95 Peckham Road, London, Peter Barber Architects, 2019 This is the final post in my trilogy of blogs on social housing. Blog 1 explored a concentration of diverse social housing developments within a small part of London to see what lessons might help address today’s acute housing need. Blog 2 situated those initial observations within... Continue Reading →
From Lutyens’ Page Street housing to Darnbourne and Darke’s Lillington Gardens and beyond: English social housing in its architectural context
In the field of collective housing Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation at Marseilles had something of the function of a prototype, writes William Curtis in his 1981 Modern Architecture since 2000. I met Curtis some time ago at an Italian architects’ conference in Sicily and have kept in touch since. Having recently seen my 17/08/25 post... Continue Reading →
Another Housing Crisis: forward to the past!
Page Street and Vincent Street Housing (1928-1930), by Edwin Lutyens. Image credits: Steve Cadman, Wikipedia Commons As England embarks yet again on a major housing building programme in the first quarter of the 21st century under the New Towns Task Force , it is worthwhile reflecting on earlier architectural attempts to address previous acute housing... Continue Reading →
How Will They Sit? Architecture and Politics in the UK Commons Chamber – Elections 2024 Special Blog
Can you fit a supermajority into a space designed for confrontational politics on opposing benches and maintain the political culture? According to the former Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, the extraordinary thing about the Commons Chamber is that when it is operates as an entralling theatre 'it can ultimately bring down the government, because of authentic... Continue Reading →
New social media network
I have a new social media network in Mastodon and would like to invite friends, colleagues and people I have not met yet to join me. I look forward to engaging with you in my blog and my social media accounts. If you are not in Mastodon you can find me in LinkedIn, Instagram and... Continue Reading →
Architecture and narrative: a postscript
Carlo Scarpa, Olivetti Showroom. Photo S. Psarra In the Fall Semester 2020 I was invited to contribute to my friend and colleague John Peponis' design studio Architecture Perception Curation in the School of Architecture in Georgia Tech. Having given a lecture to John's students in October, I soon joined a stimulating programme of reviews with... Continue Reading →
Powers of Three at EPFLausanne
Featured image: Permeability and the relationship between Parliament and the public in the Houses of Parliament, United Kingdom and the German Bundestag in the Reichstag Building. Sophia Psarra and Gustavo Maldonado. 2020. ‘The Palace of Westminster and the Reichstag Building: Spatial Form and Political Culture’ Fresh from presenting at the Bartlett/UCL European Institute joint conference on... Continue Reading →
Making Parliament Buildings: architects in conversation
The debating chamber of the Scottish Parliament, viewed from the public gallery. Sophia Psarra Last week the second stage of the UCL conference on Parliament Buildings jointly hosted by the Bartlett School of Architecture UCL and the UCL European Institute concluded in a rare conversation with four of the worlds leading architects in the design... Continue Reading →
Space and Social Behaviour: An exploration of the relationship between space and patterns of use in three London libraries
The relationship between space and function has been one of the key defining questions in modernism. However, as Bill Hillier explains, ‘[o]ne scours the architectural manifestos of the twentieth century in vain for a thorough going statement of a determinism from spatial form to function, or its inverse’. Yet, there is a relationship of some... Continue Reading →
‘Books are not made to be believed but to be subjected to inquiry’: space, language and theories of knowledge in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose
If architecture creates stories, can stories create architecture? So the essay of Mariana Garcia Fajardo - a student in my Architectural Phenomena module in the SSAC MSc at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL - begins addressing Umberto Eco’s design of the library in his acclaimed novel The Name of the Rose. For Mariana, the... Continue Reading →