The Studioification of the Home: The Freelance Artist's Studio in Western Europe

The thesis explores the studioification of the home, or rather, the process by which the home has been transformed into the studio. The figure of the artist is currently understood as a kind of curious prototype, whereby the sites of living and working are extended beyond the fixed site of the house to the studio, the street, the cafe, and the landscape beyond. Since their lives are rarely organised around conventional task divisions or family structures, they presage contemporary society’s embrace of the nomadic freelancer, who is supposedly no longer bound by the nuclear family or permanent fixed employment. This thesis argues that this informality of arrangement is in many ways a mischaracterisation and belies the role the state has in making such conditions.

Tao DuFour MA HCT & PhD Debates: History in Translation. Marina Lathouri and Guest Speakers Thursday 30 January | 4:00pm | 32 Bedford Square (First Floor Back) This lecture will address the Debates’ theme of history ‘in-translation’ in terms of an inquiry into three interrelated phenomena: empathy, corporeity, and spatiality. We will draw primarily on contemporary scholarship on […]

Damnoen Techamai Supervisors: Mark Cousins, Chittawadi Chitrabongs According to the concept of hybridity provided by Bhabha, defining hybridity and studying a location of hybridity is a kind of a translation process and interpretation process within its “new” (hybrid) forms of representation, in its own space of difference, in the space of translation which he terms […]

Aylin Tarlan Supervisors: Pier Vittorio Aureli, Maria Giudici This thesis studies the position of Figure and Ground in urban representation, from the Roman urban survey plans to today’s digital cartography. It will start by investigating the origins of the terms Figure and Ground in different fields such as optics, perception, Gestalt psychology, art and early representations […]

Eray Cayli MA HCT & PhD Debates: History in Translation. Marina Lathouri and Guest Speakers Thursday 23 January | 4:00pm | 32 Bedford Square (First Floor Back) This seminar will explore aesthetics as central to the various issues debated today under the rubric of the Anthropocene. It will do so especially by attending to the […]

Stásis: Towards a Critique of Flexibility in Architecture

Flexibility, nowadays, constitutes the canon. Applied as a technique in order to achieve living spaces that are able to accommodate a series of different occupations, lifestyles and needs, the thesis argues that flexibility, antithetically, operates as an architectural tool towards the transformation of spaces that are becoming far from being 'free' and instead alienate and restrict their inhabitants.

Milad Showkatbakhsh Supervisors: Michael Weinstock, George Jeronimidis Nature was conventionally considered a source of formal and metaphorical inspiration in the architectural discourse. However, the contemporary reconfiguration as it is reflected in the difference between the revised and original editions of Steadman, 1979 ‘The Evolution of Designs: Biological Analogy in Architecture and Applied Arts’, has changed […]

Serena Lehua Jarvis Supervisors: Mark Cousins, Costandis Kizis This thesis presents the first in-depth academic study on impact investing in social housing, specifically focusing on the case of Cheyne Capital, the London-based alternative investment manager, and their role in developing housing for disadvantaged groups. Looking at one of the earliest examples of impact investing – an […]

We have Never been Private! The Housing Project in Neoliberal Europe

The thesis puts forward an interpretation of the management of domestic space through the transformation of the concept of the private within the socio-economic regime known as neoliberalism. In this light, the thesis proposes a critical reassessment of housing privatization not merely as a policy introduced in the 1980’s to promote new contractual relationships, but as a post-war strategy to establish a change of ethos, culture and organization of housing. The thesis argues that the state has constantly partnered the market (‘private sector’) in the promotion of a carefully designed pedagogy of domestic privacy associated with property and individualism, to the extent that ‘the private’ has hardly existed as such in the neoliberal era. The daunting failures of this housing model in terms of inaccessibility and alienation of care in the urban domestic realm, negate privacy as an affirmation of essential autonomy and are reminiscent of its classical concept of deprivation.

Dorette Panagiotopoulou Supervisors: Mark Cousins, Doreen Bernath The thesis explores the space between voice, speech and writing though a study on the oracle of Delphi, an oral culture that is then transcribed and codified into written text. The manifold life of sign and sound (of language itself) as well as that of the author and the receiver, are attached by the material they share: writing, a […]