The 'veil' of control: exploring the attitudes and perceptions of UK design controllers

In the UK, architectural design is regulated through a system of design control for the public interest, which aims to secure and promote ‘quality’ in the built environment. Design control is primarily implemented by locally employed planning professionals with political oversight, and independent design review panels, staffed predominantly by design professionals. Design control has a lengthy and complex history, with the concept of ‘design’ offering a range of challenges for a regulatory system of governance. A simultaneously creative and emotive discipline, architectural design is a difficult issue to regulate objectively or consistently, often leading to policy that is regarded highly discretionary and flexible. This makes regulatory outcomes difficult to predict, as approaches undertaken by the ‘agents of control’ can vary according to the individual. The role of the design controller is therefore central, tasked with the responsibility of interpreting design policy and guidance, appraising design quality and passing professional judgment. However, little is really known about what influences the way design controllers approach their task, providing a ‘veil’ over design control, shrouding the basis of their decisions. This research engaged directly with the attitudes and perceptions of design controllers in the UK, lifting this ‘veil’. Using in-depth interviews and Q-Methodology, the thesis explores this hidden element of control, revealing a number of key differences in how controllers approach and implement policy and guidance, conceptualise design quality, and rationalise their evaluations and judgments. The research develops a conceptual framework for agency in design control – this consists of six variables (Regulation; Discretion; Skills; Design Quality; Aesthetics; and Evaluation) and it is suggested that this could act as a ‘heuristic’ instrument for UK controllers, prompting more reflexivity in relation to evaluating their own position, approaches, and attitudes, leading to better practice and increased transparency of control decisions.

Autonomy and the socialisation of architects

The socio-cultural production of architects' identities, and their professional personas, is a lively source of continuing debate. At one extreme, there is the claim to autonomy that highlights the distinctiveness of architecture and its cultural and disciplinary specificity. This view is challenged by those who emphasise architects' dependence, for acting and actions, on their embeddedness into collective, social, settings and relationships. In the paper, we consider what it may mean to be ‘autonomous of’ and ‘dependent on’ in relation to the actions of architects. There is limited specification in architectural writings about what autonomy and dependence are, and we suggest that there is a need not to discount such terms, but to reformulate them by recognising that the socially constructed self is an integral part of individual action. In this respect, we seek to amplify, and evaluate, the concept of relational autonomy that distances the notion of autonomy from individualistic, under-socialised, accounts of architects and their practices. Referring to three empirical examples of practice, we amplify this understanding by, first, outlining what a relational autonomous approach to architecture might entail, and, secondly, assessing how far it may enable a conception of the practices of architects in ways whereby, following Tony Fry's observations, they are conceived as much broader than ‘the specificity of any particular activity’ that expresses their existence.

Dating the dead: a high-resolution radiocarbon chronology of burial Within an Early Bronze Age barrow cemetery at Over, Cambridgeshire

This paper outlines the results of a programme of radiocarbon dating and Bayesian modelling relating to an Early Bronze Age barrow cemetery at Over, Cambridgeshire. In total, 43 dates were obtained, enabling the first high-resolution independent chronology (relating to both burial and architectural events) to be constructed for a site of this kind. The results suggest that the three main turf-mound barrows were probably constructed and used successively rather than simultaneously, that the shift from inhumation to cremation seen on the site was not a straightforward progression, and that the four main ‘types’ of cremation burial in evidence were used throughout the life of the site. Overall, variability in terms of burial practice appears to have been a key feature of the site. The paper also considers the light that the fine-grained chronology developed can shed on recent much wider discussions of memory and time within Early Bronze Age barrows

Fractal geometry and architecture design: case study review

The idea of buildings in harmony with nature can be traced back to ancient times. The increasing concerns on sustainability oriented buildings have added new challenges in building architectural design and called for new design responses. Sustainable design integrates and balances the human geometries and the natural ones. As the language of nature, it is, therefore, natural to assume that fractal geometry could play a role in developing new forms of aesthetics and sustainable architectural design. This paper gives a brief description of fractal geometry theory and presents its current status and recent developments through illustrative review of some fractal case studies in architecture design, which provides a bridge between fractal geometry and architecture design.

Nowhere

Nowhere is part on the series notebook architecture. The painting works with a language of forms to construct rather than represent architectural space. What the painting seeks to construct is a dialogue on depth wherein painting is conceived as quasi phenomenological project.

Screens

Summer Saloon presented at Lion and Lamb an exhibition venue dedicated to showing current painting. My work "Screens" constructs rather than represents an existing architectural space. The painting investigates an experience of phenomenological depth distinct from the model of perspective depth.

One and One and One

One and One and One is a collaborative project organized by Tim Renshaw with Outside Architecture. The work in the exhibition explored the incomplete and addresses it as an active process that opens up architectural and spatial structure to new forms of experience.

The regulations of Buenos Aires' private architecture during the Late Eighteenth Century

The article revises the new planning regulations introduced in Latin America under the Bourbon reform, looking at the real estate market that these new conditions created in the capital of the Viceroyalty of the River Plate.

Telefantasy tower blocks: space, place and social realism shake-ups in Misfits

This article considers the ways in which British youth telefantasy Misfits (E4, 2009–13) takes up and makes strange urban spaces familiar from social-realist narratives. Filmed on the sprawling East London estate, Thamesmead, the programme chronicles a group of young offenders who are given powers by a freak storm, turning them into ‘ASBO superheroes’. Misfits depends on its British urban landscapes for the assertion of its ‘authenticity’ within British youth television, using spaces and landscapes familiar from urban youth exploitation cinema and television's narratives of the underclass. After situating the series within existing cultural discourses and recent developments in social-realist representations, the article explores how Misfits disrupts what have become signifiers for the ‘real’ – the brutalism of housing estates, the grey of the concrete and sky – by making them strange, turning them into telefantasy. The series presents the estate as an uncanny place: the domestic, social-realist world shifted into a fantastical space by the storm. Through close analysis, this article explores how the familiar spaces become skewed and unsettling to match our protagonists' isolation, shifting bodies and scrambled sense of self.

The historic landscape of the Mendip Hills

When travelling north-east across the Somerset Levels and Moors the eye is drawn to the dark mass of the Mendip Hills, a Carboniferous Limestone ridge which rises abruptly from the flatness of its surroundings. The Historic Landscape of the Mendip Hills explores the archaeology and architecture of this remarkable corner of England, beginning with evidence for the first hunting groups who passed through the region over half a million years ago. Succeeding generations have left their mark on the Hills, from the enigmatic ceremonial structures of the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, to the ancient farming landscapes and brooding hillforts of the Later Prehistoric period. Field archaeology, combined with architectural and historical enquiry, has also allowed a complex narrative to be constructed for more recent periods of history. This is a story dominated by adaptation and change, evidenced by the developing architecture of manorial centres and the shadowy remains of earlier structures fossilized within village houses. This volume presents a synthesis of the results of recent fieldwork undertaken by English Heritage and traces this region’s remarkable past, revealing ways in which it has shaped the landscape we see and value today.