If there is nothing more to architecture than design –and to its attendant thinking processes–than design thinking, then core dimensions of the architectural enterprise from the perspective of (a) production and (b) use have no special character, over and above their counterparts in general design. Yet that does not appear to be true by the lights of architects or design specialists or the public at large. So what is it, at the core or periphery of the discipline or its objects, (...) that makes architecture not design? The ways in which architecture and design constitute artistic enterprises, drawing on and promoting aesthetic interest, differ such that architecture is not, or at least not only, a branch of or variation on design generally construed. (shrink)

This essay combines experiential writing, quotes from Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves and Gilles Deleuze's philosophy in order to indicate that architecture remains a largely overlooked instance of the world. This is particularly problematic in the context of the question of immanence, which can be understood to lie at the core of Deleuze's philosophy. Architecture's relation to thought is discussed here via Deleuze's writing in Difference and Repetition and pursued in conjunction with Simone Brott's notion of architectural ‘effects’. Rather than (...) seeing encounters with architecture as the site of recognition of the habitual and routine, our experience of architecture-as-world should be understood to ceaselessly contribute to the emergence of thought. Brian Massumi's writing offers one potential direction to pursue, via the notion of the diagram tied to experience before it is fed into the loop of architectural design and its accompanying representational techniques. (shrink)

Sculptors, architects, and painters are three professional groups that require a comprehensive understanding of how to manipulate spatial structures. While it has been speculated that they may differ in the way they conceive of space due to the different professional demands, this has not been empirically tested. To achieve this, we asked architects, painters, sculptors, and a control group questions about spatially complex pictures. Verbalizations elicited were examined using cognitive discourse analysis. We found significant differences between each group. Only painters (...) shifted consistently between 2D and 3D concepts, architects were concerned with paths and spatial physical boundedness, and sculptors produced responses that fell between architects and painters. All three differed from controls, whose verbalizations were generally less elaborate and detailed. Thus, for the case of sculptors, architects, and painters, profession appears to relate to a different spatial conceptualization manifested through a systematically contrasting way of talking about space. (shrink)

In this article, we use an entry to an international architectural student competition on future care to explore how social norms about older bodies may be challenged by designs that are sensitive to the spatial contexts within which we age. The power of the My Home design by Witham and Wilkins derives from its hand-drawn aesthetic and thus we consider the architects’ insistence on drawing as a challenge to the clear and unambiguous image-making typically associated with digitally aided architectural designs. (...) The hand-drawn images of My Home prompt a focus on care as enacted through the relations between material environments and things, and the atmospheric qualities these relations evoke. Throughout our analysis, we argue for greater attention to the ways in which embodied practices, everyday affects and materialities can be represented within architectural design, and the role of hand drawing as a creative methodology in this process. (shrink)