bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Spatial Planning for Urban Resilience in the Face of the Flood Risk
Authors: Meng Meng
Published: November 2023

The research was inspired by the increasing impact of extreme weather events and changing climate patterns on flood-prone regions and cities, and the consequent human and economic costs. Despite global efforts for flood resilience and climate adaptation involving climate analysts, economists, social scientists, politicians, hydrological engineers, spatial planners, and policymakers, it is only partially clear how best to construct resilience measures and implement concrete initiatives. The complexity of institutions is a key factor that is often neglected, and which needs further investigation. The thesis examines the institutional arrangements that determine the role of spatial planning in managing flood risk, through an in-depth case study of Guangzhou, one of the most vulnerable cities in China and globally. The thesis employs theories of historical institutionalism, planning procedure and planning tools, policy framing and collaborative governance, to explore the mechanisms and factors that influence the creative planning and design process. Content analysis, GIS-based mapping, stakeholder analysis and TOWS analysis are used to investigate data from official policy documents, grey literature, geo-information data and interview scripts. The findings indicate that institutional arrangements, such as long-established planning traditions, formal planning procedures and tools, policy framing patterns and contextual organisational factors, determine spatial planning’s role in managing flood risk. They do this through (1) the extent of the changeability of an established planning system towards expanded flood resilience measures; (2) the performance of cross-level communication and boundary-spanning work between planning and water management; (3) the legal framework that planners and hydrological engineers follow; and (4) the capacities of planning and water management institutions to work on flood issues. This research shows how to apply knowledge from policy science, political science, institutional science and administration, to analyse the nature of the planning process in tackling the urgent challenge of flood risk and climate change.
Quality failures in Energy-saving renovation projects in Northern China
Authors: Qi Yuting
Published: November 2023

The energy-saving renovation of an existing building is a critical strategy in achieving a longterm energy goal in the Chinese context. However, in China, building energy renovation projects are subjected to quality failures resulting in energy wastage, a decrease in the energy efficiency of the project, an increase in project cost, and thus negatively affecting the overall performance of the renovation projects. In order to avoid them happening in the future, it is essential to find and analyse the causes of quality failures in energy-saving renovation projects. Therefore, using a four-step process, this research aims to deepen the understanding of the causes of quality failures in energy-saving renovation projects of the existing residential buildings. The first and second steps are to identify and analyse the quality failures and their causes. The deeper insights from a quality management perspective are explored in the third step. The fourth step is to investigate how the actors and their interactions affect and cause quality failures during the renovation policy implementation process. This research mainly concludes the causes of quality failures in the building energy renovation projects. It is important to state that most of the quality failures can be avoided at the management level. Some external causes originated at a policy level and outside the project. The findings of this research would be valuable for policy-makers and project coordinators both for predicting and avoiding quality failures and for developing proper action and policy interventions to ensure successful building energy renovations in the future.
Immediate Systems in Architecture
Authors: Friedrich Christian
Published: November 2023

The presented research on Immediate Systems in Architecture (IS-A) is an attempt to afford a better human-technology match in architecture, pursuing a state where humans can simultaneously use and design, apply and amend the technical system they engage with.

The thesis contains both theoretical and experimental contributions on IS-A. Initially, the notion of Immediate Systems (IS) is introduced and framed. IS offer interaction in the style of direct manipulation, embed design and implementation in situations of use, and overcome limitations of remote design. IS are related to psychological concepts and described through the lens of Gibson’s Theory of Affordances. Characteristics and conditions of IS are distilled from the presentation and discussion of a series of examples.

The application of IS in architecture is approached from three angles. First, from the lived perspective of a user-designer, as adhocist mode of action. Second, from the methodology and technology, as accelerated design transfer. Third, in an ecological perspective, as humanarchitecture symbiosis.

Following the method of research by design, prototypes were developed in a series of experiments. The experiments result in multiple tools for real-time multi-directional volumetric design exploration that allows users to interactively model and ad-hoc reconceptualize parametric geometry, topology and components of architectural assemblies. A combination of these tools with digital fabrication and interactive building components lead to the most encompassing IS-A prototype, an attempt to realize an open-ended building system that joins simultaneous design, adaptation, construction and reconfiguration as interaction possibilities embedded in the built environment.
Rules, Power and Trust
Authors: Koolwijk Jelle
Published: November 2023

The aim of this PhD project was to explore the multi-level interplay between the interorganizational structures and interpersonal relations in building project organizations. In the first two studies, quantitative approaches were used to validate assumptions about how interorganizational structures are shaped by actors and how interpersonal relationships affect the effectiveness of project teams in the construction industry. These two studies were integrated in a third qualitative case study that explored the interplay between inter-organizational structures and interpersonal relationships in long-term partnerships. The third study sampled three cases of strategic partnerships which are characterized as longterm, highly integrated and collaborative relationships. To gain theoretical sensitivity in this thirdstudy, a conceptual framework was developed using the concepts from the first two studies. The major finding across the three studies is that the way integration in the supply chain develops is highly dependent on the interaction between project actors. The way actors use the interorganizational rules of a project organization, influences the level of trust and no-blame culture that emerges through interaction. In turn, the level of trust can influence the rules of actors. More specifically, dominant actors seem to able to change the rules of the system. When a dominant actor uses his power position to change the rules of the social system, it can make other actors lose their commitment to the partnership. This research shows that successful long-term and close collaboration between firms continuously requires careful consideration of how the organizational structures are designed and used and their effect on relationships between actors. One should not assume that integrated contracts and integrative practices that have been shown to work in one project, will automatically lead to close and long-lasting relationships between actors in another project.
Design and Fabrication of Shell Structures
Authors: Chiang Yu-Chou
Published: November 2023

Shell structures carry loads with their thin yet curved shapes. Being thin means shells require little material, which is desirable for minimizing embodied carbon footprints. However, the feature of being curved implies shells require immense effort to design and fabricate. To address the challenges, this dissertation consists of three parts: developing a design algorithm based on radial basis functions (RBFs), inventing a fabrication technique based on reconfigurable mechanisms, and producing prototypes based on the new algorithm and mechanism.

The first part of this dissertation introduces a new algorithm based on RBFs for designing smooth membrane shells, which is more versatile than existing methods. The algorithm can generate membranes with both tensile and compressive stresses. It can also tweak an initial shape to meet free-edge conditions. It can also incorporate horizontal loads in the form-finding process.

The second part of the dissertation presents a new system of flat-to-curved mechanisms, which allows a shell to be fabricated in a flat configuration and deployed into a double-curved state. Such a mechanism consists of panels connected by tilted hinges. The mechanism can contract non-homogeneously and change its Gaussian curvature.

The last part of this dissertation demonstrates the integral application of the RBFs form-finding algorithm and the flat-to-curved mechanisms. The prototypes designed and produced deliver form-found shapes that have spans ranging from 0.2 to 4 meters.

This dissertation contributes to the development and distribution of shell structures by developing computer algorithms and digital fabrication techniques to minimize the hurdles of designing and fabricating shell structures.
nD-PointCloud Data Management
Authors: Liu Haicheng
Published: November 2023

In the Geomatics domain, a point cloud refers to a data set that records the coordinates and other attributes of a huge number of points. Conceptually, each of the attributes can be regarded as a dimension to represent a specific type of information, such as time and Level of Importance (LoI). Drastically increasing collection of high dimensional point clouds raises essential demand for smart and highly efficient data management solutions. However, effective tools are missing. File-based solutions require substantial development of data structures and algorithms. Also, with such solutions, enormous effort has to be made to integrate different data types, formats and libraries. By contrast, state-of-the-art DataBase Management Systems (DBMSs) avoid these issues, because they are initially devised for generic use of data. However, DBMSs still present limitations on efficiently indexing non-uniformly distributed points, supporting continuous LoI, and operating high dimensional data. These problems motivate the PhD research which focuses on developing a new DBMS solution. It is aimed at efficiently managing and querying massive nD point clouds to support different types of applications.
Optimising the Use of National CORS Data in the Context of Thailand
Authors: Supinajaroen Warakan
Published: November 2023

This dissertation concerns the optimisation of the use of spatial data from the National Continuously Operating Reference Stations (NCORS) in Thailand. Thailand, among many countries, has established NCORS to observe and process the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals into spatial data to improve the positional accuracy in spatially related activities. Despite many potential user groups, only some of them appeared actually to use NCORS data. In order to investigate and recommend policy venues to encourage the use of NCORS data, this research formulates an NCORS data ecosystem concept, applies the concept to identify the gaps in NCORS data use in Thailand, and examines the policies to address the identified gaps. The research shows that Open Data is a prerequisite to make data available to the maximum extent, but not a guarantee that the data also will be used. Next to Open Data, also users, including Open Data intermediaries, must be empowered. The facilitating conditions should be satisfied to enable users to use the data. These conditions require time to take effect. Only then will the spatial data not be kept away in hidden places but will become accessible and usable for as many users as possible in Thailand and deliver social and economic benefits reported in other countries.
Mass Housing Neighbourhoods and Urban Commons
Authors: Dragutinovic Anica
Published: November 2023

The neglect of significance, deterioration and consequent devaluation of the post-war mass housing neighbourhoods are major challenges, both in the field of heritage conservation and management and in urban planning and design. The reasons for their deterioration are different, and interlinked with the socio-cultural discourse, as well as the spatial characteristics of these neighbourhoods. This doctoral research addresses the challenges of those neighbourhoods, focusing on New Belgrade Blocks, as one of the largest modernist post-war mass housing areas in Europe. The case is particularly important for the discourse on mass housing and ‘ordinary’ heritage management, as it encapsulates concepts, policies and practices developed in Yugoslavia, which are relevant to the contemporary discussions on community-driven approaches for urban planning and governance and participation in heritage studies. The doctoral thesis presents this legacy and reveals causalities and relations of spatial and socio-political aspects, policies, but also planning and design principles. Furthermore, it empirically studies and evaluates the blocks in the contemporary context, with the society (involving citizens), and within the current legal and organisational conditions. Eventually, it develops a framework for enhancement of the blocks, addressing the current and future societal and users’ needs, while preserving the identity and values of the blocks. The doctoral thesis provides different findings and perspectives, contributing to the current knowledge on integrated conservation, urban planning and governance of urban heritage, and in particular mass housing neighbourhoods. It shows co- dependence of those fields and offers an integrative and cross-disciplinary approach.
Without Pictorial Detour: Benjamin, Mies and the Architectural Image
Authors: Robbers Lutz
Published: November 2023

It can be argued that architectural knowledge was of crucial importance to Walter Benjamin for elaborating his version of an anthropological historical materialism. Between 1929 and 1931 he encounters two publications on architectural history which had a decisive impact on his ensuing works: Sigfried Giedion’s Bauen in Frankreich, Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton (1928) and Carl Linfert’s Die Grundlagen der Architekturzeichnung (1931). It can be argued that both works played a role in affirming, if not developing his historical method of awakening the dreaming collective into a ‘now of recognisability,’ a method which one can argue is based on a specific image-based epistemology. Especially the architectural image, whether in the form of a printed drawing, photographic illustration, or an actual built object, appears to have been crucial for placing the history of media technologies (architecture being one of these media) in a constellation with the ‘archaic symbol-worlds of mythologies.’ If architecture is, as Benjamin claims in his initial notes for The Arcades Project, ‘the most important testimony to latent “mythology,”’ the architectural image might very well be the agent that causes the moment of awakening, the instance when a constellation between technology and ancient symbol worlds is formed. In the second part of this essay, I will attempt to elaborate such a designation for the specificity of the architectural image by analysing a number of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s drawings and collages from the 1920s as architectural images in the Benjaminian sense.
Stasis, Charging the Space of Change
Authors: Riviere Sarah
Published: November 2023

This article fossicks through the fragments of historical understandings of the word stasis in ancient Greece – where stasis, in its extreme state, involved conflictual hostilities between kindred parties, often termed ‘civil war’ today. Through a series of readings of ancient Greek texts on topics ranging from pathology to literature and politics, stasis is revealed as a powerfully charged state of located dynamic exchange that operates through a precise temporal and spatial performance. This article teases out relevant aspects of the state of stasis – its high levels of spatial engagement, its inevitable resolution into energetic productivity, its precise restraint, its demand for full participation, and its role in the integration of change – all of which were acknowledged as part of the enactment and resolution of a stasis at that time. The intention of this article is to resurrect a more nuanced understanding of the state of stasis that can enrich current concepts of the dynamic in architectural and urban discourse. This understanding of stasis also poses new questions for the future design of spaces that can accommodate charged kindred engagement: lively spaces where contest becomes opportunity, and located spaces of kindred understanding that promise productive reconciliation as the common aim of all the parties involved.
Urban in-betweenness: Rotterdam / Mexico City
Authors: Driesse Moniek , Landeros Isaac
Published: November 2023

‘Urban in-betweenness’ offers a short reflection on the way conflicts on a global scale are perceived on an individual level within the urban context and how this will have spatial repercussions. Conflict is considered as an origin of urban resistance and a possible opening for innovation and intervention at a micro scale. The essay is a call to design researchers to re-codify the shattered urban elements in order to make new meaningful connections.
Conflict, Space and Architecture
Authors: Schoonderbeek Marc , Shoshan Malkit
Published: November 2023

Footprint 19 focuses on the more recent roles of architecture in the contemporary spaces of conflict. Departing from a spatial understanding of geopolitical, climatological and economical conflicts, the various contributions highlight the large scale and phenomenal transitions in the physical world and in society by extrapolating, through examples, the abundance of relations that can be traced between conflict, territory and architecture. Conflict areas often prove to be fertile grounds for innovation and for the emergence of new spatial forms. The issue reports on the state of perpetual global unrest in architecture through a series of articles and case studies that highlight the consequences of conflicts in the places and spaces that we inhabit. In the introduction, these are discussed as an interlinked global reality rather than as isolated incidents. In doing so, the contemporary spaces of conflict are positioned in the context of emerging global trends, conditions, and discourses in the attempt to address their indicative symptoms while reflecting on their underlying causes.
Surform: An Architectural Vocabulary of Morphogenesis
Authors: Rees Jack M.
Published: November 2023

The term morphogenesis in architecture is usually associated with parametric design strategies. I intend ‘morphogenetic’ in a different sense. Architecture in general, and architectural education in particular, are awash in proposals that might be best described as ‘biomorphic.’ Yet, in my experience, students and practitioners have neither fundamental understanding of shape-as-surface nor the vocabulary necessary to describe such designs. This vocabulary, including a powerful generalisation of biomorphic shape, is readily available in the work of Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855). Gauss’s generalisation recognised that there are only three types of surface: positively curved, negatively curved and surfaces of zero curvature. This paper offers a concise exposition of Gauss’s formulation, a proposal for a vocabulary sufficient to clearly discuss such shapes in design contexts and a plea for an architectural pedagogy that moves beyond notions of space as bounded emptiness (i.e. beyond perspectival constructions). These reflections are a product of an educational experiment conducted in a first year architectural studio during the spring of 2017. Surform is a neologism, shorthand for ‘shape conceived as surface.’
The Grace Machine: Of Turns, Wheels and Limbs
Authors: Spuybroek Lars
Published: November 2023

The following essay revolves around the notion of the figure and its relationship with grace. The figure, both object and event, is posited as what emerges in what is called ‘the gap between habit and inhabitation’. The essay is structured in three parts that each contribute to the argument that habit and inhabitation are part of the ancient structure of grace, which extends to many domains such as religion, economy and art, but above all to technology. The first part establishes the concept of grace within gift exchange where the aesthetics of gracefulness is not defined by gesture or action, but by the combination of a cyclical rhythm and the verticality of stance. The second part restructures the cycle as one of habit, linking our relationship with technology to gift exchange, while developing the central argument of grace as a machine. The final and third part expands the role of play and mimesis in the functioning of the grace machine while defining the gap between habit and inhabitation as a double gap, consisting of a temporal axis that leads from habit to the figure of grace, which again is suspended between object and field on the spatial axis.
HomeWorks
Authors: Tavone Marcello
Published: November 2023

What if the city of the twenty-first century was not as we have imagined it? What if the culture of congestion was swept away by an isotropic, weak and diffused urban reality; by the culture of dispersion? A nebulous and potentially limitless city freed from any physical and symbolic centre, where uncertain attempts of urbanity overlap with the idealised landscape of the countryside.

From this perspective, the central area of the Veneto region in Italy can still be considered a laboratory that produces urban and architectural forms for the contemporary city. The Veneto territory is here considered as a palimpsest, as the product of a slow and incessant process of accumulation of traces, elements, attempts, which have been overlapping throughout centuries. 

This article presents only a few of the layers that compose the image of this region; they serve as evidence in the investigation of the role that anthropisation processes have played in the continuous modification of the landscape. Within this frame, the ‘architecture of logistics’ is presented as one of the elements that have imposed a pervasive economic-political control of the territory, to the point of producing specific forms of living.
ICEBOX
Authors: Ramos Stephen
Published: November 2023

At the intersection of logistics and migration, I focus on US for-profit immigrant detention centres as nodes within global capital flows. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centres process humans through transnational, encoded power systems, which couple tightly to the logics, infrastructure, and public-private strategies that comprise the international logistics industry. Migrants move from the country of origin to the US as itinerant labour, and as bodies to meet detention-centre quotas, forming patterns where chain migration is transformed into supply chain. The immigration detention system is an industrialisation of humans, and its administration processes are intersectoral and vertically integrated. I use the southeastern US logistics hub of Georgia, and its capital Atlanta, to illustrate the intersection of logistics and immigration detention systems. I demonstrate how the immigrant detention systems’ scale and its architecture – its spatial contours and manifestations – mirror those systems of international supply chain coordination, assembly, transport, and sale.
There is no Such Thing as a Free Market
Authors: van den Heuvel Dirk
Published: November 2023

To deconstruct the still hegemonic narrative of free market ideologists in the realm of housing, this article looks at the provocative position of the German-British architect Patrik Schumacher, director of Zaha Hadid Architects. Schumacher’s 2016 lecture on housing at the World Architecture Festival in Berlin, in which he claims that only wholesale privatisation of urbanism would solve the housing crisis, is scrutinised on the two interrelated concepts of the free market and state intervention.

Schumacher’s lecture is analysed within the context of the current housing crisis in the United Kingdom and London in particular, which dates back to the years of the Tory government of Margaret Thatcher. Additionally, the aftermath of the banking and credit crisis of 2008 brought the further breakdown of welfare state arrangements under the politics of so-called austerity. Lastly, the housing situation worsened due to the disruptive rise of the creative classes as depicted by urban sociologist Richard Florida.

Schumacher’s position is interpreted in the tradition of the ideas of philosopher Ayn Rand and Nietzschean master-servant morality. A connection with the ideas of Rem Koolhaas is identified, in particular those expounded in his book Delirious New York and with Koolhaas’ conception of the architect as a surfer as well as a hostage, who is at the mercy of larger forces he cannot control.

The argument is concluded by referencing a number of renowned alternatives to a delusional free market approach to solve the housing crisis, namely social housing projects from continental Europe. Ultimately, the importance of striking a balance between private opportunity and public planning is emphasised.
Action Office, or, Another Kind of ‘Architecture Without Architects’
Authors: Denny Phillip
Published: November 2023

When Robert Propst set out to transform the white-collar office, he began with a research protocol: observe, notate, quantify, represent. This process, based equally on the production of data and the use of representation to turn that data into information, led to Action Office, a system that aimed to transform every action and surface of the office environment into a data-rich cybernetic loop. For Propst, the key to turning the office into a space that produced information, rather than merely managed it, was display; as he wrote, ‘Action Office 2 provides no place for paper to hide or die – all paper material is displayed. You can see it, it is all signalled or marked and it will feed back a strong purge signal when it becomes overabundant.’ Propst’s Action Office system mobilised display to produce an information environment that cuts out noisy signals to frame clear communication.
In Praise of Cybernetics
Authors: Rumpfhuber Andreas
Published: November 2023

In the late 1950s the Quickborner Team developed a cybernetics-inspired design methodology for organisations, focusing on information flow, with the aim to fully automate administrative labour and to make the organisation constantly adaptable to unpredictable future challenges. Participant analysis allowed them to quantify communication in an organisation and with that envision a new kind of office space. The so-called Bürolandschaft (office landscape), seemingly-endless, chaotic looking interiors, would allow for efficient information flow. One significant aspect of Bürolandschaft design is the non-hierarchic organisation of workers in teams that were bound to quantified decision-making processes, yet addressed as experts, scientists and creatives, ultimately conditioning them to participate voluntarily in reaching the organisation’s goal without questioning
Histoire Croisée
Authors: Zimmermann Bénédicte
Published: November 2023

Globalization makes understanding worldmaking processes a crucial issue. During the Cold War the social sciences mainly addressed this issue through comparative studies which mirrored the logic of the world-historical confrontation. In this respect 1989 fostered not only a political turn but an epistemological one. The new political situation fueled the development of approaches dedicated to the study of relations and interdependencies between different parts of the world.

Like entangled, shared or connected histories, Histoire croisée takes a cross-border approach.Their common feature is shifting the analysis from comparative approaches centered on territorial entities to the relationships that flow through and the interactions which constitute them, as well as moving away from approaches solely focused on state relationships. Dedicated to the study of intersecting processes in various settings, Histoire croisée is driven by an empirical, methodological and epistemological shift that involves redefining the object of research.
Architecture as Exchange
Authors: Mejía Hernández Jorge , Nuijsink Cathelijne
Published: November 2023

The editorial introduction to this issue of Footprint follows a double trajectory. On the one hand, it describes an ambition for architecture historiography. The social sciences have long recognised the need for more comprehensive and inclusive methods for writing history. Among them, comparative literature scholar Mary Louise Pratt’s ‘contact zone’ appears as a useful framework for writing new histories of architecture that recognise the many interrelations that characterise the discipline of architecture. On the other hand the introduction explains why, among many possible contact zones, focus has been set on the architecture competition. A short description of key aspects from the different contributions shows how, seen as a contact zone, the architecture competition emerges as fertile ground for the production of disciplinary knowledge, resulting from exchanges between different cultures. Acknowledging the diverse nature of these cultures, together with the recognition of institutions, legislation and other conceptual frameworks as key elements of architecture as contact zone offers fresh theoretical insight, but also poses unexpected communicative challenges.
I will not find this image beautiful I will not find this image beautiful I will not find this image beautiful (An unfinished monument)
Authors: Mismar Omar
Published: November 2023

Abstract

During the summer of 2014, I scrolled through the images of the Israeli bombings of Gaza, mesmerized behind the computer screen by their beauty. They were stunning and my engagement with them, so far away from the event, was based on purely flat aesthetic grounds– which is uncannily perverse. Attempting to deface the image, I insert the names of the victims of the attack into its script code. Each name typed into the script alters the photograph and leaves its mark. While trying to defile the visual, to escape from the beauty of this violence, a different aesthetic transpires, that of the glitch. With naming the dead, the notion of a monument emerges, reinforced by the sculptural quality of the smoke cloud. The resulting video is entitled I will not find this image beautiful, I will not find this image beautiful, I will not find this image beautiful (An unfinished monument) (11h 43min).

Keywords

Aesthetics, conflict, Palestine, glitch, monument
Media Ecologies of the ‘Extractive View’
Authors: Önal Gökçe
Published: November 2023

Abstract

Extraction displaces materials and reorganises habitats by accumulating resources – a process that renders populations and natural reserves as extractable data to be mobilised in systems of metabolic exchange. In contemporary practice, collecting, sorting, and processing this data require a complex interoperability between sensors, computing platforms, and databases before they are made into earth observation images. Following the scholarly research on the instrumentality of aerial survey in histories of extractive colonialism, this essay sheds light on the extractive capacity of remote sensing technologies in contemporary mining industries. Engaging with the media infrastructures of resource exploration, the inquiry revisits Heidi Scott’s theory of ‘colonialism’s vertical third dimension’ and extends it from the physical to the sensory, numerical, and temporal domains of extractivism. After Sean Cubitt’s classification of mediated earth observation, the three geomedia, the discussion is organised in three parts: electromagnetic sensing, numerical translations, and financial futures. A media-archaeological analysis of earth observation systems brings forth the extractive codes of the remote view by revealing its selective, vectoral, and speculative capacities in tapping the earth and ordering its resources into materials of exchange.

Keywords: extractive view, mining industries, remote sensing, geomedia, digital image, aerial surveillance, urbanisation, datafication
From Cybernetics to an Architecture of Ecology
Authors: Herdt Tanja
Published: November 2023

This article discusses the impact of systems thinking and cybernetics on architectural design by examining the example of the Inter-Action Centre (1970–1977) of British architect Cedric Price. The centre reflects Price’s view of architecture as part of an extensive social and environmental system, or ecology, that influences the inhabitants’ mutual interactions and their relationship with their physical surroundings. Emphasising the link between material resources, technology and individual action, the project design implied a change both in the understanding of architecture and the architect’s role: from the designer of present-day artifacts to the designer of system interventions.

Influenced by the cybernetician Gordon Pask, the systems theorist Buckminster Fuller, and the biologist and town planner Patrick Geddes, Price developed a relational approach in which architecture functions as an instrument of change within a larger system such as the city, neighbourhood or region. Following this approach, space was no longer perceived merely as a container but as the product of social interactions. Accordingly, the architect’s work represents a fundamental change in the conception of space in the arts and sciences during the 1970s, which is essential for understanding today’s design and planning practice.
Automation and the City
Authors: Giannakopoulou Karamouzi Iris
Published: November 2023

From 1959 to 1974, Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys developed New Babylon, a speculative city for a future society in which automation would free human life to dedicate itself to creativity, collectivity and play. This essay examines Constant’s thinking about automation and the city. Departing from Constant’s own writings, it argues that automation was not only an economic premise but also, and more importantly, a creative condition of future urban environments. As such it required a re-conceptualisation of the collective habitat. Constant’s vision, a critique of functionalist modern urbanism, imagined the city as a ‘complete environment’, part of an extended and dynamic activity that involved its inhabitants. The speculative framework of this essay wishes to situate New Babylon within the broader discourses of automation and cybernetics that dominated the cultural and scientific arena of the post-war period in the United States and Europe, as well as within the diverse genealogies and theoretical entanglements of these terrains.
Call and Response
Authors: Honsa Jesse Foster
Published: November 2023

A "housing crisis" is often naively understood as a simple market imbalance between supply and demand, frequently occurring within cities in a capitalist mode of development. If that were the case, the solution would be to simply open the pipes and build more houses, a regulatory action delegated to technocrats. But as Reinhardt Koselleck reveals, crisis is a concept constructed by special interest groups with the aim of challenging absolute power, enlarging a sphere of popular criticism towards business-as-usual. This paper considers the operative nature of 'housing crisis' and related terms by investigating their use as a tool for urban reform in the 19th and 20th centuries in London. In newspaper articles, think tank publications and government reports, criticism often took on qualitative dimensions, leveraging change to housing practices. Crisis itself has had different meanings, from a moral apocalypse to a political risk to an historic opportunity. This is in contrast to how the term is used today, where it is no longer a climactic moment of decision and relief, but a perpetual and seemingly unsurmountable condition. While London's housing crisis is today universally accepted according to experts' statistics, it is rarely addressed on popular aesthetic grounds.
Architectural Antiquization
Authors: Lending Mari
Published: November 2023

xx
Cult of war
Authors: Markus Elena , Frolova Nina
Published: November 2023

The Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces in Kubinka near Moscow is a quintessential example of the post-Soviet populist ideology, representating a mixture of ostensibly religious values with multiple secular cult objects.
Negative Anthropology
Authors: Trüby Stephan
Published: November 2023

Is there an architectural and urban planning agenda at work behind the politics of contemporary (neo-)fascists and populist, radical and extremist right-wing forces? The Right-Wing Spaces research project, which has been running since 2018 at the Institute for Principles of Modern Architecture (Design and Theory) (IGmA) at the University of Stuttgart, suggests that the answer to this question is fairly unequivocal, at least in the German context: ‘architecture … seems to have become a key tool of an authoritarian, populist right with a revisionist take on history.’[i] The interim findings of the project were presented in ‘Rechte Räume: Bericht einer Europareise’ (Right-wing spaces: report on a journey through Europe), ARCH+ 235 (2019), an issue that was guest-curated by IGmA, as well as in my 2020 essay collection Rechte Räume: Politische Essays und Gespräche (Right-wing spaces: political essays and conversations).

 

[i] Stephan Trüby, Rechte Räume: Politische Essays und Gespräche (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2020), 138. The Right-Wing Spaces research project is headed by Philipp Krüpe (IGmA) and myself, https://www.igma.uni-stuttgart.de/en/research/research-projects/page_0002_0001/.
What is Populism?
Authors: Szacka Lea-Catherine , Frausto Salomon
Published: November 2023

The editorial introduction to this issue of Footprint questions the complex concept of populism, explaining how, in recent debates, it has more and more often been related to architectural issues.  Partly based on the analysis of political philosopher and historian Jan-Werner Müller, our understanding of the term reaches to both ends of the political spectrum.  Yet rather than simply aiming to provide a clear definition of populism, this editorial sheds more light on a debated concept, showing its multi-facetted aspects in relation to space and aesthetics. Through the categories of media, politics and aesthetics, this introduction also shows the logical progression between the different pieces included in the issue. Acknowledging the complex nature of the word populism is essential for the understanding of the variety of takes included in this issue.
Forest Semiosis
Authors: Vangeest Jacob
Published: November 2023

This article operationalizes Bernard Stiegler’s conceptualization of the Neganthropocene, expanding his consideration of thinking (penser) as care (panser) or pænsée beyond the anthropo-techne limitations of his thought through the notion of a posthuman asignifying semiotics. It begins with an overview of Stiegler’s notion of the Neganthropocene as a mode of epochal thought building towards noesis and pænsée with the use of epiphylogenetic and exosomatic memory systems. Here, Stiegler’s approach is exposed as anthropo-techne centric, which in turn limits the possibilities of noesis. Turning to the work of C.S. Peirce, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, an alternative formulation of epiphylogenetic memory is provided through the interrelation of trees and forests: in particular the coastal redwood (sequoia sempervirens). This asignifying semiotics provides the criteria for infusing Stiegler’s epiphylogenesis beyond the human. In turn, Stiegler is brought closer to the theories of entangled care presented in the work of theorists such as María Puig De La Bellacasa and Natasha Myers, allowing for a more dynamic design process.
From Epiphylogenesis to General Organology
Authors: Gorny Robert Alexander , Radman Andrej
Published: November 2023

Epiphylogenesis is a neologism coined under Stiegler’s anthropotechnical theorisation of the co-evolution of brains and tools. In line with feminist and decolonial theorists like Claire Colebrook and Kathryn Yusoff, it foregrounds that there has never been such a thing as ‘the human’. There are only differentiation processes that historically make humans who they are, and do so in different ways. As such, it has gained some currency in a stream of neo-materialist theories that have revisited anthropogenesis, or the quasi-causality of becoming human, that operates by way of progressively differentiating environments and technics. In addition to primary memory as the genetic information expressed in DNA and secondary memory acquired epigenetically through a complex nervous system, there is also tertiary memory, which Stiegler named ‘epiphylogenetic’. It is the accumulation and retention of historical epigenetic differentiations within the spatio-temporal organisation of material environments. Specifically, the formation of organisational technics includes writing, art, clothing, tools, and machines, but also architecture and urban planning. This outsourcing of memory from the organic changes the conditions for further phylogenetic becomings, given that evolutions continue to be extrinsically organised (‘ex-organised’) by associated technicised milieus.
Ventotene and Gorizia
Authors: Fabbrini Sebastiano
Published: November 2023

This essay sets out to reflect on the prospective transformation of two Italian panoptical buildings that straddle the border between different places and times: the prison of Ventotene and the hospital of Gorizia. Local authorities have recently put forward a proposal to turn the former into a European school and the latter into a European prison. Both of these hermetic, unbending architectures have particular historical significance. Ventotene is the island where Altiero Spinelli was incarcerated by the Fascist regime and wrote the manifesto that paved the way for the process of European integration. Gorizia is the town where Franco Basaglia began his career, elaborating the theory of mental health that led to the closing of all Italian asylums. The proposed Europeanisation of these structures of confinement and isolation, which embody the exercise of disciplinary power in its most extreme form, speaks to the problem of opening the total institutions of modern statehood and repositioning them within the increasingly decentralised, indeterminate order of the European Union.
Spolia and the Open Work
Authors: Rabaça Armando
Published: November 2023

This article discusses the possibilities of signification in architectural interventions involving historical remnants, focusing on the notions of spolia and of opera aperta. The notion of spolia has been the province of art history since the Renaissance. In bringing it to the field of architectural design, the focus will shift from the historical realm to the conceptual possibilities opened up by spolia in architectural practice. The aim is to analyse the association between the creative reuse of and intervention in historical remnants and the multiplication of possible significations through various examples. Methodologically, the article expands the linguistic drive of the contemporary debate on spolia to the structural linguistics upon which Umberto Eco built the poststructuralist concept of open work. More precisely, the essay resorts to the notions of ‘sign’ and ‘sign structure’ as a vehicle to explore the possibilities for the semantic and syntactical openness of spolia. Toning in with Eco’s arguments on the open work, the openness associated with spolia will be seen as dependent on the loosening of the formal and typological structures of established architectural codes.
Housing for a Lonely Generation
Authors: Maric Marija
Published: November 2023

Organised around the advertising language for three co-living platforms—WeLive, Quarters (now Habyt), and the Collective—this essay frames the corporate housing model as inseparable from the digital media infrastructures that distribute its contents. Building, on one side, upon the existing research in the domain of housing, real estate, and media, and on the other, on the performative reading of the real estate advertisements of the contemporary co-living projects, it positions this housing typology as a genuine product of the 'real-estate-media complex,' referring to the close entanglements of speculative property markets, media infrastructures, and digital technologies in commodification of housing.
Staatenlos ab Geburt
Authors: Hoffmann Patrick R.
Published: November 2023

Die Ampel-Koalition packt derzeit die Modernisierung (und Liberalisierung) des Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetzes (StAG) an. Obwohl der Kabinettsentwurf aus August 2023, trotz gewisser Kritikwürdigkeit, viele richtige Neuerungen vorsieht, übersieht der Entwurf einen entscheidenden Punkt: Staatenlosigkeit. Staatenlose Menschen befinden sich – trotz Bemühungen, die negativen Folgen von Staatenlosigkeit zu vermindern – in einer prekären Situation. Sie müssen mit einem ständigen Gefühl der Unsicherheit leben, dürfen nicht wählen und sind in ihrer Reisefreiheit drastisch eingeschränkt.
Semiotics: The Problematic of Terminology and the Multiplicity of Semiotic Concepts
Authors: AlMushref Amad
Published: November 2023

The term faces a problem that is difficult to solve in the critical and literary discourses, especially in the field of modern literary curricula observed in the western literary work when acquired in the Arab East. What may have increased that difficulty was the large number of Western critics and philosophers who added to the terminological hierarchy of curricula, specifically, semiotics, besides dealing with the term semiotic in many languages, ​​as well as its details, ramifications and concepts that spread in most sciences. The verification of the term semiotics for the critical process is only an important compass in determining the direction for this term to play its effective role in reading the literary text and enriching the entire critical process in the modern reception for literature.