Discussion and Book Launch
10 June 2025, 19:00
et al
Architect-run space
Rue des Tanneurs 137
1000 Brussels
In 1972, German architect Oswald Mathias Ungers and his students at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, developed a prototype for a Self-Help Housing System (S-HHS). Shortly before, Ungers and his wife Liselotte had begun a research project on utopian communities in the United States; the study was published in 1972 under the title “Communes in the New World 1740-1972”.
Ungers’ approach to architecture around 1972 combines beliefs and strategies of typological research, modern urban planning, and utopianism in an unfamiliar way. The S-HHS can be interpreted as a new type of architectural component connecting larger political, social, and economic systems and community-driven initiatives. The research on communes in the U.S. departs from alternative spatial and organizational forms of community and contributes a focus on practices and typologies. Taken together, both projects point to the processual character and the broad agencies involved in architectural production.
Developed through research started with a summer school at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2021 this third publication in the series centers around negotiating between systematic and inventive approaches, and between levels of the social and the communal of both projects through essays, interviews and artistic research.
With an essay by Gerardo Brown-Manrique, texts by Lara Schrijver, Cédric Libert, Cornelia Escher, Lars Fischer and others, and an interview with Christoph Heinemann and Christoph Schmidt and Jesko Fezer.
On Tuesday 10 June 2025, we welcome the editor Lars Fischer of common room/KU Leuven for an introduction of the new publication and the Negotiating Ungers series, followed by a discussion with respondent Elodie Degavre, architect, educator and director of the film “La Vie en Kit” (Life, Assembled). This conversation will be an opportunity to examine the originality of Ungers' work in relation to Belgian experiments from the same historical period, which are explored in the film, as well as to reflect on the contemporary imaginaries that these experimental proposals invite us to reconsider. The event will be moderated by two participants of the Negotiating Ungers workshops Gjiltinë Isufi (KU Leuven) and Fiachra McCarthy (F//AAT).
The publication was made possible with support from KU Leuven, Faculty of Architecture, Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft.
https://www.architecturecuratingpractice.com/info
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