The presentation discussed Jörn Janssen’s theoretical and pedagogical efforts to analyse architecture from a Marxist-Leninist perspective in the early 1970s. Janssen scientifically situated architecture in the socio-economic dynamics of capitalist development, and examined it as an instrument of profit accumulation and workers’ exploitation. This understanding allowed him and his students to develop a clear agenda, aiming, to unveil the opposition between capital and labour at the core of every capitalist building; and to demonstrate that only revolutionary change could address this structural contradiction and liberate architecture from being an instrument of class exploitation.

Over the last 4 years I have held public events in galleries and museums where architectural themes and ideas have been displayed, narrated and discussed. In the presentation I describe some of these events, and how they were both a representation of traditional research, and also generators of new architectural knowledge co-produced through engagement with the public.

This paper was presented at the AHRA 2024 international conference, Body Matters (session: Contained Bodies). It critically revisited the history of London’s ‘tube shelters’ as a means of addressing the condition of civilians in the age of aerial warfare. By reappraising the transformation of the London Underground into a mass shelter during the Blitz, the paper highlighted the role of human experience, agency and resistance in the production of space.

This lecture explores the unique qualities that made Aalto furniture so appealing to architects and the public in London, the actors and agents involved in promoting it, such as Laszló Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Read and Philip Morton-Shand, how Finmar became the model for the Aaltos when they later set up Artek in Helsinki, and how furniture became the basis for the enduring connection between Finnish and British architecture.

This article discusses women as architectural clients through an examination of Roman Catholic nuns as patrons, designers and in some cases builders of religious architecture. The paper offers two case studies to explore the roles that women assumed in religious communities: the first, a chapel commissioned and built by a community of Carmelite nuns in Wales during the 1950s and the second, a recently completed abbey in the North of England. The examples highlight the evolution of female agency in the built environment and how this has been impacted by the professionalisation of architecture.

The starting point for this Special Issue of Architecture and Culture was a conference hosted by the University of Westminster in association with the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in 2019, entitled “Spiritual Sacred Secular: The Architecture of Faith in Modern Britain.” While the conference focused on Britain, we were aware of an important gap in the literature on global faith spaces in late modernity, and sought to explore it through a collection of written papers. The contributions to this issue have been selected to highlight the wide diversity of methods and practices used to read faith spaces.

The article explores the evolution of architectural and urban theory in the wake of the 1960s politicisation of the architecture faculties of TU Berlin and ETH Zürich. Focusing on Oswald Mathias Ungers, Jörn Janssen, and their students, it examines a symposium, an exhibition, and a seminar that shaped divergent perspectives on architectural theory.

In the UK, as in countries across the world, former cinemas have been widely reused as places of worship. While there has been some research into the reuse of cinemas as churches, there has been little work on the broad repurposing of this building type for different faith groups. This article considers the way that buildings offer a snapshot of faith and society in the twenty-first century and reveals the extent to which religious adherence is, in fact, growing in many of Britain’s cities.

Feature article on research findings from the project ‘Moving pictures: reusing cinemas as places of worship in the diaspora.’

As Liverpool’s Birkenhead Park is placed on the UK government’s Tentative List for consideration as a World Heritage site, this article explores the park’s important global role as a pioneer in public park provision. It demonstrates the design lineage with Central Park, New York City, and confirms the bold assertion that “without Birkenhead Park there would be no Central Park, and without Central Park there would be no New York City.” The article explores how the scale and concept of such historic parks is still relevant to contemporary life, especially in urban responses to climate change.

In a journal issue dedicated to ‘Landscapes for Living’, this article argues for the role of pocket parks as part of green space provision for urban housing. The article explores two important modernist pocket parks – influential Paley Park in New York City, created via philanthropy, and Crabtree Fields in central London – a park forged through the power of community activity.

This Open Access anthology examines how photobooks have variously been deployed to read, analyse and interpret cities through curated sequences of images – often in conjunction with literary or critical texts. Stemming from an urban history conference that was held in Bologna, a broad range of illustrated essays shed light on this particular genre of publication. The contents are organised into four sections: framing modernities; urban imaginaries; visual journeys; and politics of representation.

In books such as The Eyes of the Skin, architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa posits unmediated sensual encounters as the site of authentic engagement with the built environment. Such ideas, derived from phenomenology are very prevalent in architectural discourse today. In this article, I show that they are also highly problematic. Pallasmaa’s arguments are shown to be politically naive and philosophically unsound though analyses of works by Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe. Drawing on philosophical, historical and neuroscientific sources, the article posits an alternative, rationalist account of architectural experience in which the intellect and the senses are entwined.

This conference paper explored whether a current trend for white interiors suggests new directions in the social and religious cultures of Christianity. To examine this, the paper discussed three recently refurbished churches in London as case studies, through which to explore these questions: St John-at-Hackney; St Augustine’s, Hammersmith.

This seminar explored the value of social and cultural theory as a means to understand the history of the of the estate.It drew on Bourdieu’s schema of habitus that connects individual practices within a wider field of play that encompasses estate management, public health and urban regeneration. The seminar also engaged with the concept of the geo-body, unpacking the relationship between map demarcations, and the territorial quarantining of things, people and relations to be either valued and kept, or eviscerated, as well as the production of emptiness as a starting point for the production of community, and the doxa of slum clearance, urban renewal, and estate regeneration.

Public toilet provision in the UK fails to meet the needs of cis women while trans communities are absent from current building regulations. This research explores how individuals negotiate differing positions on toilet provision and accessibility. The data were formed of online posts on Dezeen, a forum for building design professionals, and Mumsnet, a parenting forum, in response to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government “Technical review on increasing accessibility and provision of toilets for men and women”. Discursive psychology was used to explore how accessibility to toilets is constructed.

The editorial board of Vesper: Journal of Architecture, Arts and Theory is going to hold a panel discussion with writers and critics to launch their ninth issue: ‘The Adversary’ (Vesper is published in English and Italian by the Iuav University of Venice). The event is organised by the Westminster Law & Theory Lab in collaboration with the Architectural Humanities Research Group.

The event will be in room MG14, Marylebone Hall, at 18:00. Drinks reception to follow. Registration via Eventbrite. All welcome.

Davide Deriu’s photo-essay, ‘On the Edge’, inaugurates the new web issue published by the Canadian Centre of Architecture (CCA), which focuses on how different measures and regulations ensure or prevent safety in our built environment. The piece weaves together a series of photographs from the CCA collections that feature protective barriers such as handrails and parapets. It revisits prominent place in the canon of Western architectural history in order to explore how photographs can visualise the tense state of being on the edge. By disrupting the logic of the archive, the essay draws on the indeterminate character of fragments to provoke new insights and interpretations.

The 13th METU Architectural History Graduate Symposium was held in Ankara on December 21-22, 2023, and explored multiple interconnections between health and architectural and environmental histories. At this symposium, Davide Deriu delivered a keynote lecture (online) based on his recent book, On Balance: Architecture and Vertigo. The talk was the closing event of the programme and was followed by a lively Q&A session.

The paper was delivered as the inaugural lecture at the 8th International Conference on Contemporary Religious Architecture: The Client.

In his polemical tract, The Present State of Ecclesiastical Architecture in England published in 1843, AWN Pugin condemned the ‘vogue’ for whitewashed church interiors that had characterised Protestant iconoclasm: for him, the return to colour and darkness was an indispensable backdrop to the reawakening of ritual, tradition and the sacred. In 19th-century Christian theologies, colour (or the lack of it) was profoundly important: no decorative scheme was ever applied without considering the religious implications. The long history of whiteness as a trope in Christian visual culture has been well documented but little attention has been paid to its meaning in late modernity. In the 21st century, whiteness is understood as a polyvalent and freighted concept, bearing implications that reach beyond the religious and into secular critical discourses. In this essay, I explore the contemporary vogue for whiteness as a motif in church architecture, focusing on its political and cultural significance in relation to the decline of traditional Christian worship and the rise of ‘believing without belonging’.

What is the proper relationship between architecture and language? How does the way this relationship, as it is currently construed, allow or constrain architecture’s capacity to address the fundamental political and environmental crises of our time? Where does the uniquely human activity of producing architectural experience sit in relation to current conceptions of our relationship to nature as informed by science? Part of a wide-ranging research project, these are some of the questions examined in a book proposal, putatively entitled Against Poetics – On Architecture and Language, to be discussed at this research seminar.