Climatic Heterotopias as Spaces of Inclusion

Sew Up the Urban Fabric

Lazaros Mavromatidis

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119779315
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This book explores, discusses and considers spatial research and its relevant pedagogic perspectives on the crossings, interactions and transformations of contemporary territorialities. The book addresses the issue of conceiving "translocal" spaces of inclusion within the framework of contemporary imposed nomadism and climate change. The concept of "climatic heterotopias" is an original, elegant concept, introduced into the pedagogy of architecture to develop teaching which aims to bring together the architectural substance and this real social need that aims to mitigate the spatial effects of climate change.

Climatic Heterotopias as Spaces of Inclusion promotes the use of spatial theory and philosophy as the tools to build a strong architectural concept. The purpose of the individual contributions in the book is to introspectively explain the original concept of "climatic heterotopias". An overview is given of an innovative, penetrating pedagogic praxis intended to enhance intuition by transforming the architectural design studio into an interface where research is incorporated into everyday architectural conceptual practice, through interaction and openness. This book is a dynamic and implicit dialogue between the tutor and the learners which shapes, little by little, an alternative spatial narrative throughout architectural theory and design.

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Climatic Heterotopias Architectural Design Studio

1.1. Reinventing the political dimension of space throughout pedagogy

How do we reverse the dominant narratives throughout pedagogy regarding space creation in a contemporary complex environment that is globally characterized by the accumulation of various multifaceted crises? The present book has grown out of my pedagogical and research intention to develop a new kind of architectural consciousness in my students’ imagination via an alternative model of pedagogy. In this pedagogical approach, the architectural design studio is organized according to a horizontal hierarchy in order to propose a novel relation between the tutor and the students and eliminate our Vitruvian phantoms and obsessions that persist today.

Thus, this book aims to reintroduce the fundamental ontological question regarding what is architecture and urbanism through a pedagogy that is developed in order to give the freedom to the students to find their own answer-narrative. This means that instead of putting strict guidelines and flirting with the professional and institutional jargon, my main concern was to organize the whole architectural design studio in a way that promotes a continuous dialogue with the active subjects (and not passive objects) of my pedagogical praxis, the students/learners. Therefore, the aim of this pedagogical praxis is to also insert in the dialogue about urban space the arguments, voices, concerns and perspectives of those who are not in the forefront of the scene and who do not hold positions of power. This book is a modest proposition for alternative pedagogical perspectives based on such concerns in order to redefine architecture and urbanism as major disciplines that possess the power to transform neutral and commercialized space to a political urban element for inclusion by reinventing everyday practices, which may significantly contribute to make our cities more habitable and sustainable.

Thus, the most significant intervention into dominant architectural and urban theories offered by this book is to dismantle the central dichotomization into architecture and urbanism, which appears due to the theorization of space in relation to the scale of intervention. According to this dichotomization, the dominant contemporary narrative is that urban space has to be phantasmagoric, while architectural space has to be politically neutral. With the passing of years, this dichotomization is institutionally and academically supported, with the consequence of disconnecting space from its inherent political dimension. Even though there has been alternative research that have underlined the necessity of moving past this dichotomy about space, none have neither offered a genuine amplification of the implications this has on the effectiveness of an architect’s work nor proposed a novel model of pedagogy to face this kind of disciplinary dead-end.

Or what significant contributions can, nevertheless, be made by developing through pedagogy a novel holistic conception of space that is independent of the scale of intervention, in order to restore the direct connection between multiscale spatial arrangements and their inherent political substance? In other terms, how can a student of architecture learn that each choice and design has a multi-scalar effect that can start by the unconscious reproduction through architectural spatialization of dominant family models at the building scale and can be expanded to the urban scale by imposing through design dominant models of urban lifestyle that enhance exclusion and marginalization?

This book directly deals with these ramifications, for the main purpose of developing a critical architectural pedagogy that is concretely transmitted throughout oral lectures and specifically conceived for the purpose of an architectural design studio. The aim of this pedagogy is to understand how these theoretical perspectives and hypotheses can be simultaneously applied to a real case architectural and urban project situation in a way to provide an insightful framework to analyze the significance of the deepening de-politicization of contemporary liberal-democratic dominant in both theoretical and institutional spatial narratives. This kind of pedagogy aims to reverse the prevailing global contemporary context, creating during a pedagogical praxis an alternative theory regarding architecture and spatial design, by restoring the political and aesthetical characteristics of every architectural action. Thus, this book aims to offer a discreet contribution regarding the reinvention of the political dimension of architectural education, since there is widespread acceptance that all the recent educational reforms aimed at the de-politicization of the pedagogical praxis in order to enhance the entrepreneurial dimension of the academic world and especially of architectural education within a rapid changing environment.

In order to reinvent this ethical dimension of architecture – and in general of spatial design – I will not propose guidelines or models. I will just focus on a concrete projectual praxis while defining at the same time an original theoretical framework that is simultaneously applied on the building and urban scales and is briefly presented in the next chapter. In other words, this book tries to identify what is the basis of the unity, cohesion and organized differentiation of the symbolic dimension of space in relation to a global society that currently faces multiple crises.

1.2. Reinventing an introspective pedagogy to enhance the architectural conscience of the learners

Secondly, this book tries to initiate introspection on what is it that brings about other and new forms of architecture? A question that aims to investigate how we may understand the way the multiplicity and diversity of social and political phenomena contributes to an alteration of the dominant spatial and architectural narratives and theories. At the end of this introspective process, the purpose is to ad hoc spearhead to an end of the “old order” that is perpetually reproduced throughout pedagogy and governs the architectural intuition of students of architecture. Then, the aim is the establishment of a more personal “new order” that is based on a real internal exploration of the theoretical potential of each student. In other terms, the objective of this book is to show that a good architectural pedagogical model is not a model that creates uniform architectural consciences being based on a series of guidelines and past references but a model that enhances introspection and develops distinct variable architectural consciences that are able to evolve over time in a dialectic relation with the multiple crises that future societies will have to face.

Furthermore, the presented pedagogical praxis aims at developing, within the imagination of architect and engineer students, that a good professional is not only someone who knows how to blindly fulfill normative requirements and standards accomplishing the design and calculation tasks being based on the reproduction of past spatial and engineering references. By putting in the forefront of the scene the theoretical dimension of this complex multidisciplinary problem in regard to space creation, the pedagogical act presented in this book demonstrates that before designing space, we need to identify the specific elements of the spatial problem and develop a well theorized concept that treats the problem with its multi-scalar dimension (in other words, independently of the scale of intervention).

1.3. Tarrying with the Castoriadian “radical imaginary”

This pedagogical approach reformulates one of the major arguments of Cornelius Castoriadis’s work (Castoriadis 1975, 1984, 1991) transposing it into the world of pedagogical ontology: the dichotomization between two distinct types of creative incumbencies, autonomy and heteronomy. Within his works, this dichotomy is shown to erode the capacity of creativity (Castoriadis 1975, 1984). In our problem, the imaginary institution of the acting subject is framed within a restrictive pedagogy where heteronomy dominates and thus the active subject is progressively unconsciously transformed into a passive object. Thus, the act of pedagogy is converted into a “totalitarian regime” that blocks the development of what is defined by Castoriadis as the radical imaginary.

This radical imaginary is completely and definitively replaced by the socially instituted imaginary (Castoriadis 1974, 1985; Kaika 2011). In two words, we can say that the instituted imaginary identifies and references the existing forms, as well as patterns morphologies and architectural vocabularies, while the radical imaginary is an intrinsic psychological foundation of each human being who navigates to an ingenious original utopic world of novel symbol formation (Castoriadis 1975, 1984). As a result, the contemporary dominant models of “restrictive” pedagogies make the learners as the passive objects of the architectural education, while they are solely trained to reproduce past references that are inscribed within the “dominant culture” relevant to the field.

1.4. Creation of an alternative pedagogical praxis: development of the “climatic heterotopia” notion within a global climate regime

Diversely, the pedagogy that is presented in this book aims to stimulate and offer to the architectural creativity the Castoriadian dimension of praxis. According to Castoriadis, praxis is a solely conscious lucid activity that is totally contrasted to the simplistic rational application of prior knowledge (Castoriadis 1975, 1991 cited in Mavromatidis 2020). Therefore, in order to achieve this transformation, I had to define and create a pedagogical praxis o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title page
• Copyright
• Preface
• 1 Climatic Heterotopias Architectural Design Studio
• 2 Of Other Climates: Glocal Climatic
• 3 Redefine the Contemporary Spatio-social Mentalities
• 4 Redefine the Body as the Physical Constitution of the Human Being
• 5 The Pause or Dreaming in the Woods
• 6 A Territory of One’s Own
• 7 The Hegelian Dimension of Climate as a Feeling Atmosphere
• 8 Rhythm as the Tool to Create Heterochrony and Innovative Territorialities
• 9 Story for an Illusory Hope Against an Absurd Life
• 10 The Fluidic Climatic Heterotopia – Fractures, Flows, Chaos, Composition
• 11 Transmission
• 12 Introspection
• 13 Sew Up the Urban Fabric: The Architectural Project
• 14 The Auto-poetic Spirit of a Creative Learning Society Within a Multifaceted Context of Crises
• References
• List of Authors
• Index
• End User License Agreement