This narrative is retrospective and reflective as well as projective. The thesis of a PhD by publication does not inherently align with a principal proposition. The building, books, chapters and articles collected in this PhD have been shaped by interaction with varied professional, academic and cultural environments and milieus. Professional contexts that have triggered research questions and enriched research methodologies range from architectural practice to scholarly research and collaborative field research undertaken internationally; cultural milieus include Germany, Switzerland, the UK, and, recently, countries of the Global South. The work was not produced with a singular destination in sight; rather, it proceeds along a set of distinct, but interdependent vectors, through changes in direction, displaced vantage points, and transposition between corporeal, architectural and urban scales. This narrative juxtaposes, confronts and discusses the work collected in the portfolio, but does not seek to unify through imposing a singular thesis. The portfolio comprises of a building project, introductory essays to three edited books, three book chapters and nine journal articles, designed and built, written and published over a period of eighteen years from 1998 to 2016. The narrative reconstructs successive questions about diagrams that led to the building project, books, and articles, and the contexts which prompted the questions and frame the work. Rather than aligned to a linear narration, the work is presented along four parallel but interrelated paths of enquiry (Sections A, B, C, D) in which one output led to another, sometimes directly, at other times over detours and longer intervals. The work is introduced through four themes that cut across those paths. While framing and consolidating a retrospective view, the narrative of this PhD also exposes previously unrecognized resonances. New meaning arises from juxtaposition, grouping, contextualising and ordering of outputs and trajectories. In this sense, the retrospective view becomes prospective and projective.

This thesis describes the methods by which individuals and associations give meaning to the concept of profession within the English building industry in the late modern period. The hypothesis is that professional associations control occupations. Whilst this might be accepted in a wider literature, building professionals identify with a far bleaker, late modern, interpretation of profession. The literature portrays a 'backwards' industry without a determinant authority, characterised by fragmented and servile professional associations. The thesis utilises Burrage's (2006) four-goal-framework to structure its investigation through semi-structured interviews with professionals and their associations. This proposes that associations control admission and training, define and defend a jurisdiction, set up a system to govern their own members and seek to improve their corporate status. This work concludes that professionals and associations strategically engage with these issues. There are problems facing professions, but their demise is not one of them. Indeed, rather than be defensive, associations are enhancing their controlling systems. This involves a looser coupling between associations and their membership, which creates some fracturing to the construction of identity. However, the result is new forms of occupational provision, in alliance with both clients and the state, that establish clear dialogues for identity and very specific types of service that are well separated from external 'quacks'. Faced with an environment that is ostensibly deeply sceptical, associations are selective in how they defend and enhance both their status and control systems. This has led, for example, to a withdrawal from controlling entry in the face of government demands to widen participation, to be replaced with strong regulatory schemes for members. This creates standardisation and practical guarantees of competency, a powerful executive in a quasi-judicial regulatory role, and clear rules of behaviour and permanent training through CPD. The result is 'competent', 'safe', 'good' and 'ethical' occupational jurisdiction.

Arakawa and Gins, radical philosophers of the future, desire to construct life beyond the human condition. Their unique and original contribution to philosophy can be discerned most evidently in their concept of reversible destiny, an innovative response to our mortal condition. ‘We have decided not to die’, their ultimate declaration, is a testament not only to their architecture – an architecture predicated on the notion that death must be combated – but also, and perhaps most importantly, to its ability to teach us to think differently about the future. Even, and perhaps especially, the most fundamental and basic assumptions of our species are deliberately and evocatively called into question. It is this resistance to the present – in learning how not to die, in educating life differently – that will be addressed in this dissertation. The claim made here is that the highly instructive architectural philosophy of Arakawa and Gins produces a positive and useful philosophy of life, which orients us towards a new century of philosophy that operates beyond the human condition.

This thesis examines the mechanisms of site-specific installation in photography, drawing on contemporary architectural debates around relationships between image and space, as well as debates in fine art around participatory practices involving installation. The project has involved a synthesis of practical research, through the production of artwork, throughout the research period. I consider the outcomes of writing, photographing and photographic installation to be at parity with one another, in the spirit of what Jane Rendell calls 'critical spatial practice'. The focus and physical context for this inquiry is the former Lilian Baylis School, built in 1964 by the Architects' Co-Partnership (ACP) for the London County Council in the Borough of Lambeth. It served its function as a school up until 2005 after which it was used for community programmes. In 2011 the site, by then Grade II listed, was restored and converted into new flats. The concept of visual memory serves as a theoretical basis of my project. I take up architect Aldo Rossi's idea of acting as a way of tracing a process of transformation, and also using these traces as a form of site-specific intervention, as an action in relation to this transformation. These aspects of transformation inform the work of making visible the memory of a place through photography and its spatial installation, engaging viewers in this process.

The environmental impact of human behaviour on the design, construction and operation of buildings is often overlooked, frequently resulting in sub optimal performance over the lifecycle of the building (credibility gap and value-action gap). An over-reliance on technological and market solutions (false positivity) throughout the design, construction and operation of sustainable buildings means changing user behaviour is not currently envisaged by all but the most sustainability-minded built environment professionals. This study aims to develop an understanding of the dynamic and complex systems by which responsible environmental, social and economic action (sustainable behaviour) emerges from the relationship between people and the built environment. The primary research question asks to what extent sustainable buildings encourage sustainable behaviour, with broader research objectives covering the need for sustainable buildings and their social, environmental and economic benefits; a clear definition of sustainable behaviour and sustainable buildings; identifying opportunities for behavioural change from current best practice and how behavioural change theory can be applied to the built environment to encourage and optimise sustainable behaviour. Literature review reveals existing theory and practice in the fields of sustainability, architecture, behavioural psychology and pedagogy applied generally to the design, construction and operation of sustainable buildings. Five exemplar sustainable buildings with pedagogical functions are also investigated. The primary empirical research methodology uses grounded theory, ethnography and phenomenology through interview and survey data analysis, highlighting common best practices and innovative approaches, as well as revealing barriers to achieving sustainable built environments that encourage sustainable behaviour. The research reveals that there are numerous opportunities for behavioural interventions at critical stages throughout the lifecycle of buildings where ‘value-action’ gaps between our intentions to be more sustainable and our often sub-optimal actions or behaviours are identified. Strategies includes education, information provision, training, experiential learning, feedback, participation and regulation. The research contributes original knowledge by relating the way building mechanisms for change can be understood through the lens of behavioural psychology and the synthesis of the three disciplines of sustainability, architecture and pedagogy.

This thesis contributes to a growing literature on identity and the home. The study's findings enrich understandings of the way people organize the material culture of their homes, and the way objects and practices are drawn into their self-storying. The study reveals the agency in homemaking as a creative practice and highlights the particularity of homemaking experience. It expands the context for understanding the creative work of designing and producing the contemporary home. Home is a key site of intensive consumption and emotional investment in identity. Possessions in the home and in our interactions with them are integral to our experience and construction of who we are in the world. We make our interior landscape visible to ourselves and onlookers through our choice of objects, arrangements and practices. And yet insight into the lived experience of everyday homemaking is elusive. This calls for empirical research to engage directly with the subjective world of individuals. My thesis examines an archive of rich experiential data gathered in informal conversations conducted with homemakers in twenty-five middle-class London homes. Their narrations of subjective experience have been used to explore how people think and feel about their homes, and how and why they arrange certain things in certain ways within those homes. Identity is understood as a storied accomplishment and homemaking is formulated as a means of organizning experience. Material is part of self-representation and is regarded as a narrative resource. A reading of narratives and images in the light of this conceptualisation reveals the meaning in the object and the object in narrative. The theses demonstrates the endeavour of homemaking as a form of creative production that is empowered by individual agency and fuelled by storying interaction.

This thesis explores the way in which interior decorating developed as a practice during the interwar period in Britain and seeks to address broader contexts of gender, class, taste and styles. While traditional design histories have tracked the development of the interior design model through a direct sequence of movements and ideologies through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this thesis addresses issues which have been problematic within the context of art and design history. It acknowledges the more linear dimension of the original strand and seeks to offer a complementary appraisal which considers and appreciates the role of class, wealth and privilege and deconstructs boundaries which have marginalized gender and obscured certain important influences. The study examines the way in which decorators, many of whom were female, negotiated a design agenda which engaged with modernity without fully renouncing hard-fought signifiers of their class, taste and individuality. It argues that in the development of its practices, significant alliances were formed with fashion and that the vital role performed by media representation and social commentary underpinned its commercial profile and provided the public locus of its discourse. The nature of professional decorating is explored against a background of emerging practices in the first decades of the twentieth-century which included the antiques trade; grand scale establishments such as Lenygon & Morant, White Allom, Thornton-Smith and Keebles; department-store studios including those at Heal’s, Waring & Gillow and Fortnum & Mason; and individual practitioners and designers including Syrie Maugham, Sibyl Colefax, Dolly Mann and Ronald Fleming. In a period rife with social and political upheavals and conflicting ideologies as well as technological advancement and life-style changes, the study’s analysis aims to provide a broader understanding of the way in which decorators proactively negotiated such conditions and presented a cultural and aesthetic response to modernity through the diversity of their styles.

The ‘Avant-Garde’ in architecture seems a challenging subject: first, because the term has not yet clearly defined, despite the ubiquity of its use; second, because through that ubiquity it has become a buzz-word that is empty of precise meaning; third, because although this use includes the history of modern architecture, its application to this field has been largely unreflective and often unconsidered, as this thesis demonstrates. There is ambivalence as to which architectures are ‘Avant-Garde’ or should be regarded as ‘Avant-Garde.’ Therefore, there is a challenge in any question such as: what is the Avant-Garde in architecture? How can the architectural Avant-Garde be defined? What is the concept of the Avant-Garde in architecture? My thesis is a sociological conceptualization of the Avant-Garde in architecture. It is based on the mapping of the use the‘ term ‘Avant-Garde’ in architectural history, theory and criticism and its analytical tools are sociological. While it belongs to the above fields, it is informed by art theory and history, cultural studies, and the sociology of the professions, and includes sociological, cultural and political analyses. I suggest that the Avant-Garde is an Operation internal to architecture; a mechanism that does not only describe it but formulates it, motivates it, or else, influences our perception of it. I propose that the Avant-Garde is directed by prominent elements of its internal domain. It includes a filtering process, a rough selection process, and a selection process, by which one or more architectures internal conditions - are introduced to the discipline to renew the profession toward the desired and necessary, for the element who directs the operation, direction (see fig. 2, appendix). The end result of the selection process is what we commonly understand as ‘Avant-Garde’ architecture, e.g. Russian Constructivism or Bauhaus. I also propose that the Avant-Garde lies in and operates within the socio-ideological sphere of architecture and that renewal of the architecture's internal domain is necessary, thus the Avant-Garde is necessary, so as to make architecture respond to each time new external conditions and so endure, as a profession, over time. The Avant-Garde is for me an operation of renewal, a driver of difference and change in architecture (see fig. 1, appendix). The methodology adopted is as follows: I first introduce my analytical tools, some key sociological concepts, and concepts from the ‘Avant-Garde’ discourse (chapter 1). I then examine the filtering process and rough selection process in architectural history: I map the usage of the term in a historiographic corpus and arrive at the more frequently and the less frequently named ‘Avant-Garde’ architectures, which become my two case studies. These are Russian Revolutionary Architecture and Italian Rationalism (chapter 2). The third step is to arrive, through the comparison of my case studies, at those parameters that are crucial in being selected as ‘Avant-Garde,’ i.e. their ‘Avantgardification’ - this occurs after 1960 when the term starts being used describing architectures (part 2). The fourth step is to examine the period of the extended 19605 when the term starts appearing as a means of describing architectures and thus the selection process begins (chapter 6). As a fifth step I research the selection process in the discourse of architectural theory and criticism: I investigate in a particular corpus of writings which architectures, by whom they are chosen as ‘Avant-Garde,’ and the reason why, as Well as which are the concomitant effects of the usage of the term on architecture. In other words, beyond concentrating on which architectures or architectural movements are ‘Avant-Garde' in these writings, I focus on the effects of this selection and denomination (chapter 7). As a sixth step, I examine the selection process of my two case studies in architectural theory and criticism, i.e the Avantgardification of Russian Revolutionary Architecture and less of Italian Rationalism. I investigate when, by whom, and the reason why the first architecture is mostly selected as ‘Avant- Garde,’ as well as which are the concomitant effects on architecture (chapter 8, see also fig. 3, appendix). As a final step I examine the Avant-Garde as a sociological concept based on the key-concepts introduced in chapter 1 (Conclusions). A sociological conceptualization of the Avant-Garde is important for shedding light on issues beyond those of ‘Avant-Garde’ architectures. Through such a concept of the Avant-Garde we recognize issues of the profession, issues which are wider than questions which are directly connected to those architectures selected as such. Looking through the ‘Avant-Garde’ we understand the ways by which architecture is being renewed and Operated. By recognizing the conditions, in which the ‘Avant-Garde’ architectures have been created, and the way and time in which the term was employed to describe them, we understand the mode in which architecture, as a discipline, functions. My thesis is a hermeneutics of the architectural profession through the term ‘Avant-Garde.’

This thesis explores the design and modernisation of public houses in London and environs in the period between the licensing acts of 1872 and 1902. The late nineteenth century public house of historical account has emerged as a site spatially and materially designed and organised to meet the needs of customers anxious to preserve class-based social distinctions within the public sphere. The thesis argues that this dominant socio-spatial mapping of the interior has obscured other important and intersecting influences on the design and organisation of London's public houses in the period, notably the relationship with the home and the influence of gender on the development of the interior. Further, the productive -and socially constitutive nature of the interior has been left largely unconsidered. The study explores the spatial, material and aesthetic models upon which London's . late nineteenth century public houses developed. It employs a public/private framework as an historical analytic with the flexibility to investigate social, spatial and intellectual constructs, and as a way of examining the site in terms used by publicans, customers and legislators to define its spaces and negotiate its boundaries. The thesis aims to extend current understanding of the public/private relationship through an examination of material change in a single building type; to evidence the historical processes by which the boundaries between public and private spaces and activities were negotiated, contested and formalised; to explore the implications of these negotiations for class and gender identities; and to provide a material focus for more abstract discussions about space.

There is a growing interest in developing systems for displaying museum artefacts as well as historic buildings and materials. This work connects with this interest by creating a 3D interactive display for Fishbourne Roman Palace Museum, West Sussex, England. The research aimed to create a reconstruction of the Palace as it would have been at its height, a reconstruction that was interactive in the sense that museum visitors would be able to walk through the buildings and local grounds and experience the site in a way not possible through traditional museum displays. The inclusion of the interactive element prompted the incorporation of game engines as a means of visualising and navigating around the reconstructed 3D model of the Palace. There are numerous game engines available, and the research evaluated a selection with respect to their functionality, cost, and ease of use. It also applied a technology readiness method to assess potential users’ response to the incorporation of different degrees of interactivity. Research was undertaken regarding the appearance of the Palace and, based on the available archaeology and relevant artistic interpretations, a model was created using Autodesk Maya software. This model was exported into each of the possible game engines, and a comparison was made based of each engine’s audio, visual, and functional fidelity, as well as composability and accessibility. The most appropriate engine is chosen based on these results. With reference to the assessment criteria, the hardware and software is in preparation for installation at the Fishbourne Roman Palace Museum. The Technology Readiness Index was applied to determine the effectiveness of such a display compared to a non-interactive representation, a study that concludes that a highly interactive display may not be the most sensible solution for the majority of visitors.