Residential Buildings and Architectural Design

Coordinators

Birgit Jürgenhake
Delft University of Technology
Faculty of Architecture
Delft, The Netherlands
b.jurgenhake@tudelft.nl

Maja Lorbek
University of Applied Arts Vienna
Vienna, Austria
maja.lorbek@uni-ak.ac.at

Ahsen Ozsoy
Istanbul Technical University
Faculty of Architecture
Istanbul, Turkey
ozsoya@itu.edu.tr

Central themes
This Working Group focuses on relationships between architecture, urban design and people. The main topics are:

  • the development of residential houses under diverse historical, cultural, political, economical circumstances
  • the reflection of socio-economic and cultural characteristics of inhabitants on spatial arrangement of residential buildings and urban units
  • sustainability of residential buildings, adaptability of buildings and urban units to different programmes and uses
  • social, political and economical forces that shape the form of residential buildings and complexes within cities
  • architectural and urban design of residential buildings in the process of transformation of cities.

Its main topic has developed from the wide range of architecture-community relationships towards the questions of public space in cities, transformations of an urban tissue under different economical a social conditions and the development of architectural form.

Activities and output in recent years
In 2017, originally 7 papers were accepted to the workshop but unfortunately only 3 people arrived to the conference and presented. Each participant had 15 minutes for the presentation, 5 minutes for the peer review and another 10 minutes for the general discussion.

In 2018 our workshop at the ENHR conference in Uppsala took place in three sessions. We had 9 contributions. 7 of these presenters submitted well-prepared full papers. The presenters were from UK (University of Glasgow, De Monfort University), Belgium (University of Hasselt), Denmark (Aalborg University), Portugal (Instituto Universitario de Lisboa), China (Tongji University), Turkey (Istanbul Technical University, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University), Sweden (Malmö University), and The Netherlands (TU Delft).

In 2019 our workshop in Athens took place in five sessions. We had 18 contributions. 12 of these authors submitted well-prepared full papers, one person did not show up.

The presentations were from Turkey (Dogus University, Istanbul University, Istanbul Commerce University, Istanbul Cultural University), Australia (University of Sydney), Romania (University of Bucharest), Austria (Vienna University of Technology), Italy (Politecnico di Milano), Belgium (University of Leuven), Finland (Aalto University Helsinki) and the Netherlands (TU Deft).

The workshops worked very well, except one person, all participants presented their research topic, however not every paper was present before the workshop. The topics were very different, related with social housing, new forms of housing, gated communities, homes for the elderly, esthetical issues, climate design, transformation and renovation, shelters and micro-compact housing. Not always but often did the papers focus on the users. Some innovative or experimental housing concepts were shown.

As we already realized in 2018, architects start to work together with other disciplines like sociologists or anthropologists in an interdisciplinary research. This year we did not have presentations of architects only showing their work (we had this in the last years). Al papers were based on research and of high quality. We see this as a very positive and promising result of changing our title a bit and explicit asking for research papers.

Future plans and activities
In 2020 we will again be very clear that we only accept papers that show research done in this field. We welcome interdisciplinary research, done in collaboration between architects and for example sociologists or anthropologists.

Policy implications

Other
We managed to find a new coordinator at the conference in Athene: Dr. Maja Lorbek from the Vienna University of Technology. She participated in the sessions and will be part of our coordinator team now.