Michael Hensel

TYPE? FURTHER
REFLECTIONS ON
WHAT THE EXTENDED
TYPE? THRESHOLD
Michael Hensel draws a parallel between the present and a
moment in the early 1990s when typology seemed poised to
come to the fore. He highlights how despite a promising start
this interest slipped away and was supplanted by an obsession
with topography and highly complex surfaces, leading to a
primacy of the individual built form over the urban.

56
This issue of 2 offers an opportunity to revisit a critical yet Johan Bettum, Michael Hensel, Chul Kong and Nopadol
Limwatankul, A Thousand Grounds: Tectonic Landscape –
overlooked juncture in the early 1990s, a time of economic Spreebogen, A New Governmental Centre for Berlin Urban Design
Study, Graduate Design Programme (tutors: Jeffrey Kipnis and
downturn during which swift and significant changes in Don Bates), Architectural Association, London, 1992–3
architectural theory and experimentation occurred. The opposite: Conceptual model indicating the folding of landscape
and built mass into one another. below: Programme and event map
consequences of these changes continue to greatly affect showing all systems that organise the site and its potential for use
practice and the built environment today and relate to questions over time. below: Axonometric indicating spatial transitions and
degrees of interiority in conjunction with landscape surfaces and
of discrete form and typology in architecture. The aim of other spatial elements such as plantation fields and densities.
this article is to re-examine this juncture and its ongoing
repercussions, as well as bringing to attention an immense, yet
missed, opportunity for a fundamental revision of the product of
architectural and urban design practice.
The account brings together a more general discussion as
well as personal experiences and realisations over two decades.
It commences with the decision in 1992 to join the then newly
established graduate design programme at the Architectural
Association (AA) in London directed by Jeffrey Kipnis and
Don Bates. The programme introduced a series of radical
ideas and design experiments, the theoretical basis of which is
rooted in Kipnis’ seminal article ‘Towards a New Architecture’
published in 1 Folding in Architecture in 1993.1 Here, Kipnis
launched a fundamental critique of Postmodern practice, which
contained an elaboration of five points or principles aimed at
overcoming collage as the then prevailing mode of design (in
direct response to an analogous attempt by Roberto Mangabeira
Unger during the ANYONE conference in 1990).2 Alongside
this was his discussion of two differing modes of actualising the
principles: DeFormation, with an emphasis on the articulation
of monolithic built form, and InFormation, with an emphasis
on questions of programme while de-emphasising form. In
rejecting Postmodern collage, Kipnis offered a detailed account
of proposed design concepts and methods that would result
in designs with entirely new characteristics or, to use his own
expression, new architectural ‘effects’.3
As graduate students we were as astounded as we were
intrigued by the raw potential of this discourse. Naturally we
wished to examine the projects cited in Kipnis’ article. While
it was clear that the DeFormationist schemes were poised
entirely outside of the canon of established architectural
typologies, they were as unbuilt as they were underpublished,
and their material articulation, the relation of the built volume
to the ground and the context were difficult to grasp. In the
context of the new graduate design programme we aimed to
tackle this problem, yet with the added aim of the eventual
ultimate dissolution of built form into a tectonic landscape
that would no longer be based on a traditional process of
subdividing the site, allocating plots and floor-area ratios in
order then to allocate typologies and extrude discrete volumes.
A technique termed ‘grafting’4 was used to concurrently derive
multiple organisational layers for an urban and architectural
design from a heterogeneous graphic space.
The underlying interest derived from Kipnis’ fascination
with the American artist Jasper Johns’ ‘crosshatch’ paintings
that defied any attempt at traditional decomposition into
fore-, middle- and background. Instead the paintings
constituted, in Kipnis’ view, the elaboration of a new and deep
middle-ground. If an analogous architecture were possible,
this would entail that built form no longer be extruded into a
figure-ground relation but, instead, built mass and landscape
surface would engage in the formation of a heterogeneous and
57
 If an analogous architecture were
possible, this would entail that built
form no longer be extruded into a figure-
ground relation but, instead, built mass
and landscape surface would engage in
the formation of a heterogeneous and
coherent amalgam that would no longer
be decomposable.
coherent amalgam that would no longer be decomposable.
Although it was clear that developing an architectural
analogue to Johns’ ‘new middle-ground’ was not possible
in a singular project, let alone a graduate design thesis,
my colleagues Johan Bettum, Chul Kong and Nopadol
Limwatankul and I nevertheless embarked on this attempt
under the keen supervision of Kipnis and Bates.
The international Spreebogen competition for a new
governmental centre in Berlin was chosen as the context for
the project as it offered the opportunity to concurrently pursue
an urban, landscape and architectural design project. Based
on a ‘graft’ developed by our colleague Amna Emir and the
design approach elaborated by Kipnis, several key items were
produced to describe the project intentions: 1) a programme
and event map that contained information about (planned
and unplanned) activities, circulation, landscape items and
surfaces for programme and public appropriation, assembly
fields, time-specific plantation schemes and lighting systems,
river regulation and flooding areas – in short all systems that
organise the site and its potential for use over time;5 2) an
axonometric that elaborated spatial transitions and degrees of
interiority in conjunction with landscape surfaces that make
up the tectonic landscape together with other spatial elements
such as plantation fields and densities; and 3) a conceptual
model that indicated the folding of landscape and built mass
into one another, using colour-coding for the various surface
systems that make up the tectonic landscape. Eventually,
however, we did not succeed in defining the actual tectonic of
the intended tectonic landscape, though the foundation for a
new series of experimentations towards this aim had been laid.
The significance of the experiment is not in its apparent
proximity to what has come to be termed ‘landscape
urbanism’, but instead in its organisation of the various items
and systems that would eventually culminate in an urban
and architectural project that redefines a heterogeneous
spatial scheme based on extended spatial transitions and
the ultimate extension and fine dissolution of the material
threshold which had previously resulted in the dichotomous
division of the figure from the ground and the inside from
the outside – in short the ushering in of the end of type. In
this might lie perhaps one of the greatest potentials with
regard to Kipnis’ heralded emergence of new institutional
‘form’ and social formations. It only dawned on us much
more recently that there would have been some rather
interesting precursors to this to be found throughout
architectural history, which might have served to inform an
initial approach towards articulating a material resolution for
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AA Graduate Design Group, Changliu Grouing Area Masterplan,
Haikou, Hanian Island, China, Graduate Design Programme
(tutors: Jeffrey Kipnis, Bahram Shirdel and Michael Hensel),
Architectural Association, London, 1993–4
opposite top: 1/5,000 model of the masterplan for a new city
for 600,000 inhabitants at 70 per cent of the final density.
The model indicates building volumes and densities, road and
harbour infrastructure, green and reserved areas, and in the
centre (in blue) the Central Business District.
opposite bottom: 1/ 20,000 masterplan showing single-,
mixed-, multiple- and differential-use areas, road, rail and
harbour infrastructure, parks and landscape elements, 40
integrated farmer’s and fishermen’s villages, and reserved
land for future development.
below left: Various plan diagrams elaborating different
combinations of buildings and hard and soft landscape. The
diagrams indicate potentials for folding buildings and landscape
into one another. The left and right perimeters are characterised
by standard piloti buildings raised from the ground, while the
landscaped area along the central axis shows an increasing degree
of a more complex relationship between landscape and buildings.
below right: Sectional sequence elaborating the transition from the
standard piloti building typology to the areas where buildings and
landscape fold into one another.
59
 Chris Lee, Gallery Project for Spitalfields Market, London, AA
Diploma Unit 4 (tutors: Ben van Berkel and Michael Hensel),
Architectural Association, London, 1995–6
below Left: 1/100 model showing the partly burrowed spatial
organisation of the gallery scheme inspired by Greg Lynn’s
theoretical elaborations on differential gravities. The spatial scheme
is based on relinquishing the dichotomous division between figure
and ground, which become indivisible and non-decomposable.
Right: Plan organisation of the gallery project showing the various
inclined circulation surfaces inspired by Paul Virilio’s and Claude
Parent’s notion of oblique space.

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6 0
Nasrin Kalbasi and Dimitrios Tsigos, Copenhagen
Playhouse Competition, Copenhagen, Denmark, AA
Diploma Unit 4 (tutors: Michael Hensel and Ludo
Grooteman), Architectural Association, London, 2001–02
below: Two views of the digital model showing the transitions from
closed surfaces to the striated organisation of the envelope and
the semi-burrowed multiple ground configuration engendered by
the continuous surface. opposite, bottom left: Geometric study
of striation density, orientation and curvature and the resultant
viewpoint-dependent visual transparency of the envelope. opposite,
bottom right: Study of gradual size transitions of the striated
envelope and its smooth transformation into furniture-scale and
ergonomics-related requirements. In this scheme the rotation of the
elements along their longitudinal axis occurs in the areas of size
transitions to accommodate the furnishing of space on a human
scale. In doing so the design diverges from the striation projects of
Bahram Shirdel and the sculptural works of Raimo Utriainen which
are characterised by parallel and straight elements.

the scheme.6 With this project the best we could achieve

was to help make more specific the questions regarding the
articulation of a tectonic landscape. What was to follow,
however, was the swift and ultimate shift away from what
had just come into our grasp.
Numerous influences and developments concurred in
time with our efforts described above. Various publications,
symposia, teaching programmes and projects of this and
the directly following period attest to a shift in interest
away from typology towards both topography and topology.
While the former might suggest a relationship to the above,
the latter swiftly shifted back towards the articulation of
exotic yet discrete built form. In the wake of this shift, in
the following year’s AA’s graduate design programme, then
co-directed by Kipnis and Bahram Shirdel, the emphasis
also shifted. The possibility of working on a life project of
a masterplan for a new city in China enforced a faster pace
of experimentation and production. In tandem with this
development, Kipnis and Shirdel developed a new interest
in the group form or field condition of flocks and swarms, in
particular schools of fish.
While this constitutes a weak form with smooth edges,
the figure nevertheless consists of discrete elements that are
all similar yet individual; in other words coherent yet varied.7
The masterplan for the new city in China that was developed
by the AA’s graduate design group in 1993–4 shows then
a clear return to buildings as figures set firmly against the
ground. Again the scheme was developed from a grafted
graphic space, yet, while the heterogeneous articulation
and use of the datum prevails, the landscaped surface and
the built volumes are in general clearly separated. While
some surfaces were designed to be continuous from exterior
to interior or from envelope to landscape, these occasions
remained largely gestural and the discreteness of the volumes
was left intact. This characteristic can also be identified in
some of the key projects of the time, for instance FOA’s
Yokohama Ferry Terminal (1994), which constitutes a
variation of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye diagram (1928–9)
with a more articulated roof garden surface that continues as
a circulation surface and connects to the ground of the city,
though, alas, the terminal constitutes a discrete form.
On a larger scale it is interesting to observe that the
swarm or school of fish actually prevailed in the form of
current discourses of so-called parametric urbanism. If
one examines, for instance, Zaha Hadid’s prize-winning
masterplan for Kartal in Istanbul (2006) it is clear that a
specific block typology was computationally (parametrically)
61
1
 varied so as to constitute a group of discrete buildings that
are similar yet individually different. Such projects invariably
follow a traditional process of urban planning: a (deformed)
grid serves to define roads and plots, the floor-area ratio and
required floor areas are established together with the building
typology (for example, the courtyard block), and the building
forms are defined through some computational manipulation.
However, one significant difference emerges: since the interior
organisation needs to fulfil developer expectations, the
architectural project becomes one of a total exterior necessarily
articulated by one practice in order to maintain a coherent
appearance to fulfil the criteria of similarity and variation.
In order to elaborate the latter it is necessary to trace back
to a second important shift in interest. This is best exemplified
through another key moment in Kipnis’ seminal writings,
which focuses on the works of Herzog & de Meuron.8 Here
Kipnis revised his former position vis-à-vis Herzog & de
Meuron’s work on the example of their Signal Box (Basel,
1995) project, highlighting the effects emanating from the
copper-strip skin laid over the actual climate envelope of
the building. Kipnis then distinguished ornamentation from
cosmetics, characterising the former as discrete aesthetic
entities and the latter as fields and as atmospheric. His praise
was nothing short of a striking foresight of what was to follow:
the parametrically varied pattern that today characterises the
parametric buildings of parametric urbanism, schools of fish
with similar yet varied scales that ‘populate’ similar yet varied
bodies, the ultimate exercise in superficiality that claims the
thinness of the exterior skin as the sole architectural project.
Meanwhile, those of us who were puzzled enough to
stay behind the fast pace of fashion and try to tackle the
questions that had arisen from the thoughts and experiments
of the early 1990s also got sidetracked. In attempting to
address the question of the extended and dissolved material
threshold of the tectonic landscape, attention was drawn to
material organisations on increasingly smaller scales, leading
eventually to the detailed elaboration of material systems and
their interaction with the environment.9 In this context the
question of spatial transitions and extended threshold shifted
from material to environmental or energetic gradients. For
example, a strong interest in Shirdel’s concept of striation,10
a monolithic form articulated as sets of parallel bars, led to
a series of student projects that examined the possibility of
articulating the built volume, the adjacent landscape surfaces
and the furnishing of the public spaces from the same, yet
scaled, set of parallel bars to projects that eventually deployed
strips of material in a much more articulated manner to define
spaces and microclimatic conditions.
Having arrived here it is very interesting indeed to
reconnect the project of the extended environmental threshold
with the project of the tectonic landscape. Both offer a
heterogeneous space based on gradient conditions over a
variety of scales. The tectonic landscape enables a versatile
distribution of all elements and systems that are different in
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Daniel Coll i Capdevila, Strip-Morphologies, AA Diploma
Unit 4 (tutors: Michael Hensel and Achim Menges),
Architectural Association, London, 2004–05
opposite top: The controlled deformation of strips made from
different materials delivers the limits to the manipulation of an
associative model. The top row shows a component made from
three strips and their relationship to an environmental input; that
is, light or sound. The middle row shows the same for a larger
arrangement of strips. The bottom row shows the subdivision
of the large arrangement into smaller areas that can each be
articulated in a coherent and interrelated manner in response
to a variety of environmental stimuli. In this way the material
threshold can become extensive rather then remaining a hard
division between inside and outside. opposite bottom: This sample
assembly with synclastic and anticlastic surface curvature shows a
complex arrangement of bent and twisted strips.
Dimitrios Tsigos and Hani Fallaha, Temporal Housing Study, The
Netherlands, AA Diploma Unit 4 (tutors: Michael Hensel and
Ludo Grooteman), London, Architectural Association, 2002–03
below left: Four samples of an extensive catalogue of geometric
manipulations of the material strips and the resulting arrays based
on preceding material experiments.
below right: Longitudinal section and two planar sections
displaying the striated tectonic scheme of the project. Due to
the small scale of the housing unit, the material strips that make
up the surface always relate to the scale of the human body.
Rotation of the strips along their longitudinal axis therefore occurs
throughout the scheme.
63
 Defne Sunguroğlu Hensel with Øyvind Andreassen and Emma
MM Wingstedt, Extended Theshold Research, Oslo School of
Architecture and Design (AHO) and the Norwegian Defence
Research Establishment (FFI), Kjeller, Norway, 2010
Threshold articulation and environmental performance analysis
of the Baghdad kiosk (Bağdad Köşkü) (1638–39) at the Forth
Courtyard (Sofa-I Hümâyûn: The Imperial Sofa) of Topkapı
Palace in Istanbul, Turkey. Left: Vertical and horizontal sectional
sequences indicating the intricate articulation and variation of the
combined spatial and material deep threshold of the kiosk. Right:
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis of airflow velocities,
pressure zones and turbulent kinetic energy indicating the
environmental effects and interaction of the kiosk. This approach
extends the question of the spatial and material organisation of the
building threshold to its exchange with the local environment.

64

The microclimatic
differentiation of the extended
environmental threshold
enables greater heterogeneity
in the choice of conditions for
activities of a lesser a-priori
programmed scheme.
kind into a coherent organisation, freed from the dictate of
strict conformity and phasing based on extrinsic organisational
devices such as the grid. In doing so it ultimately differs from
parametric urbanism, which is characterised solely by variation
and differences in degree. The microclimatic differentiation
of the extended environmental threshold enables greater
heterogeneity in the choice of conditions for activities of a
lesser a-priori programmed scheme. All this does not deny
the production of new effects, but instead strives for it, for
the sake of the possibility of an architecture that engenders
new social formations and a space that is equally articulated
by both tectonics and environment. This might then result in
an architecture that would either leave the current notion of
type behind or forge an entirely different one, perhaps one of
different types of extended spatial and environmental threshold
conditions as discussed above.11 To not miss this opportunity
requires the stamina to abide by the strenuously slow pace
of dedicated research, the will to look both backwards and
forwards to construct a rich discourse, to resist the empty lure of
current trends and, in so doing, to extend potentials and missed
opportunities of the distant and recent past with the complex
design problems of today and tomorrow.
Cases of missed opportunities exist in part due to the retreat
of leading history and theory programmes around the world
into self-imposed solipsism. Moreover, the heydays of the early
2000s turbo-capitalism saw the self-declared avant-garde follow
suit and drop valid discourse in favour of cooking up funny-
shaped buildings in Dubai, China or wherever else everything
goes. Together these developments have led to fragmentary
pseudo-discourses and the marginalisation of architectural
debate and practice. However, given that the beginning of the
approaches and agendas described here was located at a time of
strong economic downturn, it may seem that we are just now in
the middle of another opportunity. Will we miss it again? 1
Notes
1. J Kipnis, ‘Towards a New Architecture’, 1 Folding in Architecture, April
2003, pp 40–9.
2. RM Unger, ‘The Better Futures of Architecture’, Anyone, Rizzoli (New York),
1991, pp 30–6.
3. To elaborate all these interesting aspects in detail is not possible in
the context of this short article. The interested reader may refer to the
quoted literature.
4. Owing to Jeffrey Kipnis, Peter Eisenman and Bahram Shirdel.
5. Owing to Bernard Tschumi, Rem Koolhaas and influential aspects of French
landscape design of the early 1990s.
6. M Hensel and D Sunguroğlu Hensel, ‘The Extended Threshold I:
Nomadism, Settlements and the Defiance of Figure-Ground’, 1 Turkey: At the
Threshold, Jan/Feb 2010, pp 14–19.
7. For a succinct theoretical elaboration see S Allen, ‘From Object to Field:
Field Conditions in Architecture and Urbanism’, 1 Architecture after
Geometry, 1997, pp 24–31.
8. J Kipnis, ‘The Cunning of Cosmetics: A Personal Reflection on the
Architecture of Herzog and de Meuron’, El Croquis, Vol 84, 1997.
9. See, for instance: M Hensel and A Menges, ‘The Heterogeneous Space of
Morpho-Ecologies’. Space Reader: Heterogeneous Space in Architecture,
John Wiley & Sons (London), 2009, pp 195–215.
10. Shirdel’s interest originated from the detailed study of the artworks and
installations of the Finnish sculptor Raimo Utriainen.
11. For a detailed discussion see, for instance: M Hensel and D Sunguroğlu
Hensel, ‘The Extended Threshold I, op cit; ‘The Extended Threshold II: The
Articulated Threshold’, 1 Turkey: At the Threshold, Jan/Feb 2010, pp
20–5; ‘The Extended Threshold III: Auxiliary Architectures’, 1 Turkey: At the
Threshold, Jan/Feb 2010, pp 76–83.
Text © 2011 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 56-59 © Michael Hensel, AAGDG; p
60(t) © Christopher CM Lee; pp 60(b), 61 © Dimitri Tsigos and Nasrin Kalbasi; p 62 ©
Daniel Coll I Capdevila; p 63 © Dmitri Tsigos and Hani Fallaha; p 64 © Defne Sunguroglu
Hensel and Michael Hensel
65