CHAIR OF ARCHITECTURE
AND URBAN DESIGN —
PROF. KEES CHRISTIAANSE

RESEARCH

REMOTE CONTROL - GRAND URBAN RULES

doctoral research project 2005-2009

Dr. Dipl.-Ing. Alexander Lehnerer

elective: Remote Control

elective: Remote Control 2

doctoral thesis:

GRAND URBAN RULES

Alex Lehnerer

Designed by Joost Grootens

010 publishers, Amsterdam

Grand Urban Rules is a tribute to the city’s will to form, manifest in its vast number of steering regimes. The book contains a total of 115 significant ingredients for the Grand Projet of our contemporary metropolis. Not always positive but always powerful, these rules are the inverted, abstracted and extracted image of a city’s actual situation. Setting standards is first and foremost a cultural act. We read cities by their rules! Rules link the physical with the social city, connecting quality with quantity and latent characteristics to manifest ones. Thereby and almost unnoticed, they have become design instruments. In fact, regarding rules as tools offers a valuable (urban) design attitude – departing from an approach that wants to control everything, and moving towards a non–fatalistic form of control between freedom and coercion.

English, 272 pp / 240 x 175 mm / hardcover, ISBN 978 90 6450 666 6

Made possible by the Netherlands Architecture Fund.