Building Beauty: Kantian aesthetics in a time of dark ecology

In the aftermath of a normalized Foucaultian world with an all encompassing web of biopower, one remaining hope is to cultivate nimbleness. Nimbleness is an embodied aesthetic sensitivity to the material presence. Cultivating nimbleness is a particular style of cultivation; it is to willfully gather together one’s self in the wake of a formative...

Assemblage Theory, Ecology and the Legacy of the Early Garden City

This study examines ideas that were drawn together by Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928) in his formulation of the Garden City concept originally published in 1898 in his influential book Tomorrow; A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, and subsequently developed at the first Garden City at Letchworth in 1903. Howard readily acknowledged his influences, which...

GIBSONISM: Ecologies of Architecture

There is widespread commitment to indirect realism and reductionism among architects. As Robin Evans diagnosed, "we are landed not only with a picture theory of vision, but with a pervasive picture method of construction for manufactured objects as well." We see with our eyes, don't we? The answer is no. The founder of the ecological approach to...

From Penser la Ville to Faire la Ville: Brussels' and Architecture's Engagement with the Real

People's Palaces: Architecture, culture and democracy in two European post-war cultural centres

This thesis is an investigation of the relationship between cultural politics and architecture in the context of the welfare state in post-war Western Europe. The book focusses on two case studies, the London South Bank and the Stockholm Kulturhus, and examines the discourses informing their institutional concepts and architectural forms.

Thinking Shanghai: A Foucauldian Interrogation of the Postsocialist Metropolis

This work is an investigation into Shanghai’s role in the twenty-first century as it attempts to rejoin the global city network. It also examines the effects this move is having on the city, its people, and its public spaces. Shanghai’s intention to turn itself into the New York of Asia is not succeeding, in fact the city might be better trying...

Histories of the immediate present inventing architectural modernism, 1930-1975