Additions + Subtractions is a compact collection of research into the core of architecture operations in the most reductive, yet important of procedural techniques; adding and subtracting. Represented in orthographic drawings, axonometric projections, and black and white photographs, the elemental methods of architectural making are explored and documented through basic Euclidian geometry. The book represents the collective effort of studio work at the Department of Architecture at the National University of Singapore in the level 2 curriculum; document the important foundation for architects in their early education. By combining basic formal operations with clear and compelling descriptive techniques, this an ideal book for beginning students of architecture.

2009 Design Studio at the Department of Architecture, the National University of Singapore, led by Erik G. L'Heureux

The hydrological foundations that underpin the success of Singapore today and Cambodia of the 15th Century are made visible through a series of beautifully illustrated drawings, photographs and graphical diagrams. By comparing each countries’ hydrologic architecture, water distribution infrastructure, and water based economies a new understanding of Singapore and Cambodia comes into focus. The book is a breakdown and study of hydrology in every aspect – geographical, historical, economical, political, urban and architectural. Probing Hydrological Urbanism offers a timely look into Singapore’s future by reflecting on Cambodia’s past, offering lessons and warnings of two very different yet parallel civilizations in South East Asia.

Overseas research studio at the Department of Architecture, the National University of Singapore, led by Erik G. L'Heureux

"Singles and Multiples" is a graphical collection of research into the core of architecture and urban form performed at the Department of Architecture, School of Design and Environment at the National University of Singapore. Represented in orthographic drawings, axonometric projections, and black and white photographs, the elemental methods of architectural operations are explored and documented as a means to illustrate logic and formal understanding. Operations to the singular body are equated with the architectural object while deployment and modification of the multiple are understood as imminently urban; i.e. the collection and aggregation of objects. Purposely disconnected from the pragmatic, the work does not display research in finality but rather represents ideation, captures process, enables didactic conversations, and projects ideas of object-ness and aggregation as a means to think through basic architectural acts. Traced through the discourses of Fumihiko Maki's "Investigations of Collective Form", Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky's "Literal and Phenomenal", and Paul Rudolph's projects in the tropical local of Southeast Asia, "Singles and Multiples" returns the architectural and urban conversation to its operative foundations.

A Simple Factory Building for the Tropics is a compelling architectural example of the merging of passive design, digital simulation, and selective active technologies for a relatively banal building typology. A series of simple yet important design approaches, sampled and transformed from regional historical precedents, allow for the emergence of passive architectural form while being linked to the realities of tempering air, maximizing efficiency, floor space, and contemporary construction technologies. The result is an architecture located between the open and closed, durable and adaptable, passive and active. The design synthesis insures the project’s relevance today and for its future life cycle both performatively and symbolically.

4th International Network for Tropical Architecture Conference

Ato tiga vices! a incon thread ici various incarnations of what 'super' means in architecture. As a term, 'super' derives from Latin, meaning 'above, over, on the or in addition to'. As a preposition, it is always added on with an implication of excess to something or someone. Excess i at the root of architecture, for in ways large and n a i l , architecture is by definition the extra that brings meaning and order to the built environment. And, in typically additively, its architectural outcome often equates 'to scale. The large, monumental and the 'super' additive | projects are all self-evident in ARI136; but 'super' may also _ operate reductively, as one might find with the super-careful, : super-curated or super-precise. These qualities are not so 'super'-Rem Koolhaas or his Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). The most notable article is Under Construction, Super-theatre: Taipei Performing Arts Centre (p018), where the plans are an excellent collage of geometry and scale, and Baro Ole Scheeren's interlace review (p044).

If one says "Red" (the name of a color) and there are 50 people listening, it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different."-Josef Albers Architecture " Out of The Box" Finding Chance Before And After Architecture Making Connections Building the M+ Architecture Collection

The urban riverfront of Melbourne, Australia, has been transformed over the past 20 years into a popular leisure precinct known as Southbank. This is a postmodern landscape of contrived spectacle, where playful urban life is simulated, choreographed and consumed. Yet it is also the site of many forms of unplanned and unstructured activity. This paper explores the complex uses and meanings which can develop around such a waterfront, and outlines three dialectics which reveal how many new kinds of public life emerge within it. New tensions between global and local, politics and play, representation and embodied action lead to a rethinking of both formularized waterfronts and urban design theories.

This paper examines the critical and public reception of Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2004), a major recent public memorial which draws upon minimalist ideas and precedents, and two particularly important precursors, Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) and Richard Serra’s public sculpture Tilted Arc (1981). These works were completed several decades after the Minimalist movement had begun to expand the limits of artistic representation through sculpture. Eisenman and Lin chose minimalism as a means for memorialising types of tragedies which were not subjects of public memorialisation in earlier times. These memorials appeared in an era when large-scale public art had become a commonplace feature of public space. The key reference points for this investigation are essays from the mid-1960s by Morris and Fried and later reviews by Kraus which articulated the concept of minimalist sculpture. The paper identifies various ways that minimalist concepts have challenged and transformed the design, purpose, reception and management of public memorial sites. The analysis explores how minimalist public art and public memorials have established new relations between sculpture and landscape; new positions, roles and experiences for visitors; and new ways of linking visitor perceptions to memory. The paper outlines how rather than eliminating meaning, abstract forms provide new ways of provoking responses from visitors, transmitting meanings, and addressing new subjects of remembrance. The public’s responses to these designs highlight that not everyone comprehends or appreciates the messages intended by abstract forms of memorialisation.

The post-war period in Australia was one of acute suburbanisation. Beginning in the 1980s, Australians rediscovered the joys of the inner city: its mixtures of use, its social density, and the vital public spaces which these conditions supported. Whilst waterfront redevelopment was in most cases a relatively late phase in the transformation of the inner city, it is currently at the cutting edge of urban redevelopment and urban design: waterfronts allow for functional expansion and augmentation in CBD areas which are already heavily built up; they are generally well served by existing transport infrastructure which can deliver visitors; and as new linkages, they add value and amenity to existing investments. This paper critically examines the urban design of waterfront cultural and leisure precincts in Australian cities, in terms of simple functional planning matters such as use, scale and connectivity, but also examining how these are entangled in more complex representational, behavioural and political outcomes. The paper draws primarily on an analysis of 'Southbank' precincts in central Melbourne and Brisbane, although it also makes comparisons with urban waterfront areas in other cities both national and international. Particular attention is given to the tensions between the careful management of activities and imagery in these leisure zones, and the messy diversity of everyday life which actually takes place in and around them. The underlying hypothesis is that it is the constant unfolding of oppositions, contradictions and conflicts between different users and different social ideals which makes these waterfronts vital, exciting, meaningful urban places.

Contemporary spectacles are often criticized for tightly scripting public life, proscribing spaces and their meanings, and instrumentalizing the public realm for political, cultural or economic gain. Participant observation of visitor behavior at festivals in Glasgow, Scotland, and Gwangju, South Korea and analysis of the festivals' spatial organization reveal how such events can also facilitate social interaction at the local scale. Four kinds of spatial conditions—enclosure, centrality, axial connection and permeability—are shown to shape informal social encounters among attendees, and stimulate performances of local identity and engagement with the meanings of place.

Contemporary spectacles are often criticized for tightly scripting public life, proscribing spaces and their meanings, and instrumentalizing the public realm for political, cultural or economic gain. Participant observation of visitor behavior at festivals in Glasgow, Scotland, and Gwangju, South Korea and analysis of the festivals' spatial organization reveal how such events can also facilitate social interaction at the local scale. Four kinds of spatial conditions—enclosure, centrality, axial connection and permeability—are shown to shape informal social encounters among attendees, and stimulate performances of local identity and engagement with the meanings of place.

NOTE: The full paper reporting this research has now been published as:
"Temporary uses of urban spaces: How are they understood as ‘creative’?"
in ArchNet-IJAR: International Journal of Architectural Research 12(3):90-107,
DOI: 10.26687/archnet-ijar.v12i3.1673

That full paper is also available on this webpage.

Public memorials often have “spectacular” forms: visitors' feelings are affected primarily through relatively passive, distant reception of visual depictions and symbols. At London's Lady Diana Memorial fountain and Berlin's Holocaust Memorial, the visual message is intentionally reduced to almost nothing. Instead, these designs present visitors' bodies with intense and varied stimuli to hearing, touch, temperature and kinaesthesia. This undermines contemplation or introspection. Visitors explore a variety of physiological feelings, both pleasurable and unpleasurable. These physical feelings are intended to stimulate emotional ones; people should feel the purpose of the memorials rather than think them. But they come away with different impressions; most visitors' actions appear hedonistic rather than mournful.

This article examines three New World democratic capital cities – Washington, Ottawa and Canberra – where the growing number of public memorials has spurred the development of official plans and policies to regulate the siting and design of future memorial proposals. The historical evolution of these strategies is examined in relation to the designs of individual memorials. The analysis identifies a range of planning strategies that significantly influence the design of individual memorials, including large-scale memorial precinct plans, the social meanings of surrounding sites and structures and existing memorials, and the uses of memorial sites for activities other than grieving. The article examines controversies surrounding the siting, design, meaning and public use of a number of specific memorial examples. The research draws upon existing planning and briefing documents, wider public and professional discourse, and site analysis.

This paper comparatively examines how three major world cities plan for the ongoing development of memorials in their public spaces. The predominant focus is on memorials that have been erected in these cities over the past two decades, many of which have new forms and address new subjects. Each city has strategies for regulating the themes, sites and designs of future memorial proposals, because of significant ongoing demand, and to calibrate commemoration against other land use needs. Drawing upon interviews with city planners and memorial designers, analysis of planning documents and project briefs, and spatial analysis of memorial layouts, the paper analyses the needs, opportunities, constraints and historical contexts that are shaping new memorial development. It identifies the aims, principles and practices of the plans and regulations that guide memorial locations, designs and subject matter. It examines the historical evolution of formal memorial planning strategies and regulations in each city in relation to proposals and designs for individual new memorials and the availability of particular sites.

This paper examines decision-making about the location
and design of new public memorials in three major world
cities: London, Berlin, and New York. All three cities have
remained foci of political and economic power over several
centuries. The historical development of each city has been
marked by numerous shifts in the spatial distribution of
political power and its representation, and the installation of
hundreds of memorials to a plethora of subjects throughout
their built fabric. Each new memorial in these respective
cities must find a place within a complex constellation of
existing forms, settings, and values, and each new work also
contributes to an ongoing redefinition of priorities regarding
collective memory and identity. In each city, commemorative
works have to fit within a constantly evolving landscape,
potentially undermining their long-term effectiveness as
markers of memory. Ongoing demand for new memorials in
London, Berlin, and New York has created a need to develop
strategies for regulating the themes, sites and designs of
future memorial proposals. The paper examines the historical
evolution of formal planning strategies and decisions in each
city, in relation to the proposals and designs of individual
new memorials, and the availability of suitable sites.