Bartlett School Research Articles

Every Dataset is a Canon

AbstractFor architects, the construction of a dataset for use in AI, whether imported from somewhere else or newly created, is fundamentally an epistemological canon of references, likes and preoccupations often predicated on the selection of so‐called masterpieces of Western art. The canon represents ideals of beauty and knowledge, but it also reflects a bias in favour of art created by those who have occupied the most socially, politically and economically powerful positions in culture. Mario Carpo, architectural historian, critic and Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, leads us through a succinct series of eras and architectural styles to demonstrate this fact and their lack of diversity.

Disruptive Ecologies: Design with Nonhuman Intelligences

AbstractIn the last decade, the B‐Pro post‐professional Architectural Design Master's programmes in Architectural Design (AD) and Urban Design (UD) at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London have developed innovative research delving into various aspects of design and digital technologies. Such preoccupations include biotechnology, computation and artificial intelligence, digital fabrication and robotics. Programme directors Roberto Bottazzi and Tyson Hosmer, and Theory Coordinator Mollie Claypool, illustrate some of its recent thought‐provoking work.

A Posthuman Architectural Artificial Intelligence Speculum? Text and Images in Future Spaces

AbstractThe long‐term research project Posthuman AIchitectural Speculations is a collaboration between Alberto Fernández González and Mark Garcia, both of whom are lecturers at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, and PhD candidates on the Architecture and Digital Theory programme there. Here they investigate how well artificial intelligence can help develop posthuman architectures and the symbiotic relationship between language and AI as a way of speculating about spatial futures.

On the Posthuman Charm of Slime and Mould

AbstractSlime moulds have no central nervous system and are single‐ cell organisms, yet they can build communities of themselves to create complex, food‐foraging cooperative networks. They are even known to solve mazes in search of something to eat. Mario Carpo, Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, explains the unique position of slime moulds in recent complexity and emergence studies.

Beyond Domesticities: Posthuman Architectures for Animals We Farm

AbstractEver more astounding numbers of animals are being farmed for human consumption. Paul Dobraszczyk, a lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, argues that humanity does not see or bother to comprehend the cruelty these animals are subjected to within industrialised farming processes and slaughterhouses. This, he says, is a design issue, requiring more effort to be made to give these animals a dignified life.

Introduction: Contributions and reflections on Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene

AbstractModern Heritage in the Anthropocene draws from a critical selection of the 54 papers presented at the second International MoHoA conference Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene, (October 26–28, 2022), hosted by The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, in partnership with the University of Liverpool's School of Architecture. The conference expanded MoHoA's aim of encouraging equitable approaches to modern heritage as an urgent and essential response to an age of planetary crises whose roots are entangled with centuries‐old culture of extraction, exploitation, and domination. Building on the lessons learned from the first MoHoA conference, Modern Heritage of Africa (2021), hosted by the University of Cape Town and the subject of an earlier special edition of Curator (65/July 3, 2022), this second conference emphasized the interconnection between these cultures and the dawn of the Anthropocene. Participants were asked to reflect on reconceptualized formulations of modern heritage and its entangled relationship with the planetary crises experienced, albeit unevenly and unequally, by all living and nonliving things. This paper assembles and reflects on the contributions of 18 peer‐reviewed papers that collectively demonstrate the range and depth of topics presented. In the spirit of equity, diversity, and inclusivity and in line with MoHoA's decentering, decolonizing, and reframing agenda, these have also been chosen to reflect the different contributors' experiences, from senior academics to young and early career professionals.

Introduction: MoHoA guest editorial

AbstractThis special edition of Curator on Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene draws on the 2nd International MoHoA conference of the same title held from October 26 to 28, 2022, at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UK), in partnership with the University of Liverpool's School of Architecture. As a global collaborative established in 2020, MoHoA is concerned with decentring the theory and practice of modern heritage and joins the wider global effort to decolonize institutional practices that engage with the research, collection, valorization, or transformation of material culture associated with our collective recent past—from museum curators and creative practitioners to academics, and the built environment professions. Founded on the fact that our precarious present reflects an inequitable past and a perilous future, MoHoA asserts that modern heritage—inextricably bound as it is to Western notions of progress, modernization, and modernity—conceptually, practically, and as artifact, uniquely and disproportionately privileges western, invariably white, experiences and values. Unlike other kinds or classifications of heritage, modern heritage also reflects the existential paradox central to MoHoA whereby the cultural legacies of our recent past are simultaneously of modernity and yet threatened by its consequences. Through its workshops, conferences, publications, and website, MoHoA provides a platform for sharing knowledge, methods, and approaches that challenge the modernist canon and support the construction of new epistemologies centered not on race, color, or ethnicity but on humankind and our self‐inflicted precarious position on this planet. This epistemic and canonical reconfiguration has important implications for museums and heritage practice globally as the reconstitution of modern heritage and its associated modes of knowledge production and registers will direct the composition of collections, lists, and archives away from mythologizing hegemonic Western epistemic traditions, to reflect instead decentred planetary experiences, whether human or non‐human. An important outcome of this collective and restitutive endeavor is the publication of The Cape Town Document on Modern Heritage, an equitable and decentering policy proposal presented to UNESCO and its advisory bodies in 2023.

“An African View”: The photography of Denise Scott Brown

AbstractThis article develops on the plenary paper we presented for the second Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene Symposium (MoHoA), held at the Bartlett School of Architecture(UCL) October 26–28, 2022. At the first MOHoA Symposium in Cape Town in 2021 titled Learning from Steinkopf, we invoked Learning from Las Vegas (by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izneour, published in 1972) to consider South African architect Roelof Uytenbogaardt's award‐winning 1975 Steinkopf Community Centre building in the desert in South Africa. In the process of this research we pay attention to Scott Brown's multiple contributions beyond architecture and urban design. In this article we explore the extraordinary complexity and complicity of the life and work of Denise Scott Brown through her photography. She was born, brought up and educated in Africa, after which the major part of her career was in the United States, where she is known and celebrated as a great American architect. Our article follows her life and career through a consideration not of her architectural interventions nor buildings, but of her photographs, which have become the subject of more recent attention. As a woman who photographed at a time when the global field was almost completely dominated by men, her practice as a photographer spans many decades across the African and North American continents. Documenting her projects and sites, her photographs were intended as teaching materials for use in her lectures on architecture, planning, landscape and art history. We suggest that, viewed differently, her photographs speak to questions of societal modernity and inequalities that are also informed by her southern African experiences. In the 1990s Scott Brown claimed, “I have an African's view of Las Vegas.” From our location as an architect and a photographer working in Africa now, in this research we learn from Scott Brown's Las Vegas, her images of the city and desert and her photographic archive.

Alternative Arrangements

Alternative Arrangements is a series of works that have emerged from my doctoral research at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. This practice-based research asks how architectures and landscapes of the contested border on the island of Éire (Ireland) tell the stories of its pasts and presents. It uses ‘topographic practice’ – a term I have been developing through the course of my PhD building on Jane Rendell’s ideas of ‘critical spatial practice’ (Rendell, 2006) – to unpack architectural and landscape historiography as a form of artistic output; seeing the methods, practices and outputs as sites themselves, ones that build a multi-layered topography – a landscape of practice – to respond the specific characteristics of each place. Here doing so through ‘bordering practices’ (Hafeda, 2019) that aim to break down the binary of the border.  This third and final project of the PhD consists of film, photography, site-specific installation, and texts to be read in association with key locations, histories, and materials of the border; which in the process of ‘alternative arrangement’ have become intentionally ‘polysituated’ (Kinsella, 2017). In each site these installations act as allegories to create an uncanny double-take that seek to reconfigure the power dynamics of the centre by engaging with architectures, landscapes, and histories of the periphery. My PhD research began with border in sight – both conceptually as an object of study and practically in the relentless early years of the Brexit process – but ending here with the border perhaps disappearing entirely, or at least creating the imaginative space for it to do so. 

Canvassing the Concept 2023. Architects in dialogue

Canvassing the Concept event took place in May 2023 in the form of a dialogue with presentations held by young London architecture graduates - in online format. The organization, script and moderation of the 4 sessions were managed by Matei Mitrache, architect and university assistant at Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL and University Westminster, London. The idea of these meetings - presentations was provided by the Educational Forum of Architecture and Urbanism - FEdAU - held within the "Ion Mincu" University of Architecture and Urbanism, a project promoting the connection of UAUIM with the international and national educational environment. Such manifestations seem to fit naturally into a mode of operation and education, in a world of excellence in communication. Starting from 2021, the organization of these events has periodically brought to attention of Mincu students the innovative experiences of fellow architects from the European space and beyond, as well as the experiments, concerns, successful studies surprised in original projects - a world of ideas, searches and research finally materialized in the concept. This year "Canvassing the Concept" hosted eight young architects, designers and researchers from London sharing different approaches to the creative process and how they managed possible solutions to various challenges in recent experiments.

Constructing Indeterminacy: A Détournement of Didactic Models

AbstractDrawing happens across space and time, and is action orientated by pen/pencil, inkjet or paint. The substrate that is drawn/marked on is also important, whether mylar, paper or sculptural instruments. Penelope Haralambidou explores her fellow Bartlett School of Architecture professor and office room‐mate Nat Chard's Instrument 10, part of a longstanding iterative drawing and representation project.

Making Rainbows: Landscapes for Negotiation

AbstractIn recent years, Bartlett School of Architecture Professor CJ Lim has become interested in eco‐cities and social equity. His contemporary work, however, is not imbued with the lack of style and abundant hubris so often seen when architects attempt to tackle these bigger issues. His drawings still have the graphic vitality for which he has become internationally known. Johannesburg‐based Sarah de Villiers peruses and comments on his speculation for a ‘Rainbow Community’.

Consistency in Change: Architecture for Optimistic Living

AbstractBeacons of inspiration for generations of architects, Peter Cook’s drawings often have similar but differently expressed architectural preoccupations. Concerned with transparency, time and change, they choreograph ‘growies’ or ‘veggies’ and a wealth of typologies and topologies. Bartlett School of Architecture and Architectural Association design tutor Ricardo de Ostos takes us through some of his recent work.

A Moving Grove: Our Climate Future and Its Branching Possibilities

AbstractMIT Professor and Head of Architecture there, Nicholas de Monchaux explores the recent forays of Bartlett School of Architecture professors Mark Smout and Laura Allen into forestry, regreening and ecology, for example their ‘Rescue Lines’ drawing/table project, conceived in conjunction with LA‐based critic Geoff Manaugh and presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021. De Monchaux's wide‐ranging exposition offers further thoughts on the nature of drawing relative to Smout Allen's work, with reference to the underwater forest made by the timber piles below Venice.

Design Research: The Next 500 Years

In contemporary discourse and practice it is familiar to discuss design research as if it is new to architecture. But this is to ignore the history of the architect. The Architectural Design doctorate is a comparatively new qualification; the first such programme in the United Kingdom was established at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, in the mid-1990s. But the methods and means of design research are not new. Indeed, they have been invaluable to the architect for over 500 years. Studying the history of practice as well as the history of architecture allows us to appreciate that architecture is not made by architects alone. The contemporary relevance of interdisciplinary research, which occurs within, between and across disciplines, indicates that the profession is but one model of practice and implies that others may be more rewarding. In this sense, the architectural design doctorate is a means to investigate and develop alternative models of practice and discourse, acknowledging an interdependent network of diverse – new and old – procedures, not simply because they are useful but because they have social and cultural value.

Evaluating Experiential Qualities of Historical Streets in Nanxun Canal Town through a Space Syntax Approach

Many studies have been conducted to measure the experiential qualities of historical streets using the standards and principles released by many global organizations. However, little attention has been paid to the effect of spatial characteristics of historical heritage. This study proposes a space syntax-based methodology, first developed by Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson with colleagues from the Bartlett School of Architecture, while introducing factors such as complexity, coherence, ‘mystery’, and legibility from the work of environmental psychologist Stephen Kaplan and the urban designer Gordon Cullen. Our intention is to help inform urban designers in understanding people’s spatial cognition of historical streets, and thereby assist designers and managers in identifying where cognitive experiences can be improved. The proposed method is applied to Nanxun, which is a developed canal town currently in decline in Zhejiang Province, China. This will be treated as the case study in order to explore the implication of the space syntax analysis. The impact from spatial characteristics on the evaluation is indirect and largely determined by the road-network of the canal town. As for Nanxun, the findings of this research suggest that the government’s priority is to solve current negative tourist perception based on a conservation restoration plan. The findings of this research provide a reference for policymakers to better understand the experiential qualities of historical streets in townscapes.

Making the Means to Draw Out Ideas

AbstractOne of the most radical MArch units at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London is Unit X25, fronted by Nat Chard, Professor of Experimental Architecture, and Emma‐Kate Matthews. Chard has longstanding preoccupations with modelling, strange points of view and optical machines. This often results in his pupils producing work that questions the status quo in architecture and the spatial assumptions on which it is based, resulting in spectacular propositions.

After the Strike? Part 1: The Transitional Space of the Picket Line

This essay explores the activities of strikers at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL over a 14 day-period in the early spring of 2018. These days were part of the 2018 University and College Union (UCU) Pension Strike, one of the largest strikes of university academics in recent times, which occurred over a 4-week period, with strike days increasing from two days in the first week, to five by the final week. This was a strike to protect the pensions of university workers as a defined benefit scheme rather than a defined contribution one. This essay is structured as a two-stranded diary, weaving together textual materials taken from the Strike chronicle and website produced at the time, with critical reflections written in the present, concerning the current state of the neo-liberal university, discussing issues relating to pensions – namely institutional critique, ethics and equity, labor and work, precarity and care.

After the Strike? Part 2: Solidarity In and Out

This is part two of the essay exploring the activities of strikers at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL over a 14 day-period in the early spring of 2018. These days were part of the 2018 University and College Union (UCU) Pension Strike, one of the largest strikes of university academics in recent times, which occurred over a four-week period, with strike days increasing from two days in the first week, to five by the final week. This was a strike to protect the pensions of university workers as a defined benefit scheme rather than a defined contribution one. This essay is structured as a two-stranded diary, weaving together textual materials taken from the Strike chronicle and website produced at the time, with critical reflections written in the present, concerning the current state of the neo-liberal university, discussing issues relating to pensions – namely institutional critique, ethics and equity, labor and work, precarity and care.

A Symbiotic Relationship: Reminiscences of the Family

AbstractArchitect Joe Morris was a student of Simon Allford and Paul Monaghan's design unit at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. After graduation he joined the still‐small practice and subsequently rose through the ranks before leaving to form his own architectural firm, Morris+Company, which has worked with AHMM on some large urban schemes.