Architectural Language Research Articles

Karaglukh Village, Nagorno-Karabakh: An Attempt at Revival through Traditional Architecture

This article describes an architect's self-funded attempts to revive the war-devastated Armenian village of Karaglukh. The project involved the building of five houses, an agricultural processing workshop, and a new church, along with the restoration of an old one. Both the architectural language and the construction techniques used were uncompromisingly traditional, employing local materials for continuity, connecting the old and the new and, most importantly, preserving the beauty of the landscape.

Exploring the Relationship Between Contemplative Spaces, Human Experience and Spiritual Architecture

To lead a fit and peaceful life, it has become very important to dwell in spaces that are contemplative and comforting. Space for contemplation can also lead the architect towards spiritual realms. The current era can be described as tumultuous, changeable, and unsettled. Rapid urbanisation and extreme intensification are being accompanied by technical advancements and a push for sustainability. Traditional architecture was often purpose-built with little care for adapting to new users, various purposes, or changing conditions down the road. Today, however, it is suggested that building flexibility is urgently required due to climate change, changing demographics, resource depletion, and affordability issues. It is believed that architecture in the twenty-first century must approach similar levels of flexibility and adaptability for a variety of reasons, one of which being the mental health and spiritual connection of the user. Rather than deconstructing structures to fill landfills, our architecture should be designed to be disassembled, reassembled, and reused in order to generate spaces of contemplation. There can be various ways in which architecture can bring out such spaces. It can be a garden oasis in urban land crowded with buildings, a small skylight in a dark space, framing a window to form a vista. Which language of architecture has to be used to create contemplative space depends upon for whom the space is being designed. The current study is the result of extensive literature reviews in the fields of contemplative architecture and spirituality. The focus of this paper is to study the impact of physical surroundings and architectural structures on leading a healthy lifestyle. Different spaces can be designed which connect the user to themselves in a deeper way by proposing a space where they have freedom to think or meditate and feel the present moment. People suffering from depression or stress can benefit from such contemplative spaces.

Verbal Communication with the Patient Is Not Enough: The Six Languages of the Sick.

Evidence shows that verbal communication is just one of the ways patients indicate their wishes. For a sufficiently careful communication, we should also grasp other five unusual though evident languages: (a) body language, (b) the way patients manage their environment, (c) unconscious language, (d) lab-evidenced language, and (e) the way they master technology. So, we have six languages that should be intertwined to understand the real language of the sick. Grasping these languages helps health professionals frame the patient's mood, their level of suffering or mental growth, and understand what words alone cannot express. Words cannot express completely what a patient senses: for subjection, shyness, because some patients are still non-verbal or because verbal communication is just a useful way of freezing concept but has not the same fluidity and liberty of the other above-described languages. It is mandatory for caregivers to wonder how many of these languages they are actually decrypting during an interview with the patient. On the other hand, caregivers unconsciously communicate much through two unexpected languages: the architectural language and the language of medical procedures. The way they welcome or obstruct the patient, their hesitations across a treatment, or in showing a serene collegiality are forms of subtle communication. A paradigmatic scenario where all these languages should be implemented is the "informed consent" process, which should be turned into a "shared therapeutic pathway", summing up all the communicative modes illustrated in the text.

NEOECLECTICISM – OTHER MODERNISM OF THE 1930s

Neoeclecticism was one of the stylistic trends of the interwar architecture. It was based on the classical architectural language and especially flourished in the 1930s parallel with the then dominant Modern movement. Roots and development of this stylistics in different countries and in Latvia are studied in the article, and its innovative nature in the context of Modern movement is analysed. Historical place of Neoeclecticism and its value in the cultural heritage is identified. All figures in the text are photographs by the author, unless stated otherwise.

Methodology of Classifying and Characterising Architectural Styles of Malay Classical Buildings

This study attempts to classify and characterise Malay aristocratic architectural styles through the elements and language of its frontages as the guidance of designing, conserving, and identifying Malay rules and languages. It is vital to recognise, bridge and restructure the Malay architectural language, which ruptured historically because of the impact of colonialism. The focus is to find visual and formal similarities distributed within a specific common region of the Malay world which span the years of colonisation between the 1700s to 1930, and overcome the enormous diversity of this typology and phenomena across the region and eras. The historical and cultural mapping of 60 palaces and aristocratic buildings were conducted to classifies the architectural styles based on the visual, language and typological similarities. The studies then argue that the hybrid forms found in the later eras of colonisation represent the Malay stylistic categories. This study aims to identify a standard set of rules or vocabulary that can aid regionally appropriate design and appreciation of the palaces studied through field observations, measured drawings, and surveys of regional palatial and mansion types. This vocabulary will prove helpful to designers, preservationists, conservationists, heritage agencies, historians, academics, and architects. The findings will contribute to developing a formal taxonomy of style that spans traditional to modern and contributes to defining the ‘generic’ and the ‘variant’ in a classification based on archetypes. This can be the initial reference for developing the identity-making of future urbanscape with the essences of the traditional Malay world.

DOOML: A New Database & Object-Oriented Modeling Language for Database-Driven Web Application Design and Development

A database driven web application is a very common software solution to rising business problems. Modeling the database and the software architecture can be challenging, hence there not being one combined modeling language for database and software architecture, specifically suited for web application development. In this paper we present Database object-oriented Modeling Language (DooML) and its primary Archetype Diagram: a notation for specifying the design of a database schema and corresponding object-oriented software architecture. It combines the syntax for drawing Entity Relationship Diagrams, the Relational Model and Universal Modeling Language Class Diagrams as well to create a mixed diagram, stating database design as well as software design specifications. By default, DooML ensures that the approach of advanced web application development is model-driven and both database-oriented as well as object-oriented.

Performance analysis of Laravel and Yii2 frameworks based on the MVC architectural pattern and PHP language

The subject of this paper is the performance analysis of two PHP programming frameworks in the latest versions - Laravel 9.6 and Yii 2.0.45. It was carried out with the help of test applications prepared for this purpose, which have identical functionalities: they generate all prime numbers from a given range and create a book ranking system based on CRUD operations. The request handling time of each application was used as a comparison criterion. To check the performance, dedicated debugbars - bottom bars displaying information about the executed request - were used. The results obtained after the tests showed that in terms of performance, Laravel is a better technology than Yii for building web applications.

Pacific Man – A Future Speculation Developed from Pacific Architectonics

Characterised by flexible joints and renewable use of materials, Pacific Architecture contains an integrated tectonic system that is historically used to construct both buildings and highly efficient watercrafts, enabling civilizations to flourish in Oceania. However, its significant architectural languages are widely dismissed in today’s utilitarian society. Witnessed in museum, cultural faculties and resorts, Pacific Architecture is often perceived as a cultural artefact that lacks of practical application. As a celebration of Pacific Architecture, the paper aims to discover how tectonics and construction systems from the Pacific could be revived, radically developed and utilised to accommodate “Future Pacific Living” in the rapidly changing world. Through a collective of speculative architectural propositions, the paper proposes alternatives to the existing postcolonial built environment while fully embracing future technologies. The first part of the paper is a review of the author’s past project ‘The Lomipeau Speculation’, a macro-scale visionary proposal to conceive of a city formed by Pacific tectonics. The second part, Pacific Men, is a narrative developed from the past project, exploring how Pacific Architecture can re-define humans’ relationship with the Ocean at a micro-scale. The speculation will be presented through architectural drawings with references to ekistic units.

Transcultural Dwelling. Japan’s Pioneer Architect Miho Hamaguchi and her last Project in Spain

Miho Hamaguchi (1915-1988) was the first woman to be a licensed architect in Japan. A pioneer in domestic design during the postwar period, she built and consulted on thousands of houses throughout her prolific career. However, she is a little-known figure both in Japan and in the international debate. Her representation in architectural historiography is limited to her influence on kitchen design, but her writings and work go far beyond. Hamaguchi's legacy is one of bold residential architecture that embodied democratic ideas in spatial configurations. She promoted the house as a fundamental tool for gender equality, leaving behind a feudal and patriarchal system. At the end of her career, she found in Costa del Sol the perfect place to carry out a residential project as a cultural exchange. "Kaiyo Club" became a set of three houses since the first design in 1974 until the subsequent extensions were completed in 1987. Throughout its different stages, the project shows a striking Spanish-Japanese transfer where different architectural languages coexist. The white-walled exterior dialogues with the vernacular, while its interior unfolds Japanese patterns with tatami-floored rooms or ofuro-style bathrooms. These dwellings present a unique hybrid materialization, displaying Hamaguchi's design from a humanistic stance, blending of locally rooted modernist spatial principles and reinterpreted traditions.

Computation for Architecture, hybrid visual and textual language: Research developments and considerations about the implementation of structural imperative and object-oriented paradigms

In the fourth industrial revolution, programming promises to be a fundamental subject like mathematics, science, languages ​​or the arts. Architects design more than buildings developing innovative methods and they are among the pioneers in visual programming development. However, after more than 10 years of visual programming in architecture, despite the fast-learning curve, visual programming presents considerable limitations to solve complex problems. To overcome limitations, the authors propose to associate the advantages of visual and textual languages in Python. The article addresses an ongoing research study to implement Computational Methods in Architectural Education. The authors began by describing the general goal of this project, and of this article in particular. This article focuses on the implementation of two disciplines ‘Computation for Architecture in Python’ I and II. The first discipline uses programming based on the construction of functions in the imperative language, implemented in the text editor, in visual programming, using Grasshopper methods. The second discipline, which is under development, intends to teach object-oriented programming. The results of the first discipline are encouraging; despite reported difficulties in programming fundamentals, such as lists, loops and recursion. The development of the second discipline, in object-oriented programming, deals with the concepts of classes and objects, and more abstract principles such abstraction, inheritance, polymorphism or encapsulation. This paradigm allows building robust programs, but requires a more in-depth syntax. The article reports this ongoing research on this new paradigm of object-oriented language, expanding the application of a hybrid visual-textual language in Architecture.

Search of Contemporaneity in New Mosques: The Case of Bosnia and Herzegovina

The architecture of the contemporary mosque is a popular form of self-expression in Muslim communities. Many societies, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, are divided over the mosque-style dilemma. Today's understanding of mosque architecture is quite varied. Some architects, as well as the vast majority of Muslims, believe that new mosques should always be modeled after popular historic styles. A smaller number of architects and others see the mosque as a modern concept devoid of the past. Yet the number of modern designs in newly constructed mosques is significantly lower. Given that the sources of Islam do not contain strict instructions on mosque design, there is no reason to design a mosque today in the styles of the past. The architectural vocabulary of a contemporary mosque should express the present while adhering to universal Islamic principles. In that sense, contemporary architectural language will best express the cultural identity of Muslim communities. A contemporary mosque, on the other hand, will emphasize the fundamental values of Islamic architectural history in this way.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF CONTEMPORARY POLISH LIBRARIES SELECTED PROJECTS

Purpose of the article - Technologies, materials and current trends are the elements that influence design and architectural language. They shape the face of objects created in accordance with new perceptions of the functionality of architecture, including contemporary libraries, which, while remaining part of the culture industry, must have an appropriately designed and arranged space. Multifunctionality is now a unique feature of architecture, which allows libraries to implement a variety of projects. The final shape depends on the architect's comprehensive view of a given space, and projects commissioned in the 21st century are the best example of this. The objects described herein are not exclusively new constructions, but also those that have been modernized or adapted. The competition designs, which express the architects' visionary imaginings of the future, are also important for getting to know the perceptions of modern libraries. Delving into their architectural form and design will allow us to understand them and set the direction in which their design should go. Research methods - Architectural literature, technical and design documents, photos, competition designs, and the content of websites of individual institutions contributed to the source materials, which were the basis for describing their history. The analysis of the above made it possible to indicate the changes that have occurred since the beginning of the 21st century in the field of design.Results and conclusions - Contemporary libraries, being carriers of material and non-material values, are an area of ​​strong influence on the user, who is invited to explore on many levels. Their modern architecture further deepens these feelings. An architect who wants to create an excellent library, regardless of whether it will be a university library or a facility dedicated to local communities, must plan it so that users experience positive emotions while inside. Only then will the library be not only a place of practical development, but also a place for dialogue and the exchange of experiences. It is also worth remembering that libraries, being part of the municipal infrastructure, turn good cities into great ones, creating the reality of its surroundings. The library space is a constantly developing fabric, a network of connections, which, if properly designed, can have a positive impact on the lives of the inhabitants.

Contemporary architectures of production in South Tyrol

When the German-speaking community of South Tyrol regained the ability to manage the provincial territory, action was taken on the economic reprogramming of the area, favoring a widespread development. At the same time, the region’s capital city lost its interest, its economic growth came to a sudden stop and the local productive settlements began to spread across the main valley floors. Instead of having companies of extra-local origin build large industrial complexes in this territory, South Tyrolean administrators wanted to privilege small artisan businesses already present in the territory, which have now become leaders in production and export. Until the 1970s, the local economy mainly relied on subsistence farming; during the last fifty years, however, the manufacturing industry has evolved significantly, and family-run companies have become well-known production centers. Moreover, the agricultural sector and, more widely, the food industry, far from having been abandoned, continue to represent the leading sectors of the South Tyrolean economy. The architectural language intertwines with the development of the local industrial sector at a time when – perhaps in the wake of design competitions for large provincial public buildings – even private clients have started to understand the importance of making their production sites iconic. Thus, they have become true marketing assets for the brand image of the companies and contribute to building the South Tyrolean landscape as we see it today.

Architectural analysis of the colonial-era Algiers synagogues

ABSTRACT The synagogues built in Algiers after 1830 show the changes the Jewish community underwent during the occupation. Moreover, the synagogues reflect a contrast between the colonial administration’s attempt to achieve monumentality and the Moorish architectural language. Based on unpublished archival documents, this article explores the influence of the historical and social contexts of the time on architectural choices.

MOHOA. A Lesson in Sustainability Given by Modern Heritage in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: The Sacred Architecture of Paul Dequeker

AbstractThe Tropical Modernism that spread in the sub‐Saharan Africa, consigning to history many ancient architectural artifacts and practices. The Democratic Republic of the Congo preserves some precious examples of tropical architecture that were realized before and after independence. The aim of this paper is to examine this heritage and the sustainability already embedded in the language of tropical architecture, and its application in the design process through analyzing quintessential instances of Paul Dequeker's work, in particular his sacred architecture. Six projects in DR Congo are presented: King Christ Church, St. Anthony I Church, St. Luke Church, St. Augustine Church, St. Anthony II Church and St. Raphaël Church. This research explores each case study through a qualitative method analyzing, first, historical documents relating to their conception as architectural projects, and second, as part of an African modern heritage that needs to be classified, studied, and protected. Moreover, the analysis focuses on the tropical details and features characterizing the architectural artifacts.

Ariadne's Weaving in the Musical-Visual Field

Recognition and reflection of the radially structured semantic intertextual raster in the opera Ariadne auf Naxos Op. 60 by Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, are the goals of this paper, with the awareness that ‘reading’ of this complex textual amalgam cannot be comprehensive and that this is only one of the possible ways of looking at different languages, their texts, and relationships in which they come in, with the emphasis on the connection between the music and architectural texts. The focus is to spot some of the paths in this specific music-scenic maze. The recognition of the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ opera house implies the withdrawal of the parallels between the music-dramatic and the architectural level. The concept of ‘opera within the opera’ is simultaneously present in the musical-dramatic sphere (opera Ariadne in opera Ariadne auf Naxos) and in the architectural sphere (opera/residential house in the opera house). By concurring with the different meaning of the word ‘opera’ which it has in the music-drama (opera as a musical-drama work) and architectural language (opera as an architectural object), we carry out the terms meta-opera ‘per square’ (‘metaopera’) and meta-opera ‘per cube’ (‘metaopera’).

Modern and Contemporary Architecture Between Western and Arab Countries: A Review of Derivative Synonyms

The most common approaches to contemporary architecture are described as 'modern', yet the terms 'modern' and 'contemporary' possess different contextual weights, resulting in a difference in terminological synonymy. This research examines the phenomenon that emerged in the late twentieth century, processes its conflicts, and describes several interrelated implications for understanding modernity and contemporariness. This research discusses the confusion between contemporary and modernist architectural representation by analyzing Western and Arab visions. Furthermore, it explores the study with inductive logic that takes an analytical turn to analyze, compare, and explore the real causes of the problem. The research also aims to analyze the impact of modernism, the semantic evolution of 'modernity', and our arrival to the contemporary, considering neoliberalism and globalism. The research concluded that separating the idiomatic language from the architectural language is necessary. Furthermore, it found that contemporary ended as an architectural style and continued as a cultural movement.

El Assembly Hall at Brunswick Park de James Stirling como síntesis de la búsqueda de un lenguaje

In a context marked by the beginning of post-modernism, Manfredo Tafuri wrote in 1974 the article “ L'Architecture dans le Boudoir: The Language of Criticism and the Criticism of Language ”. Faced with the exhaustion of the linguistic repertoire of Modern Architecture, he identifies the work of James Stirling as an exemplary exercise for the recovery of architectural language. In this article we hypothesize that the work Assembly and dining hall for Brunswick Park Primary School, London 1958-1961 by James Stirling and James Gowan, it is a kind of Proto architecture that synthesizes the previous work of Stirling and fixes all the elements that he will repeat in their well-known buildings of the 60s. Consulting his early writings and Stirling's “Black notebook”, we propose to base ourselves on the theory of The Four Elements of Architecture by Gottfried Semper to defend that the new grammatical structure proposed by Stirling begining from a review of these elements, “signs empty of content” in the words of Tafuri, to reconstruct from them the linguistic structures of the language of modernity.

The Art and Architecture of Victor Bohm (1900–1981)

The art and architecture of modernist architect and architectural theorist Victor Bohm (Bőhm Viktor, Böhm Viktor) are rare examples of modernism. At the same time, they were unusual for a provincial city—Miskolc (Hungary)—far from the modernist hub Budapest. Bohm worked in Miskolc during the 1930s, created numerous extraordinary buildings and shaped the skyline of this industrial town. He emigrated to the United States in 1939. The architectural language of his Hungarian designs followed modernist trends, a tendency less evident in his American projects. His buildings received architectural awards, and he has become known as a designer of medical and commercial buildings. He was a pioneer in the study of the relationship between architecture and psychology and sought to understand how an architectural design affects people and how the architect’s identity is manifested in their works. None of Bohm’s Hungarian buildings are protected; most of his buildings in Miskolc were demolished. The present study attempts to preserve his modernist, Hungarian legacy.

Architectural language of the Southern Fujianese traditional Chinese temple timber frame structure in West Malaysia: a cultural semiotics analysis

PurposeThis paper examines the relationship between traditional timber frame structure and the diasporic identity of the Southern Fujianese Chinese community in West Malaysia. It analyses the cultural semiotics of Southern Fujianese traditional Chinese temple timber frame structure architectural language. This study addresses the under-examined domain of Chinese cultural identity representation through the architecture of traditional Chinese temples in Malaysia. It seeks to understand its underlying structure and process involved in revealing its disposition within the cultural phenomena from the perspective of Chinese cultural semiotics.Design/methodology/approachSelected Southern Fujianese traditional Chinese temples in West Malaysia built between the 18th to the 19th century that retain the traditional timber frame structure were investigated through field survey and focused publication review. Historical interpretive analysis and typological analysis supplement the cultural semiotics analysis to assess the timber frame structure attributes concerning architectural language expressions.FindingsFindings reveal that the architectural language signifiers of the structural disposition of the timber framework and its corresponding formal articulation establish a clear statement of the Southern Fujian Chinese cultural identity.Originality/valueThe evaluation of the cultural identity signifiers helps to understand the underlying structure and process of the Chinese cultural semiotics in architecture. Results of this research substantiate the significance of timber frame structure in preserving the architectural heritage of the Southern Fujianese traditional Chinese temples. They provide important references for conservation and cultural studies of such building typology.