bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Architecture of Logistics
Authors: Sanaan Bensi Negar , Marullo Francesco
Published: November 2023

The ambition of Footprint 23 is to provide a critical survey of the architecture of logistics, unfolding the multivalences of its apparatus, dissecting its buildings and spaces, its technologies and labour relations, its historical evolutions as well as its future projections. Gathering academic papers and visual essays from researchers and emerging scholars in the field, the issue follows three main directions of inquiry.

The first trajectory attempts to define what logistics is and how it operates, focusing on the inherent ambivalence of its apparatus, able to cope with different scales and various temporal dimensions – from barcodes and gadgets to global routes and territorial infrastructures – constituting both a physical and abstract framework supporting, measuring and quantifying movements and actions, thoughts and desires. The second trajectory investigates the way logistics penetrates our existences, not simply by affecting how we live and work but the way in which it provides the very possibility of life as such, or, in other words, how logistics is inherently political. The third trajectory tackles the past, present and future of logistics, considered as the most crucial apparatus determining the human impact on the earth, controlling the distribution and organisation of organisms and ecosystems, triggering new and more violent forms of colonisation and exploitation.

This issue of Footprint does not seek definitive statements or hypothetic solutions for the monstrous nature of logistics. On the opposite, it aims at unfolding its inner contradictions to propose new possibilities of exploration for an architecture and its project.
Context, Community, and Capital
Authors: Schindler Susanne
Published: November 2023

This essay focuses on the language architects use to navigate the intersection of architecture, housing, and neoliberalism. Schindler argues that terminology plays a powerful role in allowing architects to avoid the socio-economic assumptions embedded in their work. Schindler traces the emergence, evolution, and codification of two such terms, ‘context’ and ‘community’, and how they have frequently been conflated. She shows how they were central to New York City’s gradual shift from welfare-state to neoliberal housing policies between the mid-1960s and the present day by connecting them to a third key term, ‘capital’. The vest-pocket housing plan developed for the South Bronx as part of the federal Model Cities programme serves as a case study. In the Bronx, the triangulation of community, context, and capital led to new development models, as well as new housing typologies, including the large-scale rehabilitation of existing tenements and small-scale new construction of row houses. The resulting shift in architectural discourse, and the codification of these practices in zoning and tax laws, have remained in force in New York City to this day.
The Hannes Meyer Seminars at the Bauhaus Dessau (1980–1986) as a Contact Zone for Finnish and East German Architects
Authors: Lange Torsten
Published: November 2023

This article charts transnational exchanges between East German and Finnish architects in the development of adaptive housing solutions for urban sites. It focuses on the Hannes Meyer Seminars – a series of annual international design workshops held at the Bauhaus Dessau from 1980 to 1986 – as a contact zone. The seminars challenged dominant forms of mass housing, and put forth alternative models to suit historic contexts. These exchanges went beyond previous (one-directional) material and technical exports that stretched back as far as the mid-1950s. As a result of the policy of détente in the early 1970s, relations between Finland and the GDR began to form an ever more complex and entangled network, with greater emphasis on knowledge transfer and collaboration. Formal agreements on ‘scientific and technical cooperation’ thus provided the framework for the intensification of contacts between design schools such as the College for Architecture and Civil Engineering (HAB, Hochschule für Architektur und Bauwesen) in Weimar and the Technical University Tampere. This opened a dialogue about contextual design (the adaptation of industrialised housing to the different needs and lifestyles of individual users), as well as historic settings, new tools such as CAD/CAM, sociological and historical research, and the discourse of postmodernism.
Architecture as a Visual Resource
Authors: Andjelkovic Katarina
Published: November 2023

Abstract:

In early 1999 the conflict in Kosovo led to the apocalyptic scenario of NATO-sanctioned bombings of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. One of the targets was the complex of buildings comprising the military headquarters in Belgrade: the Generalštab. Over the past twenty years no intervention has been made to repair and protect this cultural monument damaged by war, but its mental image has inevitably changed, transgressing the identity of the historical event. The drawing project The Generalštab Building as Image: A History Decomposeddeals with an aesthetic reflection on political bodies and conditions, asking how they have re-territorialised the material reality of the Generalštab building as a cultural artifact into the performativity of its political function.

Keywords:

War, cultural monument, visual narratives, perception.
Relaying Memory through a Generated Environment
Authors: Beydoun Ahmad
Published: November 2023

Abstract:

Khiam Detention Centre (KDC), a detention camp established by Israel in South Lebanon in 1985, is currently under heavy political interference that aims to manipulate and monopolise the writing of its burdened history. The preservation of memory of events that took place in this prison needs to be urgently addressed in the face of multiple attempts of its erasure and biased revisions. This study surveys three types of media sources that contain the memory of KDC: 1) interviews conducted with former prisoners; 2) the data-archives of a radio programme called Nahnu Bikhayr Taminuna Ankom(We are alive, tell us if you are) and 3) the built environment mapped with a sonic device. The extracted memories are then transcluded to a generated environment that virtually relays the mnemonic site of KDC. This project was done out of an urgent need to preserve KDC’s media imprints that are prone to erasure and modification. KDC is situated on the border of South Lebanon, a territory whose land and electromagnetic field have been occupied by state and non-state political actors. Since the claims of technological sovereignty inside the territory are tenuous and rife with the risk of political manipulation, I chose the space of the internet as provisionally more inclusive environment to host the virtual environment of KDC. Through three media sources, the generated environment allows users to experiment with the limitations and imposition of sound, allowing the critical recreation of the KDC site.

Keywords:

Reconstruction of memory, technological occupation, border territories, electronic surveillance.
The Spatial Extensions of the Right to Seek Asylum
Authors: Philippou Melina
Published: November 2023

Abstract:

The spatial extensions of the right to seek asylum is a project to investigate the first response of the European mainland to the humanitarian refugee crisis of 2015 through critical mapping. The site of exploration is the Eastern Mediterranean Route (EMR), a passage expanding from Greece to Germany through the Balkans, used for many years as an entry path into Europe. During the first quarter of 2015, the European Union temporarily formalised the EMR. It was the first time after the Second World War that Europe addressed statelessness in its territory. This essay discusses the spatial articulations of the EMR political reality through the analytical frame of the ethics of admissions. It unfolds its institutional geography, infrastructure, programme, and strategies and unveils the EMR territory as a transnational space of exception with its own rules and principles.

Keywords:

Syrian Refugee Crisis, Eastern Mediterranean Route, Ethics of Admissions, Critical Cartography, Border Management, Camp
Site-Archive-Medium
Authors: Keller Eliyahu , Jarzombek Mark , Mann Eytan
Published: November 2023

Abstract:

The Palestinian village of Lifta, located beneath the western entrance to the city of Jerusalem, holds a deep history within its site. Evacuated by the newly established Israeli military forces during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war – or the Nakba (‘The Catastrophe’) as it is referred to by the Palestinian population – the village and its remains are a unique locus of conflicted histories, archaeology and landscape, and of collective memories. This article presents the work conducted during an experimental design research workshop within the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. Taking Lifta’s site, as well as it historical and archaeological complexity, both real and imagined, as its archive, students developed their thematics following site-visits, interviews and research, and designed virtual experiences of the village, its multiple histories and narratives. The efforts provide epistemological and experiential cross-sections through the problematics of the site’s complex history. In the process of designing a possible platform for a critical historiography of Lifta, the projects aim to further the potential of immersive technologies as a pedagogical tool.

Keywords:

Architecture, History, Lifta, Israel-Palestine, Virtual Reality
In the Midst of the Revolution
Authors: Robbers Lutz
Published: November 2023

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to explore the political agency of the rond-point, an element of infrastructural design which, since the 1980s, has become a ubiquitous feature of urban planning across the French territoire. Doesn’t the fact that the gilets jaunesseem to choose the peripheral roundabouts as their preferred sites of political contestation – while ignoring the square in the town centre – attest to a proverbial political unconscious? What makes the centres of the roundabouts amidst the informal peri-urban space such attractive mediators for the political causes of the gilets jaunes? The fact that thousands of yellow vests perseveringly chose to assemble at or on roundabouts requires us to come up with alternative ways of thinking the spatial settings for the appearance, the representation and the practice of ‘the political’, the res publicaor public matter.

Keywords

Architectural theory, political theory, contention, infrastructure
On Targets
Authors: CLUI The Center for Land Use Interpretation
Published: November 2023

Impact range targets in military training areas can be square, triangular, rectangular, circular, and linear. Some are designed to look like other things, like airbases, villages, convoys, industrial areas, surface-to-air missile sites, and are built out of old airoplanes, trucks, tanks, cars, buses, boats, tires, mounds of earth, and empty shipping containers. Some are meant to be bombed or strafed physically, others electronically. 

The most focused type of target at these ranges, the classic target you might say, is circular, like a bullseye. Its simple geometric embrace of space defines a periphery, and centre. Though largely two-dimensional when seen from above, shown as a gallery they have a cosmological air, whether a planetary hard mass pulled in by gravity, or a solar gas in a sustained continuous explosion. The tension between being drawn inwards, toward the ground, and exploding outwards, is in equilibrium.

Some people say that these days everything is a target. These, however, undoubtedly are, and they are out there for the world to see, through internet-based satellite imagery providers like Google Earth. Like framed photographs on the wall, they narrow our attention, and ask us to overlook everything else.
How to Spatially Mediate Conflicts?
Authors: Stanicic Aleksandar , Schoonderbeek Marc , Sohn Heidi , Pilav Armina
Published: November 2023

Various forms of violence and conflict continue to shape our habitats. What historically has been straightforward and even obvious two-way dependency, in recent years took more subtle and covert form due to sophisticated technological advancements in the fields of media, surveillance and armament. Recognising the detrimental effects of these new developments on the way we experience, conceptualise and build our environments, Footprint27 proposes artistic reflections, cross-media inquiry and counter-tactics as new powerful tools to rethink the complex relationship between conflict, space and mediation. On one hand, the aim of this issue is to deepen and expand theoretical considerations that substantiate investigations of spatial conflicts by making them truly interdisciplinary. On the other, it seeks to empower architects and artists in their pursuit of exposing, critiquing and fighting spatial violence by reclaiming/unlocking the enormous potential of media tools.
Architecture as Information Machine
Authors: Hammoudi Tewfik
Published: November 2023

Architecture has always been dealing with machines. Differently but constantly. At the middle of the last century, new kind of machine and its science have emerged: Cybernetics and Information Machine. Architectural theory and practice displayed great interest in these new paradigms and produced some design experimentations and essays but it seems like these scientific and technological results call for recasting the architectural foundations. Not only to figure out how to design new or complex architectural forms but to attempt replaying to the question, “what is form?” then to contribute to the understandability of all kinds of forms —not only architectural or urban forms, but all the forms involved in the built environment— and to link or “translate” one form into another. Such transversal view might renew not only our reading of the past and current built environment but also our manner to interact and to shape it. What if, in contrary to the other former machines, the Information Machine is neither to be represented, nor to be imitated but to be actualized, or better to be modeled?
From Cybernetics to Systems Theory in the First Space Age
Authors: Girard Christian
Published: November 2023

The first space age offers a remarkable context to scrutinise the inverse fates of cybernetics and systems theory in the 1960–70s, the latter taking the place of the former thanks to its operational effectiveness. Both fields appeared to tackle the pilot problem head-on, either to shoot a pilot down (cybernetics in World War II) – or to send some to the moon and back (systems engineering and management in the Apollo programme). The study of three US institutions (TRW, SDC and NASA) demonstrates an intense alliance between them, with a persistent focus on the issues of automation and systems thinking. A selection of written documents produced by each entity shows with utmost clarity their high degree of involvement in a post-cybernetics systemic approach. Incidentally, those analyses also show how the differences and similarities between old space and new space reveal themselves in light of the pilot problem. Overall, the pilot’s role reconfigured the man/machine assemblage as much as the pilot was reconfigured by that assemblage, with the critical assistance of computation.
The Dialogical, The Ecological and Beyond
Authors:   Jon Goodbun,   Ben Sweeting
Published: November 2023

In this article Jon Goodbun and Ben Sweeting engage in a conversation about design and its complex relation to communication. They look at the role of dialogue, the dialogical (signifying signs), and the limitations of the dialogical as one considers contemporary processes of cybernetisation and how “asignifying signs” are produced and exchanged within complex systems of all kinds. Prompted by the opening question referring to cybernetics as a general study of information processes, focusing on the production, exchange, and consumption of meaning, not limited to a focus on digital logic, Goodbun and Sweeting revisit a plethora of positions on dialogue including those of Gordon Pask, Gregory Bateson, Ranulph Glanville, David Bohm among others. In so doing, they make clear certain semantic confusions related to terms such as communication vs. conversation, dialogue vs. discussion, and analogue vs. digital, and provide a richer understanding of why these semantic revisions are necessary for the context of everyday design practice. Using examples from their own research and teaching work, they point towards models where an alternative approach to communication that critically acknowledges the complications related to “asignifying signs” can help designers grapple with the ecological crisis in the contexts of politics, research, and education.
Trump’s Aesthetic, Spatial and Architectural Dramalities
Authors: Suma Sophie
Published: November 2023

This article hypothesises that while drama is primarily a television genre, its operation also appears in the way Trump mediates his political activities. By observing some of the media objects and events staged by Trump, such as his escalator descents from Trump Tower, the popularisation of Trump’s Border Wall, the attempt to institutionalise the executive order entitled ‘Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again’, and the transgression of national symbolic spaces embodied by the 4 July 2019 show at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, it will be a matter of questioning the architectural politics conducted by Trump. Then to see in what way the Trumpian dramatisation participates in a populist architectural strategy.
Transductive Architecture
Authors: Gough Tim
Published: November 2023

This paper proposes a transductive architecture informed by Stiegler’s organology, and shows how such an organology exists already within the work of Le Corbusier. I show how his early work developed from a more conventional formal ontology, exemplified by his Artist’s Studio project of 1910, firstly towards a more playful compositional strategy in the Dom-ino house and the mass concrete houses of 1915, and then onto a fully organological approach where the relations between elements – existing and new buildings, inhabitants and environments – are primary (in transductive manner), and the terms of those relations (us, the building) come, as it were, afterwards. Citing  Vers une architecture and analysing Villa Savoye as a tertiary protention that responds to the tertiary retentions of baroque and neo-classical Paris, I show how our ontology of architecture can profoundly change not only how we talk about it, but how we engage and become it.
Ars Demones *2022* Manifesto
Authors: Wołodźko Agnieszka Anna
Published: November 2023

Ars Daemones is a manifesto that responds, problematises and encounters conditions and implications of the practice of technologies of spirit as specified in the Ars Industrialis’ two manifesto written by B. Stiegler in 2005 and 2010. Most importantly, the present manifesto focuses on the question of possible conditions and material implications of practice that Stiegler framed within his word of mystagogy. Here, the mystagogy as a knowledge that escapes capture, that demands “contexts, milieus, practices, gestures, rituals, and technologies” is defined as demonology, following G. Deleuze, where both, mystagogy and demonology, call for condition of relationality, movement and an embodied experience. For Stiegler, the knowledge of mystagogy, because of its risky and excessive character, enables to learn and practice care, and it is through the work of art that we can experience of what degrees of care such an excess of another plane need. Through fables of three bodies as experienced through the work of three artists, Ars Daemones will braid material narratives of care. The selection of the three artists, is contaminated by each other by the common question of the risk of care looking for practices of knowledges that rather than survive, would enable to thrive. The manifesto is thus written through the experience of vegetariat present in the work of Špela Petrič, through transbodies and xenologies in space present in the work of Adriana Knouf and through the practice of virophilia in the work of Pei-Ying Lin. Ars Daemones fabulates while experiencing the practices of “I” that is already contaminated and contaminating.
Open Map
Authors: Uçar Başak , Yoncacı Arslan Pelin
Published: November 2023

Maps are preeminent ways of collecting, organising, verifying, historicising, and even mystifying territorial knowledge. They embrace a multiplicity of readings and readers, and mediate between the visible and the invisible. In constant re-definition, maps transform and maximise themselves by connecting different layers of information and initiating uninterrupted performances. Without delineating a fixed meaning, maps respond to the city’s openness via diversity, incompleteness, and unpredictability. New developments in computer science and information technologies have turned maps into grittier models that define the new granular front of the open map. This article studies open maps in terms of participation and multiplicity, part and whole relationships, and resolution vis-à-vis Jasper Johns’s paintings, Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map and the World Game, and the MIT’s Real-time Rome project.
Rethinking Autonomous and Robotic Systems in Residential Architecture
Authors: Kotsopoulos Sotirios , Nawyn Jason
Published: November 2023

Informed by twenty years of hands-on experimentation with autonomous and robotic systems in home prototypes at [REDACTED], this study provides insight into the motivations and values of integrating computing technologies in residential architecture. Although optimising home adaptability for energy efficiency, ergonomics, and climate control is shown to have clear benefits, applications intended to influence human behaviour remain questionable. The features of three home prototypes are presented to supply evidence for this claim: a Connected Sustainable Home, which is a prototype on connected sustainability; the PlaceLab, a living laboratory for studying health-related home systems; and the CityHome, a series of robotically-transformable apartment prototypes. The case studies are of distinct scales, aim at heterogeneous objectives, and were implemented at different times. They are thematically linked through digital home automation. Evaluating these three prototypes enables the determination of design criteria for integrating autonomous and robotic systems in residential architecture and provokes reflection on the impact of autonomous systems on the practice of Architecture.
Spatial ‘Complexity’: Analysis of the Evolution of Beijing’s Movement Network and its Effects on Urban Functions
Authors: Sheng Qiang
Published: November 2023

This paper is an attempt to read the dramatic transformations happening in Beijing from a spatial perspective. Based on a model developed by Spacelab, which understands scale as being constructed in movement and communications technologies, we try to represent this process on two levels: first, on the morphology of the movement network itself, I would like to show how technological development of highway, metro and bus systems change the way people move in the city; second, on the effects of changing movement networks, I would like to examine how shops and other public activities locate and relocate themselves within urban space. In general, Beijing is a good example, with a combination of old and new patterns of movement networks, whose spatial composition results in a different pattern for emerging economies and public activities compared with western city centres. However, it is still possible to uncover a strong and consistent logic based on the way individuals move and appropriate different scales of networks. In short, this paper will try to illustrate this difference based on the local pattern of space and explain the underlying, yet simple, spatial logic behind dynamic interaction between changing movement networks and the urban functions emerging from them.
The Heaven, the Earth and the Optic Array: Norberg Schulz’s Place Phenomenology and its Degree of Operationability
Authors: van Nes Akkelies
Published: November 2023

This contribution aims to present the core of Christian Norberg-Schultz' later work about place phenomenology and architectural existentialism, its strengths and weaknesses and challenges for improvement. Christian Norberg-Schultz's book Intentions in Architecture is probably his most internationally known publication. One of his books, unfortunately only published in Norwegian, with the title Mellom himmel og jord ('between heaven and earth'), presents a continuation of Intentions in Architecture. It gives a presentation of Norberg-Schultz' architectural existentialism and his theory on places. It is build further up on Heidegger's text 'Bauen Wohnen Denken'. This book presents the frame and core of Norberg-Schultz's work from his last 30 years. In order to reflect upon the degree of operationability of his place theory, examples from Dutch and the Norwegian built environments will be used throughout the article.
The Art of Displacement: Designing Experiential Systems and Transverse Epistemologies as Conceptual Criticism
Authors: Hughes Rolf
Published: November 2023

With architects and designers increasingly facing problems that are neither predictable nor simple but highly complex, a particular synthesis of design intelligence and creativity is required. If the art of being a professional is becoming ‘the art of managing complexity’, what are the ‘boundaries’ of professional practice? ‘Trans-disciplinarity’, for example, requires liminal or neither/nor thinking (thus ‘boundary concepts’ remain a core concern). A concern with boundaries and ‘edges’ implies in turn a concern with ‘relationality’ (i.e. how we establish relations, positions, borders between different disciplinary priorities and methods) and thence a problem that affects how we think of disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, networks of various kinds, and trans-disciplinarity – that of ‘substance’, ‘content’ or ‘matter’.

This paper subjects design research, theory and practice to transverse epistemologies, attempting a ‘flow of transformations’ via such themes as authorship, remediation, smuggling, disruptive innovation, performative knowledge, and gesture versus identity. It brings together an ars combinatoria of conceptual criticism, trans-disciplinary practice as ‘disruptive innovation’, Michael Speaks’s notion of ‘design intelligence’ and Margaret Boden’s three types of creativity – combinatorial, exploratory, and transformational – seeking thereby to suggest new structures that might yield ‘transdisciplines’.

Departing from two separate points – Bruno Latour’s call for ‘earthly accounts of buildings and design processes’ and Jack Burnham’s identification of a paradigm shift from an ‘object-oriented’ to a ‘systems-oriented’ culture – the paper describes the formation of a new interdisciplinary practice, experience design (the design of meaningful experience across time), as a form of ‘epistemological Conceptualism’. This prioritises critical thinking and strategy, requiring designers, in the words of Ronald Jones, ‘capable of addressing cross-disciplinary problems by designing the social, political, economic and educational “systems” that give them greater reach, responsibility, influence and relevance’. Ultimately, therefore, any delirious promise of epistemological transformation must remain secondary to questions of ‘relevance’ and ‘impact’.
Theatrical Tectonics: The Mediating Agent for a Contesting Practice
Authors: Hartoonian Gevork
Published: November 2023

This paper posits the idea that the theme of agency in architecture is parallactic. It discusses the tectonic as an agent through which architecture turns into a state of constant flux. The intention is to promote a discourse of criticality, the thematic of which is drawn from the symptoms that galvanise architecture’s rapport with the image-laden culture of late capitalism. In an attempt to log the thematic of a contested practice, this essay will re-map the recent history of contemporary architecture.

Exploring New Brutalism’s criticism of the established ethos of International Style architecture, the first part of this paper will highlight the movement’s tendency towards replacing the painterly with the sculptural, and this in reference to the contemporary interest in monolithic architecture. Having established the import of tectonics for the architecture of Brutalism, the paper then argues that in the present situation, when architecture – like other cultural products – is infatuated with the spectacle of late capitalism, a re-thinking of the Semperian notion of theatricality is useful. Of interest in the tectonic of theatricality is the work’s capacity to bring forth the division between intellectual and physical labours, and this in reference to architecture’s reserved acceptance of technification for which the aforementioned division is vital.
Particular attention will be given to two projects, Zaha Hadid’s Phaeno Center and OMA’s Casa da Musica, where architectonic aspects of New Brutalism are revisited in the light of the tectonic of theatricality.
The Landscape Form of the Metropolis
Authors: van der Velde René , de Wit Saskia
Published: November 2023

When the city disintegrates into an archipelago of fragments a new role is imposed on the landscape as a carrier of topographical characterizations, cohesion and continuity. Patterns such as transportation corridors, settlement areas and landscape voids can be regarded as latent macro-landscape forms of the metropolitan territory. In the staging of the metropolis these forms need to be embedded in a compositional structure that addresses fragmentation and disorientation, without relapsing into utopian forms of the traditional city that have proven inadequate for the metropolitan condition.

The potential basis to inform this structure is the landscape itself: permanent, neutral and ubiquitous. The underlying landscape also contains an annotated catalogue of situations, in which the genius loci is recorded and secured. These latent compositional elements are transformed into landscape architectural ‘narratives’ within the topography of the emerging metropolis. The enlargement and distortion of specific topographies result in a field of new topologies, drawn from the genius loci and from local cultures and customs. The question is not so much if metropolitan form is determined by landscape, but how we can use it to structure and give meaning to dispersed territories. This involves a delicate choreography of macro-landscape forms and the micro-topography of landscape places.
The Vague, the Viral, the Parasitic: Piranesi’s Metropolis
Authors: Stoppani Teresa
Published: November 2023

In mid-18th century Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s etchings systematically document the old and new monuments, decrepit buildings and broken down infrastructures of a Rome that continues to inhabit and reinvent its past. His views of Rome offer a devastating account of the blurring of distinctions and articulations that time, use and neglect have imposed on the old differentiations of the urban and the rural, the public and the private, the monumental and the domestic in the 18th century city. Rome becomes for Piranesi the laboratory for a questioning of architecture that places his work well beyond the debate on style and on the origin that dominated the architectural discourse of his time. This paper suggests that Piranesi’s images anticipate the dispersion and sprawl of the city of today, in which the ‘vague’, the ‘viral’ and the ‘parasitic’ become modes of inhabitation and of transient negotiated definition.

In the Antichità di Roma, ancient buildings are represented not only in their large scale and magnificence, but also in their decay and reversal to a state of naturalness. These works, together with the acute observations of the Vedute di Roma, provide the materials that are then dislocated, manipulated, cloned and endlessly mutated by Piranesi in the synthesis of the Campo Marzio dell’Antica Roma, in which the historical city is almost entirely dissolved and replaced by an extraordinary congestion of fragments. When they are re-examined on the grounds of contemporary architectural and urban theory, the sites of Piranesi's views reveal anticipations of phenomena that affect the metropolis of today. Political, social and economic conditions have changed dramatically, but the questions asked of architecture in and by these sites challenge the definition of an architecture of style, forms and boundaries – in the 18th century as well as in the 21st – in favour of an architecture of change.
Digitally-Driven Architecture
Authors: Bier Henriette , Knight Terry
Published: November 2023

The shift from mechanical to digital forces architects to reposition themselves: Architects generate digital information, which can be used not only in designing and fabricating building components but also in embedding behaviours into buildings. This implies that, similar to the way that industrial design and fabrication with its concepts of standardisation and serial production influenced modernist architecture, digital design and fabrication influences contemporary architecture. While standardisation focused on processes of rationalisation of form, mass-customisation as a new paradigm that replaces mass-production, addresses non-standard, complex, and flexible designs. Furthermore, knowledge about the designed object can be encoded in digital data pertaining not just to the geometry of a design but also to its physical or other behaviours within an environment. Digitally-driven architecture implies, therefore, not only digitally-designed and fabricated architecture, it also implies architecture – built form – that can be controlled, actuated, and animated by digital means.

In this context, this sixth Footprint issue examines the influence of digital means as pragmatic and conceptual instruments for actuating architecture. The focus is not so much on computer-based systems for the development of architectural designs, but on architecture incorporating digital control, sens­ing, actuating, or other mechanisms that enable buildings to inter­act with their users and surroundings in real time in the real world through physical or sensory change and variation.
The Body Drawn Between Knowledge and Desire
Authors: Fitzsimons J. Kent
Published: November 2023

The architectural drawing brings together two aspects of architecture’s inescapable relationship with the human body: knowledge and desire. When Adolf Loos designed the never built Josephine Baker House (1928), his drawings mobilized and transmitted knowledge of the human body in general. At the same time, Loos deployed architectural means to express desire for the dancer’s body. The sections and plans suggest that the Viennese architect imagined Baker swimming in a pool whose submerged walls include large windows looking into the watery stage, enveloping the dancer’s body while putting it on display for guests.

Considered more generally, the architectural drawing always contains these two bodily moments, insofar as it describes proposals that give form to the lived world. This dynamic couple in the drawing corresponds to the difference between touching the body and grasping it; between an architect pursuing the desire to affect others through their senses and an architectural discipline extending its knowledge of human existence. This article considers relevant aspects in the writings of Robin Evans, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, William T. Mitchell, and Jean-Luc Nancy to develop a theoretical basis for understanding the tensions and alliances at play when architecture draws the body between knowledge and desire.
Bernard Tschumi Draws Architecture!
Authors: Hartoonian Gevork
Published: November 2023

Bernard Tschumi’s delineation prepared for the Museu de Arte Contemporânea provides the starting point for this essay, which discusses the historicity of drawing and highlights the horizontality and the verticality that structure architecture’s contrast with the pictorial realm. Juxtaposing a freehand sketch with the digital image of the same project, Tschumi moves to address the paradox concerning the position of the body and drawing. This drawing also speaks for the reversal in the position of the body brought about by digital reproductivity.

The reversal alludes to Tschumi’s theorization of architecture in terms of space and event. These, I will argue, are anticipated in The Manhattan Transcripts (1981) where a set of freehand drawings is used to evoke a filmic mood wherein the image is projected parallel to the spectator’s seated position. The essay goes further, suggesting that the theatricality permeating the present architecture is part of the shift from horizontality to the painterly, and yet the phenomenon is not merely a technical issue. Rather, it alludes to architecture’s dialogical rapport with painting at work since the Renaissance.
Drawing as Epistemic Practice in Architectural Design
Authors: Bovelet Jan
Published: November 2023

The essay deals with drawing as a genuine form of knowledge in architectural design. Drawing is described as an epistemic practice enmeshed with historically changing, material spaces of knowledge.

Starting with a brief examination of historic philosophical positions on the epistemicity of drawing, the essay tries to sketch out a tentative heuristic of the epistemic features of drawing from the perspective of symbol and media theory.

In the last part, with reference to Nelson Goodman’s distinction between analogue and digital symbol systems, the digitalization of drawing is critically reviewed. The main point is to emphasize that the transformation of drawing into digital drawing formats always consist of a translation.

It is crucial to take the challenges stemming from the indeterminacy of translation (W.v.O. Quine) into consideration in order to understand both the epistemic restrictions and the potentials of drawing under the conditions of the rising digital habitat.
Discotheques, Magazines and Plexiglas: Superstudio and the Architecture of Mass Culture
Authors: Elfline Ross K.
Published: November 2023

This article considers the groundbreaking works of the Italian Radical Architecture collective Superstudio (active 1966–80) with an eye to their complex and contradictory relationship to popular culture. Superstudio’s early pronouncements stating their abstention from building presaged their decision to investigate the radical potential of different non-tectonic mediums culled from consumer culture.

Initially, the group embraced popular culture and mass-production for their ability to challenge the hidebound discipline of architecture, leading them to produce an assortment of interior furnishings designed to activate consumers to alter their own living spaces. Later, the group abandoned these pursuits in favour of utopian ‘paper architecture’ projects, simultaneously rejecting the reified consumer object while relying entirely on the magazine as a formal support, a medium fully ingrained in the world of consumerism.

Eventually, Superstudio proposed a ‘world without objects’ in which the individual would have a more direct relationship to everyday life by pursuing nomadism and plugging into a networked grid covering the Earth’s surface. Once again, such projects were beholden to advanced information technologies spawned by late capitalism.  Studying the neo-avant-garde gambits of Superstudio, therefore, allows us to understand the contradictions inherent in any attempt to contend with popular culture in all its paradoxical forms.
From acceptera to Vällingby: The Discourse on Individuality and Community in Sweden (1931-54)
Authors: Creagh Lucy
Published: November 2023

The Swedish suburb of Vällingby, completed in 1954, culminated an investigation into the housing problem which can be traced back to the functionalist manifesto acceptera of 1931, where the issue of finding a ‘Middle Way’ between the individual and the mass, the personal and the universal was presented as being as central to the project of modern architecture as it was to Social Democracy as a whole.

The ebb and flow of discourse on housing and policy during the 30s and early 40s engaged directly with the binary of private individualism/public collectivism, drawing on the thinking of figures such as Ellen Key, Torgny T. Segerstedt and Lewis Mumford to arrive at neighbourhood planning as a suitable foil to both the laissez-faire of the capitalist system and the monotonous and alienating results of early attempts at mass social housing.

While Vällingby provided improved dwellings and amenity, setting new standards in terms of efficiency, economy and convenience, these very qualities, it is suggested in conclusion, also mask the ‘unfreedoms’ of the modern welfare state, which in the case of Vällingby might be seen as the Social Democratic bias towards a ‘group society’ at the expense of true self-determination.
The Odd One Out? Revisiting the Belgian Welfare State
Authors: Wagenaar Cor
Published: November 2023

Michael Ryckewaert publication Building the Economic Backbone of the Belgian Welfare State. Infrastructure, planning and architecture 1945-1973 describes the evolution of the welfare state and Belgium, more specifically its spatial characteristics. This by now historical socio-political model had decidedly collectivist traits, culminating in the provision of social security networks and a vast expansion of the public domain. If collectivism was one of the key elements of the welfare state, the absence of centralized planning appears to make the Belgian variant somewhat problematic.

Whereas in countries like the Netherlands, Germany and France, modernism became the house style of the welfare state, thanks to the massive investments in public housing, this did not happen in Belgium. Here, the De Taeye Act of 1948 sponsored the construction of individual, detached houses; not surprisingly, most clients preferred traditional architecture and refrained from modern experiments. Industrial parks, office buildings and shops, on the other hand, developed into the cornerstones of Belgian modern architecture after 1945. Both the low-density sprawl and the industrial parks depend heavily on the use of the car, which was accommodated by the construction of a network of highways.
An Antipodean Imaginary for Architecture+Philosophy: Ficto-Critical Approaches to Design Practice Research
Authors: Frichot Hélène , Preston Julieanna , Spooner Michael , Pickersgill Sean , Kovar Zuzana , Hann Ceri , Evans Megg
Published: November 2023

This is a collaborative essay that presents the design practice research of six postgraduate researchers (past and present), who have been working within the Architecture+Philosophy research stream at the School of Architecture, RMIT University, Melbourne. What unites the projects is an aspiration to maintain a creative relationship between architectural design project research and critical theory, with an emphasis on transdisciplinary potentialities.

While the design research introduced here is diverse, the researchers all share an engagement in how to construct imaginary worlds using what can be identified as a ficto-critical approach that draws on the productive intersection of architecture and philosophy. Hélène Frichot, who will situate this research from her position as their primary doctoral advisor, argues that by pursuing a productive relay between theory and practice a novel Antipodean design imaginary can be seen to emerge across the collected projects.
Asian Public Space since 1945: From Mao to the Mall and Beyond
Authors: Shane David Grahame
Published: November 2023

The form of the city and its public spaces are changing in Asia. This short survey tracks the retreat of the European imperial space systems as Asian nations gained independence and the multi-centered, global corporate system of public space-making that emerged from 1990-2008. It also tracks the appearance of a specifically Asian rural-urban space-making system of urban villages that has emerged as a long cultural continuity in and around Asian cities.

Four models of urban space are examined: Metropolis, Megalopolis, Fragmented Metropolis, and Megacity/Metacity. All are simultaneously present in the Asian city, forming parallel timelines weaving around each other. After the 2008 crash there is reason to pause and re-evaluate this highly successful, emerging Asian urban system and its public spaces, especially in view of the likely implications of energy supplies and climate change on key Asian cities located in coastal and river valley situations.
War, Trade and Desire: Urban Design and the Counter Public Spheres of Bangkok
Authors: McGrath Brian
Published: November 2023

This paper analyses an emergent public sphere in Bangkok in order to reveal the gap between ideals of public space as representation of power, nationhood, and modernity, versus its social production in everyday political struggles. The setting for political demonstrations recently shifted from royalist-nationalist Ratchadamnoen Avenue to the Ratchaprasong intersection, the heart of Bangkok’s shopping district. Ratchadamnoen, formerly a stage-set for royalist and nationalist pomp, has been continuously occupied for political uprisings.

In contrast, as the political base of protest in Thailand widened, the glittering shopping malls at Ratchaprasong became a new site of protest, fuelled by urban and rural working poor who sensed they could not afford to partake in Bangkok’s phantasmagorical splendours. The paper argues that in following Bangkok’s historical cycles of blood and massacre in the street lies the possibility of finding new forms of urban design and a public sphere not yet imagined in the West.
Introduction: The Participatory Turn in Urbanism
Authors: Krivý Maroš , Kaminer Tahl
Published: November 2023

This issue of Footprint examines the recent participatory turn in urban planning and urban design. It discusses the co-opting of participatory processes by planning departments, the systematic disregard of inequalities, and the empowering of the market resulting from the ‘anti-statism’ present in many participatory schemes.

What is the relationship between the institutionalisation of participation and the practices of autonomy, self-organisation, and inclusion? When and how does genuine empowerment of collectives take place? Does the demand for the empowerment of local organisations and communities strengthen the market forces at the expense of central government?

This issue attempts to problematise ‘participation’, to call attentions to some of its shortcomings, deficits, and limitations, not in order to necessarily bypass the demand for the democratisation of the urban, but in order to rectify and strengthen it.
Aporia of Participatory Planning: Framing Local Action in the Entrepreneurial City
Authors: Love Ryan
Published: November 2023

This essay examines the hegemonic-discursive barriers facing local action in cities today, first, by revisiting the New Left/Frankfurt School critique of modern institutions, which not incidentally proved a key inspirational source for the original grassroots movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

In this first section of the essay, Adorno's analysis of the Culture Industry is reconsidered alongside Berger’s and Bourdieu's critical sociology. Second, it is argued that the institutional recuperation of localism since the 1970s has resulted in a paradoxical abandoning or overturning of its earlier revolutionary-utopian motives, which has subsequently sowed the seeds for a new counterrevolutionary trend in local politics (so-called NIMBYism). This trend is seen as attendant to still larger city-transformative processes of gentrification and neoliberalisation, or ‘urban entrepreneurialism.’

The essay concludes, finally, with an exposition of the central challenges at hand, and presents an alternative envisioning of participation as a mode of nonintegrative or counterhegemonic praxis.