Planning southern Iraq: placing the progressive theories of Max Lock in Um Qasr, Margil, and Basra in the context of Iraqi national development, 1954–1956

Between 1954 and 1956, the architect, educator, and planner, Max Lock (1909–1988) produced a trilogy of plans to modernize the historical city of Basra and create new areas at Margil and Um Qasr in the south of Iraq. The New Basrah Plan was heavily inspired by the works of Patrick Geddes and aligned with contemporaries such as Lewis Mumford, Lock’s planning was progressive in scope and looked to differ from the planning of post-war principles in Britain through his notions of ‘civic surgery’. Contrary to this, his plans for Um Qasr and Margil focussed on infrastructure and the creation of more industrial areas not prioritizing people and place as highly as he did in the New Basrah Plan. Lock’s ‘Civic Surgery’ offered an alternative to mainstream thought by attempting to create usable, humanistic spaces, which hampered by politics and legislation, resulted in the plan’s shelving and were contradicted by his other works’ philosophies. New retrospective analysis of his underappreciated career reveals the complexities of his planning which this article demonstrates through the ‘failure’ of the New Basrah Plan and his plans at Um Qasr and Margil

Community in the Mind. a Model for Personal and Collaborative Design

The present paper will discuss a landmark historical change that occurred during the last decade redefining architecture from an insular, solitary, and private activity into a distributed, cooperative, and community-based one. It will inquire into the reasons for this shift and explore the need to develop a new framework for personal and collaborative design and the opportunities resulting from it. How do we reason together in design? What are the criteria for selecting the technology to be used? How is knowledge acquired in such interactive framework? What are the new problems that emerge out of Collaborative Design? What are the new criteria to be applied when evaluating new design methods in the new context of Design Community? The paper will also examine some ideas related to a model for Personal and Collaborative Design and explore cognitive aspects of Community in the Mind. It will raise some basic question concerning new directions for research: The relation between Collaborative Design model to the cross-cultural design practice and the relation between cognitive organization of the Design Mind and the social organization of the Design Community

Creativity real and imagined in architectural education

ArchitectureArchitecture and The Built Environmen

Architectural education at the crossroads

ArchitectureArchitecture and The Built Environmen

Architectural education: The core and the local

ArchitectureArchitecture and The Built Environmen

Design Case Retrieval by Generic Representations

Case-Based Reasoning and Case-Based Design have been proposed to utilize knowledge of previous design solutions to understand or solve current design problems. Case retrieval is often performed on the basis of verbal indexing systems, whereas in design the use of graphic representations is predominant. Case retrieval therefore, requires verbalization from the designer, which can interrupt the flow of thought during design. This paper aims to demonstrate how the theoretical work on generic representations in architectural design can form a graphic indexing scheme for cases that are graphic representations. The paper outlines three techniques: a decision-tree for graphic unit recognition, a query composition algorithm, and a look-up table for case retrieval. These three techniques are worked out in the context of a Case-Based Design Aid System