Teaching Space Syntax Through Reflective Practice

12-15 June 200

Sect and House in Syria: History, Architecture, and Bayt Amongst the Druze in Jaramana

This paper explores the connections between the architecture and materiality of houses and the social idiom of bayt (house, family). The ethnographic exploration is located in the Druze village of Jaramana, on the outskirts of the Syrian capital Damascus. It traces the histories, genealogies, and politics of two families, bayt Abud-Haddad and bayt Ouward, through their houses. By exploring the two families and the architecture of their houses, this paper provides a detailed ethnographic account of historical change in modern Syria, internal diversity, and stratification within the intimate social fabric of the Druze neighbourhood at a time of war, and contributes a relational approach to the anthropological understanding of houses

Extending the palette: an analysis of the heterogeneity of techniques for communicating space

This study offers an analysis of the increasing range of communication methods required by the emerging profession of the architectural technologist. It reviews the process of introducing methods of communication into the academic curriculum of undergraduate architectural technology students who have a need to select appropriate techniques in order to communicate to various stakeholders, design teams and clients. The paper reviews the integration of three-dimensional computer modelling technologies for the analysis and communication of proposed designs and considers the knowledge and skills which will be required to enable effective representation of increasingly complex buildings

Whatever happened to normative drawing?

One hallmark of humanities inquiry is its motivation by normative concerns: a critical view of how things are and a corresponding vision of how things could be. Architects used to adeptly deploy the rhetorical approaches of humanities inquiry in the promotion of architectural visions. Today architecture seems to be dominated by technical and instrumental concerns and where a vision is articulated it is usually of transformed individual living rather than of a different society. Imaginative text and image based signifying strategies have largely given way to the ubiquity of computer generated plans, elevations, walk-throughs and unconvincing images of contrived and unlikely sociality

Form and Data - from linear Calculus to cybernetic Computation and Interaction

Digital architecture developed in the 1960s and, supported by CAAD the 1990s, has created the path towards an architecture produced by computer and architect in a mutual relationship. The evolution of architecture since the 1970s led to the beginning of the first digital turn in the 1990s, and subsequently to the emergence of new typologies of buildings, architects and design tools; atom-based, bit-based (virtual) [1], and cyber-physical as a combination of both. The paper provides an insight into historical foundations of CAAD insofar as it engages with complexity in mechanics, geometry, and space between the 1600s and 1950s. I will address a selection of principles discovered, and mechanisms invented before computer-aided-architectural-design; those include the typewriter, the Cartesian grid and a pre-cyber-physical system by Hermann von Helmholtz. The paper concludes with a summary and an outlook to the future of CAAD challenged by the variety of correlations of disparate data sets

Yesterday’s church of tomorrow: St. John the Baptist, Ermine Estate

Consecrated in 1963, the parish church of St. John the Baptist is a major contribution to ecclesiastical architecture of the second half of the 20th century. This avant-garde building is the central feature of the Ermine Estate in the provincial city of Lincoln. Its importance lies in combining innovative minimalist architectural thinking with advanced liturgical planning. The structure was designed by an architect largely invisible in architectural history, Sam Scorer, and a structural engineer, Hajnal Konyi. It consists of an impressive hyperbolic paraboloid roof made in reinforced concrete. Its form was fashionable and functional (romantically rational). It gave an impression of contradicting laws of gravity. It summarizes the post-war excitement with engineering. The paper contains a discussion about contradictions and discontinuities that occur in the story of this intriguing architectural precedent

Social Hierarchy Materialized: Korean Vernacular Houses as a Medium to Transfer Confucian Ideology

Buildings reveal the social values of a society through their forms and configuration. During the Choseon dynasty, Confucianism was the national ideology and basis for governing principles. Consequently, houses for the ruling class were built to conform to the principle of separating domains for men, women, servants, and ancestors. This hierarchical social system persisted for hundreds of years, but from the 19th century, various social movements gradually delegitimized many inequalities between sexes and classes. Mysteriously, even after this series of radical political and social changes, vernacular houses still adhered to the same hierarchical spatial order until the mid-20th century. This paper analyzes the houses built from the 15th century to the mid-20th century to show how Confucian principles were translated into the design to control social interactions. The paper concludes with a discussion of how Confucianism has been passed on through the medium of housing until today and how they have influenced people’s perception of different gender roles in contemporary Korean society