ABSTRACT
Can material interest and tectonic aspiration inform the urban scale and how can urban context call for tectonic qualities in ordinary buildings? Can we speak of an ‘ecology of urban tectonics’ where the scale of the urban context relates to the tectonic scale of construction details? These questions are examined in selected work by the Danish Architect, Hans Christian Hansen (1901–1978). His buildings hold a strong building culture that is deeply rooted in a regional understanding of materials, traditions of construction and the urban context. Hansen addressed construction and material use in ordinary buildings and translated the challenges of contemporary building industry into long lasting architectural designs. One could argue that his buildings define an ecological tectonic imperative by addressing the urban scale in a direct un-impressed, but highly original manner – in this case defined as an ‘urban tectonic’ approach. The paper analyses two ordinary building to discuss whether Hansen’s ‘urban tectonic’ can inform the challenges of todays everyday architecture – a growing inability to utilize construction elements as spatial features that link the urban fabric to the human scale.
