Volume 2, Issue 3

The enclosing of spaces of nature in urban contexts is today again a common practice in Paris. Whereas modern planning produced open green spaces, multiple changes in the late 20th century resulted in the revival of the urban park, which refers again to the traditional element of structural enclosing. After defining the enclosing of spaces of nature in Paris as a research object and situating the genre of atlas in research practice, this article elaborates upon the atlas as an epistemic genre and a visual form of knowledge production. Urban landscape projects realized in previous decades are presented while critically discussing the applicability of the atlas to urban and landscape design research.

This article reflects upon the methods I used to investigate the relationship between the structure and the facade construction of industrial architecture. In Berlin in particular, iron and brick have been a constructive characteristic of the first third of the 20th century. The tool of technical drawing proved particularly effective in the preliminary investigation. After choosing to investigate buildings that still exist today by means of a critical redrawing, fragments were gradually dismantled and the construction hypotheses took on the character of a redesign of the elements. With the help of recent drawing technologies it was possible to reconstruct a »technical style«, obtained by comparing different fragments represented in the same way. Threedimensional modeling allowed the physical reconstruction of portions of the buildings digitally, brick by brick.

Revisiting my research project from 19 years ago, which deals with notions of integrity in architectural creative processes, this article reflects upon the underlying techniques of forms of spatial writing, as part of my ongoing doctoral thesis work. I approach writing now as a process of ordering references and thoughts for inspection, in relation to the textile-like patterns that I created in the previous project and concluded with a licentiate thesis or halfway doctorate. To understand more about the differences between such textile writing versus the gathering of individual threads into the format of a book, I turn to, and use as my method, the medieval arts of memory, ars memoria, specifically with regard to books, textual systems such as catena and glosses, and illustrations, or bas-de-page. I use these formats as both an instruction for making and as a tool for a speculative evaluation of the result. In the center of this article is the question of how to create a book.

The following article is a reflection on an action research project with stakeholders of a special economic zone in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. The article describes the process of engagement from the perspective of the workers and the managers of three international factories, with the aim to discover moments and entry points, for the positive social and spatial transformation of a global industrial space.

As a result of the Syrian conflict which started in 2011, middle and low-income groups in Syria have been facing difficulties in accessing energy, and left unable to cover their domestic energy expenses. How do these households respond to the low levels of comfort in their homes? In this in-situ study, I seek to investigate the intertwining discourses between domestic space, occupant behavior, and climate. Looking for evidence, I used the diary as a method to investigate the phenomenological experience of inhabiting a building. By collecting the diaries of family members in one flat in a typical domestic block in Damascus, I tell a collective story of the building through the residents. By selecting the stories of three rooms in the flat where the inhabitants felt uncomfortable in summer and winter, I present critical moments of discomfort in a visual essay. This research raises questions about the efficiency of the current model of affordable housing in Syria.

This article draws on my ongoing doctoral research on stone and its renewed use as a self-supporting or load-bearing material in architecture today. To complement the existing literature on the subject, which is overwhelmingly quantitative in nature, it discusses the potential, as well as some of the difficulties, of the ethnographic approach I have adopted instead. Focusing on my fieldwork around the construction of a collective housing project in Plan-les-Ouates, Switzerland, one of the case studies in my thesis, it explores the challenges that working with this geo-sourced material poses for the professional practice of actors involved in its production. By taking into account the perspectives of multiple actors across multiple sites, including the stone as found, it aims to contribute to a broader understanding of what its structural use does, and could, imply for architecture.

This paper offers a reflection on an educational experiment. In the spring of 2021, a group of nine architecture students at the Delft University of Technology participated in a research elective that invited them to narrate architectural and urban design history through a ficto-critical short story in graphic-novel format. This paper is based on a conversation between Janina Gosseye, the instructor of the elective, and Meitar Tewel, who made Neualtland as part of this course. In their conversation, Janina and Meitar consider whether the shift away from the more conventional modes of historiography, represented by the ficto-critical graphic novel short story, is merely a shift in genre and tools - from writing to drawing - or if it represents an epistemological shift that can help architecture students unlock and develop new knowledge about the history of architecture and urban design. Could it be a new »species of thesis«?

This experimental piece of writing explores how a metalogue can open a space of conversation expressed across student and teacher, human and inhuman relations. Drawing on the metalogues between father and daughter in Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, the performance of this metalogue seeks to disrupt habitual power relations and mix conceptual with material expression. Of central concern are the ways in which both materials and concepts are extracted for use in built environment industries and industries of higher education, begging the question of how to work ethically within material and educational industries. The metalogue performs unruly interruptions and contradictions of voices, following a flow of materials both conceptual and concrete to grapple with pressing environmental imbroglios. The structure of the metalogue is necessarily open-ended, avoiding specific recommendations or answers to problems, instead fostering a glimmering understanding of how entangled we are amid environmental relations.

The late modernist architectural heritage of Central and Eastern Europe has undergone a peculiar transformation in the last couple of years. I consider this transformation from the perspective of the taming of ugly late modernist buildings into harmless miniatures as embedded in the grander phenomenon of architectural reconstructivism, concomitant with the demolition of late modernist building stock. This article aims to explore the current trend for reconstructivism in architecture by applying a two-fold conceptual framework, projection as a discursive method and Mark Cousins’s theory of ugliness to inspect the interwovenness of diverse socio-cultural factors by unraveling the manifold ways in which late modernist architectures are perceived with unease and discomfort in post-socialist contexts. These hyoptheses are tested in the case of the Electrical Power Distribution Station by architect Csaba Virág in Budapest.

This research documents the encounters of the built fabric with migrant imaginaries. It observes the articulation of social narratives, cultural practices, and everyday rituals within diasporic communities ordered around textiles. Migrant spaces often include »soft« architectures in both the literal construction of their spaces and through the »soft« spatial systems tied to certain micro-transactions and community organizations. The work explores ways of engaging with participatory research methods through the dynamic and performative nature of people, objects, rituals, symbols, and knowledge. The performative practices layered onto this work activate inclusive and ethical forms of enquiring and representing information. The work further develops a repertoire of rituals and events ordered around textiles.

What if we imagined a mirror that reflects the city’s reality to itself? What if the city’s components identified themselves and defined meaning in their own reflections? This article aims to explore the critical dimensions of the contemporary reality of a place from multiple and unexpected points of view. It explains the theoretical framework of a project which is being conducted as part of wider research that focuses on the informal behaviors and interventions in the urban morphology that is made by the inhabitants of the urban cluster around Damascus.

This article addresses explorations of the digital world through the physical world by conducting experiments to reach prototypes that test the aspect of waste reduction and material technology within the design process. Choosing concrete as a material of investigation, and molding techniques as the starting point for explorations of the construction process, it introduces the concepts of prototypes and demonstrators in this practice-based research. The article presents a series of experiments testing material performance and construction techniques, and their impact on a digital model. The last section demonstrates the logic extracted from these experimental investigations to propose a 1:1 scale demonstrator that results from the prototypes and aims at reducing construction waste through investigating techniques to create architectural elements. This novel method promotes possibilities for design research and fabrication techniques beyond producing a product according to predetermined specifications.

Critically engaging with one’s positionality in contemporary architectural research in a post-Apartheid South African context requires an approach that blends concerns about identity, location, and voice in responsibly creative means, while not reinforcing the existing power dynamics inherent in such work. This essay employs Jane Rendell’s Site-Writing modality to develop a means of navigating these inter-demographic and inter-locational dilemmas - the What-What - that emerge when working from a »northerly« located institution and speaking from a »Southern« position through multiple audiences. A reflective-animation method has been developed that provides a proto-methodology for both documenting and speculating with the tacit nature of spatial design practice in post-Apartheid South African cities.

Expanding ideas that I previously explored in » Design Research: The Next 500 Years« (Hill 2022), this article considers the contributions to temporal understanding of three analogies: architecture as a time machine, as a history, and as a fiction. Assembled from materials of all ages: from the newly formed, to those centuries or millions of years old, and incorporating varied rates of transformation and decay, a building is a time machine, transporting us to many times separately or simultaneously. Like a history, a design is a reinterpretation of the past in the present. Equally, a design is equivalent to a fiction, freely moving backward and forward in time and between types of time. In conclusion, I emphasize temporal understanding as a means by which to learn from the past, reassess the present, and speculate on future models of practice and discourse.

A score is a research tool that approaches knowledge as a series of relations. A consciously authored, creative work, a score precipitates and establishes the initial terms of an encounter between stories or actors; performed (translated) into a context it can never fully anticipate, a score simultaneously declines certainty or control over the knowledge that results from its performance, while binding that knowledge (and by extension, all learning) to the peculiar circumstances of its construction. This paper is both an exploration of scoremaking’s possibilities and an enaction of a collision of its own: of sonic materialities and epistemologies on the Enisej river.

This article explores a pedagogical approach of using sculptural artifacts as a practical tool to explore the ineffable but powerfully evocative atmospheres found within sacral architectures. However affective these spatial experiences may seem; in architectural pedagogy we struggle to speak of their nature and nuance, since they resist the mediums through which architectural discourse typically circulates. The making of sculptural forms allows undergraduate students to gesture to aspects of the atmosphere. An extended body schema established by the making process facilitates an embodied understanding of the atmospheric qualities. Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) provides a useful theoretical underpinning as a way to understand the students′ interactions, relationships between the sculptural artifacts, the processes of making and the atmospheres created. Through these processes, students become aware of, feel, engage, articulate and express the nuances and qualities of sacral architectural atmospheres.

The impact of climate change on cities is multifold and critical; one of them is flooding. The aim and objective of this article is to speculate how the needs of flooded cities are addressed using the method of speculative design. This technique involves various actors, disciplines, local, and international participation in brainstorming and generating scenarios, discussion, and reflection. It is practiced through workshops, competitions, and exhibitions. This article showcases the speculative design practice of the non-governmental organization (NGO), Thinking Hand, and Ketham’s Atelier Architects; which takes a bottom-up and collective approach in Hyderabad, in India. Their work attempts to bring different concerned groups into a conversation about climate change and flooding, some of which are not often included in urban decision-making processes. Owing to their greater responsibilities and participation, involving all stakeholders is significant in order to rethink policies for climate responsive architecture and urbanism.

This article draws from ongoing research situated between architecture and film. It focuses on introducing film and its narrative formats into architectural design pedagogy at the Wits School of Architecture in Johannesburg, South Africa, with the aim of establishing a more inclusive and collaborative design studio environment. Techniques such as screenwriting and storyboards are discussed as part of a methodology for designing and representing buildings through characters’ lived experiences, something I call »character-led architecture«. In this article, which is accompanied by a script that explores my own affective experience as I grappled with creating and introducing this methodology during a moment of social transformation in South Africa, character-led architecture becomes a tool for self-reflection. My research is situated in the field of narratives in the design process to contribute new knowledge to architectural pedagogy and design theory.

Between the 1920s and the 1970s in France, the teaching of construction in architecture schools has undergone major modifications in relation to its social, intellectual, and professional context. The present article aims to understand the role played by the teaching of construction in the architects’ relationship to building techniques and to engineers. The study of a set of textbooks, considered as pedagogical devices and professional guides, and used in 1921 by Edouard Arnaud to teach construction at the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, and at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, tackles the role of teaching construction in architecture and engineering curricula and its influence on the profession. This study relies on a comprehensive analysis of the set of textbooks, considering its materiality and its written and visual content, combined with relevant elements from its author’s biography, publications, and pedagogical production.

Each solstice and equinox, for Site-Reading Writing Quarterly, a website I curate, I invite contributors to exchange recently completed written works and provide a situated »review« of each other’s work. These acts draw on feminist theories and critical spatial practices to open up different ways of »reading writing« differently, exploring the practice of »reviewing« from situated perspectives. The ambition is to critique and experiment with the genre of the »critical review essay«. Paying close attention to the subject matter at hand generates modes of response that create entangled and dialogic textualities - that I suggest we think of, following Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti, as »feminist figurations«. In this article I provide an overview of the approaches adopted by the contributors involved in the first 7 issues, interweaving presentations of the 14 books »reviewed« with theoretical reflections on the situated processes that reader-writer-reviewers have engaged with so far.

This article is based on a 2016 talk I gave to a drawing research group led by Lesley McFadyen, Huda Tayob and Sophie Read. In it I look back at my PhD research completed in 2013, with a view to trying to disentangle my complicated relationship with drawing as a practice of architectural research. Working through what drawing might and might not be, I propose that, hand in hand with writing, writing-drawing forms an entangled mode of doing architectural history and theory that draws out something more, or other, than each can do alone.* The mode of writing-drawing is particularly developed in the context of historical research on a building where archival material on the architect’s intent, or evidence of the uses of the building once it was built, are missing. I argue two things: firstly, that the building itself can be read as an original archive, as a series of Lacanian part-objects; and that secondly, the writing-drawing research practice creates a further archive, a »living archive« that can be contributed to over time.† The article reflects on the roles of writing and drawing in the PhD whilst incorporating thinking developed in my recent research, chiefly drawn from ethnography, sociology, literary studies, and situated feminist and autotheory writing.