18 research outputs found
Planners Get Their Way — and Newry? The Persistence of Colonial Attitudes in the North of Ireland
No full textAugust 1964. Geoffrey Copcutt, an English architect appointed only 18 months earlier by the Northern Ireland (NI) government to design the region’s first ‘New City’ of Craigavon, announces his resignation in an explosive public statement, alleging that he has been “asked to engineer propaganda rather than a city” and criticising the “religious and political considerations” constraining the project.
This episode is only one in a string of controversies revealing the sectarian nature of the “new technocratic strategy of economic modernisation and regional planning” that transformed the built environment of NI from the early 1960s onwards. These included the 1964 Lockwood Committee and 1965 Wilson Plan, both of which concentrated investment and economic development in unionist (mainly Protestant, identifying as British) strongholds, at the expense of nationalist (mainly Catholic, identifying as Irish) areas, as a way to maintain unionist hegemony. While this represented a continuation of practices of dispossession and disenfranchisement that had been ongoing since the 16th and 17th century British plantations of Ireland, the same processes of modernisation also heralded the foundation of the welfare state, leading to the emergence of an increasingly well-educated minority and an associated movement for equality and civil rights. By the late 1960s, the brutal suppression of this movement would erupt into a decades-long cycle of violence known as the Troubles.
With the advent of power sharing since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the fragile, incomplete peace process that it ushered in, such blatant sectarianism and inequality in planning has become a thing of the past. Curiously, however, the same colonial structures and decision-making processes remain a feature of NI planning at local, regional and (inter)national scales. This is evident in the continued colonial relationship between Britain and Ireland (recently highlighted by the imposition of Brexit against the will of NI electorate), but is also to be found in many of the decisions and actions taken by public representatives across the political spectrum.
This paper traces how processes of modernisation have influenced, intersected with, and been informed by the major social and political upheavals during the last 75 years in the North of Ireland. Through revisiting and diffractively re-reading official archival material through other sources, including local and national newspaper accounts, private photographs, video reels and independently-published pamphlets from activists and community groups, it explores how colonial attitudes became embedded in urban planning. Finally, in assessing two controversial infrastructure projects currently being built just 6.4km apart across the same river estuary on the Irish border, namely the Narrow Water Bridge and the Newry Southern Relief Road, the paper examines the extent to which (neo)colonial approaches have become so ingrained that they continue to shape post-conflict urban development on both sides of the political divide
Planners Get Their Way — and Newry? The Persistence of Colonial Attitudes in the North of Ireland
No full textAugust 1964. Geoffrey Copcutt, an English architect appointed only 18 months earlier by the Northern Ireland (NI) government to design the region’s first ‘New City’ of Craigavon, announces his resignation in an explosive public statement, alleging that he has been “asked to engineer propaganda rather than a city” and criticising the “religious and political considerations” constraining the project.
This episode is only one in a string of controversies revealing the sectarian nature of the “new technocratic strategy of economic modernisation and regional planning” that transformed the built environment of NI from the early 1960s onwards. These included the 1964 Lockwood Committee and 1965 Wilson Plan, both of which concentrated investment and economic development in unionist (mainly Protestant, identifying as British) strongholds, at the expense of nationalist (mainly Catholic, identifying as Irish) areas, as a way to maintain unionist hegemony. While this represented a continuation of practices of dispossession and disenfranchisement that had been ongoing since the 16th and 17th century British plantations of Ireland, the same processes of modernisation also heralded the foundation of the welfare state, leading to the emergence of an increasingly well-educated minority and an associated movement for equality and civil rights. By the late 1960s, the brutal suppression of this movement would erupt into a decades-long cycle of violence known as the Troubles.
With the advent of power sharing since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the fragile, incomplete peace process that it ushered in, such blatant sectarianism and inequality in planning has become a thing of the past. Curiously, however, the same colonial structures and decision-making processes remain a feature of NI planning at local, regional and (inter)national scales. This is evident in the continued colonial relationship between Britain and Ireland (recently highlighted by the imposition of Brexit against the will of NI electorate), but is also to be found in many of the decisions and actions taken by public representatives across the political spectrum.
This paper traces how processes of modernisation have influenced, intersected with, and been informed by the major social and political upheavals during the last 75 years in the North of Ireland. Through revisiting and diffractively re-reading official archival material through other sources, including local and national newspaper accounts, private photographs, video reels and independently-published pamphlets from activists and community groups, it explores how colonial attitudes became embedded in urban planning. Finally, in assessing two controversial infrastructure projects currently being built just 6.4km apart across the same river estuary on the Irish border, namely the Narrow Water Bridge and the Newry Southern Relief Road, the paper examines the extent to which (neo)colonial approaches have become so ingrained that they continue to shape post-conflict urban development on both sides of the political divide
Authorship and the Open-ended Nature of Circular Architecture
No full textThe projects presented in this book embody a transition in the architecture of Brussels, a change in attitude that has been accompanied by the development of a new architectural expression. Observable shifts in what might be described as the architect’s signature have begun to reveal the ways in which circular practices of adaptive reuse are challenging and redefining the notion of authorship.
The making of architecture is an inherently collective act, a work of many hands and minds in which it is impossible to distinguish every individual contribution. If authorship in architecture is already blurred, an emerging array of
practices that take concepts of circularity and adaptive reuse as their starting points are blurring it even further
Authorship and the Open-ended Nature of Circular Architecture
No full textThe projects presented in this book embody a transition in the architecture of Brussels, a change in attitude that has been accompanied by the development of a new architectural expression. Observable shifts in what might be described as the architect’s signature have begun to reveal the ways in which circular practices of adaptive reuse are challenging and redefining the notion of authorship.
The making of architecture is an inherently collective act, a work of many hands and minds in which it is impossible to distinguish every individual contribution. If authorship in architecture is already blurred, an emerging array of
practices that take concepts of circularity and adaptive reuse as their starting points are blurring it even further
Deconstructing Binaries: Demolition and the limits of reuse
No full textContemporary architectural practice – in Western Europe at least – is by necessity moving away from previously dominant, tabula rasa models of demolition and reconstruction, towards approaches based on the care, repair and transformation of existing buildings. In this transition, it is important not to fall into the trap of viewing practices of adaptive reuse through the reductive lens of a preservation/demolition binary. If anything, reuse projects call precisely such ‘either/or’ binary oppositions into question, deconstructing absolute dualities like past/future, old/new, and finished/open-ended to create spaces characterised by hybridity and ambiguity.
Likewise, “Ne jamais démolir”, a manifesto for reuse as an ecologically and socially sustainable alternative to wholesale demolition, does not aim to rule out or preclude localised acts of surgical demolition that contribute to maintaining, transforming and extending the life of a building. On the contrary, Lacaton & Vassal insist that nothing should prevent the architect from “‘doing just what is needed’. In other words, what is essential for the project”.
Determining exactly what is needed most often relies not on one single, overarching strategy, but on a whole series of decisions linked to specific architectural interventions or gestures that combine to realise the project. Like all architecture, projects of adaptive reuse are dictated and shaped by an array of limiting factors. Some – such as financial or legislative constraints – fluctuate over time and can therefore be more easily navigated. Others are more structural: for example, the buildings currently most threatened with destruction are those built during the last 50 years, since neoliberal maximisation of profit at any cost has seen floor areas and ceiling heights become much less generous and therefore less easily adaptable. Targeted approaches of partial demolition and deconstruction offer a way to transgress both physical and nonmaterial limits by permitting the investigation, unlocking and resetting of spaces without resorting to wholesale demolition.
Such operations face their own set of challenges: on one hand, heritage concerns that insist on preservation over adaptation impose an stranglehold on buildings that could otherwise find a new lease of life through critical and careful interventions. At the other extreme, valid questions should be raised regarding how much original fabric can be demolished and removed before a building ceases to be a project of reuse but in essence represents a new construction. Furthermore, deeply-ingrained, narrow societal expectations of what constitutes ‘new’ or ‘finished’ architecture often mean experimental projects featuring hybrid constructions or material juxtapositions are resisted and even rejected on aesthetic grounds.
This paper examines the extent to which the preservation/demolition binary represents a false dichotomy that hinders adaptive reuse by unnecessarily limiting the options available to practitioners. It draws on current research undertaken as part of the PhD project Adapt, Reuse, a hybrid, embodied practice of reuse that engages equally with theory and practice in a reciprocal relay. Combining first-hand experience, conversations with practitioners and critical analysis of selected built projects, the paper investigates the work of a number of practices whose creative demolitions trace and identify the limits of reuse in order to test how they might be pushed further. This ongoing research focuses on reference cases at the scale of the architectural intervention rather than at the scale of the project, as a way of identifying approaches, attitudes or gestures that taken together might suggest and enable the development of a wider conceptual framework for adaptive reuse
THICK TIME, THIN PLACES
No full textVisuo-spatial or time-space synaesthetes visualise and position abstract units of time as mappings in the virtual space of their mind, effectively sensing time in space. In Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Brian Massumi identifies a “liminal nonplace” that “lies at the border of what we think of as internal, personal space and external, public space.”(1) Rather than nonplace, a more apt description might be a thin place, where two dimensions touch and bleed freely into one another.(2)
This paper explores the correspondence between the mental, inner spaces of time-space synaesthetes and the physical spaces in the “real” world around them, examining the ways in which these different dimensions overlap, inhabit one another, and ultimately collapse into the unified and unique experience of human perception.
The journey starts from my own experience, describing my personal spatial configurations for time and memory and how I rely on these to situate myself and navigate a path through life. Along the way I connect with other stories – including from friends and family, the Indigenous Australian concept of the Dreaming, the Irish topographic and toponymic tradition of dinnseanchas, Minkowski and Einstein’s theory of spacetime, Wolfgang Tillman’s Time Mirrored, and Tim Robinson’s “deep mapping” – to illustrate how lived experience takes place in a space that is simultaneously tangible and intangible, flowing freely between inner and outer worlds and combining multiple senses, tenses, and dimensions.
(1) Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (London: Duke University Press, 2002), 186.
(2) Laura Béres, “A Thin Place: Narratives of Space and Place, Celtic Spirituality and Meaning,” Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Social Work 31, no. 4 (October 2012): 394-413
Making-with, Making-do: Constellations of Concepts and Practices around Adaptive Reuse
No full textEvery demolition is an act of violence with devastating ecological and cultural repercussions that reverberate for generations. Responding to a reality in which not just buildings but even entire communities are treated as disposable, this research supports and advances adaptive reuse as a more sustainable alternative to wasteful construction models based on demolition and reconstruction. To do so, it engages not only with the material, technical and economic aspects of reusing existing buildings, but also with the wider historical, political and socio-cultural contexts that influence and shape every architectural act.
Representing an exercise in sympoiesis or ‘making-with’, the project deliberately positions itself between practice and research. Through engaging in conversation with a range of practitioners and thinkers, it emphasises how adaptive reuse blurs authorial boundaries – not just across time, through working with previous and future authors, but also across space, as more collaborative modes of practice question previously accepted notions of a single, autonomous author-architect.
The project’s three-part outcome comprises an open-access web platform www.adaptreuse.org, the main thesis publication and a handbook for practitioners.
The thesis represents a literary practice of adaptive reuse, a polyform and polyphonic exploration that embodies and performs the ideas it explores. Instead of attempting to develop a universal, fixed theoretical framework, the thesis takes a weak theory approach: it configures a collection of diverse fragments into an open, relational and generative constellation that accommodates rather than resolves difference. Bending time and space, this constellation challenges linear narratives to illuminate and reveal insights across disparate spacetimes.
Through a reparative reading of several key examples, the accompanying handbook offers students and practitioners a set of verbs or lemmas that can be conjugated differently according to the specific context or situation. These lemmas represent concrete, transformative actions that can be translated not only across different projects, but also different disciplines.
The critical contribution of the project lies in how it creates new possibilities for the wider discipline of architecture by expanding its existing vocabulary and concepts, offering alternative ways of viewing and engaging with the world, and therefore of constructing it.The members of the doctoral jury were Dr. Kate Briggs, Dr. Elke Couchez, Arch. Ing. Jan Haerens, Dr. Catalina Mejía Moreno, Prof. Dr. Kris Pint, Dr. Mia You
Making-with, Making-do: Constellations of Concepts and Practices around Adaptive Reuse
No full textEvery demolition is an act of violence with devastating ecological and cultural repercussions that reverberate for generations. Responding to a reality in which not just buildings but even entire communities are treated as disposable, this research supports and advances adaptive reuse as a more sustainable alternative to wasteful construction models based on demolition and reconstruction. To do so, it engages not only with the material, technical and economic aspects of reusing existing buildings, but also with the wider historical, political and socio-cultural contexts that influence and shape every architectural act.
Representing an exercise in sympoiesis or ‘making-with’, the project deliberately positions itself between practice and research. Through engaging in conversation with a range of practitioners and thinkers, it emphasises how adaptive reuse blurs authorial boundaries – not just across time, through working with previous and future authors, but also across space, as more collaborative modes of practice question previously accepted notions of a single, autonomous author-architect.
The project’s three-part outcome comprises an open-access web platform www.adaptreuse.org, the main thesis publication and a handbook for practitioners.
The thesis represents a literary practice of adaptive reuse, a polyform and polyphonic exploration that embodies and performs the ideas it explores. Instead of attempting to develop a universal, fixed theoretical framework, the thesis takes a weak theory approach: it configures a collection of diverse fragments into an open, relational and generative constellation that accommodates rather than resolves difference. Bending time and space, this constellation challenges linear narratives to illuminate and reveal insights across disparate spacetimes.
Through a reparative reading of several key examples, the accompanying handbook offers students and practitioners a set of verbs or lemmas that can be conjugated differently according to the specific context or situation. These lemmas represent concrete, transformative actions that can be translated not only across different projects, but also different disciplines.
The critical contribution of the project lies in how it creates new possibilities for the wider discipline of architecture by expanding its existing vocabulary and concepts, offering alternative ways of viewing and engaging with the world, and therefore of constructing it.The members of the doctoral jury were Dr. Kate Briggs, Dr. Elke Couchez, Arch. Ing. Jan Haerens, Dr. Catalina Mejía Moreno, Prof. Dr. Kris Pint, Dr. Mia You
Young Offenders? The Case For The Cultural Value Of Recent Architectural Heritage
No full textArchitectural theorist Sylvia Lavin identifies the 50-year milestone as “the benchmark that historians use to claim that things have passed from the present into history”.[1] Buildings younger than this – such as those constructed between 1975 and 2000, the focus of this symposium – find themselves in a paradoxical position. Not yet old enough to be appreciated for their historical value but too old to be considered fit for purpose by contemporary standards, they tend to be undervalued, making them vulnerable to unsympathetic renovations or even demolition. Buildings from this period do not benefit from the critical distance and objectivity often granted by the passing of time, and similarly cannot depend on nostalgia or collective memory to recognise their cultural value as built heritage. In this context, expanding the scope of what is considered ‘heritage’ represents a key strategy in countering the lack of awareness and recognition of the architectural and historical significance of young buildings. While bridging the gap between policy, research, and practice is no doubt necessary to achieve this objective, it is equally critical to make the case for recent architecture in the court of public opinion.
Societies’ appreciation of architectural styles and individual buildings is not static but fluctuates over time, dependent on changing value regimes.[2] In a European context framed by ongoing and intersecting climate, resource and biodiversity crises, the pressing ecological, economic and material arguments for preserving and reusing recent buildings are obvious and incontrovertible. However, for the reasons already outlined, it is often more difficult to convince people when it comes to these buildings’ immaterial values, whether historical, social, cultural or aesthetic. This presents a serious impediment to wider recognition of the value and potential of young heritage, since aesthetic arguments in particular have proven extremely effective in influencing the opinions of the general public. For example, many populist social media accounts are adept at manipulating people by presenting simplistic criticisms of recent architecture based purely on images (Figure), reducing an inherently spatial and experiential discipline to a one-dimensional question of taste.[3]
This paper argues that it is impossible to convince architects and non-architects alike of the value of young heritage by depending solely on technical and scientific arguments. Instead, it posits that in order to preserve the material qualities of these recent buildings it is necessary to also emphasise their immaterial qualities, those that resist quantitative valuation or measurement such as emotion, memory, and meaning.[4] Finally, it highlights how strategies of adaptive reuse and experimental preservation enable architectural practitioners to identify and engage with these qualities, so that they can assist in fulfilling the potential of recent built heritage to remain relevant and adapt to contemporary needs.
1. Sylvia Lavin, “Sylvia Lavin, Princeton and Mark Kingwell, Toronto,” The John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, November 8, 2018, audio-recording 1:55:23, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSj7BCUGwAI.
2. Susan Holder and Rosemary Willink, “Value on Display: Curating Robin Hood Gardens,” in Valuing Architecture, eds. Ashley Paine, Susan Holder and John Macarthur (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2020), 101.
3. For example, see The Cultural Tutor on Twitter (https://twitter.com/culturaltutor), or La Table Ronde de l’Architecture on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/latablerondearchitecture/).
4. Daniel M. Abramson, “Values of Obsolescence,” in Valuing Architecture, eds. Ashley Paine, Susan Holder and John Macarthur (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2020), 37
Young Offenders? The Case For The Cultural Value Of Recent Architectural Heritage
No full textArchitectural theorist Sylvia Lavin identifies the 50-year milestone as “the benchmark that historians use to claim that things have passed from the present into history”.[1] Buildings younger than this – such as those constructed between 1975 and 2000, the focus of this symposium – find themselves in a paradoxical position. Not yet old enough to be appreciated for their historical value but too old to be considered fit for purpose by contemporary standards, they tend to be undervalued, making them vulnerable to unsympathetic renovations or even demolition. Buildings from this period do not benefit from the critical distance and objectivity often granted by the passing of time, and similarly cannot depend on nostalgia or collective memory to recognise their cultural value as built heritage. In this context, expanding the scope of what is considered ‘heritage’ represents a key strategy in countering the lack of awareness and recognition of the architectural and historical significance of young buildings. While bridging the gap between policy, research, and practice is no doubt necessary to achieve this objective, it is equally critical to make the case for recent architecture in the court of public opinion.
Societies’ appreciation of architectural styles and individual buildings is not static but fluctuates over time, dependent on changing value regimes.[2] In a European context framed by ongoing and intersecting climate, resource and biodiversity crises, the pressing ecological, economic and material arguments for preserving and reusing recent buildings are obvious and incontrovertible. However, for the reasons already outlined, it is often more difficult to convince people when it comes to these buildings’ immaterial values, whether historical, social, cultural or aesthetic. This presents a serious impediment to wider recognition of the value and potential of young heritage, since aesthetic arguments in particular have proven extremely effective in influencing the opinions of the general public. For example, many populist social media accounts are adept at manipulating people by presenting simplistic criticisms of recent architecture based purely on images (Figure), reducing an inherently spatial and experiential discipline to a one-dimensional question of taste.[3]
This paper argues that it is impossible to convince architects and non-architects alike of the value of young heritage by depending solely on technical and scientific arguments. Instead, it posits that in order to preserve the material qualities of these recent buildings it is necessary to also emphasise their immaterial qualities, those that resist quantitative valuation or measurement such as emotion, memory, and meaning.[4] Finally, it highlights how strategies of adaptive reuse and experimental preservation enable architectural practitioners to identify and engage with these qualities, so that they can assist in fulfilling the potential of recent built heritage to remain relevant and adapt to contemporary needs.
1. Sylvia Lavin, “Sylvia Lavin, Princeton and Mark Kingwell, Toronto,” The John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, November 8, 2018, audio-recording 1:55:23, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSj7BCUGwAI.
2. Susan Holder and Rosemary Willink, “Value on Display: Curating Robin Hood Gardens,” in Valuing Architecture, eds. Ashley Paine, Susan Holder and John Macarthur (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2020), 101.
3. For example, see The Cultural Tutor on Twitter (https://twitter.com/culturaltutor), or La Table Ronde de l’Architecture on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/latablerondearchitecture/).
4. Daniel M. Abramson, “Values of Obsolescence,” in Valuing Architecture, eds. Ashley Paine, Susan Holder and John Macarthur (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2020), 37
