The Art of Urbanization reexamines a forgotten tradition in Belgian and European planning history, reconstructed through a longitudinal analysis of the Study Committee of the Antwerp Agglomeration (1907-1939). Against prevailing trends, Antwerp’s urban expansion was not the product of rational master planning, but evolved gradually through collective and pragmatic responses to emerging urban questions.

Drawing on a wide range of historical sources and richly illustrated, the book reconstruc...

Cities are experiencing a renaissance today, because we've begun to understand how they really work -- and how to make them work better for people.

This book is a lively, readable account of two revealing figures in the history of that renaissance: the urban economist Jane Jacobs and the architect Christopher Alexander. Their key insights have shaped several generations of scholars, professionals, and activists. However, as the book argues, this renaissance is still immature, and more must be...

The Modern movement began in the 1920s when a small group of young architects felt all that had gone before should be rejected and that architectural design should start afresh. This fresh start, they declared, should be based on modern technology and a new, modern approach to life. Their innovations became the 20th century’s dominant movement in architecture, crystallizing into the international style of the 1920s and '30s. In Exploding the Myths of Modern Architecture, Malcolm Millais exp...

Architectural firms can be regarded as creative professional service firms. As such, architects need to navigate creative, professional and commercial goals, while simultaneously attempting to fulfil client, user and societal needs. This complex process is becoming increasingly difficult, as the historically established role of architects has become more blurred, contested and heterogeneous. While attempting to reclaim their role or to take on new roles in collaborations with other actors, ar...

This research seeks to provide insight into the energy performance progress, of the existing non-profit housing stock in the Netherlands, through the application of energy renovations. The non-profit housing stock comprises 30% of the housing market in the Netherlands and a large part of the policies towards a more efficient housing stock rely on the non-profit housing sector. To that end, we determine the energy renovation rate of the stock and the impact of the applied renovations on both t...

Apparatus and apparatisation, the focus of the Cyber-Physical Architecture (CpA) issue #2 of SPOOL, refer to an assemblage of various components, tools, and instruments that in combination produce an exponential surplus beyond the linear sum of parts.

The CpA #2 samples various interests afforded by the apparatus and apparatisation in and of architecture and how they open up new potentials and opportunities. The first article, Building as Apparatus? (by Leach) addresses the theme of “buildi...

Over the last decades, the perception of glass in the engineering world has changed from that of a brittle, fragile material to a reliable structural component of high compressive load-bearing capacity. Although the structural applications of glass in architecture are continuously increasing, they are dominated by a considerable geometrical limitation: the 2-dimensionality imposed by the prevailing float glass industry. Cast glass can overcome this limitation: solid 3-dimensional glass compon...

Who were Le Corbusier’s photographers? The question is seldom asked yet is germane to under­standing the architect’s work. Le Corbusier used photography to promote modern architecture in ways no others did. He directed the photography of his buildings, selected the images that he liked, cropped them, abstracted them, and placed them on the pages of his many books. He mediated the medium of photography mani­pulating visual facts in an era when “the camera never lied”. Yet always ...