The article suggests that the misuse of architectural form is the major threat to our cities. Form has power and form used mindlessly has indiscriminate consequences for the urban environment and its citizens.

To explore this ‘silent’ power of form, the article takes Louis Kahn’s lecture on ‘Silence and Light’ as its opening text. Kahn‘s distinction between the ‘measurable’ and ‘unmeasurable’ dimensions of architecture is compared to similar distinctions made by Kant, and extended by Schopenhauer at the turn of the nineteenth century. We learn that it is the ‘unmeasurable’ aspect of reality that gives form its power and in the second part of the article, using detailed analyses of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work, we are able to explain how the ‘unmeasurable’ is revealed within the ‘measurable’ and how such carefully balanced use of form can make a significant contribution to the health of our cities.

Contemporary ecological discourse in architecture is often built upon an approach based on quantitative parameters, characterised by the use of scientific data for environmentally sound architectural design. This article questions how such an ecological approach relates to the architectural image, experience, and inhabitation.

Through two archetypical projects - Siegfried Ebeling’s Wohnkubus (1926) and Cedric Price’s Generator (1976-9) – this article examines a possible theory of ecologically oriented architecture which engages aesthetic values related to the human experience of architectural space. The projects are separated by the same fifty-year gap that separates Generator from present day, and the article therefore tries to reveal if and how both archetypes could suggest the need for an updated model for environmental design. What can we learn from these projects, and how do the Wohnkubus and Generator unveil other modelling practices? Is architecture today capable of (or even entitled to) producing exemplary representations committed to the ethical dimension of the global change?

Paradigmatic of a cultural shift in Irish education in the 1960s, St Brendan’s Community School in Birr, County Offaly was designed by Peter and Mary Doyle as a flexible and extendable mat-building articulated by generous social spaces including exterior courtyards and an interior ‘street’. Owned by the Department of Education and Skills, administered by a Board of Management and occupied by approximately one thousand staff and pupils daily, St Brendan’s has been in continuous use since its opening in 1980. Generations of students have benefited from the intimate relationship between the cultural and social life of the school and the architectural form, fabric, and technology that facilitates it. But by the beginning of the twentieth-first century, due to the lack of consideration given to such aspects at the time it was conceived and constructed, the building was suffering from ongoing material degradation and issues in environmental performance.

This article reflects on a research project undertaken on the school, which aimed to provide the means by which its learning environment and energy use could be improved and optimised in a manner consistent with the integrity of the architects’ conceptual thinking and built design: the opportunity for St Brendan’s to continue its course as a successful paradigm, this time for twenty-first-century education through the reconciliation of its future use with its social and education heritage. Guided by the ‘three dimensions of modernity’ - social, technical, and aesthetic - this process involved the development of new ‘ways of seeing’ and ‘methods of action’ applied to the school realised through the production of a series of representations that collectively identified, mapped, and re-presented the significances and values of the school, element by element. The relationships between these phenomena were complex and necessitated an innovative interdisciplinary approach.

St Brendan’s may have embodied a radical new social agenda for education and indeed society in twentieth-century Ireland in its architecture, but the building remains unlisted and, until recently, its significance (nationally and internationally) has been much overlooked. Part of this project’s agenda, therefore, involved raising awareness in the value of the building among existing and potential future stakeholders. The creation of accessible forms of communication that would both synthesise and make clear the complex data generated and the relationships between them was of central importance to the team’s approach. The paper ultimately argues that while attuned to a specific site, these techniques contain the possibility of a wider application, a new visual literacy for the conservation of twentieth-century buildings.

Let us sit down here on this seat. We had it made as a sample for a temple in Junagadh. Now it has a place here at home. We call its back the kakshasan. Do you know why? Because the backrest supports the kaksh or the armpit, when you lean against it while sitting, just like this.

In this article, we explore how different kinds and varying degrees of co-creation have shaped cohousing in Denmark over the past half century. The first part of the article is concerned with how this is related to types of ownership and ways of establishing new communities; the second part to the role of the architect, arguing for more experimental and open processes; and the third part to resident mix and community life, which raises questions of diversity and the unfinished. The article concludes with a discussion of how the accumulated experiences may contribute to strengthening a sense of belonging and community in future cohousing during the processes of both construction and habitation.

In around 1912 Gabriel Jouveau-Dubreuil, a young science teacher from French colonial Pondicherry in South India, visited the nearby town of Cuddalore in order to inspect the construction of a new Hindu temple. Since arriving in South India in 1909 he had been travelling to many temples and archaeological sites in order to understand the history of South Indian art. The modern temple that he visited in a suburb of Cuddalore at Tiruppappuliyur was not in fact new but a wholesale renovation of a nine-hundred-year-old shrine on a site sacred to Tamil Shaivas. This was just one of the many temples substantially rebuilt from the 1890s to the 1930s under the patronage of a wealthy merchant community, the Nattukkottai Chettiars, at a time of religious revival and growing Tamil cultural nationalism. The Nattukkottai Chettiars came from the villages and towns of Chettinadu, an arid region in southern Madras Presidency. This region was significant not only for being the provenance of the most prolific patrons of South Indian temple architecture in colonial Madras Presidency but also their builders, for many of the architects and craftsmen working on the temple at Tiruppappuliyur were from villages in Chettinadu. One of these men, M. S. Swaminathan of Pillaiyarpatti, was Jouveau-Dubreuil’s chief informant, one of the many ‘natives’ who were a critical and inextricable element of colonial knowledge production. The understanding of formal composition and terminology that Jouveau-Dubreuil learnt from contemporary architects and craftsmen and his observations of the evolution of architectural design contributed towards the first study of the Tamil temple for both a scholarly and wider public audience from the very earliest monuments of the seventh century through to those currently under construction. This article explores this architectural ‘renaissance’ in colonial Madras Presidency under Chettiar patronage and evaluates modern temple design through the pioneering scholarship of Jouveau-Dubreuil and his contemporaries.

In this article, we argue that in order to properly assess the potentials, challenges, and implications of the digital transformation in architecture and construction, we need to better understand the political-economic dynamics behind it and examine it in light of the current reorganisation of global capitalism. The focus of this article is therefore on the larger political-economic and techno-economic conditions that are shaping the implementation of digital technologies in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) sector. Based on document analysis on the digital turn in architecture and construction, along with interviews with AEC professionals, we argue that the logic of platform capitalism is beginning to transform the industry, with Building Information Modelling (BIM) acting as an obligatory passage point and government policies as gate-openers. The article, first, discusses concepts of platform and platform capitalism and indicates how these apply to recent reconfigurations of actor and power relations in the field. Second, it reviews some of the developments in digital architecture from 2D drawings to BIM and beyond. Third, it examines the role of government policies as driving forces in the digital transformation. Forth, it takes a closer look at the case of software producer Autodesk and their BIM product Revit, which illustrates how the logic of platform capitalism has gained traction in architecture and construction. Finally, it concludes that some expectations can be derived from these observations: In the realm of design software, we can expect a further concentration of economic power and a near-monopolistic structure of the market. Moreover, we can expect a shift of focus and investment from architectural design to socio-digital modes of construction and urban planning that benefit primarily real estate owners, investors, developers, and construction companies. Furthermore, we can expect large construction firms to secure themselves a comfortable starting position as early adopters, while SMEs are facing bigger challenges to benefit from the digital transformation. Lastly, we can expect a further encroachment of tech giants and domain outsiders such as Alphabet into architecture and construction, turning buildings and cities into machines for data extraction.

This article explores challenges that surround the implementation of conservation management strategies for living heritage in the context of two case study sites in India. Acknowledging that, in theory, ‘bottom-up’ strategies for expertise exist but are rarely constituted in practice, it presents two vivid but fragile examples where such possibilities might be observed. It first distinguishes the Indian Cultural Heritage context from many conventional conceptions of heritage, defined by its distance from the beholder. Vignettes illustrate how the complexity of simultaneous value systems and beliefs may confound precepts relating to the treatment of tangible heritage. A discussion of the role of the architect in drawing and model making in this context is promoted for the purpose of deeper documentation. It draws upon previous work, which has proposed the enhanced potential to record the ephemeral as well as the monumental using photogrammetry. Building on this, the role of 3D digital models has recently been suggested as a means to contribute to processes for mediating between contested conservation strategies. Challenges of heritage that is at risk of destruction from being overwhelmed by nature are separated from those associated with dereliction or, in this instance and most importantly, increased use. The two case studies, in north and south India – at Ajmer in Rajasthan and at Madurai in Tamil Nadu – are discussed in relation to other examples. These present the opportunity to consider in context how issues of the designation of value at a local or a global scale might relate to corresponding difficulties in terms of governance and control at local or global scales. It again emphasises the role and scope of deeper documentation for this purpose. In terms of safeguarding, it suggests that better means for deeper observation of existing practices of maintenance should specifically be incorporated in future work.