Oswald Mathias Ungers: dialectical principles of design

An important contributor to the post-war debate on architecture’s relationship to the city was the German architect Oswald Mathias Ungers (1926–2007). Starting in the early 1960s, he became increasingly interested in questions of typological organisation and morphological transformation, positing their relationship in dialectical principles. This paper traces some of the shifts in Ungers’s understanding of architecture through a utilisation of typology as a design theme, the morphological transformation of architectural form, and the coincidence of opposites in urban building complexes by reviewing a selection of closely linked pieces of design research (lectures, writings, and large-scale housing projects) from the 1960s to 80s. This paper examines how Ungers’s interest in rational design as a problem of serial formal and social transformations led him to new understandings of architectural and urban design. The concepts of typology and morphology hereby played a central role in reclaiming architecture as a formal and intellectual, but also a social and imaginative project, through which the city could be reasoned, however, always through the problems arising from architectural form itself

Collective Forms and Collective Spaces: A Discussion of Urban Design Thinking and Practice Based on Research in Chinese Cities

The paper examines how social projects, social spaces, and social realities define three contexts and shifts critical to understanding urban design in China. The transformations from collective forms to community building, from government to governance, and from urban versus rural development to urban-rural integration. The argument presented is that a unique unification of administration, production, and reproduction spaces into one institution, produced collective forms in China, whose collective spaces and collective subjectivities contrast with Western-centric explanations of urban design and urban sociology that depend on abstract notions of the public, public space, community, and place making. Instead, collective forms and collective spaces are defined by concrete activities, interests, and benefits that provide social networks of support and care to clearly identifiable constituencies. The collective and the community in China are thus always legibly spatialized and develop in parallel to a socialized model of governance that derives from a “differential mode of association.” This creates a spatialized governmentality, an instrumentalization of spatial design by government that brings spatial and social problems of governance closely together. A brief discussion of the historical formations of these changing contexts is the basis to outlining an interdisciplinary urban design approach that deals with spatial and social environments, practices, and policies. The paper brings together research conducted in Chinese cities including Wuhan, Beijing, and Shanghai

Typal and typological reasoning: a diagrammatic practice of architecture

The twentieth-century accounts of typology are often both historiographically problematic and conceptually imprecise. They reinforce an understanding of typology as mainly an interchangeable functional and graphic classification, and present Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand as a key figure of the discourse, despite him dealing with buildings according to their genre and not their organisational and structural diagrams of typology. In contrast, one can posit that all theories of type are foremost epistemological and discursive arguments. Although not prescriptive in a formal sense, they are concerned with a rational synthesis of form by thinking through conceptual and diagrammatic organisation. This diagrammatic abstraction had already become instrumental to architectural theory and history in the eighteenth century, long before the modern discourse on the diagram was consolidated in the 1990s. While the architectural diagram is regularly explained as a generic and generative description, it can equally be defined as a typological diagram specific to the architectural discipline and its production of knowledge. Clarifying the concept of type as emerging in parallel with ideas of abstraction and diagrammatic reasoning reveals a richer set of connected problems deriving from architectural practice, pedagogy and disciplinary knowledge, which permits a different framing of the historical discourse. This is explored by discussing its meaning for a distinction between typal and typological reasoning, how this arises from a problem of history and theory, and how the evolving typological discourse relates to the concepts of invention, disposition and style. Whereas historiography commonly recognises the French academics Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy and Durand, the often-overlooked Gottfried Semper and Julien-David Le Roy were central to a modern conception of architecture that developed ideas of typal and typological abstraction through historicist processes of cultural and diagrammatic reduction

Housing experimentation and design guides: Affordable housing in Guangzhou since 2006

This paper examines the recent growth of government-led affordable housing in Guangzhou ad-dressing a paucity of global housing studies that explore experimental and contextual policy ap-proaches in China. It also addresses the lack of Chinese housing studies recognizing the impact of housing design governance, including regulatory controls and design standards, on housing preferences, supply, and lifestyles. Since 1995, the supply of affordable housing has surged, now surpassing that of market housing. This response to failures in the private housing market and a lack of equitable access to housing signifies a significant shift, acknowledging the need to re-establish a state-led and long-term public housing supply after decades of housing marketiza-tion. Employing an architectural design research perspective, this paper investigates the interplay between affordable housing supply and the emergence of housing standards, examining resultant housing design outcomes. It poses the question: What changes in housing policy and interventions in housing markets are necessary to increase public rental housing supply, and how do these changes affect housing outcomes? The paper explores these questions through a discussion of the key moments in affordable housing policy and housing estate development in Guangzhou that fa-cilitated the creation of widely accessible public housing and long-term housing assets. This pro-vides new insights into China’s unique approach to translating central government social welfare and housing policy through contextual design experimentation and pilot housing projects, de-parting from the conventional top-down policy implementation found in most other countries

The design of subsidized housing: Towards an interdisciplinary and cross-national research agenda

Comparative housing studies traditionally focus on housing systems and social or economic policy, only rarely considering design issues. Through an examination of subsidized housing and its design in 20 countries, this paper explores how design research can benefit cross-national housing studies. Subsidized housing is essential to delivering decent and affordable homes, underpinning the right to housing. To relate design dimensions to housing systems, the analytical focus is on regulatory instruments, technical standards, and socio-spatial practices as well as housing providers, tenures, and target groups. Design research benefits the contextualization of housing systems and design outcomes in several ways. It reveals the contextual and contingent nature of regulatory cultures and instruments, socio-technical norms and standards, and socio-cultural expectations and practices that shape housing solutions. The paper concludes by considering productive ways architectural design research might contribute to an interdisciplinary housing research agenda by offering new means of theorization and analysis beyond traditional housing system typologies

Home use and experience during COVID-19 in London: Problems of housing quality and design

COVID-19 lockdowns led to a reassessment of housing conditions and created greater awareness of their impact on wellbeing and inequalities. Changes in home use and lived experience during the pandemic were studied through a survey of London residents (n = 1250) in 2021, focusing on issues of housing design, perceptions of housing quality, and future housing expectations. The survey found that a quarter of all dwellings and at least one room in a third of homes were deemed too small and failing to meet the needs of occupants. Renters with a shortage of space and poorly maintained or designed homes suffered most. A total of 37.9% of respondents reported that their wellbeing was affected by housing conditions. While for well-designed homes aspects of dwelling size were considered the highest priority, dwelling layout, usability, adaptability, and flexibility were equally key concerns. However, how problems of housing design, quality, and size are understood often depends on highly individual experiences and expectations. By highlighting the importance of lived experience, the pandemic shows the limitations of current, normative design standards. Future space standards need greater flexibility in the distribution of floor areas and should consider a wider range of home uses to ensure more equitable and long-term housing provision

Dwelling size and usability in London: A study of floor plan data using machine learning

Based on a dataset of dwelling unit plans (n = 2283) with detailed dimensions derived from open-access plan data using machine learning, this paper analyses the size and usability of dwellings in London. Half of London’s housing stock was built before the Second World War but has been extensively modified. Due to greater pressure on the housing market and problems with dwelling size, London was the first local authority in England to reintroduce space standards for all housing sectors in 2011. Providing a first comprehensive analysis of space standards and dwelling size in London at room level and across all built periods, the data shows that 61% of London homes fail the recommended minimum dwelling sizes of the London Housing Design Guide (2010), 51% a bedroom standard and 88% at least one of the dimensional requirements. The paper quantifies the extent to which homes fail both recent and historical space standards and discusses their effectiveness in relation to dwelling usability and issues of design

Design research and a shift in architectural education and practice

Research, once associated only with academia, now equally connects to learning and practice in architecture, as focus has shifted towards a wider design research community. Research has become inclusive of formerly marginalised areas such as process-oriented and practice-based research in the arts and humanities as well as applied commercial research undertaken by industry. Providing a first study of this shift, this paper explores why design research is of growing importance to architecture. It systematically analyses a selection of current cases at the intersection of architectural practice and education within the UK to survey existing design research approaches, and asks: How can design research transform and create new architectural practices and forms of education? Following this question, the paper discusses some of the design research models used across architectural practice and education

Architectural design research: Drivers of practice

Research, professional practice, and learning in architecture are becoming increasingly integrated as the understanding of research and practice is transforming and research assessment criteria are expanding. This changing research landscape has created more diverse iterative and cyclical design research processes and opened new areas of exploration and experimentation in architecture. Building on existing tripartite design research models, such as research ‘into’, ‘for’, and ‘through’ or research stages of ‘processes’, ‘products/outcome’, and ‘performance/impact’, this paper uses the concepts of ‘process-driven’, ‘output-driven’, and ‘impact’ to analyse and classify current architectural design research practices. This framework is used to clarify how research criteria are differently understood in academia and practice, explore the challenges arising from translation between them, and analyse the methods commonly used. While focusing on the UK context, the paper offers transferable insights while using some international case studies

Finding building footprints in over-detailed topographic maps

Building footprints are a key component of many GIS applications, including morphological and street view based analysis. Crowdsourced data such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) is widespread but not consistently detailed enough to reliably extract footprints of individual buildings, while topographic building maps such as the Ordnance Survey MasterMap Topography Layer (MTL) may split footprints into multiple polygons or include constructions without an address. We propose a method to determine which topographic building polygons can be unambiguously matched to individual footprints of buildings with an address, to enable integration with address-based data sources such as transactions or energy performance certificates. The results suggest that this method recovers significantly more building footprints than what can be obtained from OSM