Jeremy Till

• Head of Department at University of the Arts London

It was author's first encounter with Adrian Forty when he realised the persistence of Adrian's slow hard look that is, for him, the most remarkable quality of his work, and marks him out from so many contemporary traits. There is much debate about how the financial strictures of higher education are determining a new intellectual landscape. Flying...

An article looking at how one might resolve the apparent contradiction between scarcity (which in its lack might be seen to shut down opportunities) and agency (which is open ended and transformative). Extract: At first sight the title of this essay might appear to be a contradiction in terms. Scarcity, defined at core as a lack, would suggest th...

This viewpoint looks at the 2011 London riots, and in particular interprets them against a discussion of their urban location. In contrast to previous riots, which generally have happened either in urban centres or urban margins, the London riots happened in the everyday areas of the city, along borderlines between areas of different social inequal...

Jeremy Till and Tatjana Schneider call for a redefinition of the architect away from the professional who is ostensibly involved in adding ‘more stuff to the world’. Looking beyond the business of matter or managing the impact of that matter on the environment, they explore ways that designers can use their intelligence and creativity to shift exis...

Scarcity as a concept places an emphasis on limits and the restrictions that there might be on the supply of resources, energy and materials. Timothy Morton, who is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, and has written extensively on philosophy and ecology, among other subjects, questions philosophically this emphasis on limi...

Does ecological design create a holistic shift in thinking? Jon Goodbun suggests it does. He takes the lead from systems theorist Gregory Bateson, who argued that an ‘ecological aesthetic’ was required to understand how complex systems like cities behave. Goodbun explains how, with this new approach, it is flexibility rather than efficiency that be...

This dystopian, ‘anthropocene’ age shaped by human frailties calls for an extreme response. Benedict Singleton identifies a seam of experimental work by designers and artists that responds with full force, standing outside the more established liberal view of sustainability and locally attuned architecture.

Douglas Spencer develops David Harvey's notion of the ‘spatial fix’ in which material processes in the built environment and the ground itself are repeatedly used up for the purposes of capital investment. This can be to the detriment of the quality of the land itself, which is often abandoned after a period of time as polluted and unusable brownfi...

Iceland has come to epitomise the vicissitudes of the banking system, as it was catapulted from boom to bust in October 2008. During the burgeoning years of the 2000s, ambitious construction projects were implemented. As Arna Mathiesen explains, this has resulted in ‘a scarcity of means to finish the plans and maintain buildings, public spaces and...

Kate Soper describes how at a time when the gap between the rich and poor has grown wider, scarcity has become a product of affluence in a double sense. Not only is consumption using up material and energy resources for everyone, for the wealthiest section of the world's population the pleasures of consumption are also being paid for by the dearth...

What would happen if New York became a self‐sufficient city state, entirely self‐reliant in terms of food, waste, energy, movement, manufacture, building, water and clean air? Michael Sorkin provides a masterplan for the metropolis with an ecological footprint that coincides with its political boundaries. Controversially, he explores the possibilit...

If a new stringency with economic and material resources is to become a new way of life, how should austerity be recast as a positive force rather than a negative imposition? Daliana Suryawinata and Winy Maas look at definitions of austerity and describes the Austeria project at The Why Factory at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) that look...

Hackney Wick and Fish Island, adjacent to the London 2012 Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, has developed a special character over time, accommodating 700 artists' and other creatives' studios in old warehouses. The under‐designed ‘scarce’ quality of the public realm contrasts with the highly designed spaces of the Olympic Park. Liza Fior describes how...

Architecture as a practice assimilates contradictions. Nowhere is this more apparent than in approaches to materials and sustainability. New finishes, details and products are continually specified and often fetishised, while architects are at pains to show their minimal impact on the environment. Steve Parnell highlights an era in the pages of Arc...

Here Hattie Hartman, author of a significant new book London 2012: Sustainable Design: Delivering an Olympic Legacy, and Sustainability Editor of The Architects' Journal (AJ), argues sustainability's corner. Is there a danger that a new emphasis on scarcity per se fails to acknowledge the considerable inroads that have been made by design professio...

Despite the seeming accumulation of natural and manmade disasters over the last decade, and increasing urban intensification across the world, there seems to be little or no actual progress in solving urban ecological problems. In exploring a way forward, Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw highlight three potential approaches to urban socio‐ecological...

For over two decades, ecological literacy has sought to integrate foundational premises for addressing environmental problems. Here Jody Boehnert of EcoLabs explains how she has developed graphics resources and tools for designers in order for them to understand the perceptual shifts that are necessary to learn the causality and complexity of ecolo...

If economic growth is only possible with the availability of cheap energy, what happens as production of oil peaks, and petroleum extraction declines? Rob Hopkins, an activist behind the Transition movement, argues for a new bottom‐up approach to economic development that is also more localised and nourishing. Shifting the emphasis from sustainabil...

As the network co‐ordinator of DESIS‐Design for Social Innovation towards Sustainability, which links independent design labs in design schools and universities, Ezio Manzini plays a proactive part in promoting a creative and human‐based approach to design. Here, he argues for accommodating the full range of human capability by designing ‘error‐fri...

The term 'spatial agency' was developed out of a research project , which has resulted in a book and accompanying website, written together with Nishat Awan. The aim of the project was to uncover an alternative history of architectural praxis, one that had been largely ignored by mainstream architectural histories. When we conceived the project in...

This book offers the first comprehensive overview of alternative approaches to architectural practice.

This paper posits relating ethics to architecture in a manner that exceeds the dogged connection of ethics to building as object. The accepted definition of an architect is as someone who designs buildings. If this definition is to hold, then where apart from the building can ethical behaviour be exercised? Hence, the historical and theoretical ass...

This article investigates the word ‘agency’ in relation to the role, responsibility and power of the architect. Using Anthony Giddens’s formulation of agency, we discuss the transformative potential of architecture where the lack of a predetermined future is seen as an opportunity and not a threat. Four episodes describe related instances of archit...

This article investigates the word ‘agency’ in relation to the role, responsibility and power of the architect. Using Anthony Giddens’s formulation of agency, we discuss the transformative potential of architecture where the lack of a predetermined future is seen as an opportunity and not a threat. Four episodes describe related instances of archit...

This article investigates the word ‘agency’ in relation to the role, responsibility and power of the architect. Using Anthony Giddens’s formulation of agency, we discuss the transformative potential of architecture where the lack of a predetermined future is seen as an opportunity and not a threat. Four episodes describe related instances of archit...

This article investigates the word ‘agency’ in relation to the role, responsibility and power of the architect. Using Anthony Giddens’s formulation of agency, we discuss the transformative potential of architecture where the lack of a predetermined future is seen as an opportunity and not a threat. Four episodes describe related instances of archit...

How might flexible housing be achieved? ‘Determinate’ and ‘indeterminate’ approaches are examined using twentieth-century examples

The paper 'The Opportunities of Flexible Housing' addresses today's need for buildings that can adapt to change over time. By discussing ideology, participation, use, technology, and finance as parameters for flexible housing, this paper also investigates reasons for current non-implementation and obstacles as inherent to the UK housing market, bef...

Flexible housing can be defined as housing that is designed for choice at the design stage, both in terms of social use and construction, or designed for change over its lifetime. This paper argues that flexibility is an important consideration in the design of housing if it is to be socially, economically and environmentally viable. The degree of...

In 2005 the Arts and Humanities Research Council initiated a review of practice-led research in art, design and architecture. The purpose of the review was to develop a ‘comprehensive map of recent and current research activity in the area’. What quickly became obvious to the team that won the bid to run the review (led by the three authors) was th...

In Peter Hall's introduction to Leslie Martin's ‘The Grid as Generator’ (arq 4/4) he states that ‘the crucial link between research and design has been fatally lost’ and that ‘it is more than high time that architecture schools begin to rediscover it’. I am not so sure Hall is correct in saying that the link has been broken, though the pa...

Research has entailed a distillation of published material from the principal commentators on practice-led research, and Art, Design and Architecture. Sources include conference papers, authored books and edited books. The report also includes recent correspondence directly to the author by many of these commentators, much of which are embodied in...