Constructing Building Enclosures

Associate Professor of Architecture, Matt Hall, has been consistently recognized for his extensive knowledge and research of on the work of Swedish architects Bernt Nyberg and Sigurd Lewerentz. He served as the guest editor and photographer for the 2017 A+U, Japan Architecture & Urbanism feature on Bernt Nyberg and has lectured and exhibited internationally on the work with a diverse group of collaborators. Hall is the director of the Scandinavia Study Abroad program in partnership with The Aarhus School of Architecture, in Aarhus, Denmark, a program for third year architecture students consisting of three weeks of research and travel through Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland. Most recently, he contributed an essay, “Intent vs. Interpretation: the Prosaic Poetics of Lewerentz & Nyberg” to Constructing Building Enclosures, a collection of thirteen original essays by interdisciplinary scholars.

Constructing Building Enclosures offers a critical look at the development, and the purpose, of building technology within a design framework, and investigates and interrogates tensions that arise between the disciplines of architecture and engineering as they wrestled with technology and building cultures that evolved to deliver structures in the modern era. Through two distinct sections, the essays first challenge notions of the boundaries between architecture, engineering and construction, and  follow with essays discussing particular projects as precedence.

Hall’s essay falls within the second section of the book, titled “Assembling Constructions.” Included among compositions that investigate twentieth-century building projects by exploring technological and aesthetic boundaries of postwar modernism, this section discusses buildings such as Louis Kahn’s Weiss House, Minoru Yamasaki’s Science Center, Sigurd Lewerentz’s Chapel of Hope uncovering them as lessons relevant to enclosure design that are typically overlooked.

Edited by registered architect and Temple University Assistant Professor, Clifton Fordham,  Constructing Building Enclosures focuses on disrupting common assumptions of how people understand history, and the collection may be considered an important read for students, educators and researchers within architectural history, construction history, building technology and design.