Architectural Design Practice Research Articles

A machine for playing in: Exploring the videogame as a medium for architectural design

This paper aims to investigate what is unique about videogame spaces and their construction, and how they might be utilised by architects. This design-led study establishes videogames as an architectural medium through practice-based research projects, examining game worlds as architectural spaces by developing design methods to analyze their environments. It then discusses developing games as architectural representations combining virtual space with computational rules. The paper's final study suggests how game structures might be applied in design approaches for ostensibly real sites. Through four case study projects, I outline a new form of architectural design practice operating between physical and virtual, reflecting the cultural influence of game worlds and exploring videogame environments as new ways to ‘realise’ architecture. • In videogame worlds player interactivity is integral to their architectural design. • Architecture designed within game spaces can impart meaning through interaction. • Videogame worlds can be sited within the history of architectural representation. • Analyzing videogames through architectural design methods expands existing games studies scholarship. • New forms of architectural practice will operate across the virtual and physical.

Between presence and absence: Phenomenal interstitiality in Eisenman’s Guardiola House

American architect and educator Peter Eisenman treats architecture as a form of text which can be read through the absent/present traces of a design process. Though the trace has been much developed in existing scholarship, Eisenman’s Guardiola House (1988) has been overlooked in terms of its analysis and interpretation. This paper proposes that the Guardiola House is a critical shift in Eisenman’s work, since for the first time the trace, through imprinting, is developed into a condition of interstitiality, which not only expresses the merging of geometries, but provides a new way of blurring concepts and space. The Guardiola House reflects Eisenman’s shift from the rule-bound transformations framed in structuralism to the complex, interpretive, and unpredictable ‘events’ of poststructuralism. This paper asks: what significance, in terms of theory, culture, and programme, does this notion of the interstitial have for Eisenman’s work, as well as for the practice of architectural design?

New Materials for Green Building

The construction material aesthetic characteristics used determine to a large extent the opportunities for architectural concepts. The above-mentioned architectural characteristics of chrysotile magnesium carbonate are those to be introduced in this part of the current research. Thanks to the experience in practical architectural design with the application of chrysotile magnesium carbonate it can be argued that theory in the field of architectural expressive capabilities of chrysotile magnesium carbonate has been practically tested and endorsed in the framework of pragmatic architectural design of small architectural forms.

Spatial configuration evaluation of Chinese rural houses through visual graph analysis for adaptive thermal comfort

In chapter 9, it was found that the spatial indicators can reflect the airflow performance. There is a positive or linear correlation between the spatial indicators (connectivity, integration and depth) and the airflow indicator (airflow rate). The indicators that reflect the accessibility of the spatial configuration, i.e. connectivity, integration and depth, reflect the potential of achieving natural ventilation of a particular spatial configuration. In the other words, a high degree of connectivity, integration and low depth value mean a high accessibility of the spatial configuration and a high potential of obtaining natural ventilation. This result is useful for the architectural design practice, especially in the early design stage. In chapter 10, the extended space syntax methods in the program of Depthmap for natural ventilation potential analysis were proposed by the author. In this chapter 11, the proposed methods for spatial analysis will be used for design practice. The spatial configurations of a number of Chinese rural house designs in the area studied will be evaluated in terms of natural ventilation potential for thermal summer comfort by the proposed spatial analysis methods. The rural houses as a case study in this research is chosen because the Chinese rural houses normally using passive ways to achieve thermal comfort in summer, therefore the spatial configuration for natural ventilation is important, as the author concluded in part 1 in this thesis. In addition, the rural population in China accounts for 40% of the total population with a total amount of approximately 560 million at the end of 2018 (NBSC, 2018). At the end of 2014, there were more than 585,451 villages in China and the rural housing area is at present 22.6 billion m², within a total area of more than 40 billion m² of China’s urban and rural housing together. The amount of rural housing is constantly rising. According to 2010 data, the total floor space of newly built houses is 1.6 billion m², and half of them are rural residential buildings (NBSC, 2018). Therefore, improving the living environment for Chinese rural residential buildings is important for the sustainable development of China. Moreover, previous studies have been carried out on the sustainable development of Chinese rural residential building. However, many investigations and studies related to energy conservation and indoor thermal comfort have been proposed for northern China’s rural houses (Jin & Zhou, 2008; Lai, Zhang, Wei, & Zhang, 2011; Sun, 2003; Yang, Yang, Yan, & Liu, 2011; Zhao & Jin, 2007; Zheng, Li, & Yang, 2008), focusing on winter comfort. Studies of the Chinese rural residential building in the hot humid climate regions are scarce (Han, Zhang, & Zhou, 2009; Jin, Meng, Zhao, Zhang, & Chen, 2013; Liu, Tan, Chen, Chu, & Zhang, 2013; Xie & Shi, 2012). Studies of spatial configuration for passive cooling of rural residential building design are very scarce.

Architectural spatial design strategies for summer microclimate control in buildings: a comparative case study of Chinese vernacular and modern houses

The objective of this paper is to clarify the spatial design strategies used to control the microclimate of a Chinese vernacular house in summer by comparing the building with modern Chinese rural houses and presenting ideas for contemporary architectural design practice. For this goal the spatial configuration, the spatial boundary conditions, the vegetation in the space and the human activity in the space were analysed for the vernacular house and for modern rural houses. Also, field measurements were conducted to evaluate the summer thermal environment in the vernacular and a modern house. The results show that the vernacular house has a diverse spatial design and a better building microclimate, making it easier to obtain thermal comfort than the modern houses. Therefore, spatial design strategies of Chinese vernacular houses are still of great value to modern house design, especially when the free-running thermal comfort theory is applied.

Automatically Design Convolutional Neural Networks by Optimization With Submodularity and Supermodularity.

The architecture of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is a key factor of influencing their performance. Although deep CNNs perform well in many difficult problems, how to intelligently design the architecture is still a challenging problem. Focusing on two practical architectural design problems: to maximize the accuracy with a given forward running time and to minimize the forward running time with a given accuracy requirement, we innovatively utilize prior knowledge to convert architecture optimization problems into submodular optimization problems. We propose efficient Greedy algorithms to solve them and give theoretical bounds of our algorithms. Specifically, we employ the techniques on some public data sets and compare our algorithms with some other hyperparameter optimization methods. Experiments show our algorithms' efficiency.

Organization, atmosphere, and digital technologies: Designing sensory order

We argue technology and organization are inherently spatial phenomenon. We conceptualize this conjunction as atmosphere: a gathering of mood, human practice, material and environmental conditions, and values that has sufficient coherence and distinction to constitute a distinct interior. Atmospheres, however, are not entirely stable and present: the interior is porous to outside influence, and the interior is never wholly ordered. We show this through the study of digitally mediated architectural design practice. We find the technological mediation of atmospheres is constituted in sensory and affective spatial arrangements, and not in rationally calculated configurations of assets and goals. An atmosphere is inherently aesthetic. This allows us to gesture toward a definition of organization as technologically mediated spatial struggle to reconcile interior coherence with outward exposure.

Postcolonial urbanism across disciplinary boundaries: modes of (dis)engagement between urban theory and professional practice

This paper critically examines the epistemological status of urban professional practice, i.e. architecture and urban design practice, in the theoretical debates on postcolonial urbanism. Despite joint interests in topics such as subalternity, informality, and learning, we can identify various gaps between urban theory and professional practice which contribute to the ‘alienation’ apparent in the interactions between these two disciplinary fields. The paper discusses three aspects which are hampering a more systematic reflection of the theory–practice nexus in the context of postcolonial urbanism: first, the dominance of the figure of the ‘global architect’; second, the lack of a truly inter- and trans-disciplinary perspective within the popularised debate on urban issues; and third, the insistence on epistemological difference out of tactical concerns. In contrast, the recent shifts in the intellectual foundations and teaching approaches in architecture and urban design are not yet sufficiently acknowledged within urban scholarship. It is shown how these fresh approaches advance a rethinking of the concepts of agency and authorship and expand the tools and modes of acting in urban contexts. I suggest that these recent shifts within architecture and urban design can be particularly rewarding for urban scholars to take into account in their search for new ways and tools to address real-life problems, confront inequalities and include marginalised knowledges.

The normative turn in environmental architecture

How is environmental design influencing the way in which cultural public places (museums, libraries, parks, campuses) are imagined, designed and symbolized in Canadian architecture competitions? In the 1960s, the drive towards holistic approaches of public and individual human settlements gave rise to the idea of environmental design, as a means to transcend the boundaries between various design disciplines: architecture, landscape, urban and product design. In the 1970s, environmentalism started to shift towards an ecological ideology soon dominated by technical solutions. This technological turn was driven by highly structured principles in the search for efficiency. Given that the goal of these reorientations of practice is to design for a cleaner future, how has this turn affected environmental architecture procurement and design practices?Shifting values and significances in the environmental discourse for cultural public places are not mere rhetorical choices, but meaningful traces of deeper transformations induced by the way in which environmentalism has been emerging as an imperative in the design of the built environment. This paper holds as its hypothesis that environmental issues are increasingly addressed in a normalized manner in architecture procurement and design practices, specifically, when environmental imperatives are highly specialized. This is quite a divergence from the deep systemic research and experimentation of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This potential trend can have significant consequences not only in the future of architectural design and its management of environmental risks, but also in other areas or fields where environmental technology and designs are employed to support cleaner production.We have selected the architectural competition as the comparative device to study this phenomenon. We will compare competitions launched between the 1970s and the 2000s in order to better understand the changes in environmental design practices. These competitions are selected from the comprehensive database, the Catalogue of Canadian Competitions (ccc.umontreal.ca).

Architecture and Collective Remembrance at the Tunnel D-B Memorial Site in Sarajevo

This paper will focus on the Tunnel D-B in Sarajevo (aka Tunnel of Hope) –a rare example of war heritage that commemorates both human resilience and traumatic past. It has been 25years since its construction under gruesome circumstances during the siege of Sarajevo(1992 –1995). Today, decisions need to be made to preserve this unique heritage and continue the work of remembrance. A complex design project involving a memorial museum and an educational center is underway. This raises pertinent questions that are touching upon the very purpose of its existence and are, in fact, common to most sites commemorating difficult and traumatic histories. To address relevant topics, the paper discusses a) the notion of memorial architecture and current day design practices and approaches in commemorative projects on authentic sites, b) zooms into the specific context of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Tunnel D-B and, finally, c) explains the concept design that is planned for the site of the Tunnel D-B.

Architectural spatial design strategies for summer microclimate control in buildings

The objective of this paper is to clarify the spatial design strategies used to control the microclimate of a Chinese vernacular house in summer by comparing the building with modern Chinese rural houses and presenting ideas for contemporary architectural design practice. For this goal the spatial configuration, the spatial boundary conditions, the vegetation in the space and the human activity in the space were analysed for the vernacular house and for modern rural houses. Also, field measurements were conducted to evaluate the summer thermal environment in the vernacular and a modern house. The results show that the vernacular house has a diverse spatial design and a better building microclimate, making it easier to obtain thermal comfort than the modern houses. Therefore, spatial design strategies of Chinese vernacular houses are still of great value to modern house design, especially when the free-running thermal comfort theory is applied.

Organizing Architectural Atmospheres

The article outlines an alternative type of digital drawing technique for architecture called chromatic mapping. This new procedural drawing technique redefines the theoretical frameworks of digital design practice by manipulating the formal and spatial capacities of data captured in the image. The ensuing discursive and practical changes to architectural design practice deliberately leverage the ability of image-based software to gather, collate and modify real-world data. The pixel is central to chromatic mapping because it is the medium that translates form and space into color. This alterative definition of form as visual data contests the orthodoxy that only the line can delineate form and reactivates the issues surrounding the role of the image in architectural production. While maintaining digital architecture's ambition to reduce the procedural and formal consequences of postmodern semiotics, this new drawing technique recalibrates the part images play in architectural production by activating image data to foreground drawings that simulate architecture's atmospheric qualities.

Beyond sustainability: reconsidering the healing qualities of the built environment

Sustainability, resilience and other concepts have recently emerged as a response to the most urgent problems of our time including the ones of the built environment. Throughout the last century little attention if any at all was paid to the adaptability of the built environment to nature and the needs of human beings. The ideology that shaped Modernism was hostile to the psychological qualities of the built environment and instead cared about shaping new aesthetics and advanced technology in building industry. The ascent of Modernism during the last century among other things was associated with dissemination of certain building doctrines and dogmas that neglected environmental issues and played their role in discrediting traditional ways of building architectural structures as well as traditional urbanism. As a result the built environment lost its adaptability to natural environment as well as its human qualities. Thus a new approach to building and rethinking of the legacy of Modernism as well as current practices is urgently needed. Though the rise of environmental consciousness gave an impetus to reconsider present quality of built environment, more steps in this direction are required. Reconsideration of architectural and urban design practices could and should be triggered by the new findings in psychology, neuroscience as well as re-reading of pioneering work in architectural and urban theory done by Christopher Alexander and his co-workers and more recently revisited by Nikos Salingaros. Reasoning that the development of technology in itself can solve the problems of the built environment is deeply flawed and thus should be transcended.

The Usability Study of a Proposed Environmental Experience Design Framework for Active Ageing

Growing ageing population today may be necessitating building design decision makers to reconsider the indoor environmental quality (IEQ) standards in a way that accommodates senior occupants’ diverse and individual needs and demands. An experience design approach to rationalising and individualising end-user experience on how to utilise tangible products may serve to reflect user perceptions. Generally, architectural design practices tend to incorporate neither IEQ monitoring and analysis data, nor environmental experience design today. In response to the need for filling this gap, the authors of this paper conducted a feasibility study previously that led to structuring and defining an ‘Environmental Experience Design’ (EXD) research framework. Based on the previous case study on the collective spatial analysis and IEQ monitoring results, this paper further explored the usability and applicability of this proposed EXD framework particularly to the previously documented aged care facility in Victoria, Australia, which has been stressing active ageing agendas. This EXD framework usability experiment helped to build the capacity for engaging the subjectivity and objectivity of end users’ expectations, desires, and requirements in the architectural design thinking process. Nonetheless, due to the limitation of this initial and fundamental usability study’s resources and the objective, the necessity of adjusting the scale and scope of EXD analyses emerged. Moreover, the universality of this EXD research framework usage under various architectural typologies and user conditions yet require further attempts and investigations.

Communication in architectural practice and theory with reference to city of Ekaterinburg

The aim of the paper is to formulate scientific foundations for the effective functioning of communication in architectural design practice. More specifically, communication is considered in the context of the architectural process. Current relevance. The need for establishing interaction or communication between the architect, the customer, the user and other participants of the architectural process has arisen due to the changes in Russian society and modern-day Russian architectural and building construction legislation. The nature of interactions between the architect and authorization agencies has changed, the number of participants in the architectural process has increased, customers in the architectural and building process have become more diverse, and the procedures for obtaining authorizations for the design documentation have changed. Research methods. The article reviews actual design cases in Ekaterinburg and demonstrates essential points of conflict arising in the communication processes. From the perspective of architectural theory, the authors formulate fundamental concepts of communication, communicative processes and communicative space of the architectural and building process. An interdisciplinary approach to the problem helps to formulate the basic vectors of interactions in the architectural process as a communicative space. Main conclusions. The article presents the distinctive features of communication in the design practice of Ekaterinburg. The basic fundamental concepts of communication in the theory of architecture are defined.

Challenges and recommended practices for software architecting in global software development

ContextGlobal software development (GSD), although now a norm in the software industry, carries with it enormous challenges mostly regarding communication and coordination. Aforementioned challenges are highlighted when there is a need to transfer knowledge between sites, particularly when software artifacts assigned to different sites depend on each other. The design of the software architecture and associated task dependencies play a major role in reducing some of these challenges. ObjectiveThe current literature does not provide a cohesive picture of how the distributed nature of software development is taken into account during the design phase: what to avoid, and what works in practice. The objective of this paper is to gain an understanding of software architecting in the context of GSD, in order to develop a framework of challenges and solutions that can be applied in both research and practice. MethodWe conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) that synthesises (i) challenges which GSD imposes on software architecture design, and (ii) recommended practices to alleviate these challenges. ResultsWe produced a comprehensive set of guidelines for performing software architecture design in GSD based on 55 selected studies. Our framework comprises nine key challenges with 28 related concerns, and nine recommended practices, with 22 related concerns for software architecture design in GSD. These challenges and practices were mapped to a thematic conceptual model with the following concepts: Organization (Structure and Resources), Ways of Working (Architecture Knowledge Management, Change Management and Quality Management), Design Practices, Modularity and Task Allocation. ConclusionThe synthesis of findings resulted in a thematic conceptual model of the problem area, a mapping of the key challenges to practices, and a concern framework providing concrete questions to aid the design process in a distributed setting. This is a first step in creating more concrete architecture design practices and guidelines.

Machine learning for architectural design: Practices and infrastructure

In this article, we propose that new architectural design practices might be based on machine learning approaches to better leverage data-rich environments and workflows. Through reference to recent architectural research, we describe how the application of machine learning can occur throughout the design and fabrication process, to develop varied relations between design, performance and learning. The impact of machine learning on architectural practices with performance-based design and fabrication is assessed in two cases by the authors. We then summarise what we perceive as current limits to a more widespread application and conclude by providing an outlook and direction for future research for machine learning in architectural design practice.

TEACHING PARAMETRICISM AS A STANDARD SKILL FOR ARCHITECTURE

The traditional need for coding to create parametric design has become quite obsolete with the advent of powerful visual programming languages for most becoming architects of the current young generation that are studying all around the world. Parametricism might become one of the standard skills for applicants seeking for a position at architectural design practices. It raises a question – how to implement the parametric knowledge into the workflow of a classical architectural designing approach, and rethinking the way we present these concepts at university level education of architecture. Additional knowledge of subjects is necessary, for example, about the structural integrity, material tolerance, fabrication optimization, sustainability issues etc. just to name the most frequent areas where lies the highest potential of making mistakes when these new systems are in use. Meanwhile the CAD/CAM paradigm that let architects design straight for fabrication brings new challenge for construction practice. Parametricism is an excellent platform of research for form finding, as there is very little amount of time needed to recreate significantly different design proposals by changing the variables, as soon as the bigger system of internal relations is set up.

Giving Meaning to the Concept of Sustainability in Architectural Design Practices: Setting Out the Analytical Framework of Translation

The question of how to give meaning to the concept of sustainability in architectural design practices is highly contested today. Although architects, engineers, clients, politicians, and others seem to agree that sustainability must be addressed, behind this apparent consensus many ambiguities, contradictions, and open questions emerge. Opinions largely vary on how to define the sustainability challenges that architectural design is to respond to, how to align the various stakeholders involved, which scales and elements to consider, and how to transform these questions into design strategies, spatial configurations, and materiality of buildings. These practices cannot be confined merely to technological problem-solving as they essentially mesh a range of cognitive, social, cultural, and material elements. This article draws on the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) to set out the transferable analytical framework of ‘translation’ through which to explain how the concept of sustainability is continuously transformed within contingent, complex, and dynamic architectural design practices as buildings materialize. The framework of translation is particularly well adapted to unpack claims, make them more accountable, and thereby support the larger project of sustainability.

Approaching the architectural native: a graphical transcription method to capture sketching and gesture activity

As a research team without architectural training, we approached a total of 22 experienced architects and designers in order to investigate architectural design practice with an emphasis on human wayfinding. For the main study, eight informers developed circulation systems for a number of case studies. Our graphical transcription method allowed us to systematically investigate the sketching and gesture activity as is typical in design practice. Our analysis reveals the early design decisions of our informers and links them to priorities and the resulting design solutions. Regarding our method we can conclude that it is possible to gain insight into the concepts and work practices of a visual domain or profession, even for researchers untrained in that domain.