Edinburgh Architecture Research

Editorial

2024-03-07T20:43:38+00:00

EAR 38 No2 Editorial

The Architecture of the Video Game Stray (2022)

2024-02-29T22:15:09+00:00

The twenty-first century was marked by emerging ways of space- and place-making. The architecture of the virtual environments of video games is one of the alternative practices in which the discipline of architecture got involved. This essay looks at the architecture and spatial storytelling in the videogame Stray (2022). The relevance of studying Stray does not lie only in the game’s enigmatic interiors, rigorous space-oriented narrative, unique patchwork of neon-soaked, post-apocalyptic labyrinthine spaces, or the cyberpunk Kowloon-like ghettoised urban environment in which the game takes place; Stray is an unprecedented case study as its gameplay is narrated through a non-human perspective: through the point of view of a cat accompanied by a small flying robot called B 12. This essay provides a critical review of the game and attempts to dissect how the spatial storytelling of its post/non-human architecture is orchestrated. Spatial puzzle mechanics, the fluctuation of the game between urban, architectural, and interior scales, and the role that platforms and vertical design techniques play are the subjects of the article. The challenges of the interaction of a game character with four legs with spatial elements, video game placemaking, and spatial design of fetch quests are other topics that the essay will look into. The article is supported by comments from an unpublished interview with Viv (one of the developers of the game) and a series of detailed analytical drawings from the reconstruction of the game environments by the authors.

‘Dance of Agency’

2024-02-29T22:15:09+00:00

Rather than diminishing design to a mechanical process governed by utility, efficiency and economy, this paper conceptualises the architecture of the Basilica of La Sagrada Família in Barcelona as posthuman. The Cathedral’s social, cultural and psychological implications will be considered in this paper. La Sagrada Família is an “unfinished cathedral” in Catalonia built by the architect Antoni Gaudí in 1882. It receives over 3 million visitors a year. Considering La Sagrada Família under the posthumanist lens enables it to be intertwined with the environment and technology. Posthumanism involves delegating particular acts of human agency into technological devices. Using Kenneth Frampton’s concept of architecture dealing with the tension between its ‘representational’ and its ‘ontological’ dimensions, this article highlights how posthumanism can enable new design methods to be integrated with the Cathedral’s original ideas, casting a reassessment of existing theories of design. This article also considers other theories of design and architecture. These are Andrew Pickering’s concept of the ‘mangle,’ Jonathan Hale’s rematerialisation theory, Steve Tomasula’s concept of human scale in architecture, and Francesca Ferrando’s theory of philosophical posthumanism. The paper explores the process of bringing the original architectural idea of La Sagrada Família to expression in material reality. It analyses how the construction of increasingly sophisticated technological devices is a kind of collision and interaction between human goals, material resistance and future sustainability. Finally, the article demonstrates how the ‘dance of agency’—an ongoing, open-ended and temporally structured operation involving a dialectic of resistance and accommodation—can be carried out using the posthumanist theory of future sustainability in order to transform La Sagrada Família into a shared, plural, hopeful architecture that is embodied and entangled.

Photo-able Urban Green-Blue Spaces

2024-02-29T22:15:09+00:00

Urban green–blue spaces (UGBSs) are increasingly integrated into the urban fabric transformation, playing a pivotal role in shaping everyday interactions and experiences with nature in the Anthropocene era. Crowdsourcing, facilitated by digital technologies, has emerged as a novel methodological advance for accessing subjective place-based information, allowing the public to produce and share photographs at an unprecedented scale. As people can now readily capture and disseminate images on social media from virtually any location, these photographs contribute to the digital representation of places. Many studies have leveraged social media imagery to explore mental maps of cities, place perceptions, and ecosystem services. This raises fundamental questions: What are the UGBSs that promote photography across cities? What are the similarities and differences among cities’ photogenic UGBSs? And how do cities’ photogenic UGBSs relate to the happiness of their inhabitants? This study investigates these questions through an analysis of 203,020 photographs, taken from social media, of sites across 186 cities over a five-year period (2014 to 2018). Employing Google Cloud Vision and topic modelling with a state-of-the-art neural network model, photographs are clustered and used to identify cross-city features. The correlation between prevalence of photogenic UGBSs and levels of happiness is investigated using linear regression analysis. The results show that UGBSs eliciting photography practice are predominantly characterised by water-related subjects, confirming a widespread aesthetic appreciation for urban blue spaces. Perceptions of UGBSs exhibit significant variability among cities, offering a metric to assess environmental policy efficacy. Lastly, a positive association is found in high-income contexts between number of social media photographs of UGBSs and subjective well-being, while this correlation is not significant in middle- and low-income contexts. This sheds light on human–nature relationships by providing global evidence of how aesthetic appreciation of urban nature influences human well-being.

Scoring the invisible

2024-02-29T22:15:09+00:00

This article discusses the computational and material interplays embedded in the making of [re]capture, a research–creation project combining a bio-inspired installation that materialises particulate matter, together with outdoor sensing instruments that collect atmospheric data in at-risk neighbourhoods (Montreal, Canada). With impacts on health and the environment, habitual and slow forms of exposure to atmospheric pollution (Hsu 2016) outline the relationality of air and the porosity of bodies, both human and more-than-human (Nieuwenhuis 2016; Albano 2022). What kind of technical objects, and material-esthetics can “negotiate a rapprochement” (Gissen 2009, 22) with the invisible materiality of air? At the intersection of critical and bio-design, mechanical engineering, and computer science, [re]capture delves into this question through the lens of ‘filtration,’ simultaneously envisioned as a physical process for attending to atmospheric pollution, and as a generative concept for interpolating technology, materiality, and the city. While the artwork iterates a virtual testing model (Blender and ossia score) with physical prototyping, the article examines how to compose with air through digital simulation and scoring to create new alliances between porous meshes, bioindicators, data, particulate matter, light, wind, and electronics. It also asks How to design installations that embody and materialise the affective properties of air? Attending the speculative trajectory of this process, the article draws on feedback from computer-aided simulation techniques and collaborative experiments in residency spaces to investigate the ‘scoring’ of [im]materiality and explore the spatio-temporality of air.