In this post, Julie Zook and I sit down to discuss some key headlines of our recent co-edited book, The Covert Life of Hospital Architecture, which was published open access with UCL Press on 22 March 22. Health as social, hospitals as social We conceived The Covert Life of Hospital Architecture in late 2019, just…
Joanne K Rowling is a genius for many reasons. The world of Harry Potter that she has created is fascinating for adults and children alike. It is also a world that has become the subject of research – there is an annual Harry Potter Conference in Philadelphia, where literature scholars debate the paternal atonement of…
This blog post was born out of serendipity. Which is only fitting, since it also covers the idea of serendipity. It all started with a typical day in my life as an academic: I did about ten different things at the same time and two of them suddenly created an unexpected connection in my mind;…
This last post in the series ‘ Five Things You Might Not Know About Offices‘ will focus on the issue of workplace configuration, more specifically it will look at open-plan offices. The open-plan office has taken a battering recently both in the media with headlines such as “Open-plan offices were devised by Satan in the…
In this fourth instalment of my blog series ‘Five Things You Might Not Know About Offices’ I want to look at common layout choices and the consequences these choices have. A very popular myth in office design asserts that an open-plan office accommodation is preferable because it increases communication among colleagues in contrast to a…
Last week saw the opening of the newly refurbished Tate Britain, which was much acclaimed by art and architecture lovers alike. The Millbank riverside main entrance was re-opened and the central entrance space underneath the rotunda was transformed by Caruso St John Architects into a stunning three-storey space connecting the lower ground floor via a spiral…
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal on ‘The New Science of Who Sits Where at Work‘ highlighted some interesting facts about behaviours of people in the workplace: the fact that 40-60% of our interactions are with immediate office neighbours; that bringing people from different teams and departments into close proximity can increase productivity;…
A couple of recent trips to Germany (Munich and Stuttgart) made me think about airports and how they create very diverse experiences for travellers. Obviously, each airport is unique in its size, location and its spatial configuration. However, it struck me how conceptually different airports are. How you experience an airport certainly depends on your own…
A recently published research paper on ‘A holistic multi-level analysis identifying the impact of classroom design on pupils’ learning’, written by Professor Peter Barrett and his team at Salford University has created quite a stir in mainstream media and received lots of attention. Among other outlets, it featured prominently in the Guardian, on dezeen, Wired…
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