ARC Publications

This book advances the agenda of informality as a transnational phenomenon, recognizing that contemporary urban and regional challenges need to be addressed at both local and global levels. This project may be considered a call for action. Its urgency derives from the impact of the pandemic combined with the effects of climate change in informal settlements around the world. While the notion of “the informal” is usually associated with the analysis and interventions in informal settlements, this book expands the concept of informality to acknowledge its interdisciplinary parameters.

Publication Year: 2022

Publisher: Springer

Voices from the Field is an experiential applied professional practice course that employs cases pursuing high performance building certifications to demonstrate the interrelationship of technical, organizational, behavioral, and operational domains during the process of taking buildings from concept to realization. This study contributes to the literature on teaching with case-based pedagogical methods by employing qualitative data analysis of four sets of course deliverables produced by students who studied two Living Building Challenge (LBC) projects. The findings indicate that students gained an understanding of the integrated nature of design, and an awareness of the necessity of "Backwards Design" and "Tactical Materiality" to meet contemporary climate challenges. Additionally, students increased their understanding of the strategies, attitudes, and behaviors necessary to apply their sustainable ideals to real-world dilemmas in order to build a more just and sustainable society.

https://meridian.allenpress.com/jgb/article/17/2/235/483274/CULTIVATING-...

https://doi.org/10.3992/jgb.17.2.235

Dramatic metaphors have been used to describe the city. It's been likened to a cancer, a colossal beast, as well as a mountain or crystalline jewel or a living body. Contemplating the city as a body helps us dig into the complexities of the urban environment by offering us a familiar anatomical model, one which can be further investigated through the lens of figure drawing. Just as early modern Renaissance artists and scientists, anxious to understand the inner workings and structure of the body, opened and drew cadavers to decipher its constitution and form, so can we dissect and illuminate urban systems through observation. Understanding how it works helps us to portray it, and portraying it helps us understand how it works.

https://www.intellectbooks.com/t-squared

This paper analyzes two parallel cases from Eugene, OR and Northampton, MA to identify common and divergent trends in use and behavior. Using Gehl Institute tools and field observation, data collected in the summer of 2021 revealed not only shifts in use, but also pertinent demographic differences. Use of the two spaces differed according time of day and type of group, and was improved or hampered with spatial design features. Finally, the Right to the City theoretical framework is applied to these two cases in order to identify the ways in which spatial appropriation, particularly during a global pandemic, may have long-term opportunities and consequences for urban Third Places.

Publication Year: 2022

Publisher: Proceedings from ARCC-EAAE 2022 Conference

In many areas, this urban food provisioning expanded to include foraging, the practice of acquiring food products from edible landscapes for free. This paper charts the resurgence of urban foraging during the pandemic, frames this activity within theory on do-it-yourself (DIY) urbanism and the right to the city, and makes planning and design recommendations for bolstering this trend in the future. While urban foraging has historically been characterised by bottom-up participation, the addition of top-down organisational frameworks and legal structures could reinforce this practice in North America, helping to promote local food security, particularly during periods of crisis.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01426397.2022.2047911

The word “H2O” sits uncomfortably on our tongues. While the word “water” harbors a host of divergent social, cultural, and theoretical meanings, the scientism underlying H2O distills the idea of water to its molecular structure, devoid of pluralistic, overlapping, or competing worldviews.  In so doing, H2O denies or obfuscates the diversity of values and vested interests that water can hold.  How might we better understand the complex stories surrounding water that might, in turn, help us create a more optimistic future?

Publication Year: 2020

Publisher: Journal of Architectural Education

The working methods that designers routinely bring to professional practice can be critical assets for developing more systematic yet unapologetically creative research practices. These habits of mind, such as the ability to recognize new problems and reconceptualize existing ones, to incorporate criticism, to be comfortable with ambiguity, and to change direction when the current problem - solving strategy proves ineffective, are essential for generating new knowledge. Thus, we might consider how the disciplinary logic and training of designers, architects, and engineers can inform a research agenda that, in turn, can nurture a more vibrant and sustainable built environment.

Early design prototypes appeared to offer a host of social, economic, and environmental benefits to the community of Phyang. Additional contextual considerations and unexpected challenges surfaced later, providing a more nuanced evaluation of the ice stupa as a design strategy. Today, ice stupa adherents aspire to harness a constellation of integrative co-benefits in project prototypes and to demonstrate the broader value of the design to other communities. Beyond simply addressing a discrete environmental adaptation in Ladakh, the ice stupa project highlights the tensions and possibilities in novel design partnerships and the challenge of producing integrated climate adaptive projects.

Publication Year: 2019

Publisher: Landscape Journal

The sense of being sheltered is essential in understanding the spatial setting that surrounds us and forms our relationship with others. Abdellatif Kechiche’s Games of Love and Chance portrays the rehearsal of a play by a group of adolescents at the foot of Les Francs Moisins, a large social housing complex on the outskirt of Paris. As the protagonists thread between the play and real-life, an open amphitheater at the foot at the towers become the space of drama and discovery, a place apart from the confines of each adolescent’s home and school. Intrigued by the vast and partly abandoned outside spaces surrounding the projects, this short photographic-based essay studies the constellation of social housing projects and public grounds in the suburbs of Paris in search of transitional spaces that may evoke the experience of being outside while being sheltered by elements of architecture. Focusing on spaces surrounding the housing projects, this essay is keen to identify the different connotations of open and public spaces. It documents different forms of ground, demonstrating the variety, spread and sheer scale of the unoccupied ground that borders the dense housing projects. Observing the scale and ambiguity of the existing ground(s) – whether natural or artificial, transformed or left on its own, soft or hard – and documenting some of its variety may be a critical step in reconfiguring the heritage of the late 20th century.

Publication Year: 2019

Publisher: Int/AR: Interventions/Adaptive Reuse

Innovation scholarship examines the personal intellectual habits that support new ideas, such as openness and exploratory behavior, as well as the circumstances behind the places in which creativity flourishes, such as support for cross-disciplinary fertilization and access to resources. The 2019 BTES conference explored the role of technology education and curriculum in cultivating these intellectual habits in our students (and ourselves) and in creating the organizational spaces in which the future of practice will be shaped. Sessions presented exemplary proposals of research and pedagogical applications that explore innovative practices and integrative thinking in the academy and profession.

Publication Year: 2019

Publisher: Building Technology Educator's Society

This trend is projected to continue as demographics and other factors, such as commercial vacancy and an increasingly mobile workforce, lead the industry to devote less market share to new construction and more to renovating existing facilities. In a future likely characterized by increasing resource scarcity, finding the most appropriate solution to a given design problem may mean favoring an inventive reimagining of current infrastructures rather than a focus on new construction. Claiming this central role in an altered practice will require interior architecture practitioners to develop new attitudes and analytical skillsets for future success. To address the realities of this future practice, the field of interior architecture must attend to more than the visible, physical surfaces that we can see and touch; rather, it must advocate spatial intelligence as one of its core professional services. This spatial intelligence enables practitioners to first assess existing building stock for both immediate programmatic potential and “next use”, and then apply tactics that foreground flexibility and adaptability. This book contribution focuses on the value of spatial intelligence considering emerging conditions and suggests material strategies that can be applied to future practice, such as reconfigurability, modularity, planning to accommodate future renovations, and designing to enable ongoing personal customization.

Publication Year: 2018

Publisher: Routledge

Since BIM has been widely adopted within the architectural profession for design and documentation of projects, this book contribution emphasizes the advantages of being able to use BIM for building performance analysis and illustrates the methods using a case study. It presents the advantages of performing building performance simulations as an integral part of the design process for energy efficient and high-performance buildings, since they help in investigating design options and quantify the environmental and energy impacts of design decisions.

Publication Year: 2018

Publisher: Routledge

The Routledge Companion to Architecture and Social Engagement offers a critical enquiry of socially engaged architecture’s current context characterized by socio-economic inequity, climate change, war, increasing global poverty, microfinance, the evolving notion of professionalism, the changing conception of public, and finally the growing academic interest in re-visioning the social role of architecture. Organized around case studies from the United States, Brazil, Venezuela, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Rwanda, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Nepal, Pakistan, Iran, Thailand, Germany, Australia, Taiwan, and Japan the book documents the most important recent developments in the field. By examining diverse working methods and philosophies of socially engaged architecture, the handbook shows how socially engaged architecture is entangled in the global politics of poverty, reconstruction of the public sphere, changing role of the state, charity, and neoliberal urbanism. The book presents debates around the issue of whether architecture empowers the participators and alleviates socio-economic exclusion or if it instead indirectly sustains an exploitive capitalism. Bringing together a range of theories and case studies, this companion offers a platform to facilitate future lines of inquiry in education, research, and practice.

Whilst drawings have been the main medium of representation in architecture during the past two centuries, other visual modes such as photography, film and, most recently, digital media have broadened the horizons of architectural representation and shifted the boundaries of architectural imagination, production and dissemination. Extending Evans's argument to include other representational modes, the capacity of a distinct medium to carry ideas from conception to realization persists as an integral part of architectural practice. These media share an internal and an external function. Internally, they serve as a means of exploration and notation within the body of the architect's practice. Externally, they become a medium for communication to others; holding a record of the work and designating its boundaries.
The selection of papers republished in the present volume, which comprises the fourth in the special anthology series of The Journal from the last decade (2004–2013), span from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. They present a diverse set of intentions, methods and visual and verbal evidence by architects and artists testing and redefining the boundaries of architectural representation and architecture itself. Ranging in focus from illustrations in newspapers, to dioramas, axonometric drawings, bubble diagrams, photographs and critical writings that influenced the process of image making in architecture, the current compilation productively sheds new light on representational devices, processes and outcomes.

Publication Year: 2017

Publisher: The Journal of Architecture

For a New Orleanian to willingly take up residence on the “wrong side” of the levee is to break the most fundamental rule of the city’s spatial economy and collective psychology. This article proposes the existence of a Batture Effect, a mode of insurgent citizenship whereby hidden environmental threats are made visible and small-scale architectural, urban, and psychological adaptation measures are tested. As an adaptive design strategy, organic in its development over time and responsive to the immediate needs of residents, the occupation of the Batture demonstrates a homesteader’s approach to land appropriation. In calling into question land-use and ownership, the urban planning process and its associated spatial agency, and the role of the individual in disaster preparedness, this guerilla urbanism suggests relevant lessons to the practice of landscape architecture and urban planning.

Publication Year: 2017

Publisher: Landscape Journal

It examines emerging and best practices for effective team building, structuring workflows, enhancing communication, managing conflict, and developing collective vision - all to ensure the highest standards of design excellence. Case studies detail the collaborative processes used to create award winning projects by Studio Gang, Perkins&Will, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects | Partners, Gensler, CDR Studio, Mahlum Architects, In.Site:Architecture, and Thornton Tomasetti’s Core Studio. This book also provides pragmatic ideas and formal exercises for brainstorming productively, evaluating ideas, communicating effectively, and offering feedback. By emphasizing the productive influence and creative possibilities of collaboration within the changing landscape of architectural production, the book proposes how these practices can be taught in architecture school and expanded in practice. In a changing world that presents increasingly complex challenges, it demonstrates that optimizing these collaborative skills will prove not only necessary, but crucial to the process of creating advanced architecture.

Awards: 
2018 PROSE Award Honorable Mention, Social Science Textbook
2017 First Prize, Building Technology Educators’ Society Book Award

Publication Year: 2017

Publisher: Routledge

Beyond simply providing a water cache for agricultural use, the ice stupas of Ladakh reveal a sophisticated response to social, environmental, and cultural constraints. In so doing, the project provides a working model for water husbandry in northern India and valuable insight into the emerging practice of designing for climate change.

Publication Year: 2017

Publisher: Journal of Architectural Education

Lacking multi-layered hierarchies of space between that of the individual dwelling units and the city, the open spaces that surround the suburbs are often under-used stretches of land. The paper catalogues the five elements that form the built environment of the suburbs: towers, grounds, terrains-vagues, facades, and graffiti. It then focuses on the notion of ground, by suggesting hypothetical projects to be installed in specific sites in three adjacent suburbs in the North and Northeast of Paris. The paper presents a hybrid model of research and design that aims at creating better public spaces in those areas through careful, phased operations.

Publication Year: 2017

Publisher: Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture

Francesco suggests that drawing is linked to the architect’s imagination and central in conveying images and ideas to others. Starting with the broader edges of Francesco’s written work and steadily penetrating the fantastic world of his drawings, the book examines his singular formulation of the act of drawing and its significance in the context of the Renaissance. The book concludes with speculations on how Francesco’s work is relevant to us at the onset of another major shift in architecture caused by the proliferation of digital media.

Publication Year: 2015

Publisher: Routledge