bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Other California
Authors: Bhatia Neeraj
Published: November 2023

The surface, container and conduit have become the primary infrastructural formats for logistics, operating and negotiating the scale of urbanism and landscape. ‘Surfaces’ are planes of mediation that typically function at a territorial scale as they are primarily implicated in a form of harvesting or collection. ‘Containers’ are architectural shells of enclosure often sited between the formats of surfaces and conduits – for storing, refining, or distributing a particular good. ‘Conduits’ are used to transfer matter and energy across vast distances, cutting through local settlements, political boundaries, ecosystems, and connecting to both containers and surfaces. These spatial formats typically reside in the ‘background’ of spatial design, yet are increasingly organising large tracts of land both in the hinterland as well as on the periphery of cities. Engaging in these background logistical formats holds promise for designers to have agency over territorial arrangements and could potentially offer alternate organisations that repay nature for its unpaid work. This article uses California’s Central Valley – an operationalised landscape that sustains the state and country’s food and energy needs – as a visual case study to reveal how these formats are deployed and organised.
Vienna’s Resistance to the “Neoliberal Turn"
Authors: Urban Florian
Published: November 2023

At the turn of the twenty-first century, when public authorities all over Europe increasingly retreated from their responsibility for housing, Vienna refrained from large-scale privatisations. Upholding the system of state-subsidised housing, the Austrian capital supported new architecture as a means to regenerate the inner city and to promote innovative social policy. This was based on original design inspired by a variety of mostly modernist precedents. Examples for new residences that follow this strategy include the Car-free Model Estate (1996–99, Cornelia Schindler and Rudolf Szedenik), the women-led scheme Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky-Hof (1993–97, Liselotte Peretti, Gisela Podreka, Elsa Prochazka and Franziska Ullmann), and the residences on the former railway station Nordbahnhof (1992–2015, master plan by Boris Podrecca and Heinz Tesar, buildings by various architects). This article will present Vienna’s turn-of-the-twenty-first-century housing as a successful strategy to provide affordable residences that respond to current needs, and at the same time a way to harness innovative architecture for social policy goals. The Vienna case also suggests that the ‘neoliberal turn’ in housing provision was a matter of political choice rather than economic necessity.
Density
Authors: Harper Claire
Published: November 2023

The publication of the planning agenda Towards an Urban Renaissance in 1999 marked a turning point in the approach towards urban development in the UK and specifically towards urban density. Density was attributed with a range of physical, environmental and social implications, or at least potentialities. Most significant of these was the association of high urban densities with more sustainable, socially diverse, compact urban models – a positive affiliation that lead to the introduction of minimum density ratios for new urban developments and the gradual introduction of density ratios as a component of development briefs for new urban housing.

Elaborating a potted history of architects’ use and manipulation of density ratios, I argue that density has been a critical and effective instrument of the neoliberal agenda.  In its capacity to operate as both crude economic measure, and at the same time, qualitative descriptor of the urban experience, density has been a key device in rebranding urban living. In this article, I expound the role that architects have had in negotiating this duality, reviving an image of density that has been essential to its operation as a device for facilitating capital growth.
House Vision
Authors: Nuijsink Cathelijne
Published: November 2023

The design of the detached house has been at the core of architectural developments in post-Second World War Japan and the subject of a lively discussion among architects about what makes a good home at a particular moment. Alongside the continuous production of houses, architects actively proposed new ways of living that contrasted with what was increasingly becoming a uniform housing stock based on mass fabrication. However, the intensification of neoliberal policies after a decade of severe economic crisis in the 1990s drove architects towards social involvement once again, initiating a housing trend based on sharing, renovation and re-use of the existing housing stock. This essay will highlight the work of the House Vision think-tank and full-scale building exhibitions – initiated in 2011 by Japanese designer and art director Kenya Hara – as one response to the socio-economic and political conditions after the neoliberal turn. Similar to the efforts of independent architects in recent decades, House Vision aims to generate awareness in society about alternatives to mainstream housing options. Yet what makes this initiative different is that it is not an individual effort but a collaborative project between designers and industries to push the latest technologies in home electronics, energy and mobility devices into new architectural forms.
Capital of Feedback
Authors: Jørgensen Nina Stener
Published: November 2023

The body of work by British architect Cedric Price (1934–2003) is largely concerned with architecture’s relationship to technology and its impact on society. As contemporary architecture finds itself confronted with similar issues today, Price’s designs are being revisited and hailed for their prospective and inventive visions. As such, it seems timely to ask if Price’s designs can be regarded as precedents for future projects that aim to couple participation and technology through architectural design.

In this article, I depart from the economic logic of today’s digital platforms to analyse the participatory elements Cedric Price designed for Oxford Corner House (1965–66) to be ‘self-participatory entertainment’. As user participation has gradually been capitalised on through the evolution of digital technologies, I argue that the conditions for what participatory architecture entails have changed in turn. Whereas Price regarded the transfer of information as an activity for users of the Oxford Corner House to engage with freely, the operation of today’s digital platforms instead suggests that such activities are entirely facilitated in order to retrieve information from its users. In order to make this argument, I look at how Cedric Price envisioned digital technologies to sustain participation and in turn how he understood the concept of user participation and its relation to the architectural programme.
From Exigent to Adaptive
Authors: Gálvez Elizabeth
Published: November 2023

The divorce between the disciplines of architectural design and systems engineering in conjunction with the scientisation of comfort-standards encourages a year-round and day-round comfort routine to the contemporary human. In his proposal for Air Architecture, French artist Yves Klein proposes the opposite: an architecture devoid of the responsibility to temper human environs. Mechanical machinery enables an architecture to come, while Klein’s proposal for an Architecture of Air imagines a future adaptive-human. Before the popularisation of interior weather, Native populations employed adaptations, or experience a ‘change of human sensitivity’, much like native plants and animals do in order to survive their environment, much like the transformation that Klein describes. In a world where resource reduction and scaremongering tactics regarding climate change do not accomplish enough, we must think towards a more enriched human existence, for a thriving, strengthened human race. Klein uses architecture to imagine a new, joyful world to come, encouraging human evolution through the employment of playful mechanics.
'Man is the Measure of All Things'
Authors: Muñoz Sanz Victor , Handel Dan
Published: November 2023

The term Man, and the humanist tradition which followed from it, have been challenged in feminist, queer, poststructuralist, and postcolonial critiques, which questioned its nature, or even pondered if we are actually human. What we seek in this issue of Footprint is to add to these perspectives cases of what we call radical conditioning, in which some architectures bypass assumed values of humanism and operate under a wholly different set of values, emanating from industrial and post-industrial economies and its technological developments. These architectures dictate the creation of spaces in which the human body has to operate, and to which it needs to adapt in order to survive. The research articles and visual essays included in this issue shed light on the many ways architects, advertently or inadvertently, coalesce with forces intending to condition humans. Unfolding in the study of histories, architectural types, aesthetics, atmospheres, systems, and users, authors propose inquiries along two main directions: the first trajectory highlights the prolific use in spatial design of concepts borrowed from cybernetics and information technology for the conditioning of human behavior through the built environment; the second deals with architecture conditioning the creation of new subjectivities, placing the body as the territory of intervention. Understanding these spaces, in which humans and their artifacts interact in unprecedented ways, could provide architecture with the timely opportunity to challenge our anticipated redundancy, and reconsider its own humanism in order to charge it with new meanings.
Architecture Competitions as Pedagogical Tools
Authors: Ortiz Federico
Published: November 2023

Architecture competitions are considered an essential part of the profession. But when entering the realm of pedagogy, can competitions be understood and used as tools to expand architectural practice and intertwine its professional and pedagogical strands? In this article I question and examine the sites of knowledge production that bridge the gap between academic and professional practice, and explore the idea that architecture competitions can become tools for interconnecting the traditionally separated ways of producing architecture.

I explore a case study in which a pedagogical unit and a professional architecture office come together by using professional architecture competitions as pedagogical tools. Following the first ten years of Elia Zenghelis’s simultaneous pedagogical and professional practice at the Architectural Association’s Diploma Unit 9 and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, I trace the original premises and the outcomes of this fruitful relationship. Four architecture competitions that were part of both the academic exercises of the Unit and the professional practice of the Office are explored in detail using archival documents from the Architectural Association. Examining the shifting nature of roles, viewpoints and ideas in this historical account, the professional mechanism of architecture competitions is seen as a crucial tool for collective knowledge production in the space of architecture education, and vice versa.

 

This essay explores a case study in which a pedagogical Unit and a professional architecture Office come together by using professional architecture competitions as pedagogical tools. Following the first ten years of simultaneous architecture pedagogical and professional practice of Elia Zenghelis at the Architectural Association’s Diploma Unit 9 and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, this article traces original premises and the outcomes of this fruitful relationship. Four architecture competitions that were part of both the academic exercises of the Unit and the professional practice of the Office are explored in detail using archival documents from the Architectural Association. Examining the shifting nature of roles, viewpoints and ideas in this historical account, the professional mechanism of architecture competitions is seen as a crucial tool for collective knowledge production in the space of architecture education, and vice versa.
Pools, Carparks and Ball-pits
Authors: Lonergan Hamish
Published: November 2023

The first restoration proposals to emerge after fire destroyed Notre Dame Cathedral’s roof and spire were jokes. The more serious schemes that followed Prime Minister Edouard Philippe’s announcement of a competition – many markedly similar, recreating what was lost in glass– were collected on mainstream design media websites like Dezeen where they attracted an unusually high volume of angry comments, accusing the architects of insensitivity. Soon after, Ulf Mejergren Architects’ proposal to replace Notre Dame’s roof with a meditative pool was edited into a carpark. It sparked a series of increasingly outlandish edits – first a multi-story carpark, then a ball pit – before the French Senate declared that there would be no competition after all. This at times absurd online interest might be new for architectural competitions, but it is easily explained through meme theory, as conceived of by scholars like Limor Shifman and Ryan Milner: systems of interconnected units of cultural exchange operating on both wider cultural and specific sub-cultural levels. In this essay I contend that meme theory can be used, in reverse, to analyse reactions to, and similarities between, even the most serious Notre Dame proposals. In applying this framework, we can begin to understand how competitions operate more broadly as part of a complex network online and how they relate to traditional competition conditions.
Trading Zones and the Stickiness of Ideas
Authors: Williams Goldhagen Sarah
Published: November 2023

Following up on her description of architecture as a discourse, or a long and complex conversation sustained by a multitude of professionals, Sarah Williams Goldhagen elaborates on the way this discourse has evolved over the decades, shifting from style as conveyor of meaning, to climate and technique as central concerns of the contemporary architect. Ranging from current historiography and its role in pedagogy, to the different agendas that inform architecture practice and the architecture competition in our time, this conversation provides a series of powerful leads for further investigation.
Cyberneticisation as a Theory and Practice of Matter
Authors: Hughes Rolf , Armstrong Rachel
Published: November 2023

The ecological implementation of cybernetic ideas in architecture requires a material theory and practice that enables their propositions to be tested. The need for approaches that move from simulation to cybernetic reality is a documented limitation of cybernetics recognised by Stafford Beer with his pond ecology experiments and Gordon Pask through electrochemical devices. While both experimented with adaptive material platforms as embodiments of designed cybernetic systems, their approaches were limited by the available toolsets. This article considers an ecological trajectory of cybernetisation by revisiting notions of biological computation as a generative material practice. In particular, the growing fields of biodesign and living architecture go beyond notions of biological analogues that inform modern architecture by directly incorporating living systems into the very fabric of buildings as designed expressions of ecology.
Critical Technics in Architecture
Authors: Mellas Zach
Published: November 2023

In this article, I posit that for the field of architecture to come to a distinctly architectural application of computational technologies it requires the elaboration of a concept of critical technics. This is premised on a systems-view of technical development, which highlights the importance of time and situatedness for any consideration of change, genesis or becoming. In order to then construct an architectural technicity that can grapple with the external character of technical development, I argue – using the philosophy of technology of Gilbert Simondon and Stafford Beer’s management cybernetics – that what is needed for this is a radical opening-up of the architectural process in the form of a democratisation, to augment architecture’s capacity for producing alternate futurity.
Environments (out) of Control
Authors: Vass Lorinc , Cloutier Roy , Sylvia Nicole ,   Contingent Collective
Published: November 2023

This article examines the contradictory circuits of (neo)cybernetics in contemporary architectural and urbanistic discourse by reframing them within the ‘environmentalitarian’ epoch. Cybernetics is today simultaneously exalted as a liberatory mechanism for designing emergence, complexity and open-endedness, and constitutive of an indiscernible mode of decentralised, environmentally modulated control. The history of cyberneticisation has received renewed attention as the key catalyst for environmentalisation, and as the predominant control paradigm underlying late-capitalist Environmentality. Given the profound spatial implications of this trajectory, understanding architecture’s own cybernetic entanglements is a much-needed step towards a critical revaluation of environmentality. The article thus maps the cybernetic imaginary ‘at large’ across architecture – alongside landscape architecture and urbanism – under various guises such as adaptation, responsiveness, cultivation, resilience or conversation. By probing the salient characteristics of these approaches, their problematic proximity to the logic of cybernetic capitalism is contextualised in relation to the broader ontological and ontopolitical questions of the Anthropocene era. The article concludes by tracing possible conceptual trajectories amid and beyond the restrictive circuits of Environmentality: from adaptation to contingency, via Yuk Hui’s proposal for a cosmopolitics grounded in affirmative fortuity; and from responsiveness to response-ability, via Donna Haraway’s experimental material-semiotics of sympoiesis.
Systems and Relations All the Way Down, All the Way Across
Authors: Gough Tim
Published: November 2023

This article proposes a hyper-relational theory of the world, conjoining cybernetics, information theory, general systems theory, the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari and quantum physics in order to show that systems and relations go all the way down, all the way across.  I give an exposition of Shannon’s information theory, and draw connections with quantum mechanics. The work of Bertalanffy is discussed and its relationship to philosophy and quantum mechanics outlined.  I then critique the naïve, realist account of reality; what is proposed in its place is a hyper-relational ontology whereby entities (being) are epiphenomena of relations (becoming). The implications of this ontology in relation to architecture are discussed by contrasting it with, on the one hand, a hylomorphic approach to the essence of architecture (which foregrounds entities) and, on the other, a hermeneutic approach (which foregrounds meaning).  Buildings are epiphenomena of broader political, interpersonal, ecological and essentially relational matters, assemblages, systems and interplays, and this hyper-relationality is the ontology of architecture.
Five Points Towards an Architecture In-Formation
Authors: Kousoulas Stavros , Perera Dulmini
Published: November 2023

While there have been significant discussions about the relevance of cybernetics within architectural and urban studies, the focus has mainly been on computing and digital practices. Since its emergence in the post-war period, cybernetics – in both its first and second-order versions – has introduced to architectural discourse systematic design methods and practices, while also tackling issues of reflexivity and complex problems. In this introduction, we examine the relation between cybernetics and architecture by focusing on a problem they both share. To this end, we approach cybernetics as the study of the production, consumption and flow of information, an account that has little to do with digital logics, unless one wants to pursue that special case. Therefore, cyberneticisation can set the foundations for a relational account that examines how signs are communicated and how meaning is produced and experienced within systems. This third-order cybernetics extends beyond the original scope of living organisms and their environments in order to include ecologies of ideas, power, institutions, media and so on. In this sense, cyberneticisation is radically environmental, positing the primacy of relations over fixed terms, binary oppositions and linear logics, making it high time for architectural and urban studies to take into consideration its ground-breaking potentials. By introducing five short points on the relation between architecture and cybernetics, we aim to assist in this endeavour.
Virtues of Proximity
Authors: Cuéllar Gabriel , Mufreh Athar
Published: November 2023

Whereas real estate-driven development tends to invest in singular and concentrated sites, resident-led development thrives in scattered patterns. The properties of community land trusts (CLTs) — one of the foremost models of resident-led development whereby land is claimed and used by a community without landlords — are almost always dispersed in a context where every property line is a potential obstacle to development. What these populist landholdings lack in terms of economy of scale is compensated for by virtues of proximity. This article examines the historic phenomena of property scattering and spatial patterns of CLTs across the US, articulating the possibility of designing patterns of scattered landholdings that support the values of resident-led development.
Cedric Price’s Pop-Up Parliament
Authors: Pohl Dennis
Published: November 2023

The digital era has supposedly had a drastic impact on contemporary forms of political debate. Live-tweets, podcasts, and posts have become the main channels for politics, polemics, and populism alike. But these tendencies are not only an acceleration of the politics of media brought about by the logics behind television, cybernetics, and computation in the post-war era. They gained strength when populist politics appropriated information access via mass media, which once promised the emancipation of ordinary citizens by architectural means through pop-culture.

In this essay I seek to elaborate how Cedric Price’s 1965 design of the Pop-Up Parliament dealt with a media-technical condition of politics, while proposing that architecture was an integral part of the media network of governing. Price’s project is paradigmatic of the 1960s, a period when the media operations of information compression, prediction, and audience targeting became more decisive for politics than the content of debate. This analysis allows us, on the one hand, to problematise conventional definitions of populism towards a media-based concept, and on the other, to further our understanding of architecture as a political medium operating directly with media such as documents, television, and computers. This essay argues that the advent of digital media calls for a different architectural history of populism, one which engages with the operativity of media and cultural techniques, rather than relying upon the symbolic representation of ideology in architecture.
Mary McLeod in conversation with Salomon Frausto and Leá-Catherine Szacka
Authors: McLeod Mary
Published: November 2023

In February 1989, architectural historian and theorist Mary McLeod published her now seminal essay entitled ‘Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to Deconstructivism’ in Assemblage 8. In the essay, she examined the relationship between architecture and politics in the 1980s, a time of unprecedented change. The following conversation discusses the circumstances under which the essay was originally written and offers her reflections thirty years later to think about the relationship between architecture and populism today.
Being in the Hyper City, and the Posthuman Body
Authors: Landi Davide
Published: November 2023

Since ancient times, the analogy of the body in relation to buildings was central both in Western and Eastern architectural and urban design. Over time, the prevalence of economies over inhabitants’ experience led to the adoption of architectural and urban strategies to improve spatial efficiency and specialisation. The analogy of body-buildings was affected negatively. Nonetheless, the 21st-century technological revolution transformed the city and its inhabitants into something different. These are quantified cities which are experienced dynamically by quantified post-human beings. Consequently, a renewed paradigm body - built environment is established. Taking this position into consideration, this article critically investigates the paradigm Hyper City – Post-Human body. In this, the article introduces an alternative psychological interpretation of the analogy body - buildings. It is built around an acknowledgement of a necessary continuity between digital and physical domains to effectively question the notion of urbanisation.
Architectures of Thought
Authors: Tsagdis Georgios
Published: November 2023

The present essay advances Stiegler’s neganthropological project by supplementing its genetic structural framework with a metabolic plane of analysis. Neganthropology demands the creation of technologies (exosomatic tertiary inscriptions) that arrest and reconfigure entropic flow, enabling thus collective and personal individuation as well as the diversification of noetic life. All life however must live in and through the ‘now’, which it transforms. This ephemeral yet general metabolic operation of life constitutes the minimal negentropic unit that can be maintained, a ‘now’ that neganthropology must attend to. To do so, technology, life and thought must be examined together, none being elevated to the status of a model for the other two. In attempting a non-hierarchic configuration of the three, the essay proposes a new architecture.
Closing the Open System
Authors: Stener Jørgensen Nina , Laplante-Anfossi Guillaume
Published: November 2023

This essay looks at the algorithm written by Franco-Hungarian spatial artist Nicolas Schöffer for the Tour Lumière Cybernétique, a cybernetic light tower created for Paris’s La Défense district in the 1960s and ’70s. By revisiting the tower’s computer programme, this essay aims to understand how it was thought to operate as an open system by receiving data from its surrounding environment.

The review of the programme questions how the probability distributions Schöffer included in the algorithm to ensure a random treatment of predictable city data was imagined to avoid stagnation, repetition and programmatic saturation, all elements essential to maintaining the tower’s open framework. The goal of the essay is to provide a coherent interpretation of the computer programme as well as a comprehensive description of its mathematical elements, so that future readers of La Tour Lumière Cybernétique can gain an insight into the behaviour of the tower.
Unbearable Lightness of an Open System
Authors: İşbilen Ezgi
Published: November 2023

One of the many ways in which architecture is conceptually opened up is by adopting systems theory in building technology. In this context, open systems denote modular design and construction; a system of standardized, mass-produced parts that can be configured in various ways opens a field of possibilities. However, there is a significant gap between the high expectations for the implication of the open systems principle and its results.

This essay explores the potentials and consequences of openness in architecture through a historical case study. The Packaged House project (1941–47), designed by Konrad Wachsmann (1901–1980) and Walter Gropius (1883–1969), is a prefabricated housing system devised to meet the housing shortage in the US during and soon after WWII. It was an open spatial design system, a modular construction system and a commercial enterprise all in one. Although it was cultivated in the most favourable political and economic landscape for prefabricated building systems, the Packaged House failed to be widely reproduced. Drawing from the conflicting histories of the Packaged House, the discursive formation of the post-war dwelling, changing definitions of openness, and varied representations, this essay dissects the fantasies of the open building systems as well as their practical and symbolic features.
Free Plan versus Free Rooms
Authors: Van Rooyen Xavier
Published: November 2023

Since the 1960s, open architecture has sought to move away from fixed objects built for eternity and instead towards the development of indeterminate proposals. Today, in the midst of health and climate crises, some architects are reconsidering the need for an evolving and adaptable architecture that encourages multiple uses. Sanitary confinement has made us aware of the urgency of flexibility in housing. Climate crises, on the other hand, require that buildings can be converted in order to avoid obsolescence. This article examines how the different design processes used by Office KGDVS, MVRDV, Sanaa, and Sou Fujimoto, among others, go beyond the unitary and homogeneous models of open architecture proposed in the 1960s in order to respond to a crucial desire of contemporary society: the need for singularity. As we theorise it, the free plan wanted to be singular and specific instead of neutral, in order to absorb obsolete uses into broader programmes. The free room, on the contrary, absorbs multiple uses on the scale of the dwelling and encourages multiple reconfigurations. The confinement measures taken by many governments in response to the Covid-19 pandemic have taught us that architecture must make uses possible that will undoubtedly be even more diversified tomorrow than they were yesterday.
On the Open Style of Architectural Reasoning
Authors: Apostolidis Konstantinos
Published: November 2023

This article departs from Ian Hacking’s concept of ‘styles of reasoning’ to argue that open architecture is not necessarily an ontological, but rather a methodological category, and that in order to understand open architecture we require an appropriate style of architectural reasoning. Stanford Anderson’s approach to Imre Lakatos’s methodology of scientific research programmes in architecture is used to develop the idea that a precise style of reasoning forms an explicit understanding of architectural openness, and is elaborated further using Michael Hays’s notion of critical architecture as an alternative approach to open architecture, which is free from any predetermined logic. The article concludes with an attempt to identify similarities between the work of Anderson and Hays as a basis for an open style of architectural reasoning.
Writing Open Architecture as a book on Human Rights (and against Nation-States)
Authors: Akcan Esra
Published: November 2023

Drawing on the author’s book Open Architecture, this essay studies the relation between migration and architecture as a matter of human rights, and thereby exposes the historical roots of contemporary racisms, while giving due acknowledgment to the Black and Brown migrants in the making of even the most established European architectural projects. This analysis not only exposes the weaknesses of a world order predicated on the limited and constructed idea of the nation-state, but also outlines architecture’s ways to build resistance through the concept of openness. Defining open architecture as a new ethic of welcoming toward the immigrant, the essay alludes to the formal, programmatic and procedural aspects of latent open architecture, such as flexibility and adaptability of form, collectivity and collaboration, participatory processes, and multiplicity of meaning.
Infinite But Tiny
Authors: Eftaxiopoulos Georgios , Álvarez García María
Published: November 2023

In the midst of a new Covid-19 variant—Omega—in winter 2021, the recently rebranded tech giant Meta announced the company’s vision for the metaverse: a ‘beyond universe’ of constant connection. Only a few days later, the Swedish furniture giant IKEA shared its latest version of the project Tiny Homes: an extremely condensed and cheap micro-apartment in Tokyo's district of Shinjuku. This paper scrutinises these two events and discusses the progressive upscaling of the digital dwelling and the parallel downsizing of the physical one. It argues that beyond a deadly epidemic, Covid-19 managed to upend, overnight, not only the traditional living and working practices, but also the spaces that both determine and are determined by them. It canonised a flexible life by envisioning a new architecture of hybrid dwelling where people could shift in real-time from their tiny physical spaces into an infinite digital one. Yet, this opportunity granted by the immersive, allegedly inclusive and democratic new virtual realm hides a strangely familiar set of relations. It facilitates the establishment of a new and broader economy of continuous worldwide accumulation in which constant connectedness, creation and production construct a highly ephemeral and economised hybrid space that redefines the traditional understanding of dwelling.
Housing Migrant Workers
Authors: Sgolacchia Renzo
Published: November 2023

A flexible dwelling commonly refers to housing susceptible to modification to various functions or uses. Between the 1960s and 1970s, Architectural Design magazine published studies and prototypes of flexible architectures, such as container homes and mobile homes, as alternative options to the housing market. Temporary, mobile, modular, containerised, and prefab became synonyms of flexible.
These units proliferated to fulfil housing emergencies. The ordinary concept of flexibility, including, for instance, a dwelling capable of different customisations, shifts to a more restrictive meaning, revealing the intrinsic logistic nature of the containerised housing that, rather than goods, controls and distributes human beings. Through field research, the case study is the workers’ housing in the Rotterdam-Venlo corridor, a strategic trajectory of global supply chains. The logistical organisation goes beyond the thin enclosure of productive sites, regulating the mobility of workers and the flexibility of housing. Conceived by employment agencies to provide and discipline the workforce, workers’ housing is merely driven by efficiency criteria.
Disclosing contexts where migrant flows are less tangible and visible, this research’s crucial questions revolve around the relationship between flexible housing and rigorous logistic regimes, the corporates’ exploitative strategies and the bottom-up workers’ tactics.
The House Gone Missing
Authors: Van den Heuvel Dirk , Mota Nelson
Published: November 2023

The digital turn in architecture seems to have displaced the house as a paradigm for architectural theory. Omitting the house, and with it, housing and dwelling as key sites for the reconstitution of the discipline, recent theorisations of the digital in architecture have almost exclusively focused on new methods of production and notions of materiality alongside profound changes to the urban and social dimensions of the built environment. The Covid-19 pandemic has unveiled the multifaceted dimensions of the impact of the new digital technologies on dwelling as private houses transformed into online workspaces. It calls for a reflection on the question of dwelling as formulated by Martin Heidegger in 1951, when he suggested that answers won’t be found in technology and quantitative approaches to the pressing housing urgency of the time, but rather in a rethinking of culture through existentialist philosophy. The question of dwelling after the digital turn leads to scrutiny of the history of the digitisation of the house and the shifting nature of domesticity, and to an exploration of involved motivations and values, oscillating between a techno-utopianism to a techno-capitalism. While the boundaries between real and virtual realms are blurred, the house and dwelling find a reconceptualisation in ecological and relational terms, thereby dissolving the house as a discrete object or entity. Privacy, autonomy, and physicality are in need of a rebalancing.
Ephemeral China/Handmade China
Authors: Ruan Xing
Published: November 2023

A China that is in a frenzied state of economic boom and potential social instability, which is most vividly represented in its architectural and urban developments, is, I hope I will convince you, ephemeral. A quite different China, perhaps is not so visible as its new buildings and cities, is metaphorically ‘handmade’. I should like to extend the meanings of the handmade to the more stable and long lasting attitudes towards social life, and even mortality. My sources for the second China are partially from literature (not from architecture). With the construction boom since the mid-1990s, mainstream Western architectural journals and galleries have been racing to expose new architecture in China; celebrity Western architects have been winning major commissions in China: the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games is a case in point. The sheer quantity and speed of China’s development, as evidenced in architecture and urbanisation, causes an ‘unbearable lightness of being’ (to paraphrase Milan Kundera). Does all this then suggest that China, as solidified in its buildings and cities, is no longer ‘handmade’ in the sense that memory and a sense of history are redundant (particularly for a country that has a recorded history of more than 5000 years, which have been so lovingly recorded in handmade artefacts)? The true meaning of the handmade, which absorbs labour — an ‘honourable labour’ as Joseph Conrad lovingly put it in his Mirror of the Sea, as well as memory, like that of a home, is a static artefact, which harbours our changing emotion, the frailties of human life, and indeed, the growing awareness that comes with time of our mortality: the handmade offers the necessary enshrinement of life’s vulnerability. Let me assure you, the seemingly fast-changing China, as represented in its new architecture and city forms, as well in its frenzied urbanisation and booming economy, is but a smoke screen. It is, in other words, ephemeral. The other China is, or has to be, handmade.
Performing Mimetic Mapping: A Non-Visualisable Map of the Suzhou River Area of Shanghai
Authors: Karandinou Anastasia , Koutsoumpos Leonidas
Published: November 2023

This paper questions issues concerning the mapping of experience, through the concept of mimesis – the creative re-performance of the site experience onto the map. The place mapped is the Suzhou River area, a significant part of Shanghai, the former boundary between the British and American Settlements, and an ever-changing and transforming territory. Through the detailed description of the mapping processes, we analyse the position of this particular map within contemporary discourse about mapping. Here, we question the purpose of the process, the desired outcome, the consciousness of the significance of each step/event, and the possible significance of the final traces that the mapping leaves behind. Although after the mapping had been carried out, the procedure was analysed, post-rationalised, and justified through its partial documentation (as part of an educational process), this paper questions the way and the reason for these practices (the post-rationalising of the mapping activity, justifying the strategy, etc.), and their possible meaning, purpose, demand or context. Thus we conclude that the subject matter is not the final outcome of an object or ‘map’; there is no final map to be exhibited. What this paper brings forth is the mapping as an event, an action performed by the embodied experience of the actual place and by the trans-local materiality of the tools and elements involved in the process of its making.
You Are Not Here: Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the Architecture of Absence
Authors: Herrington Susan
Published: November 2023

This paper examines Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenological ontology in relationship to experiences with architecture that account for absence. While interest in Sartre’s phenomenology has waned over the past thirty years, philosophers of art are revisiting his work, particularly the way imagination figures in his phenomenology. As educators, students, and practitioners who have the task of imagining what could be, Sartre’s grasp of the imagining consciousness in experience is especially relevant. His three main forms of the imagining consciousness – negation, nothingness, and being – are explored in the context space, place, and location. These forms of consciousness are drawn from his major phenomenological studies regarding the imagination, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (1943; 1956), The Imaginary (1940; 2004), and Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960; 1976). Examples of absence include in-situ memorial structures that literally provide the space for negation, sites of religious veneration that render the place of nothingness, and spontaneous memorials that serve as the location for being (pour-soi, en-soi, and pour-autrui). Ultimately, Sartre’s phenomenological ontology reveals that imagination plays a vital role in understanding the experiential power of architecture in relationship to space, place, and location. In doing so, this paper also suggests that the imagining conscious itself may be an important part of an ontology of architecture.
Vernacular Architecture as Self-Determination: Venturi, Scott Brown and the Controversy over Philadelphia's Crosstown Expressway, 1967-1973
Authors: Haumann Sebastian
Published: November 2023

Between 1967 and 1972 Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown worked on two projects simultaneously. One culminated in Learning from Las Vegas, their renowned contribution to architectural theory; the other reflected their political engagement in the so-called Crosstown Controversy. In this project, Venturi and Scott Brown spoke on behalf of a citizens’ initiative opposing a proposed inner-city expressway in the South Street area of Philadelphia. The aesthetic criticism exemplified in their study of Las Vegas found parallels in the political critique embodied by the alternative scheme they developed for the Philadelphia citizen group. This scheme proposed to revalorise the vernacular architecture of the existing neighbourhood, against the wholesale demolition implied in the official plans for the Crosstown Expressway.

This article investigates the connections between aesthetic ideals and social concern in the work of Venturi and Scott Brown. Embedding the discussion on architectural theory in the concrete context of urban history reveals important links between intellectual discourse and political action. Venturi and Scott Brown’s repeated reference to social aspects of architecture can only be understood, so this article demonstrates, if we analyse the concrete engagements in which they developed their projects. The South Street project offers a concrete occasion wherein the architects were forced to adopt a political position.
Interpreting the Contemporary Metropolis: Notes on the Urban Debate and on Ignasi Solà-Morales
Authors: Furtado Gonçalo
Published: November 2023

The theory of urbanism faces the difficult task of struggling to make acknowledgeable the complexity of the metropolitan form. In this sense, the legacy of the recently diseased history researcher and architecture theorist Ignási Sola-Morales arises as a sharp, generous and open perspective. Besides an apparent sense of enigma, his work has the genuine capacity of describing the cartography the metropolis and its form in its contemporary complexity. Being a teacher at the COAC (Cataluña’s college of architects) allowed him to draw one of the most remarkable and sharp theoretical cartographies of the contemporaneous condition of the metropolitan architecture. A complex line of thought towards architecture being born from a cross from artistic and philosophical ideas, capable of causing breaches on the architectural culture.

His writings correspond, in a certain way, to a selection of “categories” on which to lay the provisory interpretations of a contemporary metropolis and its form that is, in his own words, multiple, non convergent and of an instable shape arising from the crystallization of various forces. From all that, the outcome is a complex system united, as far as I’m concerned, by the permanent generosity of proposing to romantically rise above the bizarreness of a late-capitalism, post-historical world. In this paper we intend to show how the work of Ignási Sola Morales presents, in a generous, sharp and open way besides all the apparent enigma, the genuine capacity of cartographing the city and its form in all its contemporaneous complexity.
Indeterminate Architecture: Scissor-Pair Transformable Structures
Authors: Rosenberg Daniel
Published: November 2023

Most traditional approaches to architectural design assume that the analysis of present situations and the prediction of future ones will offer unique answers that would ultimately define correct and unique architectural solutions. However, this approach is based on two questionable believes: First, that present situations are representative of a reality to be produced in the future, and, second, that these situations are fixed and invariable throughout time.

The vision here is that an alternative approach is needed: a method that assumes and uses the uncertainties about present and future situations through the design of indeterminate solutions. Instead of analysing present and predicting future situations, designers should envision transformable environments able to offer a range of alternatives to be defined and redefined by the users in real-time – an indeterminate architecture, sympathetic to uncertainty, incompleteness and emergent situations that can neither be analysed nor predicted beforehand.

This paper addresses the design of an indeterminate architecture, through proposing two main directions: Designing the Range and Enabling the Choice. While the former refers to transformable solutions able to offer a variety of states, the later refers to the selection of states by the user, within that range according to chance and emergent situations.

The structure of this paper is organised around these two ideas by presenting an architectural background, some technical methods, and an empirical experiment. While the theoretical background investigates the original ideas and project about indeterminacy within an architectural framework, the technical methods analyse the range of states within the transformation of scissor-pair transformable structures, and study the real-time control and interaction within artificial intelligence (AI) robotic solutions. The empirical experiment uses the architectural background and the technical methods to materialise and radicalise indeterminacy by proposing a novel scissor-pair transformable solution.
Superstudio 1966-1973: From the World Without Objects to the Universal Grid
Authors: Quesada Fernando
Published: November 2023

The Italian group of architects Superstudio entered the architectural scene in 1966 with the exhibition Superarchitecture, an ironical commentary on cornucopia and the consumption of design objects. Between that show and the publication of a serial project called Life, Education, Ceremony, Love, Death in 1973, they developed a thorough critique of design and the professional role of architects in information society. This essay traces the development of Superstudio’s critical project, the evolution of their formal repertoire and their operative instruments, studying their designs, projects and texts.