Boris Hamzeian | The Architectural Association (original) (raw)

Boris Hamzeian

Boris Hamzeian (PhD École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne–EPFL, 2021) is an architect and post- doctoral fellow in History of Architecture. His re- search focuses on post-war avant-garde architecture and, more particularly, on the so-called “tecnomorphic architecture,” namely the experiments transfer- ring in architecture the fabrication process, methods and aesthetics of industry and technology.
He published articles on the history of the Centre na- tional d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou in Paris (subject of his PhD thesis, 2021) and UFO group, and works by OMA and Aldo Rossi.
He is one of the curators of the exhibition Unidentified Flying Object (UFO), performer l’architecture held at the Frac Centre-Val de Loire.
Hamzeian is pursuing his research on the architectural and construction history of the Centre Pompidou, focusing on its modification and restoration, as deputy researcher at the architecture service (MNAM-CCI) at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. He is pursuing the study of tecnomorphic architecture with research into the origins of Archigram group, as visiting scholar
of Architectural Association School of London and Princeton University School of Architecture.
His research has been funded by the Federal Com- mission for Scholarships for Foreign Students (CFBE, 2015-2018), the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF, 2018, 2022), and the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture (Italy) as part of the Italian Council program (IX edition, 2020).
His PhD thesis was shortlisted for the EPFL Doctorate Award 2022 and the Doctoral Program Thesis Distinction 2022, and won two thesis prizes granted by Institut Georges Pompidou and Fondazione Ing. Lino Gentilini (in colllaboration with Università di Trento).
He is member of the scientific committee of Archphoto 2.0 magazine, member of the Construction History Society and co-founder of False Mirror Office.

He is author of two monographs published by Actar in 2022
The Live Centre of Information. From Pompidou to Beaubourg. 1968-1971
Unidentified Flying Object for Contemporary Architecture. UFO’s Experiments Between Political Activism and Artistic Avant-Garde, 2022 (with Beatrice Lampariello and Andrea Anselmo, eds.)
Supervisors: Professor Roberto Gargiani, EPFL, CH , Professor Giovanni Galli, UNIGE, IT (external Advisor FCS Scholarship), Professor Dominique Rouillard (External Advisor FNS Doc.Mobility), and Olivier Cinqualbre (Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou)
Phone: +33 0620381139
Address: 20 Rue des Fossés Saint Bernard
5 Arr.
75005 Paris
FRANCE

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Papers by Boris Hamzeian

The search for ways of living adapted to the changes of society is gaining in importance in the c... more The search for ways of living adapted to the changes of society is gaining in importance in the context of the current Coronavirus pandemic. The domestic confinement, in fact, is revealing as never before the inadequacy of our homes to contemporary life. The juxtaposition and, in some cases, the hybridization of domestic activities with those traditionally carried out elsewhere, puts in crisis the concepts of type, room, furnishing and dimensional standard, no longer capable to respond to the new degrees of flexibility and privacy required in our homes. The advent of the individual and mobile digital device puts in crisis the hearth of the house and, therefore, leads to the dissolution of a space of exchange and conviviality in the domestic environment. In order to react to a dramatic condition that is affecting especially the inhabitants of the metropolitan micro-apartments, we must conceive an environment in which intimate spaces for private life, flexible spaces for collective li...

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Coronavirus. Covid-19. Pandemic. A urgent topic now both in the public media all around the world... more Coronavirus. Covid-19. Pandemic. A urgent topic now both in the public media all around the world and in our daily conversations. Infected or not, it still contaminated our lives. It changed what we believed as „normal”. It divided our existence into „Before” and „Now”. How does it affect the domestic space we live in? And what may be the new „Future”? On these issues I talk to architects from False Mirror Office, a research and design office from Genoa that re-questions, re-signifies and mis-represents Architecture

In the summer of 1971, Ove Arup & Partners and Piano+Rogers Architects presented to the French go... more In the summer of 1971, Ove Arup & Partners and Piano+Rogers Architects presented to the French government what they called a "3-dimensional wall" as part of their project bid for the Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou in Paris. This would resolve structural and expressive questions and unite three elements in a spatial sequence. The architects imagined the 3-dimensional wall as a 3D sequence of screens that would create original and interactive effects. The engineers saw it as a structure that, described as "brut," aspired to become a manifesto for a new metal structure in cast steel. Through recourse to a systematic analysis of published and unpublished sources and of interviews with the architects, engineers and administrators involved in the project, this paper reconstructs the evolution of the Centre Pompidou's 3-dimensional wall from its initial conception to the gradual loss of its original layered structure.

Villa Bay, detta anche Casa a Borgo Ticino, è un progetto per villa unifamiliare commissionato da... more Villa Bay, detta anche Casa a Borgo Ticino, è un progetto per villa unifamiliare commissionato da Vanda e Aldo Bay allo studio Aldo Rossi di Via Maddalena nel 1973. Aldo Rossi e Gianni Braghieri assistiti da Sergio Fornasetti e Arduino Cantafora si dedicano al progetto tra il 1973 e il 1974 sviluppando almeno tre versioni successive . Nonostante il progetto non venga portato a termine, Villa Bay rappresenta un passaggio fondamentale all’interno della poetica rossiana. Con essa Rossi porta a maturazione la poetica del “razionalismo esaltato” per poi decretarne il suo stesso superamento, anticipando la svolta contenuta nel successivo manifesto della Città Analoga. Questo intervento ha l'obiettivo di rintracciare le fasi significative della concezione e della costruzione di questo progetto e di valutarne il ruolo cruciale all'interno della maturazione della poetica rossiana

guest lecture held at Università di Bologna-Alma Mater Studiorum, IT Department of Visual Arts Ma... more guest lecture held at Università di Bologna-Alma Mater Studiorum, IT Department of Visual Arts Master Class: SPAZI DELL'ARTE CONTEMPORANEA Professor Anna Rossellini

course ex-cathedra held at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale De Lausanne EPFL, CH Laboratory of Th... more course ex-cathedra held at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale De Lausanne EPFL, CH Laboratory of Theory and History of Architecture LTH3 Master Class: Histoire du Beton

Building Knowledge, Constructing Histories, 2018

The paper is devoted to a decisive chapter of the construction history of the twentieth century: ... more The paper is devoted to a decisive chapter of the construction history of the twentieth century: one of the most important masterpieces of the contemporary steelworks, the Centre Beaubourg, now the Centre National d’art et de culture Georges-Pompidou. Thanks to the availability of previously unpublished documen- tary records and to interviews with some of the protagonists of the design and construction of this building, it is finally possible to retrace the origins and evolution of the most significant detail of the structure of the Centre Beaubourg: the cast steel piece that later came to be known as the “gerberette

Building Knowledge, Constructing Histories, 2018

The Live Centre of Information. From Pompidou to Beaubourg. 1968-1971, 2022

When, on July 19, 1971, Jean Prouvé and Robert Bordaz unveiled the competition-winning design for... more When, on July 19, 1971, Jean Prouvé and Robert Bordaz unveiled the competition-winning design for the Centre Beaubourg in Paris, now known as the Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, press and public reaction was harsh. The project architects, Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, and Gianfranco Franchini, were considered “unknowns”; its initiators, the engineers of the firm Ove Arup & Partners, were simply forgotten; the original idea of a “Live Centre of Information,” with its sequences of flexible platforms suspended over an open-air plaza for the crowd, was misrepresented and reduced to the image of a “metallic dam” dropped in the heart of Paris; the jury, which featured figures of the caliber of Prouvé, Oscar Niemeyer, and Willem Sandberg, was believed to have been dominated by the charismatic Philip Johnson; the competition’s promoter, President Georges Pompidou of France, was believed to be unaware of the jury’s selection and forced unwillingly to accept a winner he didn’t support.
Fifty years after those events, through the tool of the chronicle and recourse to all available documentary sources and dozens of testimonies, it is time to debunk these myths and trace the genealogy of this famous and still controversial work: from President Pompidou’s original idea of a monument to reinvigorate French architecture in the international debate to the complex origins of a project in which the aspirations and avant-garde impulses of architects and engineers delicately coexisted, to the reconstruction of the complex political plots and ideological visions that lurked behind the jury’s deliberations.

The book features a preface by Laurent Le Bon, president of the Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, an introduction by Roberto Gargiani, Professor Emeritus at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne-EPFL, and a previously unpublished interview by Boris Hamzeian with Renzo Piano

Genoa Five, Divisare Books, , 2017

The architectural memoir The Berlin Wall as Architecture (1970 and the project Exodus or the volu... more The architectural memoir The Berlin Wall as Architecture (1970 and the project Exodus or the voluntary prisoners of Architecture (1972-1973) can be considered fundamental milestones in Koolhaas’ debut into the architectural panorama. From that moment on these proposals became subject to a large series of studies and monographic researches. Nonetheless, the profound ambiguity hidden behind these projects as well as an interesting degree of heterogeneity carried out by the critics lead us to conclude that Koolhaas’ first steps into architecture still challenge the reader. Looking at Exodus as a synthetic momentum in light of the previous experiences within and without the architectural panorama of its author, the reader finds himself in front of a polyhedral project. Any attempt of reaching a conclusion is immediately discouraged by the voluntary agglutination of elements unwilling to find an easy conciliation.
Utopia or Dystopia? An unpredictable deja vu of the Ideal City or a tremendous premonition of a future to exorcise? An architectural project willing to find its Architect or a film script in search of a director?
In front of the numerous attempts to disclose Exodus’ gist, this contribution will refrain from judging the combination of opposing components as symptoms of a profound and irresolvable contradiction.
Along with the support of a few intuitions given by the architectural critics during the 70s and the 80s, this analysis will try to interpret the unexpected clash of opposing polarities as the very force of Exodus. In the light of his admiration for the Surrealist analytical techniques and the consequent recourse to PCM (Paranoid Critical Method) in Architecture, Koolhaas escapes the principle of non-contradiction in favour of a semantic device that finds in interpretative short-circuits the power to challenge contemporary architecture.
Having Interpreted Exodus as a machine capable of sustaining itself through a state of permanent conflict of oppositional forces, this contribution tries to find a confirmation of such hypothesis taking advantage of one of this dialectic clash: the paradigm of the Cold War.
The majority of critics looks at the relationship between Exodus and the physical embodiment of the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall, as an indisputable and well known reality. An interpretation like this, nonetheless, risks to leave out a wider panorama of crucial episodes that go from Koolhaas’ acknowledgement of the Western urban condition to the fundamental reflections developed during his travel to the heart of the Communist block: Moscow. This contribution analyses Exodus with three focus: the West, the East and the Wall. Along with each of these chapters it will be possible to find a long series of evidence able to challenging Exodus’ interpretation of a linear consequence of Koolhaas’ encounter with the Berlin Wall. The author’s reasoning toward the Western block and its post-war urban and social condition on one side and the theoretical discovery of Moscow and the Stalinist Architecture on the other reveal themselves as two precedents as important as Berlin in Exodus genealogy.
Rather than an archetypical source, Koolhaas encounter with Berlin becomes the unstable synthesis, a some sort of conclusive momentum of a veritable dialectics that sees the Western society and the Eastern Block as its two premises.
Such revelation not only confirms the secret gist of Exodus as a potent machine born on the constant conflict of oppositional force. It rather disclosed the Cold War as the paradigmatic source of Exodus, a veritable semantic machine.

Welcome to the post analog condition. Circolo del Design CDC, 2020

Welcome to the post analog condition. - i protagonisti del mondo del design rintracciano nel pass... more Welcome to the post analog condition. - i protagonisti del mondo del design rintracciano nel passato un progetto attraverso cui guardare il presente. False Mirror Office presenta il Conversation Pit

This lecture is dedicated to the historical reconstruction of the international competition for t... more This lecture is dedicated to the historical reconstruction of the international competition for the realisation of the Centre Beaubourg of Paris (now Centre d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou), held in the Grand Palais of Paris between June and July 1971.

The first part of the contribution is dedicated to the genesis and organisation of the competition, from the first idea conceived by the former president of France, Georges Pompidou, to its elaboration through the studies of Sebastian Loste, up to the constitution of the jury and the redaction of the official program of the competition.

The second part is dedicated to the genesis and development of the competition proposal number 493, resulting from the collaboration of Structures 3 division of the engineering firm Ove Arup & Partners, the architectural firm Piano+ Rogers and the Italian architect Gianfranco Franchini.

The third and the last part aims to reconstruct all the major phases of the selection process held at the Grand Palais of Paris between the end of June and the 15th of July 1971, from the reception of the 681 competition proposals up to the final selection of project 493 as the winning project.

The contribution resorts to a large number of previously unpublished documentary records as well as interviews with numerous protagonists of the Beaubourg adventure including Richard Rogers, Su Rogers, John Young, Mike Davies, Lennart Grut, Shunji Ishida, Tony Dugdale, Andrew Holmes, and John Morrison.

guest lecture held at Università di Bologna-Alma Mater Studiorum, IT Department of Visual Arts Ma... more guest lecture
held at Università di Bologna-Alma Mater Studiorum, IT
Department of Visual Arts
Master Class: SPAZI DELL'ARTE CONTEMPORANEA
Professor Anna Rossellini

course ex-cathedra held at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale De Lausanne EPFL, CH Laboratory of Th... more course ex-cathedra held at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale De Lausanne EPFL, CH
Laboratory of Theory and History of Architecture LTH3
Master Class: Histoire du Beton

“If you know one of their cities you know them all, for they’re exactly alike, except where geogr... more “If you know one of their cities you know them all, for they’re exactly alike, except where geography itself makes a difference. So I will describe one of them, and no matter which.”

Thomas Moore, Utopia, 1516

The USS conference 2016 is a precious occasion to introduce to the academic and scientific community the first result of a research that investigates the architectural and urban spatialisation of the celebre Utopias of the XVI and XVI century.
While following passionately the accounts of the first travellers and famous discoverers of utopian islands and cities, we find ourselves in the middle of peculiar and rich descriptions of perfect societies ruled by savior monarchs and good laws.
But when it comes to the urban connotation, a reiteration of circles, squares and platonic forms spreads constantly, from Amaurote to Selenopoli. We can do nothing but reflect on the unique connotations of such an intellectual deja-vu.
Taking advantage of the interpretation given by Branislaw Baczko in his “lumieres de l’Utopie”, we refer to what the authors label as the profound boredom of utopian cities in order to disclose the intimate nature of the isomorphic character of urban design. To do so, we will use the architectural drawing as a powerful tool in order to build up a demonstration per absurdum.
Such demonstration will show that, despite hundreds and hundreds of cases, all the plans that we could possibly redraw through the description of the authors will lead us to nothing but the umpteenth variation of the same urban scheme.
Far from becoming a project addressed to find a place in this world, the architectural character of Utopia discloses itself as a significant tool of illustration of the rational principle that has been constantly nourishing utopian thought.

At the 40th anniversary of its inauguration, the Pompidou Centre represents by no doubts one of t... more At the 40th anniversary of its inauguration, the Pompidou Centre represents by no doubts one of the most relevant achievements within the history of construction of the past century. Its realisation is the result of a unique joint venture between a young group of architects led by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers and the engineering team Structure 3 of Ove Arup composed, among the others, by Peter Rice, Edmund Happold and Lennart Grut. One of the key parts of the whole structure is the joint supporting the 48-meter span floor, realized in the form of the gerberette and fabricated in the special technique of steel cast.

The first solution employed to solve the joint consisted of a friction collar supporting moving floors made of lattice girders, a powerful translation of the principle of flexibility the competition entry was rooted in. After renouncing to further develop the moving floor solution, architects and engineers undertook new studies in order to solve the connection between floors and the vertical structures. The lattice girders solution left the place to a composite Vierendeel truss joint to the vertical structure by the means of a secondary horizontal beam anchored to the internal and external poles of the façade. The complexity of the solution and the new restrictions imposed by the project’s budget led to another setback and further research were needed. The numerous solutions attempted in 1972 included the reduction of the Vierendeel truss, the transformation of the external poles into pre-tensed cables, the abandonment of the Vierendeel and the adoption of a cantilevered beam anchored to the vertical poles. Once identified as the definitive structural breakthrough, this cantilevered beam was submitted to a process of refinement and improvement that turned a first steel composite element into the monolithic sculptural piece that nowadays so distinctively characterizes the structure of the Centre Pompidou: the gerberette.

In the last decades the value of this breakthrough seems to have overshadowed the complex process laying behind it. The aim of this contribution is both to reposition the gerberette as an arrival point of a complex evolutionary path and therefore to deepen each of the relevant stages which preceded and led to the gerberette’s design and fabrication. To achieve these objectives this contribution will resort to unpublished material preserved in public archives and private collections and will profit of a series of interviews with the protagonists of Beaubourg’s design and construction.