This article explores issues of gender and modern architecture in Mandatory Palestine in the context of 1920s and 1930s modernism. Women architects, newly immigrated from Germany, collaborated with WIZO, Women's International Zionist Organisation, in building Domestic Science and Agriculture training schools for Jewish immigrant women in the country. WIZO adopted the concept of the modern domestic sphere, particularly the rational kitchen, believing that a modern and efficient household will benefit women and society as a whole. Thus, their planned schools were to be modern both in appearance and in their built-up space: rational, airy and full of light. The women architects who studied and worked in Germany prior to their immigration, emphasised these modernist concepts in their design. These early ambitious architectural achievements by women for women were unique in the context of modernism and helped structure the national identity of the ‘New re-formed domestic woman’ in Mandatory Palestine.

This paper seeks to establish a chiasmus between notions of site as something produced and buildings as sites of production. The focus is upon Herzog and De Meuron's Schaulager in Basel, cast from and on the ground of its site, and Peter Zumthor's Bruder Klaus Field Chapel at Wachendorf, cast on local trees in hand-mixed aggregate from the site, trodden in layers by locals. Both buildings involve moulding, where a tangible transposition of site to building is produced by imprint and material transformation.

These polarities of site and production, form and matter, trace and transformation are deployed as a heuristic device to unfurl a space for thinking possibilities especially those raised by Gilbert Simondon's distinction between Plato's and Aristotle's concepts of the genesis of things in making- ‘individuation’. The buildings' materials and the mud of the fields, masses worked by hand and foot, take form by not quite taking form; this is the potential of the plastic. The act of making is examined here in imprints and traces through their capacity for signification and, in acts of production, for revealing processes and potentialities remaining after actualisation. Interaction between site and production is found to achieve poetic quality through localisation of materials.

We live in ecologies in which the elements connect with one another. If we see elements in isolation then we can believe that we are doing well by proliferating or perfecting an element, but for the ecology to do well everything must be held in balance. We are part of the environment of others, just as they are part of ours. Buildings mediate our relations with one another and with the world. Even some buildings that seem visually isolated, such as the Farnsworth House, are connected to mains services and need the rest of a civilization to be in place if they are to be conceived and maintained. If we think of ourselves as participating in actor-networks, rather than as autonomous individuals with free will to act on our desires, then it becomes possible to articulate ways in which we are enmeshed in our milieu. Our connections in the world are an important part of who we are. The elements of our bodies work together to produce consciousness, but also much else besides. The conscious part of us can articulate how it feels, and what it thinks, so we give it a disproportionate level of attention. In turn, at a larger scale, we participate in entities that act as if they have a will of their own, but they do not necessarily articulate it, but we help them along without necessarily being aware of it. Buildings are involved in establishing functional connections and separations in networks, both domestically, in providing protection and shelter, and economically, in connecting us into the banking and property systems that do much to establish the pattern of our lives. The unit of survival is organism + habitat, and our habitats do not have easily defined local limits.

This paper attempts to explore the social production of architecture in contemporary Chinese rural villages through a case study on the Community Centre in Xihe Village. This community project, designed and built in 2014, exemplifies a lesser-known type of Chinese architectural practice engaging in a local and specific context, which suddenly gave participation a dramatic image in current breakneck Chinese rural-urban transition of large scale and rapid speed. By looking at this highly specific case through a detailed description and critical evaluation, this paper takes this participatory architectural project as the very first critical example of the socially-engaged architecture in China; as presenting an alternative architecture of resistance in response to the top-down guiding principle ‘Construction of A New Socialist Countryside’ launched by the government in 2005. Source material was collected through fieldwork in the village, including observational study, photographic documentation, and intensive formal and informal interviews with practitioners, authorities, and villagers. The analysis emphasizes the social process and consequences of different stages of this building, in order to explore hidden potentials and methodologies tailoring the architectural design and construction to the site-specificity. The social consequence of the building process is much more important than the object produced. By investigating the architectural version within a broader framework combining anthropology and activism, the paper attempts to introduce a more socially resilient way of making architecture in the current Chinese rural-urban transition. On the one hand it addresses the contingencies in working with underprivileged village communities in inner rural China, which have scarce resources and fragile identities; on the other hand it cuts through the surface of rural vernacular China to expose the undercurrent of silent issues in architecture that constitute the indigenous, the everyday, resistance, transition, and resilience.

This paper explores how judges evaluate sustainability of buildings in RIBA award settings in the UK. A qualitative approach drawing on institutional theory is used to understand the ways judges legitimate particular evaluative views. Aesthetics and Sustainability focused logics are found to guide the evaluative legitimation process. An Aesthetics focused logic is characterised by reliance on expertise, ‘professionalism’ and perceptions of fair practice, whereas a Sustainability focused logic prioritises moral responsibility, scientific evidence and personal experience. Evaluating sustainability was characterised by conflict, concern and contradiction between and within the logics. Evaluation here is seen as a process of constant negotiation between conflicting priorities and managing wider expectations. Different perceptions of what counts in terms of judges’ understandings of legitimacy whether from the profession or wider society were found to provide a way of compliance or commitment to a particular evaluative view of sustainability.

Implications of the findings are threefold. First, the analysis shows a way of studying sustainability evaluation in the architectural domain that shifts the literature's dominant focus on technical features to a consideration of the social context, the profession, awards and other evaluative issues including aesthetics. Second, the discussion draws attention to the importance of examining understandings of sustainability evaluation in view of the legitimacy sources judges draw on from the profession, the awards or wider society to justify particular decisions. Finally the study reveals some of the often overlooked difficulties in evaluating sustainability including negotiating conflicts between competing values including aesthetics versus sustainability, challenges in judging scientific evidence and the need for expert legitimation regarding sustainability decisions. The paper concludes with a discussion of the contribution of empirical and theoretical analysis of sustainability evaluation for research in awards as well as the built environment more generally including the study of uncertainty in evaluative design practice.

Colonisation initiated the transfer of Western ideas about both heritage discourses and conservation understandings into the non-Western world. The process turned colonised territories into domains where developing heritage views in metropolitan countries were put into practice. Coinciding with the evolution of heritage discourses and modern architectural conservation movements in the West, the British colonial era (1878-1960) in Cyprus became a period where the importation of knowledge introduced new ways of thinking about the treatment of ancient buildings. Based on archival sources, this paper sheds light on the genesis of modern understandings of architectural conservation in Cyprus during the early colonial period (1878-1905), which established the foundations that future practice would be built on. An historical account of the early conservation activities at the key Gothic cathedral-mosques is presented, which illustrates the role of the medievalist conservation ethos imported from Britain and local considerations in the formation of modalities and techniques of intervention. It is shown that, at a time when the protection of built fabric as an amalgam of medieval and postmedieval periods was contested in Britain and Continental Europe, the political reality in Cyprus actually facilitated this approach.

The public abattoir emerged as an institution across the industrialized world in the mid-nineteenth century to centralize and control animal killing and meat processing, activities that had traditionally taken place in private slaughterhouses. The modern idea of the abattoir, however, is more than a place where animals are killed for human consumption. Designed to optimize a disassembling process that efficiently took apart the livestock into small pieces, the modern abattoir is one of the earliest building types where the production line was incorporated into the spatial layout. Modern abattoirs also separated livestock from people, and production from consumption, into special places removed from public view.

This paper is concerned with the production of a public abattoir in 1930s colonial Shanghai. The Shanghai Municipal Abattoir, completed in 1933, was deliberately designed as a ‘machine for killing’, which applied production-line principles to the efficient slaughter of animals. The result of this functionalism was an extraordinary series of multi-storey concrete structures, dictated by the bloody business of slaughtering animals and processing their carcasses, set behind an art deco façade. In this paper we seek to tell the story of the production of a building that has previously been little researched, with most of the archival material in Shanghai Municipal Archives (SMA) and the limited published material available only in Mandarin.

There is a growing interest in applying principles of biological morphogenesis to architectural practice. Biological morphogenesis differs from conventional architectonics in several important ways; architecture is teleological, biology has no purpose; architecture is blueprinted and top-down, morphogenesis is bottom-up and emergent; construction uses external agents and skills (builders) whereas embryos build themselves from largely internal information; control of construction sites is hierarchical while morphogenesis uses rich feedback and distributed control; biological systems show adaptation and self-repair. Many materials are, however, common to the two, and both use techniques of scaffolding. There are several ways in which the fields can be brought together, either using biological systems directly (for example in synthetic biological approaches), or by engineering inorganic systems to realize the potentially useful processes characteristic of living things, such as automatic adaptation to the environment, and self-repair.

This article introduces the cortijos of İzmir and discusses them as heterotopic places. Originally belonging to the Sephardi Jewish residents of İzmir during the Ottoman times, cortijos were one or two-storey buildings organised around a courtyard, with shared facilities such as toilets and kitchen. The Sephardi inhabitants of cortijos were among the poorest in their community and each family lived in a small single room opening out onto a courtyard. After the immigration of the majority of the Sephardis to Israel in the 1950s, these buildings started to be occupied by equally poor migrants from Eastern Anatolia. In time the demographics of the inhabitants changed even more, replacing families with single, aged and unemployed individuals. Despite changes in the resident profiles, the heterotopic features of cortijos were neither changed nor challenged and only oscillated between heterotopias of crisis and heterotopias of deviation. With a special focus on a documentary photography exhibit on cortijos, titled Kortejo/Aile Evleri, this article discusses their heterotopic features, both in relation to their history and to their current condition. The article concludes by highlighting the new-found public and municipal interest in these buildings after their aestheticisation through photographic images. This new interest suggests an appropriation of the cortijo into the needs and expectations of the consumer society.

Chinese architecture was for a long time ignored because it was not produced by architects and because it did not follow Western classical expectations, and vernacular architecture was little discussed until the 1960s, and only recently embraced by its own encyclopaedia. Yet the division of labour between drawing architect and practical builder was never wholly advantageous or inevitable, for specialisation of roles can lead to differentiation, inequality, and division, as well as constructional efficiency. Only in the last century has the division between office work and construction site become so complete, resulting in losses as well as gains. Most obviously it has removed design from making, the person with the drawing pen no longer obliged to experience the materials in their weight and texture, or to discover by handling them the best ways to work them. The designer who has never picked up a brick or wielded a chisel can possess little sensibility for the material, but as long as their duties are fulfilled on paper with apparent competence, the process is carried through. On the receiving end, bricklayer or carpenter must produce what drawings demand even when good sense seems lacking, so they carry the work through grumpily without conviction instead of participating in the creative process. This paper looks at oral architecture in the Dong culture, and the way in which buildings have traditionally been produced by carpenters along with the local community, accompanied by shared rituals which reinforce their significance.

Alvar Aalto's Vuoksenniska Church (1958) has been widely discussed in architectural literature, often in general terms of plasticity or ambiguity. Yet previous studies have given relatively little consideration to the approximately 800 archived sketches and drawings for the project. When a limited number of Aalto's sketches for the church have appeared previously, an isolated sketch has often been used to illustrate a single aspect or element of the church, such as a notable lighting or acoustic detail. The church's complexity and spatial qualities make it well suited for more detailed study, using sketches and drawings to clarify the design process of the church and provide new insights. The most important sketches and drawings from the church's design process are presented and discussed in this paper. They illustrate how the design process began with simple sketches, in plan and section, for folding and moveable partitions, highlighting Aalto's priority for balancing religious and social activities in the church through divisible meeting spaces. Acoustical considerations were also combined in these earlier plans, while section sketches show how the church's skylight and unique clerestory windows were gradually developed through several iterations. The threefold repetition of elements in both plan and section was consistent throughout the design process. The structure of the church was designed with simple organic motifs like frogs and fish, but was also intentionally combined with other key elements. While previous studies have emphasised one aspect of the church or another, Aalto's sketches taken together offer a more holistic understanding. They show the interrelated nature of different elements in the church and the relative relationships between different sketches and ideas in the design process. As a work of architecture, the church's definitive qualities of architectural harmony and coherence are far more compelling than any one particular feature or notable detail.

Today, at a time of unprecedented urban development, there is urgency to improve the environmental quality of cities. The present ‘greening’ of urban spaces is an ongoing response to a dirty industrial past and present, with a drive to transform cities to have better air and water, more tree-lined streets and open parks. But the amount of urban public green space varies massively between cities around the world and increasing this, or designing for it, is a particular challenge where there is pressure for space, resources, and development. The architectural fabric itself – building envelopes, roofs, and façades – has been targeted as an opportunity for additional greening. A number of strategies integrating vegetation and other photosynthetic systems onto buildings have been developed, which provide passive climatic control as well as aiding storm-water management and creating new ecological habitat, in addition to lowering atmospheric CO2. However, ‘green walls’, where plants and foliage are grown on the sides of buildings as a kind of secondary skin, have been less successful and have proven expensive to implement. Maintenance costs are significant due to the need to overcome gravity, primarily through mechanical irrigation.

The intention of this essay is to examine the intrinsic visual-spatial characteristics of the church of the Monastery of La Tourette, and understand their mechanisms, gestation and meaning.

The context for the work is the prevailing insentience at the heart of architectural culture, the systemic denial of the intrinsic visual-spatial sphere and the lack of foundation skills to inform its appreciation.

The fieldwork has consisted of observing and recording the La Tourette church, especially its lighting regimes, through all seasons, weather conditions and usages, and simulating key manifestations through spatial sculpture.

Six characteristics of the church are identified, drawing on the yardstick of Le Corbusier's notion of poetic architecture as ‘plastic happenings’. Its essence is defined as constrained and specific light within penumbra, overlying dynamically juxtaposed heterogeneous spatial forms. The harmony of the church is fragile because it is vulnerable to injudicious lighting, resulting in a duality of transcendence and earthliness. The essay speculates on the cause of the transfiguration from harmony into discord, through analysis of the surviving photographs of the design models.

The presentation is designed to infer enclosed space and minimise imagery, and consists of standard plans and sections including sun-paths, based on the author's measured and heliodon survey, amplified by a number of annotated thumbnail photo-sketches.

The empirical judgements are distilled from the teaching of two masters of the past half century, both working within established traditions, Michael H. Chilton's discourse on basic colour and form, and Geoffrey H. Baker's schematic discourse on form in architecture.

The work concludes that the meaning of the La Tourette church lies in a paradox of transcendent harmony and tragic discord.

Scientific laboratories are increasingly becoming a collaborative place to design in an emergent biodesign practice, yet there is very little literature on the actual place and practice. This paper describes an empirical account of a laboratory-based, interdisciplinary design research practice, exploring the intersection with algal biotechnology. Aimed at generating multiple applications of microalgae, the author spent 3 years (2012-2015) working in close collaboration with algal scientists in their research laboratories at Imperial College London. It expounds on the laboratory space and facilities and discusses collaborative experimentation with the intersectional outcome: Algae Printing. It reports that the sum of resultant biotechnological artefacts are scientific, aesthetic, and ecosophical with potential for the domestication of algal biotechnology. It reflects on the interdisciplinary collaborative practice with literature reviews and addresses suggestions for future practices. The main finding is that the integration of a designer into the laboratory life can lead to co-invention and that a role of designer in early stages of scientific research can be demonstrated.

The architecturally radical Steiff teddy bear factory in Giengen, Germany is a three storey, double skin glass curtain wall building with a steel frame, built in 1903. It is almost unknown in architectural history. On the other hand the loadbearing brick Fagus factory built in 1911 to a design by Gropius and Meyer, in spite of its nineteenth century technology, has become a hallowed icon of modern architecture and a UNESCO World Heritage site. The article discusses the contested history of both buildings and offers some suggestions as to why one became famous and the other did not. It also discusses the equally contested history of the teddy bear, showing that in both cases, history tends to ignore facts in favour of good stories.

Sustainability is gaining a firm presence within the discipline of architecture in spite of the number of obstacles with which it has been challenged: either confronting detractors, sceptics, and the discredit resulting from the abusive use of the term as a marketing tactic, or dealing with the actual practicalities inherent to its implementation. This heightened environmental consciousness increasingly engrained within the profession is solidly supported by a growing social, political and media interest, which has impelled new regulations and the involvement of new experts like physicists, engineers, and ecologists in the design process. This phenomenon is transforming architectural practice and design techniques, moving the focus from a mechanical perspective of architecture (tectonics, construction, materiality, structure) to a biotechnical approach which attempts to equip the architect with instruments to regard buildings as living structures permanently exchanging energy with their environment. Using the environment as a creative generator for design has prompted the emergence of new aesthetic models in current architectural design. The access to new tools, together with new concerns and ways of thinking, have opened new lines of intervention that seem to affect the profession in a more fundamental way. The focus of this paper is to provide an account of these cultural constructs as experimental aesthetic systems, with the intention of not only clarifying their principles and objectives, but also reflecting on the design techniques associated to them. Ultimately, this paper provides a reflection on the role of aesthetics in sustainable design, and on the critical question: is sustainability finally becoming an intrinsic part of architecture?

Complex design challenges exist in designing for a dynamic and ageing world. Designing for older adults is a timely and important issue. Understanding user requirements is vital and the appropriate exchange of this knowledge is crucial in the pursuit of supportive, sustainable buildings and the longevity of built-environment design.

Capturing reflections from Built Environment Professionals (BEPs) in the UK, this paper investigates the practitioners’ viewpoint on knowledge exchange by specifically focusing on the scenario of designing for the requirements of older people. Thematic analysis of BEP conversations (n=10) and the results from a questionnaire (N=35) are presented.

Findings uncover recommendations towards the enhancement of knowledge exchange. They highlight the fundamentals of good communication, the desire for structured knowledge, the value of contextual guidance, the importance of a visual format for BEPs, and the need for forms of guidance to support client motivations.

The design process can be enabled by equipping practitioners with information about user requirements. Interestingly, it was also found that BEPs find value in direct user-engagement although further support tools for these engagements with building users was desired.

Appropriate exchange of knowledge is essential for effective ‘real-world’ design impact. These findings, built from the scenario of designing for older adults, also apply to the broader context of all guidance used by Built Environment Professionals.

In the late 1960s and early 70s, many universities in Europe were designed and built using a system-oriented approach. This paper examines the specific case of the Instituto Politécnico Superior de Valencia on the basis of the documents and drawings for the scheme design competition and the production information by L35 Arquitectos, an architectural firm in Barcelona. The analysis addresses the university as an organised whole resulting from the interaction of a functional system, a construction system and an urban system.

Photobioreactors (pbr) are transparent containers for the controlled cultivation of microorganisms such as algae. The BIQ house is the worlds first architectural project realised featuring flat panel pbr, generating biomass and heat as part of an integrated energy concept. The project is part of the International Building Exhibition (IBA) in Hamburg.

In order to implement this potential disruptive technological innovation, technical, ecological and social aspects have been looked at holistically to optimise and develop the system towards market maturity.

At the foreground of this monitoring project has been the intensive evaluation and optimisation of the energy efficiency of the technology in relation to the acceptance and reception of the building users.

After the successful implementation of the pilot project, a big step towards the market maturity of the system has been taken. Further improvements with respect to the efficiency and a closed value chain are required to demonstrate commercial feasibility and attract investors to implement the system more widely.