Professor Renee Tobe

In the dialogue of his name, Protagoras professes to teach arete and in particular politike arete. Plato's exposition of how a skill becomes an excellence through the giving of justice and good sense demonstrates the relation of politike and polis and the relation of justice to both.

The opening credits of British filmmaker Peter Greenaway’s 1987 film The Belly of an Architect linger meaningfully over the twin churches in Piazza del Popolo, the city of Rome’s historic vestibule (Figure 32.1). Ignoring other buildings on the piazza, the camera circles round to a large raised belvedere looking down to the space that Giuseppe Valadier completed in 1822. We see briefly the Chigi crest on the Porta Del Popolo, a gate in the Aurelian Wall that rings and defines the historic city. In 1475, Pope Sixtus IV built this gate on the site of the ancient Roman gate, Porta Flaminia, the culmination of the arterial Via Flaminia, bringing visitors from the north. The unfolding scene is the first visual impression of the great city. We see the Egyptian obelisk of Ramses II from Heliopolis that has centred the piazza since 1589, a pointer to the unseen, but more significant, pilgrimage church of Santa Maria del Popolo behind us by the gate; then, framed symmetrically, Santa Maria di Montesanto and Santa Maria dei Miracoli, and the camera stops. This still segment lasts about a minute, a long time in a film. A lengthy sequence lets us note numerous statues and human figures that populate the architecture. Greenaway establishes a visual emphasis on the dome as an analogy for the ‘Belly’ of the title, while introducing the leitmotif of representation. The formal framing opens the film as though the curtains have been parted. As viewers, or tourists, we have arrived. We have begun our exploration of the great landmarks of Rome, their imagined significance for visitors, and their living presence for those who inhabit the city. The film’s narrative captures the human impact in how politics and ethics relate

This paper examines a specific postcard collection from the 1910s and 1920s. Like a postcard itself, that arrives with no return address and only a cryptic comment, postmark and stamp to claim its origins, are the postcard collection of archaeologist and art historian Eugenie Strong. Currently uncategorized, the postcards are filed according to geographical location, a colonizer’s map. Some of the postcards are purchased as collections of a particular place, or by a certain artist, while others are individual cards she sent to, or received from correspondents, in the days when postcards were used to make polite requests, or as a thank you note. Often addressed to her at Chatsworth House, where she was resident librarian and curator prior to moving to Rome, the postcards depict the colonial British abroad, a grand tour in postcards, showing Egypt, India as well as France, Spain, and Italy. Her collection opens with Piranesi’s depictions of the monuments of Rome, and ends with the 1911 Ethnographic Exhibition to celebrate 50 years of Italy’s unification, that shows individual pavilions from different regions of Italy for the World’s Fair that took place in the Valle Giulia. These styles of Italian vernacular became blueprints for the new town of Garbatella, to which inhabitants uprooted by Benito Mussolini’s building projects were relocated. Not uncontroversial, Strong admired Mussolini’s desire for the archaeological ‘hygienic liberation’ of Rome’s imperial monuments as well as some of his politics. The British pavilion depicted in one postcard was designed by Edwin Lutyens and is currently the British School at Rome where she was assistant director. Strong’s postcard collection is seductive and entirely subjective, often blurs fact and fiction, and, to some extent transcends history as it colonises people and place, exemplifying the use of architecture as propaganda.

Illustrated by a diverse range of films from different eras and cultures, this book investigates the reciprocity between film and architecture.

Offering an in-depth consideration of the impact which humanities have had on the processes of architecture and design, this book asks how we can restore the traditional dialogue between intellectual enquiry in the humanities and design ...

This paper looks at Alain Resnais' Last Year in Marienbad (1961) and Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962). It rests on a premise of film as a constructed, ordered world that answers only to itself. Both films address particular questions about time. It adopts from Jean-Luc Nancy descriptions of how film touches us, and the careful orchestration of the pleasure that is jouissance in being within this moment, know knowing where we are going.

Universities are places of production - producing degrees, intelligence, and even good citizens in an increasingly business-oriented model. When Plato's Academy becomes a 'knowledge factory' that must turn a profit, architecture becomes a key component of design, in urbanicity building fabric, and internal layout. There is a tension between investigations of how architecture relates to learning and decisions made by which universities can generate incomes through productive spaces.

This paper describes and discusses Dani Karavan's monument for writer and cultural critic Walter Benjamin at Port Bou; how it is made, and how the fabric and ideas relate to its experience.

As we watch a film, we let filmmakers take us by the hand and tell us a story until they lead us into a world visually constructed to captivate us for a specific amount of time. The worst thing a filmmaker can do is not to terrify us, or fool us with special effects, but to rob us of our illusion that what we are seeing is ‘true’ even if just for now. Through the mimetic power of film, we, the viewer, picture the film set as if it is real architecture, and assemble the walls and floors we see into an architectural whole. This paper focuses on what we see ‘behind’ the screen rather than the cinematic experience itself. The premise is that by examining the nature of filmic ‘reality’ we will be helped to understand architectural form and order.

Why do villains in films from Dr Mabuse and Fritz Lang, to John Lautner, often get the best designed modernist lair complete with up to date technology?

When we say we are “caught up” in a story or that we “get lost” in a novel, it doesn’t mean we have lost our orientation in traversing the terrain constructed by the writer. We really mean the opposite, that we are so fully and deeply oriented within that world that we have lost, for the moment, our connection with our own. This process is simple in that it takes place quickly, and without our realizing anything has transpired. Yet it is also complex, for if we try to examine the manner by which we accumulate a medley of coded information to follow the story and to position ourselves in a world of someone else’s creation we may easily become mired.

Walter Benjamin's description of fragments, not as objects but as vehicles that invite us to enter into a creative mode of imaginative participation, marks a path for discourse that lends to a phenomenological description of Dani Karavan's monument for Benjamin in Port Bou. This small town at the border of France and Spain, where Benjamin ended his life, is the selling for his memorial. Our journey touches on Benjamin's friendship and written correspondence with Gersham Scholem. as well as collecting and its relation to creation and creativity. At Port Bou we follow Benjamin's advice and ponder, linger, collecting information.

This essay on the novels of Millet and Camus invites us to rethink everyday urban spaces as opportunities for casual sexual encounters.

When we say we are “caught up” in a story or that we “get lost” in a novel, it doesn’t mean we have lost our orientation in traversing the terrain constructed by the writer. We really mean the opposite, that we are so fully and deeply oriented within that world that we have lost, for the moment, our connection with our own. This process is simple in that it takes place quickly, and without our realizing anything has transpired. Yet it is also complex, for if we try to examine the manner by which we accumulate a medley of coded information to follow the story and to position ourselves in a world of someone else’s creation we may easily become mired. In literature, as in architecture or urban situations when narratives or places flow smoothly from one location to the next, they create a seamless exploration of a particular world. Narrative breaks, temporal shifts, or gaps in circulation on the other hand, make us look up and take account of where we are going and where we might have arrived. We may find ourselves in an unusual space or situation, a place not yet encountered, that somehow seems strangely familiar and we “recognize” it. Somehow, no matter how strange, we “know” how to find our way. Elektra: Assassin, a graphic novel scripted by Frank Miller and illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz provides an excellent example for exploration of these principles that apply not only to textual media in general and to sequential art in particular, but also architecture and the city (Miller, 1986).

Walter Benjamin's description of fragments, not as objects but as vehicles that invite us to enter into a creative mode of imaginative participation, marks a path for discourse that lends to a phenomenological description of Dani Karavan's monument for Benjamin in Port Bou. This small town at the border of France and Spain, where Benjamin ended his life, is the selling for his memorial. Our journey touches on Benjamin's friendship and written correspondence with Gersham Scholem. as well as collecting and its relation to creation and creativity. At Port Bou we follow Benjamin's advice and ponder, linger, collecting information.

Critical review of Polish artist Robert Maciejuk

From postcards and paintings to photography and film, tourism and visual culture have a long-standing history of mutual entanglement. For centuries art has inspired many an intrepid traveller, and tourism provides an insatiable market for indigenous art, authentic or otherwise. This book explores the complex association between tourism and visual culture throughout history and across cultures. How has tourism been linked to images of colonial expansion? Why are we so intrigued by lost places, such as Tutankhamun's tomb or Machu Picchu, South Americas lost city of the Incas? What is the relationship between art, tourism and landscape preference? What role did commercial tourist photographers play in the imagination of Victorian Britain? Drawing upon examples from across the globe, this exciting new contribution to a popular subject illustrates how tourism and visual culture intersect with one another and in the process become contested ground.

Innovative in many ways, including its depiction of interactive electronic media transmission, L'Inhumaine, directed by Marcel L'Herbier and released in 1924, was the first film to display Modernist architecture through two sets designed by Robert Mallet Stevens. Although the narrative was taken from a novel written by the self-invented writer and sometime painter Pierre Mac Orlan, the real author is Modernism itself.

Disrupted Borders reflects 'otherness', and attempts to escape from the European rhetoric of modernism. It endorses the plurality of art-making practices and proposes a 'new internationalism'.

This book and the exhibition launched with it represent a powerful exploration in both image and text of the impact of the AIDS crisis. Different voices reveal the profound inadequacies in our attitudes to disease. The contributors disrupt the politically-laden mythology of HIV and AIDS, and affirm the persistence of love and desire in the face of death. More than an interruption to personal life, AIDS has stimulated an eruption in creative life. By wresting control of the imagery of AIDS, Ecstatic Antibodies demystifies icons like the nation and the family and illuminates attitudes to gender, sexuality, radical and moral diversity.

When filmmakers desire to show an ordered and controlled world populated by humans as ordered and controlled as their environment, they often use existing modernist or brutalist architecture to communicate this, in particular locations in Berlin. This lineage can be traced from Plato to the Neo-Platonists, and the neoclassicists and therefor the neorationalists of the 1960s and 1970s. This chapter argues that the architecture and set design of District 13 in the film The Hunger Games; Mockingjay Part 1 (Francis Lawrence, 2014) adapted from the 2010 novel by Suzanne Collins, presents an inverted version of Plato’s Republic; a dystopic city deep underground and ruled by an emotionless and evil President, Plato’s philosopher-king as evil tyrant. The set and design is an inverted chthonic version of Plato’s Atlantis. It therefor represents injustice as it is the reverse of Plato’s ideal city, the city of justice. District 13 was filmed on location in old bunkers in the former East Berlin. Berlin is the ‘go to’ city when filmmakers need a location to shoot a scene set in a dystopian totalitarian city. In District 13 the icy, inhuman ruler applies the tortures of the oppressor to ensure conformity and obeyance in the highly structured city she rules. She herself conforms to the familiar trope that the more super clean and technologically advanced the villain is, the more evil. She occupies a state war room with high tech displays showing global manoeuvres and three dimensional diagrammatic of the geometrically designed underground facility. District 13 is described as militaristic and ultra-controlled where everyone wears uniform military-like functional coveralls. Alcohol and caffeine are forbidden, and daily schedules, that must be rigidly adhere to or be punished, are tattooed daily on forearms using 24-hour vanishing ink. District 13 occupies a former military base that constitutes a substantial underground city, originally intended as a secret escape for world leaders. The Platonic dialogues the Republic, (the city of justice) the Critias (Atlantis) and the Parmenides (the Forms), writing about Order and Form in architectural typology in Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremére de Qunicy’s Encyclopedié Méthodique (1788), along with Sylvia Lavin’s Quatremère de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language in Architecture, (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1992), provide the secondary sources.

In order to write the text for the Plato for Architects book I had to read and analyse temporal and spatial descriptions in all of the dialogues. This presentation explains my original methodology.

I look at three different 17th century thinkers, who were also friends with one another, and who offer helpful and often meticulous instructions on catoptrics and anamorphic imagery: 3 Athanasius Kircher, (1602-1680) a 17th century Jesuit based at the Roman College, Jean- Francois Niçeron, (1613-1646) and Emmanuel Maignan both Minim monks, Maignan spent 14 years at Trinità dei Monti, the Minim Monastery in Rome located on Monte Pincio, and now at the head of the Spanish Steps. The philosophy of René Descartes (1596-1650) plays a supporting role of the discussion. Descartes proposed that philosophy should start not on the inherited certainties, but on doubt. Descartes proposed the existence of ‘innate ideas’, the mind-body connection at the pineal gland, and the mechanistic biology that sees animals as machines. Descartes sought a philosophising free from sacred authority, free from erudition and the wisdom of the ancients, in fact, free from everything Athansius Kircher revered. Descartes’ best friend was Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), a Minim friar, based in his couvent in Paris. Mersenne was the one to introduce Galileo’s (1564-1642) work to France, after Galileo’s condemnation over the debate about the Copernican system and the shortcomings of Aristotelian physics. Astronomers as well as theologians opposed Galileo because his observations contradicted Holy Scripture.

This key note talk takes the title of the conference as a structure. I am very grateful to be invited here, and to be able to present my ideas, and to question history or how it has been presented and continues to be taught and understood. It’s curious to me that while we, as architects are ready to accept, learn and take pride in innovating with new technologies and new materials, new ways of thinking that question old canons continue to bring up resistance. So many of our colleagues are resistant. At the same time, I have myself always glossed over history as ‘so much fact’ and dates. So for the purpose of this talk, I picked up some books I haven’t looked in a while, like Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy, and found others by searching for who might be asking the same questions I am : who owns history? And who writes it and who are the current voices.

In this chapter I explain the Ideal Forms and how they impact the built environment.

This chapter explains how we make things, and create the world we live in. It also explains Plato's desciption of Chora and the DemiUrge and how the world as we know it was created.

Plato gives detailed information about the form and the structure of cities but his intention is to guide us in being good citizens.

This chapter contextualises the time of the origins of Western philosophy and explains how the dialogues function as information transmission.

This chapter explains how notions of mimesis and the copy impact on thinking about architecture and also architecture's representational capacity

This chapter explains Geometry and Measurement both as an Ideal aspiring to Beauty and the Good and as a practical means to explain how to design or construct a 'good' building or city.

This thesis explores how architecture can be reshaped through the relationship between space and behaviour, using protracted refugee camps as sites to critique existing design processes and to propose a new transformative methodology. It argues that conventional architectural methods and humanitarian shelter practices, centred on linear design stages and universal typologies, fail to respond to the realities of displacement. Instead of supporting resilience, they often perpetuate “permanent temporariness.” To address this, the research engages with environment–behaviour sciences, particularly Behaviour Settings Theory, first developed by Roger Barker and Allan Wicker in the mid-twentieth century and further advanced by Wicker through to the early 2000s. While the theory was originally an analytical account of existing patterns of behaviour in specific milieus, this thesis marks its first practice-based application informed by action research in architectural design, in both residential and humanitarian contexts. The outcome is the Behaviour Setting Transformation Methodology (BSTM): a process of observing existing settings, identifying intended behaviours, and designing targeted interventions by treating space and its elements as behavioural cues. BSTM was tested through household interventions in Gaza Camp, Jerash, in Jordan. The findings demonstrated its ability to reshape spatial–behavioural relations in multiple ways: transforming emotional associations with space, mediating and rebalancing gender roles, supporting health and wellbeing, and documenting the limits of entrenched segregation. These outcomes showed that space is not a passive backdrop but an active medium of behavioural change, and that carefully designed interventions can alter lived experience in ways that conventional design processes neglect. The originality and significance of the research are underscored by four peer-reviewed publications produced during the PhD, including the presentation of BSTM as a novel design methodology filling gaps in conventional architecture in Philosophical Transactions B of the Royal Society. The work was also validated through collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme, which supported and funded its implementation in real renovations of refugee houses, and was later featured in a United Nations publication highlighting this fieldwork. While rooted in protracted displacement, the thesis argues that BSTM is not limited to camps: it positions architecture as an open, dynamic, and responsive practice, and advances the principle that every space should be treated as a humanitarian one. Keywords: Architecture, Architectural Design Methodologies, Humanitarian Design, Protracted Refugee Camps, Behaviour Setting Theory, Behaviour Setting Transformation Methodology (BSTM), Environment–Behaviour Studies.

Bringing together leading scholars in the fields of criminology, international law, philosophy and architectural history and theory, this book examines the interrelationships between architecture and justice, highlighting the provocative ...

Each of Plato's dialogues is assessed by place, time, framing device, number of characters, and subject. Plato describes his dialogues as cosmologies and each one is analysed to create a cosmology that represents that dialogue