Photo: © Yohan Zerdoun.
City Seminar Lecture: Daniel Blum
Daniel Blum, a practicing architect and educator based in Switzerland, will deliver a City Seminar lecture titled The House and the City. The event, which is free and open to the public, is co-sponsored by The Divided City initiative and organized by assistant professor Petra Kempf.
Blum has worked as an academic assistant at the ETH and has been teaching regularly at various universities since 2014, including the Dessau International Architecture School among many others. He is currently teaching a design studio at the Münster School of Architecture. His work has been exhibited widely through venues such as the Venice Biennale and the Moscow National Architecture Museum. Blum worked with David Chipperfield Architects in London and Diener & Diener Architects in Basel before he became head of the design department at Itten + Brechbühl in Basel in 2017.
About the Lecture
Europe is built. More than two-thirds of the European population lives in cities. This makes the city a “conditio sine qua non” for European architecture. We never face a tabula rasa condition, neither physically nor intellectually.
The resilience of the European city is deeply rooted in its ability to transform, to adapt, to recover. This constant evolutionary process over centuries is transcending built fabric to what we call identity, the individual character of each city, that is often praised but that cannot be produced as a whole.
In this sense, each house can be regarded as a tone in the symphony (or cacophony) of a city. Every new house, every refurbishment is a change in the city fabric that influences its overall tune.
In our recent work, we are reflecting this responsibility towards the city: Each house is an attempt to balance private interests with the demands of the city in a specific place. In this reflection on specific local constellations (always with the city as protagonist), we regard each house as an opportunity to add, adjust, or even heal the fabric of the city in its constant evolution driven by social, economic and cultural forces.
—Daniel Blum, March 2022