Negotiating Ungers 3. The Self-Help Housing System and the Construction of Communities.
Discussion and Book Launch
10 June 2025, 19:00
et al
Architect-run space
Rue des Tanneurs 137
1000 Brussels
In 1972, German architect Oswald Mathias Ungers and his students at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, developed a prototype for a Self-Help Housing System (S-HHS). Shortly before, Ungers and his wife Liselotte had begun a research project on utopian communities in the United States; the study was published in 1972 under the title “Communes in the New World 1740-1972”. Taken together, both projects point to the processual character and the broad agencies involved in architectural production.
This third publication in the series is developed from research that began with a summer school at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2021 and focuses on the negotiation between systematic and inventive approaches and between the levels of the social and the common of both projects. With an essay by Gerardo Brown-Manrique, texts by Lara Schrijver, Cédric Libert, Cornelia Escher, Lars Fischer and others, and an interview with Christoph Heinemann, Christoph Schmidt and Jesko Fezer.
The publication, published by common books, was made possible with the support of KU Leuven, Faculty of Architecture, Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft.