This publication is made up of a series of photographs taken inside the abandoned Conservative Party headquarters at 32 Smith Square in London. Award-winning artist Lisa Barnard was granted access to the abandoned site in 2009 and documented the building and found objects. This book features previously unseen photos of the interior documenting the dulled shades of corporate blue, stained carpets, peeling paintwork and discarded iconography of past alliances.

A participative approach to architecture challenges many of the normative values of traditional architecture and, in particular, issues of authorship, control, aesthetics and the role of the user. The book explores how a participative approach may lead to new spatial conditions, as well as to new types of architectural practices and investigates the way that the user has been included in the design process. Where many architectural books concentrate on formal or aesthetic issues, this book explicitly opens up the social and political aspects of our built environment, and the way that the eventual users may shape it. As government policies throughout the world call for more involvement by people in the making of their environment, the issue of participation has become of central concern to architects, clients, funders, users and government officers. However, participation often remains as a token gesture; this book promises to make a major contribution to the field by arguing for a more considered approach to architectural participation. Architecture and Participation brings together leading international practitioners and theorists in the field, ranging from the 1960s pioneers of p

A participative approach to architecture challenges many of the normative values of traditional architecture and, in particular, issues of authorship, control, aesthetics and the role of the user. The book explores how a participative approach may lead to new spatial conditions, as well as to new types of architectural practices and investigates the way that the user has been included in the design process. Where many architectural books concentrate on formal or aesthetic issues, this book explicitly opens up the social and political aspects of our built environment, and the way that the eventual users may shape it. As government policies throughout the world call for more involvement by people in the making of their environment, the issue of participation has become of central concern to architects, clients, funders, users and government officers. However, participation often remains as a token gesture; this book promises to make a major contribution to the field by arguing for a more considered approach to architectural participation. Architecture and Participation brings together leading international practitioners and theorists in the field, ranging from the 1960s pioneers of p

This book offers the first comprehensive overview of alternative approaches to architectural practice.

At a time when many commentators are noting that alternative and richer approaches to architectural practice are required if the profession is to flourish, this book provides multiple examples from across the globe of how this has been achieved and how it might be achieved in the future.

Particularly pertinent in the current economic climate, this book offers the reader new approaches to architectural practice in a changing world. It makes essential reading for any architect, aspiring or practicing.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction 2. The Motivations of Spatial Agency 3. The Sites of Spatial Agency 4. The Operations of Spatial Agency 5. Other Ways of Doing Architecture

/

Park Hill, a huge concrete-framed modernist social-housing scheme, was completed in 1961 when Sheffield had near full employment and young architects - in this case Ivor Smith and Jack Lynn - were developing new ways to satisfy the need for affordable flats for rent. Since then the national housing scene has been transformed, a change embodied in the fate of Park Hill, stripped back to its frame and recast for, largely, private ownership. Keith Collie's photographs capture the cliff-like grandeur and formal beauty of this massive structure in ruins and the epic scale of the renovation. David Levitt provides the background to the current renovation project by developer Urban Splashm and Jeremy Till's essay puts the Park Hill story into the wider context of architecture and the welfare state.

Polemics and reflections on how to bridge the gap between what architecture actually is and what architects want it to be. Architecture depends-on what? On people, time, politics, ethics, mess: the real world. Architecture, Jeremy Till argues with conviction in this engaging, sometimes pugnacious book, cannot help itself; it is dependent for its very existence on things outside itself. Despite the claims of autonomy, purity, and control that architects like to make about their practice, architecture is buffeted by uncertainty and contingency. Circumstances invariably intervene to upset the architect's best-laid plans-at every stage in the process, from design through construction to occupancy. Architects, however, tend to deny this, fearing contingency and preferring to pursue perfection. With Architecture Depends, architect and critic Jeremy Till offers a proposal for rescuing architects from themselves: a way to bridge the gap between what architecture actually is and what architects want it to be. Mixing anecdote, design, social theory, and personal experience, Till's writing is always accessible, moving freely between high and low registers, much like his suggestions for architecture itself.