A Certain Kind of Life explores the typology of the Carthusian monastery as an architecture of absolute rationality, wherein the form of life cannot be detached from the space and rituals of the liturgy the monastery shelters. Drawing from nine centuries of monastic architecture, the project reconsiders asceticism as a way to meditate upon present living and working conditions: a necessary estrangement to look closely at reality, its daily gestures and rituals.
In a society wherein maximum integration generates maximum alienation, a rudimentary practice of asceticism offers both a strategy of resistance and an antidote against collective hypnosis, social bonds, and constructed farces and behaviors. The asceticism that A Certain Kind of Life advocates is a form of productive rationalism, to conduct life under constant thought by dispelling anxieties of endless competition, consumerism, and the consequential illusions of promise.
Taking place at the Cartuxa de Laveiras as an associated project of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale 2019 “The Poetics of Reason,” A Certain Kind of Life proposes three interventions: a Cell for a Certain Individual, an architectural evocation of worldly asceticism; an Atlas detailing the charterhouse type in exemplary reiterations; and Deserts, an exhibition of prototypes for contemporary living, which distill the rationalism of daily rituals into architectural forms through specific procedures in space.
The project has been realized in collaboration with our students Nash Kennedy, Alexandra Madsen, Jacob Patnode, William Stauffer, Julia Turner, Andreina Yepez, and thanks to the precious support of the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
A Certain Kind of Life opened an issue #31 of the peer-reviewed art criticism journal NONSITE.ORG, featuring an introduction to the project by Walter Benn Michaels, and an interview with Bob Somol.
Published
2017
Editors
Wiel Arets, Agata Siemionow
Text Editors
John Bezold, Zehra Ahmed
Publisher
Actar, New York & IITAC, Chicago
Graphic design
Mainstudio
Pages
300
2016
Poznan, Poland
The Black house is a renovated typical cube house, like those built across Poland in the fifties. It’s situated in an area where this typology prevails. Over time many of the original “cubes” were transformed or rebuilt. The context of the cube house is a display of variations on itself.
The house explores the simple idea of the use of color – to blend, and on the other hand to contrast with its immediate surrounding - buildings as well as nature. On the other hand the house is an exploration on the idea of openness. Large square windows and doors allow for the interior to be penetrated from the outside and the outside to the inside. Therefore some parts of the interior are public without exposing its inhabitant's intimacy, but rather its inside.
The interior of the house is white. All the new elements are white, to work as a background for the renovated original floors, stairwell and a collection of family furniture from the beginning of the century.
The house on the outside is finished with natural materials – wooden terrace and slate tiles, and surrounded with a natural garden that allows natural weathering.
2014
Chicago, USA
This renovation of an apartment in the seminal Mies’ 860 lake shore drive apartment explores the possibility and limits of the open floor plan and the issue of scale. Mies originally envisioned that all units could be combined and internally rearranged to allow different degrees of privacy and exposure. The apartment is a combination of two units on the west side of the building, with southwest and northwest corners.
The layout of the apartment allows the experience of different degrees of openness through the variation in the size of the rooms - where one part of the apartment is compartmentalized, and the second half open. The central feature of the apartment is a kitchen with an island. It indistinctly divides the spaces between dining, living, and entertaining.
Both bathrooms are remodeled and enlarged from the original plan with the same layout and finishes in white. The use of color and material is limited to white and natural wood to avoid stylistic predetermination.
2008
Poznan, Poland
The project proposes the redevelopment of an attractive site in the city, located along the riverbank with its own harbor area. The extensive context in this part of the city is a modernist development, which consists of the combination of two typologies - housing towers and long building blocks. The most valuable is an extensive area of open greenery – the public space, although planned in the early eighties, is not adjusted to the increasing amount of cars, which cover every single empty space today.
This proposal challenges the existing typology – a tower and a slab, using them as a base form to establish a new modern housing which will allow both comfort of users and the possibility for inhabitants for an extensive green, open space.
The proposed plan provides the development based on the systems of platforms where the underground can serve as parking and the upper level would be a common ground, acting as a micro-neighborhood for the surrounding buildings.
2009
w/ baukuh
Warsaw, Poland
The new Museum of Polish History is a long, narrow building, lying on the top of Trasa Łazienkowska. The building connects the northern and southern side of Ujazdow Park and is covered by a large pond.
The new Museum deliberately resembles the magnificent, oversized garden elements of the Ujazdow and Łazienki parks, such as the Piaseczy ski canal and the Łazienkowski lake. Resembling a huge piece of garden furniture, the new Museum establishes a relation with the splendid system of canals, lakes and fountains cutting through the parks.
Instead of referring to the Ujazdowski castle and to its quite unsuccessful axis, the new Museum discovers a far more interesting and powerful geography in which to locate itself.
Beyond any traditionalism, it will never be possible to re-invent a decent system of baroque axes in the contemporary city. Instead of seeing this condition as a weakness, and instead of re-composing a mediocre - and fake - baroque arrangement, it is possible to compose the pieces available on the site inside of a new, surprising contemporary geography.
In its ultimate simplicity, the new Museum is a hybrid design, both delicate and imposing. From the park, it is a very silent element, just defining a background for the landscape of the Ujazdow Park; from the highway it is a very monumental element floating in the middle of the woods; from the top it is a sublime machine to observe the city. The new Museum is gentle with pedestrians walking through the park, strong with the drivers running below it, and astonishing with flaneurs climbing to its lunar rooftop.
The simplicity of the external shape of the building allows great freedom in transforming the inside of the building. The different sections of the building can be changed independently from one another. Hence, the Museum will be able to mutate according to the future needs of the collections and to accommodate whatever program required to show the history of Poland.
2011
Warsaw, Poland
As our modern society increasingly promotes individualistic behavior and as climate change continues to persist; the best future forms of urbanism shall seek a balance between desires of the individual and demands of the collective, while encouraging awareness of the natural environment. This proposal addresses this fundamental concern of the individual and the collective by integrating social, economic and environmental issues into one urban fabric. The resulting new neighborhood of clear, direct architecture and lush, vibrant landscapes allows inhabitants to live and work efficiently, while also urging for collective assemblies to be formed.
The deployment of two rows of twelve mixed-use slab buildings produces a city block format with defined exterior spaces - like the conventional block organization south-east of the site; yet is open-ended and porous. Each block holds two buildings with commercial, social and service spaces on the lower two floors and a unique mix of unit types on the upper five stories. While no two buildings are internally the same, all are uniformly clad to produce a singular exterior appearance. These buildings becomes a backdrop wo a wide array of small local parks, gardens and plazas. Being the defining feature of the project, these exterior spaces provide the neighborhood with a diverse range of landscapes that encourage inhabitants to live a larger proportion of their lives out of their shops, offices and homes and in the public realm.
The combination of diverse landscape and consistent buildings are framed with un-manicured parks to the east, north and west. These new nature preserves complete a trilogy of urban space within the community; performative, leisure and natural landscapes that can accommodate a range of differing lifestyles with parallel values.
2007
Warsaw, Poland
For us to address the issue of Europan 9 is to provide other answers than just a formal model of the project by giving conceptual answers for the general problematic of contemporary metropolis and society.
The continuous radical changes in history of the large city of Warsaw unfolds in a loose fragmentation of different idiosyncratic urban conditions where each of them developed its own identity that has a very strong presents in the overall perception of the city today. Therefore the main conceptual approach to operate within the understanding of Warsaw is to conceive it as an Archipelago-City, and to evolve the idea of city within the city.
Within the overall understanding of this concept, the intervention on the site is very much inspired by the local conditions and supported by the idea of an urban artefact that has the potential to absorb its immediate urban context.
Convinced with the general position that architecture is the main instrument for urban design projects - we proposed a prototypical element - the Urban type as a device to frame and to link with program and infrastructure all surrounding conditions.
The architectural formulation of the type is based on the very rationalist thinking to provide a flexible and neutral structure that allows adaptation to different programmatical changes of free market requirements.
Due to this needs for neutrality and flexibility it should be possible to change the building structures from housing into office space and vice versa where this method of creating collective buildings will become the new aim for a sustainable development. The housing and office typology will become one and the same, a situation that will be in line with the reality of future working and living patterns.
2006-2007
Berlage Institute
The project and publication is the result of a Berlage Institute research studio led by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Elia Zenghelis in 2005 - 2006, and an international team of architects and urbanists who investigated a plan for the possible future of the Capital of Europe.
The book attempts to answer questions of formal representation of Europe by linking Brussels architecture’s representative role to the future of Europe. It is a pamphlet that treats the city’s self-evident, hidden or forgotten qualities as building blocks for a tangible theoretical and architectural project that revolves around the relations between the European institutions and the city.
By adopting a critical perspective, the pamphlet discusses the European Union’s future and its capital city as concrete, palpable and accessible, rescuing it from a discourse that often remains abstract.
