Thinking Perspectives: The Layered Meaning of Heinrich Tessenow’s Drawings (1901 – 1926)

An architectural perspective drawing gives a naturalistic spatial representation of an architectural project, which is usually represented in orthographic drawings, such as floorplans, sections, and elevations. However, that same perspective drawing can also express theoretical architectural concepts and ideas in a non-verbal, but highly...

A Flat Theory: Toward a Genealogy of Apartments, 1540–1752

A Flat Theory presents a first step toward a yet-to-be-completed, larger project: a genealogy of apartments. While centering on the historical formation of apartments, it does not offer a straight-forward history of apartments or flats. Rather, as a contribution to a wider history of the present, it draws together the first synthetic study of...

Disclosing Interstices: Open-ended Design Transformation of Urban Leftover Spaces

Leftover spaces are neglected and obsolete spaces within the city. As they are temporarily unoccupied by defined urban functions, leftover spaces provide unique “interstitial conditions” that open for wild species as well as different informal social activities, offering crucial complements to the formal and defined urban spaces. In this context...

The Architecture of Continuous Dialogue: Cedric Price’s Experiments in Architectural Theory

The British architect Cedric Price (1934-2003) is well known for his radical and visionary projects, many of which were never built, and most frequently with reference to his seminal work of the 1960s which continues to inspire contemporary practice. However, Price was also active and influential as an architectural journalist, writer, critic,...

Towards an Architecture of Self-reliance: Developing and Testing a Support Tool for Inhabitants and Practitioners in Mt-Elgon, Kenya

This research project focuses on how decisions made by practitioners, articulating rural housing in Sub-Sahara Africa, contribute to the decreasing level of self-reliance inhabitants have regarding their housing. Multiple case studies on Mt. Elgon proved that inhabitants have a significantly higher self-reliance level, comparing traditional to...

The Thing Itself: AA Files and the Fates of Architectural Theory

The Thing Itself: AA Files and the Fates of Architectural Theory explores architecture’s relationship with its editing. This is ostensibly discussed through the lens of a particular architectural journal, AA Files (part of a long tradition of journals produced by the Architectural Association in London since its inception in the mid-nineteenth...

The Socio-Spatial Aesthetics of Space Formation: A New Perspective on the Concepts and Architecture of Walter Gropius and Aldo van Eyck

This dissertation deals with ‘architectural space formation’, which is understood as the part of architectural and urban design that concerns the creation and structuring of physically defined spaces of inside and outside character separately as well as in relation to each other and to open space. Furthermore, it focuses on the fundamental...

Patterns & Variations: Designerly Explorations in Architectural Composition and Perception

How can we better understand and explain the phenomena of architectural composition and perception? The aim of this research is to systematically and imaginatively (re)consider the conditions of architectural composition, whilst doing justice to the operational and the aesthetic issues of design. The ambition is to contribute towards generating...

An Inhabitable Infrastructure: Rethinking the architecture of the bazaar

The aim of this thesis is twofold. First, it offers a ‘theoretical reading’ of a historically important architectural entity – namely the bazaar – in order to propose a synthetic understanding of its complexity and to explore the multiplicity of forces and regimes involved in the bazaar’s [historical] formation. Second, by conceptualizing the...

Transactions; or Architecture as a System of Research Programs

This study of the historiography of architecture and the built environment develops the thesis that well-known modernist histories of architecture, such as those written by Reyner Banham, remain unable to appraise the many nuances and complexities that characterize modern architecture. It is argued here that, among other reasons, they are unable...

Architectural thinking in practice: A qualitative study of architectural practice seen from the view point of a refl ective practitioner

The departure point for the research is the everyday life of practitioners. The position is that the thinking and crafts of architects in the field of practice has not been seen as a valuable body of knowledge in projects, where large pragmatic, political and social factors are at work. The aim of the dissertation is to demonstrate this type of...

At Home in the World: Architecture, the Public and the Writings of Hannah Arendt

The modern emphasis on authenticity and the individual not only caused an ‘astonishing flowering of poetry and music’ and ‘the rise of the novel’ states the philosopher Hannah Arendt in her well-known book The Human Condition, but also the fall and ‘decline of the more public arts, especially architecture.’ In this study Hans Teerds takes up the...

Reclaiming Context: Architectural Theory, Pedagogy and Practice since 1950

Context is a crucial concept in architecture, despite the frequent ambiguity around its use. It is present in many architectural thoughts and discussions, while a critical discursive reflection is absent from contemporary architectural theory and practice. Situated within this schizophrenic condition in which the notion is both absent and...

Architectural Contestation

This dissertation addresses the reductive reading of Georges Bataille's work done within the field of architectural criticism and theory which tends to set aside the fundamental ‘broken’ totality of Bataille's oeuvre and also to narrowly interpret it as a mere critique of architectural form, consequently presenting it either as the negation of...

Urban Literacy: A Scriptive Approach to the Experience, Use and Imagination of Place

This dissertation discusses how literature offers valuable ways to become aware of how people experience, use, and imagine places. It argues that Lefebvre’s concept of "lived space", experienced and lived through by characters, evoking memories and imaginations, is the space that we encounter in the evocative descriptions of places and spaces by...