Environmental values within architecture are become more important as climatic changes and dwindling resources come to the forefront of the public domain. Buildings are responsible for approximately 47% of carbon emissions from EU countries placing a high portion of responsibility on architects and design teams. This discourse aims to investigate the global environmental changes and reducing resources, offering passive building strategies as a means of lowering architecture’s impact on the environment. The analysis on a series of case studies also demonstrates systems that have worked across the sector. The main outcome is presented in the form of advisory guidelines on how to design a building to maximise environmental efficiency in regards to natural ventilation and daylighting. 

The dissertation seeks to identify the relationships between senses and architecture and whether society’s ocularcentric nature has devalued architectural experience. Sensory deprivation can be caused by the preference of one sense over the rest and it can be argued that this is the case in western culture and has been for many years.

The study firstly discusses historical theories surrounding sensory perception and concludes that vision was considered to be the noblest sense with links to knowledge and God. This has only developed in from Ancient Greek philosophies of Plato to the Enlightenment and post war modernism and their changes in thinking and technological advances. In particular the machine aesthetic intensified the negation of sensual experience.

Two primary case studies are used to demonstrate the existential qualities sensory perception has to offer, the examples being Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum (1999) and Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2005). Both use haptic experiences to provide personal interaction to visitors within comparable contexts; both being located in Berlin and sharing briefs to commemorate persecuted Jews.

The study found that both studies use a holistic approach to sensory perception to offer a plastic space of transition for consciousness making people more aware of themselves and their place in the world. It calls on the entirely body’s capacity to interact with its environment to become more aware of space and time.

The conclusion advocates a more haptic and holistic approach to architecture that utilises the transitional buffer effects demonstrated the Museum and Memorial studied. It is not just the eye but the whole body that requires stimulation to make a space truly engaging. The visual reliance in contemporary architecture is isolating and offers no authentic experience. 

Gomorrah (2008) is a film directed by Matteo Garrone based on the non-fictional work of Roberto Saviano, an investigative journalist who publicly exposed the workings of the Neapolitan organised crime clans known as the Camorra. The majority of the film is purposely set in Scampìa1 within a rundown social housing complex to overtly examine the relationship between architecture and society. This essay will first look at the architecture’s influence upon the main characters and how their social situations are reflected in their surroundings. Subsequently, the essay discusses whether architecture could ultimately be the cause of social decline in the region.

Louis Kahn is regarded as one of the most influential architects of the twentieth century. This essay will identify how his social agenda developed during a testing period of history following World War II. Firstly it will concentrate on the earlier, less well know, period of his career; analysing his work on public housing projects and his written literature. Secondly it will look at how his earliest principles carried through to what is regarded as the mature stages of his career, by analysing two buildings, the First Unitarian Church, Rochester, and the National Assembly Complex, Dhaka.