updated to account for new instruments and procedures. These changes shook up the much slower design process of the buildings that were to house the devices. Fast innovation cycles inspired the conceptual disassembly of the building as object into an accumulation of layers with different life cycles. John Weeks (1921-2005), architect and lecturer at University College London, designed several hospitals and researched their performance requirements. His work contributed to the re-conceptualization of the building not as an object, but as a series of layers with different life cycles. He specifically disconnected the permanent layer of the building, namely its structure and elevation, from any relation to the specific functional performance criteria required for the interior of the building. Weeks, with his partner Richard Llewellyn-Davies, worked for the Nuffield Foundation, which was tasked with the development of innovations in hospital organization, management, and architecture. Weeks published his findings as “Indeterminate Architecture” (1963)5 in the periodical of the Bartlett School where he taught. He followed up with an article called “Endless Architecture” (1951)6, which was accompanied its pragmatic counterpart, a book by Richard Llewellyn-Davies called Building Elements (1956).7 In these publications, they articulated the structure-infill distinction for the first time. “It was becoming difficult already in the eighteenth century to compose buildings to rule, even though functional requirements were less mechanically demanding than today and buildings, like institutions, were thought to be permanent… A building for an indeterminate brief cannot then adhere to a finite geometric control system. The ideal of unity through constant relationships cannot be achieved. Such a building will be geometrically aformal. What design rules, if any, are appropriate? […]The fixed elements, then, were from the beginning the shape of the street system and the widths of the departmental buildings. The lengths of these were indeterminate[…] Criteria for the design of the external skin of the building included the need for a column-free inner face which would enable partitions to be positioned freely…it was decided to use a structural mullion system […] the mullions would then be used in numbers and clustered in a
Under the Influence
5. John Weeks, “Indeterminate Architecture,” Transactions of the Bartlett Society 2 (1963-4): 83-206. 6. Richard Llewellyn-Davies and John Weeks, “Endless Architecture,” Architectural Association Journal (July 1951): 106 -112. 7. Richard Llewellyn-Davies and D.J. Petty, Building Elements, foreword by W.A. Allen, vol. 3 of Modern Building Construction series (London: Architectural Press, 1956).
Reference: Diagoon Houses, Herman Hertzberger, The Netherlands
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