Taking Action: Transforming Athens Urban Environments

Jon Goodbun

“The Ecological Semiotics of Air Pollution and Heat in Athens” was published in Taking Action: Transforming Athens Urban Environments, edited by Norbert Kling, Tasos Roidis and Mark Michaeli and published by Jovis in 2023. The book emerged from a Technical University of Munich research and teaching project focused on Athens as a site in which urgent environmental, spatial and social transformations are already unfolding. Its wider concern is not simply to describe Athens’ urban problems, but to ask how designers, researchers, institutions and citizens might begin taking action within them.

Goodbun’s chapter contributes to this agenda by developing Athens as a case study for thinking architecture, urban climate and pollution through ecological semiotics. The paper argues that Athens should be understood not simply as a built environment or urban territory, but as a semio-ecological entity: an extended eco-mental system composed of bodies, atmospheres, infrastructures, mountains, forests, pollutants, heat, social inequalities and political decisions. Drawing on Gregory Bateson’s concept of eco-mental systems, the paper asks how cities “think,” not by attributing human consciousness to them, but by recognising that cities register, process and respond to differences through flows of energy, air, heat, water, bodies and signs.

The paper begins from the intensifying atmospheric crises of Athens: urban heat island effects, temperature inversions, chronic air pollution, traffic emissions, shipping pollution from Piraeus, winter biomass burning caused by energy poverty, Saharan and Sahelian dust, forest fires, and the loss of regional forests as air-cleaning and rain-making systems. These are not treated as separate environmental problems, but as interacting signs of a damaged urban ecology. Heat and pollution become indexical signs of deeper metabolic and semiotic disturbances: they reveal how the city’s body is being stressed, reorganised and made increasingly uninhabitable under climate change, austerity, ecological extraction and uneven urban development.

A crucial part of the argument is that heat and pollution are not experienced equally. The paper frames Athens’ atmospheric crisis as a matter of climate justice, where exposure and protection are distributed according to access to resources. Wealthier residents are more able to insulate themselves through air-conditioning, private transport, cooled workplaces, better housing, travel and higher-energy lifestyles, while poorer residents, migrants, outdoor workers, elderly people and those living in dense, poorly insulated or polluted neighbourhoods are more exposed and less able to adapt. In this sense, the urban atmosphere becomes a medium through which existing inequalities of class, race, gender, legal status and energy poverty are intensified. The paper therefore treats heat and pollution not only as environmental symptoms, but as forms of slow violence and uneven development.

A central contribution of the paper is to propose ecological semiotics as a way of moving beyond narrowly technical framings of heat and pollution. Quantitative monitoring remains essential, but the paper insists that heat, particles and airflows also tell stories. Dust blown across the Mediterranean, smoke from burning forests, emissions from shipping and traffic, and particulates from poverty-driven burning all register different social, ecological and geopolitical relations. The polluted airs of Athens therefore express an extended body of the city, linking local street conditions to regional land management, energy systems, forest ecologies, Mediterranean geopolitics, North African desertification and global climate change.

The practical design-research proposal developed through the paper is “Towards a New Tower of Winds.” This project combines a citizen-science sensing platform, “Listening to Athens,” with a network of passive evaporative cooling structures designed to draw cleaner air down from above the polluted street-level canopy, cool it through adiabatic evaporation, and interrupt the mutually reinforcing urban heat island and urban pollution island effects. The towers are understood as ecological feedback devices: temporary, tactical architectural infrastructures that could introduce a moderating feedback loop into the Athenian urban atmosphere.

The paper connects this proposal to the Athens Resilience Strategy for 2030, the work of Athens’ Heat Officer Eleni Myrivili, the city’s #coolathens initiatives, and wider calls for guaranteed spaces and corridors of cool air. It also argues for a more open, participatory and dialogical model of urban environmental knowledge. Networks of sensors, DIY workshops, community collaborations and real-time pollution data are proposed not only as technical instruments, but as means of creating new forms of ecological awareness, solidarity and urban citizenship. This is especially important where unequal exposure to heat and pollution means that data, cooling and clean air need to be understood as potential commons rather than private amenities.

The conclusion positions the project between scientific modelling and more poetic ecological dialogue. Digital twins, machine learning and high-resolution air-pollution models are acknowledged as necessary tools for understanding urban atmospheres. But the paper asks whether such platforms might also support stranger and more imaginative dialogues with the extended bodies and minds of eco-mental systems such as Αθήνα. In this sense, the paper’s originality lies in joining architectural design research, citizen science, Batesonian ecology, biosemiotics, climate justice and urban political ecology. It reframes environmental architecture not only as mitigation or adaptation, but as a practice for learning how to perceive, interpret and respond to the atmospheric signs of a city in crisis.

The Ecological Semiotics of Air Pollution and Heat in Athens

Beth Hughes

The paper considers Leros in the Greek Dodecanese as a case study in the history of rationalist architecture of the fascist Italian regime, implicating varied forms of surveillance, exile, detainment, and incarceration. The paper explores the enduring legacy and impact the colonial and military architecture, policy, and planning have had on urban and architectural forms, local labour economies, and the community that continues to the present day. 

The research spans from the Italian occupation of Leros to the establishment of detention centres for refugees today, following the chronologically overlapping trans-institutional transformation of Italian military and medical infrastructures into notorious mental health care facilities and camps for political prisoners and violently displaced children from mainland Greece. 

The paper focuses on the relationships established by the plan, the architecture, the strict imposition of *gerarchia* [hierarchy], as defined elsewhere by Diane Ghirardo, and associated governing frameworks, which established a unique urban form and social fabric. The paper explores not only the aesthetic and formal qualities of the architectural object but also the socio-political diagram embedded in the logic of the ambitious building programme of the Italian occupation. 

It will further examine the spatial tactics and policies that supported Italian control and, consequently, the gradual erosion of agrarian traditions and capabilities of the local population, forcing them into a complex co-dependence. It is precisely the interdependence and co-existence of architecture and labour that perpetuates the island’s role as an apparatus of control, creating a carceral campus of surveillance and exile.

Rationalising violence: Leros

Ines Weizman

A study of the history of before-and-after images of catastrophes, bombed-out cities, and large-scale political transformations.

Catastrophes, bombed-out cities, large-scale political transformations: "Image complexes" of humanitarian and ecological upheaval document the world as a sequence of catastrophes. But who decides how events are presented, determines the resolution of our visual worlds, and controls the circulation or censorship of images?

Eyal and Ines Weizman trace the history of the before-and-after image from nineteenth-century photography to contemporary satellite images and discover a gap that not only conceals the devastating event: it is the human subject itself that is in danger of disappearing from the images. Does humanitarian work, the documentation and reconstruction of war crimes, in which people's fates and rights should be at the centre of attention, paradoxically enter a post-human phase? How can the gap between images become a site of critical counter-reading rather than a symbol of erasure?

In the context of their current research, Eyal and Ines Weizman discuss the history, present, and future of the paradigm of the before-and-after image in an exclusive conversation with Marie Glassl.

The Architecture of Disaster

Before & After 

Graeme Brooker

From traditional nomadic dwellings to state-of-the-art airports, through monumental temples and Baroque palaces to high-rise apartments and high-fashion boutiques, The Story of the Interior explores an exciting array of inside spaces from around the world to reveal how the fundamental elements of a room have evolved and endured.

Organized in three parts – The Room, The Private Interior and The Public Interior – the book presents a fascinating account of how the interior has been conceived and thought of from antiquity to the present day. By calling attention to the most basic elements of inside space – walls, doors, windows, furniture, ambience to name a few – this engaging exploration delves into how private and public interiors actively shape the way we live, work, learn and play.

The book spans a wide range of iconic and offbeat examples drawn from the world of architecture, urbanism and furniture design, as well as art installations and imagined spaces. Brooker deftly guides us through interiors as diverse as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project, the Prada store in Marfa, Texas, and Sou Fujimoto’s NA House, as well as the rock-cut Buddhist temples of India, medieval European castles and ancient Egyptian tombs, to unveil the drastically different and surprisingly similar spaces that surround us.

The result is a fascinating tour of global interiors, tracing the genesis and evolution of these places and how they help us understand human presence and behaviour.

How Rooms have Shaped us and We have Shaped Them

The Story of the Interior

Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence reflects on the relevance of the concept of dissidence for architects today. Although dissidence is primarily associated with the political and cultural practice of individuals in the eastern Bloc during the Cold War, contemporary aesthetic practices have in recent years developed a host of new methodologies and techniques for articulating their distance from and critique of dominant political and financial structures. This book maps out the possibility of dissidence in architecture in a variety of historical and geographical contexts. Rather than breaking away from the history of the political struggles of the Cold War the book shows how contemporary architectural gestures and techniques of dissent, as well as the ‘dilemmas’ associated with it, connect with a deeper and more complex history. This collection of essays from architectural practitioners and scholars demonstrates the multifaceted dimension of this subject and constructs a robust lexicon of concepts that will point to possible ways forward for politically and theoretically committed architects.

Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence

Mark Campbell

> Those interested in either this film or the paranoid conspiracy genre will find this volume a rewarding read. – John Littlejohn (*Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television*)

The Parallax View

Towers of Winds is an ongoing practice-based architectural research project developing passive evaporative cooling towers as new forms of urban climatic infrastructure for heat-stressed Mediterranean cities. Centred on Athens, the project investigates how architectural prototypes can both transform and sense urban atmospheric conditions, operating simultaneously as cooling devices, environmental research instruments, community-built infrastructures and atmospheric observatories.

The project responds to intensifying urban heat, pollution, energy poverty and climate inequality in Athens. The city’s basin geography, summer heatwaves, atmospheric inversion layers, traffic emissions, shipping pollution, winter biomass burning, Saharan dust and forest-fire smoke create complex interactions between urban heat island and urban pollution island effects. These environmental pressures are unevenly experienced: residents with access to air-conditioning, insulated housing, private transport and cooled workplaces can partially withdraw from extreme heat and pollution, while poorer residents, migrants, outdoor workers, elderly people and those in dense or poorly insulated neighbourhoods face greater exposure and fewer adaptive resources. The project therefore frames urban cooling as a question of climate justice as well as environmental design.

The research asks how passive downdraft evaporative cooling towers might provide low-energy, low-carbon alternatives to conventional air-conditioning while also revealing the atmospheric dynamics of the city. It explores two linked scales: an open-source, kit-of-parts tower of approximately seven metres that could be constructed with communities, schools or neighbourhood groups; and larger towers of approximately twenty-five metres that could be deployed by municipalities as emergency cooling infrastructure during heatwaves. In both cases, the towers are understood not simply as objects, but as climatic interfaces between air, water, fabric, structure, sensors, bodies and urban space.

The 2024 Athens prototype tested the environmental and architectural viability of this approach at full scale. Developed through interdisciplinary collaboration with environmental engineers, structural engineers, fabric researchers and local partners, the prototype used passive evaporative downdraft cooling to produce localised temperature reductions of approximately 8–10°C within around fifteen minutes. The tower also functioned as a research instrument, using sensors to monitor temperature, humidity, airflow and atmospheric conditions before and during operation. In this sense, the prototype was both artifact and experiment: a built climatic device that generated environmental effects while producing knowledge about urban atmospheric systems.

Conceptually, the project draws on Gregory Bateson’s ecological systems thinking, learning levels and account of eco-mental systems. Athens is approached as a semio-ecological entity: a distributed system in which heat, pollution, particulates, airflows, buildings, forests, infrastructures and social inequalities communicate through material differences. The towers are therefore conceived as ecological feedback devices. They do not only mitigate heat; they make heat and pollution perceptible, measurable, discussable and collectively actionable.

The project’s contribution lies in reframing environmental architecture as climatic infrastructure and atmospheric research infrastructure. It advances passive cooling beyond the scale of the building envelope towards public, civic and community-scale urban adaptation. It also connects environmental performance to public pedagogy, citizen science and ecological literacy. Through participatory sensing workshops, community engagement and open documentation, Towers of Winds proposes that cooling infrastructures can become sites of shared environmental learning as well as physical relief.

The research has developed through collaboration with Flora McLean on fabrics and physical modelling, Aran Chadwick and Atelier One on structural engineering, Rosa Schiano-Phan and Juan Vallejo on environmental design, Dimitra Vlami and Rheomode Athens on local coordination, and municipal and international climate-adaptation partners including the Municipality of Athens and UN-Habitat heat officers. It has received support from TU Munich’s Transformation of Urban Landscapes project, the Impact Hub Athens ClimAccelerator programme, the RCA RKE fund, the RCA School of Architecture, RCA Fashion, Atelier One and Rheomode.

As an ongoing research project, Towers of Winds will continue to develop further prototype testing, environmental monitoring, community workshops, open-source construction systems and municipal-scale proposals. Its originality lies in bringing together passive environmental design, climatic infrastructure, ecological semiotics, citizen science, climate justice and Batesonian ecological aesthetics to ask how architecture might help cities learn from, and act within, their changing atmospheres.

Prototype Climatic Infrastructure and Atmospheric Observatory

Towers of Winds

Islands of Exile is an interdisciplinary research project which started in early 2014. It was recently exhibited at Manifesta 12 in Palermo at Convento della Magione, where a one-day research symposium was also organised on November 3 2018, investigating three key topics: architecture and its role in political regimes and biopolitics; spaces and archetypes of mental health care and de-institutionalisation processes; and the infrastructural violence of securitisation and militarisation in the Mediterranean and other European borders.

Movements

Leros: Island of Exile - Movements 

Charlotte Grace

Dubravka Sekulić

The themes of repair and reparation have long been a focus of Kader Attia's artistic and curatorial work.

As curator of the Berlin Biennale 2022, he gave special emphasis to repair as a form of agency and means for decolonial resistance. In conversation with architects Charlotte Grace and Dubravka Sekulić, he discusses how we can repair the wounds that modernity has inflicted on the world.

Kader Attia in conversation with Charlotte Grace and Dubravka Sekulic

Repair is Not a Metaphor

Sam Jacoby

Alvaro Arancibia

Lucia Alonso

Space standards are a deliberately technocratic translation of housing experience, use, and demand into measurable minimum floor areas and dimensions by calculating standard furniture sizes, circulation, and activity zones in a dwelling. This paper discusses how space standards register regulatory cultures and affect housing design and perceptions of housing quality from a design research perspective. The definition and enforcement of standards depend on local design governance approaches. Housing standards are of particular importance to the protection of minimum subsidised housing supply in dualist rental systems with differentiated regulations, due to greater inequalities between private and subsidised housing sectors. 

This is characteristic of countries with neoliberalised housing access. Two archetypical cases are discussed here: England, whose privatisation of council housing is considered exemplary for Western neoliberal housing policy; and Chile, who is seen as the main Latin American neoliberal model. This comparison explores how neoliberal processes in housing relate to space standards, wider *laissez-faire* housing and social welfare histories, and design experimentation in subsidised housing. It further deals with the common issues of affordable housing in market-driven contexts, such as the peripheralisation of areas with less infrastructures and services, residualisation of social housing tenure, typological stigmatisation or preferences, homeownership prioritisation, and private-sector support through subsidies. 

The discussion of housing design and space standards connects problems of design governance to technical, legal, and socio-spatial discourses, through which responses to cultural, social, and economic contexts, as well as changing modes of living, can be analysed.

Typological experimentation in England and Chile

Space Standards and Housing Design

Leros: Island of Exile

The activities of the East German secret police generated an incredible amount of paperwork. In fighting this *papierkrieg*, the legions of Stasi administrators and archivists were driven less by a sense of paranoia, or an underlying suspiciousness, than by a pathological commitment to being thorough. A dedication enabled by boundless financial resources and elaborate organisational machines. To keep track of the two million photographs, twenty thousand audio recordings, three thousand films, and one hundred and ten kilometres of collated files on surveilled ‘suspects’ and ‘suspected activities’, the Stasi used forty–six million index cards. These colour–coded 3” x 5” cards comprising shards of information that needed to be referenced to other shards of information held on other cards. One card leading to another and then on to another, producing a hallucinatory web of connections akin to what Gilles Deleuze’s termed as ‘dividuation’; the final segmentation of the individual into their bureaucratic parts.

This project considers the bureaucratic interiority of the *Ministerium für Staatssicherheit* by examining how their administrative offices acted as a mechanism for the cruel indexing of the ‘lives of others’. In this reading, these interiors – now preserved in the Stasi Museum, Berlin – evoke less the ‘banality of evil’, to cite Hannah Arendt’s famous characterisation, than the photogenic bureaucracy of evil. With these hoovered floors, worn laminate desks, direct–line telephones, unwieldy paternoster filing machines, well–used typewriters, and inbuilt storage systems swollen with observations, trivia, and manufactured accusations, accenting the pathologies and degradations they housed.

[paper war]

Der Papierkrieg

Five people are passing through a gate leading to the souk of the Tangier kasbah on a winter’s day in 1935. To the viewer’s far left, a boy walks barefoot. In the middle, two Berber women draped in layers of cloth are wearing large straw hats. One carries a hefty clay vessel on her back; the other, closer to the photographer, shouldering a basket, gazes casually at the camera. Towards the center, a man in a cloak and turban carries an empty basket. These four people seem to be returning from the market. To the right, a woman in European clothes is the only figure who is walking in the opposite direction, with her back to us. The characters appear unrelated, each is in his or her own world. Their layered clothes suggest it’s winter. The short shadows tell us the time is around midday. In the gate’s vaults, straw bags are displayed for sale. Through the gate, one can see market stalls; in one of them, I detect the head of a mannequin. Then the grains get too coarse.

Against erasure

A woman in Tangiers

This article explores the "solidarity pedagogy" methods used for researching (with) the revolutionary Autonomous Administration of North-Eastern Syria, also known as Rojava, and how this compares to my pedagogical commitments at the RCA

From Students to Comrades

 The fight for the living room is a fight for non‑productive space and free time

The Lost Living Room

Equitable access to decent housing remains a major global challenge, particularly for lower-income populations reliant on subsidised, affordable homes. This is exacerbated by the continued commodification of housing, demographic change, and the increasing time many people now spend at home. Addressing these challenges requires, as this book argues, stronger state intervention, closer cooperation between housing regulators, providers, and occupants, and a more robust evidence base that links housing policy, supply, quality, and design, along with a shift towards more long-term social and environmental housing values.

This book examines how housing design governance and lived experience shape the quality of homes and the wellbeing of residents, analysing the political, economic, social, historical, and environmental drivers of design. Drawing on new and rich comparative data and evidence from England, Chile, China, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland, it explores how contextual standards, cultural norms, and regulatory practices influence everyday life and perceptions of subsidised housing.

Combining historical, technical, and social perspectives through a comparative international lens, this interdisciplinary design research offers a multidimensional understanding of housing quality. It provides insights for policymakers, housing providers, and designers, demonstrating how design research and lived experience can inform standards and policies to create more inclusive, adaptable, and sustainable homes and neighbourhoods, with implications for contemporary housing practice.

Housing Standardisation and Design Governance

Fieldwork for Future Ecologies

David Burns

The Empty Well, the Trig Point, and the Sign

Sandra Denicke-Polcher

This paper reviews Crossing Cultures, a design-by-practice research project based in Belmonte Calabro, Italy. Comprising ethnographic, action-based research, it employs both inductive and deductive approaches to develop a model for rural revitalisation through university engagement. Since 2016, the initiative has addressed Calabria’s socio-economic challenges by combining education, local involvement, and architectural practice. Students, residents, a not-for-profit organisation, and an architecture collective collaborate to respond to migration and depopulation through knowledge exchange and community resilience.

The paper proposes a governance framework based on Communities of Practice (CoPs), aiming to empower residents through peer learning and capacity-building. Drawing on nine years of work in Belmonte, as well as other self-governing initiatives, the framework consists of four stages: “Rupture,” “Activation of Place,” “Negotiations and Communities,” and “CoPs and the Government.” These stages are intended to foster local autonomy, accountability, and cultural integration.

The paper outlines how Crossing Cultures has completed the first two stages and now plans to engage public bodies and other stakeholders to advance the final two. Its focus is on community-led governance as a route towards long-term sustainable development. By empowering communities and attracting a younger, more diverse population, the initiative seeks to enhance social sustainability and create a replicable model for rural regeneration, ensuring Belmonte’s resilience and vitality for future generations.

A Collaborative Approach to Sustainable Development

The Case of Belmonte Calabro and Its Role in Crossing Cultures

The superREUSE Manifesto

The 21st century can be characterised as a time of reactions to a warming planet and responses toward social justice(s). How can the built environment react to these challenges? In response to a world with finite fossil-fuel resources and the discord surrounding their extraction, the future of the built environment will be focussed solely on the re-designation of all existing matter. New-build processes will be an obsoleted approach to making cities, buildings, interiors and objects. Instead, their conception and construction will only be possible through the extraction and redesignation of extant matter. These approaches to working with what is already with us are what I have termed *superREUSE*.
 
This book is a manifesto, a proclamation and a declaration of intent that has evolved from decades of my teaching, researching and writing in the field of reuse and discard practices. It is a book that envisions an evolution, a step-change, a progression in approaches to thinking and making places through what has historically been characterised as reuse. *SuperREUSE* is an amalgam of thoughts, ideas and examples, a mash of data and studies combined as a polemic on the importance and magnitude of working with what is already with us.

Making Futures

There isn’t one Green New Deal

How is architecture political? Engaging Chantal Mouffe

Chantal Mouffe has transformed the contemporary understanding of politics through her re-reading of political theory inspired by anti-foundationalist philosophy-based on Saussure's linguistics, Freud's psychoanalysis and Derrida's deconstruction. Her writings have challenged the centrist, post-political ideology of the 1990s and presciently diagnosed the emergence of right-wing populism seen today with Trump and Brexit. For Mouffe, such populism is the result of the failed centrist conception of politics reduced to technical management. She has called for a “return to politics” on the view that social antagonisms cannot be reconciled but must be channeled into an agonistic form of institutionally stabilized struggle.

This book brings Chantal Mouffe's agonistic model of politics into direct dialogue with architecture and inquiries into the role that architecture plays constructing the political order of society, either by concealing or revealing its antagonisms and ideological conflicts. In doing so, it asks in what ways architecture operates politically; whether institutionally, in terms of its spaces and its part in forming cities, or as an aesthetic object with mediatic agency. Through this detailed exchange between Mouffe and four of the world's leading architectural thinkers; Reinhold Martin, Ines Weizman, Pier Vittorio Aureli and Sarah Whiting, a debate unfolds within the book that tests the implications of Mouffe's agonistic model of politics for architectural practice today. Through this, Bedford explores how architectural history, architectural drawing, the making of spectacular monuments, the design and policies behind housing, and the making of public and private space, all potentially contribute to the formulation of the channeling of social conflict into an agonistic form.

The possible architecture of the governed

Mobilizing dissent

Dima Srouji

She Still Wears Kohl and Smells like Roses is a glass intervention that reconnects glass manufacturing in Palestine to the female body. Glass vessels produced in Palestine during the Roman Empire were often used for perfume bottles, cosmetic tubes, and rosewater sprinklers for wedding ceremonies and cleansing rituals.

Not only are these objects vibrant in their embedded memory and connection to scent, they are also active vessels in carrying the history of the material culture. The rivers and sands used to produce the glass are now neglected, rotting canals, that no longer embody the healing and spiritual ancestry they once held.

This collection is a set of replicas of original vessels from Palestine displayed at the V&A Museum glass gallery. The replicas were blown by the Twam family and aged by anonymous antiquities forgers in an unknown location in Palestine. They are currently active in making forgeries for the black market.


She Still Wears Kohl & Smells Like Roses

The twentieth-century accounts of typology are often both historiographically problematic and conceptually imprecise. They reinforce an understanding of typology as mainly an interchangeable functional and graphic classification, and present Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand as a key figure of the discourse, despite him dealing with buildings according to their genre and not their organisational and structural diagrams of typology. In contrast, one can posit that all theories of type are foremost epistemological and discursive arguments. Although not prescriptive in a formal sense, they are concerned with a rational synthesis of form by thinking through conceptual and diagrammatic organisation. This diagrammatic abstraction had already become instrumental to architectural theory and history in the eighteenth century, long before the modern discourse on the diagram was consolidated in the 1990s.

While the architectural diagram is regularly explained as a generic and generative description, it can equally be defined as a typological diagram specific to the architectural discipline and its production of knowledge. Clarifying the concept of type as emerging in parallel with ideas of abstraction and diagrammatic reasoning reveals a richer set of connected problems deriving from architectural practice, pedagogy and disciplinary knowledge, which permits a different framing of the historical discourse. This is explored by discussing its meaning for a distinction between typal and typological reasoning, how this arises from a problem of history and theory, and how the evolving typological discourse relates to the concepts of invention, disposition and style. Whereas historiography commonly recognises the French academics Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy and Durand, the often-overlooked Gottfried Semper and Julien-David Le Roy were central to a modern conception of architecture that developed ideas of typal and typological abstraction through historicist processes of cultural and diagrammatic reduction.

A Diagrammatic Practice of Architecture

Typal and Typological Reasoning

Historically our architecture courses have prioritised learning through making at all scales. They nurture an approach to practice which embodies and directs students to explore the spatial materiality of things and question the role it plays for the social context in which we build. Our studio offers a project in Calabria, Italy, where we have established the project *Crossing Cultures* over the last years together with the not-for-profit organisation La Rivoluzione Delle Seppie.

The project grew out of a student-led summer school project in rural Italy during the summer of 2016. It followed a desire to test and activate what students had learnt in the studio, in a situation “beyond the institution”. Its location in Calabria, Southern Italy, is at a fulcrum of global and local concerns; the effects of migration and unemployment are issues which significantly charge the students’ imagination in terms of questioning the role they should play as architects for change.

The setting of the partially abandoned town of Belmonte has become their protagonist for the last few years. The site questions what it is to settle and (re)build, and what their role is as architects in the making of these places to successfully attract and build new communities.

La Rivoluzione delle Seppie operate in the field, “beyond the institution”, whilst the AAD studio works from a distance, within the institution. Both enter from different directions; however, they are in the same arena and complement each other with regard to the social implications their schemes might bring.

This has a two-fold effect for the project as a whole, as it builds local awareness and confidence through engaging with “paperless” live building projects, but also ignites the imagination of the local population through the paper-based visions of Belmonte as a new civic place for living, learning, and working. But for the students, how to bridge the gap between studio and fieldwork is a constant question.

In the autumn of 2020, the University went into lockdown for the second time, providing perfect motivation to consider temporarily moving to Italy and working “in a bubble” on site from the ‘Casa’. A group of ten students decided to do just this and set up home for several months in the village as Studio South. The location in Italy allowed them to become embedded in the local activities, share their experiences working together as a team, and renovate the Casa in moments of digital overload.

Using interview techniques and video diaries, we compared the differences, highlights, and challenges for the three stakeholder groups “beyond the institution”: Calabrian locals, “bubble” students, and London “Docklands” students. It is clear from this opportunistic venture that those in the “bubble” benefited from their embedded learning, as did the locals, who developed a sense of belonging through the knowledge of their greater global presence and hope for a more prosperous economic future. What remains to be seen is how this has been reflected in the students’ work, and how they see their role for the future.

Architecture Students in Residence

The Casa

> 'Poised between nostalgia and a presage of the future, this haunting [work] witnesses one of the most crucial questions of our present: the role of obsolesce in a fragile economy of things'. – Professor Anthony Vidler (Yale University)

> 'No matter what around us is crumbling, as long as there is a story or ethos, there is a possibility to sustain things and give them form – even if this form serves no purpose. In accepting that paradise is forever lost, Campbell affirms that the possibility of a history remains'. – Professor Pier Vittorio Aureli (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)

This book explores the notion of architectural obsolescence through a study of the contemporary United States. While the US was the world’s greatest economic, scientific and cultural force during the twentieth century, it now appears to be obsessed with its own decline. In this obsession the changing patterns of consumption and demand often result in an architectural redundancy where buildings exist as a form of by-product or residue. While our stereotypical image of the US reflects the heroic potential of production, this book examines the opposite – of that which isn’t work. Or, more pointedly, those abandoned pleasures and lost paradises that remain when there is no longer any work left to define them.

Paradise Lost

This essay focuses on one night — 3 October 1943 — when the Arab and Jewish elite of Haifa, a Mediterranean port town then under the British Mandate, were gathered in the Bat Galim Casino, along with British officers and international businesspeople, to hear the legendary Joséphine Baker1 in a performance benefitting General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French fighting force. That night, eighty years before the attacks of 7 October and their genocidal aftermath, now seems just a heartbeat before the Nakba. Many of the people watching Joséphine Baker would later be expelled from the city they loved, possibly by others sitting next to them in that same casino. Many Palestinians driven out of Haifa found refuge in Gaza, Lebanon, and the region. Where are their descendants now?

Joséphine Baker in Haifa

The Palestinian seafront of the future

An Unseen Archive of Nuclear Colonialism

Drawing is an important means to analyse information and develop rigorous arguments both conceptually and visually. Going beyond the how-to drawing manual, this book provides an instrumental approach to drawing, especially computer-generated drawings; it outlines how drawings should be used to convey clear and analytical information in the process of design, as well as the communication and discussion of a project. In depth examples are provided how to communicate effectively. The final section demonstrates how to transform case-studies, directly connecting an analytical approach with the design process. 

Drawing Architecture and the Urban

Emilio Distretti

The listing of the capital of Eritrea Asmara as UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2017 has raised a series of contradictory questions around Italian fascist colonial heritage: is the nomination part of the longer path of Eritrea’s decolonization and reappropriation of its colonial history or does this lead to the celebration of modernist architecture and its entanglements with colonialism and fascism? This essay draws inspiration from the case of Asmara, as a way to stir a debate around the afterlife of colonial fascist architecture, and its critical reuse. By discussing the interrelated concepts of repair, reparations, and prothesis within the debates in heritage studies and to the practices of architectural preservation, this essay claims a space for architectural heritage in the entangled struggles of decolonization and defascistization. Moreover, it reads fascism’s architectural heritage—and its histories of dispossession and violence—as part of modernism’s controversial history of segregation that cut across the southern and northern hemispheres. In so doing this essay introduces the concept of demodernization into the debate around critical architectural preservation as part of a transnational struggle for justice against old and new forms of fascisms and colonialisms.

A Critical Manifesto

The Afterlife of Fascist Colonial Architecture

On Extra–legal Space in Belgrade

Glotzt nicht so Romantisch!

Between the Libyan Sahara and the Naqab

Titanic in the Desert

Godofredo Enes Pereira

Militancy, Research, Architecture and Psychiatry

CERFI (Analysis Everywhere)

arq: Architectural Research Quarterly 29, no. 1

This chapter introduces the special issue Ecologies of Production and the Production of Ecologies by proposing the concept of the extended building site. Written with Liam Ross, it asks how architectural production can be rethought beyond the conventional boundaries of the construction site, and how the field of architectural Production Studies might be expanded to address the intertwined crises of capitalism and ecology.

The chapter begins from the legacy of Sérgio Ferro’s Marxist account of architecture, labour and the building site, but argues that this critique must now be extended across wider socio-ecological systems. Ferro describes the building site as a site of both extreme violence - he identified the Qatar World Cup stadia as the site of a genocide - but also a site of radical political possibility. The building site is not only the place where architectural drawings are realised through construction labour; it is also connected to distant landscapes of extraction, supply chains, carbon-intensive material production, energy systems, logistics networks, financial structures, and the social reproduction of labour. In this sense, every building condenses a much larger field of ecological and political relations.

The argument develops through a dialogue between Marxian theories of production and metabolism and Batesonian ecological thought. Marx’s account of labour, nature and humanity’s extended embodiment is used to understand architecture as part of a material and energetic metabolism, while Bateson’s work on mind, ecology, feedback and pattern opens the question of how architectural production also operates through semiotic, perceptual and cultural systems. The chapter therefore frames architectural production across both thermodynamic and semiotic registers: as a matter of material flows, embodied energy and extraction, but also of stories, myths, knowledge systems, rituals, images and forms of ecological consciousness.

At its core, the chapter argues that to ecologise Production Studies is not simply to add environmental impact to existing accounts of construction. It requires a deeper rethinking of production itself as a process embedded in, and productive of, ecological relations. Architecture does not merely occupy environments; it participates in making them. It organises labour, transforms landscapes, mobilises materials, encodes values, and contributes to the production or destruction of worlds.

The chapter sets out the conceptual frame for the issue as a whole, positioning the “extended building site” as a way to connect labour politics, material extraction, climate justice, embodied carbon, more-than-human relations and ecological value. It proposes an expanded critical practice for architecture: one capable of tracing the hidden chains of production behind buildings, while also imagining how design might contribute to the production of more just and regenerative ecologies.

Ecologies of Production and the Production of Ecologies

Design and the Extended Building Site

**Scarcity: Architecture in an Age of Depleting Resources** was a special issue of *Architectural Design* edited by Jon Goodbun, Jeremy Till and Deljana Iossifova as part of the wider EU HERA-funded *Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment* research project. Published in 2012, the issue intervened in architectural discourse at a moment when the converging pressures of financial crisis, austerity, resource depletion, climate change and urban inequality were becoming impossible to separate. Its central proposition was that scarcity should not be treated as a technical problem to be solved through efficiency alone, but as a political, ecological, economic and spatial condition that architecture helps to produce, mediate and contest.

The issue brought together a wide range of contributors: Jon Goodbun; Jeremy Till; Deljana Iossifova; André Viljoen; Katrin Bohn; Maria Kaika; Erik Swyngedouw; Karin Jaschke; Jody Boehnert; Tatjana Schneider; Ulysses Sengupta; Ezio Manzini; Clare Brass; Flora Bowden; Kate McGeevor; Benedict Singleton; Rob Hopkins; Timothy Morton; Douglas Spencer; Andreas Rumpfhuber; Michael Klein; Georg Kolmayr; Arna Mathiesen; Kate Soper; Michael Sorkin; Alejandro Zaera-Polo; Daliana Suryawinata; Winy Maas; Liza Fior; Edward Robbins; Christian Hermansen Cordua; Barbara E. Ascher; Steve Parnell; and Hattie Hartman.

The editorial framing by Goodbun, Till and Iossifova, “Themes of Scarcity,” established scarcity as a concept that cuts across material depletion, ecological limits, economic distribution, social inequality and architectural production. Rather than accepting scarcity as an inevitable condition of lack, the introduction asked how scarcities are constructed, where they are located, who benefits from them, and how design might intervene in their production. This gave the issue its distinctive critical edge: it moved the discussion beyond sustainability as resource management and towards a more political ecology of the built environment.

Jon Goodbun’s own contributions were central to this framing. As lead guest editor and primary authorial presence, he helped position scarcity as a socio-ecological and epistemological problem for architecture. His article “Flexibility and Ecological Planning: Gregory Bateson on Urbanism” introduced a cybernetic and ecological model of planning, arguing that cities and environments cannot be adequately addressed through linear control, efficiency or fixed prediction. Drawing on Bateson, it proposed flexibility, learning, feedback and ecological aesthetics as necessary capacities for design under conditions of uncertainty.

His co-authored article with Karin Jaschke, “Architecture and Relational Resources: Towards a New Materialist Practice,” extended this argument by shifting attention from isolated materials or objects to relations, processes and resource ecologies. Together, these contributions anticipated later concerns in Goodbun’s work: ecological literacy, extended mind, cybernetics, world-systems ecology, environmental semiotics and the need to rethink architectural agency within wider socio-material systems.

As a whole, the AD issue staged scarcity as a productive and contested field for architectural thought. Its contributors moved across urban agriculture, political ecology, ecological literacy, waste, transition towns, hyperobjects, social housing, austerity, alternative hedonism, urban self-sufficiency, cheapness, mapping, Norwegian welfare, 1960s expendability and sustainability discourse. The result was not a single doctrine of scarce design, but a plural critical framework for understanding how architecture participates in the making, masking and possible transformation of scarcity.

Architecture in an age of Depleting Resources

Scarcity

Rhinozeros (Europa im Übergang): Lügen

Die letzten Tage des Bauhäuslers Munio Weinraub in Deutschland

Mit Amos Gitai in Thüringen. Die letzten Tage des Bauhäuslers Munio Weinraub in Deutschland

Archaeology of Resistance

Depth Unknown

Maria Shéhérazade Giudici

‘Hoc Opus, Hic Labor’ is an ongoing research on technological shifts in the architecture of Ancient Rome. It was published in Arch+ as well as the book The Business of Architecture. The research questions the assumption that technology is driven by scientific ‘progress’, aiming to show how majour shifts in construction logic are often prompted by the need to control the labour force. Ancient Rome offers an ideal testground for this hypothesis, not only because its 1000-year development is consistent and lengthy enough to establish recognisable patterns, but also because its history is fundamentally a history of continuous colonisation, and of the way colonial aggression reshapes labour practices and the distribution of wealth and resources. 

Ultimately the research tries to flip the narrative of conventional architectural history putting the builders themselves centre stage, and arguing that any built form is primarily the index of the hands that built it. 
Although in archaeological studies there is extensive literature on the evolution of Roman masonry, architectural evaluations of this process are scarce and often outdated; moreover, these studies focus on the technical challenges at stake and never connect the innovations with labour conditions, or with the fine-tuning of the Roman colonial machine. ‘Hoc Opus, Hic Labor’ wants to show how form is the outcome of complex processes that often have a significant ‘invisible’ component: the human cost of those who actually build architecture. 

Straddling political theory, archaeological evidence, and a rereading of the original Latin literary sources, this research wants to reclaim the history of technology as a formal architectural fact, dense with political and ideological implications.

Technologies of the Visible and the Invisible in Ancient Roman Architecture

Hoc Opus, Hic Labor

*'A refreshing and provocative take on a figure at once familiar and remote: Campbell shows that Berenson and the connoisseurship that was both epitomized and betrayed by his notorious dealings with Joe Duveen cast a longer shadow than we might think, well into the television age. This book reveals how personal, aesthetic and financial relationships interlaced, with effects we are still coming to terms with today.' - Professor Jonathan Conlin (University of Southampton), author of The Met: A History of a Museum and Its People*


Connoisseurship & the Art Market

Bernard Berenson

Dawn of the Dead

The coloniality of Italian fascist architecture

Mark Wasiuta (ed.), *The Archival Exhibition : A Decade of Research at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, 2006–2016*

Creative destruction, or the assembly of things

Understanding and managing urban change in our global era demands a high degree of specialized and interdisciplinary knowledge. At the same time, city planners, architects, researchers, policymakers, and activists are deeply immersed in the chaotic and often contradictory urban realities that they are asked to address. What is Critical Urbanism? offers an innovative toolkit for engaging these present realities across disciplinary specializations and geographic purviews.

Central to the book is the research and pedagogy of the Critical Urbanisms MA program at the University of Basel, established in collaboration with the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. The program’s renowned and emerging urbanists demonstrate the power of working with care and reciprocity across different contexts and institutions, driven by engagement with varied communities of practice. They show how alternative urban futures can be imagined by addressing the historical injustices and global entanglements that shape the urban present. The book is tailored to students, graduates and teachers of urban studies and related disciplines including architecture, urban design, human geography, architectural history, and urban anthropology.

Urban Research as Pedagogy

What is Critical Urbanism?

This paper explores the role of the Libyan Coastal Highway across history: originally built by fascist Italy during colonisation, in the postcolonial era Libya demanded Italy commit to the construction of a new motorway as part of the reparation process for its crimes. Only in 2008 was an agreement reached. Through it, Italy used the promise to build a new road as a bargaining-chip to secure Qaddafi’s cooperation in containing migrant mobility across the Mediterranean. 

This paper explores the different ways in which the Libyan road has endured as a space and a tool of power by tracing historical and political continuities across time, from colonisation to demands for postcolonial reparations and migration governance. Drawing inspiration from the notion of “coloniality”, the paper investigates the colonial continuum expressed by the Italian/ Libyan reparation process, and seeks to posit alternative pathways towards the unresolved question of postcolonial justice around the Mediterranean.

Italian Colonialism, Coloniality, and the Future of Reparative Justice in the Mediterranean

The Life Cycle of the Libyan Coastal Highway

Modern architecture’s relationship with mass media has often been framed as purely visual, dominated by the apparatus of photography and glossy magazines. Ines Weizman expands this view, turning our attention to the interplay between the visual and the aural in architecture’s representation. Through Heinz Emigholz’s films and Adolf Loos’s sensitivity to acoustics —heightened by his hearing loss— Weizman invites us to experience buildings as both seen and heard. In this expanded media framework, architecture’s materiality, like Michelangelo’s stone, is not a static object for documentation but a vessel to be activated, resonating with layers of political, cultural, and social histories.

Listening to Buildings

19th-century Paris saw countless barricades constructed by working-class insurgents to defend themselves against counter-revolutionary forces — the 1830, 1848, and 1871 revolutions being only the most well-known of these moments of insurgency. In this text, Charlotte Grace analyses the revolutionary architecture embodied by the barricade and its consecration by the main figure behind the Commune: Auguste Blanqui.

Blanqui and the Barricade, the Cosmos and the Commune

2020 | 20′ 00” | stereo | 1920 x 1080

Don’t Trace, Draw!

> ‘An outstanding study of a key set of personalities that had a major effect on early twentieth century architectural culture. An excellent work of critical scholarship’. 
— Professor Beatriz Colomina (Princeton University)

> ‘This is an extraordinary tour de force: beautifully written, original in its perceptions and scholarly revelations’. 
— Professor Anthony Vidler (Yale University)

This book considers the motives, ambitions, and malaprops of writing architectural history during the early-1900s – a moment that coincided with the emergence of modernity. In reference to a series of eccentric Anglo-American cultural figures, it considers the relationships between architecture, human perception, disease, and frailty to provide original ideas regarding the writing of architectural history and the literary construction of architecture.

Architecture is not typically associated with frailty. Indeed, one of the founding principles of architecture is that it should aspire to be stable, resilient and indefatigable. In addition, architecture is also not typically thought of in terms of its literariness. Tracing this contradictoriness, this book considers architecture as a frail, literary object by examining the eccentric architectural criticism of Geoffrey Scott, author of *The Architecture of Humanism* (1914), together with the opportunistic connoisseurship of Bernard Berenson, the leading authority on the attribution of Italian Renaissance painting. Through a reading of their works, it interprets architecture as both “frail,” when viewed through the diffracted lens of nervous illness, and a form of  “writing,” in which architecture assumes concrete form through literary description.

This book will be of interest to academics, students, and researchers in architecture and architectural history.

Neurasthenia and the Works of Geoffrey Scott and Bernard Berenson

Architecture as a Frail, Literary Object

Collectivity is a collaboration between the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2019 Thematic Exhibition and e-flux Architecture, featuring contributions by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Leonard Ma, Mariapaola Michelotto, Martino Tattara, and Tuomas Toivonen, Ana Džokić, Marc Neelen, Jere Kuzmanić, and Predrag Milić, Keller Easterling, Andrés Jaque, and Alick M. McLean.

Editorial

Collectivity

**The Design of Scarcity**, published by Strelka in 2014, and translated and republished in German in 2018, and Greek in 2021, was written as part of the wider EU HERA-funded Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment research project. *The book argues that scarcity is not simply a natural condition of diminishing resources, nor a neutral economic fact, but something actively produced, distributed, represented and designed.* Written in the wake of the financial crisis, austerity politics and renewed anxieties around planetary limits, it challenges the familiar Malthusian image of scarcity as a simple gap between population growth and finite supply. Instead, it shows how scarcity emerges through political economy, enclosure, market logics, urban development, ecological extraction, inequality and the cultural production of desire.

For architecture and design, this reframing is crucial. If scarcity is treated only as lack, then design becomes either a managerial technique of reduction or a technocratic form of damage control. But if scarcity is understood as constructed, relational and historically situated, then design can begin to work more critically with the systems that produce scarcity in the first place. The essay therefore shifts scarcity from the language of limit to the language of constraint, ecology and possibility. Constraint is not simply a negative condition: it is also the ground through which form, practice, social relations and new values can emerge.

The text links economy and ecology through their shared root in oikos: the household as a system of care, maintenance, distribution, storage and renewal. Against the abstract models of economics, it argues for a broader ecological understanding of resource relations, one attentive to cycles, feedbacks, inequalities and forms of life. Architecture is positioned not only as a consumer of scarce resources, but as a practice that shapes the very conditions through which scarcity is perceived and organised.

The central contribution of *The Design of Scarcity* is therefore to open scarcity as a design question without depoliticising it. It refuses both growth-driven abundance and moralistic austerity, proposing instead that architects and designers learn to read scarcity as a socio-material process. In doing so, the essay asks design to move beyond sustainability as efficiency and towards a more critical, inventive and politically aware practice: one capable of exposing constructed scarcities, working productively with constraints, and imagining forms of collective life beyond the economies of endless growth.

The Design of Scarcity

In many languages and traditions, “repair” means to find a remedy for what is torn or broken. Yet to speak of repair in the context of Palestine today—after more than two years of genocidal devastation unleashed by Israel in Gaza, and in the shadow of a neocolonial scramble for reconstruction—is to stand before its threshold: to confront its limits, its (im)possibility, suspended between grief and endurance, between what can be restored and what must remain a scar. To ask what is reparable, and what is not, is to ask how to mend destruction and pursue justice; how to reckon with incommensurable loss. It is to ask how life itself might begin again amid the ruins.

Palestinian Repairs is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and Emilio Distretti supported by RIWAQ – Centre for Architectural Conservation, Birzeit University Museum, and the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art, London.

Palestinian Repairs

Provenance in Architecture : A Dictionary of Terms

Dictionary Entries

"Copyright", "Doppelgänger", "Thing Right", "Will"

Daniel Fernández Pascual

Alon Schwabe

After the first edition of the Water Buffalo Festival in September 2022, Manda Festivali continues on a yearly basis to highlight the cultural and ecological role of buffalo herding and the importance of maintaining Istanbul's postindustrial pastoralist routes.


Read
: Cooking Sections and Merve Anil, "Wallowing in Istanbul's Postmining Wetlands" in Swamplands Reader, eds. José Esparza Chong Cuy, Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa, Jessica Kwok. Storefront for Art and Architecture, 2025.

Cultivating the Rights of Drought-Resistant Peasant Seeds in Southern Italy

Water Buffalo Festival (Manda Festivali)

The Arab City: Architecture and Representation

Adrian Lahoud

This chapter explores the role of Architecture within social movements, especially the idea of the Arab Spring and in the context of the existing destruction in Syria and proposals for imminent reconstruction.

Fallen Cities: Architecture & Reconstruction

Covering the hundred year history of the Bauhaus, this book is framed by two material concepts: dust & data. While dust foregrounds new approaches to the material analysis of objects and ruins, data designates new approaches to managing the enormous amount of information accumulated about the subject over the years.

An extraordinary group of leading international scholars, architects, theorists, artists, and novelists unearth new details about the history of the school and reveal the perspectives of marginalized, dislocated, silenced, and dispersed voices that have gone unheard - until now. These include the voices of queer architects, of the (too) few women practitioners, of those in the global South who studied at the Bauhaus or were influenced by its ideas, and the perception of the school beyond the Iron Curtain of the Cold War.

The essays, conversations, and documents collected here cover a time span that starts with the inception of the Bauhaus school in 1919 in the immediate aftermath of World War I and extends through several stages of dislocation to its demise on the eve of World War II. This collection also engages with the school's multiple afterlives. It deals with the migration of teachers and students, the dissemination of its ideas into various cultural contexts, the state of the buildings that were left behind, and the circulation of objects produced by Bauhaus protagonists.

Altogether this book offers an unprecedentedly complex and unique conversation regarding Bauhaus history, underpinned by its ideological and cultural interpretations, and is an invaluable resource for scholars and practitioners alike.

Traces of the Bauhaus Across 100 Years

Dust & Data

Manja van de Worp

Multi-state design is a unique sustainable structural design method that reduces the environmental impact of structures. Traditionally, structural design develops a single design with the aim to minimise material quantities or use low-impact materials. Multi-state structures reuse structural components over multiple service lives and in different layouts. This creates a new form of lightweight design, which in building construction is rarely used, in which elements can be reconfigured over time to adapt the whole building to changing needs. This means the structural elements have to change function too, i.e. need to change their
structural performance over their lifetime. In order to allow for this change in type and magnitude of force, we do not rely on standard structural typologies such as beams or columns when analysing these structures, but on “blocks” that together at a certain moment in time can be clustered to become a column and at other times a beam, i.e. we consider specific but changing load resistance at various moments.

The design method utilises a concept of structural elements that can become different in degree (as in the game of Go), in which their performance is based on the relation between neighbouring elements, whereas traditionally elements are designed to be different in kind (like chess pieces) and are embodied as performance embedded
in a common type, as described by Reiser and Umemoto in their Atlas of Novel Tectonics (2006)

[Read more](https://cdn.sanity.io/files/qcg3l8b3/production/23c0079f34068540bd759f586b9f91981e1a5aa7.pdf)

Tallinn Art Biennale pavilion a methodology for multistate structural design

Digital Building Blocks

Visions for Architectural Demodernization

This last decade, United Kingdom universities have experienced severe neoliberal offensives. In 2010, the student movement had managed to gain momentum and occupy symbolic buildings or sites. This is the story of how student activists gloriously succeeded in taking over the Millbank building in London.

Taking and Making Space in the 2010 U.K. Student Protest Movement

“Next Hype”: 

“Steps Around a Theory of Action” is an archival and interpretive project within Bateson’s Cosmos that reconstructs a series of conferences through which Gregory Bateson developed his late ecological thought. It was produced by the 'archive team' - Jon Goodbun, Dulmini Perera, Simon Sadler and Ben Sweeting - of the AHRC-funded two year research project into Enacting Gregory Bateson's Ecological Aesthetics in Architecture and Design. This output was published as a website in 2025, and will also be included in the projects forthcoming book, due to be published by end of 2026.

Curated and introduced by Dulmini Perera, the project situates Bateson’s work not as an abstract body of theory alone, but as something formed through sites, conversations, correspondence, workshops, conferences, drawings, institutions and encounters. It draws on archival materials including transcripts, letters, reports, audio recordings and conference documents, and presents Bateson’s ideas through multiple voices rather than a single authoritative account.

Perera’s introduction is significant in explicitly identifying a short exercise led by Jon Goodbun during the group’s 2023 archival visit to Santa Cruz as one of the prompts for the project’s visual and conceptual form. Goodbun asked the group to draw two lines: one tracing Bateson’s movement across different landscapes, and another tracing each participant’s own movements of interest in ecology and design. This exercise helped make visible the relation between Bateson’s changing contexts and the researchers’ own intellectual trajectories, and Perera notes that it produced the initial outlines of what became Bateson’s Cosmos. The resource therefore emerges from an explicitly situated and reflexive method: it maps Bateson’s worlds while also acknowledging the contemporary researchers’ own positions within those worlds.

A further conceptual thread in the project — the question of a “theory of action” — was also one that Goodbun had already helped to foreground for the group. He had first articulated its importance in relation to Bateson’s politics in a panel convened with Dulmini Perera on “Gregory Bateson and the Political,” with Philip Guddemi and Fred Turner, for the Relating Systems Design conference in 2020. This earlier discussion framed Bateson’s ecological work not simply as a theory of communication, mind or systems, but as a problem of action: how to act within complex systems without reproducing the narrow, purposive and instrumental logics that generate ecological crisis in the first place. This emphasis becomes one of the organising questions of Bateson’s Cosmos.

Goodbun’s two contributions, on 1967 and 1968, form a crucial hinge in the larger project. The 1967 essay reads Bateson’s appearance at the Dialectics of Liberation Congress in London as a turning point: the moment when Bateson’s work on double bind, psychiatry, cybernetics, communication, art, ecology and consciousness begins to crystallise into what Goodbun elsewhere calls his “three ecologies” period. The Roundhouse setting becomes more than a venue; its indeterminate, post-industrial form offers an architectural and abductive metaphor for Bateson’s argument about form, purpose and systemic wisdom. Goodbun places Bateson between the New Left and the counterculture, arguing that his critique of “conscious purpose” offered both audiences a way to understand ecological crisis as a crisis of perception, epistemology and action.

The 1967 essay also repositions Bateson politically. Rather than treating him as detached from political struggle, Goodbun shows him engaging Marx, Laing, anti-psychiatry, existential phenomenology, anti-colonial and countercultural currents, while simultaneously warning that revolutionary or therapeutic action could reproduce the same epistemological errors it sought to overcome. Bateson’s warning about short-term purposive action, including his striking discussion of atmospheric carbon dioxide, is presented as an early and powerful ecological-political intervention. Goodbun’s reading casts this as a turn towards “wise action”: not withdrawal from action, but a demand that action be rethought through larger ecological systems.

The 1968 essay follows this turn from the charged public atmosphere of the Roundhouse to the more concentrated setting of the Wenner-Gren conference at Burg Wartenstein. Here Goodbun shows Bateson attempting to formalise the questions opened in 1967 into a research programme around “The Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation.” The essay tracks Bateson’s exchange with Lita Osmundsen, the emergence of the “explosive memorandum,” and the shift from a general concern with consciousness to a more precise critique of conscious purpose. This shift matters because it distinguishes Bateson’s ecological cybernetics from the increasingly instrumental, engineering-oriented cybernetics that he feared was losing its philosophical and ethical depth.

Goodbun presents the 1968 conference as an experiment in method as much as content. Its small residential format, shared papers, slow dialogue and refusal of premature solutions enacted the very problems it sought to address: how a system learns, how action can be imagined by actors who are themselves inside the system, and how ecological crisis intensifies the very operationalist habits that produced it. The presence of Mary Catherine Bateson is central here, especially her role in understanding the group itself as a cybernetic model of its subject matter. In Goodbun’s account, this becomes a key moment in the formation of Bateson’s ecological aesthetics: an attempt to cultivate forms of perception, empathy, learning and aided consciousness capable of resisting the narrow violence of purposive action.

The other contributions extend and contextualise this arc. Ben Sweeting’s account of the 1969 Wenner-Gren conference, “The Moral and Aesthetic Structure of Human Adaptation,” follows the unresolved questions of 1968 into Bateson’s explicit demand for a theory of action within large complex systems, where the actor is both part of and product of the system. In the context of Bateson’s Cosmos, this point resonates with the theory-of-action question that Goodbun had already foregrounded in the group’s earlier Bateson and politics discussions. Sweeting foregrounds Bateson’s insistence that premature action risks reproducing the same epistemological errors it seeks to correct, and shows how Bateson’s concern with action moves increasingly towards metaphor, aesthetics and the possibility that action must be planned, if at all, on an aesthetic base.

Dulmini Perera’s essay on the 1969 Princeton conference, “Human Distress and Rapid Social Change,” shifts the question of action into the terrain of social distress, institutional pathology and environmental violence. Bateson appears here as a kind of planetary psychiatrist, urging participants to move beyond “screwdriver questions” towards ecological questions concerning the deeper communicational, semiotic and systemic patterns through which distress is produced. Perera reads pollution, smog and environmental disorder not simply as material waste or technical failure, but as signs that a system is stuck, losing flexibility and “room for manoeuvre” under conditions of rapid change.

Simon Sadler’s essay on the 1970 Wenner-Gren conference, “Reconstructing the Ecology of a Great City,” brings Bateson’s ecological cybernetics directly into contact with urbanism and planning. Organised around New York City at the moment of Earth Day, ecological urban politics and new media experimentation, the conference moved beyond conventional environmental concerns such as waste, pollution and transport towards questions of social ecology, local expertise, heterarchic governance and the city as an information-rich ecology. Sadler’s account is especially important for architectural readers because it connects Bateson’s work to urban ecology, “Flexibility and Ecological Planning,” and the possibility that cities might become sites of learning rather than instruments of linear control. This urban reading is also indebted to the line of argument developed in Goodbun’s earlier AD essay, “Flexibility and Ecological Planning: Gregory Bateson on Urbanism,” published in the Architectural Design special issue Scarcity: Architecture in an Age of Depleting Resources. That essay had already established Bateson’s relevance for architectural and urban thinking by linking ecological planning, flexibility, cybernetics, learning and the critique of purposive control.

Sadler’s second contribution, on the 1974 Tarrytown event “After Robert Moses, What?”, continues this urban-political thread through the problem of power. In the aftermath of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, Bateson uses urban governance to rethink power itself through cybernetics. Power is not treated as a simple force possessed by individuals, but as a metaphor for patterns of interaction, information, reward, punishment, context and feedback within complex social systems. Sadler’s account also draws out the limits and ambiguities of Bateson’s politics: his ecological critique of mechanistic power opens possibilities for pluralist and heterarchic thought, but remains uneasy around conflict, class, race, gender and the practical mechanics of collective urban change.

Finally, Perera’s essay with Stefanie Huthoefer on the 1975 Lindisfarne Summer Conference places Bateson’s ecological thought within the emergence of planetary culture, counter-institutional experimentation and ecological imagination. Lindisfarne is presented as an attempt to create a different intellectual and cultural space outside the monocultures of the corporate university. Bateson’s thought is connected to slow temporality, autonomy, autopoiesis, coevolutionary design, the New Alchemy Institute, John and Nancy Todd, Lynn Margulis, Sim Van der Ryn and the search for forms of ecological culture beyond industrial modernity. This contribution shows how Bateson’s work moved into a broader field of ecological design, planetary technics, sacred ecology and experiments in institutional form.

Taken together, Perera’s introduction, Goodbun’s 1967 and 1968 essays, and the further contributions by Sweeting, Perera, Sadler and Huthoefer frame Bateson’s Cosmos as more than a historical reconstruction. It is a model for ecological research practice. It shows how Bateson’s thought emerged through movement between disciplines and places, and how its contemporary value lies in helping designers, architects and ecological practitioners think about action without reducing action to planning, intervention or control. Goodbun’s contributions are particularly important because they identify the late-1960s conjuncture as the point at which Bateson’s work becomes directly relevant to ecological design: a theory of action begins to emerge, but only by passing through critiques of consciousness, purpose, cybernetics, politics, technology, empathy and systemic wisdom. The surrounding essays then show how this problematic unfolds into aesthetic action, social distress, urban ecology, power, autonomy and planetary culture.

Notes on Seven Bateson Conferences

Steps Around a Theory of Action

Joshua Mardell

Gavin Stamp and the Tradition of the Activist-Scholar in Architectural History

The research initiative *Crossing Cultures* introduces an innovative pedagogical model, immersing London-based architecture students in a Calabrian village through residencies, in collaboration with a local non-profit organisation (NPO). 

Since 2016, the program has addressed societal issues of migration and depopulation, fostering a community of practice with locals, asylum seekers, and other newcomers. Since 2020, the residencies, Studio South, have worked with the London-based design studio. They have disrupted traditional pedagogy, emphasising students as research partners, fostering hybrid roles, and transcending research-practice boundaries. The findings reveal a convergence of students' and the NPOs concerns, endorsing residencies as a model bridging academia and practice for societal impact.

A Model for Co-Production of Architecture Education and Practice Through Residencies

Studio South

The paper examines how social projects, social spaces, and social realities define three contexts and shifts critical to understanding urban design in China. The transformations from collective forms to community building, from government to governance, and from urban versus rural development to urban-rural integration. The argument presented is that a unique unification of administration, production, and reproduction spaces into one institution, produced collective forms in China, whose collective spaces and collective subjectivities contrast with Western-centric explanations of urban design and urban sociology that depend on abstract notions of the public, public space, community, and place making. Instead, collective forms and collective spaces are defined by concrete activities, interests, and benefits that provide social networks of support and care to clearly identifiable constituencies. The collective and the community in China are thus always legibly spatialized and develop in parallel to a socialized model of governance that derives from a “differential mode of association.” This creates a spatialized governmentality, an instrumentalization of spatial design by government that brings spatial and social problems of governance closely together. A brief discussion of the historical formations of these changing contexts is the basis to outlining an interdisciplinary urban design approach that deals with spatial and social environments, practices, and policies. The paper brings together research conducted in Chinese cities including Wuhan, Beijing, and Shanghai.

A Discussion of Urban Design Thinking and Practice, Based on Research in Chinese Cities

Collective Forms and Collective Spaces

Roads to Maralinga

Jingru Cheng

This book proposes a new interdisciplinary understanding of urban design in China based on a study of the transformative effects of socio-spatial design and planning on communities and their governance. This is framed by an examination of the social projects, spaces, and realities that have shaped three contexts critical to the understanding of urban design problems in China: the histories of “collective forms” and “collective spaces”, such as that of the urban *danwei* (work-unit), which inform current community building and planning; socio-spatial changes in urban and rural development; and disparate practices of “spatialised governmentality”. These contexts and an attendant transformation from planning to design and from government to governance, define the current urban design challenges found in the dominant urban xiaoqu (small district) and shequ (community) development model. 

Examining the histories, transformations, and practices that have shaped socio-spatial epistemologies and experiences in China – including a specific sense of community and place that is rather based on a concrete “collective” than abstract “public” space and underpinned by socialised governance – this book brings together a diverse range of observations, thoughts, analyses, and projects by urban researchers and practitioners. Thereby discussing emerging interdisciplinary urban design practices in China, this book offers a valuable resource for all academics, practitioners, and stakeholders with an interest in socio-spatial design and development.

Interdisciplinary Urban Design in China

The Socio-spatial Design of Community and Governance

Architectural Dissonances

For Walter D. Mignolo, the distinctiveness of the archive and its determination to produce knowledge defines a narrative that exceeds the status of fiction and transforms into ontological ‘reality’. To draw such contours of analysis is to suggest that the archive produces events as much as it records them. Indeed, Emilio Distretti and Alessandro Petti produce a pedagogical twist towards new practices and parameters within which future generations can approach and question knowledge in relation to fascist heritage in the village of Borgo Rizza, Eastern Sicily.

Pathways for Undoing Colonial Fascist Architectural Legacies in Sicily

Architectural Demodernization as Critical Pedagogy

Blackballing Buckler

Towers of Winds was exhibited at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, in 2025, Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. The exhibition presented the Athens-based research project to an international architectural audience through films, drawings, prototype documentation and digital material, translating a practice-based investigation into urban heat, air pollution and passive climatic infrastructure into a public exhibition format.

The Venice presentation responded directly to the Biennale’s curatorial emphasis on multiple forms of intelligence. Rather than treating intelligence as an attribute of individuals, machines or discrete organisms, the project approached intelligence through Gregory Bateson’s concept of an “ecology of mind”: a distributed process that unfolds through relations between bodies, atmospheres, materials, technologies, environments, signs and feedback systems. In this sense, the installation framed Athens itself as an eco-mental system, whose heat, pollution, winds, dust, fires, infrastructures and social inequalities could be read as signs of a larger atmospheric intelligence under stress.

Two new film collaborations were central to this response. The main film, a twenty-seven-minute documentary made with filmmaker Gemma Riggs, narrated the development of the project, its theoretical framing, the construction and testing of the prototype in Athens, and the wider ambition to rethink architecture as climatic infrastructure. Jon Goodbun coordinated and produced the drawings and exhibition material, and scripted the text and narrative for the documentary. This film took on the more discursive, expository and “prose” aspect of the installation: it explained the project’s research questions, environmental context, technical development and civic ambitions.

A second, shorter five-minute film was made with filmmaker Lynn Phyllis Seeger. This supporting work channelled “The Eco-Mental Systems of Athena,” giving the project a more poetic, speculative and ecological voice. It was conceived as an attempt to speak from within the distributed intelligence of the city itself: a channelling of the goddess Athena as a figure for the more-than-human mind of Athens, composed of air, heat, stone, dust, water, forests, infrastructures, memories and political histories. Where the documentary film foregrounded research, design development and prototype testing, the shorter film opened a more atmospheric, mythic and semiotic register.

The two films were therefore conceived as interacting components within a single installation. Drawing loosely on Bateson’s interest in different forms and modes of cognition, including bicameral and relational understandings of mind, the films operated as two interacting “hemispheres” of the project: one more 'rational' and prose-based narration, the other more 'poetic'. One worked through explanation, evidence, modelling and argument; the other through metaphor, image, rhythm, voice and ecological imagination. Together they formed a double description of Towers of Winds: not simply an account of a prototype, but an attempt to stage the project as a distributed cognitive system in which architecture, atmosphere, sensing, myth and environmental research could think together.

The exhibition communicated the project’s two interlinked scales — a community-buildable seven-metre tower and larger twenty-five-metre municipal towers for heatwave response — and situated them within the wider environmental crises of the Athens basin: extreme heat, atmospheric stratification, air pollution, energy poverty, fire, dust, urban inequality and the search for low-energy alternatives to air-conditioning. The tower was presented as both a built experiment and a speculative civic infrastructure: a device for cooling, sensing and learning from the Athenian atmosphere.

The exhibition marked a significant moment of international dissemination for the project. It brought together previous research on ecological semiotics and Athens’ atmospheric crisis with new prototype evidence, new visual material and new filmic interpretation. It also helped communicate the project beyond specialist environmental design audiences, addressing architects, curators, researchers, policy actors and the wider Biennale public. The project was documented in the official catalogue of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition and supported by a dedicated project website and public release of the films online.

The Venice exhibition also generated critical recognition. Phineas Harper singled out the project for praise in ArtReview, while Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos discussed it positively in Anthropocenes. These reviews are significant because they register the project’s relevance beyond conventional technical sustainability discourse. They position Towers of Winds within wider debates on architecture, ecology, atmosphere, public space, environmental justice and the political imagination of climate adaptation.

As an exhibition output, Towers of Winds at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 should be understood not as a simple representation of an existing design project, but as a research dissemination format in its own right. The films, drawings and installation translated a complex interdisciplinary project into a public cultural platform, making visible the relations between passive cooling, urban atmospheric systems, climate inequality, ecological semiotics and civic infrastructure. Through its paired film structure, the installation also tested a specifically Batesonian response to the Biennale’s theme of intelligence: an ecological aesthetics in which documentary knowledge and poetic intuition, sensing and myth, infrastructure and atmosphere, could operate as interacting modes of thought.

Towers of Winds at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025: Films, Exhibition and Public Dissemination

After the First World War and under the British Mandate, Haifa grew from a small Ottoman port town into a regional metropolis and industrial center around a deep seaport. The city was part of an open space that extended from Cairo to Damascus through Beirut, in a region where Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon were part of the same fluid, interconnected space. During the Second World War, it became a border town. Under French Vichy, the border between Lebanon and Syria ran sixty kilometers to the north and hardened only after the creation of Israel in 1948 and the wars with Lebanon. Haifa's architectural modernism developed in relation to the city's geopolitical environment. No building better manifests Haifa's predicament than the modernist casino building, built in 1934, ostensibly for British officers in Haifa's Bat Galim seafront district.

Conversations about Colonial Modernism in Haifa

The Architectural Casino

First published online and in the newspaper of the Making Futures summer school at Floating University/Haus Der Statistik in Berlin, and then in the Making Futures book, “On the Possibility of an Ecological Dialogue” argues that environmental justice is indispensable but also caught in a profound double bind: justice must be demanded, yet no simple restitution can repair the ecological and historical damage produced through capitalism, colonialism, class, gender and racialised structures. Goodbun turns to Gregory Bateson to show how instrumental conscious purpose, when cut off from wider ecological awareness, generates pathological feedback loops - an “ecology of weeds”. Law, politics and planning therefore need to be supplemented by meta-aesthetic forms of ecological perception, capable of sensing relations across multiple scales.

The text proposes dialogue as a key form for this work. Drawing on David Bohm’s understanding of dialogue as a “stream of meaning”, Goodbun distinguishes dialogue from argumentative discussion and frames it as an ecological, aesthetic and pedagogical practice. Bateson’s double-description, metalogue and abductive reasoning provide further tools for perceiving patterns that connect living and mental systems. In this sense, aesthetics is not style but the study of structures of feeling and perception: how we perceive, empathise with, or become alienated from, the relations that constitute ecological life. The essay ends by asking whether an abductive ecological reasoning might hold together the demand for justice and the recognition of its impossibility.

On the Possibility of an Ecological Dialogue

Tom Greenall

This guide represents the culmination of DSDHA’s self-initiated research into the transformative role that co-design can play in the creation of both inclusive and egalitarian built environment processes and the resulting buildings and places. It was inspired by and builds on the studio's nearly 25 years' experience in pioneering innovative participatory design practice and draws on the experiences of more than 20 collaborators from across the globe. 

A guide for creating meaningful participation in co-design processes

Towards Spatial Justice

Nuclear colonialism is a uniquely 20th-century form of imperialism. It destroyed countless lives and cultures, permanently displaced people and traditions, and launched an endless desire for the development and testing of weapons with ever-increasing destructive capabilities. Its most lasting consequences, however, persist in the DNA and lands of its Indigenous victims. In the decades since the first nuclear detonation in 1945, Indigenous peoples around the world have been disproportionately affected by the intergenerational trauma of the atomic blasts – their lands repeatedly colonised, irradiated and abandoned. As remediation and repatriation of nuclear landscapes increase, an important question emerges: is a land poisoned by atomic blasts still the land it once was?

Efforts to transfer contaminated land to its traditional owners ring hollow in the Australian desert, writes David Burns

Nuclear colonialism in Maralinga

Participatory architecture can promote dialogue across cultures while working together to create physical outputs. A team of academics with a background in architecture, psychology and health sciences evaluated a participatory architecture workshop in Southern Italy as part of the Crossing Cultures project. The goal was to explore participants’ experiences and perceived benefits. In the context of situated learning, the workshop brought together architecture students, local citizens and asylum seekers, who by working together and learning from each other formed a community of practice (CoP). The aim of this study was to explore the experiences of members of the CoP, their beliefs about the benefits of the project and ways to improve it. 

Data collection took place in 2019 during a participatory architecture workshop in Belmonte, Italy. Twenty-five asylum seekers, locals and students took part in in-depth interviews, which were later subjected to thematic analysis. 

Participants reported experiences relating to ‘living together’, ‘working together’, ‘making home’, ‘making locals comfortable to be involved’ and ‘understanding and respecting differences’. Perceived benefits were ‘creating a space for connection’, ‘revitalising local communities’, ‘promoting development of towns’, ‘broadening horizons’, ‘gaining or practising skills’, ‘having your ideas heard’ and ‘creating lasting things’.

Findings suggest that creating a CoP not only fulfils individual goals but also addresses common concerns. Participatory architecture workshops in an area with high immigration can create connections between asylum seekers and local people, and promote intercultural dialogue while helping to reactivate an economically and socially deprived area.

Experiences from the Crossing Cultures Project in Southern Italy

Participatory Architecture Workshops with Asylum Seekers and Local People

‘In Praise of the Un-Original’ is a critical study that was published in Curatorial Design (2024) and shared as public lecture at ETH (Zurich) and EPFL (Lausanne) in the same year. The study questions the way labour organisation shapes the making and reuse of buildings through an analysis of the Colosseum and its various reconstructions from antiquity to today. 

As heritage conservation has become a fundamental component of contemporary architecture, it is crucial to problematise the link between historical artifacts and the systems of exploitation that created and maintained them. ‘In Praise of the Un-Original’ critically questions the practice of conservation by exploring the gaps between the re-construction of an ‘original’ built form and the re-enactment of the ‘original’ processes through which that form came into being. It draws on archaeological evidence as well as on an analysis of the written and built work of Domenico Fontana and 1800-century architects Valadier and Stern, discussing the ideological agenda of various attempts at adaptive reuse. 

Already in Imperial times projects for the restoration of the Colosseum deeply transformed its appearance and use, and in the past five centuries its ruin has been recast as quarry, factory, workers’ accommodation, and finally touristic attraction. Although archaeological and art-historical literature on the subject abounds, there is no publication that traces a clear genealogy of the many attempts to give the ancient monument a radical new use. Indeed, these projects are often seen as outlandish, while the present research investigates their profound political rationale. Ultimately, the study of the vicissitudes of the Colosseum casts a light on the evolution of building practices, but it also suggests that future conservation practices cannot divorce the fraught history of a building from its material survival. 

RCA School of Architecture Research

Research: ,

She Still Wears Kohl & Smells Like Roses, Dima Srouji

Water Buffalo Festival (Manda Festivali), Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe

Towers of Winds at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025: Films, Exhibition and Public Dissemination, Jon Goodbun w/ Aran Chadwick, Flora McLean …

Research: Themes (9), Types (3)

She Still Wears Kohl & Smells Like Roses, Dima Srouji

Water Buffalo Festival (Manda Festivali), Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe

Towers of Winds at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025: Films, Exhibition and Public Dissemination, Jon Goodbun w/ Aran Chadwick, Flora McLean …

Research: ,