Legislating Architecture – Law Creates Design

The falling out between architects and the state can’t only be attributed to the collapse of social housing 30 years ago. It reaches down into the relationship between architecture and the law. Politics, the state, with its overzealous bureaucracy, its prescriptions and regulations, has often—and often rightly so— been viewed as an irritating meddler. The artistry of the architect lay in staying true to one’s vision for a building despite regulations that often seemed obstructive. The relationship between architecture and law has often been characterized by something of a “cult of circumvention.”

Building regulations give form and shape to the built environment that surrounds us.

The most in uential territorial initiative of the twentieth century didn’t establish a comprehensive legal basis for space on land, but rather at sea.

The essay “Mapping Flows: Switzerland as Operational Landscape,” written by Marc Angélil and Cary Siress, was published in 2015 as part of the Research in Urbanism series edited by Steffen Nijhuis, Daniel Jauslin, and Frank van der Hoeven at Delft University of Technology.1

Adam Caruso in Conversation with Arno Brandlhuber

Law has materiality. This insight lies at the core of the ongoing study being carried out by British architect and researcher Liam Ross, one of the most interesting researchers today engaging with the relationship between legislation, building codes, and architecture.

No other modernist doctrine was as successful as the doctrine of functional separation. Yet hardly any idea today is quite as controversial.

Berlin currently has 918 allotment sites featuring nearly 73,000 garden plots.

“Property and the right of inheritance shall be guaranteed. Their content and limits shall be defined by the laws.”

If we interpret the phenomenon of real estate, for a moment, from a purely mechanistic perspective, it’s possible to argue that all the private buildings erected in Tirana over the course of the first decade of the new millennium were, in essence, the very same building.

Berlin is growing—inward. Ever since political powers decided to forcibly privatize huge swathes of public land, Berlin has been experiencing an ongoing process of redensification.

The House with a Lake View is located on the Zimmerberg above Lake Zurich.

Although all architects continually have to bring their work in line with building codes and land-use regulations, very few of them take a critical approach to the legislative framework that underlies their own practice.

In December 2015, Arno Brandlhuber, Waltraud Indrist, and Christopher Roth travelled to Ticino, Switzerland to meet with Luigi Snozzi.

The New York City Building Code defines habitable space asany room with an 8-foot-high (2.4 meter) ceiling. In reality, manybuyers will accept ceilings that are a few inches lower. This was especially true in the mid-2000s, when a real estate bubble fueled rapid gentrification of once-marginal New York City neighborhoods.

In Germany, the interests of the architectural profession are represented externally and internally by small, separate bodies of two distinct legal types: chambers of architects and architects’ associations.

Isabella Fera in conversation with Arno Brandlhuber

Prishtina became the capital of the Republic of Kosovo upon its declaration of independence in 2008. It is an example of a post-conflict city in which unregulated and informal construction caused considerable social and safety problems. To remedy this, it was therefore necessary to pursue retroactive regulation and work to legalize the illegal buildings.

The political and economic variables that dominate architecture make planning a complex process of continual conflict and negotiation; it is the purview of building regulations to simplify production by organizing different urban behaviors into a set of standard, authorized actions.

Die Geschichte des Wohnens entspricht der Form einer Sanduhr, deren Taille die 50er- und 60er-Jahre des vorigen Jahrhunderts bilden.

The following essay provides an account of some of the key issues raised about the relationship of legislation and regulation to architecture during the course of two major symposia co-organised in collaboration with Katie Lloyd Thomas and Tilo Amhoff over the past six years.