The current postdoctoral research project focuses on the relation between cities and urban housing estates, understood as ensembles of two or more, medium-density to high-density, primarily residential buildings, conceived at the same time and with a level of common administration. The earliest housing estates were conceived as islands More

Architectural and urban design are activities embedded in a socio-spatial and political context. Harvard Professor of Urban Planning Susan Fainstein, therefore, challenges theories of planning—and, with that, architectural and urban design—to address these relations: how does the intervention and implementation impact the (urban) context, the (city) users, and More

This research project aims to investigate the status of the photographs that architects take during their travels by car. It is based on the hypothesis that the view from the car has established a new epistemology of the urban landscape and the territory at large. Focusing on the More

Alternative principles of pooling common resources are attracting increased attention in political circles and society at large. Labelled as “commons”, some of these issues have, in the last decades, received growing academic attention in critical urban studies, urban geography, and the social sciences. Indeed, the examination of the More

The tacit dimension of architectural pedagogy—which students deploy when designing, but have trouble explaining—remains understudied, beset by methodological difficulties. Existing accounts emphasize isolated studio exercises or cognitive processes, often neglecting cultural, historical, and disciplinary contexts. Meanwhile, the notion of tacit knowledge is not even entirely adequate for architectural More

Little research exists on urban-scale models. In existing scholarship, they are often lumped together with architectural models. Although urban-scale models certainly possess characteristics that are similar to those of architectural models, they also differ. The key difference, this research project hypothesizes, is that in urban-scale models the performative More

The biography of Michel Ecochard (1905–1985) reads like a fascinating saga of migrations between geographies, cultures, and disciplines. Ecochard was not only trained in the fields of archaeology, architecture, and urbanism but, throughout his career, also worked in all of these fields. Mapping historical monuments in Syria, defining More

«Communities of Tacit Knowledge» focuses on the concept of «tacit knowledge» in architecture and urban design. Tacit knowledge is a specific type of knowledge that architects employ when designing, which is embodied in the material vectors that they design with – from treatises and drawings to models and More

In the past months, the freedom of movement of many citizens around the world has been restricted. As part of the attempt to mitigate the COVID-19 virus, people have been advised to remain within their private spaces and restrict their presence in public space to the bare minimum. More

After Agadir (Morocco) was destroyed by a devastating earthquake in 1960, the city developed a modern and innovative plan for its reconstruction that relied on novel urban typologies and morphologies. This research documents and analyzes the urban reconstruction of Agadir and posits that a great deal can be More