Bridging architecture and social sciences to study home-based work: A socio-spatial representation method

The article is devoted to the reassessment of the role of fundamental architectural science within the context of the modern architectural process. The article offers a consistent analysis of the correlation between the tools of architectural science and the nomenclature of scientific specialities, spheres of influence of applied and fundamental sciences, emergence and demand for new areas of knowledge about urban life, and education of would-be architects. Examples are provided to show how human and social sciences are integrated into architectural science and practice.

For more than a decade I have been critical of my profession for its lack of rigor (Hamilton, 2003; Stichler & Hamilton, 2008). I have contended that architecture, as commonly practiced today, does not hold itself to a particularly high standard, and this in turn has contributed to the diminishing role and credibility of architects in the eyes of their clients. I became convinced that architecture is too often characterized by its rather than its and tended to justify decisions on aesthetics, which is to say on arbitrary, subjective premises. I must add that I simultaneously believe fully in the wonderful and special contribution of creativity and aesthetics to the vitally important art of architecture. However, I feel that the science of architecture is often given short shrift.After practicing in healthcare architecture for many years, a decade ago I entered graduate school to earn a degree in the social sciences. My observation was that, based on their theories, conceptual frameworks, and typical research studies, the social sciences seemed more rigorous than architecture and the construction sciences- certainly more rigorous than my own practice at the time. Organizational consulting, for example, seemed to be more solidly founded on social and organizational theory, frameworks, and the use of evidence from research. I have recently returned to graduate school and am currently involved in a doctoral program that requires me to review and understand clinical theories, conceptual frameworks, and nursing research. My current observation is that the clinical sciences appear to be more rigorous than the social sciences, which in turn still seem more rigorous than architecture.What, then, specifi cally, do I mean when I encourage increasing rigor among the design professions, especially among those involved in the design of health facilities? What can be done to increase rigor in design practice? I off er the following suggestions.1. Use consistent language and clear defi nitions.Th ere is a tendency for people to use the same words to mean diff erent things, the eff ects of which can be exaggerated when communicating with someone from another discipline or organization. Commonly understood defi nitions of key words and phrases that are accepted by consensus within the fi eld-or at least within a design team-are needed.One example is the word research, which to a clinician or scientist means carefully planned studies to produce new fi ndings, but to many architects it can mean unstructured searching for information about a project or a client, or making a routine choice from a product catalog. Many architects consider the search for a particular piece of door hardware or an interview conducted as part of the space programming process to be research, but the client would be unlikely to agree.Similarly, design professionals may casually use the word prove in a discussion of the results of a post-occupancy evaluation. A scientist, physician, or researcher would never claim proof based upon the results of a single anecdotal study conducted using a minimal, quasi-scientifi c process. To be viewed as credible, the design community needs to learn instead to say that a hypothesis was supported. Unsupportable claims only lessen the credibility of the architect in the eyes of those more familiar with serious research.Design professionals may fi nd it helpful to collaborate with their clients to defi ne words and terms for each project. What is meant when a client asks for a welcoming character, or a high-tech solution? Can they agree on what a welcoming environment looks like? Creating a common language among diverse team members can help minimize misunderstanding. Th is is best done at the beginning of a project and should be shared with new team members as they are added.2. Base key decisions on the best current evidence.Th ere are bound to be a small number of key decisions that require careful study before they can be made confi dently. …

Discursive urban studies is an integral area of modern urban research, implemented in the interrelationships of three approaches – transstructural, humanitarian-analytical and epistemological. The transstructural approach can be considered as a new vector not only of urban research, but also of social and humanitarian science in general. At the same time, it is the discursive research of the city that is becoming the optimal field for introducing a transstructural approach to science and testing the first results. This approach integrates polydialecticism and the interpretative ambiguity of the discursive phenomena of the modern city. The concept of translucency was borrowed by me from geological and architectural sci-ence. The transstructural approach itself is aimed at developing research hypermodels – “structures with partial configurations” where horizontal and vertical layers intersect and create complex structural compositions. In the analysis of urban discourse, the transstructural method makes it possible to record not only discursive “shifts” (by analogy with geological shifts), but also the points of highest stress at which these shifts occur or will occur. Humani-tarian analytics, in turn, is designed to understand the effects of translucency on specific people living and moving in the city, and, if possible, to find certain solutions. In the context of etymological urbanism, the idea of a project city continues to develop, which can be de-scribed as a discursive space where conditions are created to meet intellectual and communi-cative needs, the needs for active social interaction and defending one’s own individuality. The discursive analytics of the modern city pulsates in the four-dimensional coordinates of space–time and communication–knowledge. The transstructural approach makes it possible to identify the patterns of functioning and development of mega-large structurally heteroge-neous cities. At the same time, humanitarian analytics and epistemological urban studies are partly project-oriented, since, one way or another, they are focused on finding solutions to problems and contradictions identified through the transstructural method.

The “International Building Exhibition” (IBA) is a format of German architecture, which has been widely awarded as contributing to a wider social agenda. In Hamburg, the IBA was initiated to overcome the traditional divide between the poorer South and wealthier North of the city. Aiming at both built and social improvements, the IBA was set up in the deprived area of Wilhelmsburg. Questions arose, however, about whether the IBA is an appropriate instrument in a fragmented city, where gentrification has deepened social inequalities. A vivid “right to the city”-movement has established itself in Hamburg and also criticized the IBA. In this chapter, the IBA Hamburg will be used as an example to discuss the profound relationship between architecture and urban society in times of increasing social fragmentation. First, the context of the IBA and the “right to the city”-movement will be introduced. Then, the impact of the IBA on the particular case of Wilhelmsburg and Hamburg, with respect to its social geography, will be studied. This chapter will deconstruct the perspectives that architects of the IBA, as well as their critics, have on the city. It will thereby show that the ongoing social fragmentation of the city is disregarded in the programmatic realization of the IBA concept and by its intellectual rhetoric. The analysis will show that this incompatibility between architecture and social science is no longer a product of disciplinary logics but has lost its relevance due to the emergence of a new narrative on planning and society.

This article examines theories of human territoriality and their historical role in the demise of public housing in Western Europe and North America between the 1960s and the 1980s. The neglect and privatization of the public housing stock and the withdrawal of the state in direct provision in this period are often subsumed under the category of neoliberalism. This article unpacks this narrative by focusing on the intersection between architecture and social science. It argues that the neoliberalization of housing not only constitutes a transformation of housing economics, from public to private funding, or design, from highrise blocks in large estates to semidetached or detached individual dwellings; it also constitutes an epistemological turn, which revolves around the shift from “habitat” to “human territoriality.”

As relates to live performance, the purview of sound quality in architectural acoustics is mostly limited to concert halls. While the concert hall is perhaps the most common setting in which to hear live Western classical music in our present day, this was not always the case historically. As will be shown from analysis of published text as well as interviews with music critics, artists, and concert-goers, a variety of alternatives to the concert hall exists currently in the form of domestic settings, casual settings like coffee shops, as well as large outdoor settings like farms and parks. The advantages and disadvantages of such alternative venues, as concerns the overall concert experience and the quality metric of intimacy particularly, will be discussed. Moreover, design issues relating to the acoustical environment as well as the social environment in these venues will be discussed based on the data. This paper will ideally foster discussion in the acoustical and the architectural community on ways to expand the traditional concert hall experience as well as address design issues in alternative venues. [Work supported by ASA Minority Fellowship and RPI Humanities, Arts, Architecture, and Social Sciences Fellowship.]

Intimacy can be subjectively defined as the feeling of closeness to performance. Intimacy has been widely correlated with the initial time delay gap, the delay between the direct sound and early reflections in a venue [Beranek, Concert and Opera Halls: How They Sound (Acoustical Society of America, New York, 1996)]. Contemporary research suggests that visual stimuli have considerable bearing upon intimacy perception [e.g., Cabrera and Nguyen, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 116, 2475 (2004)]. Building upon paradigms of ecological psychology, the author hypothesizes that social affordances, perceived offerings of social propinquity in a venue, will significantly enhance the auditory impression of intimacy. A socioecological approach to weigh the hypothesis is proposed wherein auditory perception is evaluated in the context of both the physical and the social environment. The methodology will employ interviews, ethnographic analyses, field studies, and laboratory tests. The research results will likely have immediate ramifications for the tools of visualization and auralization, its acoustical analogue. The study has broader ramifications for the design process, engendering the possibility of more humane design of artistic listening spaces through understanding reciprocal relationships between physical, acoustical, and social domains. [Work supported by ASA Minority Fellowship and RPI Humanities, Arts, Architecture, and Social Sciences Fellowship.]

This study investigates the influence of academic discipline on higher-dimensional visuospatial abilities among undergraduate students. Drawing upon a diverse sample from multiple universities and BSc programs, the research examines the performance of architecture, engineering, and social sciences students on a novel nD cube mental rotation task. A total of 101 participants engaged in an online test involving the visualization and interpretation of two-dimensional, three-dimensional and four-dimensional geometries projected onto two-dimensional planes. Results indicate a difference in performance between architecture students and other students, with architecture students demonstrating higher accuracy in predicting nD cube rotations. These findings suggest that architectural education may enhance visuospatial abilities, potentially due to its emphasis on spatial cognition and representation throughout the curriculum. Further research with more comprehensive tests and broad participation is needed to explore the longitudinal effects of educational interventions and the potential for interdisciplinary collaboration to foster cognitive development among undergraduate students.

In recent years, Populism has attracted considerable interest from social scientists and political commentators even though the mercurial nature of populism has often exasperated those attempting to take it seriously. Indeed, the term “populism” is both widely used and widely contested. It has been defined based on political, economic, social, and discursive features and analyzed from myriad theoretical perspectives – including structuralism, post-structuralism, modernization theory, social movement theory, party politics, political psychology, political economy, and democratic theory – and a variety of methodological approaches, such as archival research, discourse analysis, and formal modelling. In this regard, one of the trending themes of Populism is its impact on populist fiction of historical genre. This interest has led to a growth of a plethora of historical fictions especially in the twenty-first century, like the works of Khaled Husseini (The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns), which provides us a window of the lives of the Afghan people during the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, an issue which is becoming very pertinent today given the recent developments in the Afghan nation. In this regard, Populism has played an integral role in the growth and development of historical fictions in the twenty-first century. Historical fictions or narrative histories are not forthcoming in the academia as a legitimate form of history. More than any other contemporary literary form, historical fictions have always struggled to find acceptance within professional academic frameworks designated as either history or fiction. To accept historical fiction/narrative as a precise, learned method of historical representation, one needs to first overcome the belief that historical works must present clear, documented evidence which can be taken as true representations of historical past and challenge the assumption that all fictions are merely stories conjured in an author’s mind. In this line of thought, works of such genre are often excluded from being seen as History or as having something to offer to the audience who is interested in the past being represented in a manner that works both within and outside of what is designated as “History.” But in this sense, all distinctions are then problematic, as drawing a distinction between what is historically factual and what is literarily possible ignores the role of possibility in historical analysis and the role of actuality in the writing of literature, i.e., what could happen, what typically happens, what might have happened, and what actually happened. This entry examines how much “truth” a historical fiction may command and indulges in the view that a historical fiction should not be seen to be compromising the historical truth but instead in terms of its ability offers readers access to a past unavailable to traditional or “proper” modes of historical research. This entry will also explore the development of the genre of historical novel alongside the development of contemporary historiographical theory. The entry will trace the development of the historical novel from its popular form in the nineteenth-century Romantic period, a time when the historical novels were rarely subject to critical appraisal to the contemporary twenty-first century where historical narrative is often scrutinized for its representation of historical “truth.” This entry will explore the idea that historical fiction given the impetus of Populism allows an experience, an opportunity and that it is often the encounters we have and the stories we tell that make history accessible, memorable, and applicable to our present.