This book critically examines the philosophy of the term ‘transgression’ and how it shapes the utopian vision of contemporary urban design scenarios. The aim of this book is to provide scholarly yet accessible graphic novel illustrations to inform narratives of urban manifestos. Through four select case studies from the UK, Cyprus and Germany, the book highlights the paradoxes and contradictions in architecture and provides detailed evaluation of the limits and contemporary forms of sustainable urban regeneration. The book proposes an ‘utopian urban vision’ approach to social, political and cultural relations, trends and tensions – both locally and globally – and seeks to inspire an awakening in architectural discourse. The book argues that the philosophical undermining of transgression is the result of a phenomenon from a different perspective – its philosophical background, social construction, experimental research process and design implications on the city. As such, the book provides a critical examination of how architectural design interventions contribute to sustainable urban regeneration and gentrification and can impact local communities. This book provides a significant contribution to both undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as early career researchers working in architecture, planning and sustainable urban design. It offers effective guidance on adopting the state-of-the-art graphical illustrations into their own design projects, while considering contradictions between architectural discourse and the philosophy of transgression.

Perspective as Logic offers an architectural examination of the filmic screen as an ontologically unique element in the discipline’s repertoire. The book determines the screen’s conditions of possibility by critically asking not what a screen means, but how it can mean anything of architectural significance. Based on this shift of enquiry towards the question of meaning, it introduces Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou in an unprecedented way to architecture—since they exemplify an analogous shift of perspective towards the question of the subject and the question of being accordingly. The book begins by positing perspective projection as being a logical mapping of space instead of a matter of sight (Alberti & Lacan). Secondly, it discusses the very nature of architecture’s view and relation to the topological notion of outside between immediacy and mediation (Diller and Scofidio, The Slow House). It examines the limitation of pictorial illusion and the productive negativity in the suspension of architecture’s signified equivalent to language’s production of undecidable propositions (Eisenman & Badiou). In addition, the book outlines the difference between the point of view and the vanishing point by introducing two different conceptions of infinity (Michael Webb, Temple Island). Finally, a series of design experiments playfully shows how the screen exemplifies architecture’s self-reflexive capacity where material and immaterial components are part of the spatial conception to which they refer and produce. This book will be particularly appealing to scholars of architectural theory, especially those interested in the domains of philosophy, psychoanalysis and the linguistic turn of architecture.

This book explores energy consumption and thermal comfort in the social housing sector in the Eastern Mediterranean basin. This book presents a novel methodological framework for the optimisation of post-war social housing developments in the Eastern Mediterranean climate. The authors draw on semi-structured interviews to present evidence on in situ thermal sensation and provide the results of walk-through and walk-in thermographic surveys to highlight building-fabric performance and highlight anomalies in the building envelopes. The authors go on to show how this data-informed retrofit design solution can be applied to reduce household energy consumption, increase awareness of domestic energy use and inform effective policymaking decisions in energy use in the Eastern Mediterranean basin, including the development of Energy Performance Certificate schemes. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of energy policy, energy efficiency and planning. It will also assist architects, building engineers and other practitioners in closing the gap between the current understanding and the actual performance of existing residential building stocks in the Eastern Mediterranean basin.

The Spatialities of Radio Astronomy examines the multidisciplinary overlap between the spatial disciplines and the studies of science and technology through a comparative study of four of the world’s most important radio telescopes. Employing detailed analysis, historical research, interviews, personal observations, and various conceptual manoeuvres, Guy Trangoš reveals the depth of spatial process active at these scientific sites and the territories they traverse. Through the conceptual frameworks of territory, hyper-concentration, and contingency, Trangoš interprets the telescope as exploded across space and time, present in multiple connected sites simultaneously, and active in the production of space. He develops a historiographic and contemporary analysis of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA, Chile); the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST, China); the Arecibo Observatory (Puerto Rico); and the MeerKAT/SKA (South Africa). These case studies are global exemplars of the different spatial transformations that occur through science. Their relationships to surrounding communities and landscapes reveal deeper constitutional processes embodied in each institutional and spatial form. This book spans the modern history of architecture and science, the studies of science, technology and society, and urban theory. It is of specific interest to architects and designers expanding their analysis of spatial production, scholars in the study of geography, landscape, science, technology, and astronomy, and people fascinated with how these radio telescopes were conceptualised, built, and operate today.

Architecture and Affect is motivated by two questions: Why does dismissed affective evidence trouble us? What would it mean for architecture to assemble such discrepant evidence into its discourse? Arguing that the persistent refrains of lived affect dwell in architecture, this book traces such refrains to a concept of architecture wedged in the middle ground—jammed amidst life, things and events. Rather than being aloof from its surrounds, architecture-in-the-midst challenges an autonomous epistemology. Beyond accounting for the vivid but excluded, this book develops a frame and a disposition for thinking critically about, speculatively through, and being grounded by, encounter. Examining affect through a constellation of spaces in contemporary Singapore, it details architecture’s uneasy but inextricable relationship with key subjects relegated to the incommensurate, the peripheral, the scenic and the decorative. The outcome is a politicized architectural discourse simultaneously grounded and speculative; bridging depth and intuition, thinking and feeling.

This edited collection explores the visibility of modernization in architecture produced in different capitalist regions across the world and provides readers with a historico-theoretical and historico-geographical discussion. Focusing on a particular building type, an influential architect’s work, as well as relevant texts and documents, each chapter addresses the many facets of "delay" which are central to the problematization of capitalism’s progressive dissemination of technological and aesthetic regimes of modernism. This collection underlines the centrality of temporality for a critical understanding of colonialism, modernism, and capitalism. The book is primarily concerned with the historical timeline, the tangential point when a nation enters modernization processes. In exploring modernism in diverse regions such as East Asia, Pacific, Eastern Europe, and Iran, each chapter addresses the historiographic and architectonic unfolding of modernization beyond the western hemisphere. The exploration of these diverse case-studies will be of interest to students of architecture and researchers working on the collision of temporalities and the subject's critical importance for different country’s built-environments.

This book seeks to provide an alternative post-Western perspective to the history of contemporary architecture. It puts forward detailed critical analyses of various areas of the world, including Europe, Latin America, Africa, China, Australia, India and Japan, where particular movements of architecture have developed as active ‘political acts’. The authors focus on a broad spectrum of countries, architectures and architects that have developed a design approach closely linked to the building context. The concept of context is broad and includes various economic, social, cultural, political and natural aspects. In all cases, the architects selected in this book have chosen to view context as an opportunity. However, each architect has considered certain specific aspects of context: some have been very attentive to the social context, others to material aspects or typological issues, and still others to aspects related to political visions or economic factors. The analysis critically highlights interesting, creative and respectful design approaches towards local conditions, such as sustainability in Nordic Europe, climate-conscious design in Africa, and the ‘bottom-up’ sensitivity of India. The book’s main aim is to retrace, through both theoretical arguments and case studies, the debate that focuses on politics and the environment. Thanks to its valuable examples, this book strives to make a conscious contribution to establishing a bulwark against the current ‘flattening-out’ processes that architecture is experiencing. This book will be of relevance to researchers, teachers and students interested in the history of architecture, architecture and planning, and postcolonial studies.

Architects care. It is foundational and germane to the discipline and practice of architecture. This book charts the way the Arts and Crafts Movement established the moral ethos of ‘an architecture of care’ that not only remains embedded in current discourse and practice but also that is being given a more vocal presence in our climate-crisis and social justice world. By way of ‘genealogical strands’ the book charts the origin of ‘architecture of care’ ideas in the Arts and Crafts Movement and their impact on the ‘other progeny’ architectural projects in South Africa over the past hundred years. These range from the translation of inglenooks into an armature architecture of ‘Dignified Places’ in Cape Town’s townships to the ethos of ‘upliftment’ and care that translates from Octavia Hill through to ‘correcting’ building regulations and eventually finding a less moralising and more transformative impact in the ‘Hostels to Homes’ project. The birth of design through context and climate in the Arts and Crafts Movement is demonstrated by the shift in South African houses from boxy cottages to solar- and nature-oriented ribbon plans as demonstrated through the work of Helmut Stauch and Norman Eaton. The dislocation of Arts and Crafts ideas to the Cape also demonstrated a limit to the valorising of vernacular architecture and its ‘against-globalization’ building materials whereby English architects promoted Cape Dutch settler architecture and denigrated African vernacular architecture. As a final ‘genealogical strand,’ the book demonstrates the coherence of moral instrumentality with the animism and affects potential of handmade buildings. Written for academics, students and researchers interested in architectural history, it is an eye-opening investigation into the role of architecture in society.

Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices explores how the changing modes of representation in architecture and urbanism relate to the transformation of how the addressees of architecture and urbanism are conceived. The book diagnoses the dominant epistemological debates in architecture and urbanism during the 20th and 21st centuries. It traces their transformations, paying special attention to Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s preference for perspective representation, to the diagrams of Team 10 architects, to the critiques of functionalism, and the upgrade of the artefactual value of architectural drawings in Aldo Rossi, John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman, and Oswald Mathias Ungers, and, finally, to the reinvention of architectural programme through the event in Bernard Tschumi and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Particular emphasis is placed on the spirit of truth and clarity in modernist architecture, the relationship between the individual and the community in post-war era architecture, the decodification of design process as syntactic analogy and the paradigm of autonomy in the 1970s and 1980s architecture, the concern about the dynamic character of urban conditions and the potentialities hidden in architectural programme in the post-autonomy era. This book is based on extensive archival research in Canada, the USA and Europe, and will be of interest to architects, artists, researchers and students in architecture, architectural history, theory, cultural theory, philosophy and aesthetics.

This project is born out of similar questions and discussions on the topic of organicism emergent from two critical strands regarding the discourse of organic self-generation: one dealing with the problem of stopping in the design processes in history, and the other with the organic legacy of style in the nineteenth century as a preeminent form of aesthetic ideology. The epistemologies of self-generation outlined by enlightenment and critical philosophy provided the model for the discursive formations of modern urban planning and architecture. The form of the organism was thought to calibrate modernism’s infinite extension. The architectural organicism of today does not take on the language of the biological sciences, as they did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but rather the image of complex systems, be they computational/informational, geo/ecological, or even ontological/aesthetic ‘networks’. What is retained from the modernity of yesterday is the ideology of endless self-generation. Revisiting such a topic feels relevant now, in a time when the idea of endless generation is rendered more suspect than ever, amid an ever increasing speed and complexity of artificial intelligence (AI) networks. The essays collected in this book offer a variety of critiques of the modernist idea of endless growth in the fields of architecture, literature, philosophy, and the history of science. They range in scope from theoretical and speculative to analytic and critical and from studies of the history of modernity to reflections of our contemporary world. Far from advocating a return to the romantic forms of nineteenth-century naturphilosophie, this project focuses on probing organicism for new forms of critique and emergent subjectivities in a contemporary, 'post'-pandemic constellation of neo-naturalism in design, climate change, complex systems, and information networks. This book will be of interest to a broad range of researchers and professionals in architecture and art history, historians of science, visual artists, and scholars in the humanities more generally.