Moving architectures. Visualizing and Analyzing Relationships in 19th century Architectural Competitions in Switzerland

Abstract

Our cities are changing and this implies changes in many fields of our activities, research and everyday life. Architecture, urban design and planning are the main tools for making design decisions which structure and articulate these transformations. The problem we are dealing with, when we are talking about the creation of our cities, is to visualise the complexity of urban procedures and the ‘urban futures’ that they ‘produce’.
In our collaboration between the disciplines of human geography and informatics we worked on the collection of historical data about architectural competitions held in Switzerland in the nineteenth century. We analysed these historical data in order to better understand how cities were created and developed; in other words, we addressed this complex problem using architectural competitions as an epistemic vehicle. Competitions are platforms for communication where different people (architects, clients, engineering and financial specialists, etc.) and objects (designs, models, competition briefs, etc.) come together, and where decisions are made about the future urban environment. We have developed a visualisation tool, which is able to represent the disparity of an architectural competition in space and in time: the networks it brings together, the actors it involves, their role and their spatiotemporal trajectories. Our visualisation tool presents the information as a navigable landscape enabling the interactive manipulation of the visual interface and leading to a deeper understanding and knowledge discovery.
In the article, we discuss the challenges associated with the analysis of the data on architectural competitions, present our visual analytics tool and the findings it enables. Finally, we elaborate on the advantages and potentials of our interdisciplinary collaboration.