Ticks, crosses and amendments: revealing the design methods of Stirling's office.

This article investigates architectural responses to everyday sociospatial practices in public spaces in the postconflict urban landscape of Belfast, where public buildings and façades impact pedestrian flows and movement patterns in the public space. While the city has an extended history of vibrant public spaces and active urban life throughout the first half of the twentieth century, devastating memories of the so-called Troubles leave imprints of division across the city’s public spaces. Inscribed by memories of conflict and violence, ground floor façades are mainly solid, disengaging, and do not encourage fluid movement across their thresholds. This article argues that the architectural design of public buildings and spaces characterise attributes of a reciprocal reproduction of memories of fear. A comparative analysis of the architecture of four different public spaces in Belfast city centre highlights factors that inform the relationship between the building façades, ease of accessibility, and use of the public space.

After the Boxer Rebellion ended with China’s crushing defeat and the signing of the Boxer Protocol, China participated in the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition as its official debut at world’s fairs. The Chinese pavilion was supposed to represent the country’s national pride and cultural identity, yet ironically, the pavilion materialised the Chinese government’s weak position in its quasi-colonial relationship with the US – both politically and culturally – in terms of the appointment of architects, the design process, and the arrangement of construction. Such power interaction shaped an ambiguous ‘Chinese architecture’ presented at the fair, imitating the Beijing residence of a Chinese Prince while incorporating vernacular architectural elements from south China. It reflected the Chinese government’s early self-vision of its global image in an age of political turmoil and cultural uncertainty, and pioneered the exploration of an architectural ‘Chinese-ness’ in the early twentieth century.

This article examines multi-modal perceptions of İstiklal Street, a public space in İstanbul, using a zoetrope, an optical, scientific, and educational instrument invented in the mid-nineteenth century that was a predecessor to film in early cinema. It discusses how this tool increases the awareness of architectural students to environmental perception through observation. Constructing a black curtained zoetrope with a radius of five metres allowed them to metaphorically inhabit the optical device as it was large enough for their bodies to enter. After experiencing İstiklal Street as flâneur/flâneuse, students aimed to understand its heterogenous and fragmented narrative using the zoetrope. Re-reading the street through a zoetrope enabled a paradoxical interplay between the device and its scale. By interacting with a zoetrope to create different fragmented movements and scales, movement in the urban space was understood as more than a visual perception or transient state of curiosity. Instead, the students comprehended architectural production through filmmaking as ‘a mode of reflection’ rather than as mere representation. The zoetrope became a medium through which the students’ visual, haptic, and kinaesthetic senses were fused together.

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.

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.