Made Default

“There is probably no architect who has not used Neufert, whether as a didactic tool or as a volume of references. It contains all the necessary information to design and execute works of architecture.” In 1936, it was first published Ernst Neufert’s Architects’ Data (Bauentwurfslehre) best known colloquially as “Neufert.” As Reinier de Graaf states, “Neufert” may be the most influential architectural book of the 20th century. A manual conceived as a compendium of dimensional and spatial solutions to help in initial building design stages providing extensive information regarding design requirements such as ergonomics, dimensions, layouts, construction details, etc. constituting a direct relationship between the human body and the spaces and objects which surround it.

The question then arises, whose body is this? The descriptions within “Neufert,” and similar manuals like Architectural Graphic Standards, Modulor, and The Measure of Man: Human Factors of Design, follow the modern dream of an optimized, objective, and universal built environment. However, these idealized design rules are constructions created through a Eurocentric, reductionist, and masculine Occident that controls the production of images in the world and that chooses irremediable those that legitimize its vision. That is to say that the creation of these manuals, encyclopedia, and guidebooks are acts of design, more specifically they design the act of designing.

The manual is a manifesto, “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions–in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements."

This seminar will be concerned with drafting its own manifesto. An interrogation into and redesign of domestic objects and the surrounding room. A gesamtkunstwerk which puts to question to the rituals of everyday life. As a manual for design, these rules will not only transform the object but also the subject emphasizing the idea of the body as a social and political construction. The drafting of guides and standards is, first and foremost, a cultural act.

“We are and always have been continuously reshaped by the artifacts we shape, to which we ask: who designed the lives we live today? What are the forms of life we inhabit, and what new forms are currently being designed? Where are the sites, and what are the techniques, to design others?”

Students: Diana Ashkanani, Man Pok Chan, Yunzhen Chen, Nuti Dhaval Dave, Anna Drewitz, Juan Carlos Franco, He He, Luqi Jia, Chengcheng Jiang, Andrew Juhoon Kim, Anqi Li, Mingyuan Liu, Yining Mao, Wanlu Ni, Zhijun Peng, Zicheng Qu, Xiaoyang Shi, Miao Wang, Yifan Wen, Junxi Wu, Shuying Xi, Yi Yang, Peng Zhang, Rui Zhang, Xiaodan Zhang, Yuhan Zhang, and Jingdan Zhu.