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Architecture typically overlooks the presence of animals and the role design plays in domestication. Domestication makes settled human societies possible through the shared burden of labor with ani...

Universities across the world are increasingly dependent on substantial gifts from the super-rich and their charitable foundations for capital development. The “golden age of philanthropy” compels ...

From his birth in 1971 to his death in 1984, a child born without a functioning immune system lived in a sealed isolator, his predicament immortalized in the term “bubble boy.” This paper follows the inhabitable sterile bubble from medical curiosity, through filmic fantasy, to its current status as a commercially available, mass-produced therapeutic retreat from urban air pollution. It is proposed that the conditions – technological, environmental and social – are now in place for a further iteration – the widespread uptake of lighter-weight, personal, wearable air bubbles that secure against airborne toxins. Arguing the entanglement of the self, immunity, architecture and air, this paper examines the conditions under which the adoption of privatized air is likely and with what effect on public space and the social body.

Traditional routes to academic publication are currently under attack as publishers and authors seek quicker ways to reach larger audiences. Double-blind peer review is seen by some as a process that slows and narrows the sharing of knowledge, while others value the level playing-ground that anonymity ensures. This paper explores the impact of different methods of procuring and reviewing architectural research for publication in scholarly journals. It maps the proportion of male and female contributors to eight anglophone journals of high repute and speculates on the results.

Set against the background of a ‘general crisis’ that is environmental, political and social, this book examines a series of specific intersections between architecture and feminisms, understood in ...

Georges Perec’s importance for architecture is twofold. First, Perec was interested in architectural space and the organization of the city. In his book Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Perec attempted a systematic documentation of buildings, of apartment dwellers and the streets of Paris. Architectural students are referred to Species of Spaces because the techniques of observing or ‘stalking’ the ordinary that Perec developed in that text yield significant insights into how built space is composed and used. Perec’s stubborn empiricism, his attention to things and spaces-as-they-are is a useful antidote to much of the sensationalist and apocalyptic writing about the city, including that of his friend, Paul Virilio. Second, Perec approached writing with the deliberation of an architect approaching the problem of design. He established geometrical frameworks, numerical constraints and structural parameters. Perec’s practice of working with predetermined constraints should be a useful model for architects yet there is little evidence of engagement with this, despite the current practice of parametric architecture. This chapter will address architecture’s engagement with Perec, both in terms of what has been and what is yet to come.

‘Translation’ is dealt with in this paper as a descriptor of the transformation that occurs as a concept, structure, image or notion is appropriated from one discipline to another. This understanding of translation as process or movement, rather than a field of overlap between disciplines, is facilitated by the work of the philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault considers disciplinarity as the structural demarcation of knowledge and information (discourse) and the demarcations that are disciplined by knowledge. This understanding may be expressed as: disciplines as a disciplining. Foucault rejects the idea of disciplines as bounded self-similar content, arguing instead that disciplinarity lies in the framing of logics applied to content. The disciplines in question are considered in their contingency and temporality yet are not entirely bound by them. Thus, a coherent and organised discipline such as biology dates from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Before then its subject matters either were comprehended within other disciplinary frameworks (natural history) or were considered outside science itself (natural theology). In The Order of Things (1966), Foucault groups several naturalists, including Buffon (French eighteenth century) and Darwin (British nineteenth century), as belonging to the same ‘discourse’ or discursive family. Separating disciplinarity from the origin of ideas and time of writing fosters the productive translation of concepts, images and artefacts between disciplines.

Monochromaticity has been significant in twentieth-century visual art and its aims and disciplinary effects substantially theorized. In architecture and interior design, the rendering of buildings and spaces in a single colour has, in the last decade, gone from isolated instances to a notable international phenomenon across disparate styles. Looking to monochromatic art and its specific disciplinary history, this paper attempts to understand the ambitions, context, and consequences of monochromatic architecture. Characteristic of the critical reception of monochromatic art is a tension between the cultural meanings of colour and the physiological nature of colour perception. The immersive effects of the coloured interior are physiological, yet, as this paper argues, their use is cultural and argumentative.

The history of science is inseparable from the development of a contained and controlled space for the conduct of experiments, a new program that emerged in the sixteenth century and eventually gave birth to a new space, the laboratory. The raison d’etre of the laboratory for scientic research lies in the exclusion of variables – vibration, moisture, noise, dust, light, heat, animals and unauthorized people – that are not a dened part of the experimental set-up; along with the containment of all materials and waste products that pertain to the experiment. The social lives of scientists – their interpersonal relations and hierarchies, disciplinary habits and the personalities of individuals – are outside of the experiment. Excluded, too,from this purportedly neutral space is architecture – its spatial arrangements and atmospheric eects, its materiality and surface treatments, formal idiosyncrasies and stylistic fashions, furnishing and decor. “Of all forms of culture”, observes Steven Shapin, “science has been thought least marked by the places in which it is made and evaluated. The universal validity of scientic knowledge has been taken as a testimony to the irrelevance of the particular physical and social sites in which it happened to be produced”.2 Furthermore, in “fundamental research” comprised of “experimental or theoretical work undertaken primarily to acquire new knowledge of the underlying foundations of phenomena and observable facts”, any consideration of “direct practical application or use in view” is excluded.3 In this view, science is physically and epistemologically isolated from industry and the scientist is released from the economic or moral consequences of potential applications of their discoveries.

There are no Australians included in the several anthologies of architectural theory published in the past decade. Anthologies that survey the recent period of intense theoretical production in architecture include Architecture Theory Since 1968 (1998), edited by K. Michael Hays, with 47 entries, and Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture (1996), edited by Kate Nesbitt and including 51 contributions spanning the period 1965—1995. Contributors to these anthologiesare primarily North American or European, with the exception of one Japanese and a New Zealander now based in New York. Hanno-Walter Kruft's A History of Architectural Theory: From Vitruvius to the Present, 1994, has no discussion of the scene outside Europe and the United States and anthologies that address the modern period such as Joan Ockman's Architecture Culture 1943-1968: A Documentary Anthology (1993) are similarly without Australian content.The selections involved in constructing an anthology in any historical subject are motivated, even where authors profess to objectivity or an even-handed survey. It would be difficult, though, to argue that the absence of Australians in an international setting is a major oversight or a deliberate slight...

This article examines the formation, activities, and significance of a group dubbed the “London Conceptualists” by Peter Cook that were students of Bernard Tschumi at the Architectural Association School of Architecture during the mid-1970s. Through RoseLee Goldberg, director of the Royal College of Art, the students were introduced to theories of performance along with radical experiments in performance art. Goldberg's conception of space as an arena for the realization of theory goaded the London Conceptualists away from writing and drawing toward installations and performance in disused buildings. This article situates their activities in London in the late 1970s and analyzes their relationship to other performance art practices and to conceptual architecture.

Subnature: Architecture's Other Environments By David Gissen Princeton Architectural Press, 2009 ISBN 978-1568987774, $35, pp. 240, with illustrations Nature has had several roles in the history of...

(2001). Authentic Japanese architecture after Bruno Taut: the problem of eclecticism. Fabrications: Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 1-12.

This paper examines the long rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne for architectural superiority. It is argued that Robin Boyd's 1961 characterisation of Melbourne in the 1950s and of Sydney in the 1960s, which was as much concerned with historical shifts as with regional differences, has been subsequently adopted by Spence in 1985 and others as essential differences between the two cities. The theoretical positions against which the debate has been referred and renewed, resonate with many of the more interesting questions around architectural identity, cultural specificity and geographical location. The most durable of the theoretical frameworks in which the rivalry has been cast is that of critical regionalism. The paper argues that critical regionalist theories have been reduced in such a way that its claims, particularly as they have been applied to Sydney and Melbourne, are readily taken up within the discourses and activities of ‘branding.’

Between 1973 and 1976 Bernard Tschumi and RoseLee Goldberg undertook a program of cross-fertilization between architecture and art at their respective institutions, the Architecture Association and the Royal College of Art. This paper examines the repercussions for Tschumi’s students of an approach to architecture that embraced the methods and ideas of the experimental performance art that Goldberg championed. The students, dubbed “The London Conceptualists” by Peter Cook, included Will Alsop, Nigel Coates, Paul Shepheard, Jenny Lowe, and Peter Wilson. This paper examines their subsequent experiments in the context of London and draws broader conclusions from this intense, historic and personal exchange.

This paper reviews the ambitions and importance of design proposals for inhabiting the sea from the 1960s and 1970s. Critics in subsequent decades dismissed projects for the sea as irrelevant utopias and technological fantasies. While the unique marine environment and the new city were sometimes taken up as opportunities for social and formal experiment, there are many technically resolved projects considered by architects and developers alike as viable alternatives to terrestrial cities. This paper argues that architects adopted technologies from the exploration, fishing, military and mining industries towards solving what were widely perceived as threats to human existence. Neither in ambition nor detail were these projects futuristic fantasies. They were, rather, prototypes, a model this paper uses to examine a wide variety of projects, raising questions about the validity of their testing and the reasons for their failure to flourish. Using current proposals for new cities in the sea, shifts in attitude towards community and technology are traced.