Design potentials between empirical data and architectural imagination: an exploration

This article discusses ways in which we can connect empirical data and design skills to create more circular and sustainable urban areas. The case of Hellersdorf-Süd (Berlin, DE) is used to describe a design approach that is context-driven and combines data and design skills to formulate coherent and relevant design proposals. Based on this exposition, this article presents and exploration of the future urbanist practices in which sustainability and circularity on a conceptualized larger scale. As such, it provides a speculative account of a future course of action to achieve urban sustainability and systemic circularity.

With Jørn Utzon: Approaching and Preaching Architectural Texts

Architecture is communication. It conveys human stories, feelings, philosophies, and cultural histories and interacts through them with viewers, occupants, artists, and surrounding communities. Architecture, whether explicitly religious or not, is spiritual, too. Embodying and manifesting spatial spirituality, it invokes in the mind of the appreciator awe, wonder, and contact with the transcendent. All this is possible because architecture is, to borrow Paul Tillich’s language, an art form carrying the ultimate concerns of human life. Recognizing the communicative, spiritual, and existential nature of architecture exemplified in Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House, this article meets a need and demonstrates the potential for architectural preaching. Preaching can serve biblical texts efficiently—particularly architectural ones (e.g., Exodus 26 and Revelation 21)—by approaching them through an architectural hermeneutic and creatively presenting them with architectural imagination.