This perspective paper explores the concept of multispecies design in architecture, focusing on the building scale. Historically, architects have prioritized human needs, neglecting nature’s integration in urban settings, leading to environmental and social challenges. To address these issues, a new multispecies approach that promotes the integration of ecological knowledge into architectural design has evolved. This paper aims to map existing concepts, challenges, and gaps in this novel multispecies approach, focusing on the building scale design process and suggests a roadmap for its implementation. This paper analyzes the existing literature and current architectural practices. This analysis is complemented by the findings from an architectural design studio that have highlighted real-world challenges not readily apparent in the literature. By promoting a multispecies architectural paradigm, this research not only underscores a transformative approach to building design but also positions multispecies design as an essential strategy in combatting the challenges of declining biodiversity and escalating climate change.

This essay explores the interplay between educational and architectural methodologies for analysing the school environment. It historicises the affinity between architectural and educational practices and modes of knowledge pertaining to the child’s body during the period of postwar reconstruction in England to argue that educational spaces were designed to accommodate the child’s free movement and bring it under observation, in order to constitute an active and emotionally adjusted citizen. Drake and Lasdun’s Hallfield Primary School is studied to illustrate the architectural implications of the shift in the modes of knowledge defining the child as an active and emotive subject, in part by aestheticising the sensation of movement. Thus the essay expands upon Andrew Saint’s seminal account by reinterpreting the architecture of the postwar school as a social technology, and identifying a pragmatist current of modernist architecture that was influenced by the concepts of time and growth developed independently by Alfred North Whitehead and Herbert Read.

Hard coastal infrastructure such as breakwaters and seawalls are built according to engineering parameters of structural performance and cost efficiency. Especially in urban settings, they conflict with the diverse needs and values of other users and stakeholders, such as sustaining coastal ecosystem biodiversity and providing the public with open, accessible spaces for socialisation and recreation. The presented research explores how the discipline of landscape design can contribute to their evolution. Building on recent precedents in developing multi-functional, ecologically enhanced seawalls, it proposes the concept of the blue garden, and explores two of its key features: bio-engineering the form and materiality of seawalls to enhance their performance as ecosystem service providers; and utilising computational fluid dynamics to poetically shape sea waves as a visual, aural and tactile landscape material to enhance its social and experiential value. It concludes with a pilot study that implements these principles for a specific urban site.

Between 1935 and 1959, the architecture of childhood was at the centre of architectural discourse in a way that is unique in architectural history. Some of the seminal projects of the period, such as the Secondary Modern School at Hunstanton by Peter and Alison Smithson, Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation at Marseilles, or Aldo van Eyck’s playgrounds and orphanage, were designed for children; At CIAM, architects utilized photographs of children to present their visions for reconstruction. The unprecedented visibility of the child to architectural discourse during the period of reconstruction is the starting point for this interdisciplinary study of modern architecture under welfare state patronage. Focusing mainly on England, this book examines a series of innovative buildings and environments developed for children, such as the adventure playground, the Hertfordshire school, the reformed children hospital, Brutalist housing estates, and New Towns. It studies the methods employed by architects, child experts and policy makers to survey, assess and administer the physiological, emotional and developmental needs of the ’user’, the child. It identifies the new aesthetic and spatial order permeating the environments of childhood, based on endowing children with the agency and autonomy to create a self-regulating social order out of their own free will, while rendering their interiority and sociability observable and governable. By inserting the architectural object within a broader social and political context, The Architectures of Childhood situates post-war architecture within the welfare state’s project of governing the self, which most intensively targeted the citizen in the making, the children. Yet the emphasis on the utilization of architecture as an instrument of power does not reduce it into a mere document of social policy, as the author uncovers the surplus of meaning and richness of experience invested in these environments at the historical mom

Seawalls and other types of waterfront infrastructures are predominantly designed to counter natural forces and maintain structural stability. Consequently, their defensive and reactive design impedes other types of uses and users. As an alternative to the single-use paradigm, there have been attempts to develop a more ecological, performance-based and civic approach to coastal defence structures that would engage with the diverse needs of human and non-human stakeholders. This paper presents a theoretical and methodological framework for employing computational tools to creatively design the interaction between the sea and the man-made shoreline. The research developed and tested a computational design methodology for the early stages of the seawall architectural design process. The suggested design methodology relies on inputs from a wave and texture taxonomy that was developed using physically based fluid simulation tools. The methodology was tested in a case study design.