Despite the increase of users of Mobility Assistive Devices (MobAD), there has been a lack of accessibility in urban environments in many parts of the world. We present a systematic review of how t...

The philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) has influenced the design work of architects as diverse as Steven Holl and Peter Zumthor, as well as informing renowned schools of architectural theory, notably those around Dalibor Vesely at Cambridge, Kenneth Frampton, David Leatherbarrow and Alberto Pérez-Gómez in North America and Juhani Pallasmaa in Finland. Merleau-Ponty suggested that the value of people’s experience of the world gained through their immediate bodily engagement with it remains greater than the value of understanding gleaned through abstract mathematical, scientific or technological systems. This book summarizes what Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy has to offer specifically for architects. It locates architectural thinking in the context of his work, placing it in relation to themes such as space, movement, materiality and creativity, introduces key texts, helps decode difficult terms and provides quick reference for further reading.

Several substantial market barriers obstruct the widespread adoption of sustainable buildings. Esthetic features are amongst the main driving forces behind the marketability of buildings, thus improvement of sustainable buildings in terms of visual esthetics would enhance their marketability and thus their market intake. Nonetheless, esthetic improvement of the buildings is a challenging task because it lacks in scales and methods to measure and evaluate buildings’ facade esthetic. In this regard, this study aims to develop machine learning-based models to predict the esthetic appreciation of buildings related to their façade features. For this purpose, an artificial neural network and decision tree models are developed and validated with the results of a conducted comprehensive survey (n = 807). In addition, the impact of different window features (i.e., position, number, area, width, height, symmetry, and proportion) on housings esthetic and marketability is investigated. Results show a high level of accuracy for both models in the prediction of esthetic appreciation of buildings.

Architectural writing norms have been a subject of constant debate in recent decades. Architectural poststructuralists have often conceptualised writing as a form of virtual construction in the medium of words. Recent scholarship relating to innovative architectural writing questions the power relations inherent in the canonical forms of academic architectural writing. This article examines Pritzker prize-winning Chinese architect Wang Shu’s [王澍] doctoral thesis, ‘Fictionalising Cities’ [‘虚构城市’] (2000), and other related writings, focusing on their experimental forms, the critical intentions behind them, and the multiple resonances between Wang’s written and built works. This article begins by foregrounding the intentions behind Wang’s experimental writing approach, namely his rejection of the dualistic opposition between writing and building, as well as his critique of instrumentalism in architectural representation. Through a close reading of ‘Fictionalising Cities’, this article explicates the central influence of Roland Barthes’s understanding of text as a ‘tissue of quotations’ and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage in shaping Wang’s writing approaches and his design thinking. By comparing Wang’s written and built works, specifically the Ningbo History Museum [宁波美术馆] (2003–2008) and the Xiangshan Campus of the China Academy of Art, Phase II [杭州中国美术学院象山校区二期] (2003–2007), the article identifies Wang’s consistent critical sensitivity towards the power relations and implied linear temporality that pre-structure modes of architectural creation. By highlighting Wang’s case, this article also suggests how the critical concerns that drive innovative architectural writing can be expanded into creative design practice.