In the Gothic architecture Lars Spuybroek discovers a vitalist ontology that allows him to rethink the nature of constructivism. The vitalist beauty emerges out of a particular field of material forces and is not an actualisation of a pre-given model. His analysis leads to a critique of the work of Deleuze and Guattari, who are portrayed as philosophers of the sublime. Their resistance to the signifying semiotics leads them too far. They unjustly claim that the Gothic structures emerge due to an affirmation of chaos and not in a careful process of construction. In my paper, I will nevertheless demonstrate that Spuybroek’s critique misses a fundamental point of their analysis. Only phantasms or spiritual becomings - concepts lacking in the analysis of Spuybroek - can allow for a proper appreciation of the Gothic and of the process of construction.

This paper presents a detailed explication of the main tenets of Félix Guattari’s theorisation of asignifying semiotics in the context of the mixed semiotics that he developed in the 1970s and which extended throughout his career. This foundational work on the relationship between asignification and signifying semiologies, and the micropolitical necessity of escaping from meaning in the broadest sense encompassing individuation, double articulation, and limited subjectivation, is contextualised in terms of information theory, in the work of Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, as well in terms of Roland Barthes’ semiology and suggestive extra-structural conception of signifiers without signifieds or obtuse meaning. Guattari’s favourite examples of asignifying technomaterial info-networks and mushrooms sprouting on manure are both discussed.

Underneath the turbulent surface of the ubiquitous media-scape lies an even more agile and aggressive set of relations. A central figure in this turmoil of desires seems to be the asignifying sign, which has a hybridising liaison with both the realm of the real virtual and the realm of the actualised. The main question is what does it want? This new materialistic, non-anthropocentric liberty of affect is creating an arena of strange attractors and other topological vector fields in which our own unconscious drive is as effective as that of the steel ball in a pinball machine. Could we isolate the intrinsic drive of the medium from its subservient position in the aesthetic, freeing its desire from the anthropocentric dominion? What does it Yen for? Perhaps this gap is not meant to be filled, as it is this yearning what it yearns for. The asignifying sign cannot be isolated, it is neither here nor there, yet it is conditionally omnipresent, it inhibits the gap, its desire is to affect.

What is the relationship of affect to the non- of non-philosophy? And how might asking this question also go some distance toward answering (or raising) questions about the continuing relevance of disciplinarity itself? By first taking up minor remarks made by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in What is Philosophy? – especially around the work of Francois Laurelle – this essay will explore how some of the implications of affect’s relation to the ‘non-‘ intersect with matters of immanence, pedagogy, and, finally, with the resoluteness of disciplinary boundaries.

The form of the city and its public spaces are changing in Asia. This short survey tracks the retreat of the European imperial space systems as Asian nations gained independence and the multi-centered, global corporate system of public space-making that emerged from 1990-2008. It also tracks the appearance of a specifically Asian rural-urban space-making system of urban villages that has emerged as a long cultural continuity in and around Asian cities. Four models of urban space are examined: Metropolis, Megalopolis, Fragmented Metropolis, and Megacity/Metacity. All are simultaneously present in the Asian city, forming parallel timelines weaving around each other. After the 2008 crash there is reason to pause and re-evaluate this highly successful, emerging Asian urban system and its public spaces, especially in view of the likely implications of energy supplies and climate change on key Asian cities located in coastal and river valley situations.

This paper focuses on exploring a quantitative approach to mapping street space. Characteristics of street space can hardly be described and explained using only the traditional architectural forms of street space. The difficulty arises because of the lack of relevance between these forms and people’s activities in them. This phenomenon presents a challenge to mapping methods. Expanding mapping elements is one viable and ongoing path. Which element could be an effective one and how it should be measured and mapped, are vital questions. Interface signs have been selected as the experimental elements, with an area of central Nanjing selected as the research sample. Database and statistics of interface signs and pedestrian flows have been established and inserted into the GIS (Geographical Information System) where a series of correlation analyses between basic mappings and pedestrian flows are carried out.

This article reviews the book Swedish Modernism. Architecture, Consumption and the Welfare State, edited by Helena Mattsson and Sven-Olov Wallenstein. In this volume, the editors plea for the construction of ‘multiple modernities’, following which a more diversified understanding of the European welfare state can be constructed. Through twelve contributions by a group of international scholars, Mattsson and Wallenstein aspire to initiate the construction of an emblematic Swedish modernism. The book offers an intricate and diversified reading of the history of the Swedish Folkhemmet, including political history, social sciences and media studies.When it comes to the built environment, however, the volume focuses largely on the home, with a few excursions to exhibition spaces and into corporate culture. In this volume, Mattsson and Wallenstein answer many questions, but raise an equal amount of new questions and thus leave the reader wanting more, as any good book should.

This article reviews BAVO’s recent publication, Too Active to Act, Cultureel Activisme na het Einde van de Geschiedenis, which forms a critical analysis of cultural production and activism in The Netherlands. This publication is then used as an occasion to question, in more general terms, the possibility of a form of social engagement that is situated and embedded in the real, that is within the system [rather than processed through theory, ideology or oppositional critique]. It argues that, in order to address this question, one needs not just to question what practice can or should do (in order to guarantee criticality, for example), but one also needs to revise the meaning of being ‘marginal’ once we are within the system, and the role of theory in the ‘anti-theory setting’ described by BAVO.

This issue of Footprint is based on the conference session ‘The European Welfare State Project – Ideals, Politics, Cities and Buildings’ as organized by the editors at the first EAHN Conference in Guimarães, Portugal in 2010, and as elaborated in the second EAHN Conference in Brussels, Belgium in 2012 (together with Mark Swenarton). These sessions were proposed as part of the research programme ‘Changing Ideals – Shifting Realities’ at the TU Delft, which aims to further disclose, map and question the architectural culture of the second half of the twentieth century. It focuses on how the welfare state in Western Europe represents a unique time frame in which manifold shifts within the modernist discourse in architecture and planning were paired with societal changes that established new assemblages between producers, designers, governments, clients, builders and users. It is part of the editors’ assumption that the current crisis of capitalism puts the politics of redistribution back on the agenda. In re-investigating the vast legacy of the welfare state, it seems only natural to look for new models for collectivity, not to dwell in nostalgia, but indeed to find alternatives to suit the new situation. At the intersections of building practice, architectural viewpoints, national and local cultural contexts, a nuanced image of welfare state architecture emerges.

The housing projects built by the London Borough of Camden in the years 1965-73 belong arguably to the most substantial investigations into the architecture of social housing undertaken in the past half-century. Under borough architect Sydney Cook, Camden aimed to establish a new kind of housing architecture based, not on the Corbusian tabula rasa, but on a radical reinterpretation of traditional English urbanism.The outcome was a series of projects, including Fleet Road, Alexandra Road, Highgate New Town, Branch Hill and Maiden Lane, designed by members of Cook’s team, including Neave Brown, Peter Tábori and Gordon Benson and Alan Forsyth, as well as projects designed by up-and-coming private architects like Colquhoun & Miller, Edward Cullinan and Farrell Grimshaw.While it began in what Hobsbawm called the ‘golden age’ of postwar capitalism, the Cook years (1965-73) saw the onset of the crisis of the 1970s and with it the rise of the New Right and the Hard Left, both of which viewed the Camden housing projects as a legitimate target for attack. Based on archival research and interviews, the paper explores the ways in which the Cook projects both mediated and articulated the emergence of these fissures within the British welfare state.