Backwards is the way forward: feedback in the cortical hierarchy predicts the expected future

Clark offers a powerful description of the brain as a prediction machine, which offers progress on two distinct levels. First, on an abstract conceptual level, it provides a unifying framework for perception, action, and cognition (including subdivisions such as attention, expectation, and imagination). Second, hierarchical prediction offers progress on a concrete descriptive level for testing and constraining conceptual elements and mechanisms of predictive coding models (estimation of predictions, prediction errors, and internal models)

Physical, social and intellectual landscapes in the Neolithic: contextualizing Scottish and Irish Megalithic architecture

The broad aim of this study is to examine the way in which people build worlds which are liveable and which make sense; to explore the means by which a social, intellectual order particular to time and place is embedded within the material universe. The phenomenon of monumentality is considered in the context of changing narratives of place and biographies of person and landscape, which are implicated in the making of the self and society and the perception of being in place. Three groups of megalithic mortuary monuments of quite different formal characteristics, constructed and used predominantly during the fourth and third millennia BC, are analyzed in detail within their landscape setting: a series of Clyde tombs on the Isle of Arran in southwest Scotland; a group of cairns in the Black Isle of peninsula in the northeast of the country, which belong primarily to the Orkney-Cromarty tradition; and a passage tomb complex situated in east-central Ireland, among the Loughcrew hills. Individual studies are presented for each of these distinct and diverse landscapes, which consider the ways in which natural and built form interact through the medium of the human body, how megalithic architecture operated as part of local strategies for creating a workable scheme to 'place' humanity in relation to a wider cosmos, and how the interrelation of physical, social and intellectual landscapes may have engendered particular understandings of the world. An attempt is made to write regionalized, localized neolithics which challenge some of the traditional frameworks of the discipline - in particular those concerned with morphological, chronological and economic classification - and modes of representation which, removing subject and monument from a specific material context, establish a spurious objectivity. (DXN 006, 349)

The Redundant City: A Multi-Site Enquiry into Urban Narratives of Conflict and Change

Dynamic processes and conflicts are at the core of the urban condition. Against the background of continuous change in cities, concepts and assumptions about spatial transformations have to be constantly re-examined and revised. The author explores the rich body of narrative knowledge in architecture and urbanism and confronts this knowledge with an empirically grounded situational analysis of a large housing estate. The outcome of this twofold research approach is the sensitising concept of the Redundant City. It describes a specific form of collectively negotiated urban change

Felt_space infrastructure: Hyper vigilant spatiality to valence the visceral dimension

Felt_space infrastructure: Hypervigilant spatiality to valence the visceral dimension. This thesis evolves perception as a hypothesis to reframe architectural praxis negotiated through agent-situation interaction. The research questions the geometric principles of architectural ordination to originate the ‘felt_space infrastructure’, a relational system of measurement concerned with the role of perception in mediating sensory space and the cognised environment. The methodological model for this research fuses perception and environmental stimuli, into a consistent generative process that penetrates the inner essence of space, to reveal the visceral parameter. These concepts are applied to develop a ‘coefficient of affordance’ typology, ‘hypervigilant’ tool set, and ‘cognitive_tope’ design methodology. Thus, by extending the architectural platform to consider perception as a design parameter, the thesis interprets the ‘inference schema’ as an instructional model to coordinate the acquisition of spatial reality through tensional and counter-tensional feedback dynamics. Three site-responsive case studies are used to advance the thesis. The first case study is descriptive and develops a typology of situated cognition to extend the ‘granularity’ of perceptual sensitisation (i.e. a fine-grained means of perceiving space). The second project is relational and questions how mapping can coordinate perceptual, cognitive and associative attention, as a ‘multi-webbed vector field’ comprised of attractors and deformations within a viewer-centred gravitational space. The third case study is causal, and demonstrates how a transactional-biased schema can generate, amplify and attenuate perceptual misalignment, thus triggering a visceral niche. The significance of the research is that it progresses generative perception as an additional variable for spatial practice, and promotes transactional methodologies to gain enhanced modes of spatial acuity to extend the repertoire of architectural practice

Architecture’s Poetic Instrumentality. Developing the Critical, Political, and Ethical Capacities of Architectural Artifacts

The PhD thesis Architecture’s Poetic Instrumentality is rooted in and driven by an enthusiasm of architectural practice—an enthusiasm for conceiving, constructing and deploying architectural artifacts that, as poetic instruments, intend to have an agency within urban environments. The title puts in tension the two notions of instrument and poesis (from the Greek poiesis, referring to a making activity but moreover to an activity of making up, situated here in those encountering architecture). Preparing the architectural artifact as a poetic instrument then puts the partly contingent adventures it helps affording at the center of the inquiry. Poesis, as an activity of making up, of sense-making, and agency, as a dynamic able to invoke such acts of poesis, are considered in this thesis as endowed with a transformative potential. They explicitly bring into scope the realm of architectural reception: the many uses, appropriations, occupations, and negotiations of architecture. In order to explore such poesis and agency, a variety of architectural artifacts have been developed within the time span of the research, spread across different collaborations. These artifacts propel the research, giving particular substance to the main methodological approach, that of research-through-practice. The exploration of a poetic instrumentality has been pursued through an exploration of architecture’s capacity to act critically, politically, and ethically, within situations. Such capacity is often, according to a variety of contemporary authors, atrophied or at least left partly unaddressed. Answering calls to re-activate architecture in that sense, this research aims to substantiate contributions that can help counter this deficit. It does so through edifying a heterogeneous set of architectural artifacts, developed as well as deployed within real urban surroundings and situations, working as acupuncture-like interventions. The research also develops a set of approaches, strategies, and attitudes. The audience is multiple as both those professionally practicing and conceiving of architecture and those practicing architecture through encountering it within daily situations are targeted. Architecture’s Poetic Instrumentality is edified on two main experimenting grounds. One is the educational design studio COmplicating MAchines / COmplicating INteriors, the other the architecture firm STUDIOLOarchitectuur. Each advances a differently constrained terrain for experimentation, raising different challenges, assembling different contributions. What links the experimenting on both grounds together and characterizes all artifacts of the research is that they all seek to include dynamics often neglected in architecture: critical, political, and ethical dynamics; dynamics of projectivity, negotiation, conflict, dissensus, agonism; para-functional dynamics. Substantiating this inclusion has led to an other kind of architectural artifacts and to other ways of doing architecture, conceived not as an alternative to architecture, but as a promise and capacity that fundamentally reside within architecture and its artifacts

Knowledge Accumulation and Dissemination in MNEs: A Practice-Based Framework

Much has been written on the importance of knowledge accumulation and transfer within the network firm but two questions remain. First, what are the specifics of this process, particularly for high tacit content knowledge? Second, how can firms create a sustainable competitive advantage from knowledge acquired from outside the firm? We address the first question by proposing that the mechanisms of external knowledge capture and internal knowledge transfer can best be understood and studied not at the level of networked subsidiary firms, but at the micro-organizational level of Communities of Practice (CoPs). We then offer a model of the dynamics of organizational learning in network organizations, such as MNEs, which builds on this unit of analysis. This framework clarifies the link between CoPs and Networks of Practice (NoPs), by offering a novel conceptual model of how knowledge, particularly tacit, embedded knowledge, is absorbed. The framework also proposes a new link - that between CoPs and Internal Networks of Practice (INoPs), as another essential ingredient to knowledge accumulation and transfer within firms. We also propose that the firm-level architectural knowledge that is developed through INoPs is valuable and rare. In combination with the component knowledge that is developed through NoPs, architectural knowledge can create novel knowledge that may be a source of competitive advantage

Latour for Architects

Bruno Latour is one of the leading figures in Social Sciences today, but his contributions are also widely recognised in the arts. His theories ‘flourished’ in the 1980s in the aftermath of the structuralism wave and generated new concepts and methodologies for the understanding of the social. In the past decade, Latour and his Actor-Network Theory (ANT) have gained popularity among researchers in the field of architecture. Latour for Architects is the first introduction to the key concepts and ideas of Bruno Latour that are relevant to architects. First, the book discusses critically how specific methods and insights from his philosophy can inspire new thinking in architecture and design pedagogy. Second, it explores examples from architectural practice and urban design, and reviews recent attempts to extend the methods of ANT into the fields of architectural and urban studies. Third, the book advocates an ANT-inspired approach to architecture, and examines how its methodological insights can trace new research avenues in the field, reflecting meticulously on its epistemological offerings. Drawing on many lively examples from the world of architectural practice, the book makes a compelling argument about the agency of architectural design and the role architects can play in re-ordering the world we live in. Following Latour’s philosophy offers a new way to handle all the objects of human and nonhuman collective life, to re-examine the role of matter in design practice, and to redefine the forms of social, political and ethical associations that bind us together in cities

The Redundant City

Dynamic processes and conflicts are at the core of the urban condition. Against the background of continuous change in cities, concepts and assumptions about spatial transformations have to be constantly re-examined and revised. Norbert Kling explores the rich body of narrative knowledge in architecture and urbanism and confronts this knowledge with an empirically grounded situational analysis of a large housing estate. The outcome of this twofold research approach is the sensitising concept of the Redundant City. It describes a specific form of collectively negotiated urban change