedenbuurt in Amsterdam and addresses the exclusion of women. Several inventive tools were developed in this neighbourhood to empower women to make their diverse, tacit, embodied knowledge heard and make design suggestions that better fitted their needs. As a result, new knowledge was brought into participatory urban renewal processes of which women were so often excluded; diversifying and expanding what was commonly perceived as the concerns of the resident. This paper brings forward various tools developed in the Staatsliedenbuurt that were used as vehicles to bring women’s voices into urban renewal processes, such as the fictiocritical character Els, a workshop on dwelling stories, and a manual. The paper contributes to histories on the collective efforts by various women’s groups in the 1980s that fought exclusion and sought to develop feminist approaches for urban design by making what is the tacitly known, explicit; making the invisible, visible.

This paper will be presented at the TACK Conference in the paper session NATURE(S), 19 June 2023 between 14:30 – 17:00 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Soscha Monteiro de Jesus is a PhD researcher at TU Delft. She investigates how urban design approaches have evolved with paradigms of sustainability at the end of the twentieth century. She is an AHRA Steering Group member and cofounder of a housing cooperative. Soscha holds a MSc from TU Delft.

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Improvised architectural responses to the changing climate: Making, sharing and communicating design processes in rural Bangladesh

Author

Tumpa Husna Yasmin Fellows

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Abstract

Bangladesh is particularly vulnerable to global climate change because of the shifting riparian characteristics of its landscape and location, with weather-driven calamities disproportionately affecting low-income rural communities. Research findings highlight the unequal distribution of responsibilities and the greater burden on women in the community to respond to the threats of extreme climate. The research methodology for this PhD by Architectural Practice therefore seeks to empower those in Bangladeshi villages by enabling marginalised voices to be heard through an emphasis on collective engagement, especially incorporating the contributions by female residents. Carried out through community-oriented projects in the remote village of Rajapur, this ‘live’ practice-based thesis explores, tests, shares and disseminates some of the rich and varied forms of tacit knowledge which can provide valuable understandings both for those people in the locality and also for architects and designers on the international scale. Responding to social and ecological ‘entanglements’ in Rajapur, the specific problems addressed are erratic rainfall patterns which create both droughts and floods, rising sea levels caused by climate change, and naturally occurring extremely high levels of arsenic-contaminated groundwater supplies, poisoning the food chain and fish in nearby ponds and lakes. How to devise affordable, low-tech solutions that utilise the tacit knowledge and skills of those living in remote villages such as Rajapur? To reshape architectural practice as an active agent for decolonising design methods, so that issues of climate change and spatial justice can be better dealt with, the research draws upon applied anthropological methods – ‘ethnography in the field’ – which prioritise local community members as the indigenous producers of design research, analytical drawings, making and storytelling. The thesis thus addresses a gap in knowledge by contributing a unique approach to participatory architectural practice, showing how it can be expanded to include rural communities in the Global South.

This paper will be presented at the TACK Conference in the paper session NATURE(S), 19 June 2023 between 14:30 – 17:00 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Tumpa Husna Yasmin Fellows is an academic, researcher (PhD candidate), an architect. She undertakes practice-based research that focuses on design practice to be an active agent of socio-spatial decolonisation for environmental practice at Our Building Design and the charity Mannan Foundation Trust.

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ID – Integrated Processes of Reading and Creating Post-Objects in Digital Design

Authors

Lina Mantikou Athanasios Farangas

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June 19, 2023
Abstract

Α mechanism for generating logic that describes an under-design object by its user, in a digital design medium (AutoCAD by AutoDesk), using a deconstructive tracing of the design process is proposed. Creating multiple, independent, and autonomous correlations of the design language structure and its representation during the design process leads to new associations accessing the notion of Post-Object. The mode of deduction and the research results aim to measure the by-design idiosyncratization, a subject-oriented process of understanding and reacting to a deeper structure. This socially and culturally expected mode, described as a singularization process (Reckwitz, 2020) and the User-Interface relationship, provide correlations between a unique selection of things and an infrastructure, that could be understood as a dispositive of singularization (Agamben, 2009). Crafting a method of relating the design of objects to subjects, as well as the use of language to form, raises questions about how contemporary design is constituted as a way of conceptualizing contemporaneous subjectivities and implicitly post-industrial societies and economies.

This paper will be presented at the TACK Conference in the paper session NATURE(S), 19 June 2023 between 14:30 – 17:00 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Angeliki-Sofia Mantikou (1987) and Athanasios Farangas (1987) are architect-researchers and Ph.D. candidates at NTUA.  focusing on interdisciplinary, idiosyncratic methods between art and architecture and on the comparative intersection of Architecture & Computer Science in digital design software.

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Book presentation: Tacit Knowledge in Architecture

moderated by

Margitta Buchert Klaske Havik

presentators

Eric Crevels Anna Livia Vørsel Mara Trübenbach Paula Strunden Claudia Mainardi Hamish Lonergan Ionas Sklavounos Caendia Wijnbelt Jhono Bennett Filippo Cattapan

respondents

Christoph Grafe Wivina Demeester

The book presentation will take place on 19th June 2023 at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5) between 17:30 – 19:00 (CEST).

This part of the conference will present the various approaches of the PhD researchers in the TACK network exploring `Tacit Knowledge in Architecture´. In short talks they will show glimpses into their research settings and contents and debate these special ways of researching into this special research field. The series of reflections opens with explorations on `Dramaturgies´ to investigate architectural culture’s relationships to material, the body, workmanship and care. In transdisciplinary encounters tacit knowing is discussed as sensual lived experiences of skillful interaction with different materials in real, productive settings. It becomes clear how material concerns and details have an impact on the social aspects of architecture as well as on the culture of its maintenance. Furthermore, they demonstrate how performative capacities and embodied impulses, related to materiality, steer processes of architectural imagination in the analogous context of a design process as well as in augmented reality, where they enable to uncover and discover different layers of spatial experience. The second focus is on a central aspect of architectural culture, namely the `communities of tacit knowledge’ in the field of architecture. They indicate how practices of architects come with their own ways of doing, from positioning and communication to ways of approaching sites, assignments and design processes. They address the cultural trajectories they imply and generate between the situated local and regional to the overarching and intermingled courses and ways of doing. The last set of contributions dwells upon the very situations that architects encounter, and that may call for very different forms of tacit knowing. They present highly situated approaches in which local communities and local building traditions and specificities as for example geographical and political situations are intrinsically interrelated with and also build critical parts of participatory and jointed projects. They address cultures of repair and especially the relevance of value settings in developmental processes, which also are key questions in educational contexts, where codes and conventions of architectural cultures are implicitly transmitted and in this way form part of future architectural practices.

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TACK – Exhibition “Unausgesprochenes Wissen / Unspoken Knowledge / Le (savoir) non-dit”

organized by

TACK Network

 

The exhibition opening with a word by Tom Avermaete and Janina Gosseye and statements by Angelo Lunati, Mara Trübenbach, Elli Mosayebi and Kees Kaan will take place on 19th June 2023 at ETH Zürich in the Archena (HIL D 57.1) between 19:30 – 20:30 (CEST).

The exhibition “Unausgesprochenes Wissen/Unspoken Knowledge/Le (savoir) non-dit”, which runs in parallel with the conference “Tacit Knowledge in Architecture”, explores the tacit dimension in architecture culture through a series of objects organised in four sections:

‘Horizons and References’ explores the importance of visual, conceptual, and material references in architecture culture. It shows how their tacit presence can install a horizon against which architects think, write, draw, speak and build.

‘Making and Materiality’ demonstrates how the act of making a drawing, a scale model, a piece of furniture, a book, or a building can result in the acquisition of knowledge. It also reveals how the physical qualities of materials often adopt central roles in such acts of tacit knowledge production.

‘Codes and Communities’ focuses on how codes about building and buildings can be learned through tacit observation, and illustrates how the ability to decipher such codes is often a matter of belonging to an informed community.

‘Embodiment and Experience’ uncovers the role of bodily experiences in learning about architecture. It explores how our senses can be activated in analogue and digital ways to gain knowledge about the built environment.

The various objects on display in this instant (three-day) exhibition have been crowd-sourced. They result from a ‘call for objects’ to which a large group of practitioners and scholars responded. The selected items – models, photographs, videos, etc. – are prime witnesses of the critical and fertile role of tacit knowledge in architecture culture.

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Chozos, Houses of Nomadic Shepherd

Speakers

Alba Balmaseda Dominguez Kyra Bullert Špela Setzen Markus Vogl

This object will be presented at the TACK Conference in the object session SITE, 20 June 2023 between 09:30 – 11:15 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Chozos are traditional handcrafted shepherds’ huts. They were built by the shepherds themselves and served them as shelters when moving with their herds from field to field. The construction technique was used by shepherds in rural Spain until the end of the 20th century.

In a transdisciplinary project, we decided to explore this fading knowledge of building because we understood that this vernacular architecture in extinction offers the opportunity to learn about awareness, care, community, craftsmanship and harmony between nature and human beings. The holistic approach therefore focused on the collection of perceptions, experiences, and narratives and on what contemporary witnesses could tell, well knowing that this could be the last chance to preserve the knowledge for future generations.

The project not only aimed at “re-creating” the chozos but at “co-creating” them, i.e. understanding how all their components – context, history, actors, material and projections – are intertwined. For this reason, the process included an intense exchange and a mutual learning within shepherds, local people, various experts, students and tutors.

With this approach, the project offers an alternative to current attempts of sustainable architectural transformation with its focus on innovation and digitalization. In contrary to those current attempts, the chozos project closely looks at the principle of “exnovation”, i.e. investigating whether really all innovations were helpful or whether some of them could and should be abolished again while instead finding out that vernacular architectures can still and maybe now even more than before help to contribute to face the current global challenges.

The project’s plan was to build two chozos, both in line with traditional building material and traditional basic construction methods. As a result, we created a monolithic chozo, which remained in the Extremadura, and a modular chozo, which started travelling through Europe. With that parallel building task the project managed to highly engage the participants in the process of collecting, reproducing and reflecting the knowledge. While working on and with the chozos we found out that these two seemingly simple “objects” are “more than objects.” Both chozos are complex manifestations of a society in which we identify ourselves as part of something larger.

Alba Balmaseda Domínguez, Kyra Bullert, Špela Setzen and Markus Vogl are members of the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Stuttgart. The Project “Chozos” is a collaboration between “e1nszue1ns” platform, founded in 2015 as a knowledge transfer project group at the faculty and the departments IRGE (Institut für Raumkonzeptionen und Grundlagen des Entwerfens, Prof. Markus Allmann) and SuE (Lehrstuhl Stadtplanung und Entwerfen, Prof. Dr. Martina Baum). The project has been strongly supported financially and in terms of content by the German Sto-Stiftung, the municipality of Cabeza del Buey and the Spanish Embassy in Switzerland.

The activity is a partnership between the 1zu1 platform and the departments IRGE (Institut für Raumkonzeptionen und Grundlagen des Entwerfens, Prof. Markus Allmann) and SuE (Lehrstuhl Stadtplanung und Entwerfen, Prof. Dr. Martina Baum). The project has been supported by Sto-Stiftung, the municipality of Cabeza del Buey and the Spanish Embassy in Switzerland.

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Maintaining a Wetland

Speaker

Johanna Just

This object will be presented at the TACK Conference in the object session SITE, 20 June 2023 between 09:30 – 11:15 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

NSG Wagbachniederung is a nature reserve and birdwatching hot spot in the Upper Rhine Plain between Karlsruhe and Mannheim. Once, the site was a large peatland in the alluvial plains of the Rhine until the area was used by a sugar-beet factory for disposing of wastewater and mud in 1937. Over the years, the peatland was destroyed and turned into a wetland with large reed areas and mud plains, attracting numerous migratory and water birds and leading to the protection of the anthropogenic site as a nature reserve in 1983. With the closure of the factory and the subsequent discontinuation of water influx a few years later, the wetland was threatened to fall dry and deteriorate. Its newly gained importance for the avian world required the authorities to prevent this process by ensuring irrigation is continued. The controlled watering and other maintenance measures are defined in a management plan. However, due to the complexity and unpredictability of interactions affording the site’s ecology, the possibility of codification is limited and needs to be supplemented by the tacit knowledge of an expert. Biologist Ulrich Mahler takes on this role. Although retired from his position at the nature protection agency, where he was responsible for the site for over 50 years, he remains the site’s guardian. He spends several hours daily walking and monitoring the site and operates the irrigation system when needed to prevent ecological succession. He keeps records of all his excursions in the form of annotated maps where he marks precisely the duration of the water flow and which birds, insects or amphibians he encountered along the way. His “Exkursionszettel” exemplifies how tacit knowledge is embedded in the maintenance of a highly modified and constructed landscape and expresses the impossibility of codifying its complex management.

Johanna Just is an architect and doctoral fellow at the LUS Institute at ETH Zürich. In her work, she traces relationships among more-than-humans and the environment in the Upper Rhine Plain and explores new modes of spatial representationbetween different species, humans, and extractive ecologies in the Upper Rhine Plain. Currently, she is one of the guest editors of the 2024 issue of gta papers.

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Unpacking Hermia

Speaker

Mara Trübenbach

This object will be presented at the TACK Conference in the object session SITE, 20 June 2023 between 09:30 – 11:15 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

While we know little about the transport, we do know that the steam cargo ship SS Hermia, a Hamburg-London Line ship of the Flensburger Schiffsbau-Gesellschaft, launched in 1910, transported Warburg’s library, including furniture, from Hamburg to London by way of two voyages in December 1933 (Abert, 2002). During this time, the ship was owned by HAPAG and was bought in 1934 by Adolph Kirsten & Co., which had operated the HH-LDN line from 1910 until 1928. In 1940, Hermia became a hospital ship for the German Navy, was renamed Adriana, and sunk by a British air mine on the Elbe River near Flensburg in December of that year (Kuldas, 2009: 196).

In 1943, philosopher Hannah Arendt described the state of migration as follows: “Our identity is changed so frequently that nobody can find out who we actually are” (Kohn and Feldman, 2007: 270). It is the idea of change and the fact of constant departure that I want to experience through material. The process of model-making is not about representing the truth, but about creating a vehicle for the library, which was transported from the port city Hamburg to the British capital. The performative potential of a model, which come to the fore in the employment a layered way, building on the scale of materiality, the scale of form, etc. participate in a performative act. The complexity of performative capacities has the ability not only to construct realities, but also to shed light on what kind of history is being produced and presented through the re-enactment of archival material.

Mara Trübenbach is an architectural designer and scholar. She holds a MSc Architecture from Bauhaus-University and is doing her PhD at AHO (Oslo). She is part of the TACK network and is strongly interested in the intersection of craft, material and alternative design methods in architecture such as performance and theatre studies.

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Embodied Knowledge: Eilfried Huth’s Eschensiedlung in Deutschlandsberg, Styria, 1972–1992

Speaker

Monika Platzer

Affiliation

Architekturzentrum Wien (AzW)

This object will be presented at the TACK Conference in the object session SITE, 20 June 2023 between 09:30 – 11:15 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

As early as the Middle Ages, a Bauhütte referred to a place of cooperation and interaction between craftspeople.

The Austrian architect Eilfried Huth, a pioneer of participatory housing, used this notion to express his reliance on the embodied knowledge of future inhabitants who gathered as an advocacy group to design a new housing estate called Eschensiedlung,1972-1990 in Deutschlandsberg, Styria.

At the Eschensiedlung, the Bauhütte would not only be the marketplace for construction materials but also the centre of communication and strong neighbourly support structures. Huth initiated lectures, discussions, and consultations, while future residents contributed to the planning process with their tacit knowledge, to realise 110 low-cost single-family houses.

Monika Platzer studied art history at the University of Vienna. She is head of collections and curator at the Architekturzentrum Wien. Monika has engaged in curatorial undertakings at leading international institutions such as the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) and the Getty Research Institute (GRI). 

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title

City as Forest

Speaker

Verena Brehm CITYFÖRSTER

This object will be presented at the TACK Conference in the object session SITE, 20 June 2023 between 09:30 – 11:15 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Designing is based on images. Nature is an essential source. The image ‘City as Forest’ has accompanied cityfoerster since its founding in 2005 as a mission statement.

We understand the city as a forest: a complex (eco)system in which various spatial elements are synergistically and dynamically networked. In this sense, with every design, the challenge and the opportunity arise to contribute to the system as a whole rather than creating a solitary object.

The metaphor of the city as a forest is always an occasion for interpretation, evokes associations and includes various readings of the interaction of scales, objects, functions, and programs. Thus, the brushwood stands for open spaces for innovation, the humus is the constantly renewing network of urban spaces and userships, wasteland are underexposed places for the unpredictable, only the mixed forest creates climate resilience, material cycles keep the system alive…

The image of the city as a forest is closely linked to a professional self-image that focuses on sustainability and the future viability of architecture and the city. The concept of sustainability comes from forestry: consumption and growth are in balance. This understanding results in concrete tasks and design principles for our work, which we in turn translate into guiding principles and conceptual images and make them interpretable. These include, for example, the realization of recycling architecture according to the guiding principle “design by availability” or climate-adaptive urban designs according to the image “Landschaf(f)tStadt”.

After all, when designing architecture and urban spaces, we follow the guiding principle formulated by the well-known forester Jack Westoby: „Forestry is not about trees, it is about people. And it is about trees only insofar as trees can serve the needs of people.“ 1 Westoby 1967, cited by A. J. Leslie in: Westoby, Jack, The Purpose of Forests. Follies of Development, New York 1987, ix

Verena Brehm is a founding partner of CITYFÖRSTER architecture + urbanism. Her field of work encompasses urban transformation processes. Verena Brehm studied architecture and urban design in Hannover, Berlin, and Copenhagen. Since 2022 she is professor for urban design at the University of Kassel.

  1. Westoby 1967, cited by A. J. Leslie in: Westoby, Jack, The Purpose of Forests. Follies of Development, New York 1987, ix

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title

Clay Landscape

speaker

Klas Ruin Ola Broms Wessel Spridd

This object will be presented at the TACK Conference in the object session SITE, 20 June 2023 between 09:30 – 11:15 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

This 1:1000 landscape model made from clay shows the site of a prominent 12th century church and graveyard located between two housing areas, Tensta and Rinkeby, built during the 1960´s as part of the Million Programme in Stockholm, where we are currently adding a wall of housing combined with an assembly hall, 100 metres long. In our practice we have used this kind of clay model for numerous projects over the years.

Collecting these models, we have built our own growing landscape of models in the office. We enjoy the reference to John Soane’s house museum in London and his mode of producing imaginative collage paintings, representing the totality of his work as an autonomous place of culture production.

Klas Ruin and Ola Broms Wessel founded Spridd in 2005. Spridd is one of Sweden’s most innovative offices with success in competitions, research, debates and completed projects. Spridd is nominated for the Kasper Salin prize, best building of the year 2023, for the transformation of St Pauls church in Stockholm.

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title

Cylinders of Soap, Mud, and Pottery: On Cultures of Making Beyond Architecture

Speaker

Nadi Abusaada Wesam Al Asali

This object will be presented at the TACK Conference in the object session SITE, 20 June 2023 between 09:30 – 11:15 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

In this paper, we extend the concept of the site in architecture from being a future space awaiting a built product to an existing space of production. In expanding this concept, we trace spaces of building and environmental crafts that contribute to shaping the built environment beyond the boundaries of the architecture profession in its traditional sense. We focus on three products that are similar in their from as cylinders, but differ in their materials, the purpose of their production, and their cultural and social meaning. From the tanoura in the soap factories in Syria and Palestine, totannour mud ovens for baking bread in northern Syria, to abraj hamam dovecotes in Egypt, this paper presents a framework for understanding cultures of making in the Arab region and their connection to the production of the built environment in rural and urban setting. We aim to understand these formations from their tacit meanings (how they are built, what are their building techniques, and what knowledge is based on) to their spatial-cultural meaning (how the products of these crafts relate to their production sites). Finally, we work to extract the connections of these cultures with architecture and frame a methodology for how design today can dialogue with products outside its professional and educational boundaries.

Nadi Abusaada is an architect and a historian. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) at ETH Zürich. Wesam Al Asali is an Assistant Professor at IE University in Spain and the co-founder of IWlab and CERCAA.

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title

Tacit knowledge and the locus of legitimate interpretation

Speaker

Harry Collins

This keynote will take place on Tuesday 20 June 2023, 13:15-14:15 (CEST) at the TACK Conference, ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

“I will suggest that tacit knowledge comes in three variants which are relatively easy, a bit more difficult, and impossible or near impossible to transform into explicit knowledge. The existence of tacit knowledge means that sciences are never as exact and deterministic as they were once thought to be. Scientific domains can be defined by their ‘locus of legitimate interpretation’ (LLI), the group entitled to comment on creative work. Science’s LLI is restricted to those very close to the producers; the LLI of the adventurous arts gives little emphasis to producers but much to consumers – gallery owners, newspaper critics, the general public. Architecture’s LLI has lobes of both types.”

Harry Collins is Distinguished Research Professor at Cardiff University. He is an elected Fellow of the British Academy and winner of the Bernal prize for social studies of science. His c25 books cover, among other things, sociology of scientific knowledge, artificial intelligence, the nature of expertise, tacit knowledge, and technology in sport. His contemporaneous study of the detection of gravitational waves has been continuing since 1972 and he has written four books and many papers on the topic. He is currently looking at the impact of the coronavirus lockdown on science due to the ending of face-to-face conferences and workshops and on the role of science in safeguarding democracy.

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title

(Un)Programming the Factory: Weaving Panopticon Stories

Author

Fernando Ferreira

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Abstract

This paper departs from practice-based research developed in Coelima, a Portuguese textile factory under socio-spatial dismantlement, to investigate the relationships between its assembly line, stories, and weaving. I ask how sets of tacit knowledge developed through workers' stories and temporal hand-weaving practices can provide new directions for architectural design to reimagine alternative 'poethical' (Retallack, 2003) working modes in the assembly line. To do so, I build upon workers' stories, which refer to acts of surveillance experienced in the weaving department under capital efficiency (Giedion, 1948), to investigate the tacit process of patterning stories through weaving (Kruger, 2001; Albers, 1959). Words taken from the workers' stories are designed as weave draft notations, or 'panopticon patterns', through a collaborative event with a group of former workers of Coelima to generate a site-specific textile language and knowledge. Although this knowledge can only be transmitted via experience, repetition, and performative making (Nimkulrat, 2012), I suggest that it can evoke emancipatory possibilities for workers and architects to reimagine socially and spatially other configurations for the assembly line grounded in ideas of industrial commons (Rappaport, 2021). Finally, I argue that knowledge acquired from weaving, weave draft notations and stories can provide creative means for architectural design to (un)program work control and time in Coelima's assembly line while re-evaluating issues of (post)work, pleasure, and productivity within the contemporary workplace.

This paper will be presented at the TACK Conference in the paper session VECTORS, 20 June 2023 between 14:30 – 17:00 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Fernando P. Ferreira is an architect and artist based in Porto (Portugal) and London (UK). His practice interacts with activism, urban research, storytelling, fictional and textile practices. Fernando is also the co-founder of Space Transcribers – a Portuguese NGO that works through art and architecture.

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title

Constructing Communities of Tacit Knowledge: Political Commitment and Urban Planning in Postwar Milan

author

Elettra Carnelli

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Abstract

Exploring historical models of the construction of tacit knowledge, this paper examines the contribution of the communist architectural collective Collettivo di Architettura to Milanese postwar planning culture. During the reconstruction period, Milan underwent significant economic, social, and territorial transformations that intensified the divide between the city center and the periphery. The Milanese outskirts were left to speculation, rapid urbanization, and high migration rates without adequate urban planning tools and policies. In this context, leftist practitioners sought to address the problems affecting the Milanese periphery and wanted to contribute to their resolution. Among them, Collettivo di Architettura stood out for its explicit political stance and extensive contribution. Its members attributed social and political dimensions to architectural work and integrated collaborative ways of working and political militancy into their practice. From the 1950s, they provided free professional support in the Milanese periphery, using the expression urbanista condotto to define their work: in addition to their architectural practice, they assisted municipalities that lacked adequate planning tools and knowledge and initiated discussions with local authorities and institutions concerning urban development. As a result, procedures, strategies, and processes were collectively developed to establish effective planning methods and improve living conditions in the Milanese outskirts. By explicitly drawing from the Gramscian concept of the organic intellectual and the example of other committed practitioners of their time, the engagement of Collettivo’s members provided the basis for a shared knowledge of urban planning and management. Thus, this case study highlights the significance of political commitment in generating communities of tacit knowledge.

This paper will be presented at the TACK Conference in the paper session VECTORS, 20 June 2023 between 14:30 – 17:00 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Elettra Carnelli is an architect and researcher currently pursuing her doctorate at the ZHAW and ETH Zurich. Her academic experiences include working as a teaching assistant at the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio in 2016 and research associate at the Professorship of Urban Design at TU Munich from 2018 to 2022.

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title

Rooms: Architectural Model-Making as Ethnographic Research

author

Ecaterina Stefanescu

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June 20, 2023
Abstract

Within design and architecture, scale models can create worlds of proposition, speculation and fiction. This paper situates the model as a tool for observation, documentation and engagement; a slow, durational method that manifests a deep participation in the lives of place and people marginalised by wider society. Rooms was an artistic and research project undertaken as part of the Urban Nation artistic residency in Berlin which looked at the Romanian immigrant community inhabiting the city, the spaces they occupy and appropriate, and the objects that they surround themselves with. These instances were drawn, surveyed, documented and then recreated through 1:20 paper models. Built to an extreme level of detail the models of everyday space visualise, offer new insight, and give a sense of value and recognition to the lived realities of individuals. A situated mode of research, this form of representation transforms the seemingly mundane into an object of beauty and atmosphere, encouraging access and participation from the participant, maker and the viewer. The inherently collaborative aspect of this process reveals the tacit, implicit knowledge present in everyday actions.

This paper will be presented at the TACK Conference in the paper session VECTORS, 20 June 2023 between 14:30 – 17:00 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Ecaterina Stefanescu is an architectural designer, artist and lecturer based in Preston, UK, where she teaches architecture at the Grenfell-Baines Institute of Architecture, UCLan. Ecaterina uses live-build, model-making and drawing as tools for exploration, investigation and participation in her artistic and research work to respond to place and material cultures of people.

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title

Re-enacting everyday life. Architectural History meets the Body

Author

Alejandro Campos-Uribe

Abstract

The seventeenth century building were Hannie and Aldo van Eyck lived from 1965 was diligently remodelled into their treasured family home. Almost hidden from the street hustle, yet open to the outside, the place lights up as soon as the threshold is crossed. Both literally and metaphorically, the changes and additions to the building reveal their architectural thinking and ways of inhabiting. In the house, layers of temporality, materiality, everyday living and lived experience mingle with design solutions and worldviews affecting them. Grounded on a phenomenological approach, this paper argues for the use of Re-Enactments as a fruitful method for architectural historians. As re-enactor, the researcher recreates some of the repeated, stylised acts of the Van Eycks’ lives, somatically reproducing the customs, values and practices that instituted their ways of living. The researcher’s body informs the reflections and findings, from materiality to meaning, through the continuous and embedded experience of the house. Tacit architectural ideas, specific ways of understanding history, time, and space, are indeed embodied into the built environment, and they can only be disentangled with the help of our own bodies, by performing actions in, within, and around buildings. A task which is inevitably creative, striving to animate rather than simply mimic, to evoke rather than just report.

This paper will be presented at the TACK Conference in the paper session VECTORS, 20 June 2023 between 14:30 – 17:00 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Alejandro Campos is a Lecturer and Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Architecture, TU Delft, where he received EU funding for the research project Multiculturalism in the work of Aldo and Hannie van Eyck. Rethinking universalist notions in architecture. Alejandro specialises in Post-War Modern Architecture and the colonial dynamics behind its universalising claims.

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title

Revealing the tacit: a critical spatial practice based on walking and re/presenting

Author

Nilsu Altunok

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Abstract

Spatial practices that investigate architectural space with the ideal architect's eye and a commonplace representational perspective have been the subject of a lot of writing. The potential of critical spatial practices, which combine performative actions with incomplete representation possibilities, to investigate and reveal the tacit knowledge underlying space is yet unexplored. This paper finds its problem in these missing pieces in the literature and tries to decipher by deconstructing the conventional methods and tactics it criticizes, a way is sought to trigger the creative potentials of the relationship between body and space that cannot be stable. Critical spatial practices can be situated as alternative ways of understanding the architectural space and establishing a dialogue with it since they pave the way for new kinds of relationships to emerge between the subject and the space. This study focuses on the act of walking, which is claimed to be a critical spatial practice, and its re/presentation, which is argued to reveal tacit knowledge in the walked place. Based on the poststructuralist critical theories, the case study was carried out in the Historical Peninsula of Istanbul in the Khans District by walking and extracting the things which can reveal tacit knowledge. By finding top-down investigation and representation tools problematic in capturing and expressing the body and space interactions, experiences, and experimentation on the ground level, I believe walking by drifting through the invisible spaces and transitions of the Khans District when viewed from above is meaningful in expressing the experimental and creative flows on the ground level. Depending on the re/presentation, it can be suggested that performing a spatial practice with the participation of the body and interpreting the architectural space from a critical position carry the contingency of uncovering tacit knowledge.

This paper will be presented at the TACK Conference in the paper session VECTORS, 20 June 2023 between 14:30 – 17:00 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Nilsu Altunok received B.Arch from Yıldız Technical University as valedictorian. She has been continuing her M.Arch at Istanbul Technical University Architectural Design Program and is currently working as a research assistant at Yıldız Technical University. She works with critical, spatially situated tools trying to reflect them to architectural design studios.

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title

A Studio for Orbanism The living archive of Luc Deleu & T.O.P. office as a source of commons for unsolicited architecture practice.

Speakers

Sofie de Caigny Tine Poot

Affiliation

Vlaams Architectuurinstituut (VAi)

The house of Luc Deleu, the founder of T.O.P. office, in the city of Antwerp (Belgium), is not only a design studio and home for the architect but, above all, it is a space of accumulated knowledge: a kaleidoscope of collected references and an archive of drawings and models produced over more than fifty years.

This ‘orbanist’ universe – the term ‘orbanism’ was coined by Deleu as a vision for a global urbanism – that exists in Antwerp became the basis for an interuniversity educational project in 2020-2021, when the Flanders Architecture Institute digitised the archive of T.O.P. office. Five groups of architecture students were invited to develop a project based on the office’s immaterial knowledge by producing a storyline following objects found in the archive. As a result, a virtual studio space emerged as a cumulation of different sets of tacit knowledge.

These different sets of tacit knowledge unfold within T.O.P. office as an architecture studio; the living archive materialized in the drawing cabinets at the studio and the curatorial practice of the Flanders Architecture Institute.
The studio of T.O.P. office is fundamentally an unsolicited practice, holding up mirrors. A critical tool here is their Proposals, free and often subconscious concepts of interventions on a global scale, which address pressing ecological and societal unsolicited questions. They escape the confines of architecture and move into the art realm.
Within the archive, the proposals continue to be studied in depth in drawings, which form a laying of this line of thought in space and time. Finally, within a Studio for Orbanism, they were recalibrated by the students to discover uninhabited territories of future possibilities and alternatives.

This object will be presented at the TACK Conference in the object session LINEAGES, 20 June 2023 between 17:30 – 19:00 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Sofie De Caigny is director of the Flanders Architecture Institute and visiting professor at the Faculty of Design Sciences of the University of Antwerp. She holds a Ph.D. (2007, University of Leuven) in architectural history. She publishes on contemporary architectural culture in Flanders, with a special focus on architecture and memory.
 
Tine Poot is consultant design at the Flanders Architecture Institute and project leader of the Future Plans- project (2020-2021) which celebrated 50 years practice by architect-artist Luc Deleu & T.O.P. office. The project culminated in a publication, exhibition, documentary and two educational projects Futurum and a Studio for Orbanism.

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title

Bâton à marques (tally stick) of the Bisse de Bitailla (irrigation channel), 1762

Speaker

Nicole de Lalouviere

Bâtons à marques (also called ratement,s Tesseln) are pieces of carved wood used as tally sticks in the Swiss Alps. They functioned as records of use rights, taxes, products, and labour duties. Tesseln in Upper-Valais and and bâton à marques in Lower-Valais were employed in the governance of common property and resources, including alpine pastures, wine, and irrigation water.

The tally stick of the Bisse de Bitailla, an irrigation channel in the Arbaz municipality, has carvings referring to domestic signs and their associated water rights. These link water right holders to water use, accounted in irrigation time.

As they were passed down, edited, and made anew, tally sticks enabled tacit knowledge transmission and performed as adaptable physical supports of negotiation and cooperation—crucial components to govern the commons.

Beyond their regulatory function, they also offer a glimpse into how premodern alpine communities engaged in practices of commoning.

This object will be presented at the TACK Conference in the object session LINEAGES, 20 June 2023 between 17:30 – 19:00 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Nicole de Lalouvière is a doctoral fellow at the Institute of Landscape and Urban Studies, Department of Architecture, ETH Zürich. Her doctoral research project, undertaken under the supervision of Prof. Tom Avermaete, examines the landscape and material history of the irrigation systems of Canton Valais in Switzerland.

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title

Architectural photography as conduit for tacit knowledge: The Heinrich Helfenstein Estate at the gta Archive

Speakers

Irina Davidovici Ziu Bruckmann

The architectural photography of Heinrich Helfenstein (1946-2020) is grounded foremost in an understanding of language. A trained linguist, his approach to image-making was shaped by semiology and post-structuralism. Helfenstein’s point of entry to architecture, as Aldo Rossi’s teaching assistant at ETH in the 1970s, was also the start of his career as architecture photographer. Some of his earliest photographs are also some of the most familiar, having been used to illustrate Rossi’s widely circulated Scientific Autobiography. The delicate and absorbing dialogue between images and words that resulted from this collaboration influenced generations of architects, whilst paving the way to an extensive photographic oeuvre. By the time of his retirement in the early 2010s, Helfenstein was one of the most celebrated Swiss architecture photographers, having worked with Diener & Diener, Peter Märkli, Peter Zumthor, Meili Peter, Gigon Guyer, Burkhalter & Sumi, and Valerio Olgiati, as well as artists Hans Josephsohn, Per Kirkby, and Meret Oppenheim among many others. Due to his approach, his photography not only helped disseminate Swiss architecture in the late 20th century, but actively shaped its discourse, particular its interfaces with art. Based on original material from the Helfenstein holdings at the gta Archives, this paper explores the formation of tacit professional knowledge through the vector of architectural photography. It accompanies the exhibit co-curated with gta archivist and architect Ziu Bruckmann.

This object will be presented at the TACK Conference in the object session LINEAGES, 20 June 2023 between 17:30 – 19:00 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Irina Davidovici is the Director of the gta Archives at ETH Zurich, where she is also active as private lecturer and senior scientist. Her research straddles urban housing studies, commons theory, and architectural history and criticism.
 
 Ziu Bruckmann is an architect who works as a scientific assistant at the gta Archives at ETH Zurich and at the THEMA laboratory at EPF Lausanne. Besides, he studies Classical Archaeology at University of Zurich and works on renovation projects in Germany.

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title

Forêt DesCartes – A Postcard Stand as Metaphor of Architectural Visual Knowledge

Speaker

Filippo Cattapan

Forêt DesCartes is a prototype of a postcard display designed by Belgian architect Christian Kieckens in 1995 as part of a larger series of objects titled Jardins Divers. It is a rather small MDF board with maple veneer on which are inserted 16 postcard holders made of bent iron rods and arranged in a regular 6×4 cm grid.

This curious object evokes Kieckens’ habits and practices: the collection of images and their arrangement in space, the journey as a form of disciplinary exchange with several communities of practice, the transmission of knowledge through the medium of illustrated books and exhibitions, the teaching of architecture by means of quotes and visual references.

Forêt DesCartes can be seen as an experimental spatial device for producing disciplinary knowledge. The title of the object is a play on words that combines the term ‘forest’ with the name of René Descartes. Through its basic structure, the object metaphorically represents the fundamental tension and interaction between the two terms as a free landscape of images composed on a regular Cartesian grid. The two elements correspond respectively to intuition and rationality, or to analogical and logical thinking, which means also to implicit and explicit forms of knowing, with their opposite as well as complementary epistemological modalities.

The pictures assembled on the podium mirror in turn the varied as much as fragmented landscape of Kieckens’ architectural imagery, at the intersection between local Flemish culture and a wider network of European and international communities of practice.

Forêt DesCartes is therefore the image of a complex and substantially visual knowledge paradigm, but also of the corresponding disciplinary culture made of parallel ideas, themes and references.

This object will be presented at the TACK Conference in the object session LINEAGES, 20 June 2023 between 17:30 – 19:00 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Filippo Cattapan is PhD candidate at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal, working within the framework of the EU-funded ‘Communities of Tacit Knowledge’ network.

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title

Navigating, Performing and Book Making

Speaker

Eva Sommeregger

‘The B-Sides’, published in 2022, is a book that presents arts-based research on spatial theory and performance. It juxtaposes the stories of the Polynesian navigator Tupaia, Margaret Mead’s Kybernetes and Lara Croft’s avatar. Although very different—one is an indigenous historic character who becomes involved in a British expansionist sailing expedition across the Pacific, one is a character from Ancient Greek philosophy, and one is a gaming character, an avatar—, they all exhibit exceptional navigational practices. Investigating the specific ways in which the three characters navigate through two worlds simultaneously brings into focus on a particular form of space: a space characterised by a body that mediates between two co-existing environments.

The book project adopts a performative approach that foregrounds the conceiving, writing, designing and making the book while maintaining the characters’ blurry qualities. The limited edition comes in the form of a leporello: Although they take their name from an opera character invented by the European composer Mozart, accordion folded books appear in many eras and cultures across the globe. The history of the leporello thus can be described as temporally and geographically ambiguous—it opens up space for the indeterminate.

During the writing and design of the present book, tacit conversations unfolded between the theoretical content and the limitations of the physical copy: as if the projection of the future book object spoke to me—the author/designer—about the limitations of its appearance, influencing decision-making. The effort to make performance part of the project culminated in me screen-printing all twenty copies myself.

The finished book copies continue the tacit conversations: In keeping with the theme, the kraft paper tells the stories of long journeys; white ink expresses non-standard printing; and the double-sided printing on continuous paper reveals hand-made methods.

This object will be presented at the TACK Conference in the object session LINEAGES, 20 June 2023 between 17:30 – 19:00 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Eva Sommeregger is an architect/researcher, a Senior Scientist at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and a Senior Researcher at LMDA research institute of the Art Academy of Latvia. Eva is also co-founder of eyetry architecture and Magazin, an exhibition space for contemporary architecture in Vienna.

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title

Paperwork and Wordcraft: Institutionality at IAUS

Author

Alex Maymind

Abstract

This paper examines the bureaucratic management of the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) through the lens of tacit knowledge as manifest in an analysis of paperwork and wordcraft. Specifically an examination of the “little tools of knowledge”– the self-evident and mundane administrative tools–reveals the epistemological foundations and specific character of the institute as distinct from and similar to others in the same milieu, and positions it within a larger phenomenon of similar agencies, activities, and groups. Archival documents attest to a self-aware bureaucratic and representational medium in a state of flux as IAUS attempted to accommodate multiple and often conflicting modes of work, funding, and directions in order to stake out a productive territory in a landscape of similar institutes, all of which were competing for prestige, legitimation, attention, student participants, and dollars. An examination of these documents through multiple parallel trajectories that are not strictly chronological mirrors the manner in which the institute functioned, not as a cohesive entity, but as a contradictory one, as overlapping concerns struggled to find priority during the course of its brief history. This archival analysis forms the basis of a counterhistory in which the institution itself is considered as an abstract author in the larger context of New York City and beyond, determined by and determining of a variety of forces beyond the individual’s control.

This paper will be presented at the TACK Conference in the paper session ACTORS, 21 June 2023 between 09:30 – 12:00 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Alex Maymind is an assistant professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Minnesota School of Architecture. He is an architectural historian, educator, and designer who works on architectural institutions and pedagogy in the context of the American research economy after 1968.

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title

Understanding the roles of tacit knowledge in the historical collaboration between AEC: a case study approach

Author

Laurens Bulckaen

Abstract

This paper tries to introduce three kinds of tacit knowledge that, according to the authors, are present in the process of designing and constructing a building. By looking through the lens of the concept of tacit knowledge, collaboration between the architect, engineer and contractor, thus the building professionals is evaluated. By closely examining a limited number of key archival documents in three case studies that were already developed before, it becomes visible that tacit knowledge is an indispensable part of the intangible process of collaboration in building. Since creating buildings requires to assemble large amounts of knowledge from a wide variety of disciplines, also interdisciplinary knowledge is necessary, which is often tacit in nature. As the complexity in building grew, throughout history it also became visible that roles of the building actors started to shift and new roles emerged. Using the concept of tacit knowledge this research tries to bridge the gap of looking at the building process as a collaborative effort also showing that the building process is governed by much more than the factual explicit knowledge of only one actor.

This paper will be presented at the TACK Conference in the paper session ACTORS, 21 June 2023 between 09:30 – 12:00 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Laurens Bulckaen is a Ph.D. researcher at the BATir department of the Ecole Polytechnique at the ULB in Brussels under the supervision of professor Rika Devos. He is currently preparing a dissertation with the title: A culture of collaboration: how architects, engineers and contractors interacted on complex projects in Belgium (1890-1970). This research is particularly interested in uncovering and understanding the guiding principles of the historical practices of collaboration in the Belgian building process.

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title

On Twists and Turns. Architecture, Design and Judgment

Author

Hans Teerds

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Abstract

Architects design in different ways, but rarely in the form of waiting for a singular hunch. Most often, instead, designing is hard work, reassessing material again and again, until the moment the various facets come together convincingly. In this paper, I use Hannah Arendt’s discussion of judgment in order to understand the process of design. Arendt borrows her understanding from Immanuel Kant, but draws it out of his aesthetic perspective and reassesses it into a political context. She emphasizes how a community is a necessary prerequisite for every judgment made. It is not enough to simply hear what others say, but one need to be able to think from that particular situation, in order to judge the validity of that perspective. I see a parallel here with design, though architects operate in different communities. The main challenge of design then is to connect these communities through the design and to understand what kind of information and knowledge can be gained within the different communities. By drawing the parallel, I will discuss the different knowledge communities wherein architects operate, and how 'judgment' offers a model of activating various knowledge systems.

This paper will be presented at the TACK Conference in the paper session ACTORS, 21 June 2023 between 09:30 – 12:00 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Hans Teerds is an architect and urban designer, who works as a senior lecturer and researcher at the Chair of the History and Theory of Urban Design at ETH Zurich. His research bridges between political philosophy, architecture and urban design, examining the public aspects of the built environment.

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title

In Quest of Meaning: Revisiting the discourse around “non-pedigreed” architecture.

Author

Vasileios Chanis

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Abstract

The topic of the current contribution is the discourse around “non-pedigreed” architecture (an alternative term for vernacular architecture), mostly in the first decades after WWII. As a matter of fact, knowledge around “non-pedigreed” architecture belongs automatically to the realm of the Tacit; little is known about its actual "ways of doing", relying mostly on interpretations. In this context, several key interpretations of the vernacular are being revisited and discussed through the perspective of its "actors", meaning the scholarly work of chosen architects. The paper is structured into three parts. The first presents the incentives behind the study of "non-pedigreed" architecture and touches upon questions of aesthetics and authorship. The second highlights the fruitful contradictions found in the first part while it focuses on the relationship of vernacular architecture with the notion of Time and the development of craft skills. Finally, in the third part, the contribution examines selected case studies in which the value of the vernacular is shifted from the realm of reference for architecture to that of the process of architectural production.

This paper will be presented at the TACK Conference in the paper session ACTORS, 21 June 2023 between 09:30 – 12:00 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Vasileios Chanis is an architect and doctoral assistant at Laboratory LAPIS of the EPFL. His ongoing research focuses on the postwar interpretations of vernacular architecture, examining its correlations with the notion of the “environment”. He studied architecture at the UPatras and the TU Delft.

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title

Dissemination of Architectural Culture: A View on Turkish Architects’ Journeys in the Pre-Digital Age

Author

Ceren Hamiloglu

Supervised by

Ahsen Özsoy

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June 21, 2023
Abstract

An architect is an intellectual person who develops a professional architectural identity and approach through an accumulation of their personal experiences, education and knowledge. Perhaps the most pivotal part in an architect’s ‘formation journey’ is the initial years they start constructing their architectural selfhood. The initial years in which a person “becomes” an architect, are signified by the mobility of young architects, ideas and encounters, through which an architecture culture forms and disseminates. The dissemination of ideas is facilitated through institutions, visual, verbal and textual representations. Traveling, with its ability to embody all of these components appears to be a fruitful practice through which architecture culture can be analyzed. During the twentieth century, new encounters provided a ground from which Turkish-speaking architects established a firmer professional position and disseminated new implementations in the architecture field. The purpose of this research is to understand how Turkish-speaking architects’ journeys in the pre-digital age, contributed to the period’s architectural discourse in Turkey. Therefore, the ways in which architects traveled, translated and disseminated their travel experiences were studied and evaluated through content analysis.

This paper will be presented at the TACK Conference in the paper session ACTORS, 21 June 2023 between 09:30 – 12:00 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Ceren Hamiloglu holds a B.Arch from Bilgi University, an MA Architectural History from the Bartlett School of Architecture and is currently a PhD student in Architecture in Istanbul Technical University. Since 2016, she has been working as a research assistant and lecturer in architectural history, theory and design.

Prof. Dr. Ahsen Özsoy graduated from ITU Faculty of Architecture, where she continued her academic career until 2020. She has publications on housing quality; earthquake, women’s role in housing; creativity and university, post-occupancy evaluation, and design participation. She has received national architectural awards.

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title

Unbinding the TACK publication (a digital publishing platform)

Author

Helen Thomas

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June 21, 2023

This presentation will be held on 21 June 2023 at the TACK Conference, ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5), 13:15 – 14:15 (CEST).

The TACK digital publishing platform is a response to a simple question: how can a large and complex organism like the TACK network – a group of over 40 individuals scattered across 10 academic partners, 3 cultural institutions and 9 architecture practices, living, growing, and producing individually and together over a period of three years – contain the sum of its parts in a single codex publication? During the course of this talk, presented in three parts, I will explain the process of making the collectively produced answer.

The term ‘unbinding’ that occurs in the title belongs to a retrospective theoretical framework – a seeking of terms and a testing out of what have been largely responsive moves based on practical experience and tacit, rather than explicit and formalised, knowledge. Using this opportunity to reflect on issues of authorship, the challenge of visual dominance and the acknowledgement of other senses, for example, the book as a performative, interconnected and relational process will be considered in terms of the publishing apparatus that we have assembled. This apparatus includes the technical architecture of the digital platform, but also its content elements and their conceptual frameworks. These embrace the classification and naming systems, and the connections, routes, and associations between the different parts. The possibility to make bespoke collections, or albums, of individual elements inspires the active participation of the reader and listener into an act of co-production. Framing this process within our discipline, we could even argue that the logic of the digital world finds a starting point in the work of an architectural theorist. When Christopher Alexander says, in the ‘Introduction’ to A Pattern Language, that “each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over in our environment” he explains a way of thinking and designing that became a basis for coding, but also the modular, associational networks that underlie the publishing platform.

The process of making the digital platform will be briefly illuminated – from the moment precedents in my own work initiated my commissioning by TACK, through the communal consultations, workshops and conversations that miraculously resulted in consensus within this large group. Detailed conversations held with and between Lizzie Malcolm, the digital architect, Korinna Zinovia Weber, the editor, and the TACK editorial and executive boards signing-off at various stages are balanced by feedback loops, refinements, and intimate negotiations. Finally, we will visit the publishing platform together, carrying these narratives with us as we leap into the world of TACK to seek our own understandings of the mysterious concept of tacit knowledge.

Helen Thomas is an architect, writer, and publisher. Founder and editor of Women Writing Architecture.

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title

Tacit(t)acts

Speaker

Katharina Kasinger

Architecture formulates, organizes, and choreographs social behavior. It permeates our surroundings with architectural codes, value systems, and conventions that we have implicitly and explicitly learned to read, follow, and take for granted.

Tacit(t)acts are performative urban interactions with relational objects – so-called Tactiles – that challenge spatial conventions and activate new relationships with the urban surroundings.

As a strategy to develop spatial knowledge, Tacit(t)acts foster a process of unlearning restrictive spatial codes; re-learning through encounters of intimacy, embodiment, and connectedness; and co-learning through shared performative experiences.

This project alienates urban infrastructures that determine spatial actions, such as sidewalks, traffic bollards, traffic islands, and fences, to withdraw their prescribed purpose and trigger unlearning.

Legible architectural codes are transformed into Tactiles -unidentified objects- that function as perceptive mediators between the acting body and the social forces of urban reality. By creating embodied experiences of spatial proximity, Tactiles unravel tacit associations and layers of meaning and activate a process of re-learning.

Forms of co-learning are probed and enacted through various performative workshops. These workshops initiate embodied and non-predefined communication through the objects that translate intuition, new thinking processes, and ideas performatively while merging into a collective choreography.

This object will be presented at the TACK Conference in the object session SHAPERS, 21 June 2023 between 14:30 – 15:45 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Katharina Kasinger holds a BA in Interior Architecture from the Hochschule Mainz in Germany and a MA in Interior Architecture: Research + Design from the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam in The Netherlands. Katharina works as an artist, interior architect, and teaching assistant at Hochschule Mainz teaching ‘Material’ and ‘Spatial Design Processes’.

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title

Infra-thin Magick: An Extended Reality (XR) Ceremony

Speaker

Paula Strunden

It is well known that spatial perception is multi-sensory, and the interplay of our senses goes beyond the cross-fertilization of sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing. Yet architectural design tools only touch the surface of what we can feel regarding our spatial environments, such as our sense of gravity, balance and orientation, our ability to feel time passing, or our knowledge of where each of our body parts is without having to look at them. Some of these “always-there-but-never-felt” sensations can be physically experienced when we enter an immersive virtual environment. As our brain adjusts to these novel surroundings, we can suddenly feel our senses at work.

The performative extended reality model “Infra-thin Magick” allows you to experience how such insights can be purposefully evoked by displacing and reassembling the components constituting your multimodal and synaesthetic spatial perception. It invites you to co-create embodied spatiality through active participation and play.

This object will be presented at the TACK Conference in the object session SHAPERS, 21 June 2023 between 14:30 – 15:45 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Paula Strunden is a transdisciplinary artist with an architectural background who studied in Vienna, Paris and London and worked at Raumlabor Berlin and Herzog & de Meuron Basel. Since 2020, she has been conducting her PhD as part of the European research network TACK at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

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title

Material Chariots

Speaker

Paul Vermeulen De Smet Vermeulen architecten

Material references play a vital role in the collaborative work of architects. At the office of De Smet Vermeulen architects in Ghent, chariots are used to expose samples of materials and combine them into palettes.

The main idea is that the materials stay on display for the duration of the project in order to facilitate material decisions. The chariots are part and parcel of the design process.

As the office only has three chariots but more ongoing projects, each chariot carries more than one palette of materials. Complementary samples often lie on the floor. As a result, different project palettes tend to melt together, creating new sources of inspiration.

This object will be presented at the TACK Conference in the object session SHAPERS, 21 June 2023 between 14:30 – 15:45 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Submitted by
Paul Vermeulen is an architect, writer, and founding partner of the Ghent-based office, De Smet Vermeulen architecten. He is a professor at TU Delft, leading the chair of Urban Architecture. In 2011 he was awarded the Flemish Culture Prize (Architecture) for his contribution to architecture, its culture, and its criticism.

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title

From copper wire to spline. Reciprocal relationships of the Analogue and the Digital.

Author

Holger Hoffmann

Affiliation

One Fine Day architects

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This project captures a moment at the Städelschule Architecture Class in Frankfurt in 2001 – when Ben van Berkel and Johan Bettum took over the class previously led by Peter Cook and Enrique Miralles. Both Cook and Miralles had shaped the class with crucial methodological and aesthetic guidelines. Balsa wood surfaces and copper wire models were the suitable tools for developing the sweeping architectural shapes so typical of the architectural class of the time. These techniques and aesthetic conventions still resonated noticeably among the students also under the new leadership.

However, digital design techniques had begun to transform the field since the mid-1990s, and it was overdue that such advances made their way into the Architecture Class. Interestingly, it had been the spline-based three-dimensional drawing and NURBS surface modelling techniques that were particularly predestined to transfer the formal vocabulary of (mainly) Miralles’ wireframe and balsa wood models into a new digital domain. Although understood by some alumni as an abrupt paradigm shift, the exact opposite was the case: The digital turn of the architecture class was based on the tacit knowledge of the techniques that had been cultivated up to that point in combination with the aesthetic and methodological conventions that had now been newly introduced. A sort of “Digital craft” emerged that combined the school’s legacy in artistic composition and search for architectural gesture with the possibilities of digital design techniques.

These techniques formulate geometric relationships that are as intuitive as analogue models, but are based on rigour and lead to precision. A digital twin – another conceptual model that translated the developed forms into plausible architectural designs, complements the model exhibited here.

This object will be presented at the TACK Conference in the object session SHAPERS, 21 June 2023 between 14:30 – 15:45 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Holger Hoffmann is a registered architect based in Düsseldorf, Germany. In addition to his activities as a practicing architect he holds a professorship for Techniques of Representation and Design‘ at the University of Wuppertal. He is the founder of onefineday architects based in Wuppertal.

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title

Concrete Column, Pirelli Learning Centre

Speaker

Angelo Lunati Giancarlo Floridi

Architectural references and citations of visual culture are embedded in the form, materiality, and ornamentation of a structure.

This precast concrete column fragment  from the Pirelli Learning Centre built in Milan (Italy) in 2020 is a case in point. The physicality of the column has created a strong reference to the between-war Italian architecture culture. Its material form speaks to the innovation in construction techniques that characterised the period, while its ornamentation echoes that of the neighbouring Bicocca degli Arcimboldi villa; illuminates the company’s history as well as the common culture through a series of abstract tire thread advertising graphics imprinted on the columns and façade elements.

This object will be presented at the TACK Conference in the object session SHAPERS, 21 June 2023 between 14:30 – 15:45 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Onsitestudio, a Milan-based architectural studio founded in 2006 by Angelo Lunati and Giancarlo Floridi, values the bond between culture and professional practice. Recent works include a public library BEIC, Mapei football centre, Hotel Le Palace in Brussels, and Pirelli learning centre. Onsitestudio is part of the Tacit Knowledge Community as a non-academic partner.