The architectural theorist and practitioner Bernard Tschumi asserts that enquiring and working at the limits of a discipline expands our knowledge and experience. Within this thesis I examine the limits of architecture as they relate to the non-material and the nonvisible elements of space. As Mark Wigley observes in his essay on atmosphere, architects, at different times, have sought to understand, capture and control the otherwise ungraspable aspects of space. The elusive nature of such ephemeral architectural aspects and elements makes them hard to manage and map. Their examination provides a challenging exercise within architectural research. Atmosphere is such an elusive element; as Zizek would call it, it is that which remains always as a backdrop to daily life. It seems to vanish when subjected to conscious scrutiny. Non-visual sensations such as sounds, smell, textures, temperature, clearly constitute invisible elements that are notoriously difficult to represent. As a further example, event, the way in which a space is or could be deployed or inhabited over time, provides another unpredictable and ambiguous design consideration. Spaces relate to performance. The performance of a place constitutes its nature, character, function and meaning. However, the complexity, changeability, and potentiality of spatial performance render it as something abstract and non-representable. As Steven Connor, and Jonathan Hill, amongst other theorists, observe, new media, electromagnetic fields, and digital gadgets, also constitute invisible elements of space. They create invisible fields, territories, links and boundaries, affecting everyday spaces and relationships. So a typology of the elusive and ephemeral characteristics of space would include: non-conventional materials, elements changing over time, electromagnetic fields, electronic equipment, nonvisually representable sensations, situations, processes and events. Attending closely to these themes reveals some key questions. Why do these themes appear (or re-appear) now, at this particular moment in history? How are they related to contemporary thought, practice, and to current shifts in society, culture and technological development? New technology, new means of representation, and emerging design media change both the way in which we inhabit space, and also the way in which we understand and represent it. Digital media allow us to record and represent time and duration. Hence, events and situations occurring over time can be documented and studied. Subsequently, new media can also function as a new tool to think about space, and for designing accordingly. As Marshall McLuhan claimed in the 1960s, the emergence of new digital media has caused a ‘shift in the sensorium’ and has readdressed the significance and role of experiencing and sensing other than through the visual sense. In this thesis I discuss in turn a series of limits and the qualities of the spaces that they reveal. Each chapter title is based on a binary and a theme that indicates its transgression: (a) the visual versus the non-visible – the sensuous (chapter 2), (b) the discourse about the formal versus the material – the performative (chapter 3), (c) the physical versus the digital – the hybrid (chapter 4). In order to examine these themes and explore the design potential they entail, I review relevant literature in parallel with the conduct of a series of design experiments. The experimental processes deployed are of three kinds: (1) mapping and documentation of sensory situations, (2) design experiments that challenge the issues discussed and (3) real-scale interventions that test some of the design ideas at a 1:1 scale and in an actual place. The latter includes a major installation at the 2009 Venice Biennale on the theme of Athens by Sound initiated and designed by a team involving the author.

Attributable to the legacy of modernism, within the Western world there exists a widespread and as-yet unresolved sense of detachment from place; our contemporary, globalized condition has given rise to a visually-biased, alienating architecture lacking in meaningful, human connections to site or context, relying all too often upon the abstract projections of the distant and objective architect rather than on the realities of needs and experience. Whilst the field of environmental psychology (within which the topic of place has been widely researched) has suggested theoretical solutions, few practical methods for the translation of relevant findings into strategies for the generation of place and attachment have been developed. Following a literature review, this thesis identifies two key place-related theories which address the characteristics and psychological impact of the physical environment (Attention Restoration Theory (Kaplan, 1995) and Canter’s place theory (1977)); in binding these theories to architectural practice, the author offers a strategy capable of aiding the successful understanding and creation of place. Providing an architectural brief to which this study responds, the practice-based element of this research focuses upon the context of North Lands Creative Glass, in Lybster, Caithness. Through a personal account of the impact of place and its manifestation within the author’s works in glass, mixed media and on paper, this thesis proceeds to promote an honest, haptic narrative between the architect and the realities of context and experience; in doing so, it illustrates how an architecture conducive to a sense of place and attachment could be understood and created successfully.

Includes bibliographies / 2 v. : ill ; 31 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Architecture, 1987

This study seeks to investigate the impact of globalisation on the architectural behaviour in the United Arab Emirates, to clarify the benefits and risks of globalised architecture in architectural behaviour. Although there are several supporters of globalisation who see the phenomenon as a means of progress and development, many experts have indicated that this phenomenon has been demolishing local culture and regional considerations, and ignoring residents’ requirements. As a result, this study presents all the views about this phenomenon from many aspects, such as political, social, economic and environmental, whereby it investigates the changes in architecture and urban planning due to global standards, methods of construction, and building materials. The literature review was the first part of the study and the theoretical studies were divided into three pivots in this thesis: The globalisation impacts and features, the relationship between globalisation and architecture and the last pivot concentrates on the human needs in architecture. The study also concentrates on the impact of globalisation on architecture through the terminology of “globalised architecture”, and focuses on some global phenomena in the architectural domain, such as skyscrapers, multi-storey buildings and iconic landmarks. The empirical study examines this argument about globalisation through questionnaires and interviews. A comparison is drawn between two groups: globalised houses is the first group, which reflects globalisation’s impacts on architecture, where this provides easier ways to specify features, elements and specifications for the era. In contrast, the non-globalised sample is the opposite of the first group, because it reflects the features of houses without the impacts of globalisation. Ultimately, the findings indicated that there are differences between the two groups. Both samples occurred in the same place and time, but the form of architecture and urban design has affected human behaviour. Thus, this study suggests a paradigm that could provide more humanitarian elements in architecture and urban design. It also suggests some general recommendations supporting human needs, and local considerations such as standards and codes.

To incorporate bioremedial functions into the performance of buildings and to balance generative architecture's dominant focus on computational programming and digital fabrication, this thesis first hybridizes theories of autopoiesis into extended cognition in order to research biological domains that include synthetic biology and biocomputation. Under the rubric of living technology I survey multidisciplinary fields to gather perspective for student design of bioremedial and/or metabolic components in generative architecture where generative not only denotes the use of computation but also includes biochemical, biomechanical, and metabolic functions. I trace computation and digital simulations back to Alan Turing's early 1950s Morphogenetic drawings, reaction-diffusion algorithms, and pioneering artificial intelligence (AI) in order to establish generative architecture's point of origin. I ask provocatively: Can buildings think? as a question echoing Turing's own "Can machines think?" Thereafter, I anticipate not only future bioperformative materials but also theories capable of underpinning strains of metabolic intelligences made possible via AI, synthetic biology, and living technology. I do not imply that metabolic architectural intelligence will be like human cognition. I suggest, rather, that new research and pedagogies involving the intelligence of bacteria, plants, synthetic biology, and algorithms define approaches that generative architecture should take in order to source new forms of autonomous life that will be deployable as corrective environmental interfaces. I call the research protocol autopoietic-extended design, theorizing it as an operating system (OS), a research methodology, and an app schematic for design studios and distance learning that makes use of in-field, e-, and m-learning technologies. A quest of this complexity requires scaffolding for coordinating theory-driven teaching with practice-oriented learning. Accordingly, I fuse Maturana and Varela's biological autopoiesis and its definitions of minimal biological life with Andy Clark's hypothesis of extended cognition and its cognition-to-environment linkages. I articulate a generative design strategy and student research method explained via architectural history interpreted from Louis Sullivan's 1924 pedagogical drawing system, Le Corbusier's Modernist pronouncements, and Greg Lynn's Animate Form. Thus, autopoietic-extended design organizes thinking about the generation of ideas for design prior to computational production and fabrication, necessitating a fresh relationship between nature/science/technology and design cognition. To systematize such a program requires the avoidance of simple binaries (mind/body, mind/nature) as well as the stationing of tool making, technology, and architecture within the ream of nature. Hence, I argue, in relation to extended phenotypes, plant-neurobiology, and recent genetic research: < Architecture = Nature > Consequently, autopoietic-extended design advances design protocols grounded in morphology, anatomy, cognition, biology, and technology in order to appropriate metabolic and intelligent properties for sensory/response duty in buildings. At m-learning levels smartphones, social media, and design apps source data from nature for students to mediate on-site research by extending 3D pedagogical reach into new university design programs. I intend the creation of a dialectical investigation of animal/human architecture and computational history augmented by theory relevant to current algorithmic design and fablab production. The autopoietic-extended design dialectic sets out ways to articulate opposition/differences outside the Cartesian either/or philosophy in order to prototype metabolic architecture, while dialectically maintaining: Buildings can think.

My thesis concerns how architecture can actively participate in processes of community-formation without reducing its creative processes to the oppositional tensions, prejudices and instrumentality of conventional left/right or bottom-up/top-down politics, “two poles of the same governmental machine.” By elaborating the architect as craftsman-author, my thesis explores Community and processes of political and poetic Representation. It is critical towards the biopolitics of governance. Theorisation is drawn principally from the political philosophy of critical theory, phenomenology and hermeneutics. My thesis promotes the architecture of “unavowable community.” Rather than forming communities by grouping likenesses together, and architecture forming their limits to either secure self-sufficiency or protect against insufficiency, architecture is tasked with finding methodologies for delimiting community-formation based on affirmative views of incompleteness and insufficiency. It is arranged in three Sections: Section I sets out the political and representational ground from which the investigation into community begins – it is a brief investigation into historical processes of forming community; Section II sets out possibilities for rethinking community – it is an investigation that shifts questions of craftsmanship, authorship, politics and representation from the search for appropriate community form to processes for becoming community; Section III is an investigation into the processes of craftsmanship and authorship directed towards the unpredictable but nonetheless “coming community” – it sets out a methodology for how an architect might go about proposing community.

Dans cette thèse, nous nous intéressons aux relations spécifiques entre l’architecture et la philosophie dans une période bien précise de l’histoire de l’architecture. Notre recherche consiste en une analyse approfondie du processus de la conception architecturale approchée à partir de la philosophie de la déconstruction. Il ne s’agit pas d’aborder de façon générale le domaine trop vaste des emprunts que les architectes peuvent faire à la philosophie, mais bien de se limiter à une entrée beaucoup plus précise, en partant d’une interrogation portant sur les relations que les architectes dits «déconstructivistes» entretiennent avec un courant de la philosophie connu, depuis les écrits du philosophe français Jacques Derrida, sous cette même appellation de «philosophie de la déconstruction». L’enjeu est d’étudier le processus de conception architecturale, son passage par des concepts et son aboutissement dans des formes, en le référant à la philosophie et en se demandant en particulier comment les architectes utilisent des références philosophiques. Pour arriver à une assimilation plus rigoureuse de la pensée déconstructive en architecture, l’architecte American : Peter Eisenman a proposé une interprétation du processus de conception architecturale proche de la logique textuelle. Ce processus s’appellera chez Eisenman la «décomposition». Notre problématique majeure sera d’essayer de comprendre quels outils à la fois théoriques et pratiques utilisent les architectes contemporaines afin de restructurer une conception architecturale influencée par la pensée déconstructive ? Le but était d’arriver à donner à la déconstruction en architecture un aspect et une définition précis, au-delà loin des seules images métaphoriques que certains architectes peuvent proposer de cette notion. De là dépendait le choix des œuvres analysées comme exemples de ce mouvement, mais aussi l’élucidation que nous tentions du processus de conception architecturale issu de cette notion de déconstruction. Notre but était de parvenir à donner une figure esthétique, théorique, fonctionnelle et opérationnelle à un mouvement architectural. Nous avons construit notre projet de recherche autour de quatre problématiques et hypothèses majeures qui résument de façon générale le chemin parcouru. La première interrogation vise l’origine de ce mouvement, dans la mesure où il est au croisement de ses deux disciplines divers, la philosophie et l’architecture. Est-il possible que ce mouvement soit le fruit d’une transformation philosophique en architecture, détaché de toute théorie architecturale antérieure ? Ou bien n’est-il que le développement d’une ou plusieurs idéologies antérieures en architecture ? Notre deuxième interrogation est orientée vers une compréhension de la source philosophique – les écrits de Jacques Derrida – et le processus d’une critique de la métaphysique chez le philosophe. Qu’est-ce que la déconstruction? La troisième interrogation vise une analyse concrète entre les données philosophiques et les œuvres architecturales. Comment l’architecture, art de construction par excellence, peut-elle devenir une déconstruction d’elle-même ? Dans quelle (s) limite (s) est-il possible de réduire la déconstruction à des connaissances définissables, comme semble malgré tout l’exiger l’architecture ? Ainsi, la dernière interrogation principale de notre projet vise l’impacte de ce mouvement sur l’architecture en globale et l’architecture contemporaine. / In this thesis, we focus on the specific relationship between architecture and philosophy in a specific period in the history of architecture. Although our research analyzes the process of architectural design through the philosophy of deconstruction, it does not generally address too broad field of philosophy. In fact, the project undermines the effects of the philosophical method of deconstruction on architecture and the so-called deconstructivists' concern with "philosophy of deconstruction" known from the writings of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. In other words, the challenge is to study the process of architectural design, its association with concepts and its effect on forms, by referring to philosophy and in particular by claiming how architects use the philosophical references. To achieve a more precise assimilation of deconstructive thought in architecture, American architect Peter Eisenman proposed an interpretation of the architectural design process close to the textual logic. For Eisenman, this process is called "decomposition". Our major issue is to try to understand what theoretical tools and practices are used at the same time by the contemporary architects to restructure an architectural design influenced by the deconstructive thought. The aim is to give the deconstruction in architecture, a specific dimension and precise definition, far beyond the few metaphorical images that may offer some architects of thisconcept. Although we require analyzable projects to achieve a clear-cut definition, we have tried to elucidate the architectural design process resulting from the notion of deconstruction. Our goal is to achieve an operational, functional, theoretical and anaesthetic figure in an architectural movement. We have carried out our research project around four major issues and assumptions that generally summarize achieved progress. The first question examines the origin of this movement, in so far as it is at the crossroads of two different disciplines, philosophy and architecture. Is this architectural movement theresult of a philosophical transformation in architecture apart from any previous ideologies in architecture or is it the product of the development of one or more ideologies ? Our second question is directed towards an understanding of the philosophical source in the writings of Jacques Derrida and the process of critique of metaphysics for him. What is deconstruction ? The third question is about the concrete analysis between philosophical data and architectural works. How architecture, art of construction by excellence, become a deconstruction itself ? To what extent is it possible to reduce the deconstruction to a definable knowledge that the architecture can use it ? Thus, the last main question of our project highlights the impact of this movement on architecture in global and contemporary architecture.

Cette thèse questionne le devenir du champ de l’Architecture urbaine en France, et, plus particulièrement, les possibilités d’une réactualisation de ses approches et théories projectuelles dans le contexte des mutations et prises de conscience plurielles au regard de la ville européenne contemporaine. Elle met en lumière les évolutions dans les modes de pensée et les notions structurantes du champ depuis sa définition dans les années 1970 et propose une remise en question des fondements du projet urbain, tels qu’ils ont été formulés en France depuis les années1980. L’idée d’une nouvelle approche projectuelle, celle du projet métropolitain, est enquêtée, d’une part, à travers une relecture critique des positionnements théoriques véhiculés en France (depuis la décennie 1980), et d’autre part, à travers un regard critique prospectif, au prisme de trois outils conceptuels et opératoires : récit, scénario, figure. Leur exploration fait apparaître le propre d’une culture narrative-descriptive où nouvelles postures intellectuelles, démarches réflexives et représentations mentales contribuent à développer les nouveaux sens du projet métropolitain, entre continuités et ruptures avec l’héritage du projet urbain. / This thesis questions new developments within the field of urban Architecture in France and, specifically, possibilities for the renewal of the discipline’s project approaches and theories, taken in the context of increased awareness towards the multiple challenges presented by the contemporary European city. It thus highlights fundamental changes in conceptual frameworks (ways of thinking and structuring notions) since Urban Architecture’s first definition in France in the 1970s, and critically analyses the “projet urbain” approaches, as developed in the French context since the1980s. The idea of the “metropolitan project” as a renewed urban planning and design approach is thus investigated both from a retrospective and a prospective critical view point : on one side, by reviewing the “projet urbain”’s theories and methods; on the other, by exploring three conceptual and operating design tools – narrative, figure and scenario. Within this emerging narrative-descriptive design culture, renewed intellectual stances, reflexive processes and mental representations help develop new meanings of the “metropolitan project”, marking both continuities and points of departure with respect to the legacy of the “projet urbain”.

La forme suit l’esprit. Tout projet d’architecture doit se doter d’esprit. Cela fait sens, de faire démarrer le projet par ce souffle conceptuel, cet esprit qui va créer la forme. Une architectonique instaurée par le spirituel et en lien avec l’habiter, pour en faire une architecture qui a une âme, animée par une pensée ! Ceci permet de fonder une méthode à l’établissement du projet architectural. Des projets conçus à partir d’une pensée singulière forte sont étudiés afin de dégager l’essence et le sens du spirituel en architecture. Quatre types d’apports théoriques sont observés : le premier sert à l’histoire et à la théorie de l’architecture. Le deuxième sert le projet d’architecture en relatant les démarches spirituelles de six architectes modernes et contemporains. Le troisième prouve l’immuabilité des démarches spirituelles. Le quatrième dégage le facteur spirituel, commun à toutes les démarches, servant à engendrer l’œuvre architecturale singulière. / Form follows spirit. Every architecture project should get hold of a spirit. It is meaningful hence to start the project with a conceptual inspiration, the spirit who will create the form. Architectonic is derived from the spiritual and related to the dwelling to attain a soulful architecture yet moved by one though.This enables the elaboration of a methodology for the architectural project.Projects that were conceived out of one and only powerful though are surveyed so as to reveal the essence and meaning of the spiritual in architecture. Four types of theoretical approaches are observed. The first caters for the history & theory of architecture. The second attends to the architectural project by narrating the respective spiritual processes of six contemporary and modernist architects. The third asserts the immutability of the spiritual processes. The fourth reveals the spiritual dimension that is common to all processes and that helps in begetting the unique architectural opus.

L’esprit dialectique qui caractérise la posture intellectuelle d’Aldo Rossi en tant qu’enseignant et architecte, cristallise durant les années 1960, en Italie, une nouvelle approche de l’enseignement de la théorie du projet en architecture. Cherchant à être rationnel tout en intégrant la question de « l’élément subjectif » de l’architecte, au travers de son expérience, la posture intellectuelle de Rossi s’est positionnée en réponse à un contexte politique et universitaire en crise. Dans la continuité des recherches menées sur l’épistémologie et la pédagogie de l’architecture ainsi que sur son ouverture réflexive à d’autres champs disciplinaires, Rossi tente de construire un essai théorique à la Fabrique du projet (la Città analoga). Il y questionne la pensée analogique face aux études typologiques en cherchant à esquisser une méthode didactique fonctionnant par étapes. Face à la difficulté de rationaliser « l’élément subjectif », Rossi, prolonge son essai sur la Fabrique du projet, au travers de ses propres œuvres. / The dialectical spirit which characterizes Aldo Rossi's intellectual disposition as a teacher and architect practitioner, crystallized during the 1960s, in Italy, a new approach to the teaching of the theory of the project in architecture. Trying to be rational while integrating the question of " the subjective element " of the architect, through his experience, the intellectual posture of Rossi was positioned in response to a political and university crisis. In the continuity of the researches led by the epistemology and the pedagogy of architecture and on his reflexive openness to other disciplinary fields, Rossi tries to build a theoretical essay to the Fabric of the project (Città analoga). He questions the analogical thought in front of the typological studies and tries to sketch a didactic method step by step. Facing the difficulty of rationalising " the subjective element ", Rossi, extends his essay on the Factory of the project, through his own works.