This thesis addresses the evolution of supermarket architecture in the UK from the period following the Second World War up to the present day. It records the history of this phenomenon and explores the relationship between the developing architectural design styles of supermarket buildings and the social economic and political changes that have influenced their design. Focusing on the main objectives the research progressed through interview, observation and the analysis of archive material towards an inquiry into the nature, and particular significance, of these buildings and their place in the field of retail commerce. In order to examine in depth the concept of supermarket architectural design, four case studies are presented, both to illustrate the evolution of store design and to demonstrate the complex processes involved in the design and the completion of specific developments. These studies of individual stores together present a clear picture of the many variable elements that must be considered in the design and construction of a supermarket building. The discussion and conclusions drawn from the research material, in particular the four case studies, records and demonstrates the substance and meaning of these and other supermarket buildings and the influences, both mandatory and elective, that are important and significant in their design and the design of the sites they occupy. The review of relevant literature supports the conclusion that this research presents new knowledge in a field as yet unexplored by academic study.

Operating within the landscape of new materialism and considering recent advances in the field of additive manufacturing, the thesis is proposing a novel method of designing with a new type of material that is known as functionally graded. Two of the additive manufacturing advances that are considered of radical importance and at the same time are central to the research have to do with the progressively increasing scales of the output of 3D printing, as well as with the expanding palette of materials that can now be utilised in the process. Regarding the latter, there are already various industrial research initiatives underway that explore ways that various materials can be combined in order to allow for the additive manufacturing of multi-material (otherwise known as functionally graded material) parts or whole volumes that are continuously fused together. In light of this and pre-empting this architectural-level integration and fusing of materials within one volume, the research initially outlines the anticipated impacts of the new way of building that this technology heralds. Of a total of six main anticipated changes, it then focuses on the impact that functionally graded materiality will have on how design is practiced. In this attempt to deal with the uncertainty of a material realm that is unruly and wilful, an initial criticism posed of the scant existing methods for designing with multi-materials in the computer is that they do not consider the intrinsic behaviour of materials and their natural propensity to structure themselves in space. Additionally, these models essentially follow a similarly arbitrary assignment of sub-materiality within larger multi-materials, to the hylomorphic imposition of form on matter. What is effectively proposed as a counter design technique is to computationally ‘predict’ the way materials will fuse and self-structure, with this self-arrangement being partially instigated by their physical properties. Correspondingly, this approach instigates two main objectives that will be pursued in the thesis: – The first goal, is to formulate an appropriate epistemology (also known as the epistemology of computer simulations-EOCS), which is directly linked to the use of computer simulations to design with (computational blending). This is effectively the creation of a methodological framework for the way to set out, run, and evaluate the results of the simulations. – The second goal, concerns the new design methodology proposed, in which the conventional material-less computer aided design methods are replaced by a process of constructing b-rep moulds and allowing digital materials to fuse with one another within these virtual frameworks. Drawing from a specific strand of materialist and cognitive theory (conceptual blending), the theoretical objective in effect is to demonstrate that form and material are not separate at any instance of the proposed process. The resulting original contribution of the design research is a process model that is created in an existing simulation software that can be used in a standard laptop computer in order to design with functionally graded materials. The various ‘stages’ of this model are mapped as a diagrammatic design work ow in the concluding end of the PhD, while its main parts are expanded upon extensively in corresponding chapters in the thesis.

How do architects address the ambiguity of practice, being on the one hand tasked with making buildings that perform well in terms of energy use and environmental strategy, and on the other facilitating the production of capital, through their service to ensuring that the performance of the occupants (efficiency, productivity and wellbeing) is satisfied? In this PhD by practice, I use the theoretical concept of ‘the performative’ through both the written thesis and project to interrogate the various ways in which thermal management becomes entangled with management processes. The context is specific: the workplace at a moment of convergence between smart technology with architecture; where notionally, agency is given over to autonomous environmental systems to do the right thing, and work environments that are embedded in performative-linguistic company cultures that urge their occupants to ‘do the right thing’. In other words – where machines do things with fans and boilers, and humans do things with emails, meetings, performance reviews and corporate culture. I invoke Lucy Schuman’s question ‘who is doing what to whom?’ to draw attention to the way that actions are elicited from employees through discursive and constitute organisational practices. At a point where new-build non-domestic buildings, which are specifically designed to perform environmentally well, are failing to do so- I invoke Isabelle Stengers’ ethical proposition ‘what are we busy doing?’ to ask whether architects’ actions are fundamentally compromised by this entanglement. I propose a strategy for architects to address their practice in relation to these propositions, and trace the actions as they migrate through discursive fields – sustainability, organisational management, theories of motivation, workplace politics, technological innovation, activism and resistance. The narrative of the written thesis is asynchronous, and is interconnected with the project in multiple ways, it is structured in such a way so as to introduce strategies of encountering the various discursive fields which form the context of study. The project work, on the other hand, immerses the reader directly within these fields. The database that reveals the multiple realms that embed the concepts of power, economics, desire, love, productivity and war into the architectural concerns for comfort and energy use; while the performance video places two subjects constituted by management, whose passions are put to work and situate them within a discursive environment latent with the full cultural significance of its metaphors in the workplace of the knowledge economy. The first part of the written component of the thesis opens up discussions about performance and action – which are generally applicable for the discourse of environmental performance, as mediated by the occupant and the use of technology, within the contemporary workplace. I move into the second part of the written thesis, which places the context specifically within the conceptual domain of thermal management, elaborates on the implications of taking a performance oriented approach to ‘heat’, and reveals how performance and the domain of heat converge on issues of productivity, subjectivity, and wellbeing. The two actors who perform in the video can only continuously improve their performance, every action can be subverted or appropriated, presenting the urgency for my conclusion in the written thesis, that as we, in architecture, are expected to also act entrepreneurially – the question is not how we do so subversively, or as a mode of critique. We should instead pay attention to Stengers’ and Suchman’s questions, and paying attention to what is brought about, and for whom, and focus our work on care for precarious, exhausted and hyper-active subjectivities that are produced through these actions.

The aesthetics of motorway architecture has not received attention within theoretical photographic discourse and has never been the subject of an academic photographic research project. This project begins from the understanding of the motorway as one continuous piece of architecture that crosses international boundaries on its route across Europe – an architecture so large that it cannot be perceived in its entirety. As a research-by-practice PhD, photography is used to identify and record incidents of the sublime in the route of the motorway. The photographs are produced with a large field study from the Swiss Alps to Naples, where numerous complex topographical and spatial conditions are found. This results in incidents of the sublime within its architecture when the motorway is forced to negotiate these conditions during its route. The research domain was chosen for its significance within the history of art and literature in European cultural history. Travelling in these regions was and is strongly related to the development of cultural concepts of the sublime. The questions that this research investigates are: Is it possible to make a depiction of architectural, spatial, topographical factors combined in a sublime incident? Can a methodology be defined to photograph these structures? How can photographs be made of large-scale architecture that cannot be seen or experienced in their entirety? The meaning of the term sublime has become diluted in contemporary usage, often being used inaccurately in description of something exquisite or delightful. This project revisits 18th-century formulations of this aesthetic categorisation, alongside historical travel literature, representations of landscape in painting and photography and contemporary architectural and photographic discourses. These references enable a thorough understanding of principles of aesthetic composition, resulting in the creation of a new understanding of the sublime and methodology for photographing large-scale motorway architecture. Employing a photographic aesthetic that embraces representation and post-production enhancement of Fine Art practice, the project culminates in the production of 29 photographs that form a narrative series exploring incidents of the sublime within motorway architecture between the Alps and Naples.

The years between 1945 and the early 1980s are the most celebrated in Italy’s design history. From the rhetoric of reconstruction to the postmodern provocations of the Memphis design collective, Italy’s architects played a vital role in shaping the country’s encounter with post-war modernity. Yet as often as this story has been told, it is incomplete. Craft was vital to the realisation of post-war Italian design, and an area of intense creativity in its own right, and yet has been marginalised and excluded in design historiography.

Media Architecture design, although visually prominent and involving interdisciplinary collaboration, rarely succeeds in creating urban situations of contextual relevance beyond temporary effects. This research understands Media Architecture as a communication medium and proposes the need to engage with its multi-stakeholder audience from early on in the conceptual design stage. This practice-led design research presents a broad critical investigation into the emerging field of Media Architecture (Jaschko & Sauter 2006; Foth 2008; Haeusler 2009) spanning conceptions of media space, experience, participation and design as discourse (Scollon & Scollon 2003; Fatah gen. Schieck 2006). Its findings contribute a new perspective on Media Architecture as experiential visual design process, based on an analysis of design methods, principles of participatory design and reflection, as well as an overview and classification of Media Architecture practice. Following a related literature review, the thesis identified experiential learning and the notion of troublesome knowledge (Meyer & Land 2003; Perkins 1999) as a distinguishable new perspective on design for Media Architecture. By connecting exploratory and generative design research tools (i.e., interviews, collaborative expert workshops, visual prototyping) with theoretical constructs of learning theory (Schön 1983; Kolb 1983), experience (McCarthy & Wright 2004) and ownership in urban design (McDonnell 2009; Townsend 2013; Lange & Waal 2013), this thesis developed an experimental design methodology for stakeholder involvement in Media Architecture. An iterative review and reflection process led to methods evolving from initial research tools for analysis to self-reflective design process outcomes. The findings of this study were used to create the Media Architecture Archive (MAA), a digital participatory database using a comprehensive classification system of Media Architecture practice. It is complemented by an experiential method framework based on visual design for contextual research, envisioning and prototyping in Media Architecture. Thus, the research contributes a novel approach to visual communication in Media Architecture, by applying visual design to encourage stakeholder involvement, discourse and reflection at early stages in the design process. The self-reflective structure of the study contributes to our knowledge of how practice-led learning processes applied through visual communication can serve as an extension of the Media Architecture experience as both process and outcome.

This thesis primarily deals with the adaptation of a theory from one context and its application in another context. In this case the "building systems integration theory" which has been introduced in the context of buildings, in the book Building Systems Integration Handbook (Rush, 1986), is adapted to the context of architectural organizations. The hypothesis of this research is that "building system integration principles can be applied to architectural business organizations." Building system integration theory defines four fundamental systems within buildings and five levels of integration ranging from unified to remote. It further defines an abstract two dimensional diagrammatic language that is referred to as a "ball diagram" for portraying the system integration within a building. Using the building system as an analogue to organizational structure, I have redefined the five levels of integration in the vocabulary of an organization and formulated seven systems in an organization on the basis of my literature review. I surveyed five prominent architectural firms in Texas (three Matrix organizations, and two Studio organizations) and discussed their project handling methods with their principals in charge, with the intention of investigating the degree of contact between personnel, their meeting patterns, and the reporting structure. This has helped me to identify the levels of integration between systems in each organization and eventually represent the working process of these firms using the diagrammatic language introduced in BSIH. The resulting diagrams, which primarily represent the production/ delivery segment of the organizations, reveal organizational structures during the project cycle as well as certain characteristics of a Matrix or Studio. Due to the limited scope of the survey done initially, some shortcomings were noticed in the diagramming method including the absence of any representation of the client and the user in the diagrams. Despite certain shortcomings owing to the scale of the investigation, it is felt that the diagramming method portrayed here is a novel yet effective idea to represent organizations and the levels of integration between systems in an organization that contributes to the production of a cohesive organizational design theory.

This thesis primarily deals with the adaptation of a theory from one context and its application in another context. In this case the "building systems integration theory" which has been introduced in the context of buildings, in the book Building Systems Integration Handbook (Rush, 1986), is adapted to the context of architectural organizations. The hypothesis of this research is that "building system integration principles can be applied to architectural business organizations." Building system integration theory defines four fundamental systems within buildings and five levels of integration ranging from unified to remote. It further defines an abstract two dimensional diagrammatic language that is referred to as a "ball diagram" for portraying the system integration within a building. Using the building system as an analogue to organizational structure, I have redefined the five levels of integration in the vocabulary of an organization and formulated seven systems in an organization on the basis of my literature review. I surveyed five prominent architectural firms in Texas (three Matrix organizations, and two Studio organizations) and discussed their project handling methods with their principals in charge, with the intention of investigating the degree of contact between personnel, their meeting patterns, and the reporting structure. This has helped me to identify the levels of integration between systems in each organization and eventually represent the working process of these firms using the diagrammatic language introduced in BSIH. The resulting diagrams, which primarily represent the production/ delivery segment of the organizations, reveal organizational structures during the project cycle as well as certain characteristics of a Matrix or Studio. Due to the limited scope of the survey done initially, some shortcomings were noticed in the diagramming method including the absence of any representation of the client and the user in the diagrams. Despite certain shortcomings owing to the scale of the investigation, it is felt that the diagramming method portrayed here is a novel yet effective idea to represent organizations and the levels of integration between systems in an organization that contributes to the production of a cohesive organizational design theory.

The thesis is a detailed study of the changing middle class home in contemporary Sri Lanka. It examines whether and how the interaction of spatial boundaries and embodied meanings have changed as a consequence of current social change. Results suggests that the middle class home in Sri Lanka has transformed from a 'pre-open economy4 model and stabilised into a new a 'post-open economy model', after the free-trade regime was introduced in 1977. Quantitative analysis of forty house plans investigated through space - syntax and statistical tools suggested that configurations, thresholds, positions and vistas of space have been organised and controlled to create generic spatial patterns in two alternative models, corresponding to pre and post open economy periods. Qualitative analysis through accounts of home lives by women that the 'pre-open economy model' was first socially constructed during the British Colonial Period (BCP), which embodied behaviours of a strongly institutionalised home life. A 'lifestyle' constructed within Victorian ideals with a strong emphasis on power structures of the institution of the family was embodied in the spatial classification of the BCP home. Quantitative analysis also suggested that the 'pre-open economy' spatial classification has transformed and stabilised into an alternative model in recent years as a 'post-open economy' model. Published records in Sri Lanka suggests that indicators of social change that affect gender issues such as roles and position of women, decline in domestic services, transformation of family structures, merging of conjugal roles and distancing from the neighbourhood as a community, are global phenomena, known to change during urbanisation in other contexts, for example during industrialisation and in the post-war periods in the UK society. Interestingly, such global phenomena have acquired spatial forms, which are conditional to the socio-historical structures in which the Sri Lankan middle class evolved. Qualitative analysis of accounts of home lives by women living from the post-open economy period revealed a 'user oriented lifestyle' and social boundaries between categories of users such as the family, visitor and outsiders have acquired novel forms of inclusion and exclusion. Thus, the synthesis of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis suggest that changing spatial organisation relates to new forms of social solidarity seen to be consequential to larger social changes effected by the open-economy.

Much of the available literature on the impact of the architecture of museums of modern art has centred upon the 'spectacularity' of such structures and the regeneration effect on sites and/or cities triggered by their presence, often highlighting their agency in promoting mass tourist activity. However, apart from these widely debated facts, more complex circumstances regarding major shifts in the socio-cultural and political arenas may have influenced the identity, conception, design and implementation of these architectural structures within cityscapes and urban fabrics - circumstances which are often overlooked. Considering this complex contextual frameset, this work concentrates on a specific period of time, indicating the substantial renovation cities have been through since the industrialisation-boom of the 1950s, and ponders the relation between these physical and symbolic transformations and the consequences of this 'modernisation' process in the social-cultural panorama. Albeit assumed as a preponderant factor in cities' 'modernising' policies, this research does not aim to map the most significant or to construct a historiography of modern art museums. The objective is to discuss whether this 'modernisation' process is related to the transformations in the scope, form, function and identity of modern art museums in the last 60 years or so, highlighting the implications of the phenomenon that glorifies these architectural structures per se. But to what extent, or in what sense, has the set of socio-cultural transformations seen since the 1950s conceptually/concretely affected the architecture of museums of modern art? How did this particularly elitist building type emerge as such powerful element in both politico-economic and socio-cultural terms, becoming a major agent in transforming cities' identities since the 1990s? The Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro (Affonso Eduardo Reidy, 1953-1967); the Centre de Culture et d'Art Georges Pompidou, Paris (Renzo Piano & Richard Rogers Architects, 1970-1977) and the TATE Modern, London (Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron, 1994-2000) were selected to illustrate these transformations. In fact, this work discusses these museums' relevance as architectural objects ; analyses whether they have contributed (or not) to set up a new agenda for modern art museums; and investigates if these (conceptual/concrete) transformations have corresponded (or not) to major shifts in paradigms in the arts, in social-cultural trends and in the architectural practice and thinking within the period.