Jaap Bakema’s work and position were marked by an unshakeable belief in society’s engineerability. In his many lectures and publications he also noted a number of reservations about decision-making processes and life itself as the greater reality outside architecture’s; his optimism nevertheless seemed to know no bounds. Not only when he formulated answers to the […]
Students of Delft University of Technology have been taking part in the Habitat Design Studio in Ahmedabad since 2010. The design studio is organized annually by Balkrishna Doshi and his firm Vastu Shilpa.1 For two months, the students work on a task related to the explosive growth of the city together with other European students […]
The plan documentation for the seventh issue of DASH presents a series of exemplary ecological houses. The majority of them are detached or situated in rural areas or suburbs; two are townhouses, one of which is even an example of stacked individual dwellings. Together they demonstrate how architectural design can contribute to solving the problem […]
On the edge of Berlin’s Tiergarten, hidden among stylish embassies and the postmodern architecture of the late 1980s, are three variegated clusters of stacked owner-built homes. They are the result of an intensive building and planning process that began in 1981, when Josef Paul Kleihues invited Frei Otto, surprisingly enough, to take part in the […]
Through an analysis of three ‘moments of confrontation’, this article reveals the complex relationship between architect Piet Blom and the Team 10 architects collective. Both were investigating the potential of megastructures and other urban design typologies, in Blom’s case culminating in his design for the Oude Haven district in Rotterdam.
The bombing of Rotterdam in May 1940 largely obliterated the centre of the city, including the Oude Haven (Old Port). Work immediately began on reconstruction. The Witteveen Plan, named after municipal architect G.W. Witteveen, was adopted in the same year as the bombing. After a general building freeze in 1942, the Plan became the subject […]
An extensive reconstruction of how thinking about differences was adopted in Dutch house-building practice in the early 1990s, ultimately culminating in an unprecedentedly successful period, better known as SuperDutch.