bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Hans Scharoun and urban structure
Authors: Mebes Friedrich , Jones Peter Blundell
Published: August 2008

In February of this year an exhibition of the work of Hans Scharoun devised by Nasser Golzari and Peter Blundell Jones was put on at the RIBA in London, in connection with which was held a Scharoun Symposium on 17 February. This included two German speakers sponsored by the Goethe Institute. Günter Behnisch spoke as the leading practitioner in what could be called a Scharounian direction. Also invited was Alfred Schinz, one of the most articulate of Scharoun's assistants from the rich period of the early 1950s, when Scharoun devised the prototypes for all his later work. Schinz's health unfortunately let him down, and he suggested that his place be taken by Friedrich Mebes, an architect friend from Essen who had been a student of Scharoun in Berlin in the 1940s and who still practises rather well in a Scharounian direction. With some help from Schinz, Mebes prepared what turned out to be an inspiring and informative paper, and it is printed below slightly shortened and with some tidying of the translation. Peter Blundell Jones
Architectural history and computing
Authors: Tavernor Robert
Published: August 2008

This paper is based largely on a document presented at a conference celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Martin Centre, held at the University of Cambridge in October 1992. It takes as its point of departure Sir Leslie Martin's essay, ‘Architects’ approach to architecture' (Martin, 1967). Commencing with his argument that ‘intentions and processes’ in architecture are more fundamental than form, this paper questions past attempts at relating history to architectural process, and outlines the potential offered by more recent advances in technology – especially, photogrammetry and the computer – for achieving a more objective and broader base for architectural criticism and consensus.
Computers, metaphors and change
Authors: Coyne Richard
Published: August 2008

The study of metaphor provides valuable insights into the workings of technology and how technology brings about change. This paper considers some current influential thinking about metaphor and how this impinges on understandings of technology and design.
Gottfried Semper: towards a comparative science of architecture
Authors: Hvattum Mari
Published: August 2008

This paper investigates Gottfried Semper's use of comparative science as a basis for a theory of architecture. It traces Semper's reliance on the works of Jean-Nicholas-Louis Durand and the zoologist Georges Cuvier. Following Michel Foucault's argument that the emergence of comparative science entails a decisive transition in modern thought, the paper explores the origins and implications of Semper's comparative theory of architecture. Through this focus, the paper attempts to identify and explore an essential tension inherent in Semper's work between, on the one hand, his sensitive recognition of the symbolic significance of architecture, and on the other, the proto-positivism implied in his ‘science of invention’. This dilemma still conditions our contemporary architectural culture, making the study of Semper's complex and conflicting ideas more relevant than ever.
Research into practice: Potsdamer Platz, Berlin
Authors: Steemers Koen
Published: August 2008

The purpose of the research project described in part here was to inform strategic environmental and architectural issues in the design of three buildings for Potsdamer Platz, Berlin. The design team consists of Richard Rogers Partnership (architects), the Martin Centre (research consultants), RP+K Sozietät (environmental engineers), debis Immobilienmanagement mbH (client), and Drees & Sommer AG (project manager). The research element of the project was funded by the European Union's JOULE II Solar House Programme (JOU2-CT93-0436) and the Mitsubishi Corporation Fund for Europe and Africa. Our role in the design development was as daylighting and sunlighting research consultants with the aim of informing building form, façade design and the interior to improve environmental performance. This paper focuses particularly on the research and development of the façade, briefly describing the role of research activities in design. The purpose of this paper is thus not to describe new or pure research, but rather to investigate the architectural potential of environmental issues and analysis techniques.
Interactive computer rendering
Authors: Richens Paul , Schofield Simon
Published: August 2008

Interactive rendering combines the geometrical precision of classical computer graphics with the representational freedom of a paint program. It is more sympathetic to the ways in which designers use images, and overcomes many of the frustrations experienced in rendering from CAD models. The scene is generated in a standard viewing application, but saved as a specially enhanced raster image. The extra information allows the interactive renderer to apply brushed-on rendering effects which are sensitive to the perspective of the image. Effects can be applied locally or overall, and may be overlaid, blended and erased to create complex combinations. A huge range of treatments is obtainable, both photorealistic and not.
Hillier's visitor centre, Romsey: a project by David Lea
Authors: Jones Peter Blundell , Woudstra Jan
Published: August 2008

David Lea is known for his refined and sensitive designs and for his long-standing concern for issues of sustainability. Sadly, many of his projects remain unbuilt. The latest of these is a visitor centre for an internationally renowned garden and arboretum in southern England. The design, described by Peter Blundell Jones, marks a break from Lea's customary use of pitched roofs and embraces the planning freedom which flat roof allows. But its greatest significance lies in the inspired manner in which the building acts as gateway to a remarkable landscape described by Jan Woudstra.
The aesthetics of gravity
Authors: von Meiss Pierre
Published: August 2008

Beyond taste or fashion, there exists a lasting and common consensus for a perception of beauty linked to weight or weightlessness. This essay attempts to develop an understanding of different approaches to the issue of weight and weightlessness in architecture and civil engineering. In complex urban and programmatic settings, however, the question of gravity has to be integrated with many other issues, as exemplified by Albini and HeIg's La Rinascente department store in Rome.
The individual and mass housing: the delicate balance
Authors: Trencher Michael
Published: August 2008

One of Alvar Aalto's major preoccupations throughout his life's work was redefining the place of the individual in modern society in the face of industrialization, urbanization, and the political ideologies of extreme left and right. Unwilling to accept the Communist models of communal living and their rigid architectural suppression of individuality as well as Le Corbusian paradigms of platonic idealism, Aalto set out in MIT's Baker Dormitory to redefine the modern mass housing model with Le Corbusier's Swiss Pavilion as a point of departure.
Following the crowd: spatial layout and crowd behaviour
Authors: Major Mark David , Penn Alan , Spiliopoulou Georgia , Spende Natasa , Doxa Maria , Fong Polly
Published: August 2008

In preparation for the Millennium Eve celebrations, a study was undertaken to predict crowd movement. The objectives were: to identify characteristics of crowd movement and congregation, and how this might be related to spatial layout; to evaluate, in consultation with risk management experts, how this might affect public safety; and to help develop and prepare effective crowd management measures. The study demonstrates how the observational techniques of space syntax have evolved to enable the investigation of the effect, if any, of spatial layout on crowd behaviour.
Building methods in the architecture of Álvaro Siza
Authors: Riso Vincenzo
Published: August 2008

In the poetics of Álvaro Siza, the enriching experience of making architecture on site has always been very important; but even though his work has been widely recognized, published and discussed, little is known about the construction strategies employed. This paper reviews Siza's use of reinforced-concrete wall construction to create, through a process of subtraction and a search for the essential, building forms of a very particular kind.
The grid as generator
Authors: Martin Leslie
Published: August 2008

One of the sad oddities of academic life is that great and original contributions get cursorily noticed at the time of their appearance, and are then ignored. Leslie Martin's ‘The Grid as Generator’ is one such case. Published in the book he co-authored with Lionel March in 1972, this opening essay – and indeed the entire book – represented an extraordinary breakthrough in urban research. Yet neither has been properly recognized.
Domestic type and urban image – three mews houses in Dublin by Boyd Kelly Whelan
Authors: Campbell Hugh
Published: August 2008

Three small mews houses in a Dublin suburb are reviewed here in terms of their typological ambitions, formal preoccupations and vision of domesticity. Their nature and form is compared with an earlier project by Cleary and Hall in order to extrapolate a more general picture of the changing criteria and concerns guiding Dublin's architectural development. The project demonstrates how a repeating order can accommodate difference. The feeling of exposure in their unusually open upper floor living areas is tempered by the exhilarating sense of contact with the city.
The Atacama desert's last nitrate cities
Authors: Feliú Eugenio Garcés
Published: August 2008

Oficinas saliteras (nitrate works) were company towns developed to extract and process nitrates in the Antofagasta region of Chile's Atacama desert, one of the world's harshest environments. The two last of these oficinas were María Elena (founded in 1925) and Pedro de Valdivia (1931), whose development marked the introduction of the Guggenheim industrial system. Their urban design was closely related to the industrial cities of Europe and the United States, as well as the Spanish urban tradition. María Elena used an octagonal street plan, while Pedro de Valdivia is based on a crossing pattern.
In a dark wood: dwelling as spatial practice
Authors: Ballantyne Andrew
Published: August 2008

In architecture the link between life and art can be so strong that one can see them as fused, as Heidegger did. We encounter buildings in connection with the life that inhabits them, but the relationship between building and life is not that of cause and effect. The building is a tool, for which a variety of uses might be found. Gilles Deleuze saw ideas as tools, and valued ‘nomadism’ – moving between sets of ideas. He deployed a rhetoric of mobility and invention that encourages the free play of ideas, while effectively resisting the lure of Heideggerís ‘blood and soil’ nostalgia.
An observation on the fan vault of Henry VII Chapel, Westminster
Authors: Heyman Jacques
Published: August 2008

A close inspection was made of the vault of Henry VII Chapel, Westminster Abbey, when it was scaffolded for repair and maintenance in 1994–95. Defects were seen which appear to be peculiar to fan vaults, and this paper attempts to explain these defects. The discussion involves an understanding of the behaviour of masonry, from the simplest arch form to barrel vaults, rib vaults and the complex fan structure, with an examination of the ‘pathology’ of these forms.
Siedlung Halen: between standards and individuality
Authors: Scalbert Irénée
Published: August 2008

In 1961, a group of young designers practising under the name of Atelier 5 completed Siedlung Halen near Berne. This private housing development was the first built example of the compact, low-rise housing type conceived by Le Corbusier for vacation use in the south of France. It was the forerunner of the newly resurgent carpet or mat planning form. In addition, Halen was a social experiment likened by its designers to the Unité d'Habitation at Marseilles, reinterpreted to fit closely with the local topography. Beyond its undisputed claim to history, its success resides, as in the case of the Unité, in having raised the standards of a particular housing form. Attention to the welfare of users has since become a hallmark of the work of Atelier 5. This paper describes the genesis of the project, its form and social outlook.
In the presence of absence: Cambridge's forgotten masterpiece. The Cornford house by Colin St. John Wilson (1967)
Authors: Spens Michael
Published: August 2008

The house is not widely known but has been praised by a distinguished circle since its completion, including Aldo Van Eyck and Christian Norberg-Schulz. It represents a fusion of European revision of modernism as a model of the continuity of ‘The Other Tradition’ with avant-garde American design concepts of the late 1960s. Quite distinct from the work of the New York Five, for example, it is, the author claims, nonetheless related to it through the architect's teaching involvement with the Yale and MIT schools from 1960. Today it remains a significant architectural icon, and following the death of its owners is in need of formal listing and statutory protection.
The education of architects
Authors: Arup Ove
Published: August 2008

‘The advice of the architect is very much needed in the councils which take political decisions about how to use our resources and what to build’, wrote the structural engineer, Ove Arup (1895–1988) in this 1970 paper. ‘The architect is in a way the counsel for the people…and, if he doesn't speak up, there is nobody else to put the case for humanity in an informed way.’ But Arup added that competence in building is essential. ‘Nobody will listen to your advice about how to run the state if you can't run your own business.’
A new setting for the Marble Arch
Authors: Saint Andrew
Published: August 2008

This paper suggests the removal of one of London's most conspicuous and familiar monuments, the Marble Arch, to a site in Park Square, Regent's Park, where it would serve to link the axis of Portland Place with the Broad Walk, as evidently intended by Nash. Not only is the current site of the Arch not the original one, the author argues, but its whole setting and environment have been compromised since it was moved there from the front of Buckingham Palace in 1851. Fresh research into the history of the Marble Arch is presented in the article, with particular regard to its experimental use of exposed marble in the British climate.
Renaissance mathematics and architectural proportion in Alberti's De re aedificatoria
Authors: March Lionel
Published: August 2008

This paper sets Alberti's rules of architectural proportioning in the context of Renaissance mathematical practice. While Alberti makes didactic use of the well developed theories of harmony from music, it is shown that his architectural usage is not analogous to musical systema, even though the arithmetical foundations are shared. The common base for fifteenth-century musical theory and Alberti's architectural recommendations is Pythagorean arithmetic, derived largely from Nicomachus. Alberti also develops a geometrical approach involving magnitudes derived from the cube. Neither the diagonal of a face, nor the diameter of the sphere which circumscribes the cube are commensurable with its side. Alberti makes use of rational estimates for the square roots of two and three, and these ratios are evident in his work. Some examples are indicated for the purpose of linking theory to practice, but it is not the intention of this paper to analyse specific buildings in depth. The purpose of the paper is to suggest a potent theoretical frame within which future empirical investigations might flourish.
Principles for building
Authors: Rice Colin
Published: August 2008

This paper is a practical pocket philosophy of building construction. It sets out a way of thinking about building construction in terms of principles, rules and compensation, and illustrates their application with a range of examples. Its basis lies in reflections on the way things work and the way they fail, and a search for a simple pattern in this. Its aim is to set out a system which by virtue of its simplicity will serve as a guide both to those designing and to those interpreting buildings. The ideas it contains were first set out by Lyall Addleson and the author in Performance of Materials in Buildings (Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford, 1991). The focus of these ideas is those parts of a building which act as containers, separators, and modifiers of environments or, in other words, the construction of the building envelope.
Living with a virtual city
Authors: Day Alan , Bourdakis Vassilis , Robson Joe
Published: August 2008

Computer models of entire cities are becoming increasingly common. The uses to which these models are put are varied and include the visualisation of proposed changes, the marketing of the facilities a city has to offer, and the mapping of socio-economic data. Developments with the Internet mean that city models can be widely accessed and it is now possible to both construct and view these models on personal computers. This paper discusses some issues relating to the construction and use of large urban models and draws upon the authors' experience of constructing one for the City of Bath.
Notes on the Architectural Education of Nomads
Authors: Fung Stanislaus
Published: August 2008

This paper deals with issues and possibilities of cross-cultural study in architectural education, especially the teaching of architecture history and theory in schools with students of diverse cultural background. The paper argues that responding to cultural diversity involves not only a more comprehensive curriculum, but also a correlated view of curriculum content, skills, course structure and interdisciplinarity, and a sensitivity towards differences that cannot be accounted for in a universalist frame of reference. Instances of the cultural possibilities offered by the Chinese tradition to contemporary architectural education are given as examples and these are related to a geo-cultural landscape of Chinese communities in which Western schools might exercise a significant role.
Brikettfabrik Witznitz: specific indeterminacy – designing for uncertainty
Authors: Beigel Florian , Christou Philip
Published: August 2008

A two stage international landscape and urban regeneration design competition was held last year for the site of a former Brikettfabrik at Witznitz near Borna in the south Leipzig region of Germany. The design of the winning entry was based on architectural, urban and landscape design strategies developed over the past five years. This paper opens with an introduction to these ideas and related theoretical precedents. There follows a description of the project's context and of the design itself.
The Errant's Lodge: reconstruction, research and teaching
Authors: Carrasco Manuel Casanueva
Published: August 2008

The Errant's Lodge forms part of the Open City (Ciudad Abierta) founded by the staff and students of the University of Valparaíso in 1970 (see the review of The Road That is Not a Road and the Open City Ritoque, Chile on p. 92 of this issue). This paper outlines the project's origins; the ‘alternative’ programme to which the design responds; the climatic and environmental considerations; the construction; and its relationship to research and teaching. The project, which is still in progress, is partly funded by a Chilean government research grant.
Hugo Häring: on proportion (Proportionen)
Authors: Jones Peter Blundell
Published: August 2008

For Hugo Häring, the role of geometry was one of the central issues in architecture. For him, geometric ordering systems were a deadening force. He rejected Le Corbusier's view that ‘geometry is the daughter of the universe’ and doubted the aesthetic efficacy of proportional systems. He believed that there was no absolute: geometry had different meanings at different times and places and was often present for purely technical reasons. This essay on proportion was written shortly after the Nazis came to power and Häring lost all his work. It was then that he turned to writing, both as a means of legitimating his Modernism as not un-German and, as in the case of this essay, of setting out his developing theories. Peter Blundell Jones' introduction gives the background to this, the first translation of this important work to be published in English.
Murder at the Modern
Authors: Fitch James Marston
Published: August 2008

This paper deals with a strange and isolated series of events at New York's Museum of Modern Art between 1966 and 1977, orchestrated by the Director of the Department of Architecture, the late Arthur Drexler. The events, which consisted of a series of books, exhibitions and catalogues, were all aimed at discrediting the Museum's own International Style and replacing it with Drexler's own special brand of eclectic post-modernism.
Schindler, Symmetry and the Free Public Library, 1920
Authors: Park Jin-Ho
Published: August 2008

Schindler's Free Public Library competition project of 1920 is analysed. Archival documents are interpreted and an analytic model is constructed. Schindler's standing as a Modernist is considered and his early career is rehearsed, especially his involvement with Frank Lloyd Wright. The formal analysis focuses on the use of symmetry. An interpretation of Schindler's employment of the diagonal axis in the Library is proffered. Historical precedents for diagonal butterfly symmetry in the English free school and the Arts and Crafts movement are examined. A method of analysis using the partial ordering of subsymmetries of the square is applied to the floor plans In conclusion, the influence of the Library project on Schindler's later work is surveyed.
The irritable occupant: recent developments in thermal comfort theory
Authors: Baker Nick
Published: August 2008

This paper explores thermal comfort, following recent renewed interest in thermal comfort standards. It also reports on findings from the Thermal Comfort Task in the EU funded PASCOOL project which had an overall objective of promoting passive cooling and avoiding air conditioning. Finally, some tentative conclusions are developed together with their implications for architectural design.
Research assessed
Authors: Carolin Peter
Published: August 2008

The publication, last December, of the ‘research ratings’ awarded to subject groups in each of the United Kingdom's higher education institutions provoked a shocked response in many Architecture schools. A fierce debate on the nature of architectural research and its implications for the future form of architectural education is now developing. With so many countries following the UK standard of a five-year period for full-time education in Architecture (and RIBA validation), this is a subject of more than local interest. Peter Carolin reports on the background to this debate.
The recognition of design
Authors: Keniger Michael
Published: August 2008

Australian Architecture schools, like their UK equivalents, have also been grappling with the need to obtain recognition for design as equivalent to research. They have had to tackle the subject not because of pressures imposed by a national funding system, as in the United Kingdom, but because of the need to maintain credibility within their universities. Michael Keniger looks back over a 10 year period of experiment.
The value of plenty
Authors: Scalbert Irénée
Published: August 2008

For the last 40 years, organic values have prevailed in Western architecture. The conflict in the 1950s between the organic and the typical with its ideology of mechanisation is currently being reenacted under the new categories of the generic and the specific. These two orders of value are assumed to be incompatible, even though both history and theory suggest otherwise. In this conflict, the organic has so far survived unscathed in spite of a growing interest in the typical, the status of which remains unclarified: should it be envisaged as a means to an aesthetic, as it is at present, or should it be a means to affluence?
Claus and Kaan: high theory and low practice
Authors: Rattray Charles
Published: August 2008

The work of Amsterdam architects Felix Claus and Kees Kaan is moving away from formulae associated with modern architecture. This paper studies their attempt to find meaning which is at once more abstract and more direct, and notes that a guiding light in their search is a fundamental concern with the physical realities and compromises of the building process.
The use and meaning of materials in the garden of the Villa d'Este at Tivoli
Authors: Dernie David
Published: August 2008

Regardless of theoretical approach, architectural ideas are ultimately embodied in materials. While contemporary buildings are often brimming with architectural theories, they frequently flounder at the attempt to translate these ideas into materials. The uncertainty of this contemporary architectural climate is powerfully mirrored in the artistic language of mannerism. Rejecting the tenets of the Renaissance, and inspired by new discoveries, the italian architect of the late sixteenth century sought to reformulate architectural language. Founded on an increasingly encyclopaedic knowledge of the antique world, this language was to represent a new understanding of nature and involved an exploration of natural materials in a way unimaginable in the early Renaissance. This paper describes the garden of the Villa d'Este at Tivoli, a masterpiece from this period where materials themselves resonated with significance. Based on the author's iconographic interpretation of the garden, it draws on original eyewitness descriptions of the effects of water, light and sounds.
The Serlio floor and its derivations
Authors: Yeomans David
Published: August 2008

The idea of spanning a space with beams, none of which is long enough to reach clear across, is one which has long held a fascination for designers. Described by Villard de Honnecourt and by Serlio, variations on this form have appeared both in drawings and in actual use. This paper describes examples of both and considers the structural behaviour of this kind of arrangement.
Further thoughts on design research
Authors: Pepper Simon
Published: August 2008

The last issue of arq (no. 7) included an account of the recent Research Assessment Exercise undertaken in United Kingdom university schools of architecture and reported on the latest developments in the long-running debate on whether design can be regarded as research. This same debate has also taken place in Australian universities and Michael Keniger reported on the Refereed Design Scheme which had been evolved to resolve this problem. Here, Simon Pepper, an architectural historian who has been involved in this debate over many years, reflects on the issues and the Australian system.
Sir John Soane's House and Museum model
Authors: Mullan Peter , Gluck Thomas
Published: August 2008

This paper describes a model of Sir John Soane's House and Museum which was executed as an independent study during the authors' Third Year at Yale University School of Architecture. Having visited the building independently of each other and having returned with a similar mystified curiosity, they initiated the project as an attempt to further understand the house by developing an analytical method of representation specific to it. The model was constructed from drawings prepared by the authors which synthesised information from available published documentation and drawings obtained from the Soane Museum Library.
The individuality of the home
Authors: Nylander Ola
Published: August 2008

What role does memory play in our concept of home? How important are the sounds that fill a home? What significance do nuances of light and shadow hold? These are critical issues in the search for a residential design strategy after the modern public housing era. This paper discusses these issues in the context of some apartments designed by Kjell Forshed for a housing co-operative on the island of Stumholmen, Karlskrona, Sweden.
Reflections on Hunstanton
Authors: Smithson Peter , Carolin Peter
Published: August 2008

‘This is an extraordinary group of buildings’, wrote Philip Johnson (then a Mies van der Rohe follower) when The Architectural Review published Alison and Peter Smithson's School at Hunstanton in September 1954. ‘… Here we have an unknown team … being allowed to win and build. Most surprising they are allowed to build not a conventional school, not even a Hertfordshire plan, but something quite the opposite of the prevailing trend … The plan is not only radical but good Mies van der Rohe, yet the architects have never seen Mies's work …’ In this paper, based upon a talk given at the Architectural Association School and on conversations with the Editor, Peter Smithson recalls the background to the project, its design and construction, his later visits to Chicago and a 1973 revisit to the building.
The emergence of modern Dublin: reality and representation
Authors: Campbell Hugh
Published: August 2008

This paper challenges the predominant reading of Dublin's architectural history whereby the eighteenth century is a golden age of rational urbanism and the nineteenth century represents a collapse into confusion and stasis. It emphasises the different ways in which the city continued to change in the nineteenth century. An examination of James Joyce's changing representation of Dublin - from the ‘scrupulous meanness’ of Dubliners to the exuberance of Ulysses - suggests how an equivalent shift in architectural strategies, from a nostalgia for the formal certainties of Georgian Dublin towards an appreciation of the heterogeneous nineteenth-century city, might produce a new kind of urbanism.
Tradition and innovation: timber as rainscreen cladding
Authors: Forster Wayne
Published: August 2008

This paper describes the use of timber as a rainscreen cladding on David Chipperfield's River and Rowing Museum at Henley. The extensive use of green oak in this way is the key to a precise and beautifully crafted building and was the result of collaboration between the architects and the Timber Research and Development Association. This use of timber represents a major shift in the work of David Chipperfield from concrete toward a wider palette of materials. Henley is also an important example of a recent trend in the development of timber as an external cladding material. Timber cladding as a rainscreen will be discussed in the context of the Henley project in terms of its performance factors and the design and construction process, and analysed with a view to drawing some conclusions for its future use.
The arcade environment
Authors: Potvin André
Published: August 2008

This paper is an account of a study of existing arcade environments in London and Cardiff. Seasonal surveys were undertaken in order to understand both the arcades' thermal performance and their contribution to the environmental diversity of the city. Arcades, which are genuine bioclimatic buildings and urban spaces, appear to generate progressive environmental transients that draw on the ability of users to adapt and thus improve their comfort. The surveys were conducted using a portable sensor array. The results are analysed in terms of environmental transients and seasonal performance.
Telematics in historical survey and documentation projects: a report of work in progress
Authors: Warden Robert , Velasco Guillermo Vasquez de
Published: August 2008

This paper describes current research activities oriented towards the development of an innovative methodology for survey and documentation activities in buildings that owing to their general characteristics challenge the use of traditional survey and documentation methodologies. In particular, the specific project of the survey and documentation of the Abbey of Valmagne in southern France is presented as an example of the use of telematics for conducting geographically distributed activities within a methodology specially designed for projects in which the location and complexity of historical structures poses a dramatic challenge. The paper ends by addressing a number of conclusions that can be applied to a general framework and their relation with future research and development work in this field.
Improving practice through knowledge and research
Authors: Watson Donald
Published: August 2008

The architectural profession lacks the infrastructure that enables other professions, such as mechanical engineering, to build a knowledge-base and share research results of use to practitioners. To create such an infrastructure, the profession needs to develop learning cycles that involve researchers, educators, and practitioners working in task groups to set research priorities, raise funds, publish findings, and disseminate knowledge through conferences and curricula.
Architectural intersections: Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki
Authors: Laaksonen Esa
Published: August 2008

Steven Hollwon an international competition for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland, based on the concept of intertwining or ‘chiasma’. That idea stems from the museum's site, which stands at the point where the city and Töölö Bay, the commercial core and the Parliament building come together. Intertwining also characterizes the form of the building, in which a gallery wing twists over and around a rectangular block, separated by a tall, curving entry hall dominated by a broad ramp. The museum has a few functional lapses, but is generally successful.
A building as a contextual machine: the Printworks in Dublin
Authors: Ryan Raymund
Published: August 2008

As disciplines, urban design and architecture often seem to be at cross purposes. Urban design tends to concern itself with the collective, architecture with isolated buildings. The Group 91 framework plan for Dublin's Temple Bar is an integrated proposal by architects for the creation of public urban spaces and for the insertion of new buildings into the historic fabric. In particular, the Printworks by Derek Tynan is a didactic model: it suggests how people can beneficially live and work in a quickly evolving city and offers an urbanism of collage and potent reciprocity.
Architectural Competitions and Bureaucracy, 1934–1945
Authors: Shanken Andrew
Published: August 2008

The 1930s in the United States marked a turning point in the relationship of the architectural profession to both the government and corporations. The federal government and large corporations, began to hold design competitions to stimulate the building industry during the Depression. This caught the American Institute of Architects unprepared and led to the transformation of the profession from one grounded in the ideal of the architect-artist to one whose survival depends, in part, upon business acumen, technical competence, and public relations skill.
The political paradoxes of practice: political economy of local and global architecture
Authors: Cuff Dana
Published: August 2008

Globalization, while extensively theorized and empirically studied by economic geographers, has yet to be seriously investigated in architecture. There are multiple forms of architectural practice in the United States and some significant changes are under way. In addition the local politics of urban architecture discloses a counterweight to balance globalism's homogenizing tendencies. This paper proposes strategies for a more experimental architecture that partakes of the global-local dialectic.
Without Rhetoric
Authors: Maxwell Robert
Published: August 2008

When I first went to teach at the Bartlett School of Architecture, Peter Cowan asked me what my research would be. I answered diffidently: ‘meaning in architecture’, and he grinned sceptically, and said: ‘your first job will be to find something to measure’. But I had been seduced by reading Stendhal's De l'amour into believing that measurement wasn't necessary for insight; and persuaded by reading Wellek and Warren on Theory of Literature that theory wasn't to be restricted to physical science. So I was soon giving a course called Meaning in Architecture, without measuring anything, but using lots of comparisons (twin slide projectors had become all the rage).
Reworking the Modern: Rodolphe Luscher's Collège de Corsier
Authors: Jones Peter Blundell
Published: August 2008

A surprising amount of good and original architecture has been built in Switzerland and Austria in recent years, combining the power of international ideas and techniques with the special characteristics of a local setting. This paper considers a school by Rodolphe Luscher, who practises in French-speaking Lausanne but was born in the more Germanic Zurich. Analyzing it in detail, the author comments on how it can be accommodated into the developing story of Modernism.
British Airways at Waterside: a new model office?
Authors: Duffy Francis
Published: August 2008

Waterside is one of a handful of recent British commercial buildings that will be remembered long after this decade is over. Its greatest significance is as a marker of the changing relationship between organizations and their office accommodation. The story of its development contains many generic lessons to be derived from the use of architecture as a catalyst in change management. It is hoped that a future paper will report on one of the most intractable problems in architectural research–whether office design (and Waterside in particular) can affect productivity.
Kenneth Frampton apropos tectonic: on the high-wire of a definition
Authors: Barata Paulo Martins
Published: August 2008

Kenneth Frampton, architectural critic and Columbia University professor, responds to the criticism that has been levelled at his notion of the ‘tectonic’ in this interview with Paulo Martins Barata. Frampton views the tectonic as a way of resisting both the ‘speculator’ economy of mass-produced construction and the ‘atectonic’ architecture of Post-Modernism and Post-Structuralism. At the same time, he acknowledges the quixotic nature of an idea that is ‘a kind of rearguard response to the commodification of architecture’. The interview is set in context by Martins Barata.
Metiendo Vivendum: ‘By Measure We Must Live’
Authors: Rollo John
Published: August 2008

Convinced that his father's work was arranged around an underlying structure, Robert Lutyens, in 1944, posed the challenge that ‘…someone will someday discover my father's system of applied geometry’. Drawing on an analysis of the ground floor plans of 40 English country houses designed by Edwin Lutyens between 1889 and 1913, this paper considers Robert Lutyens's ‘Armature of Planes’, a theory which he closely associated with the development of his father's work. The analysis reveals Edwin Lutyens's consistent use of ratios to structure his work.
A specialist partnership frustrated: Utzon and Symonds at Sydney
Authors: Cochrane John
Published: August 2008

The resignation of the Sydney Opera House architect, Jørn Utzon, marked the culmination of an increasingly frustrating phase of the project. Utzon had intended a partnership between designer, consultant, contractor and subcontractor to develop technical design solutions which would not have been possible under normal competitive tendering. The government rejected this. Here are examined the issues which underpinned the relationship between the architect seeking technical perfection and the manufacturing engineer seeking the fullest artistic expression of his product.
The embodied architect in the information age
Authors: Coyne Richard
Published: August 2008

The relationship between architecture, the body and the computer is considered in this paper. Whereas the body has been related traditionally to architecture through concepts of geometry and proportion, the computer also brings to light the valorization of craft, McLuhan's philosophy of the changing sensorium, the projection of digital utopias, Freud's construction of the relationships between repetition, obsession and the uncanny, and the residence of the body in concepts of mind. The examination of these issues is productive in the context of the design studio.
Time architecture: Stadtlandschaft Lichterfelde Süd, Berlin
Authors: Beigel Florian , Christou Philip
Published: August 2008

This winning design in the 1998 Lichterfelde Süd International Landscape and Urban Design Competition is for the regeneration of a former military training ground on the southern boundary of Berlin. The brief was for a new urbanism of the periphery, with 3200 dwellings on a 115 hectare site. The design is a continuation of research embracing conditions of uncertainty and change on mainly post-industrial or former military sites. It could be described as a fragment of an infrastructural urbanism in preparation for an unpredictable diversity of architectures.
Working with tolerance
Authors: Bates Stephen , Sergison Jonathan
Published: August 2008

This paper defines an architectural position in which the concept of tolerance provides a strategy for making work. It also represents a moment in time within a continuing assessment and re-assessment of the ideas of the practice we established three years ago. Ideas are explored through built and speculative projects and tested through critical discussion with collaborators. The source of these ideas within a historical context is acknowledged and their application in a number of our recent projects and buildings is illustrated.
The Sheffield Urban Study project
Authors: Jones Peter Blundell , Williams Alan , Lintonbon Jo
Published: August 2008

In the UK, government policy has encouraged architecture schools to be more research active and there is pressure to make the two final years of the five year course more definitively postgraduate. The University of Sheffield has responded with an experiment that combines studio teaching with real research on the city and its history. Sheffield is Britain's fourth largest city with a population of around half a million. It grew very rapidly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, It now employs a fraction of the former labour force and the city is having to adjust its identity.
Colonies at Home: Loudon's Encyclopaedia, and the architecture of forming the self
Authors: Macarthur John
Published: August 2008

In the early nineteenth century, the small house in its own garden formed a crucial image of agricultural reform in Britain and in the aspirations of those leaving for North America and Australasia. The material and social technologies of the ‘cottage’ became not only equipment for the colonial enterprise, but a kind of colonization of the home by a new kind of family. These issues are apparent in J. C. Loudon's Encyclopaedia where the whole gamut of architecture is re-examined as a subject of interest to agricultural reformers, colonists, democrats and homemakers, especially women.
Viipuri Library and Como Kindergarten: a climatic reading
Authors: Fisher Peter
Published: August 2008

Aalto's Viipuri library and Terragni's Como kindergarten were built at about the same time in two very different climates. Architectural theory rarely considers environmental moderation as part of the task of architecture and yet the spatial and poetic stances and attitudes to natural light in these two buildings are, in part, informed by their response to very differing climates. Today, when so much environmental moderation is self-conscious and explicit, these buildings show how it can become an enriched part of a wider spatial and compositional whole.
A model for research efforts: evolutionary not revolutionary
Authors: Crosbie Michael J.
Published: August 2008

The U.S. home builders and suppliers, funded by the Federal government, have developed new methods and technologies to improve the energy efficiency and reduce the cost of single-family housing. This report by Michael Crosbie, one of the researchers involved in the effort, reviews the work done so far and looks ahead to future collaborative efforts to advance this huge sector of the U.S. economy.
A changing environment: the virtual world meets the physical world
Authors: Mitchell William
Published: August 2008

With the coming of computers and the Internet, the relationship of the physical and virtual worlds has shifted. Virtual environments will not replace physical ones, but the nature, location, and function of the latter will change, creating both challenges and opportunities for architects.
Sunshine Coast University Library: innovation in a subtropical climate
Authors: Keniger Michael
Published: August 2008

The library at Sunshine Coast University, Queensland was completed three years ago. The library is both the physical heart and the social focus of the new campus. Two firms of architects collaborated on the design: one, Lawrence Nield & Partners, with extensive experience of major projects and the other, John Mainwaring & Associates, familiar with the local climate. The low budget encouraged innovatory construction. The building is of interest for its visual openness, its suitability for the subtropical climate and the extensive use of timber for cladding and screening.
Remnants of power behind the Bund: Shanghai's IBC and Robert Dollar Buildings, 1920–22
Authors: Cody Jeffrey W.
Published: August 2008

Two buildings constructed in early twentieth-century Shanghai, one by a U.S. bank, the other by a shipping company, and both designed by a New York architect reveal the complex aesthetic and cultural issues that architecture must address in a global setting. These issues go beyond the buildings' facades to their construction, use, layout, leasing, and imagery. These two examples suggest that more comprehensive analyses of early twentieth-century commercial buildings in many global settings should lead to a clearer understanding of their significance.
Little things that matter
Authors: Brenda  , Vale Robert
Published: August 2008

Practice for us began with a series of near dilapidated cottages in East Anglia which were to be renovated with the help of a housing improvement grant and much labour from the clients and sometimes even the architects. This must have appealed to the officer who handed out the grants as whenever anyone arrived at his door with a cottage that had a demolition order on it they were sent to us. To aid this practice we soon purchased a copy of Handisyde's Everyday Details. With all respect to Handisyde, the most memorable image to come out of this book was a drawing of a thatched dovecote made from an old barrel. This drawing, in the Foreword, was attributed to Edwin Gunn, the author of Little Things that Matter forthose Who Build, published by The Architectural Press in 1923. Gunn's book had been the inspiration for the new Everyday Details.
Concepts and material associations in the work of Gigon/Guyer
Authors: Rattray Charles , Hutton Graeme
Published: August 2008

Zürich architects Annette Gigon and Mike Guyer display an enjoyment of the realities – both physical and intellectual – of architectural production and, to this extent, can be seen as part of a prevailing pattern in northern Switzerland. This paper comments on their work and shows it also to be creatively critical, subverting a number of modern orthodoxies and supplanting them with an affective internal logic.
The architect and the academy
Authors: Hawkes Dean
Published: August 2008

In the first issue of arq, the author argued that the adoption of a model, or perhaps models, borrowed from the procedures of, respectively, the humanities and the sciences does not constitute a sufficient basis from which to define the nature and content of the discipline of Architecture. The present paper returns to this theme and develops further the proposition that design practice, both its processes and its products, constitutes the core, the centre, of the discipline and goes on to examine the implications of this for the form, content and delivery of architectural education.