The genesis on this research began a very long time ago - probably from the moment I became an architectural student in 1974 and was endlessly confused by the disjunctures between what my clever, passionate, thoughtful modernist tutors said and the bleak mechanical qualities of many of their design solutions; between the deliberately obscure languages proffered as `obvious' within the academy and the inability of my family and friends to talk about architecture in anything but the most banal way. Then, later in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, stumbling into Marxist and feminist politics looking for models which more effectively explained the relationship between the social and architecture; and finding similar gaps between what was being offered as `proper' political action and a strange difficulty with aesthetics and beauty; and between what was constituted as the feminist problem (the isolation of the white middle class housewife) and the much more complex experiences of my own suburban upbringing. Despite being a relatively conventional product of my generation - those post second war white middle-class women who went into higher education in Britain in such numbers in the 1960s and 70s - it continued to feel as if I was, as Sheila Rowbotham put it, " lumber(ing) around ungainly-like in borrowed concepts which did not fit the shape we feel ourselves to be". ' My continuing need to understand the means by which different people make sense of, and survive in, the world - and in particular to understand how we engage with its architectural landscapes - and a frustration with `conventional' or `radical' accounts has led to a search for ways of thinking about physical space that can simultaneously value its architectural qualities whilst integrating the complexities and inequalities of social, cultural and economic relationships. On the one hand, we seem endless bogged down in a cyclical argument which sets elitist designers against popular opinion as a way of framing debates about what constitutes good design and how the social qualities of architecture should be expressed. On the other, we seem to have contemporary theories caught in merely revealing society as relativity and difference. I want, instead, to open up architecture and all its complex problems and pleasures, to truly public debate - where the different concerns that matter to architects and to others can be negotiated within the same conceptual space (without issues of power and inequality disappearing either into simply defined oppressions or into an amorphous plurality of different identities).

As suggested in the title, this thesis examines architectural drawings outside of what can be defined as the conventional architectural domain - the buildable. Starting with an almost complete absence of the plan and the ubiquitous presence of perspective in the representations of the unbuildable, a number of different traits will be defined. Both, the unbuildable and the buildable, are revealed as working distinctly, but importantly, not in opposition to one another. In fact, they will frequently be found to operate in a complementary fashion. Selected from immediate post-revolutionary Soviet Russia, the period taken as the peak of the projects of the unbuildable, detailed case studies will include Tatlin's Tower and the Palace of the Soviets. Despite these examples being purportedly amongst the best-known architectural projects ever conceived, the in-depth analysis will demonstrate, somewhat paradoxically, that not much about them can be claimed for certain. Such projects are going to be shown to have an ability to exist at multiple scales, in many locations, repeated and copied as a reference or through multiple associations. Speculations on Lissitzky's Cloud Stirrups will form the basis for the discussion on the architectural series. Here, Piranesi's Career; will be proposed as the pioneering, if not the very first example of architectural drawing as a series. The discussion of the reproduction, repetition and seriality will culminate in the final example - Lakov Chernikhov's opus. One of the several concluding suggestions will include that the buildable may continue to increasingly resemble the unbuildable, mimicking its traits such as scalessness, existing on multiple sites and excessive visuality. This has the potential to make the distinction between the two more blurred, and even eventually abolished, meaning that every building in part becomes unbuildable, and vice versa.

This thesis examines the interrelationship of hygiene and modernist architecture (Neues Bauen) in Germany in the early twentieth century. The thesis proposes that the role of hygiene in the architecture of Neues Bauen progressed from its initial position as a purely functional consideration, into a design element, and finally established itself as an integral part of the aesthetic of Neues Bauen. A further proposition is that both the hygienists and the modernist architects of Neues Bauen consciously exploited this overlap in their respective disciplines. Following two introductory chapters, different aspects of the interrelation between hygiene and architecture will be examined in particular relation to the medical doctor, Friedrich Wolf (1888-1953), who can be seen as the pivotal figure within a whole network of hygienic-architectural exchange. Chapter One describes how infectious diseases generate basic hygienic architectural types (the hospital and sanatorium), and how these became a precedent for modem architectural design. Chapter Two demonstrates how the hygienic criteria of the hospital and the sanatorium became integrated into residential architecture, ultimately resulting in the residential housing of Neues Bauen. Focusing on Friedrich Wolf, Chapter Three documents the biographical interconnections between hygienists and the leading architects of Neues Bauen, and examines the mutual influence that they exerted on one another. The primary objective of Chapter Four is an analysis of the chapter in Friedrich Wolf's medical advice book Die Natur als Arzt and Helfer (Nature as Doctor and Helper) of 1928, in which he portrays Neues Bauen as the prototype of ideal hygienic architecture. Chapter Five deals with Wolfs definition of architecture as hygienic shell, surrounding and determining the man within, and his classification of this shell within a self-contained system of healing, concluding with his analogies of the `New Man' and of Neues Bauen. Chapter Six reveals the specific mechanisms that enabled hygienists and doctors such as Friedrich Wolf to `sell` Neues Bauen as a prototypically hygienic architecture, whilst at the same time furthering their personal goals. Finally, this chapter considers the motives, which led the architects of Neues Bauen consciously to adopt metaphors of hygiene to further their own personal design objectives.

This thesis is an exercise in theory with an empirical exercise. It deals with the traditional architectural ideas of 'composition' and 'parti', and applies a formal analytic approach to them. It takes a top-down approach to the notion of 'composition', which tries to reflect the way architects think, and looks at the 'parti' as the deep structure of the building, which is abstract, global, and capable of many realisations. As a case study, 19 houses of Mario Botta are analysed. The purpose of the empirical exercise is to explore how far it is possible to produce an analytic construction of the notion of 'parti'. It asks: are there formal top-down themes which underly the composition of the houses and have to do with their relational structure? After the description of the houses a formal analysis of the identified themes takes place. These formal top-down themes are defined as rules. A distinction is made between the nature of the rule, the degree of its realisation and the domains (mass, elevations, plan) of its realisation. Formal analysis, thus, measures properties of the mass, the elevations and the plan. What analysis shows is that the interrelations of the rules define the 'parti'. Three phases are identified in the development of the 'parti' of the houses which show an evolution of it from combinations to structure. A distinction between a short and a long genotype for order is thus made, as well as a distinction between the intension and the extension of the rule seen as a relation. In the last part the thesis explores what these findings suggest towards theory building as well as implications for further research by addressing the notion of relation and by defining two different types of interrelations.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

My thesis is that urbanity is a function of the communicative movement between the natural and social conditions of a site, as revealed in architecture and sculpture, and most clearly in their continuity. In order to deal with the effects upon modern design and architectural thinking of dead metaphors like 'technology, 'form' and 'space', I critique and reject their use in architectural discourse, by returning to the philosophical tradition of 20th century phenomenology - Husserl and Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, et al- in order try to reveal the power of spatiality in 20th century thought, and its central importance to modern art and architecture. This led to new ways of making site-specific, topographic and spatial sculptures, and in some cases led to brilliant and urbane syntheses of architecture with sculpture - revealing the potential communicative depth of spatiality. Central to characterizing this communicative depth was recovering the cultural - rather than formal or picturesque - continuity of Renaissance and Classical poetics. Whilst the iconographic, social and political aspects of this continuity arc standard features of interpretation, far less noticed is the tradition of Eurhythmia. Rhythm was traditionally seen as an aspect of measure - therefore invoking justice (cf. Plato's Divided Line in the Republic) and mediation; and these animate a rich geometric poetics that is more profound than the usual understanding. A vital aspect of the character of urban spaces - arguably the most communicative of architectural settings - is the rhythmic characteristics of situations and the natural world that are revealed in urban topography and architectural physiognomy, and often articulated most emphatically in sculptures. Crucially, the revelation of the structure of relationships between site, place, social life, the natural world, etc., which make up the architectural conditions for civic praxis, is the basis also of ornament and decorum in the arts generally. However, when architects confuse their work with sculpture - misunderstood as '(arm' rather than rhythmic spatiality - the philosophical and communicative potential of architecture is diminished. My thesis concerns the conditions of the possible recovery of this potential in urban terms.

The research was originated by the identification of the topic as worthy of investigation and capable of being concluded - the lacuna in architectural theory of the concept, origins and significance of Emergence. The enquiry sought to acquire new knowledge of the relations of ecology and climate to the emergence of the cultural and architectural systems of civilisation, to their subsequent evolutionary diversifications and developments, expansions and contractions, and to their eventual collapse and reorganisation. It has been informed by knowledge produced in the disciplines of archeology and anthropology, the life sciences and the physics of climate, oceanography and geomorphology, and the sciences of complexity, and in architectural history. The primary aim of the research is to contribute to design science knowledge that is necessary for the design of cities and their systems that will enable them and their citizens to successfully transit through the critical thresholds of chanqe driven by climatic, ecological and social forces that are currently transforming the world in which we live and which our descendants will inherit. The secondary aims are the abstraction and systematisation of knowledge of biological morphogenesis and evolution to contribute to innovative computational processes of architectural design and materialisation that are necessary to sustain human societies through the impending changes. The principal contributions to knowledge of the body of work are to architectural theory and to design research. The four publications constitute a coherent body of work that has provided a contribution to architectural theory of the correlation of the dynamics of the systems of the natural world to the origins and evolutionary development of human architecture from the scale of pit dwellings to settlements, through to cities and systems of cities. The publications have also outlined the precepts for computational morphogenetic design procedures, for evolutionary computational design, for models of building and urban metabolism, for their materials, and for their future. The publications have made a contribution to the pedagogy of architectural design research within academia, and to a wide architectural design community.

The thesis is concerned with the various ways that architectural modernism of the interwar era functioned as an instrument of ideology. This complex and historically specific function is explored through the agency of a conceptual pair: (social) alienation and (aesthetic) estrangement, where the latter is understood to refer to an avant-garde artistic device, de-alienation. These terms, associated with the evolution of the capitalist economy and the practices of the historical avant-garde, respectively, manifest in a concrete way the linguistic and conceptual reworking of the discourse on ideology, which took place during the course of its migration through the disciplines of philosophy and political economy, to artistic thinking and practice, and eventually to the spatial production of architecture. The thesis studies the means by which alienation, closely associated with the ideological hegemony of the bourgeoisie, was first perceived by the avant-garde as a problem for art; and then, how it was defied in practice by the conception of the counter- ideological artistic device of estrangement. Most importantly, however, the thesis considers how one ofthe tendencies of the extensive category of interwar architectural modernism attempted to transform this "negative" function of estrangement into a project for a de-alienated restructuring of human production. The inclusion of artistic strategies that could operate as counter-ideological took place in the discourse of art practices with the historical avant-garde movements of the 1910s and 20s. It is at this moment that the understanding of the function of the dominant ideology, which occurred with the constitution of the bourgeois subject during the Enlightenment, moved from philosophical and political discourse to an aesthetic one. The avant-garde artists reconceptualised their ow~ project as a counter- ideological one and undertook the task of the ideological destruction of bourgeois culture through the destruction of bourgeois subjectivity. Thus destruction as a model of action became a fundamental strategy of the avant-garde, which saw it as a necessary obligation to be undertaken in its historical confrontation with modern, bourgeois culture. It is within this framework, of an ideologically instrumentalised negativity, that the device of estrangement originates. Estrangement was employed by the historical avant-gardes as one of its privileged artistic techniques to reveal and push to its limits the function of "contradiction", by actively making artistic form strange or alienating, so as to operate with various degrees of ideological intent against the alienation and the impoverishment of modern life.