Cultural Heritage and Strategies for the Cities of Tomorow: Towards a New Concept of High Density Urban Space

Activity: Talk or presentation Lecture and oral contribution

Description

The Modern Movement at the beginning of the 20th century marked a fundamental break with the traditional western concept of the city which was defined by streets and squares. In this traditional concept the facades of the buildings formed the “walls” of both the streets and the squares.
The Modern Movement saw the city as a functional organism. They subsequently invented the idea of “the open plan” and a new more transparent type of building organized as a uniform structure. Mies van der Rohe called this new way of composition an architecture of “skin and bones”.
Today this concept of urban space is challenged by architects like Rem Koolhaas, MVRDV and building engineers like Cecil Balmond. They no longer see the city as an organism but as an “infolded space” of high density. Subsequently they replaces the concept of the uniform construction of “skin and bones” for the concepts of a hybrid space and a hybrid construction.
The lecture discusses the potential of this new concept of high density space and shows some experiments on this type of space made by students from the Aarhus School of Architecture.




Frelæsning afholdt på China Cntral Academy of Fine Arts. CAFA. Beijing.
Period15 Jun 2011
Held atUnknown external organisation