Managerial Representations of Achieving Competitive Advantage in Architectural Firms within the United Kingdom

Purpose - The purpose is to unearth managerial representations of achieving competitive advantage in relation to architectural firms operating within the United Kingdom (UK).
Design/Methodology/Approach - A sequential qualitative methodology is applied, underpinned by nine managerial interviews in five architectural practices; all of which are analysed using computer assisted qualitative data analysis software.
Findings - 108 representations are identified with highly rated concepts discussed in detail. Subsequently, the leading concepts include reputation, client satisfaction, fees and staff resources, among others.
Research Limitations/Implications - There are numerous studies conducted on this subject; however, there has been no research done to date documenting managerial representations within the UK on achieving competitive advantage in the context of architectural firms.
Practical Implications – The need for architectural firms to develop a competitive advantage within their market sector is ever more apparent, particularly during times of increased competitiveness.
Originality/Value – This paper fulfils a gap in knowledge by contributing to underlying research on the subject of competitive advantage, but focusing on the managerial representations, specifically within UK practices. The findings are of relevance to architects in both the UK and beyond, as well as perhaps forming the basis of identifying further research with the area.

Unsettling modernity: Shifting values and changing housing styles in the Kathmandu Valley

Abstract

Culture has always been important for the character of the cities, as have the civic and public institutions that sustain a lifestyle and provide an identity. Substantial evidence of the unique historical, urban civilisation remains within the traditional settlements in the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal; manifested in houses, palaces, temples, rest houses, open spaces, festivals, rituals, customs and cultural institutions. Indigenous knowledge and practices prescribed the arrangement of houses, roads and urban spaces giving the city a distinctive physical form, character and a unique oriental nativeness. In technical sense, these societies did not have written rules for guiding development. In recent decades, the urban culture of the city has been changing with the forces of urbanisation and globalisation and the demand for new buildings and spaces. New residential design is increasingly dominated by distinctive patterns of Western suburban ideal comprising detached or semi-detached homes and high rise tower blocks. This architectural iconoclasm can be construed as a rather crude response to the indigenous culture and built form. The paper attempts to dismantle the current tension between traditional and contemporary ‘culture’ (and hence society) and housing (or built form) in the Kathmandu Valley by engaging in a discussion that cuts across space, time and meaning of architecture as we know it.

On the statistical memory architecture exploration and optimization

The worsening of process variations and the consequent increased spreads in circuit performance and consumed power hinder the satisfaction of the targeted budgets and lead to yield loss. Corner based design and adoption of design guardbands might limit the yield loss. However, in many cases such methods may not be able to capture the real effects which might be way better than the predicted ones leading to increasingly pessimistic designs. The situation is even more severe in memories which consist of substantially different individual building blocks, further complicating the accurate analysis of the impact of variations at the architecture level leaving many potential issues uncovered and opportunities unexploited. In this paper, we develop a framework for capturing non-trivial statistical interactions among all the components of a memory/cache. The developed tool is able to find the optimum memory/cache configuration under various constraints allowing the designers to make the right choices early in the design cycle and consequently improve performance, energy, and especially yield. Our, results indicate that the consideration of the architectural interactions between the memory components allow to relax the pessimistic access times that are predicted by existing techniques.

Of no fixed form: The Irish Pavilion at Venice 2014 and beyond

This paper explores the theme of exhibiting architectural research through a particular example, the development of the Irish pavilion for the 14th architectural biennale, Venice 2014. Responding to Rem Koolhaas’s call to investigate the international absorption of modernity, the Irish pavilion became a research project that engaged with the development of the architectures of infrastructure in Ireland in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Central to this proposition was that infrastructure is simultaneously a technological and cultural construct, one that for Ireland occupied a critical position in the building of a new, independent post-colonial nation state, after 1921.

Presupposing infrastructure as consisting of both visible and invisible networks, the idea of a matrix become a central conceptual and visual tool in the curatorial and design process for the exhibition and pavilion. To begin with this was a two-dimensional grid used to identify and order what became described as a series of ten ‘infrastructural episodes’. These were determined chronologically across the decades between 1914 and 2014 and their spatial manifestations articulated in terms of scale: micro, meso and macro. At this point ten academics were approached as researchers. Their purpose was twofold, to establish the broader narratives around which the infrastructures developed and to scrutinise relevant archives for compelling visual material. Defining the meso scale as that of the building, the media unearthed was further filtered and edited according to a range of categories – filmic/image, territory, building detail, and model – which sought to communicate the relationship between the pieces of architecture and the larger systems to which they connect. New drawings realised by the design team further iterated these relationships, filling in gaps in the narrative by providing composite, strategic or detailed drawings.

Conceived as an open-ended and extendable matrix, the pavilion was influenced by a series of academic writings, curatorial practices, artworks and other installations including: Frederick Kiesler’s City of Space (1925), Eduardo Persico and Marcello Nizzoli’s Medaglio d’Oro room (1934), Sol Le Witt’s Incomplete Open Cubes (1974) and Rosalind Krauss’s seminal text ‘Grids’ (1979). A modular frame whose structural bays would each hold and present an ‘episode’, the pavilion became both a visual analogue of the unseen networks embodying infrastructural systems and a reflection on the predominance of framed structures within the buildings exhibited. Sharing the aspiration of adaptability of many of these schemes, its white-painted timber components are connected by easily-dismantled steel fixings. These and its modularity allow the structure to be both taken down and re-erected subsequently in different iterations. The pavilion itself is, therefore, imagined as essentially provisional and – as with infrastructure – as having no fixed form. Presenting archives and other material over time, the transparent nature of the space allowed these to overlap visually conveying the nested nature of infrastructural production. Pursuing a means to evoke the qualities of infrastructural space while conveying a historical narrative, the exhibition’s termination in the present is designed to provoke in the visitor, a perceptual extension of the matrix to engage with the future.

Museum City - Improvisation and the narratives of space

This paper provides four viewpoints on the narratives of space, allowing us to think about possible relations between sites and sounds, reflecting on how places might tell stories, or how practitioners embed themselves in a place in order to shape cultural, social and/or political narratives through the use of sound. I propose four viewpoints that investigate the relationship between sites and sounds, where narratives are shaped and made through the exploration of specific sonic activities. These are:
- sonic activism
- sonic preservation
- sonic participatory action
- sonic narrative of space

I examine each of these ideas in turn before focusing in more detail on the final viewpoint, which provides the context for discussing and analysing a recent site-specific music improvisation project, entitled ‘Museum City’, a work that aligns closely with my proposal for a ‘sonic narrative of space’.
The work ‘Museum City’ by Pedro Rebelo, Franziska Schroeder, Ricardo Jacinto and André Cepeda specifically enables me to reflect on how derelict and/or transitional spaces might be re-examined through the use of sound, particularly through means of live music improvisation. The spaces examined as part ‘Museum City’ constitute either deserted sites or sites about to undergo changes in their architectural layout, their use and sonic make-up. The practice in ‘Museum City’ was born out of a performative engagement with[in] those sites, but specifically out of an intimate listening relationship by three improvisers situated within those spaces.
The theoretical grounding for this paper is situated within a wider context of practising and cognising musical spatiality, as proposed by Georgina Born (2013), particularly her proposition for three distinct lineages that provide an understanding of space in/and music. Born’s third lineage, which links more closely with practices of sound art and challenges a Euclidean orientation of pitch and timbre space, makes way for a heightened consideration of listening and ‘the place’ of sound. This lineage is particularly crucial for my discussion, since it positions music in relation to social experiences and the everyday, which the work ‘Museum City’ endeavoured to embrace.

Rent: apartment blocks and their uses

In 1974, pursuing his interest in the infra-ordinary – ‘the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the back-ground noise, the habitual’ – Georges Perec wrote about an idea for a novel:
‘I imagine a Parisian apartment building whose façade has been removed … so that all the rooms in the front, from the ground floor up to the attics, are instantly and simultaneously visible’.
In Life A User’s Manual (1978) the consummation of this precis, patterns of existence are measured within architectural space with an archaeological sensibility that sifts through narrative and décor, structure and history, services and emotion, the personal and the system, ascribing commensurate value to each.
Apartment comes from the Italian appartare meaning ‘to separate’. The space of the boundary between activities is reduced to a series of intimately thin lines: the depth of a floor, a party wall, a window, the convex peep-hole in a door, or the façade that Perec seeks to render invisible. The apartness of the apartment is accelerated when aligned with short-term tenancies. Here Perec’s interweaving of personal histories over time using the structure of the block, gives way to convivialities of detachment: inhabitants are temporary, their personalities anonymous, their activities unknown or overlooked.
Borrowing methods from Perec, to move somewhere between conjecture, analysis and other documentation and tracing relationships between form, structure, materiality, technology, organisation, tenure and narrative use, this paper interrogates the late twentieth-century speculative apartment block in Britain and Ireland arguing that its speculative and commodified purpose allows a series of lives that are often less than ordinary to inhabit its spaces.
Henri Lefebvre described the emergence of an ‘abstract space’ under capitalism in terms which can be applied to the apartment building: the division of space into freely alienable privatised parcels which can be exchanged. Vertical distributions of class and other new, contiguous social and spatial relationships are couched within a paradox: the building which allows such proximities is also a conductor of division. Apartment comes from the Italian appartare meaning ‘to separate’. The space of the boundary between activities is reduced to a series of intimately thin lines: the depth of a floor, a party wall, a window, the convex peep-hole in a door, or the façade that Perec seeks to render invisible. The apartness of the apartment is accelerated when aligned with short-term tenancies. Here Perec’s interweaving of personal histories over time using the structure of the block, gives way to convivialities of detachment: inhabitants are temporary, their personalities anonymous, their activities unknown or overlooked.

A box in the field: modernity and the barn in twentieth-century Ireland

This paper argues that the modern barn in Ireland is a complex social and architectural phenomena that is without, or has yet to find, a satisfactory discourse. Emerging in the middle third of the twentieth century, the modern barn – replete with corrugated iron and I-sections – continues to represent a presence in the Irish landscape whose ubiquity is as emphatic as its flexibility. It is, however, its universal properties that begin to suggest connections with wider narratives. The modernising aspects of the barn that appear in the 1920s and 30s begin to conflate with a rhetoric of architectural modernism which was simultaneously appearing across Europe. But while the relationship between high modernism’s critique of what it divined as the inspirational qualities of utilitarian buildings – Walter Gropius on grain silos, Le Corbusier on aircraft hangers etc. – has been well-documented, in Ireland this relationship perhaps contains another layer of complexity.
The barn’s consolidation as a modern type coincided with the search for a nation’s cultural identity after centuries of colonial rule. This tended to be an introspective vision that prioritised rural space over urban space, agriculture over industry, and imagined the small farm as a central tenet in the construction of a new State. This paper suggests that the twentieth-century barn – as a product of the mechanisation of agriculture promoted by the new administrations – is an iconic structure, emblematic of attempts to reconcile the contradictory forces and imagery of modernity with the mores of a traditional society. Moreover, given a cultural purview that was often ambivalent or even hostile to the ideologies and forms of modernity, the barn in Ireland is, perhaps, not so much the inspiration but the realisation of an architectural modernism in that country at its most pervasive, enduring and unself-conscious.

The Dublin Lock Hospital: Medicine, Morality, Disease and Sin

Anecdotal evidence has it that when Dublin’s venereal disease hospital closed its doors for the last time in the 1950s, its administrative staff began to burn its records, starting with the most recent. This attempt to conceal the results of sexual profligacy is perhaps understandable in the rarefied climate of mid-century Catholic Ireland. However, the sense of shame attached to this institution has been pervasive. For example, of all Dublin’s major hospitals, the lock hospital remains the only one without a dedicated history. And, throughout its two centuries of existence, the ‘lock’ had often been a site of controversy and approbation.

The institution began in the eighteenth century as the most peripatetic, poor relation of the city’s voluntary hospitals, wandering indiscriminately through a series of temporary premises before finally achieving a permanent home and official recognition as a military-sponsored medical hospital in 1792. It also gained architectural extensions by both Richard and Francis Johnston and in the following decades. This new-found status and a growing re-conceptualisation of venereal disease as a legitimate medical problem rather than a matter of morality was, however, somewhat compromised by the choice of site at Townsend Street. The institution occupied a hidden part of city, appropriating the vacated home of the Hospital for Incurables, another marginalised group whose presence in the city had been viewed through the lens of superstition and fear. For the rest of its existence, the lock hospital would share this experience occupying a nebulous position between medicine and morality; disease and sin.

Using what’s left of the hospital’s records and a series of original architectural drawings, this paper discusses the presence and role of the lock hospital in the city in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, tracking how changes in its administration and architectural form reflected wider attitudes towards disease, sexuality and gender in Georgian Dublin.

Protestantism, Spectacle, Motherhood and Vice: Dublin's New Pleasure Gardens

In 1748, Bartholomew Mosse, a curious combination of surgeon, obstetrician and entertainment impresario, established a pleasure garden on the northern fringes of Dublin. Ostensibly designed to fund the construction of a maternity hospital to be located adjacently, Mosse’s New Pleasure Gardens became one of the premier leisure resorts in Dublin. This was to have a profound effect on the city’s urban form. Within a few years the gardens became an epicentre of speculative development as the upper classes jostled to build their houses in the vicinity. Meanwhile, the creation nearby of Sackville Mall, a wide and generous strolling ground, established a whole section of the city dedicated to haute spectacle, display and leisure. Like other pleasure gardens in the British Isles, Mosse’s venture introduced new, commodified forms of entertainment. In the colonial context of eighteenth-century Ireland, however, ‘a land only recently won and insecurely held’ (Foster, 1988) by the Protestant Anglo-Irish settler class, the production of culture and spectacle was perhaps more significant than elsewhere. Indeed, the form of Mosse’s gardens echoed the private city gardens of a key figure in the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, while the hospital itself was constructed in a style of a Palladian country house, symbol of colonial presence in the countryside. However, like other pleasure gardens, the mix of music and alcohol, the heterogeneous crowd culled from across social and gender boundaries, and a landscape punctuated with secluded corners, meant that it also acquired a dubious reputation as a haunt of louche and illicit behaviours. The curious juxtaposition between a maternity hospital and pleasure garden, therefore, begins to assume other, hitherto hidden complexities. These are borne out by a closer examination of the architecture of the hospital, the shape of its landscape and the records of its patrons and patients.

Designing Bare Essentials: Aldi, Lidle and the architectures of cheapness

They’re cheap. They’re in every settlement of significance in Britain, Ireland and elsewhere. We all use them but perhaps do not always admit to it. Especially, if we are architects.
Over the past decades Aldi/Lidl low cost supermarkets have escaped from middle Europe to take over large tracts of the English speaking world remaking them according to a formula of mass-produced sheds, buff-coloured cobble-lock car parks, logos in primary colours, bare-shelves and eclectic special offers. Response within architectural discourse to this phenomenon has been largely one of indifference and such places remain, perhaps reiterating Pevsner’s controversial insights into the bicycle shed, on the peripheries of what we might term architecture. This paper seeks to explore the spatial complexities of the discount supermarket and in doing so open up a discussion on the architecture of cheapness. As a road-map, it takes former managing director Dieter Brandes’ treatise on the Aldi formula, Bare Essentials: the Aldi Way to Retailing, and investigates the strategies through which economic exigencies manifest themselves in a series of spatial tactics which involve building. Central to this is the idea of architecture as system rather than form and, in Aldi/Lidl’s case, the result of a spatial network of flows. To understand the architecture of the supermarket, then, it is necessary to measure the times and spaces of supply across the scales of intersection between global and local.
Evaluating the energy, economy and precision of such systems challenges the liminal position of the commercial, the placeless and especially the cheap within architectural discourse. As is well known, architectures of mass-production and prefabrication and their origins exercised modernist thinkers such as Sigfried Giedion and Walter Gropius in the early twentieth century and has undergone a resurgence in recent times. Meanwhile, the mapping of the hitherto overlooked forms and iconography of commerce in Learning from Las Vegas (1971) was extended by Rem Koolhaas et al into an investigation of the technologies, systems and precedents of retail in the Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, thirty years later in 2001. While obviously always a criteria for building, to find writings on architecture which explicitly celebrate cheapness as a design virtue or, indeed, even iterate the word cheap is more difficult. Walter Gropius’ essay ‘How can we build cheaper, better, more attractive houses?’ (1927), however, situates the cheap within the discussions – articulated, amongst others, by Karl Teige and Bruno Taut – surrounding the minimal dwelling and the moral benefits of absence of the 1920s and 30s.
In our contemporary age of heightened consumption, it is perhaps fitting that an architecture of bare essentials is defined in retail rather than in housing, a commercial existenzminimum where the Miesian paradox of ‘less is more’ is resold as a paradigm of ‘more for less’ in the ubiquitous yet overlooked architectures of the discount supermarket.

Beyond the artefact and techno-centricity: towards process-centric understanding of architecture - alternative facilitation strategies and proposals

The artefact and techno-centricity of the research into the architecture process needs to be counterbalanced by other approaches. An increasing amount of information is collected and used in the process, resulting in challenges related to information and knowledge management, as this research evidences through interviews with practicing architects. However, emerging technologies are expected to resolve many of the traditional challenges, opening up new avenues for research. This research suggests that among them novel techniques addressing how architects interact with project information, especially that indirectly related to the artefacts, and tools which better address the social nature of work, notably communication between participants, become a higher priority. In the fields associated with the Human Computer Interaction generic solutions still frequently prevail, whereas it appears that specific alternative approaches would be particularly in demand for the dynamic and context dependent design process. This research identifies an opportunity for a process-centric and integrative approach for architectural practice and proposes an information management and communication software application, developed for the needs discovered in close collaboration with architects. Departing from the architects’ challenges, an information management software application, Mneme, was designed and developed until a working prototype. It proposes the use of visualizations as an interface to provide an overview of the process, facilitate project information retrieval and access, and visualize relationships between the pieces of information. Challenges with communication about visual content, such as images and 3D files, led to a development of a communication feature allowing discussions attached to any file format and searchable from a database. Based on the architects testing the prototype and literature recognizing the subjective side of usability, this thesis argues that visualizations, even 3D visualizations, present potential as an interface for information management in the architecture process. The architects confirmed that Mneme allowed them to have a better project overview, to easier locate heterogeneous content, and provided context for the project information. Communication feature in Mneme was seen to offer a lot of potential in design projects where diverse file formats are typically used. Through empirical understanding of the challenges in the architecture process, and through testing the resulting software proposal, this thesis suggests promising directions for future research into the architecture and design process.

Colonial architectures, urban planning and the representation of Portuguese imperial history

This article proposes a critical analysis of recent interpretations made to the history of architecture and urban planning in the Portuguese colonial context in the twentieth century, particularly in the former African territories. More generally, it intends to explore how the internal history produced by specific fields of activity, such as architecture or urbanism, can reinforce the logic of a national and nationalized history. This effect is due partly to the fact that the legitimacy of these fields is largely dependent on the national identification in the context of activities that are internationalized. I will argue that the specific field of activity, while creating this internal discourse, can directly or indirectly produce representations of the nation, its history and its people on a larger scale, penetrating popular culture and influencing a shared common sense. In the case in question, the internal discourse on architectural and urbanistic works, on authors and styles, eventually reinforces an idealized and idyllic image of Portuguese colonialism.

Design and low-power implementation of an adaptive image rejection receiver

This paper deals with and details the design and implementation of a low-power; hardware-efficient adaptive self-calibrating image rejection receiver based on blind-source-separation that alleviates the RF analog front-end impairments. Hybrid strength-reduced and re-scheduled data-flow, low-power implementation of the adaptive self-calibration algorithm is developed and its efficiency is demonstrated through simulation case studies. A behavioral and structural model is developed in Matlab as well as a low-level architectural design in VHDL providing valuable test benches for the performance measures undertaken on the detailed algorithms and structures.