Design Ecologies - Current Issue

As buildings need bodies, architectural design needs new modalities in unpacking space making and habitation. Space making and habitation have often been studied whole in space but never whole in time, while spaces adapt best when constantly refined and reshaped by their occupants.

This issue of Design Ecologies (DES) will focus on how bodies change spaces physically and mentally through our relationships with them, through them and from them. Particular concerns will focus on how revisiting the same space multiple times can change our understanding and can be recorded as an architecture of varying power. What we touch, we edit the space and leave a residue in the actual space. Architecture could be viewed as the relationship between the amateur and professional in space-making and habitation from who instructs whom to who informs whom. Do we have the methods to communicate the modalities of multiple habitants in one space over an extended period of time? Could we view an architecture of varying power as a layering of knowledge and our relationship of space over time? This issue on ‘Architectures of Varying Power’ will focus on articles.

In Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud metaphorically transfigures the city of Rome from a physical human habitation into an imagined ‘psychical entity’ with an equally lengthy and substantial history, where everything that would have previously existed continues to remain connected to any further developments. Sigmund Freud’s consulting room and study at Berggasse 19 in Vienna famously contained his remarkable collection of 2300 antiquities and artefacts, all of which he carefully curated and arranged exclusively within these two work spaces. What if we were to imagine these founding spaces of psychoanalysis as ‘a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past’ where ‘nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one’. This particular supposition is what initiated the idea for this article, in which I examine seven rooms he either worked in, lived in or dreamt about, prior to the inhabitation of his more famous rooms at Berggasse 19. Specifically, this article focuses on the rooms Sigmund Freud inhabited from 1875 through 1885, during the formative years of his university education and as a medical intern at the Vienna General Hospital when he was 19–29 years old. Abundant evidence shows us that he could be both overt and covert in how he relayed his thoughts, memories and experiences within these habitations. These spaces were recorded and conveyed through a combination of his drawings, written descriptions, memories and imaginings, and are found primarily in his personal letters, as well as various biographies and other documents. I will delve into the emerging spatial and psychical traits found within these spaces, and compare them with each other, to shed light on Sigmund Freud’s growing awareness of his surrounding environments. His behaviours in these early rooms, where he arranged past and present to coexist within the same psychical space, offer a revealing prelude to what he spatially and psychically undertook within his later construction of the famous work rooms at Berggasse 19.

Night Kitchen explores architectural representation through a design methodology informed by picturebooks. This article explores how their work utilizes the ‘fourth and fifth dimensions’ of picturebooks – the interplay between words and images and the intertextual references that suggest wider narratives beyond the page. Their incorporation of ephemera from their studio archive is presented as blurring the lines between reality and fiction, in relation to ideas of enthralment and a real-world immersion in fiction. This research examines their work in the context of postmodern publishing techniques and the contemporary multimodal world, in relation to postmodern picturebook theory, highlighting the potential of an integration of the format with archival practices to inform architectural research that explores temporality and narrative.

Through the process of ‘instruct’, ‘occupy’ and ‘dominate’, this article delves into the intricate interplay between architecture and its user. Drawing on the concept of architectural drawing as a means of instruction, the first part of the article examines how the architect’s initial plans and drawings instruct the users and shape their understanding of the building. The second part of the article explores the experience of occupying the building and how the user’s perception of the building may change over time, potentially leading to changes in the spaces. Finally, the article examines how the user takes ownership of the building, evolves with it over time and eventually becomes the building. Through a critical examination of these stages, this article seeks to contribute to a deeper understanding of the complex interrelationship between the architect, the user and the architecture they create as a procedural event. The findings and discoveries of this article will have implications for the future of architectural practice and space-making, potentially influencing the ways in which architects and users approach the creation and occupation of space.

This article examines seemingly trivial disputes over taste in the context of early European modernism, focusing on two key conflicts involving prominent cultural figures: one centred on controversy over the Bauhaus canteen menu, and the other publicly dramatized through a story culminating over a pair of slippers in turn-of-the-century Vienna. Though these disagreements may appear minor, they expose deeper rifts within the foundations of Western modern architecture, art and design. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of taste, this article explores how both aesthetic and literal taste operate as sites of contestation, instrumental in defining social relationships and power dynamics. Bourdieu’s distinction between ‘legitimate’ taste, cultivated through education, and ‘natural’ taste, grounded in embodied experience, is central to understanding these conflicts. While the protagonists are recognized experts in matters of aesthetics, their disputes center on peripheral, seemingly trivial subjects. These subjects, however, offer a distinctive perspective for analyzing broader professional and cultural dynamics, precisely because they fall outside the protagonists’ areas of expertise, freeing them from the constraints of disciplinary norms and allowing for more candid engagement. This investigation adopts a micro historical approach, informed by Carlo Ginzburg’s methodology that emphasizes the importance of small, overlooked details. By focusing on these specific instances of in-fighting within the early European modernist movement, the article sheds light on the complexities of group dynamics, professional hierarchies and the negotiation of taste in a historical moment marked by significant political, cultural and artistic transformations. The microhistory approach prioritizes intimate, personal observations over broad historical narratives, revealing how peripheral matters of taste may offer profound insights into the professional and social tensions of the time.