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Prof. Robert Harbison
My interests have always cut across disciplines and I try to
connect up subjects normally seen as distinct, like architecture and
poetry, or gardens and ideas about time. Gardens are a subject I keep
returning to, because they bring so many human concerns together so
effortlessly - nature and culture, transparent artifice and deep
layers of the psyche, barely controlled growth and geometrical
structures.
I am just as interested in literature and painting as in
architecture, and especially at their edges where a certain runic
inscription or rude dwelling may not appear to count as poetry or
architecture at all. I see all forms of art as mediums for both ideas
and feelings and try not to stray too far from the original strength of
response when you are actually walking through the streets of Delhi or
standing under one of Borromini's domes.
Hamlet and Lewis Carroll, Disneyland and ancient Rome, Malinowski in
Polynesia or Ruskin in Venice are all, despite their diversity,
subjects one can read spatially, finding an almost tactile vividness in
words and things, places and ideas.
My current project is a history of architecture that tries to tell
an often told story in a fresh way, the general frame more or less
given, the detail mostly new. My books include Eccentric Spaces (about
the imagination), Deliberate Regression (primitivism from Rousseau to
Kandinsky), Pharaoh's Dream (narrative from Gilgamesh to Proust), The
Built, the Unbuilt and the Unbuildable (purely architectural) and
Reflections on Baroque (which treats music and the twentieth century as
well as architecture and the seventeenth).
Prof. Colin Davies
I teach building technology as well as architectural history and
my research often combines these interests. A good example is my recent
book, The Prefabricated Home ( http://www.reaktionbooks.co.uk/titles/non_prefabhome.html),
which is divided into three sections: Histories, Theories and
Practices. The idea is that in order to understand the history of this
building type it is necessary to appreciate, for example, the technical
logic of the "balloon frame"; and that in order to understand the
development of any building technology it is necessary know something
about the philosophical question of authorship. This research has given
me a taste for popular architecture and made me sceptical about the
social status of the profession I joined thirty years ago. My latest book is also about houses, but this time seen from within
the boundary of the cultural field called architecture. Key Houses of
the Twentieth Century, which will be published by Laurence King in
autumn 2006, looks at 106 of the best known architect-designed houses.
Each house is described in a 600 word text and a page of specially
redrawn plans, sections and elevations. This is the artistic canon
presented faithfully and accurately so that it can fulfil its purpose
as a common pool of reference for architects, clients, teachers and
students.
Reference works in a digital form are a particular interest of mine.
I have developed a database solution specifically designed for
collections of objects - buildings, for example - which require several
images per object. The first volume of Robert Harbison's England's
Parish Churches will shortly be available in this format on CD ROM (http://www.crowstep.co.uk/). I also plan to publish a digital version of Key Houses of the Twentieth Century.
My next book will be an introduction to architectural theory.
Architectural theory is coming to the end of what might be called its
post modern phase during which it has relied heavily on French critical
theory. My book will try to take it in a new direction and made it
accessible to a wider audience.
Helen Mallinson
My general research topic is 'air' whilst my doctoral thesis
explores how the concept of air changed in the late seventeenth century
in a reshaping of relations between language, pneuma and space. My
thesis examines the pneumatic experiments of Robert Boyle and their
background in natural philosophy, religion and medicine, and claims
that the air was 'devitalised' in the late seventeenth century - less
as a consequence of the scientific revolution and more as an aim. The
prize - as developed by Newtonians onwards - was a new concept of
'space'.
My wider research interests concern modern architecture and the
consequences of utilizing space as a paradigmatic context and
structure. My research here focuses on the phenomenology of the senses
and their relationship to the emotions, as played out in twentieth
century architecture, film and art. For example, I look at how climate
and weather is used to represent emotions as well as a foil in
determining the status of the human or the ethical. Publications
include: "Metaphors of Experience: The Voice of Air " in The
Philosophical Forum, vol. 35, June 2004 and, forthcoming, "Heart of
Darkness: Air of Comfort" in Primitive: Original Matters in
Architecture (Taylor & Francis).
Joseph Kohlmaier
Joseph Kohlmaier is a senior lecturer in the history and theory
of architecture. He teaches history seminars in the undergraduate and postgraduate programmes and is convenor for the third year history dissertation module. Joseph studied
photography at the Schule für Künstlerische Photographie in Vienna and
architectural history at the London Met, where he gained a masters degree in
2005. Joseph has worked as a lecturer, researcher,
performance artist and on public art projects and is a director in graphic design firm Polimekanos. Joseph also runs a choir and music and architecture research project at the ASD (www.asd-choir.org).
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