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This thesis examines the reception of the woodcut-illustrated architectural treatises and architectural mathematics of the Bolognese architect-painter Sebastiano Serlio (1475-1554) in Britain from the 'Scientific Revolution' into the early Enlightenment from around 1600 to 1750. In part, many modern-day strategies of architectural design trace back to Serlio's treatises, published from 1537 onwards, which first combined architectural prints and text to create a comprehensive theory for architectural design. Despite the acknowledgements of Serlio's widespread influence on theory and the built practice, his architectural treatises remain little-understood in respect to their mathematical impact on architectural theory and practice. My thesis argues that the robust response to Serlio's architectural mathematics via proportional systems shaped the advent of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment thinking in Britain. Serlio's mathematical syntax proved popular in Britain as the English translations of Serlio by Thomas Jenner (†1673) and Robert Pricke (†1698) show. While academia generally acknowledges Serlio's significant influence in Britain, no extant study has investigated the extensive impact of Serlian mathematics on British architectural conception, writing and theory. By performing a quantitative and historical analysis of Serlio's influence on British architectural conception and thinking in the seventeenth mid-eighteenth centuries, my study offers new insights on the evolving roles of Serlian and Palladian architectural mathematics in Britain. British scholarship propagated the term 'Palladianism,' and has long placed Palladio (1508-1580) at the centre of the rigorous mathematics in the region's architectural culture by making use of design's visual persuasion through print. I reveal that British early modern architects vigorously engaged with Serlio's writing by collating his forms and theories with other architectural models and allows altering the Palladian debate that has mesmerised scholarship for long. I pursue understanding Serlio's theories in practice by probing columnar ratios, decorum and typologies in Britain. My thesis augments our understanding of the interplay between early modern architecture and mathematical culture by using 3D scanning and computer-aided-design (CAD) which measures and evaluates the mathematical compositions of early modern architectural prints and buildings. By using digital remote sensing, I draw and measure the influence of Serlian mathematical conventions traceable in the buildings and treatises of the architect Inigo Jones (1573-1652), the gentleman-architect Sir William Bruce (1630-1710), the aristocrat Lord Burlington (1694-1753) and the landscape designer and writer Batty Langley (1696-1751). I perform a comparative analysis between the mathematical insights of the building scans and conventions of architectural mathematics derived from British architectural treatises and archival material. This allows me to assess how and why Serlio's theory shaped British architectural writing and building. My analysis reveals that Serlio altered British architectural writing and design and rivalled Palladio's authority from the Elizabethan to the early Georgian periods in which architects modified Serlian theory to satisfy contemporary needs. Serlio's quintessentially visual and proto-scientific treatise, categorised aesthetic and mathematical principles which complied the sensorial and scientific early modern mind. New inductive empiricism refined Aristotelian logic which resulted in a culture of subjective rather than absolute reason. These aesthetic evolutions affected architecture by looking back to versatile antique examples, and, dismembered the dominance of the architectural canon in architectural theory. Ambiguously, Serlio as one of the founders of the architectural canon, also helped tilt the authority of the canon from its pedestal as Serlio's versatile syntax allowed permutation of the orders, which suited Enlightenment ideas unlike most columnar books. Serlio's theory proved particularly susceptible to scientific thinking since Serlio prescribed undogmatic aesthetic and mathematical categories which allowed architects to alter architectural principles to create various and intemperate architectural designs.

Contemporary cities have emerged as a result of diverse urban and architectural transformations, new interventions and redevelopment, as well as through a cycle of abandonment and regeneration. New categories of resulting spaces are generated through these processes. Simultaneously, generic spaces are becoming new urban centralities, arguably to the detriment of local identity. City centre malls, for instance, are flattening the uniqueness of the cities by re-proposing similar characters across various locations and contexts. Non-places, empty spaces and urban voids are cases in point that deserve and require further investigation. Nowadays, in a period of economic recession, developments based on demolitions and reconstructions are not always suitable. Against this context, areas of abandonment appear to offer potential for development that is at once both creative and sensitive to local contexts. This research explored the urban and architectural phenomenon of abandonment, and investigated the discrepancy between academic expected qualitative design of re-use and real solutions often adopted during projects of regeneration. The study took Aberdeen city as its concrete focus, exploring methods to connect more strongly the environment of cultural challenges (the academy), and the environment of the urban and social priorities (the local government), in an effort to define a network of reciprocal collaborations. Typo-morphology and rhythmic urban analysis, together with sites observation utilising mental maps, were the main methods used to investigate specific abandoned spaces in Aberdeen. Furthermore, through three urban workshops delivered in collaboration with Aberdeen City Council, Robert Gordon University, International College RGU and the University of South of Florida, the research explored collaborative ways to transform knowledge of urban and architectural re-use into actual practice. This work represents an original contribution to knowledge through the presentation of a conceptual system of mutual collaboration between the main authorities and institutions within the city of Aberdeen, and proposes a framework for delivering workshops in partnership. On the one hand, the academy may significantly influence the urban evolution through cultural and creative input. On the other, the city council may consider the cognitive process of academic analysis of the city, developing strategies to improve the quality of the city spaces in terms of liveability and valuable social environment.

This thesis looks at the idea of ecology and its relationship to, and influence on, architectural thought. Ecological thinking emerged as a subset of biology in the second half of the nineteenth century and developed as a philosophical idea and a political outlook. As an idea that stands in the hinterland between science and society, it has not been particularly stable; sometimes it is fashionable, at other times it has disappeared from consciousness. This thesis looks at the long history of ecology, paying particular attention to the periods when it was a popular idea and it had an impact on the imagination and outlook of architects. The first of these periods is in the decades from Darwin's publication of his theory of evolution through to the run-up to the First World War, prior to the emergence of the Modern Movement. The second period is brief, from the late ‘60s through to the early '70s, and is popularly referred to as the Age of Ecology. Finally, there is the period from 2000 to the present. The final section of the study looks at the impact of ecological thought on architectural ideas and buildings today, when there is a high level of concern about the environment. Through historical interpretation, the study identifies some of the core themes of ecological thought and looks at their relationship to the design of the built environment. It traces the recurring themes of naturalism, vitalism and materialism, which are emerging as significant influences on today's architecture. The thesis includes research interviews with some of the leading architectural thinkers and historians of our time in order to situate the discussion of ecology in the broader discourse on the purpose and nature of architecture and the future of the discipline and the profession.

The concept of home has often been recognized as a foundational concept in popular science-fiction (SF) as the point of departure or place of return in the space odyssey, timetravel mission, or heroic quest. Most SF narratives evidently centre on notions of homelessness, homecomings, threats to home or journeys from it. However, independent of the film’s narrative, home is also considered within SF as the place of the audience member, spatially and temporally, the distinction of which is critical for establishing the alien encounter with the putative future world. As a critical genre, SF continues to offer insights into the contemporary milieu that have significant implications for all areas of cultural research and, more specifically, architecture. While architectural literature and practice has confirmed a sustained interest in SF, representations of home are often overlooked in favour of the various innovations and special effects on-screen. It is the intention of the research to elevate the discussion of home in SF from its often abstract engagement by architectural texts, and more specifically question how notions of home are expressed in SF film through the various narratives and designed environments. Thus, the research posits the notion of home as providing the essential link between SF and architecture by establishing a theoretical framework and detailed analyses of four films adapted from the prolific American SF author, Philip K. Dick: Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990), Stephen Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002), and Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly (2006). The research examines science, method, and truth, in relation to the foundations of the SF genre and its various representations of home. Furthermore, by comparing and contrasting modern and postmodern approaches to design, similarities are drawn between the cultural mechanisms of SF imagery and architecture. The research draws from SF theorists such as Darko Suvin, Scott Bukatman, and Vivian Sobchack, as well as authors focussed on notions of home such as Witold Rybczynski, Mary Douglas, Juhanni Pallasmaa, and David Morley. Topics related to contemporary identity construction, gender roles, domestic environments, global mobility and connectivity, spectacle, surveillance, tourism, and technology, are scattered throughout the chapters offering a broad survey of the notion of home as represented in contemporary SF with the intent of generating further architectural discussion.

In the early twentieth century, the modernists problematized ornament in their refashioning of architecture for the industrial age. Today, architects are formulating different responses to image and its (re)production in the information age. In both discourses of ornament and image, surfaces are often the perpetrators: visual boundaries that facilitate false appearances, imprisoning humanity in a shadowy cave of illusion. Such views follow a familiar metaphysical model characterized by the opposition between inside and outside and the opaque boundary that acts as a barrier. This model determines the traditional (Platonic) philosophical approach that follows a distinct hierarchical order and a perpendicular movement of thought that seeks to penetrate appearances in order to arrive at the essence of things. This thesis deploys Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy to advance a different understanding of surface, image and appearance in architecture. Using the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum as a catalyst, the thesis argues that many of the concepts with which commentators and critics analyse contemporary architecture follow models of thought that consider surfaces and their effects as secondary categories. Given the significance of visual (re)production and communication for contemporary society, the thesis proposes a different model based on surface as that which simultaneously produces, connects and separates image and reality. This non-hierarchical approach is inspired by surficial philosophy, which relates to Earth, to geology and topology, conjuring up a diversity of concepts from the thickness of the crust to the smooth fluidity of the seas. The result is an unfamiliar, polemical model of thought that does not define surface as a limit or barrier, rather a medium, a pliable space of smooth mixture. In this model, difference is not in the opposition between the two sides of a boundary line, rather it occurs upon and within the surficial landscape that consumes categories, promoting nomadic movements of thought that offer greater flexibility towards creativity and new possibilities. In surficial thought, images and appearances are not artificial copies of an originary reality, rather they possess a unique reality of their own. This approach allows architectural imagery to be theorised as a positive surfacing of architecture beyond disciplinary lines and the locality of a specific time and place.

This study undertakes a comparative analysis of Olympic architecture in order to yield a greater understanding of the conflict between nationalism and cosmopolitanism - a conflict that has long occupied a central place in practical and theoretical debates within the field of international relations (IR). The thesis begins by offering a review of the relevant literature in the fields of IR theory, Olympic Studies, and Architectural and Visual Studies. After producing a political context narrative for each of the Summer Games held between 1936 and 2012, the author conducts a formal analysis of key venues for each of the Games. The results of the analysis are summarized in architectural diagrams and reconciled with the respective political narratives in order to test four hypotheses: 1) That nationalist formal elements and motifs will be more readily apparent in the architecture of Olympic venues in which the host country seeks primarily political rather than economic benefit. 2) That nationalist formal elements and motifs will be more readily apparent in the architecture of Olympic venues built in countries with more authoritarian forms of government. 3) That nationalist formal elements, architectural motifs, and patterns of urban planning will reinforce the dominant narrative propagated by host-country organizers, and 4) That countries wishing to advance national interests have increasingly relied on cosmopolitan rhetoric, a shift that will be apparent in architectural form. In the end, the paper concludes that all four of the hypotheses may be too simple adequately to describe the complexity of the observed phenomena. While the study finds support for the idea of architecture as a useful tool of legitimation, it also calls into question the adequacy of nationalist visual content to achieve desired goals. It seems that embracing the mantle of cosmopolitanism has increasingly become the path of choice for host countries wishing to advance national interest by way of visual rhetoric; the thesis calls for more research to interrogate connections between architectural theory and aesthetic diplomacy.

The Atlas of Indexical Cities aims at challenging established city models and theories, by placing them on the broader contexts of architecture, mathematics and computer science. By reframing city models within the idea of communication as a circular process of encoding and decoding, it will explore the possibility of bridging established orthogonalities in urban theory, such as global and local, collective and individual, urbs and civitas, objectivity and active subject. Ultimately, this pendular movement will allow to touch upon questions not adequately addressed in city modelling up to this day, such as qualitative aspects of cities and more importantly, the role of the active subject in the constitution of such models, which has remained until now seemingly absent. Considering the active subject as their principal architect, the atlas explores the idea that city models in the digital reignite a moment similar to one that gave birth to projective perspective during Renaissance. Under this light, we will reflect on what a perspective projection of the digital could be. The first part of the atlas, Open Sea, is an invitation to think of the city in informational terms, where the open sea is a metaphor for entropy as abundant urban data streams. This introductory chapter explores some of the fascinating phenomena that allow for and populate Indexical Cities as an idea of the city. We will explore networks, quantum, probability and computing — and some other fantastic infrastructures of the 20th century — as a fertile ground on which we can articulate personal models of Indexical Cities. The second part addresses Instruments of Navigation, generic infrastructures that allow for the articulation of any-models as a means to find one’s way within the open sea. We will characterise the qualities of these instruments by exploring three gestures present throughout this work: On Atlases, On Perspectives and On Search Engines. Lastly, their common projective and heterotopic qualities are discussed in On Heterotopias. The third part, An Archipelago of Rationalities, explores at first the ideas of model and theory at large and stresses the shift towards modelling that takes place with the digital. Consequently, it retakes the work of Kevin Lynch and David Grahame Shane and examines it within the context of space, time and life as substrates for modelling. These substrates are treated as characterisations of the conditions of possibility for multiples ideas and imaginaries of the city. Within this conceptual architecture, the atlas introduces the hypothesis of a conceptual gap, between our digital moment – where data becomes ground for any infrastructure – and the current state of the art in city modelling, where urban infrastructures are primary. The fourth part of the atlas, Navigation with a Personal Search Engine for a World, introduces a navigation instrument, alike to a search engine. This instrument, a generic infrastructure for communication (machine intelligence), can be tuned by an active subject (human intellect) in order to articulate personal models of the city. Unlike Google search engine, for which subject and context are known, such an instrument can be enacted by a multiplicity of avatars, where an active subject can impersonate many personas. Each of these models is simultaneously an atlas or a projection, from which another projection might unfold, until ultimately constituting the narrative of a more extensive atlas of atlases. These stories not only showcase a multiplicity of personal projections about cities but expose diverse ways of navigating the city as probability space. Navigation itself affirms the brand of the active subject, her world, her Atlas of Indexical Cities.

Tradicionalmente, el estudio de la arquitectura vernácula ha tenido un enfoque eminentemente constructivo y tipológico. Frente a ese paradigma comprensivo materialista y formalista, este trabajo propone un estudio de caso desde una perspectiva decididamente cultural. Se aplica a un palomar de la Tierra de Campos, pero no a un palomar típico. Se trata una arquitectura híbrida, en uso y reconstruida con materiales industriales. La investigación demostrará la importancia de los estudios contextuales y la necesidad de centrar la investigación en el factor humano, pues es a este al que remiten los valores que recogen los atributos de la arquitectura vernácula. Igualmente, revelará que los palomares en Tierra de Campos tienen una tradición y significado histórico muy diferentes de los que se han venido considerando. Se pretende, en fin, la comprensión más integral posible de una arquitectura vernácula en orden a los fundamentos (culturales) que definen su especificidad como tal y como patrimonio.

This paper will explore the relationship between photography and architecture in the work of Moholy-Nagy, through an exploration of its spatial properties. Developing a critical theory around spatial relationships that occur in the artistic production, the paper argues for Moholy-Nagy’s work to be seen as a hybrid form of avant-garde experimentation that bridges the medium of both photography and architecture, and draws into question the qualities of each. By exploring this interstitial mode of experimentation, the paper argues for a unique mode of spatial production in Moholy-Nagy’s work, that brings together modern concepts of space-time and the photographic gaze to reframe the spatial experience of architecture. Moholy-Nagy’s formative experiments with photo-media throughout the inter-war period provides a unique insight into a critical interaction between photography architecture occurring at the Bauhaus. For Moholy-Nagy, by “arresting fragments of the world”, the criticality of photography was elevated by its ability to both represent and abstract architecture to produce new spatial compositions. At the centre of this discussion is Moholy-Nagy’s development of creative processes in photography that can be applied to architectural scholarship, where technologically enhanced vision is cultivated as the new embodied modern experience.paper examines his written work through the framing of Giedion and Benjamin to advance a critical theory that argues for the mutual development of spatial production in photography and architecture. The paper critically analyses the spatial composition of his experimental photo-practice, taking examples from his oeuvre of photography (View From the Berlin Radio Tower in Winter, 1928), photoplastics (Murder on the Railway Line, 1927), and photograms (Photogram No. 1-The Mirror, 1922-23). The correlations of spatial production in these different mediums provide new insights into space creation as a critical interaction between photography and architecture.

The adoption of new construction techniques and materials, after the sudden shift in Kuwait's economy in the 1950s, yielded an architecture that is today locally unsuitable. This thesis attempts to reconnect Kuwait's rich heritage with its lost architectural identity through explorations of the ways in which architectural tectonics express culture in traditional forms of Kuwaiti dwelling. Tectonics comprises relationships between structure, surface, and assembly; what Kenneth Frampton calls poetic construction. The irreducible essence of the building unit informs architectural form. Tectonics, as Marco Frascari and Vittorio Gregotti claim, is expressed in relationships between part-to-whole, material, texture, surface, and joinery, all capable of articulating specificities of culture and context. Analytical approaches are used to study architectural drawings, sketches, and photographs to interpret the cultural expressiveness of tectonics. Archives, artwork, and books support inferences about culture, construction methods, and assembly. Detailed tectonic interpretations of three Kuwaiti case studies (the mud-brick beit, Bedouin beit sha'ar, and the dhow) support these claims, exploring questions such as: How does tectonics relate to architecture? To culture? How is this relationship expressed? What socio-economic, religious, political, and historical contexts shaped pre-1950s Kuwaiti building culture? How is culture tectonically manifest in each traditional form of dwelling? This work affirms the ways in which tectonics is linked to culture, reinforcing details as tell-tales of culture and valuable elements in architecture and its discourse. This thesis bridges architectural identity with culture, present with past, and Western architectural theory with Eastern architecture, to enhance and better appreciate the built environment and the profession.

In the Modern period, the problem of architecture seems to have been cast as one of function and commodity towards form. As such, space is understood as the functional void which is defined by the boundaries of the commodity/building. All other considerations have been relegated to ornament or "mere" aesthetics. Is inhabitation of these voids, then, a purposeless act carried out by unthinking, uninvolved human beings? Is culture really a fixed structure such that it a) is nakedly borne by members of society? b) can be read by researchers and predicted by architects? Since the beginning of this century, theorists, such as Henri Lefebvre, have been skeptical of these presumptions and have shown space as an active, participatory structure which carries culture with it, bound up in its "spatiality". Two settings will be analyzed in this respect. First, in the example of New Orleans Mardi Gras, an event that merges practice and criticism of social structure and roles, we see the human at play-a play defined not as leisure, but a participatory act. This ludic activity gives rise to speculation regarding our Modern assumptions about architecture. Space is no longer defined by any formalism. The event and the environment depend on one another for definition and the urban space of this festival seems to be one of convenience and irregularity. Inversion and transgression provide the mechanisms for exploration of the representational, architectural and symbolic mode of being. Second, In the early postwar era in France the Situationists formulated a revolutionary stance against the advance of capitalism which by their definition appeared as a spectacle of alienated life. Through art and criticism they explored the relationship between the commodity-form and the alienation that mechanisms of production and consumption create in society. Searching for a way of supplanting that "alienated experience" with "directly lived experience," the Situationists moved from Surrealism's desire to merge art and society, through a Utopian vision of the city in a so-called "unitary urbanism" to a strictly political agenda eventually giving rise to the events of 1968 in the universities and workplaces of France. The Situationists developed a set of revolutionary tools to use towards this goal and the city (Paris) was their experimental laboratory. Emphasizing that which is unpredictable in Human Nature and openly hostile to Modern, functional urban planning, the Situationists created a self-defining paradox of attitudes whose themes prefigure postmodern perspectives on history, objectivity and multiplicity. Finally, Gadamer shows that the being of architecture is play. Play is constitutive of both art and architecture as it forms the structure of release from and return to self which for him is the opening of the artwork to the world. The phenomenon of architecture, therefore, is misunderstood without a firm account of the experience of its "working." Through Gadamer's re-definition of ornament and decoration as something which opens out onto its context, we propose an interpretation of Mardi Gras as a decoration of the city-a doubling of the decoration performed by architecture. The overall intent is an experiential critique of space. It is not a prescription for producing better architecture; and certainly not by conventional means. It can only serve to point out that there is in fact an architecture in-between the solids of architectural form-forms which not only synthesize the raw materials of the earth into their abstract, unrecognizable, useful character, but also solidify the values of political, economic, and social force.