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aE participates in BouT organized technical excursions. This page will collect the travel guides and travel reports. Reports on the München Stuttgart excursion and the London excursion will be published here.
München Stuttgart 18 - 22 april 2010.
In preparation to this excursion an itinerary was made. it was reported on in Rumoer, the quarterly journal of BouT, the student association of the Department of Technology. Ype's contribution on the report is published on the right.
Ype’s thoughts
A journey starts with expectations; it is an experience and then becomes a memory. In April 2010 BouT organized a technical excursion to Munich and Stuttgart in collaboration with the Chair of Architectural Engineering. Now it is time to reflect on this trip, nurture our memories and build on it.
Travel by train: an experience in space and time
Unlike planes trains do not challenge gravity (friction only) and cannot crash vertically. This notion makes travelling by train far less stressful. In addition train travel makes us aware of the distance we cover and the time it takes to get to our destination. En route we can see the scenery change if we have an eye for it. In between cities with railway stations German farmers do not only cultivate livestock and crop, but harvest solar energy as well by photovoltaic panels, observations that are lost on aisle seat EasyJet travellers studying the in-flight magazine.
Architectural Engineering: technology-based architecture
Architectural Engineering specializes in technology based architectural design. This applies to all ages and scales. It ranges from leading-edge 1928 technology of the Weissenhof Siedlung in Stuttgart that now looks so obvious to the twenty first century material science based Allianz stadium in Munich.
Architectural engineering is not how we wish to define it but what we make of it and time will tell.
Urbi et Orbi (To the city and to the world).
Cities are not just passageways towards the next object of architecture; they provide the context for buildings at the same time the ensemble of buildings make environments that work. The same applies to the landscape. Just compare the Allianz stadium, while not in use it does not leave an alternative purpose of its surrounding space, whereas the Olympic site of Munich doubles as a city park.
Competition between building and content
The boy in all of us loves cars. If we love cars so much should a car museum then be even more loveable or should it be a modest background and just present the cars we adore?
The Porsche 911 is a straight pedigree of Hitler’s 1938 Volkswagen with its rear mounted air-cooled flat engine, which in turn was a 1912 designed airplane engine. It is the most elegant car ever built, not the Beetle but the 911. But it comes at a price. Lots of technology is applied to deliver the power from the awkwardly placed engine to the road. The parade of 911’s writes the history of car design. However, seeing all stages of development in the museum is less exiting than seeing one 911 on the street.
Mercedes Benz has always offered a wide range of vehicles, from passenger cars to busses to trucks. Mercedes taxis dominate the streetscapes of many cities, in Munich they are coloured beige. Busses and trucks many times are sold as half products to be completed locally, such as the 1969 LO-1112 Buenos Aires bus. And then there all those special cars with a history. Most of the dictators in the second half of the former century owned a Mercedes Benz 600.
BMW started as a motorcycle factory and their motorbikes are still the most exciting. Their first cars were equipped with motorcycle engines and still have great charm. While the cars got bigger and better they also got blender. That is good for the business, however less exciting from the designer point of view.
The mindless golden calf needs a flamboyant temple; our mind can do with less.
Buildings do not have to shout for attention in order to be appreciated. In Munich the on street level windowless Jewish synagogue silently adds to the quality of the urban space and the Herz Jesu Kirche windows-only encloses a serene space for worship.
Both Munich and Stuttgart have inner cities with a long history that go back to medieval respectively Roman times. War scars, repairs and constant building activities have made it the energetic places they are and have become inspiring surroundings for modern architecture. Which buildings we have seen will pass the test of time? Will they be demolished soon? Will they slowly disintegrate, or be kept as modern monuments of the nineties when there was abundant money for prestigious objects? Or will they become a crystallization point for an environment that gets better as it gets older? We have to wait and see. It nevertheless is the concern of the engineering architect.
ILEK is the Institut fur Leichtbau und Konstruieren (Institute for Lightweight structures and Structural design). It was founded in 1964 by Frei Otto and is based in a lightweight structure prototype developed for the world expo in Toronto, 1967. Since it was a prototype only and thermal comfort was less an issue then as it is now the roof is gracefully slender. They say in summer it is steaming hot inside, but one has to suffer for not wearing a thick coat of polystyrene. Insided it buzzes from activity. AE needs its own ILEK.
Brains and computer power
The Mercedes Benz museum presents an ingeniously interlocked chain of spaces that could never have been visualized and built without applying brute computer power. The interior parapets had to be designed into position manually since the computers had already been stretched to their limits. Think how great it would have been to have Frei Otto have his brains stretched to its limits and then have our modern computers take over. Then the perspective emerges of the BMW museum routing, the pie shaped one, not Coop Himmelblau’s BMW Welt and the elegancy of the ILEK building.
That would be my ideal outcome of the engineering architect.
Ype Cuperus
Last updated:
10 September, 2010
Ype Cuperus
Open value stream mapping last planner system lateral thinking Pattern Language Biomimicry Townscape Serial vision space syntax Route scenique Route architecturale Transformation Flexibility Changeability Responsiveness Time based building John Habraken tectonics
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