Expanding Fields of Architectural Discourse and Practice: Curated Works from the P.E.A.R. Journal.

Expanding Fields of Architectural Discourse and Practice presents a selection of essays, architectural experiments and works that explore the diversity within the fields of contemporary architectural practice and discourse. Specific in this selection is the question of how and why architecture can and should manifest in a critical and reflective capacity, as well as to examine how the discipline currently resonates with contemporary art practice. It does so by reflecting on the first 10 years of the architectural journal, P.E.A.R. (2009 to 2019). The volume argues that the initial aims of the journal – to explore and celebrate the myriad forms through which architecture can exist – are now more relevant than ever to contemporary architectural discourse and practice

KINE[SIS]TEM'17 From Nature to Architectural Matter

Kine[SiS]tem – From Kinesis + System. Kinesis is a non-linear movement or activity of an organism in response to a stimulus. A system is a set of interacting and interdependent agents forming a complex whole, delineated by its spatial and temporal boundaries, influenced by its environment. How can architectural systems moderate the external environment to enhance comfort conditions in a simple, sustainable and smart way? This is the starting question for the Kine[SiS]tem’17 – From Nature to Architectural Matter International Conference. For decades, architectural design was developed despite (and not with) the climate, based on mechanical heating and cooling. Today, the argument for net zero energy buildings needs very effective strategies to reduce energy requirements. The challenge ahead requires design processes that are built upon consolidated knowledge, make use of advanced technologies and are inspired by nature. These design processes should lead to responsive smart systems that deliver the best performance in each specific design scenario. To control solar radiation is one key factor in low-energy thermal comfort. Computational-controlled sensor-based kinetic surfaces are one of the possible answers to control solar energy in an effective way, within the scope of contradictory objectives throughout the year.FC

Feature-based Product Modelling in a Collaborative Environment

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Hear: Law and the Senses

Hearing is an intricate but delicate modality of sensory perception, continuously enfolded in the surroundings in which it takes place. While passive in its disposition, it is integral to the movement and fluctuations of one’s environment. Always attuned to the present and immersed in the murmur of its background, hearing remains a situated perception but fundamentally overarching and extended into the open. It is an immanent modality of being in and with the world. It is also the ultimate juridical act, a sense-making activity that adjudicates and informs the spatio-temporal acoustics of law and justice. This collection gathers multidisciplinary contributions on the relationship between law and hearing, the human vocalisations and non-human echolocations, the spatial and temporal conditions in which hearing takes place, as well as the forms of order and control that listening entails. Contributors explore, challenge and expand the structural and sensorial qualities of law, and recognise how hearing directs us to perceiving and understanding the intrinsic acoustic sphere of simultaneous relations, which challenge and break the normative distinctions that law informs and maintains. In exploring the ambiguous, indefinable and unembodied nature of hearing, as well as its objects – sound and silence – this volume approaches it as both an ontological and epistemological device to think with and about law

Capital, Cooperation and Creating Performance: Blood Water Theatre Develops Ownership in Collaborative Theatre Practice

This thesis is developed from an experiment undertaken between 2011 and 2014. It interrogates Marx’s theory of capital, with a particular focus on cooperation. The purpose of the experiment was to develop a model for non-hierarchical collaborative theatre premised on collective ownership. My personal experience of collaborations and the literature in this field pointed to an erosion of the political roots of the theatre collectives formed in the 1950s and 1960s. Since then collaboration has come to reflect capitalist modes of production, characterised by hierarchy and utility, distancing it from its earlier intentions to promote equality in the making of theatre. By interrogating Marx’s theory of capital through practice, I suggest possibilities for reclaiming shared ownership in collaborative theatre-making. While the argument for ownership originates from capital and cooperation, it is developed through a theoretical and practical engagement with Engels’ three laws of the dialectic. I identify capital and cooperation to be the primary dialectic of capitalist economy and transpose this to the product/process dialectic in theatre-making. By applying the laws of the dialectic to the process/product dialectic, I discover a theoretical route to developing ownership in collaborative theatre. I test and refine this in practice with BloodWater Theatre, a collective of artists I formed for the purpose. I name my theory and our practice Dialectical Collaborative Theatre. The findings of this research materialise from BloodWater Theatre’s practice of Dialectical Collaborative Theatre over the three years when we created Whose Story Is It Anyway? and Leave Your Shoes at the Door, performed at the Tron Theatre and the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, respectively. Through observations, video diary reflections, focus group/audience feedback and dialectical analysis, I suggest how we came to own the processes and products of our labour. It is not my intention to replace capitalist modes of theatre production. These have their place. Dialectical Collaborative Theatre works within the capitalist cultural economy but it challenges its systems of production and proposes an alternative way of making theatre, working with and against normative cultural production. I hope this practice as research thesis opens up conversations and new practice which interrupt prevalent hegemonic utility-led collaborative theatre practice

The Way to Optimistic Land: The role of attunement and theatre in reducing child and adolescent mental distress.

PhD ThesisThis thesis explores the impact of an original applied theatre practice of attunement, on reducing the mental distress of children and adolescents with experiences of trauma. This practice, the Theatre Troupe Model (TTM), was tested out in a pilot project that I designed and delivered with a group of young people with complex emotional and behavioural difficulties in London, in the UK, in 2016 and 2017. ‘Attunement’ in the context of this thesis, is the process in which two or more people come together in interactions and relationships. My research crosses two disciplines - applied theatre and psychology - and as such I draw on Attachment Theory and ideas about attunement from neurobiological research. I apply these to the methodology of the TTM as informing the research. I combine these ideas with my theory of change for the TTM in which I have posited that a theatre “troupe” working together in the process of making a theatre production is a powerful vehicle for healing to take place. My findings from the pilot project suggest that the TTM provides an ameliorative community for young people who have experienced mental distress and that the labour of the troupe - what I call the Festivalesque - enables healing. Primarily, my research is situated in the applied theatre field, and I contribute original ideas to this paradigm. I offer a new way for applied theatre practitioners to work with those who have experienced trauma, which differs considerably from existing models in its unique attunement-based methodology. In this regard, my research also adds new knowledge about socio-political contexts of arts with/for/in health: it shows that attunement is a powerful way to resist divisive neoliberal agendas that can be found in Arts and Health/Wellbeing work. I use Bourdieu and Passeron’s theories of Symbolic Violence, and William Davies’s The Happiness Industry: How Big Business and Government Sold us Well-being, to critique the Arts and Health movement and give opportunities for practitioners to approach work differently. However, given my research is psychologically informed and works in interdisciplinary ways, I contribute original ideas to this field also. I argue, after psychiatrists Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon, that artists and scientists find some common ground in the realm of poetry

The Copla Musical: An Intercultural Exploration of Spanish Musical Form

This Practice-as-Research thesis, The Copla Musical, explores an intercultural adaptation of the 20th-century Spanish folkloric song-form of copla. Enjoying great popularity during the mid-20th century, copla’s influence waned in the latter years of the Franco regime. It remains, however, a strong marker of Spanish cultural identity through nostalgic musical preservation. This project investigates copla’s roots as a storytelling form, its position as a folkloric genre and its role as a subversive tool in the Spanish 20th-century zeitgeist. It asks new questions of copla, by documenting and analysing the process of sharing my experience of this musical form with audiences outside Spain, testing the findings in an iterative context. Merging copla with elements found in Anglo-American musical theatre structures such as book musicals, revues and jukebox shows, The Copla Musical shows the ways in which this cultural form can be appropriated within an alternative theatrical and socio-political context. The numerous performances documented and commented on in the thesis allow for a discussion of divergent forms of musical theatre, audience engagement and cultural difference. Chapter 1 (Positioning copla) presents a history of musical theatre in Spain, framing copla in relation to Anglophone developments of musical theatre. Chapter 2 (Adapting copla) analyses the theoretical framework to my practice: translation, intercultural and queer theories, and their influence on the practical elements of the thesis. Chapter 3 (Making copla) explores resonances of the practice in its various presentations. The thesis is accompanied by a series of appendices and a website which documents the evolution and iterations of the practice (www.thecoplamusical.com). In its totality, the project demonstrates the possibilities for copla to be appropriated as a musical form that can travel beyond its Spanish roots