The Archigram Archive

The Archigram archival project made the works of seminal experimental architectural group Archigram available free online for an academic and general audience. It was a major archival work, and a new kind of digital academic archive, displaying material held in different places around the world and variously owned. It was aimed at a wide online design community, discovering it through Google or social media, as well as a traditional academic audience. It has been widely acclaimed in both fields. The project has three distinct but interlinked aims: firstly to assess, catalogue and present the vast range of Archigram's prolific work, of which only a small portion was previously available; secondly to provide reflective academic material on Archigram and on the wider picture of their work presented; thirdly to develop a new type of non-ownership online archive, suitable for both academic research at the highest level and for casual public browsing. The project hybridised several existing methodologies. It combined practical archival and editorial methods for the recovery, presentation and contextualisation of Archigram's work, with digital web design and with the provision of reflective academic and scholarly material. It was designed by the EXP Research Group in the Department of Architecture in collaboration with Archigram and their heirs and with the Centre for Parallel Computing, School of Electronics and Computer Science, also at the University of Westminster. It was rated 'outstanding' in the AHRC's own final report and was shortlisted for the RIBA research awards in 2010. It received 40,000 users and more than 250,000 page views in its first two weeks live, taking the site into twitter’s Top 1000 sites, and a steady flow of visitors thereafter. Further statistics are included in the accompanying portfolio. This output will also be returned to by Murray Fraser for UCL

What are the visual communication requirements of a built environment?

This paper explores an aspect of the Built Environment that is part of our everyday lives, yet often goes unnoticed. It is something that is not far away from any vista. It often appears frivolous, and yet can be a matter of life or death. It is very much a part of how people interact with environments on a local, intermediate and global scale — interaction that requires highly sophisticated, and at times, quite basic design solutions. It is a subject rooted in communication, yet is subjected to the everyday forces faced by the established Built Environment professions. In short Visual Communication in the Built Environment is a complex subject, and attempts to understand it, and about why and how it happens, are fragmented

Critical Dialogues : Scotland + Venice 2012

Alberto Campo Baeza writing in the catalogue, Young Spanish Architecture, an Ark Monograph of 1985, talks about, ‘’a world riddled with noise and yet paradoxically mute, creatively speaking, a group of young Spanish architects are playing a very engaging song, their own song, the most beautiful song.’’ Twenty-seven years later that Spanish song has grown in quality and projection as subsequent architects took their lead from this earlier generation resulting in a Spanish architectural culture of great stature and depth. New voices are occasionally heard, often emanating from the architectural edge, such as Pascal Flammer and Raphael Zuber’s work in Switzerland and Alejandro Aravena’s Elemental Housing in Chile. Some of the most beautiful and poignant songs have emerged from China in Atelier Archmixing’s Twin Trees Pavilion and Amateur Architecture Studio’s early Ceramic House, projects that can be heard through the din of the architectural circus that travels the globe, a circus with an increasingly desperate and cynical appetite. For a song to become engaging and powerful, three components are critical: personality, passion and technique. Scotland’s presence in Venice 2012 is about the recognition of four voices that are on the verge of making themselves heard. Scotland lies on the periphery of Europe, nascent both politically and in contemporary terms architecturally. Yet once its architects stood shoulder to shoulder with the best in Europe and many claim that Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s sublime Glasgow School of Art 1899-1909 heralded modernism not just in the UK but also in Europe. In the post-Second World War period Gillespie Kidd and Coia in the West and Morris and Steedman in the East helped propel Scottish architecture in new directions, the former becoming part of a west coast figurative culture that explored a phenomenological sense of section and atmosphere, the latter by an east coast sense of abstraction, detachment and refinement. It seems to me there has always been this kind of architectural watershed that splits Scotland in two. The west possesses a character like its fractured romantic coastline that is passionate about layers, complexity and conversation, whilst the east with its more austere coastline nurtures a more ascetic, reflective, emotionless and silent quality in both its art and architecture. More recently the architectural scene seems to have lost this sense of split personality that came out of place. The new architecture has a tendency towards an image of rediscovered modernism albeit executed with a new graphic material suaveness that could equally be seen anywhere in the UK. The years from the 1970’s have seen a gradual dissolution in the architect’s role. It is a situation that has been greatly exacerbated by the current recession in which many architects have lost not just their voice, but their ability to make architecture altogether. The four architectural practices represented in Venice are all based in Glasgow; they all share a concern for people, the ordinary, and the street. They all have passion and an emerging personality even though their technique has had little opportunity to develop. The critical word that connects these architects is architectural practice. They explore the act of practicing as an architect in a marginal situation, politically, socially, professionally and culturally. Their approach is primarily concerned with conversation and engagement. Venice itself is a city on the edge. Once the edge of Europe and a portal to a far eastern imagination, a city barely founded on land or sea, a mirage. The Scottish contribution to the Venice Biennale itself is a marginal act, emerging, hopeful, outside the main event. Four Northern figures flit amongst southern shadows

Learning through prefabrication

The use of prefabrication in design exemplar houses has escalated in Australia in the past decade. The same level of design quality has not been applied to the design of prefabricated school buildings. As CADCAM technology becomes more prevalent within the construction industry and greener, smarter materials are developed, new opportunities arise in the design of learning spaces. What can be learnt from bespoke prefabrication techniques being developed in other industries and overseas in order to advance the design and delivery of learning spaces within Australia? This research investigates whether industrial design methodologies might be strategically adopted into architectural design in order to incorporate mass production techniques. Learning environments need to be designed to be environmentally efficient, place specific and better suited to user needs. By including both macro and micro oriented scenarios, the research aims to clarify the challenges for using prefabrication in the design of learning environments. While this ambitious research is in its infancy, the complex framework and support from industry is relevant for other researchers who are seeking to have an impact on design practice using an action research methodology. The research is timely. Following in the footsteps of the United Kingdom, Australian state and federal governments have committed to reinvigorate our aging school stock. This research led by an interdisciplinary team is being developed in partnership with Departments of Education in three Australian states. The aim is to align designers with experts in prefabricated construction and delivery. The research proposal is positioned within current knowledge as demonstrated through a literature review. Its focus is in response to needs expressed by providers of school buildings in three Australian states. The key innovation is to undertake research concurrently as micro and macro scale in order to capture the potential for industry wide change. Keywords: Learning spaces, school design, bespoke prefabrication, prefabrication in architecture, design research, CADCAM.</p

Transgression from drawing to making

a peer reviewed journal article

Street Art and Space

Various forms of street art, such as murals, anamorphic painting or urban interventions, become an important component of urban space. The paper examines examples of selected works of urban art in the context of space and its reception. These unexpected “events” entertain and educate. They become, on the one hand, a tourist attraction, and on the other hand, a major voice in the debate on the public nature of visual urban sphere. Although ephemeral and inconspicuous, usually reluctantly accepted by architects and urban planners, they successfully urge viewers to reflect on space and its existing functions

Usage of Network Simulators in Machine-Learning-Assisted 5G/6G Networks

Without any doubt, Machine Learning (ML) will be an important driver of future communications due to its foreseen performance when applied to complex problems. However, the application of ML to networking systems raises concerns among network operators and other stakeholders, especially regarding trustworthiness and reliability. In this paper, we devise the role of network simulators for bridging the gap between ML and communications systems. In particular, we present an architectural integration of simulators in ML-aware networks for training, testing, and validating ML models before being applied to the operative network. Moreover, we provide insights on the main challenges resulting from this integration, and then give hints discussing how they can be overcome. Finally, we illustrate the integration of network simulators into ML-assisted communications through a proof-of-concept testbed implementation of a residential Wi-Fi network