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ARCHAEOLOGICAHEREDITAS
Monographs of the Institute of Archaeology of the Cardinal
Stefan Wyszyński University in WarsawVolume published in
cooperation with the Institute of Art History of the University of
Warsaw
Warsaw 2017
10Preventive conservation of the human environment
6.Architecture as an element of the landscape
edited by Weronika Kobylińska-Bunsch, Zbigniew Kobyliński and
Louis Daniel Nebelsick
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Archaeologica HereditasWorks of the Institute of Archaeology of
the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński in Warsaw
Editorial Board:Editor-in-chief: Zbigniew Kobyliński
Members of the Board: Tadeusz Gołgowski, Jacek Lech, Przemysław
UrbańczykSecretary of the Board: Magdalena Żurek
Editorial Board’s address:1/2 Wóycickiego St., Building 23, PL
01-938 Warsaw, Poland
tel. +48 22 569 68 17, e-mail:
[email protected]
Technical editing and proofreading: Zbigniew KobylińskiLayout:
Bartłomiej Gruszka
Cover design: Katja Niklas and Ula Zalejska-SmoleńLinguistic
consultation: Louis Daniel Nebelsick and Wojciech Brzeziński
Cover picture: part of the imperial garden Summer Palace in
Beijing, China; photo by Weronika Kobylińska-Bunsch
Publication recommended for print by Professors Martin Gojda and
Andrzej Pieńkos
© Copyright by Fundacja Res Publica Multiethnica, Warszawa 2017
and Instytut Archeologii Uniwersytetu Kardynała Stefana
Wyszyńskiego, Warszawa 2017
ISBN 978-83-946496-4-7ISBN 978-83-948352-2-4
ISSN 2451-0521
Publisher:Res Publica Multiethnica Foundation
44 Cypryjska St.PL 02-761 Warsaw, Poland
http://res-publica-multiethnica.pl/
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CONTENTS
ArchAeologicAHereditas 10
5 Preface Weronika Kobylińska-Bunsch, Zbigniew Kobyliński
and Louis Daniel Nebelsick
*
7 Environmental preventive conservation Andrzej
Tomaszewski
11 The idea of preventive conservation of human environment
Zbigniew Kobyliński and Weronika Kobylińska-Bunsch
*
15 Preventive conservation of the human environment:
architecture as an element of the landscape Lazare Eloundou
Assomo
17 The role of the architecture in the creation, enhancement
and preservation of cultural landscapes Stefano De Caro
21 World Heritage SITES for DIALOGUE: heritage for
intercultural dialogue, through travel, “Life Beyond Tourism” Paolo
Del Bianco
*
23 Role of cultural sustainability of a tribe in developing a
timeless cultural landscape: a case study of the Apatani tribe
Barsha Amarendra, Bishnu Tamuli and Amarendra Kumar Das
37 The corporate and cultural: honoring the monumental in
Kansas City, Missouri Cynthia M. Ammerman
47 Damaged landscape of ancient Palmyra and its recovery Marek
Barański
57 The art of (architectural) reconstruction at archaeological
sites in situ within the context of cultural landscapes Ewa M.
Charowska
73 Lessons from landscape, landscape archetypes Urszula
Forczek-Brataniec, Ana Luengo and Tony Williams
83 The city for people – the image of post-industrial sites in
modern city Joanna Gruszczyńska
95 Sustainability by management: a comparative policy study of
the World Heritage cities of Amsterdam, Edinburgh and Querétaro Eva
Gutscoven, Ana Pereira Roders and Koen Van Balen
105 Polychromy in architecture as a manifestation of the link
between man and environment Tetiana Kazantseva
119 Capturing architecture – the poetic vision of cultural
heritage in the inter-war Polish pictorial photography Weronika
Kobylińska-Bunsch
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127 Landscape with ruins: preservation and presentation of
archaeological relics of architecture Zbigniew Kobyliński
153 Educating architects: the problem with agricultural
buildings Diederik de Koning
163 Historic gardens and climate change. Conclusions and
perspectives Heiner Krellig
177 The monastic landscape – carrier of memory and potential
catalyst in conservation and adaptive reuse processes of material
and imma-terial heritage Karen Lens and Nikolaas Vande Keere
187 The missing landscape of Yuanmingyuan: preservation and
revitalisation of a Chinese imperial garden Mingqian Liu
195 Seeking the traces of a former mon--astic landscape in the
vicinity of Samos Abbey (Galicia, Spain) Estefanía López Salas
213 Landscape and national identity in Portugal Fernando
Magalhães
225 The city that penetrates the sky Romano Martini and
Cristiano Luchetti
231 Siting penal heritage: a history of Wellington’s prison
landscape Christine McCarthy
243 Phantom heritage: Thingstätten and “sacred” landscapes of
the Third Reich Louis Daniel Nebelsick
265 21st Century Garden with exhibition pavilion in Royal
Łazienki Museum in Warsaw Ewa Paszkiewicz
283 The meanings of ruins for the history of the cultural
landscape on the example of the remains of the castle complex at
Wyszyna Kamil Rabiega
303 Dissolving materiality: ruins and plant relicts in the
landscape parks by Denis McClair in Volhynia Petro Rychkov and
Nataliya Lushnikova
323 Memory of the landscape: revela-tion through architecture
and built environment at the Çamalti Saltern Işılay Tiarnagh
Sheridan
333 Pre-Hispanic walkscapes in Medellín, Colombia Juan
Alejandro Saldarriaga Sierra
345 The invisible and endangered land-scape: the case of the
margins of the Cascavel Stream in Goiânia, Brazil Carinna Soares de
Sousa and Almir Francisco Reis
361 Diamond mines shaping the South African landscapes
Aleksandra Stępniewska
369 (Un)wanted heritage in the cityscape – arguments for
destruc-tion or reuse. The case of the city of Kaunas Ingrida
Veliutė
379 The Nordic Pavilion projects at the 2016 Venice Biennale.
Scandinavian approach to architectural landscape Anna Wiśnicka
389 Architecture in the cultural land--scape of the Prądnik
Valley Dominik Ziarkowski
*
403 Notes on authors
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Educating architects: the problem with agricultural
buildings
Diederik de Koning
ArchAeologicAHereditas 10153–162
It has proven1 difficult for architects to engage them-selves
effectively with the design of agricultural build-ings in the
various cultural landscapes of post-war Eu-rope. On the one hand,
the many traditional farm types that helped shape the appearance of
agricultural land required no design intervention as their forms
crystal-lised through time instead. Farms were built based on
habits and traditions that varied regionally. Its knowledge was
passed on from one generation to the next. On the other hand,
industrial developments in agriculture and its building industry
have now made these culturally rich farms obsolete as they cannot
efficiently host con-temporary agricultural activities. The
industrial building culture developed itself rapidly after the
Second World War and is in continuous evolution. The construction
of industrial farms is led by economics, leaving little room for
architectural design in relation to its surrounding cultural
landscape. Consequently, new architectural designs of agricultural
buildings and rural settlements have become curiosa within the
discipline of architec-ture, and only occasionally are these
efforts addressed as part of the architecture discourse.2 Farm
designs have become more of an engineering challenge instead, based
on knowledge gained by the agricultural sciences. The architecture
debate in Germany and Austria during the second half of the 20th
century, however, seems to have been somewhat of an exception to
this. Driven by a po-litical ambition to protect the appearance of
the country-side in Austria3 and Germany4, and following a
tradition of questioning the design of farms5, new institutes were
formed at various architecture faculties. This paper uses the
Institut für landwirtschaftliches Bauen und ländliches
1 Considering the sizable amount of farms that are continuously
be-ing built by construction companies without direct intervention
of an architect.
2 Only a few journal editions were devoted to the topic through
the years, mostly in Germany and Switzerland. More recently,
“Archi-tectural Design” released an issue in 2016 on Designing the
rural, but hardly any concrete examples are discussed in this
journal.
3 Bartussek 2002: 7.4 Meissner 2015: 18.5 See for example the
work of Werner Cords-Parchim and Walter
Wickop. Perhaps this particular interest into the farm and
country-side evolved out of German National Romanticism.
Siedlungswesen (Institute of Agricultural Architecture and Land
Settlement) at Graz University of Technology6 as an example of one
such academic institute, to explain how the education of
architecture students on the topic has been tackled
methodologically. We speak here in the past tense, as hardly any –
if any at all – such institute still exists today. By revealing
these particular methods, we may be able to revive the topic at
architecture facul-ties in Europe today.
The lack of knowledge among practicing architects about both
traditional farms and industrial farms could cause problems for the
conservation of agricultural herit-age at large, as farms often had
a very specific place in its landscape.7 While older farms as part
of agricultural heri-tage can be protected and renovated, the
construction of new agricultural structures forms is an entirely
different challenge. This raises the question whether the value of
agricultural heritage lies in the collection of individual
buildings alone, or rather in the cultural landscapes that were
actively shaped by a specific culture of farming and farm building.
We are left with a dilemma: should we emphasise the protection of
each of these individual farms alone, or should we rather emphasise
the protec-tion of the larger cultural landscapes that surround –
and include – these farms? For architects specifically, the first
challenge is more straight-forward and includes the res-toration
and renovation of traditional farms. On the one hand, many farms
throughout Europe are adapted and transformed into houses, for
instance, keeping the (exte-rior) appearance of the building intact
while disregarding its original agricultural function. The second
challenge, on the other hand, includes the careful construction of
new buildings in relationship to their surrounding agri-cultural
heritage, thus more specifically addressing the continuous function
of farming as part of a rural way of life. The topic re-emerged
during the second half of the 20th century, although a gap in
knowledge resulted after the Second World War due to the rejection
of the na-tional romantic connotations of the topic with Blut
und
6 Technically still called Graz University of Applied Sciences
or Fach-hochschule Graz then.
7 Schnitzer 1983: 148.
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154 ArchAeologicA Hereditas • 10
Diederik de Koning
Boden ideology.8 The design question required an archi-tectural
understanding of both the traditional building culture of the past
and the industrial building culture of the present. It is the
combination of these two fields of expertise that formed the core
of the research done at architectural institutes such as the
Institute of Agricul-tural Architecture and Land Settlement at Graz
University of Technology. Rather than merely trying to protect the
spatial charm of the countryside, architecture professors in
Germany and Austria intended to actively engage in designing new
buildings in order to offer realistic solu-tions that considered
the rich traditional building culture present in agricultural
communities.9
Framework
The hypothesis put forward in this paper is that cultural
landscapes containing objects of agricultural heritage can be
preserved by actively designing new buildings that are economical
and useful, while at the same time evolving from the traditional
building culture that is under threat. If this hypothesis were to
hold true, then this opens up possibilities for the architecture
community in particu-lar – parallel to work done by
conservationists and arche-ologists – to engage in the active
protection of cultural landscapes. In this proposition, the word
“landscape” is used consciously. Unfortunately, the word has a wide
variety of meanings – especially between different dis-ciplines –
so a clear understanding of the hypothesis would require further
definition. Four meanings seem to be widely accepted: first of all,
the word landscape seems to be used these days to define a sphere
of com-mon socio-cultural characteristics that – contrary to what
we may expect – may not be defined by a piece of land per se. For
example, a cultural landscape may refer to the collection of
cultural activities held at museums, galleries, libraries, and
other such public buildings. The preservation of a cultural
landscape would thus imply the preservation of the cultural
activities rather than the spatial context in which these
activities take place. Al-ternatively, the word „landscape” may be
used to define a spatial condition that is homogeneous and has its
very own particular qualities. In this example, a cultural
land-scape may thus refer to a region in which certain forms of
farming emerge due to particular soil and climate con-ditions. This
merging of natural and human influences in a piece of land is the
definition that UNESCO uses to de-fine a cultural landscape.
Contrary to the first definition, this use of the word landscape
implies that a region can be differentiated by its particular
spatial characteristics instead. A third definition of the word
landscape is the particular view on such a piece of land, as
portrayed, for instance, in landscape paintings. A landscape would
thus
8 Peters 1983: 98.9 Schoch 1977: 37.
refer to a particular scene that one can witness while being
physically present as a subject. This meaning can be traced back to
Petrarca’s trip to the top of the Mont Ventoux in France in 1336.
Supposedly, he was the first European to climb a mountain with the
sole purpose of enjoying the wide-stretched view on the surrounding
landscape.10 This definition of landscape became popular in the
English language with the rise of landscape paint-ings in the 16th
century. There is, however, a fourth defi-nition of the word
landscape that predates this meaning by centuries. During the early
middle-ages, the original Anglo-Germanic word landskipe or
landscaef11 was used to refer to a particular piece of natural land
that had been transformed into arable land. In other words, the
word landscape could be used to define the active al-teration of
(new) land for agricultural purposes, such as the poldering of land
in the Netherlands. It is the latter definition of the word that is
used in this paper, albeit under the term cultural landscape to
avoid confusion. Not only does the word imply that a cultural
landscape is an active project that requires continuous effort, it
also implies that agricultural buildings – as a reflection of this
effort – are crucial to understanding a wider building cul-ture.
With the term „natural landscape”12 we will from here on refer to
the prior condition as found, before set-tlers transformed it into
a cultural landscape.
This agricultural transformation from a natural piece of land to
a cultural landscape can be further explained with the example of
the „Valley Section.” As this pa-per was written for an
inter-disciplinary conference in memory of a man who had a broad
range of expertise, it seems only appropriate to refer here to the
work of a like-minded thinker. That is: the Scottish geographer,
biologist, and town planner Sir Patrick Geddes (1854 – 1932). Over
a hundred years ago, he first developed his influential idea of the
Valley Section based on observa-tions he made along the river Tay
in Scotland (Fig. 1). Geddes’ idea13 of the Valley Section is
revealed clearly in a detailed illustration that may be attributed
to both his son Arthur Geddes and his son-in-law Frank Mears.14 The
Valley Section shows how our culture of inhabiting land evolves
from the resources that a natural landscape has to offer. Mountains
supply us with stones and min-erals when extracted and processed;
forests supply us with wood when cut and sawn into timber; meadows
supply us with pasture for cattle to graze on as we give them
shelter; plains near the river supply us with fertile soil for
farming when plowed, and rivers supply us with sweet water and fish
when caught in nets. From moun-tain top to river, each zone thus
requires specific tools to make use of its natural resources. Each
zone and instru-
10 Lemaire 2010: 17.11 Jackson 1984: 5.12 Strictly speaking,
this is a contradiction in terms.13 Geddes 1925: 398.14 This is
an educated guess of Grant Buttars from the Centre for
Research Collections of the University of Edinburgh.
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155Preventive conservation of the human environment 6 •
architecture as an element of the landscape
Diederik de Koning Educating architects: the problem with
agricultural buildings
ment in turn offers materials that can be used for the
construction of buildings that are necessary to sustain a culture
or way of life. Just as a fisherman requires a net and a boat to
catch his fish, so also does a farmer require a set of buildings
that are instrumental to the cultivation of land. Through many
generations, settlers transform a pre-existing natural landscape
into what we now refer to as a cultural landscape or
Kulturlandschaft.
Agricultural buildings are of particular interest as their
small-scale „design” solutions are later used for other structures
as well. When new buildings have to be con-structed that have no
agriculture purpose, their initial form is often derived from an
existing farm type. In other words: the cultural influence of
agricultural practices on the spatial environment is larger than
merely the design of its farms. This building culture has a big
effect on how village-patterns continuously evolve on a larger
scale. Rather than being designed by architects, their forms
crystallise through generations of tinkering and pass-ing on
accumulated knowledge. While better known as „vernacular
architecture” or as „architecture without architects”15, this
evolutionary building practice has also been referred to as
„Anonymes Bauen”16 or anonymous building. The term is rather
elegant, as it suggests that architects can engage in the design of
anonymous build-ings as well, as long as their authorship is not
forced upon it. The preference of an individual is thus taken out
of the equation and replaced with meaning that reflects a broader
culture and is shared by a collective. Across Eu-rope, there are
numerous examples of anonymous build-ings that uniquely mark their
surrounding cultural land-scapes. One agricultural example is the
typical hayrack called Harpfe in Austria and Kozolec in Slovenia.
These structures have a relatively simple function: they protect
cereals, corn, or hay from rainfall and wet soil, and let the
collected crops dry in the wind. We can find many variations of
this type throughout Austria and Slovenia. These range from a
simple stick in the ground to double parallel hayracks with a roof
and full of ornamentation. The dimensions of these structures are
predetermined by conventions that appear very architectural: for
some, the proportions and angles of the hayrack’s roof and height
are defined almost mathematically.17 As the types were defined by
the particular region they were built in, all that was left for the
family’s individual expression was the ornamentation of the wood.
The structures are so intertwined with local tradition and their
surround-ing cultural landscape that it is no coincidence then,
that the storing of straw occasionally went hand-in-hand with
various folklore costumes made of cereals or hay in such regions as
well.
Industrial innovations in agriculture, however, started to
compete with traditional types such as the hayrack as
15 Rudofsky 1965: preface.16 Windbrechtinger-Ketterer 1995:
80.17 Juvanec 2012: 73.
they offered a far more practical alternative.18 The cut-ting,
drying, and storing hay simply does not require such a physical
structure anymore. Most of the hayracks have consequently become
obsolete, unless they are used for a different purpose altogether.
Without use and main-tenance, these wooden structures are prone to
decay and are therefore declining in number. In those regions where
the hayracks used to be an integral part of the agricultural
community, the question arises if and how to protect these
buildings from being lost. They are after all the marking stones of
a specific cultural landscape. The preservation of a single
building is very much within our capabilities. The preservation of
the building type as a recurring object within the cultural
landscape, howev-er, is a completely different challenge. As it is
the varia-tion of these buildings as a whole that reflects a
cultural practice, one cannot single out a single structure with
the aim of preserving the entire traditional landscape. At the same
time, it is simply too costly to preserve all these hayracks as
long as they offer no practical use to those who maintain them.
Occasionally, this deadlock is solved by rebuilding key examples of
agricultural building types in one location that is open to the
public. All over Europe there are open air museums where people can
learn about the wide variety of farms and farm struc-tures. Some,
like in Stübing in Austria, are the result of years of
extraordinary investment requiring a long-term vision.19 Next to
the farms present on the site initially, many buildings exhibited
now in this valley were bought elsewhere, dismantled, and rebuilt
on site. A similar open-air museum exists for the various Kozolec
in Slo-venia as well.20 These solutions, however, focus on the
building as object of heritage rather than the cultural landscape
they once marked. The buildings are uprooted from their original
environment and displaced, thus by-passing the hypothesis put
forward in this paper.
The particular context of Germany and Austria
The initial challenge in such a situation still remains: to use
architectural design that makes use of industrial in-novations
while considering the demands of existing rural communities. The
new global building industry is often considered to be disruptive
to the landscape.21 In response, a group of architects in post-war
Germany and Austria have actively tried to reconcile the anonymous
building culture with the globalised building industry when
designing for agricultural communities. They val-ued the wide
variety of building types and way of life in
18 Sotriffer 1978: 22.19 See for instance: Pöttler 1992.20
The Dežela kozolcev Šentrupert/Land of Hayracks open-air mu-
seum in Šentrupert, Slovenia, covers 2.5 ha and showcases 19
hayracks.
21 Simons 1987: 2.
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156 ArchAeologicA Hereditas • 10
Diederik de Koning
the countryside, but also knew that the building culture had to
be modernised in order for agricultural commu-nities to move
forward. Their contributions to architec-tural education may well
have been more influential than the individual projects they
realised. As the anonymous building culture is not passed on from
parent to child anymore, these architect-educators intended to pass
on the knowledge they accumulated from teacher to stu-dent instead.
Since the turn of the century, however, this academic engagement
seems to have come to a halt and consequently a large body of
knowledge is at risk of be-ing lost. Hardly any academic
architecture institute still exists today that is solely committed
to this effort. After architect Franz Riepl retired in 2000 as
professor from the Institute of Agricultural Architecture and Land
Set-tlement in Graz, Paulhans Peters considered this loss of
attention for the topic problematic. Reflecting on Riepl’s work, he
wrote: „But one question remained unan-swered in Graz: who is to
pass on the necessary specialist knowledge to students about
designing the agricultural buildings that will be needed there in
the future?”.22
This question did not remain unanswered in Graz alone: the rise
and gradual disappearance of an archi-tectural institute in Graz
devoted to the topic of agricul-tural buildings and rural
settlements is emblematic for aca demia in both Austria and
Germany. One of the last remaining examples was that of the chair
of Planen und Bauen im ländlichen Raum (freely translated: Planning
and building in rural environments) at the Technical University of
Munich, when professor Matthias Reichenbach-Klinke passed away in
2008.23 The overview presented (Fig. 2) gives us the possibility to
put the specific case of Graz in a larger context, showing some of
the key locations where architect-educators were still very much
engaged with building up knowledge on the topic as part of
architec-ture faculties. The developments in these two
countries
22 Peters 2006: 17.23 Meissner 2015: 20.
were relatively similar24 and the architect-educators work-ing
in these countries were occasionally in contact with each other.25
We could thus argue that an international discourse was more or
less established here on the topic.
From 1980 until 2000, professor and architect Franz Riepl was
the head of the Institute of Agricultural Archi-tecture and Land
Settlement, founded in late 1969 at the Faculty of Architecture of
what is now Graz University of Technology. Both the topical
research and teaching methods developed under him are exemplary for
the rise and fall of the architectural discourse in post-war
Aus-tria and Germany. In one way or the other, each of the
architect-educators specialised himself within the larger debate.
What they shared, however, was that many of these professors were
tied to a particular region in prox-imity to their home university.
This made it possible to set up a network between architecture
faculties, agri-culture institutions, and municipalities. In each
of these cases the professors offered their expertise to villages
on how to develop their cultural landscapes further. For example,
professor Erich Kulke from the Technical University of Braunschweig
was, among other things, devoted to the protection of a type of
circle-shaped vil-lage found nearby Wendland. Together with his
students, Kulke worked on the conservation and development of the
village of Lübeln (Fig. 3). One of the results was the
transformation of a farmhouse into a community cen-ter.26 Besides
being an architect and professor at the uni-versity, he was also
the head of the building department of the Landwirtschaftskammer
(Agricultural Chamber of Commerce) in Hannover.27 Other professors
were de-voted to a particular building type rather than a village
pattern. For instance, professor Ulrich Schnitzer from the
Technical University of Karlsruhe was, next to his passion for
designing stables, engaged in traditional farmhouses
24 Although the East German institutes functioned very
differently due to the socialist agenda.
25 Guldager 1977: 20. 26 Kulke 1973: 8.27 Grube and Johannsen
(eds) 1977: 111.
Fig. 1. Patrick Geddes’ Valley Section illustrated by his son
Arthur Geddes and/or Frank Mears (source: Centre for Research
Collections at University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh)
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157Preventive conservation of the human environment 6 •
architecture as an element of the landscape
Diederik de Koning Educating architects: the problem with
agricultural buildings
Fig. 2. Selection of institutes acting in Ger-many and Austria
on the topic of Agricultural Architecture and Land Settlement:
Braun-schweig – Erich Kulke, Landwirtschaftliche Baukunde; Dresden
– Werner Cords-Parchim, Landwirtschaftliches Bau- und
Siedlung-swesen; Graz – Hinrich Bielenberg and Franz Riepl,
Landwirtschaftliches Bau- und ländliches Siedlungswesen; Hannover –
Wilhelm Landzet-tel, Ländliche Bau- und Siedlungswesen; Karlsruhe –
Ulrich Schnitzer, Planen und Bauen im ländlichen Raum; Leipzig –
Manfred Berger, Landwirtschaftliches Bauen; Munich – Helmut
Gebhard, Entwerfen und ländliches Bauwesen; Stuttgart – Detlev
Simons, Ländliche Siedlung-splanung; Vienna – Alfons Dworsky,
Ländliches Bauwesen (designed by D. de Koning)
found in the Black Forest. He explored ways of adapting these
anonymous buildings to a more modern way of life. He restored and
renovated several of these farm-houses, helped setup competitions
for architects on the topic, and built contemporary variations of
this type as well.28 By surveying the many variations of anonymous
buildings in these regions, the architect-educators raised an
understanding of a particular building culture in order to propose
new design solutions. Some of these propos-als included social
housing on a larger scale. For example, Helmut Gebhard from the
Technical University of Munich worked with his students on the
expansion of the nearby village of Hirblingen around 1980.29 The
prototypical na-ture of traditional farmhouses here resulted in a
particu-lar village structure. Modern housing designs were
devel-oped that had a similar prototypical nature, even though they
were not intended to be used as farms themselves.
The case of Graz
One thing most of the professors were engaged in, was the
careful surveying and consequent understanding of the anonymous
building culture. Helmut Gebhard would, for instance, collaborate
on a book series on farmhouses
28 Schnitzer 2001: 30.29 Gebhard 1981: foreword.
in Bavaria.30 They used this understanding to question how the
building culture could evolve further, while tak-ing into account
the globalising building industry of the time. Unlike the more
artistic projects that were typi-cally done with students in urban
contexts in that time, the resulting building designs and regional
plans were relatively modest in nature. This was typical also for
the work done at the Institute of Agricultural Building and Rural
Settlement at Graz University of Technology. During the 1980s and
1990s, professor Franz Riepl’s design ap-proach contrasted that of
the artistic architectural style of the Grazer Schule (Grazer
School), which became in-ternationally recognised during the 1970s.
In parallel, architecture students may generally have been more
excited by the nurturing of their “inner creativity” than by the
studying of anonymous buildings. Cultural land-scapes seemed to
offer less freedom for radical designs. Consequently, the strict
approach taken by Riepl was not always favored at the time, which
perhaps gave him the nickname Rüpl (freely translated: Bully).31
But, in hind-sight, it is precisely this sensible approach to
designing for the countryside that made both the education and work
done by Riepl so effective.
30 Seven editions were published under the title series
Bauernhäus-er in Bayern. Similar series on regional farmhouse types
exist for other countries as well.
31 Based on conversation with Helmut Hoffman, assistant of
Bielen-berg, 17.10.2016.
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158 ArchAeologicA Hereditas • 10
Diederik de Koning
His predecessor, professor Hinrich Bielenberg, was even more
humble about architectural form–if not indif-ferent to it.32
Although he had practiced as an architect33, he focused his
attention in Graz primarily on animal well-being and the protection
of the natural environment. Key aspects of his work involved
optimising conditions for a proper indoor living environment for
animals, which could also increase productivity of the farm34, and
the use of natural materials for the structures involved.35 On
behalf of the institute, he helped farmers from the surrounding
area to build well-functioning farms that si-multaneously respected
the well-being of their farm ani-mals. His designs may appear
conservative, but they did include high-tech ventilation solutions
and were based on a prefabricated concrete structure.36 Uniquely,
this concrete framework allowed the farmers to finish some parts of
the buildings themselves using local wood. Other work, such as the
construction of wooden trusses, was a more specialist task left to
carpenters (Fig. 4).
32 Based on conversation with Helmut Hoffman, assistant of
Bielen-berg, 17.10.2016.
33 Bielenberg 1963: 170.34 Bielenberg 1963: 156.35 See for
instance the farm he built for the family Steiner in St. Geor-
gen ob Judenburg, Austria.36 Technical drawings can be found in
the archive of Graz University
of Technology.
While farming played a role in the lives of both Riepl and
Bielenberg (both came from farming families), Riepl considered the
farm merely a part of a much larger cul-tural landscape to be
studied.37 This becomes particularly clear when we look at the work
he did with students in a course on Land Settlement or Ländliche
Siedlungswes-en. This was one of the key courses given at the
insti-tute. Others were the course on Agricultural Architecture
(Landwirtschaftliches Bauen) and Settlement Planning in Rural
Environments (Dorpsplanung). During an impres-sive twenty years,
Riepl would focus (almost) each year on a different village in
Austria for his course on Land Settlement. The work done by the
students has been carefully documented. The combination of all
these years of research (Fig. 5) offers insights on how
architectural education could be structured today on the topic of
ag-ricultural building and rural settlement.
Riepl’s approach to the course was both thorough and
methodological. The seminars done on the villages of Döllach38 and
St. Roman39 in the Spring of 1985 and 1986 are excellent examples
of this approach. In advance, meetings were held to define concrete
design tasks to-
37 Based on conversation with Peter Pretterhofer and Joan
Carlos Gomez, assistants of Riepl, 04.10.2016.
38 Riepl 1985.39 Riepl 1986.
Fig. 3. Erich Kulke with his students in front of house number 2
of the village of Lübeln, 1970 (source: Rundlingverein,
Wendland)
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159Preventive conservation of the human environment 6 •
architecture as an element of the landscape
Diederik de Koning Educating architects: the problem with
agricultural buildings
Fig. 4. Hinrich Bielenberg at the building site during the
construction of the wooden trusses (source: Archive of Graz
University of Technology)
gether with the local municipality and representatives of other
organisations such as the chamber of commerce and the spatial
planning department of the state.40 Based on the exchange of
information, the institute defined zones of interest. Some of these
zones were extremely small in scale, such as the hamlet of Weilers
Ranach near Döllach. The roughly sixty students who applied to the
course were invited for a three-day “excursion” to the site. These
three days, however, were not taken leisure-ly. Students were asked
to bring measuring equipment, drawing tools, and a camera to make a
thorough inven-tory of the assigned location with its buildings.
Groups of students worked on cataloging the built environment
meticulously. The combined effort of the students result-ed in a
detailed plan that occasionally reveals the interior of the
buildings as well. This can be seen in the inventory made for the
old village of St. Roman. The resulting map of the village seems to
suggest that, in a village, people were still very much accustomed
to meeting each other in their homes as part of the public
environment: much like Giambattista Nolli´s map of Rome, the
outlines of the interior spaces of the buildings were drawn rather
than representing the buildings as black blocks (Fig. 6).
Back in Graz, a model maker turned the inventory into a physical
model of the region. Having understood the condition of the
village, students developed various architectural proposals for the
spatial challenges set by the municipality, such as: barn
adaptations, renovations of courtyard farmhouses, or new housing
developments. Together with the model, these realistic design
propos-als were presented to the municipality in the form of an
open exhibition. A cost estimation was occasionally made for the
interventions as well, giving the beneficiar-ies an incentive to
follow-up on the designs. Consequent-ly, some of the smaller
proposals have been realised as
40 Information on the process is based on letters, notes, and
docu-ments that can be found in the archive of Graz University of
Tech-nology.
a result, although a proper documentation of these cases does
not exist. There were, however, also spin-off pro-jects that are
worth mentioning. The method followed by Riepl resulted in a
network of contacts between the various villages and the Institute
of Agricultural Architec-ture and Land Settlement. This ultimately
resulted in the realisation of various more sizable projects,
developed at the institute. An example of this is the housing
project in Sinabelkirchen, realised six years after the seminar
held for that village.
The approach followed by Riepl can be considered successful as
he managed to contribute to these vil-lages by realizing
substantial projects. Regardless of the designs themselves, the
mere fact that he was able to implement ideas based on the
knowledge gained shows how he was able to overcome the
misconception that there is no space left for an architect when
building for everyday life in the countryside.41 Although Riepl did
not put focus on the design of farms themselves, the course on
Agricultural Architecture was still taught to students during his
professorship. It is interesting to point out two farms that Riepl
did realize with his own office: the first is the Finsterwalderhof
built for the structural engineer Ul-rich Finsterwalder near
Munich, Germany, in 1972.42 The second is the redesign of the
Dambachmayrhof built in Kematen, Austria, a few years later. While
the first farm is much more of an industrial and modernist farm
complex, and contrary to what one may expect, Riepl considered it a
pleasure to redesign the fortified farm in Kematen in a much more
traditional way. Looking back at the process in 2008, however, he
pointed out that the adaptation of such a traditional farm type
would not be feasible any-more due to the increase of farming scale
these days.43 This observation is critical, as it implies that
older types are abandoned in favour of new agricultural
buildings
41 Acedaño, Pichler and Pretterhofer 2013: 4.42 Riepl 1972:
524–527.43 Meder 2008: 35.
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160 ArchAeologicA Hereditas • 10
Diederik de Koning
Fig. 5. Villages visited for the Land Settlement cause led by
Franz Riepl in Graz: (1) 1980/81: Lieboch, Styria; (2) 1981/82:
Sat-tendorf, Carinthia; (3) 1982/83: Sinabelkirchen, Styria; (4)
1983/84: Turracher Höhe, Styria/Carinthia; (5) 1984/85: Döllach,
Styria; (6) 1985/86: St. Roman, Upper Austria; (7) 1986/87: St.
Roman, Upper Austria; (8) 1987/88: Sinabelkirchen, Styria; (9)
1988/89: Villach, Carinthia; (10) 1989/90: St. Peter am
Kammersberg, Styria; (11) 1990/91: Seiersberg, Styria; (12)
1991/92: Goldegg am Pongau, Salzburg; (13) 1992/93: Bad
Kleinkirchheim, Carinthia; (14) 1993/94: Judenburg, Styria; (15)
1994/95: Bad Zell, Upper Aus-tria; (16) 1995/96: Bad Gleichenberg,
Styria; (17) 1996/97: Berg bei Rohrbach, Upper Austria; (18)
1997/98: Perg, Upper Austria; (19) 1998/99: St. Wolfgang, Upper
Austria; (20) 1999/00: Gallneukirchen, Upper Austria
Fig. 6. Detail of the survey done by the students of Franz Riepl
during the Land Settlement seminar on St. Roman (source:
unpublished report stored in the library of the Institute of
Architecture and Landscape)
elsewhere. Focusing merely on protecting our agricul-tural
heritage may be a costly endeavor that ignores new developments
that threaten the cultural landscape at large. In order to design
new and practical farms, how-ever, one needs to have a proper
understanding of their inner workings. Bielenberg, Riepl’s
predecessor, solved
this problem by designing a series of farms that were based on
new semi-industrial standardised types (agri-cultural
architecture). This approach, on the other hand, ignored the larger
impact of housing developments in villages (land settlement) that
Riepl was interested in as well as part of a bigger picture.
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161Preventive conservation of the human environment 6 •
architecture as an element of the landscape
Diederik de Koning Educating architects: the problem with
agricultural buildings
Conclusions
Riepl’s seminar on land settlement seemed to connect the dots
well at the time, and his projects are in some ways similar to work
done at other such institutes. There are connections to be made
between Franz Riepl’s aca-demic work in Graz and Helmut Gebhard’s
academic work in Munich, for instance. Riepl may have been aware of
Gebhard’s work as they both had their architect´s of-fices in
Munich, Germany, and in his lectures, he referred to student work
done under Gebhard as well. This shared approach bridged the gap
well between practice and aca-demic research. In both cases,
however, the institutes’ interest in agricultural buildings and the
countryside fad-ed when their professors retired. In Graz, the
institute’s name was changed to Regionales Bauwesen (Regional
Architecture) in 2000 and to Architektur und Landschaft
(Architecture and Landscape) in 2006. In a similar way, the
institute’s name in Munich changed to Sustainable Urbanism in 2010.
This raises the question why the topic came to a halt, and why it
is not taught and researched as intensely anymore at architecture
faculties today.
A few plausible reasons for this can be put forward. First of
all, the regional character of the topic meant that material
produced in the post-war era was written solely in the native
language. Hardly any information is available in English, hampering
the establishment of a larger international discourse. That the
international discourse discussed in this paper was limited to
Ger-many, Austria, and to some extent Switzerland, can be thus be
explained. Secondly, each of the numerous cul-tural landscapes in
Europe is highly unique. This means that it is difficult to apply
knowledge gained in one place to another, as its context may be
entirely different. The specialist knowledge of the wide range of
traditional building types remained local knowledge as well.
Conse-quently, students in Austria learned about the Austrian
farmhouse types, while students in Germany learned about Germany
farmhouse types. After all, these were most likely the conditions
the graduated students would be facing later. Thirdly, architects
seem to find it difficult to react to either the (beautiful)
anonymous architecture that once was, or the (monotonous)
industrial building industry that dominates the landscape. There is
little
room left for design. As a consequence, architects seem to opt
for a “laissez-faire” attitude regarding the topic, generally
focusing attention on less complex commis-sions in the countryside
such as the design of new villas. Finally, universities are
orienting themselves more and more on international conditions. For
instance, the In-stitute of Architecture and Landscape of Graz
University of Technology has in recent years decided to investigate
more exotic places such as Sao Paolo, Istanbul, and the African
desert instead. In parallel, it seems that archi-tecture faculties
have gradually focused their attention more on the city as object
of study. It seems no coinci-dence then, that the institutes
changed direction around the year 2008, for that is the year that
marked the first time that more people lived in cities that in the
country-side globally.
Recommendations
We could argue, however, that the topic is again relevant today,
albeit in a slightly different way. The industrial farming types
that appeared in the countryside during the second half of the 20th
century as a consequence of industrial innovations evolved so
rapidly, that it must have been tough for architects to catch up.
Farms gradu-ally increased in size, which would make every new farm
outdated relatively quickly. Consequently also, attempts to adapt
older farm types to new developments proved unsustainable. Now that
new agricultural building types have settled somewhat in their
development, we could grab this opportunity to attempt to
understand them as new anonymous buildings that are an integral
part of the cultural landscape as well. In each region, the
knowledge of traditional building culture – rather than the
build-ings themselves – may be used to make variations on these
more generic industrial buildings. Perhaps a new challenge will
emerge: rather than updating the old, ar-chitects may have to add
culture to the new. For such a challenge, we can learn from the
academic body of knowledge that was once built up at the institutes
men-tioned in this paper. Key texts may have to translated to
English and key projects may have to be analysed in order to
finally build up an international discourse on the topic.
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162 ArchAeologicA Hereditas • 10
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Notes on authors
ArchAeologicAHereditas 10403–404
Barsha Amarendra – BA, architect; Visvesvaraya National
Institute of Technology, Nagpur, India.
Cynthia Ammerman – historian and preservation strate-gist;
director of the Polis: Cultural Planning, LLC in Kansas City,
Missouri, and of the Cass County Historical Society in
Harrisonville, Missouri, USA.
Lazare Eloundou Assomo – Deputy Director of UNESCO’s World
Heritage Center, Paris, France.
Marek Barański – Dr eng., architect, conservator of histo-ric
monuments; Kielce University of Technology, Faculty of Building
Engineering and Architecture, Kielce, Poland.
Ewa M. Charowska – Dr eng., architect, historian and historic
preservationist; independent scholar working in Toronto,
Canada.
Paolo Del Bianco – President of the Romualdo Del Bian-co
Foundation, Florence, Italy.
Stefano De Caro – Dr, archaeologist; Director-General of ICCROM,
former Director-General of Antiquities with the Italian Ministry of
Cultural Heritage and Activities, Rome, Italy.
Urszula Forczek-Brataniec – Dr; lecturer at Cracow Uni-versity
of Technology, Cracow, Poland. Secretary General of the European
Region of the International Federation of Landscape Architects.
Joanna Gruszczyńska – MSc. Eng. Arch., architect; doc-toral
student at the Warsaw University of Technology, Faculty of
Architecture, Warsaw, Poland.
Eva Gutscoven – MSc; architect and conservator working in
Belgium.
Tetiana Kazantseva – Dr, Associate Professor; Depart-ment of
Design and Architecture Basics, Institute of Architecture, Lviv
Polytechnic National University, Lviv, Ukraine.
Weronika Kobylińska-Bunsch – MA, art historian; doc-toral
student at the Institute of Art History, University of Warsaw,
Warsaw, Poland.
Zbigniew Kobyliński – Professor Dr habil., archaeologist and
manager of cultural heritage; director of the Institu-te of
Archaeology of the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński Uni-versity in Warsaw,
Poland.
Diederik de Koning – MA, architect and environmental and
infractructural planner; PhD candidate at the Delft University of
Technology, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment,
Borders and Territories Research Gro-up, Delft, the
Netherlands.
Heiner Krellig – Dr, art historian, independent scholar, working
in Berlin, Germany and Venice, Italy.
Amarendra Kumar Das – Professor; Department of De-sign, Indian
Institute of Technology Guwahati, India.
Karen Lens – MA, architect; doctoral student at Hasselt
University, Belgium.
Mingqian Liu – MA, historian of art and architecture; PhD
student at the Department of Architecture, Texas A&M
University, USA.
Estefanía López Salas – Dr, architect and restorator; Professor
at the School of Architecture, University of A Coruña, Spain.
Cristiano Luchetti – Assistant Professor; American Uni-versity
of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
Ana Luengo – MA, MSc, PhD, landscape architect; former President
of the European Region of the International Federation of Landscape
Architects –IFLA EUROPE.
Nataliya Lushnikova – Dr Eng., Associate Professor; Na-tional
University of Water and Environmental Engineering, Institute of
Civil Engineering and Architecture, Department of Architecture and
Environmental Design, Rivne, Ukraine.
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404
Notes on authors
ArchAeologicA Hereditas • 10
Fernando Magalhães – PhD, anthropologist; Interdisci-plinary
Venter of Social Sciences (CICS.NOVA), Polytech-nic Institute of
Leiria’s School of Education and Social Sciences, Leiria,
Portugal.
Romano Martini – PhD, theoretician of law and politics; Adjunct
Professor at Niccolo Cusano University, Rome, Italy.
Christine McCarthy – PhD, architect and art historian; senior
lecturer at the Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand.
Louis Daniel Nebelsick – Dr habil., archaeologist; Profes-sor at
the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in War-saw, Poland.
Ewa Paszkiewicz – MA; main scenographer at The Royal Łazienki
Museum in Warsaw.
Ana Pereira Roders – Dr, architect and urban planner; Associate
Professor in Heritage and Sustainability at the Eindhoven
University of Technology, the Netherlands.
Kamil Rabiega – MA, archaeologist; PhD student in the Institute
of Archaeology, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński Uni-versity in Warsaw,
Poland.
Almir Francisco Reis – Dr, urban planner; Professor at the
Federal University of Santa Catarina in Florianópolis, Brazil.
Petro Rychkov – Dr, architect; Professor at the Lublin
University of Technology, Faculty of Civil Engineering and
Architecture, Department of Conservation of Built Heritage, Lublin,
Poland.
Juan Alejandro Saldarriaga Sierra – Dr, cultural geogra-pher;
teacher at the Faculty of Architecture of the Natio-nal University
of Colombia in Medellin, Colombia.
Carinna Soares de Sousa – BA, architect and urban de-signer; MA
student in urban planning at the Federal Uni-versity of Santa
Catarina in Florianópolis, Brazil.
Aleksandra Stępniewska – MA student of architecture at the
University of Social Sciences in Warsaw, Poland.
Bishnu Tamuli – Doctoral student at the Department of Design,
Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India.
Işılay Tiarnagh Sheridan – BA, MSc, architect; research
assistant at the İzmir Institute of Technology in Faculty of
Architecture, Izmir, Turkey.
Andrzej Tomaszewski (1934-2010) – Professor dr habil., historian
of art and culture, architect, urban planner, in-vestigator of
Medieval architecture and art; director of ICCROM (1988-1992),
General Conservator of Poland (1995-1999).
Koen Van Balen – Professor at the Catholic University of Leuven
and director of the Raymond Lemaire Internatio-nal Centre for
Conservation, Belgium.
Nikolaas Vande Keere – MA, civil engineer architect; Professor
in charge of the design studio of the Interna-tional Master of
Interior Architecture on Adaptive Reuse at the Hasselt University,
Belgium.
Ingrida Veliutė – Dr; lecturer at the Vytautas Magnus University
Faculty of Arts and member of ICOMOS Lithu-ania.
Tony Williams – former President of the Irish Landscape
Institute and President of The European Region of the International
Federation of Landscape Architects.
Anna Wiśnicka – Dr, design historian; teacher at the In-stitute
of Art History of the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in
Warsaw, Poland.
Dominik Ziarkowski – Dr, art historian; Cracow Universi-ty of
Economics. Chair of Tourism, Cracow, Poland.