Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design

Bianca Bottero Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy 295

If they are read from another point of view, in that state of mind that Bachelard

called the “constant restructuring of the past through the present”, their recovery,

their re-interpretation in the light of new or critical approaches may constitute a

precious source of concreteness; that concreteness that new technologies tend to

cancel and whose recovery, if done though only direct practice, can be spoiled by a

serious emptiness, an emptiness of history and memory.

During the first half of the XX century, architects like Adolf Loos or Rudolph Schindler,

Bruno Taut or Alvar Aalto, Gunnar Asplund or Hans Scharoun, Aldo Van Eyk or Ralph

Erskine, Frei Otto or Buckminster Fuller included in their methods and projects those

same premises aimed at a new balance, at a new pact between men and nature. which

we nowadays mean with the word “sustainability”. And this with completely different

linguistic and individual achievements.

Concepts like: connection with place, how do you enter the house, light in the

making of the space, environmental quality of glass, links between building and the

ground and its openness to the sky, the sensible skin, architecture of democracy... and

others are all precious tools for reading with a new perspective many architectures

Figure 1
Eric Gunnar Asplund and Sigmund Lewerentz, Woodland
Chapel, Stockolm, 1918-20.

Figure 2

Bruno Taut, Alpine Arkitectur,

1912.

Figure 3
Frey Otto: living and non-living nature.