BKK-3 wurde von ARCHILAB – Orleans/F eingeladen die MISS SARGFABRIK im Zuge eines dreitägigens Symposiums und einer darauf folgenden 40-tägigen Ausstellung zu präsentieren. 

Eine internationale Jury hat weltweit 90 interessante Wohnbauten ausgewählt. Darunter sind so bekannte Architekturbüros wie Dominique Perrault, Peter Cook,Toyo Ito, Osamu Ishiyama, MVRDV, OMA, NOX, NL-Architects, Asymptote und viele andere.

Die Veranstaltung war eine intensive und fruchtbare Auseinandersetzung mit innovativen Konzepten zu neuen Lebensstilen. BKK-3 vertritt den Standpunkt, daß die Entwicklung des Wohnbaus eng gekoppelt ist mit einer gesellschaftlichen Weiterentwicklung. Neue Lebensformen bedingen erst den Anspruch an die Architektur sich diesen neuen Gegebenheiten anzupassen. 

ARCHILAB about MISS SARGFABRIK :   This huge housing complex, built in Vienna, includes offices, apartments for, among others, students and disabled people, and lots of community areas: kitchen, dressing-room, library, multimedia area, basement café, and so on. These shared areas had already been included in the " FAB Sargfabrik " programme in Vienna, which incorporated a children's playground, a public swimming pool with sauna, seminar and concert rooms, and rooms for other cultural activities. The main concern of BKK-3 is thus to cross the private dwelling place with a host of community programmes, and translate it into the architecture through a non-standard apartment design, which can be freely appropriated by the user; the flexibility and differentiation of the spaces, the use of stairs and outside landings for circulation, and the use of sloping planes connecting the spaces and, from one floor to the next, forming negative volumes. Housing has thus really become an at once social and cultural undertaking, as well as a spatial experiment that is being constantly renewed. For BKK-3, only a form of "evolutionary architecture" can be adapted to today's lifestyles. Their community-based approach, which they call "futurist", is designed to meet the individual needs of the user.

EXHIBITION:   The projects being shown in the exhibition will be grouped within six themes acting as a framework for discussion at the round tables. In no instance, however, does this pigeonholing have anything dogmatic about it: the categories worked out are not foolproof; and there may be shifts from one to another. What is proposed here is a reading key, aimed at highlighting different attitudes to the architecture of housing

•1) Individualizing collective housing:    This concern has become more or less run-of-the-mill, encompassing, as it does, a set of issues associated with the city and with places where there is a premium on space. In most instances, the issue is raised in terms of space-saving. The answer is usually conveyed by an increase in density. How is density to be increased and the hetereogeneity of population groups to be taken into consideration? How is unity to be retained in terms of urban development, and how is the community-oriented idea to be preserved by favouring a diverse range of appropriation methods, permitting their evolution? How is the public place to be reconciled with the need for an identity-based space?

•2) Flexibility   This was a popular theme in the 1970s. Thirty years later, this concern is re-remerging, though set forth in different terms. Do-it-yourself and the open form, where the daily round is dictated by use, have replaced "architectless architecture". "The industrialization of the building" ushered in the design of housing units with moveable partitions, offering multi-purpose areas. Today, industrialized production methods are veering towards the possibility of formulating unusual propositions based on assemblage amd the combination of prefabricated modular parts. "Cooperation and consultation with users", aimed at embracing individual and collective wishes within the design, has taken on different forms as a result of the new communication technologies, helping towards a real collaboration between architects and their clients.

•3) Creating the landscape   For some people, presence in place is crucial. The landscape become a binding feature between architecture and nature. Housing belongs to the place where it is erected. It is buried and becomes landscape, incorporating the context; it invents the landscape, and glorifies it, rising up to break with it, or alternatively be in continuity with it. It creates another territory, or turns into metaphor, in memory of vanished activities                      

•4) New lifestyles, today and tomorrow  As a response to the emergence of new lifestyles associated with living conditions, reprogramming strategies are being introduced, stemming from day-to-day reality, taking uses, and the way they are overlaid, into account, to the point of proposing an architecture that has a make-believe, anticipatory value. What is appearing is a non-standard conception of housing, not trying to get values across or express them, but meeting current requirements, and at the same time being in a position to adapt to the evolution of life. What also appear are new forms, claiming to respond to an announced, nomadic, de-territorialized lifestyle, turning housing into an extension of the body, where space is made the best possible use of; it also sidesteps the natural landscape and, at will, rebuilds another that is virtual and modulable. 

•5) Subversion This should be understood here as an attitude that blurs practices, and hijacks procedures and tools. Challenging constructive customs, getting round the rules and regulations, subverting conventional forms: all these things conspire to dismantle accepted ideas of their own praxis and, by contamination, underpin a critical discourse on the contemporary world: a harsh or, alternatively, hushed objection, which may take shape on the borderline of legality or, conversely, take the path of a pragmatic practice, and turn the derisory into a positive tool.                            

•6) Form--Creative process         Over and above issues to do with housing, form or, rather, the creative process, is still the major concern in design, for some people. Form may be the outcome of technological manipulation, a choice of structure and material, a way of handling the volume, the plan, or alternatively, the product of a self-generating system. Architecture may result from the context, and from overlaid territories which disorganize the form. In some instances it incorporates the effects of time and climate, and turns into landscape.user.space?

Special grettings and thanks to Maria-Ange, and Beatrice, Yves Duranthon and his team - Barbara and Dieter Feichtinger from Paris - Santiago and Hermann from Sevilla - Wolfram Popp from Berlin - MAO from Rome - Mantia Studio from Venice - Cero9 / Madrid - Ada Tolla from LOT/EK / NY - Sadar in Vuga Architekti / Ljubliana - Lucy and Rob from London - Roger Riewe and Njiric&Njiric from Graz - Alleswirdgut - Next enterprise- Pauhof / Vienna.  

Have a good time!

We also would like to thank our sponsor

ARCHILAB 2001  >> www.archilab.org

<< back