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…
A couple of weeks ago, floor plan and seating arrangements of the 250 people running the General Election campaign for the Labour party were revealed in the Guardian. The article outlined teams and their tasks, where they all sat and how the war room operated on a day-to-day basis. It is a fascinating account of life inside a…
A lot of my architecture friends got all excited this week by the completion of the new Learning Hub of Nanyang Technical University in Singapore by Heatherwick Studio. Quite rightly so! It seems to be an amazing building – made up of twelve stacked towers arranged around a central courtyard, allowing views up, down and…
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 an earlier post I have already described how a hospital in the Netherlands is attempting to revolutionising healthcare (by organising – among other things – a flexible working environment that actually works). In this post I want to elaborate on a different aspect of the hospital design of Orbis and investigate how the spatial…
Several months after the opening of the new concourse of Kings Cross Station, now that the initial hype is over, I’ve finally had the chance to go and have a closer look at how the new station works. Designed by John McAslan and Partners and engineered by Arup, the new station was mostly praised for…
On twitter (thanks, Colin!) I recently stumbled upon a wonderful video produced by ARTE, in which the German designer Erik Spiekermann sketches his ideal office. It is fantastic to see someone sketch their ideas live (and funny as well to see Spiekermann struggle to draw a cool looking espresso machine – he later admits it…
Inspired by the start of term at UCL, a new great cohort of students to teach and interact with, and the new module that I teach (‘Buildings, Organisations, Networks’ in the MSc ‘Advanced Architectural Studies’ – now called ‘Spatial Design: Architecture and Cities’), I have recently thought a lot about building typologies. So in essence,…
Or: Why buildings with voids in the middle are bad design choices. Apple’s plan for a new campus in Cupertino has received a lot of attention in the media and architecture world, most of it awestruck and full of praise, reproducing the same glittering images of a new iconic building. The project is not only…
spaceandorganisation 