THE FUTURE OF STRUCTURALISM
The interventions in existing buildings present the arduous task of combining different realities in a single image, the opportunity to bring new life to these structures preserving the connection to their past. But, how to position oneself in front of the global question of these interventions? The present graduation project is the expansion of the ideas previously developed by the author in the theoretical thesis Constant Change, in which, in order to understand the contemporary city and use that knowledge in the interventions on the architectural heritage, two important urban treaties of the second half of the 20th century were confronted as representatives of the cities of Economy and Culture: Collage City (Colin Rowe, 1978) and L'Architettura della Città (Aldo Rossi, 1966). There, the transformational process of an architectural piece was particularly valued, as well as the possibility of its adaptability and personalization through a “weak architecture” (Solà-Morales, 1987)2. A Growing Centraal is a project guided by this theory and driven by an obsession with the social character of heritage architecture and how it relates to change. In an everchanging economy and culture, where buildings will mutate over time, why try to impose a fixed solution on a new stage of intervention? Some structuralist qualities of the Dutch Centraal Beheer building in Apeldoorn, by Herman Hertzberger, gave clues on how to intervene. Adaptability, personalization and change became the key to facing a new stage in its history.
The work focused on the Dutch structuralist movement of the 1960s, in which Team X architects criticized the narrowness of the functional principle ‘form follows function’. In historic cities they found solutions for a new principle of form: an interpretable architecture, adaptable and expandable3. The objective was to determine relevant values of the movement in one of its icons, the Centraal Beheer complex, and use them to propose a solution to the problems that have led the building to its current state of abandonment. The analysis of some icons of the movement was key to deepen the values of structuralism and perceive the potential of their theories, by authors like Aldo Van Eyck, Piet Blom, John Habraken and Herman Hertzberger. It was the participation and personalization of the user that gave meaning to the original structure of Centraal Beheer, and only after a while was it possible to detect it. Thus, the passage of time emerged from these analyses as one of the essential ingredients in the generation of their particular architectural notion. In this project, the ideas of structuralism were used to generate a feasible development strategy over time. Not only for the design of a finished building, but also for the planning of one that was in constant growth. Understanding architecture as a process open to the service of economy and culture allowed experimenting with flexible design solutions, where the essential objective was to welcome different ways of doing.
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