420 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy
intervention. Jürgen Rosemann, Professor at TU Delft who embraces the anti-utopian
strategies,^15 explained in his interview to our project: "...we are discussing the idea of
space not only as a physical environment but also related to social activities. Sociality
and space... a lot of people share this approach that space is not only produced by
society, but space is also producing society, in the sense that space forms the conditions
for social activities. One field of research is to examine the way those social conditions
and activities are related to spatial conditions. An important role in this debate plays
Bruno Latour and his ANT. He developed a new idea of a network, where he introduces
the so called 'agents' which can be people or an institution... We look into everything
that generates movement or is causing movement based on this idea of network... A lot
of different actors are doing something but in total they are just generating the environ-
ment. It is typical student work to create a framework for such a planning approach.
If you want to give a maximum amount of freedom to individual actors then on the
other hand you have to provide a framework. Otherwise the city becomes a chaos. So
the big question is how you can provide a framework that on the one hand makes an
efficient city and on the other gives maximum freedom to the actors."
Stephen Read,^16 member of the Spacelab research team in the Department of Architec-
ture at TU Delft, refers to city as a virtuality or 'a possible outcome, or set of possible
outcomes, to processes of urban becoming.' Read claims that "we see to develop an
effective conceptualization of the local in a powerfully globalizing world. To this end
we must, we fell, deal with an urban space which is global in its scope. The object is
not to develop a dichotomy between the global and the local –which seems in fact
to be the dominant position today– but rather to develop a view on how the local
is constructed or assembled in this global-in-scope space. The local, in the view we
begin to develop, is not a given, it is an effect." Read, who considers the Spacelab
approach contradictory to the traditional diagrammatic techniques that froze the
city, believes that "the local becomes in fact something other than purely singular
or purely multiple. It becomes a fractional reality." Spacelab’s philosophy supports
the fact that "people inhabit simultaneously regions of different scales, related to
the different scales of their orientation and movement needs. The movement space
of the city will tend to separate out into discrete more or less coherent, networks of
pathways, working at these respective scales, through this space. People will shift
between these nested regions depending on their immediate movement and orienta-
tion needs." Consequently, the escalation of movement from structures supporting
high speeds to those hosting lower ones constitutes one of the most important
preoccupations of Spacelab.
The aforementioned theoretical approaches played an important role in Delft’s
conceptual reformation which targets a continuum in its course program regarding
scale. As Rosemann explains: "Actually I have to say that we just re-organized our
department. In the past we had different Chairs working on different scales. Now, we
are investigating more in Chairs working through the scales because things are too
much related. The objective is to define issues but not to divide them through scales."
According to Rosemann, the Department’s objective is not only to foster analysis but
moreover to form solutions. Space Syntax analysis is used as an evaluation tool while
3D modeling techniques generate forms and analyze the consequences of a spatial
intervention. Along this path, the Department is experimenting with evolutionary