This article follows the fascinating mythology of grace and gift exchange to construct an argument about appearances as transcending the boundaries of things through a form of radiance or shining. The latter is based on the primary figure of the Graces, Aglaea, whose name literally signifies shining. The question arises how the obligatory rules of gift exchange - giving, receiving, and returning - apply to appearances, which leads to a cyclical ’alternating current’ of shining and working. It now becomes clear why the ancient Greeks married the ethereal figure of Aglaea to the sweaty, club footed smithgod Hephaestus: shining things are necessarily linked to the making of shining things. In the magic realm of Hephaestus shining and automation are fully merged: automata are without exception made of gold or silver, while the abundantly embellished objects he creates always evoke movement. At this point in the essay the term ’phenotechnology’ is coined: the work of making things lies in their overworking, which is sharply contrasted to the classic notion of ornament as parergon, as by-work, or in the words of Aby Warburg, as bewegtes Beiwerk. Instead of viewing movement as added on (Alberti) to structure we find that the figural movement of pliant motifs in fact creates structure, a structure that according to Gottfried Semper undergoes ’the mystery of transfiguration’, which reverses the relationship between surface and space: space is the very depth of radiating surfaces.

Archio interviewed by Dhruv Sookhoo and Ava Lynam

Kyle Buchanan and Mellis Haward, directors of architectural practice Archio, reflect on their experience developing a toolkit of practices that facilitate co-design of community-led housing.

In this interview, Buchanan and Haward examine the participatory approaches that Archio adopts to negotiate the delivery of enhanced housing outcomes [1]. They describe building trust with residents by interpreting their lived experiences and aspirations through architectural knowledge and practices. Discussion focuses on the co-production of design artefacts as tools that enable community stakeholders to negotiate shared ambitions for their neighbourhood within community-based development and regulatory processes (e.g. development management).

In 2016, Archio was invited by London Community Land Trust and Citizens UK to compete for the opportunity to design and deliver eleven affordable homes on a disused garage site at Brasted Close, in Lewisham, London [2]. Unusually, a “Pick an Architect” workshop was held on the development site, where the public was able to evaluate prospective architectural teams for their ability to engage future residents and neighbouring communities in the collective examination of fundamental socio-spatial aspects of the project. Archio’s successful approach at the pioneering community land trust at Brasted Close anticipated their development of a toolkit of practices that emphasise collaboration during community-led development of affordable housing. These design tools were refine through use across a series of later commissions including a co-housing project at Angel Yard, Norwich and a resident-led estate regeneration scheme at Astley Estate, Southwark.

Erik Gunnar Asplund’s Stockholm Public Library is considered an important building in the history of twentieth-century architecture, yet relatively few archival plans have been saved from the library’s extended design process from 1919–25 and its subsequent construction until opening in 1928. This work presents the first systematic review of the available, digitised archival plans from Sweden’s National Centre for Architecture and Design (ArkDes), and explains Asplund’s gradual design and development of the project. Subsequent alterations in the library are briefly summarised, followed by the results from an extensive 3D laser scanning process throughout and around the building as it undergoes a significant period of renovation and maintenance. The results from 3D laser scanning create the first comprehensive and detailed record of the building for supporting future research, teaching, and renovation work. This study emphasises the mutual benefits of combining historical and technological approaches, and conducting academic research in parallel with contemporary renovation projects of historical architecture.

The use of bio-based construction materials in Haiti could help the construction sector to transition, from non-seismic unreinforced masonry structures towards materials that can reverse catastrophic deforestation, promote ecological regeneration, and help save the soil. Architecture has a role to play in this vision, by creating new designs and incentivising clients to invest in new materials.

The article demonstrates that the Ger Plug-In, a housing prototype that combines the traditional Mongolian nomadic dwelling, or ger, with new construction, is a viable sustainable and affordable housing product that addresses urgent issues that have arisen from the growth of Ulaanbaatar’s ger districts. These settlements have no water supply, sewers or centralised heating, and households use coal and coke briquettes to heat their homes. The prototype provides the ger with electrical heating,, sanitation systems and improved thermal insulation. The pilot project was constructed in 2017 and on-site field measurements together with numerical simulation have been used to calculate its Energy Use Intensity (EUI). By using both quantitative and qualitative methods, the results show that the Ger Plug-In meets the EUI criteria to be eligible for green mortgages provided by the Green Climate Fund. Household surveys were conducted to ascertain the financial capacity of residents. By proving its qualification for low interest rate mortgages and by evidencing its market demand, the objective is to demonstrate that the product can have scalable impact for the 840,000residents living in the ger districts.

This paper discusses spatial agency practice within a living lab in Hong Kong. Lab members work in Tai O Village, a historic fishing settlement receiving increased attention due to remnant vernacular housing there. The article presents historical and policy context for ongoing casework conducted with stakeholders in Tai O. It presents Tai O’s history in brief, recent policy developments, and inherent conflicts arising from the interaction of the two. The third section of the article describes informal settlement land tenure conflicts as historical phenomena in Hong Kong. The paper follows this case-specific discussion with global literature review of selected regularisation and settlement upgrading efforts from around the world. These reviews present the article’s thesis that third sector and design-led efforts are critically applicable methods to address informal settlement conflicts that remain due to colonial legacy policies and political inertia. The final section of the article presents ongoing living lab research and initiatives, including collaborative monitoring projects and strategic development proposals. Each living lab initiative presented elaborates the article’s thesis on the interaction between architecture, research, and governance to negotiate complex development transitions. The article contributes to architectural scholarship by summarising unique interactions between history, policy, economics, and demography that engendered the development situation in Tai O. Further, it reflects upon response development methods through architectural science and spatial agency practice, including the role of architectural representation products and discursive distinctions at boundaries between architectural practice and spatial agency practice.

The Hill House by Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1902-04) is widely considered a seminal work of early modern architecture. Today, after more than a century of saturating Scottish weather, the house is crumbling from water damage and needing renovation. In 2019, the first stage of works to stabilise the house and rectify its damp walls began in radical fashion with the ’Hill House Box’ by London-based architects Carmody Groarke. Like an oversized architectural raincoat, this roof and chainmesh-walled structure completely encases the house, allowing it to dry out before conservation works can begin. The design also incorporates a series of walkways through the interstitial volume, enabling visitors to observe the old building from new vantage points during its renovation. As such, the enclosure not only forms a protective case, but effectively turns the building - and its conservation - into a museological exhibit.

The architectural interest of the Hill House Box, however, lies in its encounter with Mackintosh’s temporally and stylistically distinct design, and the perverse strategy of placing one building inside another. For this essay, the Hill House and its new box highlight the underexamined architecture of buildings-in-buildings and, in particular, the creation of spaces that are neither interior nor exterior, but both, simultaneously. Drawing upon a diverse array of buildings and texts, this paper will attempt to outline a theoretical framework through which such composite constructions might be better understood. In particular, it will argue that, while there are countless ways that buildings have historically become encased within other buildings, it is within museums and sites of preservation, like the Hill House Box, that these fantastic architectural encounters find their most exciting and emphatic expressions.

The concept of ‘publicness’ addresses the intersection between people and their physical surroundings, and the ways in which they affect each other in an ongoing process. This point of relational exchange is the core concept behind ‘Public Space in European Social Housing’ (PuSH), a three-year HERA-funded project conducted by a transnational, multidisciplinary team of researchers. Large-scale modernist postwar housing estates, often used for social, cooperative, or mass rental housing, tend to be problematised as places of segregation and disintegration in European cities. Yet they are potentially also primary sites for integration between people of different cultural origins and social backgrounds. By investigating publicness in relation to social housing, including cooperative housing and mass rental housing estates, PuSH aims to better understand how cultural encounters happen, and ultimately to reflect on how integration can be better sustained. In this paper, we take a relational conception of publicness as our point of departure to explore the differentiations and intersections between sites and modes of public life in relation to our approach and the social housing estates we investigate. Moreover, we present our conceptual contribution to the concept of publicness, both theoretically and methodologically using multidisciplinary theories and methodologies, and four analytical categories: heritage, practices/policies, democracy, informality, and moreover exhibitions are used as a research tool. This paper is a collaborative output whereby different researchers on the project present their theoretical developments and positions, identify the analytical categories and theoretical vocabularies on which they daw, and reflect on potential ways in which these concepts can be operationalised, and on the synergies that may develop between them. Taken together, our approach offers significant interpretations of publicness in relation to questions of public space, and tackles some of the most pronounced tensions in discussions of public space.

We will equip in the museum a bathroom with its enamelled bath, its porcelain bidet, its wash-basin, and its glittering taps of copper or nickel. […] Clearly, this museum does not yet exist. Such a museum would be truly dependable and honest; its value would lie in the choice that it offered, whether to approve or reject; it would allow one to understand the reasons why things were as they were and would be a stimulant to improve on them.

After experiencing a floor-heated ‘Korean room’ in Tokyo in the 1910s (possibly in 1920), Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) applied its operating principle to his Usonian houses, starting with the Jacobs House I (1936–7). Successively, Wright’s heating method, along with other Usonian features, was applied to many postwar mass-produced houses, particularly those by Levitt & Sons in New York and Eichler Homes in California, two representative housing development companies in mid-century America. In their tract housing projects undertaken for about two decades from the late 1940s, floor heating (what is generally called ‘radiant heating’) was attractive not only owing to its thermal comfort but also because its slab system without a basement made construction inexpensive and expeditious. Although research on Levitt and Eichler homes has often mentioned the new heating method in relation to Wright’s influence, they could hardly identify the inspiration that Wright drew from Korea. Bridging the gap, this study argues that the Korean floor-heating idea disseminated to postwar mass-produced houses in America through Wright. Considering that their affordable houses were targeted at ordinary families seeking the American dream in a renewed social context, it can be said that Korean heat warmed the American dream, albeit indirectly. Ultimately, this radiated Korean heat would illustrate how one culture influences another, resulting in cultural cross-fertilisation.

The architect Hans Döllgast (1891–1974) has steadily gained in international recognition. His works of postwar reconstruction in Munich have been heralded as original contributions to modern architecture that resist historiographic classifications, such as modernist vs regionalist, avant garde vs traditionalist, or internationalist vs nationalist. Döllgast was also a revered pedagogue and prolific author, and his varied writings have yet to receive much scholarly attention. Döllgast’s books and essays present a significant body of sources that shed light on the complexity of architectural discourse in the formative years of modern architecture in Germany. This article considers Döllgast’s study of farmhouse ‘parlours’, entitled Alte und neue Bauernstuben (‘Old and New Farmhouse Parlours’) was first published in 1937. It was both his most popular book and the one that critics and historians have paid least attention to. Though it may appear antiquarian at first glance, it is in fact both critical and contemporary in spirit. Döllgast’s study sheds light upon his mature thinking about the relevance of the vernacular for the modern house. It also serves to question a general assumption in the existing literature that Döllgast only engaged with tenets of modern architecture after the war, having been a regionalist aloof from the discourse of the modern movement prior to the war. Scholars have shown that the loaded motif of the vernacular was never the sole preserve of anti-modernist conservatives and played a significant, if ambivalent, role within modernist discourse, from the late Wilhelmine period to postwar West Germany. While it reflects these wider trends, Alte und neue Bauernstuben also eschews alignment with the dominant strands of architectural discourse of its time by charting an independent-minded path in the context of imposed totalitarian uniformity. Döllgast’s text thus stands out in modern architectural discourse less for adducing the farmhouse as such, than for developing such a close, multifaceted reading of a particular vernacular interior, while alluding to more than elaborating its relevance for contemporary architecture. Ultimately, Döllgast’s study served him to develop a practical phenomenology of dwelling.

Emilio Pérez Piñero represents the paradigm of the architect inventor of the twentieth century. His extraordinary mind developed through a series of special circumstances in the early stages of his life, and further, through his own disciplined dedication, he was able to produce a wealth of work of a richness and complexity that go beyond innovation and problem solving. Invention in Pérez Piñero’s work was the result of a masterly mathematical command and a highly developed three-dimensional vision, which enabled him to see possible solutions that had been considered impossible before him. His geodesic domes are true structural landmarks and his folding reticulated structures, in which dynamic folding mechanisms are designed so as to reach equilibrium when fully stretched at the point at which they become static structures, are the culmination of a body of work that has no comparison in the panorama of the architecture of the time.

Building materials both derive from nature and human culture. Although this categorisation often assumes a binary opposition; it should be reminded that natural materials have always been utilised for architectural design through human faculty embedded in cultural knowledge. On the other hand, modern materials produced via destructive industrial means, credited to human culture, do reveal their inherent ‘nature’ in their various applications and in different climatic conditions. Acknowledging the inherent intertwining of nature and culture in building materials, this article discusses the reasoning and moral language embedded in architectural theories regarding material use in design, through the angle of perversion. Based on its various definitions, interpreted as unnatural, abnormal and contingent, the article approaches this multifaceted topic, through examining aluminium; an industrially produced modern material that is conceptually malleable. The transformation of aluminium’s use in architecture and its perception throughout its short history presents a fruitful case for understanding many-sided arguments regarding material applications to formal design approaches and thinking with/through material in order to design.

Singapore’s city-making strategies are seen by many Asia Pacific cities as a model to achieve today’s desired ‘world-class city’ status. They represent a source of innovation to design alternative configurations and rethink established norms of urban and social standards. This article looks at the urban landscape of the city of Singapore through infrastructural systems instead of individual design masterpieces, focusing on the urban corridor defined by the connection of Changi Airport, East Coast Parkway (ECP), and Marina Bay as a single urban entity, unified by a visual and experiential choreography. At a time of intense global competition in the aviation industry, Changi has deployed new strategies to sustain its reputation as an innovative transportation hub. The leg between Changi Airport and Marina Bay is an integral part of Singapore, experienced by the majority of its annual visitors arriving in the city-state. The 19-kilometre route, a major infrastructural project begun in the 1970s and still in progress, is a highly landscaped and scenic artery of the island, through which the airport has injected its hyper-urbanism into the city. While conveying the history of the developments of the Corridor, we consider the soft power strategies used by the city state to develop a form of transnational elite urbanism based on leisure and recreation, where urban planning, design, and green infrastructure play a key role. We reflect on the global and local dimension of Singapore, discussing how the ECP corridor reveals only one side of the city’s double character.

On the one hand, this article critically analyses the rhetorical use of landscaping ingrained in the Corridor to attract foreign investment and tourism, where the artificialisation of green interventions has overwritten the presence of the native vegetation and morphology. On the other hand, we reflect on the less evident but nonetheless split that the Corridor has generated between the city’s southern residential areas and foreshore. While cutting through the urban tissue of part of the island seamlessly and without interruption, the Corridor does in fact separate out substantial residential areas, turning Singapore successful green strategies into a form of urban injustice. The twofold nature of the corridor – at the same time, that of the ‘connector’ and ‘divider’ – thus reflects Singapore’s intrinsic ambiguity: its manifestation of global ambitions set against its local realities. This article unpacks the planning mechanisms used to design this development, including the land reclamation powers of the state and the government land sales programme. It also discusses the strategies and choices underpinning the urban sequence of the ECP’s infrastructural nodes, from the Jewel (2019) to the Conservatories (2012). Drawing on official documentation from Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), field research, and using a multidisciplinary lens, this article interpolates architectural and planning studies with insights gleaned by onsite investigation.

The changing concepts of the body have had a significant impact on architectural and structural design thinking. This article examines the influence of historical analogies with the body on structural design, highlighting the analogies’ bias against functionalist aesthetics and their scope limitations. By contrast, recent advances in cognitive neuroscience research on the body and perception enable us to gain a new perspective on the analogy between body and structure. While exposing the traditional analogy's static and one-sided limitations, the article proposes the perspective of incorporating bodily experience dimensions into structural design considerations based on neuroscience. The article also emphasises the importance of collaboration with all disciplines in the structural design process from a biological standpoint, with the goal of refining and enriching the analogy between structure and body, thus complementing and refining the artistic and human dimensions of structural design from a body perspective.

In modern architectural debate, buildings are made by their description in the literature as much as they are defined by the reality of their construction. On this point, a relatively small glitch in the celebratory narrative of the roof of the Sydney Opera House – four columns that do not appear in the descriptions of the building – offers the opportunity to reflect on the generation of architecture’s canons and perhaps the perceived need to elevate the subject matter by abstracting the engineering of its construction. While questioning the reasons for the absence of the columns from the biographies of the building, the article articulates the value of embracing even the smaller details in projects' histories.