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...

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...

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...

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...