Design Archives

Experiments with Body Agent Architecture

Experiments with Body Agent Architecture puts forward the notion of body agents: non-ideal, animate and highly specific figures integrated with design to enact particular notions of embodied subjectivity in architecture. Body agents present opportunities for architects to increase imaginative and empathic qualities in their designs, particularly amidst a posthuman condition.

Beginning with narrative writing from the viewpoint of a body agent, an estranged ‘quattrocento spiritello’ who finds himself uncomfortably inhabiting a digital milieu (or, as the spiritello calls it, ‘Il Regno Digitale’), the book combines speculative historical fiction and original design experiments. It focuses on the process of creating the multi-media design experiments, moving from the design of the body itself as an original prosthetic to architectural proposals emanating from the body.

A fragmented history of the figure in architecture is charted and woven into the designs, with chapters examining Michelangelo’s enigmatic figures in his drawings for the New Sacristy in the early sixteenth century, Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s physically ephemeral ‘putti’ adorning chapels and churches in the seventeenth century, and Austrian artist-architect Walter Pichler’s personal and prescient figures of the twentieth century.

Architecture of Memory

Architecture of Memory explores architectural disappearance, urban remembrance and functional change amid social upheaval. Using archival, architectural and artistic methods, Natalia Romik investigates the spectral architecture of former shtetls – predominantly Jewish towns in Central and Eastern Europe before the Second World War. After the war, these towns were repopulated by people of other nationalities, who reused former Jewish properties. Today, traces of the Jewish populations have nearly vanished from urban reality and public discourse. Romik’s work seeks to discover new ways to develop abandoned shtetl architecture, focusing on Jewish heritage sites like synagogue ruins and ritual baths.

Through an interdisciplinary approach that merges architectural design, contemporary art and Jewish studies, Romik’s experimental research addresses the complex social issues of former shtetls by combining theoretical discussions with artistic performances and architectural interventions. The book documents projects ranging from subtle, mirror-clad interventions – such as the Nomadic Shtetl Archive, JAD, and Hurdy-Gurdy – to practical renovations that transform derelict synagogues and Jewish pre-burial houses into historical museums and cultural centres. These efforts confront the ‘present absence’ of these towns by merging theoretical discourse with archival research, artistic performances and architectural interventions, aimed at investigating the lost Jewish communities’ spectral architecture.

Architecture’s Model Environments

Seen through the distilling lens of the architectural model, Architecture’s Model Environments is a novel and far-reaching exploration of the many dialogues buildings have with their environmental surroundings. Expanding on histories of building technology, the book sheds new light on how physical models conventionally understood as engineering experimentation devices enable architectural design speculation.

The book begins with a catalogue of ten original model prototypes – of wind tunnels, water tables and filling boxes – and is the first of its kind to establish an architectural approach to fabricating such environmental models. Subsequent chapters feature three precedent models that have been largely overlooked within the wider oeuvres of their authors: French polymath Étienne-Jules Marey’s 1900-2 wind tunnels, Hungarian-American architects Victor and Aladár Olgyay’s 1955-63 thermoheliodon, and Scottish chemist and building ventilation expert David Boswell ‘The Ventilator’ Reid’s 1844 test tube convection experiments.

Moving between historic moments and the present day, between case studies and original prototypes, the book reveals the potent ability for models, as both physical artefacts and mental ideals, to reflect prevailing cultural views about the world and to even reshape those views. Fundamentally, Architecture’s Model Environments illustrates how environmental models reveal design insights across scales from the seam (that leaks) to the body (that feels) to the building (that mediates) to the world (that immerses).

Architecture in Dialogue with an Activated Ground

Architecture in Dialogue with an Activated Ground sets out to validate the role of the unreasonable in the design process.

Using case study projects, architect Urs Bette gives an insight into the epistemological processes of his creative practice, and unveils the strategies he deploys in order to facilitate the poetic aspects of architecture within a discourse whose evaluation parameters predominantly involve reason. Themes discussed include the emergence of space from the staged opposition between the architectural object and the site, and the relationship between emotive cognition and analytic synthesis in the design act. In both cases, there is a necessary engagement with forms of ‘unreasonable’ thought, action or behaviours.

By arguing for the usefulness and validity of the unreasonable in architecture, and by investigating the performative relationship between object and ground, Bette contributes to the discourse on extensions, growth and urban densification that tap into local histories and voices, including those of the seemingly inanimate – the architecture itself and the ground it sits upon – to inform the site-related production of architectural character and space. In doing so, he raises debates about the values pursued in design approval processes, and the ways in which site-relatedness is both produced and judged.

Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art

Projects that bring the ‘hard’ sciences into art are increasingly being exhibited in galleries and museums across the world. In a surge of publications on the subject, few focus on regions beyond Europe and the Anglophone world. Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art assembles a new corpus of art-science projects by Latin American artists, ranging from big-budget collaborations with NASA and MIT to homegrown experiments in artists’ kitchens.

While they draw on recent scientific research, these art projects also ‘decolonize’ science. If increasing knowledge of the natural world has often gone hand-in-hand with our objectification and exploitation of it, the artists studied here emphasize the subjectivity and intelligence of other species, staging new forms of collaboration and co-creativity beyond the human. They design technologies that work with organic processes to promote the health of ecosystems, and seek alternatives to the logics of extractivism and monoculture farming that have caused extensive ecological damage in Latin America. They develop do-it-yourself, open-source, commons-based practices for sharing creative and intellectual property. They establish critical dialogues between Western science and indigenous thought, reconnecting a disembedded, abstracted form of knowledge with the cultural, social, spiritual, and ethical spheres of experience from which it has often been excluded.

Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art interrogates how artistic practices may communicate, extend, supplement, and challenge scientific ideas. At the same time, it explores broader questions in the field of art, including the relationship between knowledge, care, and curation; nonhuman agency; art and utility; and changing approaches to participation. It also highlights important contributions by Latin American thinkers to themes of global significance, including the Anthropocene, climate change and environmental justice.

Expanding Fields of Architectural Discourse and Practice

Expanding Fields of Architectural Discourse and Practice presents a selection of essays, architectural experiments and works that explore the diversity within the fields of contemporary architectural practice and discourse. Specific in this selection is the question of how and why architecture can and should manifest in a critical and reflective capacity, as well as to examine how the discipline currently resonates with contemporary art practice. It does so by reflecting on the first 10 years of the architectural journal, P.E.A.R. (2009 to 2019). The volume argues that the initial aims of the journal – to explore and celebrate the myriad forms through which architecture can exist – are now more relevant than ever to contemporary architectural discourse and practice.

Included in the volume are architectural practitioners, design researchers, artists, architectural theorists, historians, journalists, curators and a paleobiologist, all of whom contributed to the first seven issues of the journal. Here, they provide a unique presentation of architectural discourse and practice that seeks to test new ground while forming distinct relationships to recent, and more longstanding, historical legacies.

Ethnographic Experiments with Artists, Designers and Boundary Objects

Ethnographic Experiments with Artists, Designers and Boundary Objects is a lively investigation into ethnographic practice. Richly illustrated, it invites the reader to reflect on the skills of collaboration and experimentation in fieldwork and in gallery curation, thereby expanding our modes of knowledge production.

Francisco Martínez increases our understanding of the relationship between contemporary art, design and anthropology, imagining creative ways to engage with the contemporary world and developing research infrastructures across disciplines. He opens up a vast field of methodological explorations, providing a language to reconsider ethnography and objecthood while producing knowledge with people of different backgrounds.

At the heart of this study are the possibilities for transdisciplinary collaborations, the opportunity to use exhibitions as research devices, and the role of experimentation in the exhibition process. It is critical reading for researchers of Anthropology, Material Culture and Museum Studies, and for any reader with an interest in ethnographic methods.

Musical Cities

Musical Cities represents an innovative approach to scholarly research and dissemination. A digital and interactive ‘book’, it explores the rhythms of our cities, and the role they play in our everyday urban lives, through the use of sound and music.

Sara Adhitya first discusses why we should listen to urban rhythms in order to design more liveable and sustainable cities, before demonstrating how we can do so through various acoustic communication techniques. Using audio-visual examples, Musical Cities takes the ‘listener’ on an interactive journey, revealing how sound and music can be used to represent, compose, perform and interact with the city. Through case studies of urban projects developed in Paris, Perth, Venice and London, Adhitya demonstrates how the power of music, and the practice of listening, can help us to compose more accessible, inclusive, engaging, enjoyable, and ultimately more sustainable cities.

Fabricate 2024

Fabricate 2024: Creating Resourceful Futures is the fifth volume in the series of Fabricate publications. The first conference – ‘Making Digital Architecture’ – explored the ways in which technology, design and industry are shaping the world around us. Since then, we have become finely attuned to the negative impacts of this shaping. The 2024 conference, hosted in Copenhagen, sets focus on the pressing need to develop new models for architectural production that rethink how resource is deployed, its intensity, its socio-ecological origins and sensitivity to environment.

This book features the work of designers, engineers and makers operating within the built environment. It documents disruptive approaches that reconsider how fabrication can be leveraged to address our collective and entangled challenges of resource scarcity, climate emergency and burgeoning demand. Exploring case studies of completed buildings and works-in-progress, together with interviews with leading thinkers, this edition of Fabricate offers a plurality of tangible models for design and production that set a creative and responsible course towards resourceful futures.

Fabricate 2020

Fabricate 2020 is the fourth title in the FABRICATE series on the theme of digital fabrication and published in conjunction with a triennial conference (London, April 2020). The book features cutting-edge built projects and work-in-progress from both academia and practice. It brings together pioneers in design and making from across the fields of architecture, construction, engineering, manufacturing, materials technology and computation. Fabricate 2020 includes 32 illustrated articles punctuated by four conversations between world-leading experts from design to engineering, discussing themes such as drawing-to-production, behavioural composites, robotic assembly, and digital craft.