Architecture & Bureaucracy€¦ · Session chair: Hilde Heynen, KU Leuven Helena Mattsson, KTH School of Architecture ‘State Phobia and the Reregulation of Architectural Bureaucracy

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Bureaucracy&Entangled Sites of Knowledege Production and Exchange

International conference, Brussels, 30-31 October 2019

www.architectureandbureaucracy.be

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Architecture and BureaucracyEntangled Sites of Knowledege Production and Exchange

Often experienced by architects as a site of imposition and control, the bureaucracy associated with the production of the built environment can alternatively be seen as one of knowledge exchange. It is and has been a unique forum for the expression and discussion of ideas originating in disparate fields. Principles and concerns particular to architecture, interior design, urban design, engineering, construction sciences and technology, meet and met topical issues in sociology and economy, law and politics, administration, management and government sciences and the ethics of public and private interests. These encounters, involving a wide variety of actors and cultures, significantly contribute to the production of architectural thought and to the materialisation of abstract concepts.

The unpublished record of bureaucracy, including planning applications, funding submission files, design, tender and building papers, central, regional and local government documents and company management papers, has been largely overlooked as a source for the study of architectural thought in the twentieth

century. Yet it can illuminate valuable theory-practice relays and provide insight into the diverse intellectual traditions that converge in a culture of architecture more generously and inclusively considered. Reading such records as pieces of a powerful yet little understood form of media for architecture, as proposed by Ben Kafka for cultural history artefacts (The Demon of Writing, 2012), can bring out new dimensions in a wide-scope ontology of architectural production. This conference intends to test such premises. The papers use the record of bureaucracy to illuminate the architectural and extra-architectural cultures of stakeholders in the design, regulation, assessment, approval, funding, specification and construction steps of building creation processes throughout the twentieth century. They focus on specific case studies of buildings, agents or administrations; discuss the nature, origins and specificities of discourses found in built-environment-related bureaucracy; and/or reflect on the methodological challenges in studying architecture and bureaucracy.

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Welcome & Introduction

Day 1 - Wednesday, 30 October 2019

Conference chairs: Fredie Floré (KU Leuven), Ricardo Costa Agarez (Universidade de Evora) and Rika Devos (ULB)

9.00

Session 1 - The Politics of Built-Environment Bureaucracy

Session chair: Marnix Beyen, UAntwerpen

Masha Panteleyeva, Cornell University, Architecture Art and Planning Department‘Blessing in Disguise: Bureaucracy and Unofficial Architecture’

Stephanie Herold, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Kompetenzzentrum Denkmalwis-senschaften und Denkmaltechnologien‘Collective Architectures: Structures and Processes of Architectural Work in the GDR’

Rujana Rebernjak, Arts University Bournemouth‘The Object of Bureaucracy: Designing the Spaces of Self-Management under Yugoslav Socialism’

9.30

Coffee break 11.30

Keynote Address 1

Prof. Ben Kafka, New York University, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication‘Made to Wait’

12.00

Lunch break13.00

Session chair: Hilde Heynen, KU Leuven

Helena Mattsson, KTH School of Architecture‘State Phobia and the Reregulation of Architectural Bureaucracy in the 1980s: The Buil-ding Code as a Site of Negotiation’

Maarten Van Den Driessche, Maarten Liefooghe and Pieter-Jan Cierkens, Ghent Univer-sity, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning‘Project Definitions in the Flemish Government Architect’s Open Call Procedure. A Buil-ding Principal’s Architectural Discourse, between Empowerment and Compliance’

Chiara Velicogna, IUAV University of Venice‘“Red Tape” at the Tate? The Case of James Stirling’s Clore Gallery’

Michael Abrahamson, University of Utah, College of Architecture + Planning‘Organizational Signature: Norms and Forms in Late Twentieth Century US Architectural Practice’

Coffee break16.00

Session 3 - The Media of Bureaucracy

Session chair: Rajesh Heynickx, KU Leuven

Elis Mendoza, Princeton University‘Building Through Manuals: The Humanitarian Government and its Design Apparatus’

Jonathan Duval, Brown University‘“The Heavenly Light as a Copying Clerk”: The Production of Blueprints and Architectural Authority in the United States before 1917’

Katie Lloyd Thomas, Newcastle University‘“A Devious Route”: Proprietary Specification as a Space on the Page for the Entry of the Building Products Industry into Architecture in the Interwar Period’

16.30

Conference Dinner19.30

Session 2 - Design in Bureaucracy14.00Programme

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Day 2 - Thursday, 31 October 2019

Session 4 - Architecture, Governance and Bureaucracy

Session chair: Helena Mattsson, KTH School of Architecture

Bilge İmamoğlu, TED University‘The Bureaucratic Tradition and the Professional Ideology: Architectural Culture in the Early Republican Turkey’

Davide Spina, ETH Zurich‘SGI, or the Bureaucratisation of Architecture in Post-War Italy’

Emine Seda Kayim, University of Michigan‘Stasi as a Building Agent: East German Architectural BureaucracyBetween Economy and Security 1961-1989’

Ruth Lang, Newcastle University‘The Sociologist Within: Margaret Willis and the London County Council Architect’s Department.’

9.00

Coffee break11.00

Keynote Address 2

Tania Sengupta, Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London‘Spaces of Bureaucracy in the Colonial Margins Eastern India, nineteenth century’

11.30

Lunch break12.30

Session 5 - Office Spaces for Bureaucracy

Session chair: Sven Sterken, KU Leuven

Dawid Kasprowicz, RWTH Aachen University‘From Cockpit to Cubicle – How the Human Factors Engineering Influenced Office Design’

13.30

Eleni Axioti, Architectural Association School of Architecture‘An Architecture for the Officialdom: The British Civil Service, Modern Bureaucracy and Whitehall’

Jens van de Maele, Ghent University, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning and University of Antwerp, Department of History‘Architectural Transparency in the Governmental Bureaucracy: A Case Study on Belgium (1930s)’

Olga Touloumi, Bard College‘The Workshop, or a New Aesthetic for Global Bureaucracies, c. 1945’

Coffee break15.30

Session 6 - Bureaucracy, Design and Knowledge Exchange

Session chair: Johan Lagae, UGent

Marta Bacuzzi, Politecnico di Torino, Department of Architecture and Design‘Gerling Viertel, Köln: the Negotiations behind a Building Complex. Architecture and Bureaucracy in Post-War West Germany’

Zsuzsanna Böröcz, KU Leuven, Department of Architecture and University of Antwerp, Faculty of Design Sciences‘Aligning Views and Knowledge. The Bureaucracy of Belgian Church Restorations with New Stained-Glass Windows after WWII’

Michael Kahn, University of Technology Sydney‘Bureaucracy in the Making—Unpacking Architectural Production from the Inside’

Yasser Megahed, De Montfort University, Leicester School of Architecture‘Dramatising Bureaucracy in Architectural Production: Using an Architectural Graphic Novel to Examine the Competing Ideologies of Multiple Actors in the Contemporary Construction Industry’

16.00

Closing & drinks18.00

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Poster presentations

Laurens Bulckaen, Université Libre de Bruxelles‘Postal Offices under the Ministry of the PTT at the End of the 19th Century: Case Study on Louis Cloquet and Stephan Mortier on the Ghent “Hôtel des Postes”’

Bram De Maeyer, KU Leuven, Department of Architecture‘Building a Bureaucratic Environment Abroad: The Case of the Belgian Purpose-built Chan-cery in Washington D.C. (1945-1957)’

Nico Deswaef, KU Leuven, Department of Architecture‘The Case of Bank Lambert: A Transatlantic Dialogue between Belgian and American Office Building Traditions in Post-war Brussels’

Martin Dumont, Ghent University, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning‘The Unbureaucratic Bureaucrat: Victor Bure and the nascent Administration of Urban Planning (1945-1958)’

Laurence Heindryckx, Ghent University, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning‘Iterative strategies of commercial housing development and government policy: The diver-se roles of Jean-Florian Collin (Etrimo)

Zhengfeng Wang, University College Dublin‘The Central Market in Hong Kong: Bureaucracy and the Speculative Facility’

Ivana Mihaela Žimbrek, Central European University, Budapest‘The First Yugoslav Department Store in Zagreb: Planning and Building Department Stores under Yugoslav Self-Management, late 1950s-early 1960s’

Abstracts and Biographies

Session 1 - The Politics of Built-Environment Bureaucracy

Blessing in Disguise: Bureaucracy and Unofficial ArchitectureAs Russian scientists and academics across multiple disciplines worry about the most recent reform in the distribution of research funding, introduced by president Putin as the ‘Western-inspired’ competitive grant system to replace the outdated ‘targeted’ state support, one can not help but wonder: What changes will it bring to the field of architecture and construction and will it be fully transparent?In the Soviet context most of the applied research associated with new building technologies, just like in general science, was subsidized by the state and featured a close involvement of political figures, where the absence of the private construction sector and its independent sponsorship significantly hindered the technological innovation factor. Unlike in the West, most of the Soviet research work was produced outside of the universities, in specialized network of research institutes established, controlled, and bureaucratized by the government. Multiplied after Stalin’s death, in Khrushchev’s attempt to decentralize Soviet science towards more unexplored territories, these institutes were expected to manage somewhat ambiguous but absolute tasks, from improving the living condition of the entire population, to the invention of new building materials, and to no less than a creation of a new Soviet man—all paid by the ‘people’s money’, not to be squandered on ‘overindulgences.’ The successful research results and various innovative prototypes were criticized in Soviet media as “too small-scale”, “narrow-minded” and in some cases, even “self-promotional” in nature.This paper explores various modes of institutionalization and bureaucratization of Soviet research in architecture by drawing parallels between various funding schemes, organizations of technical research, as well as discussing Soviet political ideology as the main factor behind the distribution of crucial funding resources. As a specific technology, this paper focuses on the research sector linked to the development of the large-panel prefabricated building systems that, both as an experimental construction technique and a political strategy, realized itself as a symbol of state-funded knowledge spread internationally. Inevitably, ideology stood in the way of technological innovation: the politically-induced interchangeability of notions such as technique, form, materiality and even aesthetics—all subjects to the costly ideological process of standardization of form and even language—hindered the funding of specialized areas of applied research, in favor of vague but totalizing task of the socialist project. However, I argue that such bureaucratization of architectural practice has also inadvertently boosted the proliferation of ‘unofficial’ architectural collectives that strayed away from officializing their experimental and often groundbreaking activities. Such groups have adopted the state ‘codified language of socialism’ and transformed it into a new formal language of architecture. Looking at this history as we transition into a new global era of totalizing political narratives that promise to set independent research even farther back in its track, it becomes clear that systematic governmental control over

Masha Panteleyeva

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Stephanie HeroldCollective architectures. Structures and processes of architectural work in the GDR Since the beginning of the 1950s, as part of the nationalization of the construction indus-try in the GDR, private architecture firms had been gradually dissolved and transformed into state-owned architectural and planning collectives. In architecture-historical research this development is often regarded as the marginalization of the architectural profession, as the degradation of the creative architect from the artist to the engineer. However, until today little is known about the work of architects in these state-organized collectives, about processes, work distribution, artistic freedoms and ways of working. The architec-tural collectives of the GDR had precursors, such as Hannes Meyer’s attempts to work collectively at the Bauhaus or the construction brigades of the Soviet Union, to whose organization Ernst May made a significant contribution. Against the background of socialist theories, all these collectives should not concentrate on the individual, ingenious architect, but rather support all the different participants in contributing to a collaborative work according to their special competencies. This should not only promote qualities but also increase the efficiency of construction processes. The motivations for collectivization processes in the GDR were quite similar. However, the composition and organization of these planning collectives could differ in a high degree: from the local housing combine to the “master classes” of the Bauakademie, where the (still existing) GDR architecture-eli-te carried out prestigious projects such as the Berlin Stalinalle. Also the distribution of the work within the collectives could be organized very differently, regarding for example the involvement of different participants in different project phases. And, of course, the political dimensions should not be forgotten in this context, which usually meant that the

the creative processes can leave an irreversible mark on the development of research and innovation in architectural field. But paradoxically, it can also help frame and strengthen the present belief in the autonomy of creative experimentation itself. Biography Masha Panteleyeva, Ph.D. is a Lecturer in Architecture Art and Planning department at Cornell University. Previously, she taught architectural history and design, and served as a design critic at Princeton University, Pratt Institute, the School of Architecture of The Cooper Union, and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. Prior to her academic career Panteleyeva worked as an architect at Diller Scofidio and Renfro and Cook and Fox Architects, and as an editor and writer at the Architect’s Newspaper. Her work has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, as well as Princeton University, and has been featured at the Venice Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and publications such as Open City (Charta, 2015), Single Story Urbanism (Lars Müller, 2009), the ARPA Journal, Constructs, Pidgin magazine, and the Architect’s Newspaper. Her recent book NER: City of the Future examines the evolution of Soviet formal architectural language as a discoursive tool used to outline fundamental differences between the socialist urban fabric and its Western counterpart. In December 2018 Panteleyeva curated the exhibition Tracing the Future City at the State Moscow Architecture Museum and is currently directing a documentary film about Soviet experimental architecture in the 1960s, supported by the Graham Foundation.

‘The Object of Bureaucracy: Designing the Spaces of Self-Management under Yugoslav Socialism’Thinking about, confronting and wrestling with bureaucracy was part and parcel of everyday life under socialism, underpinning activities that ranged from purchasing a raincoat to gaining access to housing. Across socialist Eastern Europe bureaucratic processes acted as mediators between individuals and the state. In SFR Yugoslavia, however, rethinking the role of bureaucracy in everyday life became central to shaping the country’s unique ‘third way’ to socialism. After Tito’s split with Stalin in 1948 and the country’s separation from the Soviet Bloc, the Yugoslav technocrats sought to engender the ultimate withering away of the state. With the introduction of workers’ self-management in 1951, bureaucracy, bureaucratism and bureaucrats were to be replaced by decentralisation and direct participation. While this renouncement was mainly rhetorical, it remained clear that the forms, processes and spaces of self-managed bureaucracy had to be rethought. Reshaped under the guise of self-management, the laborious administrative and decision-making processes of bureaucracy were, over the 1950s, transferred to Yugoslav workers self-managers. Often made of impenetrable rules and regulations, as well as abstract rhetorical declarations, the bureaucratic system of self-management was to be made more accessible

Rujana Rebernjak

actual project- (or collective-) leaders were mainly architects with a close relation to the SED-party, who – at least in some cases – appeared only sporadically on the construction sites and merely countersigned the plans. As early as the 1960s, resistance to this ‘forced collectivisation’ had been stirring within the architects’ community. Despite the highly regulated expression of opinion in the GDR, individual articles appeared in relevant archi-tecture magazines and discussions took place, where architects tried to struggle for more (creative) freedom and a less bureaucratized work. Using individual examples and a look at contemporary discourse, the paper aims to explore the question of how work in the architecture collectives of the GDR was organized and how this organization was perceived by contemporary architects. At the same time, the question will be raised, to what extent the collective organizational structures had an influence on the making of the architectural objects. The paper thus provides first insights into the work of a DFG-funded research project, which investigates the structures and working methods of the architectural collectives of the GDR. (https://www.unibamberg.de/kdwt/arbeitsbe-reiche/denkmalpflege/projekte/architekturund-planungskollektive-der-ddr/) Biography Stephanie Herold studied art history, heritage preservation and European ethnology in Bamberg, Bergen (Norway) and Berlin. From 2008 to 2016 she was a research assistant at the TU Berlin, Institute for Urban and Regional Planning, Department of Heritage Pre-servation. In 2016 she earned her doctorate with a thesis on the role of beauty in heritage preservation (published 2018). Since 2016 she has been working as a research assistant at the Competence Center for Heritage Sciences and Heritage Technologies at the University of Bamberg. Currently she is leading a project on collective planning in the GDR, funded by the German Research Foundation. In addition to research on architecture and urban planning in post-war Germany (east and west), she is interested in the role of emotions in processes of negotiation and valorisation of cultural heritage, with a special focus on empa-thy and the perception of time.

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Ben Kafka

Keynote Address 1

Made to WaitBiography Ben Kafka is a professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He is the author of The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (Zone Books, 2012), which helped establish the field of “paperwork studies.” Since then, he has become increasingly interested in the psychodynamics of groups,

through modern architecture and design. Exploring the relationship between bureaucracy and architecture within the context of Yugoslav selfmanagement in the 1950s and 1960s, this paper will consider bureaucracy as an object of design. In particular, it will look at the way decision-making processes were designed within Yugoslav factories. This was achieved through a broader spatial intervention that took into consideration the factory as a place of self-management. The factory acquired heightened significance under self-managed socialism. It was not only a space of economic and political decision-making, but was also at the centre of bureaucratic management of everyday life. Indeed, it was through their role within factories and their ability to navigate the administrative structures of self-management, that Yugoslav workers were able to gain access to housing, education, healthcare, holiday or culture. Factory buildings, housing blocks, schools, holiday resorts and cultural centres built around and by industrial enterprises became the materialisation of the bureaucratic system of self-management. At the same time, by designing the environment of the factory, Yugoslav architects and designers gave shape to bureaucratic processes. Over the late 1960s, the debates about designing self-management and its bureaucracy centred on cybernetics, whose utopian promise was its supposed ability to make decision-making more objective, rational and seamless. This paper will examine the way Yugoslav self-managed bureaucracy both influenced design and was an object of design by focusing on the case-study of Rade Končar factory. Končar was one of the largest Yugoslav electronics manufacturers, producing both small electronic goods as well as large infrastructure and industrial systems. It was a factory that manufactured other factories, with cybernetics at their core. Equally, it was at the centre of a wider urban and social network of self-management. As such, Rade Končar offers a particularly fruitful case study both for understanding the way bureaucratic processes shaped the production of buildings, as much as being a material, spatial object of bureaucracy.

BiographyRujana Rebernjak is a design historian whose research focuses on the relationship between architectural and design production and the experience of everyday life under state socialism. She is a Senior Lecturer in Contextual and Theoretical Studies at the Arts University Bournemouth. She has previously taught design history at the Royal College of Art, London College of Communication and University for the Creative Arts. She gained her PhD from the RCA/V&A History of Design programme, with a thesis on design and self-management in SFR Yugoslavia. She is currently working on a monograph about architecture and design in socialist Yugoslavia titled ‘Designing Self-Management: Objects and Spaces of Everyday Life in Post-War Yugoslavia’.

State Phobia and the Reregulation of Architectural Bureaucracy in the 1980s: The Building Code as a Site of NegotiationIn Sweden around 1980 heated discussions on postmodernism, architectural norms and regulations framed the abandonment of the functionalist paradigm for new economies and new esthetic styles. The critique of regulations and rules in the early eighties not only dominated contemporary architectural debate, but also the criticism of the welfare from social, political, and economic perspectives. Moreover, it was not only the architects and planners who introduced new ideas into the built environment and sketched new imaginary futures: politicians, bureaucrats, and legal experts all came to revise their frameworks for arranging life and tested them on the site. Parallel to the esthetic turn towards postmodernism another, less remarked regulatory turn took place inside the bureaucracy of architecture, which is often labeled “deregulation” and marked by processes of neoliberalizations. Michel Foucault identified the excessive attacks on the state and argued that the “state phobia” was a symptom of a “crisis of governing” and not of the state itself. The architectural critique of regulations and building codes in the early eighties became an explosive societal force when it fed into the critique of the welfare state.

Drawing on the Swedish turn towards neoliberalism, managed by the state, this paper discusses a proposal in 1982 from the Swedish National Board of Urban Planning to deregulate the Swedish Building Code (Svensk Byggnorm, SBN) that implied a move from prescriptive regulations towards performance based regulations. Laws, norms, and standards, just like lived space, are in this paper discussed as sites for organizing life that express the shifts in how human life and society ought to be governed and experienced. The Swedish Building Codes, are prescriptions that clarify the law (the Building Ordinance) and pin down what it means when broadly formulated political aims meet practice. The paper discusses, it will be discussed how the Codes closely mirrored architectural discourse, while the legislation was instigated by politicians and consequently owed more to economic and political issues. The paper will demonstrate how the Codes could be understood as a soft field in continuous flux, where resistance and affirmation commingled through negotiation and deliberation, creating a politics of consensus that prepared for coming changes to the law. This demonstrates the interdependencies between architectural practice and policy making embedded in the practice of regulation. BiographyHelena 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

Helena Mattsson

Session 2 - Design and Bureaucracy

organizations, and cultural processes, and is currently working on a new book about induced insanity (gaslighting, double binds, folies-à-deux, Catch-22s, etc.). Professor Kafka has been a member of the School of Social Science of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a senior fellow of the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. He is also a psychoanalyst, and sees patients in private practice.

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contemporary architectural history with a special focus on the interdependency between politics, economy and spatial organizations. She has published in journals as Nordic Journal of Architecture; Journal of Art History and Journal of Architecture. 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 “Architecture and Capitalism”, Architecture and Culture, 2017 and the forthcoming book Neoliberalism: An Architectural History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press) She is currently working on a book Architecture and Retrenchment on postmodernism and politics in Swedish architecture. She is a member of the editorial board of Journal of Architecture.

Project Definitions in the Flemish Government Architect’s Open Call ProcedureA Building Principal’s Architectural Discourse, between Empowerment and ComplianceIn 1999 the office of Flemish Government Architect (Vlaams Bouwmeester) was installed by the Flemish Government, entrusted with improving the architectural quality of the Flemish authorities’ public buildings and infrastructure. The first appointed Government Architect, bOb Van Reeth, developed what would turn out to be a major and effective instrument for this mission: the so-called Open Call procedure (Open Oproep). Levering between tendering procedure and architecture competition, this Open Call procedure stands out for the way it preserves and maximizes a space for societal ambition and architecture critical assessment, despite the strict juridical framework of European Tendering. A key idea underpinning the entire procedure is that qualitative architectural designs not only benefit from, but require building principals, commissioners, who have a clear vision on the needs, desires, and ambitions of the institution they represent. As interim-Government Architect Stefan Devoldere stated in a 2015 interview in ARCH+, ‘We consider as the most important role of the Vlaams Bouwmeester to positively influence the whole area of ‘pre-architecture’, i.e. all the foundations that make a good project possible.’ This is why the Open Call procedure accords a key role to building principals, who are assisted and activated to take responsibility at different phases of the procedure. The main formalization of this activation is the drafting of a Project Definition in which principals have to state and elaborate their the cultural and societal ambitions they have with this project. The Project Definition is then added to the project dossier, and used not only to select design teams, but also to brief them, and later to assess their project proposals.Drawing on a current explorative research project into two decades of about 600 Open Call procedures, this paper analyses this Project Definition as a paradoxical ‘bureaucratic’ document, and as an extra-disciplinary architecture discourse. One of the reasons it is paradoxical, is because it is prescribed while being underdetermined in format and open-ended in scope. Similarly, it makes building commissioners comply with the procedure, while empowering them to participate in discussions of architectural quality but in their own terms, with their own words and concepts. In that regard, the project definitions amount to a different discourse of terms, and beliefs and expectations in the societal capacities of architecture. We propose to analyse the Project Definitions of four Open Call project procedures, ranging from an early project like the Hoge Rielen masterplan (eventually assigned to Secchi-Viganò) to more recent projects like VRT public broadcasting

Maarten Van Den Driessche, Maarten Liefooghe and Pieter-Jan Cierkens

company’s headquarters (won by Robbrecht en Daem and Dierendonckblancke). This allows to map the genre of this document, and to gauge the variations in this discourse, while situating and comparing the operationality of the specific documents in the course of the four selected Open Call project trajectories.

Biography Pieter-Jan Cierkens is engineer-architect and researcher in architectural history and theory at the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning of Ghent university. His research focuses on the intersection of nineteenth-century architectural, cultural and construction history. Primary research interest are architectural education and the organization of building administrations. In 2018, he defended his PhD thesis ‘Architectural culture and building practice in 19th-Century Belgium : the case of Louis Roelandt (1786-1864), architect, academic, civil servant’. Cierkens assists in the teaching of architectural theory and design and is assistant curator of the exhibition ‘Open Call. 20 Years of Publicly Commissioned Architecture’.Maarten Liefooghe is assistant professor in architectural history and theory at Ghent University. His research revolves around encounters between art, architecture, and exhibition and preservation practices. His doctoral research ‘The Monographic Factor’(2013) was concerned with single-artist museums and their institutional and architectural make-up, combining aspects of art museums, archives and person’s memorials. More recently, Maarten has been studying contemporary architectural exhibitions as an experimental field in which 1:1 and in situ exhibits may formulate alternative approaches to key problems in historic preservation. In 2019 he co-curated with Maarten Van Den Driessche and Pieter-Jan Cierkens the exhibition ‘Open Call. 20 Years of Publicly Commissioned Architecture’. His work has been published in journals like Architectural Histories, the Journal of Architecture, the Journal of Architectural Education, and Architectural Theory Review.Maarten Van Den Driessche is assistant professor at the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning at Ghent University teaching ‘Theory of Architectural Design’ and ‘Architectural Theory’. His research is concerned with design methodology, architectural criticism, architectural education, architectural drawing and the use of typology in architectural thought. He has published in numerous journals and was editor or co-author of the following books: (2017) ‘Robbrecht en Daem architecten: An Architectural Anthology’ Brussels: Mercatorfonds. (2019) ‘GAFPA, Maarten Van Den Driessche, Aglaia Konrad, Bert Huyghe, PRIMARY STRUCTURE.’ Ghent: MER. Dirk Somers (ed.) (2019) ‘Living the Exotic Every Day’. Antwerp: Vai. Maarten is founding member of labo A, a scientific platform at the Ghent University conducting research by design projects. He is member of Heim Collectief and co-curator of the travelling exhibition ‘Open Call. 20 Years of Publicly Commissioned Architecture’ (2019-2021).

Red Tape” at the Tate? The Case of James Stirling’s Clore GalleryJames Stirling’s Clore Gallery in London, an extension of the Tate Gallery housing Joseph Turner’s paintings, is a controversial building completed at the end of the 1980s that provides an excellent example of a multiform and prolific interaction between architecture and bureaucracy. Documental research, conducted in both Stirling’s and the Tate’s archives, has unearthed the previously unknown and quite complex process that

Chiara Velicogna

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ultimately shaped the building’s final appearance and ensured its existence. The small museum is a public-private hybrid where the traditional dichotomy architect-government is challenged, particularly in regard to funding and the relations between designers and functionaries. The institutions involved in the project were the Department of Environment and the soon-to-be privatised Property Services Agency, which behaved both as client, along and sometimes against the Tate, and as public bodies. Moreover, an already precarious situation within the Property Services Agency resulted in a marked institutional turnover, thus preventing a single functionary to follow the whole process through. The wide range of the possible relationships between governmental agents and architects is explored, both explicitly and implicitly: Stirling openly acknowledges the competence of a particular project manager by requesting his presence in the design team despite his imminent retirement, while other relationships, friendly or otherwise, are inferred by way of often ironic notes affixed to the official correspondence. Design becomes a twofold collective effort, first within the architect’s firm, then within a larger design team including technical consultants and public functionaries. Finally, the matter of funding highlights how the British government, at the beginning of the 80s, aimed to shift the responsibility of funding the arts from the public to the private sector in a move that was both pragmatic and political: despite the main source of money for the Clore Gallery being a fortunately timed private donation made, the responsibility for the running costs of the museum was retained, with some reluctance, by the government. In addition to this, a long period of uncertainty on the actual sum available, due to institutional misunderstandings, directly influenced design choices and the actual extension of the building: with the Clore Gallery, bureaucracy entered a wider debate on architecture and its role in contemporary Europe, as well as museum design.

Biography Chiara Velicogna has recently completed her Ph.D in History of Architecture and Urbanism at Iuav University of Venice, where she has also graduated in Architecture. Her research has focused mainly on contemporary architecture, in particular James Stirling’s work in London, although her interests span from 16th century Venetian infrastructure to Filippo Juvarra’s work. She has also worked as independent researcher for the Académie de France in Rome.

Organizational Signature: Norms and Forms in Late Twentieth Century US Architectural PracticeIn the late twentieth century US, increasing specialization in the construction field sapped the influence architects had over the realization of their designs, even as claims to individual authorship became ever more important for market competitiveness. At the same time, the emergence of new specializations and new roles within firms showed that changes were nascent in the then-conventional definition of the architect as a generalist. As a result, in writing the history of this period we must adjust our conception of “the architect” to include not only those remaining generalists at the top of the professional hierarchy, but also those who translate design into a constructed object—project managers, spec writers, draftspersons, and interior designers. We must write of an architecture that is undecided beyond the schematic design phase, an object that evolves from start to finish. Instead of a design signature, historians should work to distill an organizational one, asking how a particular firm responded to challenges posed by specialization and administration rather

Michael Abrahamson

than site or building type. Because no two architectural projects are identical, each brings together a new group that must negotiate the terms of its own relations. Project teams develop their own rhythms and routines to deal with the specific complexities their collaborative work brings about. With a firm’s reputation at risk in the work of its subordinates, the document forms of conventional practice must maintain a chain of authorial intention through their distillation of the legal norms of professional expertise. Interpreting these norms and forms are the subject of the proposed paper. As a demonstration of this method, the proposed paper draws from archival research into a key project by the important late modernist architecture firm Gunnar Birkerts and Associates, a building for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Minnesota, completed in 1973 (seen under construction above). The firm produced 1676 drawings, 1009 pages of construction specifications, 163 bulletins, 702 memos, 63 change orders, and several linear feet of correspondence for the project. Despite inheriting deeply ingrained professional knowledge through the contracts and document formats they used, the architects had to make sense of unfamiliar management and scheduling protocols like the Critical Path Method, as well as an unfamiliar project delivery method that included new roles like Construction Manager and Interior Designer. Aversion to formalized “methods” was reinforced by the ad-hoc nature of project teams and their work at most firms. New projects, in other words, often brought together a collective of employees who learned to work and to work together on the fly. Interpreting this kind of archive requires a methodology that accounts for the art of administration as well as that of design. This paper asks what new modes of understanding architecture come into focus when we zoom out to permit a view of other consequential people in the process? What historiographical possibilities might such a wider view allow?

BiographyMichael Abrahamson is an architectural historian and critic whose research explores the materiality of buildings and the methods of architectural practice across the twentieth century. His PhD dissertation at the University of Michigan centered on the important late modernist architectural firm Gunnar Birkerts and Associates. Michael has also written about the Detroit firm Albert Kahn Associates and on the architectural style known as Brutalism. In these and other research projects, Michael explores the systems of creativity, subordination, and legitimation that have enabled the creation of architecture. Michael is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Utah, where he teaches history surveys, research seminars, and design studios. He has previously taught at Kent State University and the University of Michigan. In addition to his Ph.D., Michael holds a B.Arch from Kent State University, and a master’s degree in architecture criticism from the Ohio State University.

Building Through Manuals: The Humanitarian Government and its Design ApparatusIn 1974, disaster and emergency experts grouped under Intertect, an agency led by Frederick C. Cuny, started the edition of their “Relief Operations Guidebook” a six-volume manual

Elis Mendoza

Session 3 - The Media of Bureaucracy

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meant as a guide that recollected aid workers experiences in the field and made specific recommendations for future missions. The guidebook was a groundbreaking contribution to the growing humanitarian government and served as a precursor the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Operation Manual (1981). The convoluted end of the 1960s brought the disenchantment of those taking part in the student and counterculture movements. The highly televised famine in Biafra became the call to arms for a generation that believed that humanitarianism, existing outside of the nation-state, could become the last space of utopian thought. This period is what Didier Fassin has called “Second Humanitarian Era,” a time in which humanitarian practices expanded drastically to the Third World provoking the rapid multiplication of aid agencies, international organizations, and the consolidation of the UNHCR as a global actor. Humanitarian practitioners were suddenly called to house a growing number of displaced, corollary to the decolonization movementds and Cold War power struggles. As such, humanitarianism, as a practice, became a field in which methodologies coming from technological science, medicine, ethnology, computer science, economy, sociology, anthropology, urbanism, and architecture found themselves intertwined in order to attend the urgent needs of a precarious population. As a comprehensive designer, taken from the concept coined by Buckminster Fuller, Cuny saw the abundance of information produced by aid workers in the field as a potential source of knowledge. The problem, according to Cuny, was that there was no one making sense of this production, missions were always planned with little time ahead with a sense of urgency and after the mission wrapped up aid workers, often volunteers, went back to their lives or to the next mission. The possibility of building institutional practices through the training of this muscle that were the practices of temporary field workers was hindered by the ontological nature of aid and disaster response. Cuny envisioned a clearing house that would gather all this paperwork produced not only on the field but on the agencies offices (Geneva, Oxford, New York). Carefully looking at paper trails revealed important information for the humanitarian government: it provided a guide on how to deal with local governments; how to anticipate local resistance; lessons learned; data on malnourishment and epidemics in the camps; and effective ways to design shelter that could serve the changing nature of its inhabitants instead of restricting their growth. The humanitarian government was indeed a new global and expanding bureaucracy that needed a system to fulfill its mandate. For Cuny it was clear that this organization needed to happen from the ground up since it was where real knowledge was being produced. The draft versions of Intertect’s “Relief Operations Guidebook” and UNHCR’s Operation Manuals serves as witness of the consolidation of humanitarian practices.

BiographyElis Mendoza is a Ph.D. candidate in architecture history and theory at Princeton University. Her dissertation traces a history of architecture experimentation within the incipient humanitarian government of the 1970s that runs parallel to well-established architectural histories of development and technology.Elis works in the intersection between built space, technology, and human rights with a special focus in post-conflict cities. She has presented her research the Guatemalan Court for Vulnerable Victims in 2016. Her writings have been published in Avery Review, Art Papers, and DC Papeles.

Elis has been a Open Society Archives Fellow (2018), a Lassen fellow at Princeton University (2015), and a fellow at the National Council Science and Technology (CONACYT) 2012-2014 among others. She has taken part in projects by the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative and Forensic Architecture.Elis earned a B.Arch. by UNAM, Mexico and a M.Sc. in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture by Columbia University.

The Heavenly Light as a Copying Clerk”: The Production of Blueprints and Architectural Authority in the United States before 1917In this paper I examine the crucial historical role of blueprints in architectural production and practice. As a site of concentrated architectural knowledge, blueprints serve to extend the authority of the architect into the larger network that makes possible the realization of architectural ideas. This paper traces the early history of these artifacts by focusing specifically on cyanotype blueprints: the earliest and, for nearly half a century, the only economical method of photochemically duplicating drawings. In order to substantiate my claims about blueprints, and to understand them on their own terms, I look to several types of contemporaneous published sources including instruction manuals, trade catalogues, and professional serials.The height of cyanotype blueprinting in the United States, from the 1880s to the 1910s, coincides exactly with the period in which the boundaries of the architectural profession were being delineated from the outside and from within. Craft knowledge became expert knowledge—a reality reinforced by formal architectural education, fledgling professional organizations, emerging trade publications, and incipient laws and codes. Blueprints stand at the center of this narrative. These inexpensive documents were instrumental in the transformation of architecture into a legitimate profession; they physically extended the authority of the architect and simultaneously facilitated the complex building projects that made necessary those same professional architects. Architects became managers, capable of the carrying out their role at a distance thanks to blueprinted copies of their schemes. Blueprints served as a nexus of knowledge and control over contractors, site-managers, engineers, masons, bricklayers, carpenters, metalworkers, plumbers, riveters, and others who had disparate professional cultures and knowledge bases. The power of the blueprint ultimately lies in its status as a photochemical copy of the architect’s original drawing. It is thus a document imbued with authority, and this feature of blueprints explains in part their crucial role in the establishment and crystallization of the architectural profession in America.

BiographyJonathan Duval is a PhD student in the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University, Providence, RI, USA. Jonathan studies the history of American architecture and its intersections with technology, education, and professional practice. With his PhD advisor Dietrich Neumann, Jonathan is currently curating the exhibition “Raymond Hood and the American Skyscraper” to be held at Brown University in 2020. He received his BA in Architectural Studies and Art History from Tufts University. Before beginning at Brown, Jonathan worked for several years at the MIT Museum, where he curated “Imre Halasz: Architect and Educator” and assisted with other architecture and photography exhibitions.

Jonathan Duval

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A Devious Route”: Proprietary Specification as a Space on the Page for the Entry of the Building Products Industry into Architecture in the Interwar PeriodAs a bureaucratic document that both describes and organises the business of building, the architectural specification is a potent resource with which to explore the impact of historical change in the construction industry on the work of architects and their designs. Unlike the architectural drawing which varies little, the specification undergoes major and highly legible transformations at moments of change (such as the emergence of the capitalist building industry in the late 18th century) and is at the same time constitutive of new practices with significant ramifications for the production of architecture. This talk looks at one such transformation; the emergence of proprietary specification in the interwar period, when for the first time on any scale in Britain, the architect’s role began to include the selection of one branded product over another. While this development was much commented on and debated at the time, it is now overlooked in histories of the period, and is today an unquestioned aspect of contemporary architectural practice.Seemingly a modest change in the scope of the architect’s paperwork, the proprietary clause in fact opened up a space of contestation for the expanding building products industry, at the same time authorizing practices that had previously been consigned by the British architectural profession to advertising. As one US commentator put it at the time, proprietary specification was ‘a devious route’ via the architect for the sale of commodities. Nevertheless, modernist architects such as Wells Coates and F.R.S Yorke embraced the promotion of building products; taking considerable care with clients over their selection, collaborating with science and industry to develop new products and to expand markets for their sale, designing trade stands for the popular building exhibitions and building centres of the day and making use of proprietary products in their designs and in their polemics such as Le Corbusier’s ‘Law of Ripolin’. Thus, the effects of the proprietary turn extended well beyond the pragmatic procedures of the building industry, to transform the aesthetic and discursive concerns of modern architecture. This talk uses original archival research to look closely at the inventive range of ‘technical’ literatures developed by manufacturers such as Crittall’s Windows and Venesta Ply to secure their products’ selection in the specification. It explores how languages of tradition and of innovation; of technical and of artistic means were all mobilized to this end, and at how proprietary specification was a bureaucratic mechanism that brought product manufacturers and architects into communication and collaboration. At a time now, when increasingly, the selection of products falls outside the architect’s remit, sometimes with tragic consequences, and when buildings are described through the performance criteria they are to meet more than the parts and components that will be used, we need to better understand the significance of proprietary specification in the production of the built environment and to identify the new mechanisms which guarantee sales – even without the intervention of architects.

BiographyKatie Lloyd Thomas is Professor of Theory and History of Architecture at Newcastle University and an editor with Architectural Research Quarterly (ARQ). Her publications include Material Matters (2007) and with Tilo Amhoff and Nick Beech, Industries of Architecture (2015), and with Tilo Amhoff, ‘Writing Work: Changing Practices of Architectural Specification’ in Deamer (ed.) The Architect as Worker (2015). Katie is a founder member of

Katie Lloyd Thomas the feminist spatial practice collective taking place (www.takingplace.org) and her research often examines intersections between gender, architecture and technology, most recently ‘This strange interloper: building products and the emergence of the architect-shopper in 1930s Britain’ in Darling, Walker (eds.) Suffragette City: Women, Politics and the Built Environment (2019). In 2017 Katie was visiting scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) and she is currently the recipient of fellowships from Leverhulme and the Paul Mellon Centre to prepare her upcoming monograph The Architect as Shopper.

The Bureaucratic Tradition and the Professional Ideology: Architectural Culture in the Early Republican TurkeyThe radical transformation from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey in the early 20th century has been a prolific research topic for architectural historians who are interested in discussing architecture and planning particularly as an ideological tool of the state in producing cultural representations of power. The Republican revolution required to replace the out-dated Ottoman social structure with that of a contemporary and secular nation state’s, and architecture provided the Republic with the modern urban components of the project of such “nation building”.Though such studies of architectural modernization as a representational tool of cultural politics construct a compelling narrative, it is not the whole story, as that narrative mostly assumes that the architectural discourse of the time is what is manifestly vocalized by the community of free practicing architects. In actuality, there was a larger group of architects working within the bureaucratic bodies as civil servants and their production was heavier with its impact on shaping the built environment of the modern Turkey. Their existence, as well as their production, regularly falls out of the sight of architectural historiography, mostly because they were intentionally ignored by the architectural media of the time and were poorly documented. The very few architectural journals of the time circulated the professionalist view that “true” architecture, as a work of art, is only possible when it is obtained through free market relations. The common practice within the state body on the other hand, which constituted the majority of the architectural production in the country from the early 1920s well into the late 1950s, reflected an opposite nature, where anonymous and interdisciplinary production replaced the conviction on the architect as the creative individual. The architects in state offices, very much like any other technical experts, were seen as public servants first and the professional identifications came later. They were not treated by the bureaucratic body in which they operated as creators of buildings, but as producers of architectural design, which needs to be combined with the production of many others to actually become the built environment. Concepts such as “public service” and “public interest” were expressively prioritised in such bodies over issues of form or representation, and those concepts were heavily loaded with political as well as ethical values, as the last three centuries of the Ottoman attempts at modernization in the violent opposition of traditional religious authorities created a bureaucratic tradition which was not just instrumental and value-free but was deeply engaged in a secular and positivist political agenda.This paper will argue that the early Republican architectural culture in Turkey was a product of the conflict of the ongoing practice in the State and the professional agenda of

Bilge İmamoğlu

Session 4 - Architecture, Governance and Bureaucracy

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the architectural community, and cannot be simplified in narratives where the latter merely provided a cultural representation of the former. It will also present some exceptional cases where the conflict gave way to productive cooperation of the socially engaged bureaucrat and the professional architect with modernist training. BiographyBilge İmamoğlu graduated from the Middle East Technical University, Department of Architecture in Ankara in 2000. He completed his thesis on the workers’ houses for the Zonguldak coal field in 2003 and got his M.A. degree from the History of Architecture program in METU. In 2007 he went to the Netherlands, to carry on his research on the professionalization of architecture in Turkey at IHAAU in TU Delft. He was employed by TU Delft until he got his PhD degree in 2010. He teaches architectural design studios and history and theory courses in TEDU, Ankara, since 2012. Bilge İmamoğlu studies and researches into various fields in the general frame of modernism and modern urbanism and architecture, such as; 20th century architecture in Turkey, professionalization of architecture in Turkey, architectural education, and modern architectural heritage.

SGI, or the Bureaucratisation of Architecture in Post-War ItalyIn the post-war years, Vatican-controlled real estate developer and contractor Società Generale Immobiliare (SGI) emerged as a major force in the country’s reconstruction process. From its Rome headquarters, the ‘Leviathan’ (as journalist Antonio Cederna famously called it) devised, delivered, and managed dozens of schemes across the peninsula – from residential and commercial developments, to industrial, road transport, and water infrastructure. None of this would have been possible without the establishment, immediately after the conflict, of a centralised administrative system coordinating the work of the company’s ten thousand employees. This system allowed SGI to quickly achieve an economy of scale, so much so that by 1965 one of its top engineers could confidently affirm that ‘in Italy... we produce space, just like FIAT makes cars’. This talk will examine the progressive bureaucratisation of SGI’s design and construction processes via the analysis of the firm’s unpublished documents (drawings, reports, charts, internal and external correspondence). In particular, the presentation will recount SGI’s early traffic with scientific management theory; the criteria underlying its post-war hiring spree, enforcement of a division of labour, and creation of regional branches; the modernisation of the company’s office space in Rome; the firm’s embrace of specialist knowledge from mathematics and statistics, development of in-house information management and preconstruction protocols, and later adoption of American project management techniques (PERT). In addition, the talk will outline SGI’s habit to exploit the generative potential of national and municipal regulations (and of the gaps within them) for the production of building types and urban configurations never seen before in Italy. Alongside the above, the paper will situate SGI’s ‘bureaucratic drift’ in the context of the increasingly more corporate and specialised professional realm of post-war architecture. Methods-wise, the contribution will eschew conventional concerns with individual authorship to explore instead the possibilities of a narrative focussing on collective efforts and based on a class of evidence hitherto largely ignored by historians.

Davide Spina

Biography Davide Spina is a PhD Candidate at ETH Zurich within the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture - gta (main advisor: Laurent Stalder). Prior to this, he studied architecture at Roma Tre and architectural history at the Bartlett, University College London (main advisor: Adrian Forty). His PhD thesis concentrates on the post-war activities of the Rome real estate developer and contractor Società Generale Immobiliare (SGI). Davide was a recipient of the Collection Research Grant at the CCA, has been a Visiting PhD Scholar at the Columbia GSAPP, and has taught at ETH. In 2018-19, he was the Architecture Fellow at the Swiss Institute in Rome (ISR). Some of his essays have been published in the AA Files.

Stasi as a Building Agent: East German Architectural Bureaucracy Between Economy and Security 1961-1989The German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) Ministry of State Security—known as the Stasi—was intimately involved in the production of the East German built environment throughout its 40-year existence. The state security apparatus monitored building enterprises and construction sites to ensure the fulfillment of centrally-mandated economic plans, oversaw building permits to inspect their compliance with military and telecommunication codes, commissioned top-secret governmental structures as well as housing for its employees, and influenced the physical make-up of its structures’ surroundings. The Stasi acted as a building agent for it was an invisible hand intervening in processes determining the efficiency, productivity and national security of East German architecture. Bureaucracy, in this regard, was the primary site of exchange and negotiation between institutions and constituents of architecture and surveillance in the GDR. In this paper, I propose to include agents of surveillance within the constellation of architectural experts, legislators and policy-makers to examine the multifaceted and co-constitutive operations of East German state security and its building industry. Looking at the entangled bureaucratic sites of exchange between East German architecture and surveillance is significant to understand this relationship for two reasons. First, the architectural activities of the Stasi were largely of bureaucratic nature. For instance, the surveillance organization’s economic monitoring of the East German building industry culminated in comprehensive reports on workers’ disputes, supply shortages, and material damages across the GDR. Its building inspections were coordination efforts between the interests of East German Postal Service, Ministry of National Defense, city councils, and municipalities. Second, records of bureaucracy shed light on the moments of architectural resistance and resilience as opposed to the familiar narrative of state power and its violent ramifications. It was through bureaucratic maneuvering, for example, that the Stasi’s petitions for changes to urban and architectural plans were pushed back by East German architects. Similarly, we learn from legislation drafts and the correspondences in-between how the Stasi’s building control activities were challenged by the Ministry of Building. The grey literature of bureaucracy, however, does not only help us portray a more nuanced picture of surveillance’s architectural ramifications varying between oppression and bureaucratic consensus. It also shows us how the output of surveillance activities was productively translated into architectural knowledge, how architects themselves were complicit in realizing surveillance objectives, and how—ultimately—architecture both facilitated and resisted surveillance’s methods and end goals.

Emine Seda Kayim

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By exploring the Stasi as a building agent, this paper will historically examine the ways within which surveillance and architecture met in bureaucracy and interrogate their common denominators—namely, economic hegemony and security. In doing so, I aim to illustrate how the co-production of these regimes of knowledge may inform us about the current conditions of architectural bureaucracy.

Biography Emine Seda Kayim is an architect, documentary filmmaker, and historian. She is an advanced PhD Candidate at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, a German Studies Graduate Certificate Student. Seda’s scholarly work bridges between architectural history, media theory, and German studies and focuses on the cultural and political geographies of Europe, the Soviets, and the US from the interwar period to the present. Seda’s doctoral dissertation explores the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) Ministry of State Security—known as the Stasi—as an architectural producer to examine the co-production of surveillance and architecture in the Soviet-socialist system of the GDR. Seda is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the Graham Foundation’s 2018 Carter Manny Award in Research and 2017 Helen Wu Award. Seda received her BSc and MSc degrees at the Yildiz Technical University in Istanbul, Turkey.

The Sociologist Within: Margaret Willis and the London County Council Architect’s DepartmentThe creation of an Architect’s Department at the London County Council provided a platform within the mechanisms of local government which challenged efinitions of professional boundaries and accepted forms of practice. In contrast to their peers in private practice, the structures of employment within the Council placed these architects within a broader network of extra-professional resources. Alongside the connection with legislative, economic, and industrial agency, the Department’s human resources included the services of the sociologist Margaret Willis, who was based in the Reconstruction Group of the Town Planning Division in room 694 of North Block, in the midst of the Architect’s Department. Whilst early attempts by the Department at engaging public participation to inform their urban and architectural propositions had been obstructed, Willis’act of infra-professional collaboration established a connectivity to agencies and experieences beyond the domain of the Department, facilitating ingenuity in the architecture produced as a result.It is an oft-cited fact that the LCC employed a sociologist, yet whilst the influence of her work upon the urban and residential schemes proposed by the Department in the post-war period has been celebrated, her work itself has gone unseen. This obfuscation developed in three phases: in producing work anonymously in the spirit of collaborative contribution common to contemporaneous bureaucratic practice, in the active repression of her work to be published beyond the Department, and in the posthumous archiving of her research as a subcategory of the more prominent names of the Department. As a result, although the biographies and work of those with whom she shared both projects and workspace - of Walter Bor, Graham Shankland and Percy Johnson Marshall - have since emerged, the location and demands of Willis’position, her means of operation, and the documentation she produced have remained masked by the Department’s protocols.Through recourse to archival documentation, this paper demonstrates not only the

Ruth Lang

role Willis played, but also the mechanisms of the bureaucratic environment through which such stories are lost. It asserts the value that such rsources beyond that which we might ordinarily deem ‘architectural’ bestowed to employment within a bureaucratic environment through which such stories are lost. It asserts the value that such resources beyond that which we might ordinarily deem ‘architectural’ bestowed to employment within a bureaucratic environment, and confornts the challenges posed in redefining the boundaries of architectural histories to include such contributions.

Biography Ruth Lang is a writer, curator, architect, and senior lecturer at Central Saint Martins. Her work exploring the hidden influences and practitioners of architecture has formed the basis for a three-part exhibition with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and a photographic series exhibited at the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings in 2018. Ruth was shortlisted to curate the British pavilion at the 2020 Venice Biennale alongside architects OMMX and curator Brendan Cormier. She is an editor for Architectural Research Quarterly, and writes for a broad range of non-academic publications, including Volume, Architectural Review, Architect’s Journal, and Modernist magazine (for which she has guest edited the current issue on the ‘Invisible’). Her PhD thesis at Newcastle University exploring the tension between bureaucracy and creativity in the work of the of the London County Council Architect’s Department from 1943-1965 is currently under examination.

Tania Sengupta

Keynote Address 2

Spaces of Bureaucracy in the Colonial Margins Eastern India, nineteenth century

Biography Dr Tania Sengupta is an architectural historian and Director of Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. Tania trained and worked as an architect and urban designer in India, and taught architectural design and history and theory in various schools there before moving to teaching and research in the UK. She works on architectural history from postcolonial and transcultural perspectives. Her research interests lie in colonial and post-colonial architectures and urban landscapes of South Asia; provinciality and urban-rural relationships; material and spatial cultures of governance and bureaucratic practices; architectures of domesticity; modernity’s and modern state bureaucracies’ everyday aspects; and scalar relationships of architecture and urban space from the proximal to the panoramic/ global.

Tania has recently contributed a substantial chapter on the architectural history of colonial South Asia for the forthcoming 21st edition of Banister Fletcher’s History of Architecture and is finalising her book on spatial cultures of provincial governance and everyday life in colonial Bengal, India. Presently she’s also involved in a collaborative project spanning USA, UK and India and entitled Mapping Urban Materiality, the first part of which, called Mapping Ephemerality, seeks to read the historical, spatial, social and cultural imprints and popular mobilisation of a city-wide religious festival in Calcutta.

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From Cockpit to Cubicle – How the Human Factors Engineering Influenced Office DesignIn 1964, the American company Herman Miller Inc. advertised its first collection of office furniture called “Action Office I”. Being specialised in the production of furniture for private spaces, the company hired for this new challenge the designer and inventor Robert L. Propst. Although this first series turned out to be a commercial disaster, Propst̀ s following Action Offices became the formative signature of the office as the dominant workplace in the western countries, also widely known as the “cubicle” – a room consisting of three flexible walls in which the employee could work standing or sitting. However, today cubicles are negatively associated with little, enslaving micro-cells to conduct work on computers. But how could the “Action Office” become a symbol for the western model of office architecture? And what kind of scientific knowledge influenced its design? To answer this question, my talk will look at the Action Office from a historical and theoretical point of view and highlight an epistemological turn in the history of psychology and design that comes with the advent of Human Factors Engineering. Propst, one of the first furniture-designers to quote from Human Factors Engineering, used this design-approach for his Action Office. The Human Factors Engineering consisted mostly of experimental psychologists who were hired by the military as cockpit designers during and after World War II. Their job was to reduce the amount of pilot errors through new designs of displays, knobs, rudders, pedals and windows. This meant also to collaborate with engineers, who spoke a different language. To translate the psychological episteme into the engineering concepts, the experimental psychologists had to change their main research subject and look more on the design of machines than on the characteristics and capabilities of pilots. Trying to overcome the Tayloristic paradigm, these psychologists developed an own approach that regards the machine as a contingency absorbing and information processing interface for the human user. In the eyes of Human Factors Engineers, it should not be the human anymore that has to adapt to the machine and her/his workplace like in Taylorism. Thus, the materialization of these cockpits represents a change of interfaces from an area with instruments to an information processing and displaying environment that already includes a human factor and her/his limited physical and cognitive capabilities. Design becomes here, as I argue, a theory about machine environments that has to be materialized in cockpits – or just in offices. It is not by chance, that the one-man-environment of the cockpit and its displays play a central role in Propst’s designs from the start. My talk will first examine the special aspects of the design-concept in the Action Office. I argue then that the theoretical concept of machine developed by the Human Factors Engineering had a huge influence on designs like Propst’s Action Office. Also, I show where the Human Factors Engineering connects and disconnects to the machine concept of cybernetics in the 1950s.

Biography Dawid Kasprowicz is a research associate at the Chair for Philosophy of Science and Technology and at the Human Technology Centre, RWTH University Aachen. From 20132016, he was a research associate at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Media Cultures of Computer Simulation in Lüneburg. His research interests include the media

Dawid Kasprowicz

Session 5 - Office Spaces for Bureaucracy

An Architecture for the Officialdom: The British Civil Service, Modern Bureaucracy and WhitehallThe paper traces the formation of the administrative bureaucracy of the state and of the civil service in Britain and relates it to the evolution of the typology of the office building. Max Weber considers the bureaucratic model as a form of rational)legal authority. This rationalization and calculability are accompanied by constant control over the work process as well as a disciplinary control on the relations of labor that is evident in the work space. The Whitehall district in central London has evolved during the years as the physical center of the British government and civil service. In the past four centuries, the Whitehall became the speculative site of many abandoned building schemes. One cannot but notice that the majority of the proposed architectural plans for the Whitehall had been articulated at specific points in history when the forms and practices of government were at the threshold of a change. Charles Barry’s General Scheme for Metropolitan improvements that was exhibited in 1857 is drafted at the time when the state institutions are changing from traditional to modern bureaucratic structures with the publication of the Northcote-Trevelyan report. While, Leslie Martin’s 1965 project, Whitehall: A Plan for the National and Government Centre signifies the turn of the British government towards more technocratic practices and attitudes. Both plans gradually dissolved into the bureaucratic machine from where they had emerged. Nevertheless, they remain telling documents of their time and characteristic examples of the relation between architectural design and bureaucratic polies.The paper discusses how the proposals for the Whitehall government buildings follow the evolution of the office typology and reflect the changes in the organizational theories and practices of the work processes, as well as in the structure of the civil service and of bureaucratic institutions. From the traditional office space with its hierarchical arrangement and clear subdivisions that demonstrates the rigid traditional bureaucratic structure to the modern ideas about the application of scientific management in the workplace with the use of the Taylorist open plan. More specifically, the paper focuses on leslie Martin’s Whitehall plan and argues that it reflects in its design proposal the gradual managerialization and technocratization of work processes. This is evident both in the proposed office designs for the British civil service as well in the actual design process followed by the architects. In this plan, one can observe the emergence of a twofold techno-bureaucracy, that of the government and that of the architectural practice. The paper expands this investigation by considering the behavioral management theories of Elton Mayo, as put in practice in the design of Bürolandschaft, reflecting the inclusion and absorption of all aspects of the worker’s personality by work. In parallel, one notes important changes in the technology and organization information collection and processing that present a new form of techno-bureaucratization of work. The paper concludes by problematizing exactly this endless expansion of the work space, as a form of total bureaucratization of our lives as argued by David Graeber in The Utopia of Rules.

Eleni Axioti

history of immersion, media theory of embodiment, human-robot collaborations and philosophy of digital media. In his PhD-Thesis he wrote a media history of the concept of immersion. Recent publication: The Hidden Space of Production. Virtuality in Henri Bergson and Gilbert Simondon, in: Daniel Blanga-Gubbay and Elisabeth Ruchaud (Ed.): ‘You were not expected to do this.’ On the Dynamics of Production, Düsseldorf 2017.

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Biography Eleni Axioti is course leader of the second year history and theory studies at the Architectural Association School of Architecture and an associate lecturer in contextual studies at Central St. Martins School of Architecture. She has recently concluded her Ph.D. thesis on the transformation of the institutional architecture of the British welfare state to a state of workfare. Her research focuses on architectural history in regard to issues of social policy and political economy, investigating the practices of governance and more specifically the biopolitical aspects of architecture and planning. Axioti holds an MA in Histories and Theories (AA) and an MEng. in civil and structural engineering (AUTH). She has practiced as a designer, editor and writer in the U.K. and Greece.

Architectural Transparency in the Governmental Bureaucracy: A Case Study on Belgium (1930s)“Bureaucracies are the late bloomers of modern political structure. They grew silently, inexorably in the underbrush – seldom noticed, little analyzed. Convenience and necessity, not ideology and legitimacy, are their life-blood; they are not loved and respected, but rather tolerated and depended on.” (Samuel Krislov, Representative bureaucracy, 1974) In the mid-1970s, the American political scientist Samuel Krislov pointed at a key characteristic of the modern ministerial bureaucracy: contemporary societies cannot do without, but at the same time, people generally hold it in low regard. Arguing in the research tradition established by Max Weber, Krislov thus described the governmental administration as a phenomenon subjected to ‘disenchantment’ (Entzauberung): it serves a purely rational aim, and generates a sphere of human activity in which traditional social relations no longer play a functional role. Thus separated from the citizens’ lifeworld, the bureaucracy is often perceived as an impenetrable ‘black box’, governed by arcane rules and procedures (cfr. Becker 2011, Chevallier 2007, Böhme 1998). In my case study, I want to address a remarkable (but failed) attempt at ‘uncovering’ the black box of bureaucracy. In the second half of the 1930s, during times of political, social, and economic crisis, the Belgian government charged a so-called Royal Commissioner for Administrative Reform with conceiving and implementing an ambitious makeover of the civil service. This Commissioner, the political scientist Louis Camu, believed that the performance levels of both the ministerial bureaucracy and many politicians left much to be desired. To counter the growing public distrust and dissatisfaction vis-à-vis the political-administrative system, Camu proposed to impose a regime of visual transparency upon the civil service, allowing citizens visiting the ministerial offices to monitor the administrators’ activities. Going back to the democratic ideal of ‘publicity’ first postulated by the early-nineteenthcentury English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, this transparency was to be materialized through a new ministerial complex containing ample glazed open offices. Yet, as it turned out, the Royal Commissioner was far from a ‘transparent’ political actor himself. During the first months of the Second World War, Camu became actively involved in New Order-oriented political groupuscules. In this period, he maintained his proposals for the creation of new ministerial offices. I argue that the architectural transparency advocated by Camu was commensurable with this new ideological direction. Like the well-known Casa del Fascio in Como, Camu’s ministerial complex could thus have functioned as a “repressive space, [where] nothing [escaped] the surveillance of power, [and where] the

Jens van de Maele

sphere of private life – which should be enclosed and have a finite aspect – [was merged] with the opening outwards of public space” (to quote an analysis of the Casa del Fascio by historian Simona Storchi).

Biography Jens van de Maele studied history at the universities of Leuven and Vancouver. He is currently completing a PhD thesis dealing with political and architectural discourses on ministerial office buildings in Belgium during the interwar period (University of Ghent and the University of Antwerp). E-mail: [email protected]

The Workshop, or a New Aesthetic for Global Bureaucracies, c. 1945As the story goes, in January 1946, Wallace K. Harrison was given the most coveted job in the world – at least at the time: to lead a team of designers, engineers, and contractors to design and build the United Nations Headquarters. In front of the Board of Design, Harrison announced that the team was not going to design a symbol for peace, but rather a workshop, calling the architects to leave behind their dreams of monumental architectures and symbolic gestures. This sensational announcement of humility was widely circulated in newspapers, radio announcements, and later books, celebrating the building of the headquarters as the product of unity and harmony. Yet, very few scholars have been addressing the roots of this “workshop” culture in changing managerial and bureaucratic structures that hoped to address group dynamics for efficiency. In fact, discussions of the United Nations Headquarters often focus on Lewis Mumford’s critique of its managerial aesthetics or the formalistic battles between the old master, Le Corbusier, and the young prodigy, Oscar Niemeyer. Such accounts have reduced the production and construction of this landmark building into a tale of creative masterminds clashing with one another. As a result the arduous transactions and negotiations among international administrators and diplomats that this model bureaucracy in the making entailed. This presentation will reconstruct the exchanges that borrowed from cultures of management and research on effective bureaucracies to produce the spaces of global governance. I will, in particular, discuss the manuals and books that circulated among diplomats and officials, such as George B. de Huszar’s Practical Applications of Democracy, to explore the emergence of a workshop aesthetic and to argue that rather than an architectural invention, this move constituted a calculated political recalibration of the space of global governance. In bringing forth the managerial debates that shaped these new spaces of institutional governance of the world, I will also point to some new questions and problems that interdisciplinary research on bureaucratic structures pose. How does this new knowledge transform the histories we write about international institutions and the role that design played in shaping their worlds?

Biography Olga Touloumi is Assistant Professor of Architectural History at Bard College. Her research concerns questions of globalization and media in twentieth architecture. Her book-in-

Olga Touloumi

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Session 6 - Bureaucracy, Design and Knowledge Exchange

Gerling Viertel, Köln: the Negotiations behind a Building Complex. Architecture and Bureaucracy in Post-War West GermanyThe present contribution aims to highlight the complex relationship between the bureaucratical sphere, the design culture and the multitude of other actors involved in the construction of a building complex. The general context that will be taken into account is the reconstruction of West Germany after the Second World War, during the very first years after the end of the conflict. The investigated object is the Gerling Viertel, a urban block located in the city center of Cologne, seat of an important insurance company, the Gerling Konzern. At the end of the war the headquarters of the firm, funded in 1904, was a late nineteenth-century villa, expanded in the Thirties with the addition of two side buildings. The complex survived the bombings without major damages, unlike the rest of the city, which was one of the most teared apart during the war. The company owner, Hans Gerling, immediately conceived a great plan of expansion and renewal, which started with the acquisition of the surrounding lots, composed by both private and public buildings, at a very profitable rate. From 1949 to 1966 he was able to rebuild the villa according to his new vision and to add nine new buildings. The Wiederaufbauplan of Cologne by Rudolf Schwarz stated precise guidelines about the reconstruction of the city center, especially concerning the dimensions of the buildings, which should be kept unchanged. Even if the urban plan, based on the formation of new neighborhoods around the Romanesque churches within the city inner ring, was clearly against the construction of any high-rise building, Gerling managed to erect an office tower very close to one of these churches, St. Gereon. The project was controversial for many other reasons: the demolition of several historical buildings; the style of the complex, undoubtedly inspired by the same neoclassical monumentality of the Third Reich architecture; the previous commitment with the regime of the main authors, like the architects Helmut Hentrich and Hans Heuser -who then denied any connection with this project- and Arno Breker, Hitler’s favorite sculptor. Through an archival research it was possible to explore the multiple layers of the building creation process and, for instance, to determine that one of the adopted strategies to get the project approved was to gain the favor of the public, at the beginning strongly reluctant.

Marta Bacuzzi

progress, “The Global Interior”, situates mid-20th century architectural constructions of global governance within debates on media democracies and liberal internationalism. Touloumi has co-edited Sound Modernities, a volume on how acoustics and sound technologies transformed modern architectural culture during the twentieth century; and Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground, a volume about the exchanges between designers and computational technologists in Europe and North America. Her writing has appeared at the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Buildings & Landscapes, Journal of Architecture, and Harvard Design Magazine. She has been a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and her research has been awarded fellowships from Harvard University, the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation, and the Canadian Center for Architecture. Touloumi is the co-founder of the Feminist Art and Architectural Collaborative (FAAC).

Thanks to a differentiated approach based on multiple communication media, like article journals, private and public celebrations, speeches, and even videos, the company was able to reach both the prominent figures and the citizens of Cologne.By showing the mutual influence that architecture and bureaucracy can have on one another, especially if a stakeholder actively takes part in the negotiations behind a project even up to overturn its fate, this case study allows to recognize not only the blurred boundary between these two fields, but also to portray the agents and the tools that vehiculate their interaction.

Biography Marta Bacuzzi is an architect, graduated at Politecnico di Milano with a thesis on the role of utopias in shaping the architecture of the global turn. Her research interests mainly concern a transnational history of architecture, with particular attention to the circulation of models, theories and professional knowledge. She is currently a PhD Student of the program ‘Architecture. History and Project’ at Politecnico di Torino with a research that aims to integrate the historiographical discourse on the reconstruction of West Germany after the Second World War.

Aligning Views and Knowledge. The Bureaucracy of Belgian Church Restorations with New Stained-Glass Windows after WWIIDuring the Second World War Belgium suffered relatively limited damage to the built environment, but the use of V-bombs did cause extensive damage to windows, in particular to stained-glass windows of churches. During the reconstruction these elements of great heritage value posed a special challenge, particularly in the numerous churches where the original glass drawings had been lost and new designs were needed. In these cases, temporary windows were placed as a matter of urgency, and the issue of the definitive windows and their artist was often postponed to the final stages. Being cases of war-damaged national heritage a considerable number of administrative departments at various levels of government was involved in the procedure. Though the applicable law from 1950 designated the church council to choose the stained glass artist, it required a long list of organisations to be consulted even before the assignment could be awarded. Parties concerned included the church council (kerkfabriek), with its private and collective interests managed by donors and clergymen little acquainted with artistic matters, the diocese with its specific intellectual tradition, the local city council, and most importantly the Belgian Royal Commission for Monument Care, whose early post-war vision was tainted by bitter memories of the reconstruction effort after the Great War. All these perspectives needed to be aligned in order to result in new stained-glass windows for these architectural monuments, which also had to convince the assembly of believers. Many expressed criticism at the complex procedures without guaranteed results, not least canon André Lanotte (1914-2010) of the Namur diocese, who played an influential role in numerous projects. Already in 1950, he pointed out that quality could only be attained if the public services were allowed to independently choose the architect, the sculptor and the stained-glass artist. This was not the case. A telling description of the actual, labyrinthine process is offered by the case of the collegiate church of Saint-Germanus in Tienen (Flanders), which underwent a meticulous restauration after WWII, led by renowned architect Raymond M. Lemaire (1921-1997). Here, the remaining 19th-century

Zsuzsanna Böröcz

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stained-glass, safely stored away during the war, was subsequently put back in the original windows, leaving openings needing artistic glass throughout the monumental church. Based on the study of archival records going back to 1941, I will trace the consecutive assignments for the new stained-glass, which was eventually awarded to Michel Martens (1921-2006) between 1957 and 1960. By analysing in detail the negotiation process between parties, especially concerning the appointment of the glass artist, I will try to elucidate not only the mechanics of transdisciplinary exchange and antagonism – e.g. between the State and the Church, between Tradition and Modernity –, but also the potential of bureaucracy as a space for institutions to debate cultural and societal roles, and to influence the character and quality of architectural and artistic culture.

Biography Zsuzsanna Böröcz (1970) is an art and architecture historian and obtained her Ph.D. with a study on postwar stained-glass windows (2004, KU Leuven). Since then she has had teaching assignments on art, design and architecture theory, worked on research projects, and has curated exhibitions. At the moment she is part time guest professor at the Faculty of Architecture of the KU Leuven and as a researcher affiliated to both the KU Leuven Department of Architecture A2I research group Architecture Interiority Inhabitation and the University of Antwerp Faculty of Design Sciences Henry van de Velde Research Group. She is also Vice-President of Docomomo Belgium and founding member and Co-Chair of the ISC-Interior Design of Docomomo International. Her research topics are 19th- and 20th-century interior issues in the context of monument care, craftsmanship and design. [email protected]

Bureaucracy in the Making—Unpacking Architectural Production from the InsideIn the design and development of major public infrastructure projects through public-private partnerships (PPP), tens-of-thousands of documents, drawings, and other production outputs are generated as professionals representing an array of specialties respond to the challenges and parameters of the project in pursuit of a design. Contained within these artefacts—mechanisms of discovery—is a tangible and traceable lineage of the inputs and manipulations of architects as they participate in the ongoing transdisciplinary exchange of knowledge, both within the architectural practice and across the intricate multi-disciplined team structure. The very nature of PPP procurement strategy necessitates the comingling of development and design expertise from the inception of the project, creating an internal project bureaucracy manifest in the production of documents generated in pursuit of winning the contract. The exchange of knowledge between architectural practitioners tasked with the crafting of the design, the production of drawings in support of the submission, and the authoring of written narratives to accompany the tender response, all take place within the broader context of knowledge exchange between architects, engineers, contractors, and the end user. All shape architectural thought and final outputs, which in turn shape the design of the realised project, with co-produced outputs central to the process. As part of a PhD exploring the role of design and designer in the development of a major transport project in Sydney, the author is embedded in architectural practice as a participant-observer, negotiating the day-to-day bureaucratic processes which shape the

Michael Kahn

design responses. An ethnographical approach to examining architectural practice from within, leveraging the work of Albena Yaneva (The Making of a Building, 2009) in the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, will form the core of the research. Analysis of the process and product of writing narratives for the project’s various Design Reports—documents of bureaucracy which form a sort of design synopsis/manual—will be used as a tool to understand the interplay of design ambitions and project pragmatics as conceived and resolved by a team comprising a cross-section of industries. This methodological paper will draw upon the ongoing PhD research to establish a framework for how to examine bureaucracy in architectural practice in the context of an active project. In particular, it will look at how architects navigate the varied relationships within a PPP (architect-contractor/client; architect-consultant/fellow sub-contractor; architect-government body/end user) and how this process generates documents which influence and shape the larger project as bureaucratic frameworks. The paper will also illuminate the processes of bureaucracy generation in the design and documentation for an active project, recognising the long-term potential for the crafted elements to themselves become a record for future exploration and understanding of the realised project. Through interrogation of the process to craft the response to the government-led process, the paper will reflect on issues such as representation, workflow, and project organisation to explore their impact on the deliverables produced and evaluate methods for interrogating bureaucracy through the framework of the active project.

Biography Michael Kahn is a PhD candidate at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) as part of the school’s Industry Doctorate Program. Employed by Cox Architecture in Sydney, his research and work in practice focuses on transport planning and architectural design, with an emphasis on the role of design and designer in shaping urban transport infrastructure. A licensed architect in the USA, Michael received his undergraduate degrees and Master of Architecture from Tulane University in New Orleans in 2013, before working in architectural practice in Atlanta until relocating to Sydney in 2018. While in Atlanta, he also worked in architectural journalism, authoring more than 2,000 articles for four publications and serving as a regular contributor on National Public Radio. He has been recognised by the American Institute of Architects numerous times, receiving a research fellowship to study transport nodes in 2011 and as Georgia’s Young Professional of the year in 2018.

Dramatising Bureaucracy in Architectural Production: Using an Architectural Graphic Novel to Examine the Competing Ideologies of Multiple Actors in the Contemporary Construction IndustryThe architectural profession is not autonomous. It is widely influenced by agencies outside its control as well as the intertwined interests of the multiple actors of the building industry with whom it cooperates. Moreover, with the growing technical and technological specialisation in contemporary building production, decisions typically paired to the specialist knowledge of the architect have become progressively implicated by the values and agendas of these collaborating actors in a way that may not always agree with certain priorities of architectural discourse. This has created a complex intersection of values between the multiple actors of the construction industry, which often manifests

Yasser Megahed

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as a semicollaborative/confrontational atmosphere between specific professional groups. A clear example of these entangled relationships can be found in the records of projects’ construction progress and valueengineering meetings, where disparate views of key actors in the industry manifest, interact and clash. Surprisingly very little has been written about these meetings, despite being a fertile area where most of the encounters between architects and other trades in the building construction process materialise. This paper therefore aims to analyse – through an auto-ethnographical reflective practice exercise – examples of the bureaucratic exchanges found during the progress and value engineering meetings held in an architectural renovation project in the United Kingdom; in which the author was the appointed concept and executive architect. Using methods of storytelling, design fiction and cartoon, the author has produced an architecturally-themed graphic novel to reflect upon his experience with the different trades and stakeholders of the project, including: engineering consultants, construction contractors, quantity surveyors, a facility management service acting as the client liaison and a multinational Construction Design Management (CDM) coordinator. The novel examines issues of post-design technical conflicts, maintenance and warranty discussions, engagements with building product manufacturers, and exchanges with building control and building conservation officers, which occurred during the project. The paper will present sections of this novel showing a dramatised version of the official meeting minutes, correspondences and various architectural and extra-architectural discussions occurred during the project. Through these quasi-realistic stories, the paper will attempt to present the ideological values of the different actors of the construction industry and understand their varied disciplinary positions to professional situations in the building production process. In summary, the key aim of this paper is to raise critical questions about mundane routines in the architectural profession that practitioners may take for granted, reflecting upon the largely tacit assumptions which inform these routines. The paper aspires to go beyond the immediate view of bureaucracy as a source of hindrance, imposition and control in order to extract wider lessons for the architectural profession that can inform its future collaboration with its siblings in the construction industry. The paper will conclude with a reflection on the graphic narrative of the architectural novel as an emerging promising tool for practice-based research in architecture that can enable the examination of opposing ideologies and can critically visualise specific ideas related to bureaucracy and architectural production that may otherwise go undiscussed and underexplored.

Biography Yasser Megahed is Lecturer at Leicester School of Architecture, UK. He is a registered architect and researcher with fifteen years of experience in the profession and academia in the UK and the Middle East. Yasser holds a PhD by Design degree from the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University, as well as MSc and BA degrees in Architecture. His by-design research culminated in the architectural graphic novel: Practiceopolis, Journeys in the Architectural Profession forthcoming 2020 by Routledge. In practice, Yasser worked as an associate of the Design Office—a design research practice operating out of the School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape, Newcastle University. Previously, he worked as an Assistant Lecturer at the department of Architecture, Cairo University and as a Senior Architect and design team leader at AUG: Architecture and Urbanism Group – Cairo.

Laurens Bulckaen

Poster Presentations (permanent display)

Postal Offices under the Ministry of the PTT at the End of the 19th Century: Case Study on Louis Cloquet and Stephan Mortier on the Ghent “Hôtel des Postes”

Laurens Bulckaen (°1993) is a PhD. candidate at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), BATir department. He graduated from the Bruface (VUB/ULB) master program in 2017 as architect-engineer. He worked in the architectural office of POLO-Architects before he started his research in 2018. His study focuses on the collaboration of architect, engineer and contractor in Belgium between 1870-2010 with as title: Collaboration and exchange between architects, engineers and contractors in building in Belgium (1870-2015): lessons from the past and emerging collaborative approaches. This research is supervised by professor Rika Devos.

Bram De MaeyerBuilding a Bureaucratic Environment Abroad: The Case of the Belgian Purpose-built Chancery in Washington D.C. (1945-1957)

Bram De Maeyer (°1994) is a PhD student at the Faculty of Architecture, KU Leuven. His PhD project Designing Embassies for Middle Powers: The Architecture of Belgian Diplomacy in a Globalizing World centres on post-war Belgian embassy architecture and is supervised by Professor Fredie Floré and Professor Anne-Françoise Morel. In 2017 he graduated from the University of Antwerp with a Masters degree in History. His main interests lie in political representation and diplomatic history.

Nico DeswaefThe Case of Bank Lambert: A Transatlantic Dialogue between Belgian and American Office Building Traditions in Post-war Brussels

Nico Deswaef obtained his Masters degree in Heritage Studies from the University of Antwerp in 2017. During this study, he completed an internship at the Flemish Commission for UNESCO. Throughout his years of study he took a strong interest in the heritage of the ‘common man’. This is reflected in his Masters thesis, entitled The legacy of the ‘model gantois’, centralizing heritage of the working class in the first half of the 20th century. Now he has shifted his focus from blue-collar workers to white-collar workers at the knowledge factories in the second half of the 20th century. He is currently working as a PhD candidate at the KU Leuven Department of Architecture on a project entitled Office interiors in Post-War Belgium: genealogy of a modern sociotope. This project is supervised by prof. Fredie Floré and prof. Dominique Bauer.

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Martin DumontThe Unbureaucratic Bureaucrat: Victor Bure and the nascent Administration of Urban Planning (1945-1958)

Martin Dumont is an architect graduated from the Faculty of Architecture La Cambre-Horta and the Department of Architecture ETH Zurich. He worked at Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen. Currently he is assistant and PhD fellow at the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning in Ghent. His research focuses on the intersections and crossovers between various planning cultures in postwar Belgium. It seeks to trace back the rich diversity of planning practices that co-existed in the aftermath of WWII and identify their roots in different fields of knowledge such as geography, sociology, architecture and economic science.

Laurence HeindryckxIterative strategies of commercial housing development and government policy: The diverse roles of Jean-Florian Collin (Etrimo)

Laurence Heindryckx graduated as engineer-architect in 2016 at Ghent University. She worked as an urban designed at Labo S (Research Laboratory for Urbanism, Ghent University), collaborating to the Flood risk Management Plan of the Dender region. In 2018, she participated as an academic researcher on the ADEB project ‘Collaborations and exchanges in building in Belgium (1870-2015)’ at the BATir department of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, researching the complementary and overlapping professional roles awarded to or taken up by architects and building engineers during the interwar period in Belgium.Her resent work centres on twentieth century housing development in the metropolitan nexus in the context of a doctoral project at the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning of Ghent University. Focussing on the production of Francois Amelinckx (Amelinckx n.v.) and Jean Florian Collin (Etrimo), the project seeks to substantiate and test the hypothesis that the metropolitan ambitions of these real estate pioneers have been restricted in the post-war period and that this had lasting consequences for the way in which urban project development developed in Belgium.

Zhengfeng WangThe Central Market in Hong Kong: Bureaucracy and the Speculative Facility

Zhengfeng Wang is a PhD candidate in Art history in University College Dublin and a resident scholar in UCD Humanities Institute. Funded by the China Scholarship Council, her research project is titled ‘A Historical Style of the Modern Markets in Chinese Cities and the Creation of a Public Realm’. Before going to Ireland, Zhengfeng received her Master’s degree in Architecture from Tongji in Shanghai and from ETSAB in Barcelona. Her article ‘Barcelona Public Markets in the Process of Urbanisation’ has been published by the Chinese academic journal The Architect. In 2019, her papers were presented at the eighth annual conference of the All Ireland Architecture Research Group and at the Modernist Studies Ireland Inaugural Conference.

Ivana Mihaela ŽimbrekThe First Yugoslav Department Store in Zagreb: Planning and Building Department Stores under Yugoslav Self-Management, late 1950s-early 1960s

Ivana Mihaela Žimbrek (1992) is a PhD candidate in History at Central European University in Budapest/Vienna. She holds a BA and MA in Art History and Comparative Literature from the University of Zagreb, and an MA in Comparative History from CEU. Currently, she is working on her dissertation project titled “Links in the Chain: Department Stores, Modernization of Retail and the Transformation of the Urban Environment in Socialist Yugoslavia, 1950s-1980s”, which broadly deals with the urban history of modern retail under state-socialism. Her other research interests include urban and architecture history, history of material culture and labor, and transnational history of state-socialism in East Central Europe.

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Practical informationVenueSITE MUNTPUNTadress: rue de l’Ecuyer / Schildknaapstraat 26, 1000 BrusselsAfter 10:00 AM: Monnaie / Munt 6, 1000 Brussels

Conference DinnerRESTAURANT ‘LES FILLES’adress: Rue Vieux Marché aux Grains / Oude Graanmarkt 46, 1000 Brussels

Organizing CommitteeProf. Fredie Floré, KU Leuven Prof. Ricardo Costa Agarez, Universidade de Évora / CIDEHUSProf. Rika Devos, ULBNico Deswaef, PhD Candidate, KU Leuven Laurens Bulckaen, PhD Candidate, ULB

Scientific CommitteeProf. Ricardo Costa Agarez, Universidade de Évora / CIDEHUSProf. Marnix Beyen, UAntwerpenProf. Rika Devos, ULBProf. Fredie Floré, KU LeuvenProf. Rajesh Heynickx, KU LeuvenProf. Johan Lagae, UGent

[email protected]

PartnersFWO Research Foundation FlandersTexts ≈ Buildings: Dissecting Transpositions in Architectural Knowledge (1880-1980) KU Leuven Faculty of ArchitectureUniversité Libre de BruxellesUniversidade de Évora / CIDEHUS

The international conference ‘Architecture and Bureaucracy: Enangled Sites of Know-ledge Production and Exchange’ is hosted by the FWO-funded Scientific Research Network ‘Texts ≈ Buildings: Dissecting Transpositions in Architectural Knowledge (1880-1980)’

More infowww.architectureandbureaucracy.be

Documents

Architecture & Bureaucracy€¦ · Session chair: Hilde Heynen, KU Leuven Helena Mattsson, KTH School of Architecture ‘State Phobia and the Reregulation of Architectural Bureaucracy