The shortage of affordable housing in cities is one of the most significant global challenges. It affects 1.6 billion people ( one- third of urban population) and is a key priority for policy change identified by the United Nations in the New Urban Agenda ( Tsenkova, 2016). Globally, cities and central governments have championed housing strategies and action plans, with a strong…
On March 1, 2020, Greece closed its borders, denying refugees the right to seek political asylum, a reaction to Turkey’s decision to strategically refuse its role as gatekeeper to the European Union. A few weeks later, Italy, France, Belgium, and Spain closed their borders as the global COVID-19 pandemic spread. China had already closed its borders a few wee…
In the 1890s, the eccentric American businessman Franklin Webster Smith proposed grand new ‘National Galleries of History and Art’ for Washington, DC. A rendering of his imagined project has the vertigo-inducing scale of the architectural proposal that was destined from its inception to remain unrealized (Figure 1.1). Imagine that you stand at the he…
Large?scale urban parks have been used as a concept for contemporary land?scape planning and design. These parks are intrinsically tied to the development ofcontemporary cities, the various conceptions of dynamic urban landscapes, and thesustainable, cost?effective, and process?oriented transformation of post?industrialsites.This book offers one of the first thorough analyses of contemporary la…
Empires are large. It is one of their signature qualities. As assemblages of different peoples and polities, empires link distant territories to each other by their very def inition: they are ‘large political units, expansionist or with a memory of power extended over space’; consequently, when studying empires, ‘[s]pace matters, size matters, and so does the character of space and size…
Are architects who write a dying race?”1 asked Belgian architectural theorist and historian Hilde Heynen in 2017, reflecting on the position of the practis-ing architect as a writing scholar in the academic field. In her article, Heynen compares Joan Ockman’s Architecture Culture 1943–1968: A Documentary Anthology with Michael Hays’s selection in Architecture Theory s…
In 1925 a rare type of building made its appearance in the literary world: a house entirely constructed of glass, prefabricated yet individualized, light but stable, flat-roofed but with walls which changed colour according to the surrounding land-scape. The cavity walls allowed for the movement of water – warm in winter-time and cold in summer-time – which generated a co…
Japan Style introduces 20 special residences. With more than 200 color photographs, this book showcases Japanese design in the stunning beauty of old homes and reveals how they are cared for by their owners. Traditional Japanese homes, with superbly crafted fine wood, great workmanship and seasonal interior arrangements, have an aesthetic of infinite simplicity. Unlike Japanese inns and hist…
This anthology comprises written versions as well as extended case studies of talks from the international two-day workshop “Architectonics of Game Worlds—On Aesthetics and Mechanics, Spaces and Places, Rhythms and Philosophies” at the University of Cologne in March 2019. The contributors do not only come from across Europe but also cover diverse research disciplines thro…
The ‘universal value’ of vernacular architectural heritage in the prestigious UNESCO World Heritage List, although more or less recognised and considered in the holistic dimension of their integration in-to exceptional cultural contexts, which are themselves listed, is still very limited as shown by the 11211properties inscribed on this list to date, in 2020. The tangible and intangible val…