PAST TALKS 2020

10 December 2020

Takis Zenetos’s ‘Electronic Urbanism’ and Telework
Individual Living Units vis-à-vis the Home-Office Conditions
+ CCA open session

MARIANNA CHARITONIDOU
gta Institute, ETH Zurich




The article explores how Greek architect Takis Zenetos conceptualized the reinvention of the relationship between the living units and home-office conditions. Zenetos, like Yona Friedman was interested in the re-invention of the home-office conditions and in how architecture and urban design strat¬egies could respond to distance working. It also examines how architecture and urban design methods could incorporate the impact of the new conceptions of 'tele-work', 'tele-communication', and 'tele-education' on the relationships between the different social classes. Special attention is paid to how Zenetos envisioned a new mode of thinking urbanism able to be adapted to the continuous mutations in both social and technological domains. Additionally, the article sheds light on Zenetos’s critique of low density living, as well as his concep-tion of circular economy, and his intention to provide environments for heterogeneous patterns of domesticity. It also investigates which were the interdisciplinary references in Zenetos’s writings. Central for the paper is The City and the House of the Future by Zenetos, which aimed at the design of flexible systems for both buildings and infrastructures, and was based on his intention to take into consideration the accelerating mutation of the living units in the cities of the future. Zenetos and Friedman’s intention to provide comfortable, flexible and independent home-office conditions through the design of 'individual living units' using advanced technological achievements could be helpful for better understanding how architecture and urban design could respond to the challenge of providing contemporary home-office conditions.



Practices of Creative Destruction in Capital-Led Developments
The Case of TEZ, Plovdiv


INA VALKANOVA 
LUS Institue, ETH Zurich



Spatial design is often confronted with an immense diversity of transformation processes. As a designer it is often difficult to fully acknowledge this immanent complexity and find a position to intervene. How can we answer questions as ‘With whom do I collaborate? How does personal transformation play a role in organizing my collaborations? And can collective action innovate and restructure the way we think about our built environment?‘ With the Chair of Architecture and Urban Transformation of Prof. Freek Persyn we are experimenting with answering these questions through studio teaching, research and action. In order to better understand different methodological approaches, the Chair organizes in collaboration with the Transdisciplinary Lab of ETH Zürich the workshop series «From collective learning to collective action». The aim of the workshop series is to explore different operational frameworks for collective learning and try to apply them to the case of Trakiya Economic Zone in Plovdiv, Bulgaria.
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