Lara Schrijver | University of Antwerp (original) (raw)

Books by Lara Schrijver

The work of Oswald Mathias Ungers and Rem Koolhaas is examined as intellectual legacy of the 1970... more The work of Oswald Mathias Ungers and Rem Koolhaas is examined as intellectual legacy of the 1970s for architecture today. Particularly in the United States, this period focused on the autonomy of architecture as a correction to the social orientation of the 1960s. Yet, these two architects pioneered a more situated autonomy, initiating an intellectual discourse on architecture that was inherently design-based. Their work provides room for interpreting social conditions and disciplinary formal developments, thus constructing a `plausible' relationship between the two that allows the life within to flourish and adapt. In doing so, they provide a foundation for recalibrating architecture today.

In architecture, tacit knowledge plays a substantial role in both the design process and its rece... more In architecture, tacit knowledge plays a substantial role in both the design process and its reception. The essays in this book explore the tacit dimension of architecture in its aesthetic, material, cultural, design-based, and reflexive understanding of what we build. Tacit knowledge, described in 1966 by Michael Polanyi as what we ‘can know but cannot tell’, often denotes knowledge that escapes quantifiable dimensions of research. Much of architecture’s knowledge resides beneath the surface, in nonverbal instruments such as drawings and models that articulate the spatial imagination of the design process.

Awareness of the tacit dimension helps to understand the many facets of the spaces we inhabit, from the ideas of the architect to the more hidden assumptions of our cultures. Beginning in the studio, where students are guided into becoming architects, the book follows a path through the tacit knowledge present in materials, conceptual structures, and the design process, revealing how the tacit dimension leads to craftsmanship and the situated knowledge of architecture-in-the-world.

Architecture in the Netherlands 2018-19, 2019

For over 30 years Architecture in the Netherlands has provided an indispensable overview of Dutch... more For over 30 years Architecture in the Netherlands has provided an indispensable overview of Dutch architecture for everyone with a professional or more general interest in the subject.

The Yearbook is the international showcase for Dutch architecture. The three editors select special projects that have been completed in the preceding year and describe the most important developments that influence Dutch architecture.

Architecture in the Netherlands 2017-18, 2018

Architecture in the Netherlands 2016-17, 2017

The influence and position of the ‘Generation 74’ in Flemish and international architecture Five ... more The influence and position of the ‘Generation 74’ in Flemish and international architecture
Five well-known architects who studied together in Ghent, Marie-José Van Hee, Christian Kieckens, Marc Dubois, Paul Robbrecht and Hilde Daem, can be considered as leading protagonists of their generation. From their education at Sint-Lucas Institute and the Academy of Fine Arts to the present day, their professional careers and legacy have been of great importance to the development of Flemish architecture. In their early works and writings, they established a distinct architectural language, rooted in historical knowledge and with a reflection to art and craftsmanship. Architecture was singled out as a spatial phenomenon with an autonomous logic grounded in inhabitation and experience. This generation represents a significant turn towards architectural autonomy in Flanders which resonated with similar international developments in the late 1970s. Moreover they played a decisive role in the emancipation and professionalization of the architectural culture in Flanders.

Papers by Lara Schrijver

Since the late twentieth century, urban projects have increased significantly in size, reintroduc... more Since the late twentieth century, urban projects have increased significantly in size, reintroducing some mid-century ideas on megastructures and habitat. In this light, a return to some of the founding ideas of the 1960s may prove illuminating. In particular, the notion of Grossform, put forward by Oswald Mathias Ungers in his 1966 essay ‘Grossformen im Wohnungsbau’, seems remarkably topical. Although Grossform, or ‘megaform’, is literally about ‘large form’, this definition of ‘large’ is based on the strength of its form more than on scale. ‘Only when a new quality arises beyond the mere sum of individual parts, and a higher level is achieved, does a Grossform arise. The primary characteristic is not numerical size. A small house can just as well be a Grossform as a housing block, a city district, or an entire city.’ In retrospect, it appears to prefigure the importance of architectural form in urban planning and the rise of many contemporary urban enclaves, marked by a specific f...

Archined, 2022

At its core, architecture is a hopeful gesture; it envisions the potential of a place and strives... more At its core, architecture is a hopeful gesture; it envisions the potential of a place and strives to improve the conditions of human habitation. At the same time, it aims to facilitate the life within, providing what is needed for a range of individual and collective experiences. These two perspectives-the drive to improve and the aim to facilitate-are the foundation of architecture and its self-conception. As such, design oscillates between hubris and serviceability. Architecture thus encompasses two concurrent visions, one that maintains the world as it is, and one that foreshadows another, possible form of coexistence. Imagining possible worlds is what architecture shares with science fiction and speculative fiction. Overconfidence sets in when the architect believes that society can be changed directly through architecture. In the manifestoes of modernism, the scale tipped towards hubris, with architects taking on increasingly largescale problems, and aiming to construct new societies through their projects. As sci-fi

This issue of Footprint explores the potential role of analytic philosophy in the context of arch... more This issue of Footprint explores the potential role of analytic philosophy in the context of architecture’s typical affinity with continental philosophy over the past three decades. In the last decades of the twentieth century, philosophy became an almost necessary springboard from which to define a work of architecture. Analytic philosophy took a notable backseat to continental philosophy. With this history in mind, this issue of Footprint sought to open the discussion on what might be offered by the less familiar branches of epistemology and logic that are more prevalent and developed in the analytic tradition. The papers brought together here are situated in the context of a discipline in transformation that seeks a fundamental approach to its own tools, logic and approaches. In this realm, the approaches of logic and epistemology help to define an alternate means of criticality not subjected to personalities or the specialist knowledge of individual philosophies. Rather the vari...

Wouter Van Acker, Thomas Mical, eds. Architecture and Ugliness. Anti-Aesthetics and the Ugly in Postmodern Architecture , 2020

Building on the inclusive approach of postmodernism, which expanded aesthetic conventions in arch... more Building on the inclusive approach of postmodernism, which expanded aesthetic conventions in architecture with notions such as ‘kitsch’, ‘ordinary’ and ‘as found’, this chapter examines the role of ugliness in architecture. Ugliness is more than simply the counterpart to the beautiful; it often fulfills a need for aesthetic renewal both within singular practices and in the culture of architecture as a whole. The postmodern turn to the ordinary and kitsch demonstrates positive aspects of ugliness. Building on the increased attention to the ordinary, kitsch and camp, the chapter suggests that the increasing interest in ugliness today is less about testing the boundaries of aesthetic standards and more about producing a glitch in today’s aesthetic economy.

Handbook of Ethics, Values, and Technological Design, 2014

The Journal of Architecture

Ethics, Design and Planning of the Built Environment

AGORA Magazine

OMGEVINGSDENKEN AGORA 2019 -2 hebben als een negatief. In zichzelf hebben ze geen morele superior... more OMGEVINGSDENKEN AGORA 2019 -2 hebben als een negatief. In zichzelf hebben ze geen morele superioriteit (of inferioriteit), maar ze kunnen wel tot actie overgaan en staan daarmee aan het begin van de vorming van nieuwe structuren, zoals we recent hebben gezien met het succes van de gele hesjes in het afdwingen van fiscale aanpassingen. Occupy heeft een bescheiden effect gehad, #metoo een groter. De Arabische lente van 2009 was zichtbaar in zowel de stadsruimte als de digitale ruimte. Steeds vaker strekt het effect van digitale media ver voorbij de stadsruimte. Kunnen de inzichten van Park ook helpen in het begrijpen van digitale menigten? Dat heeft te maken met wat Edward Shils ooit identificeerde als de centrale vraag van Park: de opname van het individu in het collectieve zelf-bewustzijn. De massa en het publiek zijn eigen entiteiten die een 'algemene wil' belichamen. Hoewel de publieke ruimte en het rationele discours nog altijd van groot belang zijn voor een weloverwogen inrichting van beleid en richtlijnen, is deze fundamentele studie van de 'algemene wil' toch relevant naarmate we steeds vaker geconfronteerd worden met verschillende groepen, belangenverenigingen, bewegingen of tijdelijke flash mobs. De analytische kaders van Park zijn vooral gericht op de interactie tussen individuen, waardoor ze nog altijd een interessant perspectief bieden in een tijd waarin de fysieke openbare ruimte slechts een deel is van de werkelijkheid die wij ervaren.

Architecture and Culture, 2019

This article takes the Caritas building by De Vylder Vinck Taillieu (2016) as a foil to discuss t... more This article takes the Caritas building by De Vylder Vinck Taillieu (2016) as a foil to discuss tolerance from a number of perspectives, demonstrating the productive nature of the very notion of tolerance as a filter through which to understand a contemporary building with an innovative approach to professional conventions in both psychiatric care and architecture. The building, a pavilion on the campus of a psychiatric care facility in Belgium, flies in the face of architectural conventions for care facilities, yet provokes a rethinking of contemporary institutional care. Its strategic use of the gap between idea and building and of improvization in the building process provide a striking example of the potential ripple effects from a singular project that provide “wiggle room” in order to understand what architecture can do.

Harvard Design Magazine, 2016

The natural response to terrorism is to bunker down—to increase the thickness of concrete, and ex... more The natural response to terrorism is to bunker down—to increase the thickness of concrete, and expand the distance between public spaces and the fragile institutions within them. What if we responded differently to terrorism? What if we acknowledge vulnerability, encourage dialogue, and move ahead with the faith that openness and generosity will, in the long run, prevail? This article discusses the proposal for the House of One in Berlin, a project that offers an alternative view on religious structures.

Marius Grootveld and Jantje Engels, eds. Building upon Building (NAi010 Publishers, 2016), 2016

In essence, one could argue that philosophy and architecture make natural bedfellows, as they see... more In essence, one could argue that philosophy and architecture make natural bedfellows, as they seek to understand some of the most fundamental concerns of human existence: the issue of shelter
as the first architectural gesture is but a small step away from the ethical question: how do we wish to live, or what is the good life? The desire to house our institutions in purposeful, representative and significant edifices is intimately linked to issues of aesthetic judgment, and the question of how we perceive beauty (or a lack of it). At the same
time, philosophy also questions our means of questioning, our means of the very discourse of inquiry through the study of knowledge and logic. The four core branches of philosophy–metaphysics, ethics,
logic, and epistemology–have spawned count-less further specialisations, which ebb and flow in popularity. While architecture thinking has freely adopted and adapted the continental philosophies
of metaphysics and ethics, the domains of logic and epistemology have been less visible. While we acknowledge the limitations of a simplified distinction between two ‘camps’ of thinking, this issue of Footprint sought to open the discussion on what might be offered by the less familiar branches of epistemology and logic that are more prevalent and developed in the analytic tradition.

For full article, please see: http://footprint.tudelft.nl/index.php/footprint/article/view/1801/1926

The papers brought together here are situated in the context of a discipline in transformation that seeks a fundamental approach to its own tools, logic and approaches. In this realm, the approaches of logic and epistemology help to define an alternate means of criticality not subjected to personalities or the specialist knowledge of individual philosophies. Rather the various articles attempt to demonstrate that such difference of background assumptions is a common human habit and that some of the techniques of analytic philosophy may help to leap these chasms. The hope is that this is a start of a larger conversation in architecture theory that has as of yet not begun.

For full issue see:
http://footprint.tudelft.nl/

Architecture in the Netherlands 2018-19, 2019

Architecture in the Netherlands 2017-18, 2018

Architecture in the Netherlands 2016-17, 2017

Archined, 2022

Wouter Van Acker, Thomas Mical, eds. Architecture and Ugliness. Anti-Aesthetics and the Ugly in Postmodern Architecture , 2020

Handbook of Ethics, Values, and Technological Design, 2014

The Journal of Architecture

Ethics, Design and Planning of the Built Environment

AGORA Magazine

Architecture and Culture, 2019

Harvard Design Magazine, 2016

Marius Grootveld and Jantje Engels, eds. Building upon Building (NAi010 Publishers, 2016), 2016

For full article, please see: http://footprint.tudelft.nl/index.php/footprint/article/view/1801/1926

For full issue see:
http://footprint.tudelft.nl/

This micro-narrative explores transatlantic meetings of influential European and American figures... more This micro-narrative explores transatlantic meetings of influential European and American figures at Cornell University in the 1970s. It focuses on Colin Rowe, Oswald Ungers, and Rem Koolhaas, respectively authors of the widely known books Collage City (1978), The City within the City (1977), and Delirious New York (1978). The article argues that their time in the USA led them to produce a body of urban thought that may be seen as a tipping point in design, both for European cities and the USA urban landscape. The twentieth-century discourse on the city is markedly transnational and has often sought a neutral logic for configuring the built environment, yet it also bears the marks of the places in which it was conceived. The disillusionment with the universalizing and technocratic discourse of modernism was already tangible throughout the European debates on the city at the time. The Cornell period incited these three figures to abandon a societally engaged approach to the city in architecture in order to develop a body of work that reclaimed architecture and urban space as domains of cultural meaning. From a background of the social agendas of Europe and confronted with the unselfconscious American environment, Rowe, Ungers, and Koolhaas developed a specifically architectural perspective on planning and urban ideas.

The Journal of Architecture, Feb 2014

The Museum park area in Rotterdam comprises three large institutions: The Boijmans van Beuningen ... more The Museum park area in Rotterdam comprises three large institutions: The Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, the Kunsthal and the Netherlands Architecture Institute. Situated along the extension of the Witte de Withstraat with its local galleries, it is by now a constructed historical document of architectural and urban ideas, particularly of the late twentieth century. The Boijmans van Beuningen Museum alone spans the entire twentieth century, from its original construction in 1935 by Van der Steur through its respective extensions and additions (Bodon, extension 1971; Henket, pavilion 1990; Robbrecht and Daem, extension 2003). The Kunsthal, completed in 1992, has become an icon in its own right and the Netherlands Architecture Institute (completed 1993) is the result of a competition that also shows the complexity of forces that architectural practice by necessity must navigate (such as juries, urban plans, and local preferences). The area thus forms a showcase of the ideas circulating in architecture in the 1980s, with the multiple perspectives on the past implied in the 1980 Venice Biennale.

This article focuses specifically on the Netherlands Architecture Institute as the focal point of a number of prominent issues in architecture in the past two decades since its realisation, including diverse perspectives on materialisation (reclaiming material articulation from the white walls of modernism); urban contextualism in a city characterised by the modern urban planning executed after extensive wartime destruction; and the multiple pasts referenced within (from the classical to the modern).

Candide Journal for Architectural Knowledge, Mar 2012

Posthumanity: Merger and Embodiment, 2010

Many architectural projects of the 1960s incorporated early visions of potentially networked futu... more Many architectural projects of the 1960s incorporated early visions of potentially networked futures. As cheerfully imperfect as these visions were (relating more to a pop-sensibility of a progressive technology that knew no bounds and presented no threats), they offer us in hindsight a clear view of the questions we continue to struggle with today in terms of cyberspace and its relation to community and physical space. Projects such as the 1969 'Electronic Tomato' by Archigram hint at the development of the iPod, while Constant's 'New Babylon' is more deeply networked. The transposition of these projects makes it clear that the position of the individual and its relation with the community or the collective is still being reconfigured. Have we moved into the era of the iPod, where we can entirely enclose ourselves in the capsule prefigured in the projects of Archigram, or have we become one with our environment through the 'extensions of man,' as Marshall McLuhan might suggest? Cyberspace promises permanent connectivity but has ramifications in physical space. Although cyberpunk literature offers many examples of connectivity and a reconfiguration of the collective, the architecture projects of the 1960s made them tangible. While the projects of the 1960s literally transposed the network onto physical space, the question should be approached more in terms of complementarity. The existence of 'light communities' in cyberspace is based on affinities, while the traditional sense of Gemeinschaft is based on (long-term) physical proximity. I would argue that approaching these projects from the perspective of contemporary cybercomunities offers us a way to rethink our contemporary cities in order to incorporate both the fluidity of communities as we know them from cyberspace, while still including the various groups that one might encounter in the space of the street but not in the virtual realm of elective affinities.

Architectural Theory Review, 2011

The Situationist International introduced the creative, psychological, desiring individual as a c... more The Situationist International introduced the creative, psychological, desiring individual as a counterweight to the utopian schemes of the modernist city. The resistance formulated throughout situationist principles underlies many contemporary activist urban practices. Nevertheless, the situationist approach to the city incorporated an affirmation of utopian thought. This totalizing aspect of modernist thought, still present in contemporary discourse, constrains our understanding of the potential of micro-interventions in the city. Although the “right to the city” may be crucial to reclaiming an active engagement with our urban environment, this paper discusses some limitations of situationist ideas, arguing that current urban practice requires a new discourse beyond the by now well-known frame of resistance and negation.

Footprint: Delft Architecture Theory Journal, 2012

Over the past fifteen years most advanced education programmes within Schools of Architecture hav... more Over the past fifteen years most advanced education programmes within Schools of Architecture have been questioning the parameters and requirements of doctoral research both in terms of content and form. This double issue of Footprint was motivated by the question of where the field stands today. Footprint 10|11 presents nine contributions from both recently defended and developing PhD candidates from a variety of institutions. The diversity of their work, as well as the similarities found in the submissions, offers a partial view into research topics currently addressed in PhD programmes within Schools of Architecture.

Beyond no.1: Scenarios and Speculations, 2009

Aesthetic Investigations, 2021

Journal of Architecture, 2018

Book review of Reinier de Graaf's Four Walls and a Roof: The complex nature of a simple professio... more Book review of Reinier de Graaf's Four Walls and a Roof: The complex nature of a simple profession (Harvard University Press, 2017)

Leonardo Online, Mar 2010

Architectural Theory Review, 2011

The Situationist International introduced the creative, psychological, desiring individual as a c... more The Situationist International introduced the creative, psychological, desiring individual as a counterweight to the utopian schemes of the modernist city. The resistance formulated throughout situationist principles underlies many contemporary activist urban practices. Nevertheless, the situationist approach to the city incorporated an affirmation of utopian thought. This totalizing aspect of modernist thought, still present in contemporary discourse, constrains our understanding of the potential of micro-interventions in the city. Although the "right to the city" may be crucial to reclaiming an active engagement with our urban environment, this paper discusses some limitations of situationist ideas, arguing that current urban practice requires a new discourse beyond the by now well-known frame of resistance and negation.