Architecture and building blocks

Research project P 14493 Architecture and Building Blocks Anita AIGNER 09.10.2000 Taking as its starting point the theoretical considerations of the pedagogue Friedrich Fröbel and the occupational boxes he developed for play in the first thirty or so years of the 19"` century, the planned research project will examine the history of ideas within constructional play with regard to morphological qualities, the modes of use and function and the educational implications of the objects. It will also examine the relevance of architectural building blocks within the context of the architectural model. The various research perspectives find their categorial correspondence in the distinctions made by Fröbel, who divided the use of constructional play into form of cognition, form of beauty and form of life. To follow on, the building block will be considered as the product of a representation of space, rationality and knowledge measured against Euclidean Geometry on the basis of a historical analysis of practical education in architecture. Taking as the starting point a collection of architectural building blocks plus accompanying material housed at the Institute for Artistic Design at the Technical University in Vienna, which is also used in the teaching of design, the building block will be examined as a potential instrument of design for architects. Furthermore, the building block is interesting as an instrument of both aesthetic and social training, in its availability to children - and, in this instance, particularly to boys as the pocket-sized builders of the world. Adopting a culturo-scientific stance, the project will examine the way in which the actual procedures of play are directed by the design of learning aids and the fundamental, yet historically differing, constructions of childhood. Finally, the building block will be addressed as a problem in the modelled representation of architecture. On the basis of selected designs, the building block will be presented as the instrument of a modelled construction - a construction that is understood as a representational model of the design model which played an active role in the creative design process. On the basis of the building block, significant types of model design within the architectural design process will be looked at. The findings will then be evaluated within the broader context of the history of architecture and will be used to observe architecture within the context of a Generally applicable theory.

This research project will examine building blocks from the following perspectives: pedagogical-psychoanalytical, architectural-historical and architectural-theoretical. The set of building blocks will be treated in a number of different ways, as an instrument of aesthetic and social training, as a framework-based deductive planning principal in the teaching of architectonic design and as a visualisation aid within the architectonic design process. The psychoanalytical examination will focus on the role of building blocks within the "International scene of toy guns, cuddly toys and Barbie dolls" (G. Didi-Huberman). Playing with building blocks will be examined here as an early childhood phenomenon. Along with an outline of the play process and its material preconditions, playing, learning and working activities will be differentiated in the light of the pedagogical theories of Friedrich Fröbel and Maria Montessori, predominantly. With reference to the psychoanalytical interpretation of early-childhood play of M. Klein, D. W. Winnicott, H. Segal and S. Freud, it will be argued that play-building in the context of transitional phenomena is to be seen as an appropriation of the world and the establishing of an ability to act. Architecture is sometimes the result of an abstract play with modules. The basic units out of which the design process arises are either practical building elements (e.g. bricks) or the product of an abstractive process of analysis (building parts). From an architectural-historical perspective, an attempt will be made to discover the design teachings systematised during the course of the academisation of architectonic practice, which proceed from the framework as design and drawing aids. J. N. L. Durand`s standardised process of architectonic composition is compared in a concrete manner with E. Neufert`s building design and building planning teaching. This allows the essential features of the Taylorised modern age to be identified during the very beginnings of institutionalised architectural education in France. An empirical study contextualises questions of module-based and new-media- based design processes in the sphere of design teaching. At the heart of the third approach lies an examination of the set of building blocks as a special form of architectural model and the relationship between model and built architecture. The originality of the hypothesis presented here lies in the fact that the received notion of the relationship between architectural model and finished building is reversed. The hypothesis is illustrated with three examples (Bruno Taut`s Glass Building Blocks, the New-City Ingenius building blocks by Wilhelm Kreis and Walter Gropius` Baukasten im Großen blocks) that at the same time reflect three different approaches to 20th-century architecture (Expressionism, Functionalism,Classicism). This result is a step towards a generally applicable theory that does not make demands about how buildings should be built, but shows how buildings are built.