Hilde Heynen

Space as Receptor, Instrument or Stage: Notes on the Interaction Between Spatial and Social Constellations

Abstract Acknowledging the need for a shared scholarly paradigm capable of explaining the interaction between spatial and social constellations, this paper presents a model which identifies three important ways to conceptualize this interaction: space seen as receptor, as instrument or as stage. The paper reviews the relevant literature from architectural history and theory, positioning it within a broader framework that also addresses material from anthropology, sociology and cultural geography. It points to similarities and parallels, but also to divergent sensibilities and contrasting understandings, which together make up a rich matrix of theoretical positions.

The obduracy of the detached single family house in Flanders

After the Second World War, Belgium, and especially the Flemish region, was confronted with massive suburbanisation. The single family house became the dominant building type located in residential subdivisions, ribbon developments or as piecemeal developments scattered through the landscape. Today, there are growing concerns about the future of the post-war suburban housing stock in the light of the changing demographics, economics and an increasing ecological consciousness. Incremental modification, through the creation of secondary dwelling units in existing underused dwellings, is one of the strategies currently discussed to transform low-density residential neighbourhoods into more sustainable patterns. However, practice shows that the subdivision of detached single family houses still remains a rather marginal phenomenon in Flanders. This article analyses the ‘obduracy’ of the detached single family house in detail. Our analysis shows the obduracy as the result of a complex entanglement of very heterogeneous elements such as the materiality of the house, the meaning of home, the local home culture, real estate values, spatial policies, zoning plans and legislative framework. If the creation of secondary units would be adopted by the government as a transformation strategy for the suburban housing stock, then its implementation will demand a clear spatial vision on the future of residential neighbourhoods, an integral policy with linkages between the different policy sectors and different levels of administration, and a comprehensive set of measures.

Positioning Research and Design in Academia and Practice: A Contribution to a Continuing Debate

[van de Weijer, Marijn] Katholieke Univ Leuven, Louvain, Belgium. [van de Weijer, Marijn] Eindhoven Univ Technol & Urbanism, Eindhoven, Netherlands. [Van Cleempoel, Koenraad] Warburg Inst, London, England. [Van Cleempoel, Koenraad] Hasselt Univ, Hasselt, Belgium. [Heynen, Hilde] KU Leuven Univ Leuven, Dept Architecture, Louvain, Belgium.

Belgium and the Netherlands: Two Different Ways of Coping with the Housing Crisis, 1945–70

ABSTRACT Belgium and the Netherlands are very different in their spatial outlook and in the way housing is organized. In Belgium individual private dwellings predominate whereas in the Netherlands social housing and planned neighborhoods are much more common. This article aims at unraveling the histories and sensibilities that led to this situation. It argues that the well-known diverging histories of architecture and urbanism make up only one explanation, which needs to be complemented by understanding the different processes of mediation between producers and consumers adopted by both countries. In tackling the postwar housing crisis, Belgium chose to stimulate private initiative by providing tax incentives for home builders. The Netherlands, on the other, hand mitigated the housing crisis by planning new estates of social housing, using new techniques of prefabrication that led to standardized flats. In the Netherlands the process of mediation, oriented towards “correct living,” was dominated by a national organization, which resolutely advocated modernist design as the most rational way to organize the home. In Belgium the task of mediation was taken up by “pillarized” social organizations rather than by a national institution. This resulted in a much stronger bottom-up influence from ordinary dwellers, who convinced their organizations to soften the modernist approach in favor of more traditionally inspired homes and interiors. The Belgian way of organizing home cultures thus came to resemble much more an “American way of living” than its Dutch counterpart—contradicting the prevailing literature that tends to stress the Americanization of Dutch culture while ignoring such patterns in Belgium.

Designing the Belgian welfare state 1950s to 1970s: social reform, leisure and ideological adherence

Introduction: Belgium, a pillarised state The Belgian welfare state came about, like most others in Western Europe, as a political project at the end of the Second World War. The Social Pact that in April, 1944, was signed between representatives of the labour movement, leaders of the employers’ organisations and a few high-ranking civil servants, provided the basis for what later on became a well-elaborated system of social insurance, covering health care, unemployment, old age pensions, child benefit and the annual vacation. In Belgium as elsewhere the political basis for the grandiose new ‘social contract’ came forth from the profound uncertainties that people had been exposed to during the war. Because quality-of-life prospects had become blatantly unreliable, it was generally felt that social justice on an impartial basis should be guaranteed by the State. In contrast with American corporate capitalism and Soviet communism, the welfare state project was an attempt to devise a specific European answer to Cold War politics and to emerging postcolonial realities. In most European countries this resulted in strong legislation which offered social security to the majority of the population, administered by a new bureaucracy. This was paralleled by the establishment of planning institutions meant to facilitate the redistribution of wealth, knowledge and political power. Hence all Western Europe saw the rise of heavily subsidised housing estates and social infrastructure, such as health facilities, cultural or community centres and sports facilities. The way in which these amenities were planned, financed and managed varied considerably among the different nation-states. In some countries, such as the Netherlands or Sweden, planning was very much centralised and the distribution of amenities was carefully administered by national institutions. In other countries, such as Belgium, a more decentralised policy prevailed that, thanks to subsidies from the state, enabled local authorities to plan and realise these new facilities. Historical, sociological and philosophical studies of the welfare state abound. Studies that focus on how the welfare state was translated into built reality are scarcer. The domain of housing is by now reasonably well covered. Less attention, however, has been paid to the other built infrastructure to which the welfare state gave rise: the cultural centres, sports fields, hospitals, schools, universities, retirement homes and other social amenities that were built as part of the effort to provide equal access for all to provision that previously catered only to the happy few. These massive construction programmes have so far not been systematically 557

Anonymous architecture as counter-image: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy's perspective on American vernacular

Introduction When Sibyl Moholy-Nagy (1903–1971) set out, in 1952, to write a book on anonymous architecture in America, it was a clever move. She had only recently become a teacher of architectural history at the Pratt Institute, and was in fact still transforming herself into an architectural historian. Her life up until then, as the wife and widow of László Moholy-Nagy, had been intellectually stimulating and challenging, but she lacked the formal university education that would have given her a stable footing in academic research. Her father, Martin Pietzsch, however, was a German architect and important Werkbund member in Dresden, and it was this family background that gave her the confidence to start, after her husband’s death, a teaching career focusing on architecture. As Moholy’s wife and close collaborator, she had moreover been acquainted with many of the protagonists of the Modern Movement in Europe and America, such as Walter Gropius and Sigfried Giedion. She made good use of this double closeness by deciding upon architectural history as her field, but still she could boast neither a thorough academic knowledge nor a serious methodological training. She compensated for these disadvantages by choosing a topic on which the scholarly material was not abundantly available, and for which intensive fieldwork offered an entrance ticket. The resulting book, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, published in 1957 by Horizon Press, was the first of its kind: a book on vernacular architecture, written specifically for architects, with visually attractive materials, that aimed at providing them with sources of inspiration to make their own work more environmentally responsive and more adequate. It constituted a clear manifestation of what can be called modernism’s primitivism: the fascination of many modernist architects and critics with exotic, anonymous, indigenous or vernacular buildings that resulted from a supposedly direct and un-mediated interaction between people and their environment, and which thus were seen to represent an ‘unspoiled’, more ‘primitive’ and therefore more authentic state of architecture.

Towards a sustainable transformation of the detached houses in peri-urban Flanders, Belgium

The housing stock in Flanders contains a significant share of detached dwellings. Recent demographical, economic and ecological developments, however, have induced a large demand for other housing types. This paper addresses the resulting issue of whether the adaptation of existing low-density neighbourhoods is possible, and hypothesizes that the presence of a certain NIMBY (not in my back yard) attitude among current residents might complicate any planning efforts that would bring about fundamentally different spatial patterns. The paper offers an analysis of the existing residential patterns, focusing on the presence of underused housing. This analytical part is complemented by qualitative research into the acceptability of different possible scenarios at the neighbourhood level. Three distinct strategies have been elaborated for discussion with homeowners. The paper concludes that a top-down projection of transformative strategies needs to be brought into balance with interests of residents, thus capitalizing on an ‘overarching interest’, bringing into play an alliance of different tendencies.

Unthinkable doctorates? Introduction

The NeTHCA Colloquium, 2005, ‘The Unthinkable Doctorate’: Call for Papers In April, 2005, Nethca, the Network for Theory, History and Criticism of Architecture, held its fourth international colloquium at the Sint-Lucas School of Architecture in Brussels. The colloquium was devoted to the question of practiceor design-based doctorates in architecture. Its title, ‘The Unthinkable Doctorate’, referred to the perceived distance between the expectations regarding a conventional PhD (scholarly acceptable writing, based upon scientifically codified research) and a design-based PhD (a hybrid product that is partially based upon a design activity). The text of the call for papers follows: it was written by Marc Belderbos, with editorial input from Hilde Heynen and David Vanderburgh, members of the scientific committee of the conference. This colloquium is intended to unite academics and practitioners around the question of the doctorate in architecture, and particularly the more specific question of what might be a doctorate for architects who practise. The question might be formulated in at least two parts:

Architecture for leisure in post-war Europe, 1945-1989: between experimentation, liberation and patronisation

Introduction The impetus for this special, themed issue came from an International Symposium, entitled ‘Architecture for Leisure in Post-war Europe, 1945-1989’, which took place at the University of Leuven (Belgium) in February, 2012. In the decades following the Second World War a stark increase occurred in the construction of state-sponsored leisure infrastructure, including cultural centres, sport centres, holiday homes and youth clubs. This Symposium set out to explore the correlation between the socio-political motives that inspired this new building programme and the architectural inflexions of its resulting infrastructures. Identifying the massive investment in the construction of publicly accessible leisure infrastructure as a logical component in the expansion of the post-war welfare state, which not only targeted education, social security and health care, but also democratised the right to leisure, the geographical frame of the Symposium initially focused primarily on Western and Northern Europe. A glimpse behind the Iron Curtain (in the form of a multitude of abstracts submitted for the conference), however, revealed that in the post-war era communist regimes also strongly encouraged, and financially supported, the construction of leisure facilities. The geographical frame thus expanded to include Eastern Europe, which in turn resulted in the broadening of the socio-political context. Situated at the nexus of architectural discourse and socio-political history, the six essays in this special issue paint a fascinating picture of the development of leisure infrastructure in post-war Europe, ranging from the establishment of youth clubs in France, to the re-conceptualisation of the school as an open house in Switzerland, to the construction of a large sports stadium in Romania and, finally, to the accommodation of tourism in culturally diverse regions in Europe, including the Algarve in Portugal, the former East Berlin and Greece. In spite of the diverse nature of the essays, a few common threads that connect these contributions can be identified. The collection exemplifies how the development of leisure infrastructure in post-war Europe on the one hand sought to create a common ground for the contemporary egalitarian society, enabling architects to experiment with new concepts and forms, whilst on the other hand empowered governments to influence the way in which citizens spent their free time, thus creating the possibility for subtle, and sometimes less than subtle (even rather blatant), coercion of citizens into participating in the ideological beliefs 623

At Home with Displacement? Material Culture as a Site of Resistance in Sudan

ABSTRACT This article displays the complexity and ambivalences that emerge as a result of a long-lasting condition of displacement. It discusses the experiences of war-displaced persons, more specifically within the borders of their own countries, taking Sudan as a case study. Sudan is the country that has witnessed the largest number of “internally displaced persons” (IDPs) worldwide. The article focuses on both the physical displacement of the southern Sudanese IDPs who have arrived at the borders of a capital city (Khartoum), and the other forms of displacement related to the complex multitude of changes in their social, cultural, and economic environment. This has caused the displaced to design their own distinct ways of perceiving and interacting with space; establishing their own stand-points of resistance towards an all-encompassing, forceful urban environment that is in every way different from the lands and cultures from which they were forced to flee. “Home” in this condition might be redefined to suit the tactics of resistance which are devised to deal with the conditions of displacement, tactics that engage with a condition of rather continuous mobility and detachment. “Home” in such a case might no longer be the stable stationary physical manifestation that is rooted concretely to a specific “place” but rather the “mobile symbolic habitat” that can be taken to the next place on the next journey.