Category: Scientific Study

The critical potential of “total installations”— the logic of Ilya KabakovThis paper focuses on the analysis of the installation Ten Characters by Ilya Kabakov, as this artwork is considered as a crucial instance in interpreting Soviet narratives and figures as a metaphor for life in the Soviet Union. The paper shows that Kabakov draws attention […]

Context in the Works of Nikola Dobrović on the Territory of Herceg Novi

In the conditions of current globalization trends, the creation of a new European political and spatial context and the expression of regional cultural differences, a need has emerged to redefine cultural and urban identity. Spatial-cultural identity is particularly strong in settings enriched by a recognisable geo-climate and cultural and built heritage such as the Adriatic […]

The New Bratislava of Josef Marek

The study represents the urban-planning work of the relatively unknown Moravian-born architect Josef Marek, a pupil of Jan Kotěra and a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. During his years in Slovakia after 1919 up until the end of the 1950s, Marek created an entire series of urban plans, though the form […]

The Czech Discourse on Regional Planning Between 1945 and 1948

The study focuses on the peak period of Czech regional planning during the short-lived postwar Czechoslovak democracy (between 1945 and 1948). The author examines the attitudes of leading actors of the debate about regional planning, and discusses how their concepts corresponded with the immediate rhetoric of ongoing political, social and economic transformation. Among the leading […]

The Urban Space of the Migrant Crisis: Analysis of the Spatial Evolution of an Informal Transit Camp in Budapest’s Historic City Centre

From June till September 2015, Baross Square in front of Budapest’s Keleti Railway Station became the temporary living area for thousands of refugees and migrants travelling to Western Europe. This unconventional use of one of the busiest squares in the historic centre gave rise to a new perception of the existing environment. The paper aims […]

Microbial Ecologies Exploring Industrial Hemp Behaviour under Artificial Climates (Growing Apparatus)

Microbial Ecologies (ME) is proposing a speculative scenario in which is able to explore new robotic fabrication processes as a framework for investigating the generation of bio-artificial systems. These systems allow us to regenerate polluted and eroded terrains, protect the soil from farther erosion and encourage healthy plant growth using interconnected 3D fibre systems.

Material Moods: Material and Algorithms

The introduction of emergence theory in architecture nearly 10 years ago rapidly changed the field of digital architecture towards process-oriented design. The functioning process of algorithms shifts the designer’s approach to the field away from the modeling (copying) of forms toward their generating. As designers no longer fully control the final shape, the computer and […]

The Smooth Striped City

The main aim of urban design should be to provide as elastic a plan as possible. This plan should define private and public space and allow its users the maximum possibilities and freedom to build. We seek such tools and methods that would be elementary but also sophisticated, which using only a few rules could […]

From Architecture and Construction to the Planning of Autonomous Processes, Systems and Structures

Studio FLO│W at the Faculty of Architecture of the Czech Technical University in Prague holds the belief that a digitally-driven architecture should be flexible, interactive and adaptable. The digital revolution, together with the development of new advanced materials, has principally changed the way of planning, directing, controlling and building constructions. Through the creative engagement of […]

The Project “Learning by Doing” at FA CTU

Can you learn architecture without direct experience? In recent years, attention has been paid to the idea of “design-build” projects at schools of architecture, the methodology of which makes it possible to bring students to the reality of architectural practice differently than the simply mediated. Students have the opportunity to create a proposal for a […]

Behind the Glitch: Research by Digital Drawing in Contemporary Architecture Education

This work examines the epistemological and creative potential of analytical drawing in architecture, reinvented in the age of computation. The immediate object of survey involvesthe drawings produced within different type of courses at the University of Belgrade’s Faculty of Architecture: an introductory theoretical course for Bachelor’s studies, a design teaching studio at the Master’s degree […]

Wall Curtain On the Idea of Soft within the Digital and Fabrication Realms

The project Wall Curtain tests the properties of the soft in the real and computational worlds. Both territories influence and teach each other. The textile techniques are virtually simulated in order to create an object: a new, complex and well-informed soft layer of an interior. This enclosure fills the imaginary gap in between our bodies […]

Aspects and Appearances of Mathematisation in Architecture from the Standpoint of Christopher Alexander’s Theory

This text forms a response to the crucial changes occurring in the architecture design process during the 1990ties and the post-millennial era. This radical transition, shifting from the analogue design principle to the digital processes through new technological possibilities, is changing the key conceptual apparatus of the architecture of 21st century. Searching for answers to […]

Interactive Buildings: The Case for Interaction Narratives

In this position paper, we present the results of ongoing theoretical investigation into the phenomenon of “interactive architecture.” Interaction in architecture deals with the meaningful exchange of information and physical acts between building and person. Beyond responsive systems like automated doors, shading systems, and so on, most examples of interactive architecture are technological explorations that […]

New Argumentation for the Digital Paradigm

It has again become necessary to argue for the conceptual novelty and potential of digital design to emerge a relevant moment in the history of architecture. We are conducting research into design and fabrication tools with a generative capacity – i.e., the possibility to create during the manufacturing process. A multitude of agents enters the […]

The Greater Bratislava of Architects Alois Balán and Jiří Grossmann

The declaration of Bratislava as Slovakia’s capitol opened a new chapter in its urban development. In reflecting on the new city, a significant contribution was made by the visions of architects Alois Balán and Jiří Grossmann, as the only ones consistently presenting the urban program of Greater Bratislava. The present study presents the intellectual genesis […]

Bohuslav Fuchs’s “New Zoning”

This article deals with a remarkable yet little-explored topic in the history of Czech urban and regional planning: the work of the well-known architect and urban planner Bohuslav Fuchs. The article focuses mainly on the post-war period, especially the 1960s, and on Fuchs’s devotion to “New Zoning”, the context in which his urban and regionalist […]

Tracking Contemporary Streetscape Transformation Processes – Two Case Studies from Slovenia

This paper examines the transformation processes of city streets that have until recently been characterised by intense motor traffic, but which are currently undergoing, or are scheduled for, transformation into more people-friendly and high-quality urban environments, supporting the goals of sustainable mobility. The paper aims to track recent streetscape transformation processes in two selected examples […]

White, Everything White? Josef Frank’s Villa Beer in Vienna and Its Materiality in the Context of the Discourse on ‘White Cubes’

A recent conservation-science study of the materials used in the construction of Josef Frank’s main work, the Villa Beer (1930) in Vienna-Hietzing, and of the building’s surfaces was an opportunity to find evidence indicating whether the contemporary description of the wall color as a noncolor white corresponded to physical reality. The notion “Weiss, alles Weiss” […]

Skopje’s Transitions and the City’s Struggle to Preserve Collective Memories

Skopje underwent many changes to its urban environment, caused by different factors both human and natural. Due to these impacts the community’s responses have ranged from deeply personal to collective mobilization of attachment that erupted during some periods of rapid change. After the big changes that occurred after the 1963 earthquake and the dissolution of […]

Sarajevo´s Modernist Olympic Ruins – A Future for the Vanishing Past?

In 1984 the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) organized the Winter Olympic Games in Sarajevo. It was a time when severe economic problems and socio-political changes were on SFRY’s horizon. The state which after the death of Tito in 1980 started to fall apart, tried once more to overcome and above all to mask […]

When Architecture Is Transcendence: Vital Poetry and Social Intervention

Lina Bo Bardi (1914 – 1992) was a woman architect working in a man’s world. Italian by birth and training, Lina produced her work in Brazil, the place where, in 1946, she chose to live in exile. Lina’s way of thinking kept evolving, being permeable to the Brazilian miscegenation between African, Indian and European cultures, […]

Between Redevelopment and Modernization: The Evolution of Opinions on the Future of Prague’s Gründerzeit Districts between 1958 and 1989

The Evolution of Opinions on the Future of Prague’s Gründerzeit Districts between 1958 and 1989The professional opinions on the future of Prague gründerzeit quarters went through an enormous transformation between 1958 and 1989. While in poststalinism their fate was designed to be sealed by the large-scale demolitions with follow-up contemporary construction, in the late 1980s […]

Emigration of Architects and the Foundations of Modernism Hungarian Architecture Students Entering the Profession Abroad After the 1950s

The present study intends, on the one hand, to add to the topic of artistic and architectural emigration provided with relevant literature; on the other, it wishes to draw attention to the importance of the educational and cultural background in the lives of emigrants. For this purpose, this study uses, out of the history of […]

From Yugoslavia to Angola: Housing as Postcolonial Technical Assistance City Building through IMS Žeželj Housing Technology

After fifteen years of helping Angola’s decolonization struggle, in 1976 Yugoslav Committee for Technical Assistance came to Luanda, to negotiate the technical assistance to Angolan people. They had discovered the factory of the IMS Žeželj housing technology, brought in 1975 by Cubans – one of three facilities Yugoslavia had delivered to Cuba during 1960s, and […]

From Modernism to Today: Reading Urban Planning Approaches to the Turkish Capital Ankara