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Dissertation
Adidas' world of work: an architectural assessment of a 21st century company town
Authors: --- --- ---
Year: 2022 Publisher: Leuven KU Leuven. Faculteit Architectuur

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Abstract

Company towns were an efficient model for accommodating work and living in the 19th and 20th centuries. The shift in labour from material to immaterial and, more recently, the digital revolution have made working from home possible, making the company town model redundant. However, suitable, affordable housing is harder to find nowadays, especially when people also work from home. Employers, in turn, have difficulty attracting and retaining suitable employees. The provision of housing can be advantageous for both employee and employer. This dissertation aims to research how the company town model, integrating labour and living on a large scale, is relevant to tackle the previously mentioned problems and in which ways it can regain relevance. Specifically, it investigates whether it in light of the shift in labour is a relevant model to accommodate immaterial, white collar work. In this context, immaterial work is work that can be done from home. To test the hypothesis that the model is relevant again, a research case was picked to be investigated: the Adidas company headquarters in rural Germany. The headquarters are a company town model and facilitate mostly immaterial work. Firstly, there was a spatial analysis carried out to understand the site, its development and motivations. Secondly and thirdly, an analysis of the employer’s vision and interviews with employees working at the headquarters were conducted. The results showed that it is a complex matter, in which for example the model worked for one employee for a certain reason, and not for another because of that very reason. Although it might be interesting for Adidas to focus on housing, they have no future plans at the moment. As a result, the outcome shows that the company town model is not (very) relevant to tackle previous problems of housing. If the model is to gain relevance, the working week, for example, needs to be approached with more flexibility, with employees staying overnight a few days a month in the office.

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Dissertation
Housing economies of scale : an architectural assessment of three historic case studies in London
Authors: --- --- ---
Year: 2023 Publisher: Brussels Eigen beheer

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It is largely assumed that large-scale housing has been an outright failure. The typical images that we have of mass housing have been derived from canonical but polarising projects, the wet dreams of megalomaniacal architectural figures and demonising rhetoric. Since large-scale, coordinated housing solutions are politically incorrect, the types of actions celebrated today tend towards the small: self-help models which risk only serving to validate business as usual. Yet we do not have such a strong understanding of how scale actually affects housing. This PhD project asks if there are salvageable features of scale. It reassesses practices from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, centring on the concept of "economies of scale": how the scale of organisations affects the architecture and economy of housing. London serves as the geographic focus, as a city with a rich history of severe housing crises and different models of housing provision within a capitalist system—models which informed and were informed by models elsewhere. The project focuses on three case studies: the Peabody Trust, a philanthropic developer in the age of industrial overcrowding; John Laing & Son, a construction firm and speculative builder during interwar shortages; and the London County Council's Architect's Department, a municipal design office which oversaw the post-war reconstruction of the capital. Using institutional archival material and redrawing, the project compares these three case studies to the status quo of their respective times, demonstrating the critical role that scale has played in yielding new housing methods. These case studies challenge the stereotype that big practices are by default cumbersome, callous and domineering. They reveal how scale allowed the three practices to account for a variety of concerns which are normally left 'external' to the economy of a housing project, from worker welfare to the inclusion of collective facilities. It allowed for costs—the costs of durable buildings or the costs of innovative research—to be amortised across long timeframes, making it possible to plan and build for the long term. And it established protocols for collaborative work, incorporating experts and even inhabitants into networks of circulating information. On the other hand, big endeavours required the cooperation of many powerful stakeholders, and ultimately represented the interests of capital and accumulation. The dissertation is addressed to architects and policymakers, to reopen a discourse on scale which has been an almost taboo subject in recent years, and it is addressed to architectural historians, to reveal how architecture is always in the service of economic and political constructions.

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Book
The claim for a good life

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Abstract

The Claim for a Good Life is a book in a series of publications related to The Good Life, a program dedicated to exploring the relationship of the built environment to collective pursuits, personal aspirations, and our contemporary world.The booklet is published on the occasion of the graduation of Berlage Generation 26. Designed by the award-winning Joris Kritis The Claim for a Good Life features ten explorations of architectural goodness, with written contributions including those from Ido Avissar (LIST), Thomas Weaver (AA), and TU Delft Professors Tom Avermaete, Michiel Riedijk (Neutelings Riedijk), Kees Kaan (KAAN Architecten), Dick van Gameren (Mecanoo) and Daniel Rosbottom (DRDHA).

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