Urban notebooks / Stadsschriften / Cahiers Urbains

In Brussels, the need for affordable and middleincome housing is entangled with the necessity to reduce the environmental impact of housing. The current climatological and health crises demand us to improve the resilience of our human habitat in the city. In planning and developing new collective housing projects, private and public developers alike are struggling to find the right answer to these questions.

In this book, we present a researc...

"Nikos Salingaros is a mathematician who's also a brilliant thinker about architecture and urbanism. 'Solid' doesn't begin to hint at his virtues and talents, but isn't it nice when you encounter 'solid' in the world of the arts? Salingaros has worked closely with Christopher Alexander, and has become a major architecture theorist in his own right." -- Ray Sawhill.

"This is an interesting compilation of some of the important roots and evolutions of modernism and its latest development, the De...

Recently, Chinese Public Rental Housing (PRH) provision has witnessed a shift from ‘government’ to ‘governance’: policy making shifted from government steering to mixed forms involving government, market and civic actors to pursue effective and fair policies. In the meantime, this new-era PRH governance is credited with mixed results. However, the existing studies fail to describe the mechanisms underlying this new-era governance of PRH with the rising involvement of market actors and...

This dissertation focuses on architectural education and practice as a collective experience, examining the particular case of the PUCV School of Architecture and Design and Ciudad Abierta in Chile. The study asks whether the culture of collectivity that characterises the school has served as a supporting structure for its artistic and pedagogical project and if so, which elements configure the collective ways of studying and practising at this school. The dissertation delves into these quest...

Footprint #29 aims at exploring the architectural relations to populism intended as the political approach that strives to appeal to the “common” public. It examines architecture’s intersection with media, politics and aesthetics. From Nazi Germany to Trump’s presidency the use of architecture and its relationship with ideologies is reflected upon, as well as how architectural aspirations are reshaped in the light of different populist ramifications. This issue is an open inquiry into...

An evocative photo book with three essays documenting the careful transformation of the nineteenth-century Fort Hoofddorp, part of the Amsterdam Defence Line. The strategic interventions of architect Serge Schoemaker are captured in the photos of Max Hart Nibbrig and described in the contributions of Kirsten Hannema, Hans Ibelings, and Jolanthe Kugler.

Twenty eight architects from Scandinavia present their latest projects involving residential, commercial and public buildings all characterised by Nordic flair.

For Dutch please see below

- Englisch -

The fiercely social and vigorously innovative Mei realizes trend-setting buildings in the Netherlands and abroad. This Rotterdam-based architecture firm has built up an idiosyncratic oeuvre in which respect for the environment is central.

This first overview shows works of the past 25 years. From the 1995 modular Smarthouse to the wooden residential building Sawa that is currently being developed: they all display a fascination with intelligent building...

This publication offers an overview of the latest cross-disciplinary developments in the field of Building with Nature (BwN) for the protection of coastal regions. The key philosophy of BwN is the employment of natural processes to serve societal goals, such as flood safety. The starting point is a systems-based approach, making interventions that employ the shaping forces of the natural system to perform measures by self-regulation. Initial pilots of this innovative approach originate from c...

Architectural design greatly influences building energy performance (BEP), and energy-efficient design is therefore often studied. Architectural space layout also can affect BEP. However, only a few of the numerous studies on energy-efficient design considered the effect of space layout. Within these studies, the isolated effect of space layout on the BEP has hardly have been analysed systematically.

The framework of Performative Computational Architecture (PCA) had been proven to be effectiv...