The special issue Writing Urban Places: New Narratives on the European City, marks the culmination of an international research network that delved into the intricate interplay between communities, urban spaces and narratives. At its core, this endeavour introduced an inventive approach aimed at deepening our comprehension of urban communities, their dynamics and their rootedness, all through the lens of narrative methodologies. This collection gives an account of the dynamics of this network of academics, which consists of over 175 individuals from 35 different European countries and a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. As such, the issue offers a conclusion to the Writing Urban Places COST Action while also, hopefully, providing a springboard for further reflections and discussions on urban narratives, and the role these could play in spatial developments in the European city.@en

Engaging the educational context, topic, working process, and theoretical framework of the first month of The Space of Words design studio, this article addresses the threshold of graduate education. The article presents the potential for stories and modelmaking to foster strong collaborations among peers — particularly within a multicultural group of incoming master students — making the first month of graduate studies a pivotal moment in architectural education.@en

This article will discuss the conditions that define the intermediate European city at the beginning of the twenty-first century: the mid-size, other or secondary city as it many times appears in the relevant bibliography, although these terms fail to capture its full potential. We argue that the intermediate European city cannot simply be defined by parameters like population number, territorial extension, or other forms of scale. Instead, we propose an interpretation through categories of conditions from various scientific disciplines covering different perspectives, as provided by our network members. These conditions suggest a systematization of phenomena commonly manifested in the urban contexts under examination. The article aims to get closer to defining what an intermediate city is or is not, concluding with the concrete illustration of seven selected conditions: scale as a commodity, gravity, perceptual coherence, open-ended image, walkable distances, parochial realm and against fragmentability. @en

Because of its status as the fourth largest city in Croatia, Osijek is considered an intermediate European city. It is the administrative, economic and cultural centre of eastern Croatia, located on the River Drava, and has a rich, multicultural history that is reflected in its tangible and intangible urban identity. It is famous for its historical Fort Tvrđa and its European Avenue, the most representative street of Austro- Hungarian Secession architecture, but also for its specific sociolects that have been a part of its everyday life. Within the COST Action Writing Urban Places: New Narratives of the European City, Osijek was host to the doctoral training school ‘Urban Chronicles in Empirical Context’ (April 2022) and a short-term scientific mission to investigate the ‘other’ perspectives of the city (August 2022). As events that fostered the training, research, and the networking of international and national young researchers, doctoral candidates and members of academia, they helped to raise awareness of the notion of urban identity of a city as a complex of its physical (geography, architecture, infrastructure) and ephemeral manifestations (literature, culture, history) through time. As such, the events functioned as an outreach, linking the involved participants to their own responsibilities to the city as potential and future policymakers. The following chapter focuses on elements of the city of Osijek as presented through the literary point of view of local authors from the mid-twentieth to the early twenty-first century.@en

Around 1661, Johannes Vermeer painted what has become one of the most famous city views: the View of Delft. The city of Delft is depicted from across the water of the River Schie. We see the city as a collection of brick buildings with lower and higher towers, peaking into the sky, and being reflected in the water of the river. The light looks alive: despite the clouds it is bright, setting the buildings of Delft and the riverbank in the foreground in a palpable warmth. Delft, an intermediate European city in the province of South Holland, between The Hague and Rotterdam, has featured quite prominently in Dutch city narratives, partially thanks to Vermeer’s paintings, which showed fragments of both spatial and social characteristics of the city in the sev-enteenth century. In the same period, biologist Anthoni van Leeuwenhoek experimented with lenses and built a microscope, which led to the discovery of the micro-world of cells and bacteria. The city’s small streets, the canals, the church towers and the market squares still remind us of the times of Vermeer and Van Leeuwenhoek. But Delft today, as a centre of trade, knowl-edge and art, is a very vibrant city, with the University of Technology as one of its most celebrated contemporary inhabitants. The TU Delft is recog-nized around the world for educating progressive thinkers and innovators in varied engineering fields, while its Faculty of Architecture has raised, and keeps raising, inspired generations of architects and designers. As Delft is the city where this Writing Urban Place network originated, and where many members of the network have lived, studied or lectured, or are still doing all the above, we have asked our Delft-related colleagues for their views on Delft, painting for our readers, in words, their accounts of the sociospatial characteristics of this city, their relationship with the water, their favourite urban places, their personal Views of Delft.@en

Where do we begin? Architecture is a profession riddled with many orientations, directions, and perspectives. How one favours what to signify in representation is equally open in processes, methodologies and approaches to form-making, spatial ordering, material choices, and so forth. The educational process is similar; it is riddled with conundrum after conundrum. The education of the architect was not unique; it developed through the artists’ guilds into academies wishing to elevate the discipline, and the mechanical arts, which was a subset of armatura. Carl Goldstein’s Teaching Art traces not only the growth of academies but the shifting issues with craft and thought, noting that both the disciplinary art and their education were always responsive, and often confrontational.1 The Florentine academy, which privileged disegno over Venetian colore, had a responsive curriculum. As soon as the papacy allowed dissections, life drawing and the study of cadavers were not only included, but mandated at the Accademia del disegno. The elevation of the arts with European royal support led to what Goldstein refers to as ‘triumph of the academy’, a consolidation of processes and methods as de rigueur, inadvertently creating strict doctrine and prescribing inflexible methods and values.2 The response to this was, of course, reactionary, and the dialectical confrontation repeats itself many times, over many decades, as a confrontation between mainstream and avant-garde. Other themes that occur and recur in the academies over the centuries are issues of mimesis and exemplars, the antique, art and science, style, originality, craftsmanship, and in the last two centuries, questions of modernisation, modernism, and modernity. The latter aligns with the territories of contestation: modernisation with process, modernism with establishment, and modernity as condition. In our current climate crisis, political shifts, and recent global pandemic; architectural process, establishment, and conditions are again re-examined.@en

For pressing and complex spatial or social urban agendas, understanding and interpreting place has always been an important issue. In-depth and close explorative reading of a site—in which drawing, modeling and writing (the basic tools of architecture) become instruments to open up new perspectives—is vital for imagining site-specific architectural possibilities. We thus see creative imagination, related to and emerging from place, as a crucial source of innovation. As educators, therefore, we need to examine how to guide students explore their imaginative faculties. Our pedagogic approach is founded upon the philosophical thought of phenomenology, theory on place, findings from neuroscience, and examination of architectural precedents. Based on these underpinnings we developed a course that focused on enhancing students’ spatial imagination and challenged them to think how the tools of architectural analysis and design can offer new imaginative ways to approach the local, social and historical aspects of a place. The paper illustrates how this framework is brought into architectural education by engaging the example of “Methods of Analysis and Imagination,” a master level elective course we taught in 2019. It presents the course’s overarching structure, as it unfolded over three intensive workshops on drawing, modeling and writing respectively. Investigating a selected site—through readings, conversations, exercises, hands-on and in situ assignments—the three workshops explored the way imagination can help us look at a place, and discover new and unique spatial or architectural relationships lurking in the banal and the ordinary. Through selected students’ work the paper concludes situating the course in an educational context that cares to expand spatial and architectural imagination, trusting imagination to be the productive and valuable answer to the many critical contemporary conditions we face as architects.@en

For pressing and complex spatial or social urban agendas, understanding and interpreting place has always been an important issue. In-depth and close explorative reading of a site—in which drawing, modeling and writing (the basic tools of architecture) become instruments to open up new perspectives—is vital for imagining site-specific architectural possibilities. We thus see creative imagination, related to and emerging from place, as a crucial source of innovation. As educators, therefore, we need to examine how to guide students explore their imaginative faculties. Our pedagogic approach is founded upon the philosophical thought of phenomenology, theory on place, findings from neuroscience, and examination of architectural precedents. Based on these underpinnings we developed a course that focused on enhancing students’ spatial imagination and challenged them to think how the tools of architectural analysis and design can offer new imaginative ways to approach the local, social and historical aspects of a place. The paper illustrates how this framework is brought into architectural education by engaging the example of “Methods of Analysis and Imagination,” a master level elective course we taught in 2019. It presents the course’s overarching structure, as it unfolded over three intensive workshops on drawing, modeling and writing respectively. Investigating a selected site—through readings, conversations, exercises, hands-on and in situ assignments—the three workshops explored the way imagination can help us look at a place, and discover new and unique spatial or architectural relationships lurking in the banal and the ordinary. Through selected students’ work the paper concludes situating the course in an educational context that cares to expand spatial and architectural imagination, trusting imagination to be the productive and valuable answer to the many critical contemporary conditions we face as architects.@en

Engaging the example of the course “Binckhorst: A Palimpsest of Architectural Lives”—a master level design studio—this paper addresses issues of cohabitation and coexistence between past and current actors, activities and programs in Binckhorst, The Hague. It discusses explorative methodologies of analysis and design, that aim to create innovative and anchored urban interventions for the transformation of post-industrial landscapes. Binckhorst is an exemplary case-study to this regard. Home to a 14th century Castle, a 1920s cemetery, 1950s-60s heavy industry buildings and empty offices, postmodern housing projects and contemporary refugee settlements, it currently witnesses an accelerated change. Small-scale creative industries, event venues and apartment buildings transform and redefine its architectural identity. Moreover, Binckhorst’s strategic location next to the city’s center and a major train station, has attracted the interest of local and international architects, planners and developers. The course “Binckhorst: A Palimpsest of Architectural Lives” engages the students with this rich context and guides them to develop design methods where the old and the new can be actively part of the area’s new blooming. Through innovative site analysis assignments, personal interactions with the area’s actual actors, careful and in-depth study of the Binckhorst’s heritage, a precise selection of The Hague housing typologies, and the employment of bottom-up design methodologies, the studio advocates for a pedagogical approach in which the knowledge acquired from the analysis informs every step in the design process. The studio follows a structured sequence of three phases: “Description,” “Transcription,” “Prescription” (Havik, 2014) ensuring the constant interweaving between analysis and design. It culminates in a big-scale housing project that needs to incorporate the area’s past and present layers and suggest architectural propositions that envision a future for the co-existence between the old and the new. A thorough presentation of the studio’s theoretical context, the methodological framework, the topics and parameters of investigation along with selected student’s examples, will unpack in detail the pedagogical topics addressed by this studio and suggest possible courses of action for architectural education.@en

Engaging a selection of narratives from the episodic novel Seibo There Below (2008) by László Krasznahorkai, this paper discusses how literature can enable the atmospheric presencing of well-known architectural monuments’ atmospheres. Belonging to a genre of literature that depicts historical locations and buildings without fictional elaborations (Lending, 2018), Seibo There Below offers readers the possibility to experience moods and sensations of geographically and culturally diverse places of heritage, in unexpected ways. More specifically the paper examines how the reader can presence the multilayered atmosphere of three famous monuments, that are spatial manifestations of three distinctively different sets of religious beliefs and civilizations: the Athenian Acropolis (Greece), the Ise Grand Shrine (Japan) and the palace of Alhambra (Spain). Through the respective narratives “Up on the Acropolis,” “The Rebuilding of the Ise Shrine,” and “Distant Mandate” the paper unpacks atmospheric descriptions related to these monuments, through the affective and emotional accounts of the novel’s characters. By doing so, it allows architects, historians and theoreticians to presence atmospherically, in situ atmospheres of significant places and understand them under a different light. Based on the conviction that literary narratives can contribute to a proper attunement with atmospheres of places even unknown (or not yet physically encountered), the paper focuses on how the emerging literary language, which is inherently innovative, polysemic and metaphoric, can contribute towards this end (Pérez-Gómez, 2016). The paper concludes exhibiting how the narratives of these monuments and the possibility as readers to presence their atmospheres in specific times and through given conditions, can even contradict established historical views, which tend to create specific expectations for the buildings’ understanding. This literary presencing suggests an architectural approach towards place that prioritizes emotional and subjective elements emerging from an embodied perspective, and questions canonized interpretations emerging from political agendas that can influence our perception. @en

Engaging Hejduk’s compelling project, ‘Berlin Masque’ (1981), this paper looks into writing’s power to develop unforeseen possibilities of architectural program. In his ‘Berlin Masque’ proposal, unlike his earlier ‘Masques’, Hejduk clearly prioritizes his prose – not his small accompanying sketches – as the place where the architectural proposition is primarily portrayed. Unpacking these texts in detail will indicate how language represents spatial elements and allow one to imagine moments of spatial appropriation, thus creating original architectural images of cultural significance. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates how Hejduk’s texts and new programmatic possibilities aspire to reconcile Berlin with the trauma of the Second World War. His proposal intends to remind the city’s inhabitants that history is not something that is limited to the past, but a development that involves new, everyday happenings and their interaction with memory. Expanding on the rituals of inhabitation for each suggested structure, as narrated in the texts, the paper outlines how the new stories proposed by the architect acknowledge the city’s existing narratives while creating the necessary space for new ones to appear. The conclusion extracts the significance and uniqueness of the ‘Berlin Masque’ as an architectural project, as well as the significance of language for Hejduk as an architect. It discusses briefly the noted interest in architecture and language nowadays, reminding us of the value of literary imagination.@en