Erika Brandl

To investigate the broad topic of universals in architecture already implies the clarification of three basic, interrelated questions. First, is there such a thing as universal architectural design? This is a question of possibility. Theorizing architecture’s universality, in effect, necessitates theorizing its very possibility – its conceivability, or actuality. Second, and granted that there is such a thing, how can we qualify or quantify its features, without invoking the particular? This is a question of measure. Indicators of architectural universality, beyond matter-of-fact survival functions, are bound to denote spatial, cultural, and temporal characteristics. Third, and granted that architects can assess the universality of their designs in relevant ways, what motivates them to pursue universality in design in the first place? This is a question of rationale. The pursuit of architectural universals is generally grounded in a well‑defined underlying rationale: this pursuit, surely, can be adequately or ill motivated. In the following essay, I examine those three subjects in turn: the possibility of universal architectural design, the measure of universal architectural design, and the rationale of universal architectural design.

What does it mean to build with foresight for the future? Which architectural qualities enable long-term adequacy? This essay explores how housing architecture can sustain forms of attachment and endurance in the face of long-term temporal and social uncertainty. It argues that indeterminacy in architectural form (spaces left open, incomplete, or without prescribed function) is not a normative strategy but an unavoidable structural condition of architecture. The tension between determination and indeterminacy is not normative but structural, and cannot be resolved by design. It focuses, in particular, on the material and spatial ways in which small portions of built space, when left programmatically indeterminate or incomplete, become sites of appropriation under conditions of uncertainty. Indeterminacy does not guarantee resilience; it exposes the limits of architectural determination in the face of temporal, social, and material variability.

This paper examines the neglected story of rammed earth houses in Norway, with a focus on the socio-political conditions that enabled its craft and emergence. Architectural representations in the country have been inexorably tied to craft traditions and localisms, but little attention is given to rammed earth building techniques. Beyond tectonic considerations, the paper's aim is to document and debate the value-tinged and normative discourse around the making of rammed earth houses built at the end of the nineteenth century, between 1920 and 1930, and during the post–World War II building boom. I examine the economic, social, and cultural circumstances and ideologies that caused Norwegian individuals to turn to—and away from—such a material. Notions of self-ownership and resourcefulness, of vernacular knowledge and place attachment, are utilized to qualify and weigh the significance of jordhus for present-day Norway, shedding new light on the country's key architectural (and national) narratives.

While architects, social psychologists, anthropologists and historians have conceptualized it in varied ways, little has been made of the issue of housing in philosophy. The aim of this master's thesis is to demonstrate that many aspects of housing relate directly to fundamental philosophical concepts and questions. I revisit notions of justice, freedom, dignity, equality and privacy through the lens of the house, and make a case for bringing the issue of housing to salience in normative philosophical theorizing. Two simple questions thread their way through the text: What constitutes adequate housing? And, why does housing matter? As possible answers to these questions, I discuss significant characteristics of one’s house and use diverse case studies to highlight how such features are meaningfully entangled with ethics, morality, law and politics. I borrow and elaborate on the capability approach to identify features of the adequate house, which I situate within the contemporary landscape, weighing up clashing private, collective and common property rules. My hope – and my normative claim – is that viewed collectively, these features make evident that philosophers ought to consider the issue of housing seriously if they are to engage in conceptualizing and contributing to human welfare.

Participatory housing models offer a critical perspective on housing justice by emphasizing the temporal stability of domestic needs and the capacity of homes to adapt over time. This article argues that involving future inhabitants in design processes is essential not only for cultural and spatial adequacy but also for ensuring that housing remains resilient to evolving life circumstances. Historical cases, exemplified by Álvaro Siza Vieira’s social housing projects in The Hague and Berlin, demonstrate how co-creation enables the negotiation of diverse and future-oriented requirements, including cross-cultural and intergenerational needs. Contemporary cases, exemplified by Patrick Bouchain’s habitat participatif, extend this principle by embedding indeterminacy and adaptability directly into construction, allowing residents to shape and reshape their living spaces. Participatory design, therefore, transforms occupants into co-producers of homes, fostering dwellings that can accommodate unforeseen temporal shifts. This approach positions housing as a site of long-term justice, where flexibility and agency safeguard the adequacy of domestic life across time.

This essay asks how architectural representation ought to be understood in relation to environmental ethics, using Sverre Fehn’s depictions of buildings in the Nordic landscape as case study. The central issue is whether these drawings confirm a view of buildings as defensive objects (worlds) set apart from nature, or whether they can also be read—when conceptualized as complementary companions to the insights of deep ecologist Arne Næss—as pointing toward more relational and ecological ways of inhabiting place. I show that Fehn’s studies suggest something close to Næss’s idea of 'ontological equivalence', a continuity between human and non-human beings, spaces, and systems. Their compositions give comparable weight and presence to structures and landscape elements, creating a holistic quality that does not require architecture to dominate or be diminished before 'Big Nature', nor reduced to tropes of refuge or raw materiality. By setting Fehn’s visual practice in dialogue with Næss’s normative framework, I argue that these works can be seen as offering a practical ethic of situatedness, one that moves beyond romantic idealization and mere protection against the natural world.

This paper takes a rights-based discourse on the material conditions for the realization of human freedom – and flourishing – and re-centers this discourse on the necessary, physiological activity of sleep. It utilizes one principal case study (Shaunak Sen’s 2015 documentary 'Cities of Sleep') to re-calibrate normative insights about liberty, capability, physical integrity and corporeal security to the ‘mundane’ scale of basic body functionings (sleeping, but also eating, drinking, washing, excreting), and, crucially, to these functionings’ space-bound nature. As such, it proposes an alternative theoretical exploration of the key role of domestic spaces in relation with bodily subsistence; with life and limbs.

This essay conceptualises uncertainty in architectural interiors as ‘plan flexibility’, with a normative focus on its future-oriented qualities, and on one specific typology, housing. I argue that a future-ready plan refers to the quality of conserving options and resources for coming generations of dwellers. This builds from principles of architectural resilience, or exaptation, where design ambitions link to preparing for an increasingly vague future where ecological, economic, political, and socio-cultural conditions of human life are difficult to anticipate. Despite risks of temporal agnosticism, focusing on housing allows me to discuss the forthcoming architectural needs of individuals without fully committing to an era-bound programme. I assert the long-term value of dwellings’ flexibility in terms of programme indeterminacy (multipurpose use of space; hard-then-soft) rather than formal indeterminacy (adaptable elements; soft-then-hard). I define the notions of programme indeterminacy and formal indeterminacy, which I briefly tie back to the modernist history of alternative models of flexible domestic dwelling. Then, I comment the interiors of Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza Vieira’s Wohnhaus Schlesisches Tor (Berlin, Internationale Bauausstellung, 1984–1987), making the case for some of the abovementioned principles. I contextualise these interiors aims and effects in light of contemporary characterisations of housing adequacy, and argue for the potential of the ‘extra room’ as one possible manifestation of the desired plan flexibility. This, inter alia, develops into a broader reflection on measures such as the ‘bedroom tax’ policies, and into a celebration of future-ready attitudes in planning houses.

Monograph of Frankfurt-based architectural studio Markgraph (fnd. 1986) that examines its practice through the framework of encounters, foregrounding relationality and experience over form. Projects are organized in seven thematic chapters (spectral encounters, threshold encounters, plastic encounters, metabolist encounters, migratory encounters, convivial encounters, pattern-based encounters) and across three relational registers: encounters between people and space, between objects and space, and between spaces themselves.

This short essay situates adaptive reuse in architecture within theories of intergenerational justice, emphasizing ‘option conservation’ as a normative principle. Building activities inevitably shape future life, yet uncertainty compels precautionary, better-safe-than-sorry design approaches. Preventing architectural rigidity means conserving a diversity of options, enabling future generations to respond to emerging information, values, and conditions; adaptiveness, understood as a resource, allows incremental, reversible decisions while avoiding rigid infrastructural strategies. By operationalizing option conservation, architects can normatively assess the adequacy of their projects, ensuring future readiness and intergenerational fairness through the sustained conservation of both material resources and users’ capacity to choose.

This essay mobilizes popular insights about the 'law of the jungle' to conceptualize and critique prevalent consumption and policy attitudes in urban environments, with a focus on residential infrastructure. A phrase used metaphorically to describe a given situation where competition, aggression, and 'survival of the fittest' prevail, it is here used in order to formulate a new characterization of contemporary cities as environments where there is minimal housing regulation or oversight (architectural occupation as survival-of-the-fittest battle), and where individual dwellers are left to operate without significant constraints. In the first section of the paper, I introduce a commonplace interpretation of the 'jungle metaphor', commenting on sets of characteristics and values which are associated with it. In the second section of the paper, I paint a portrait of contemporary socio-economic environments, with a focus on urbanity and its distributive ordering of housing resources. I describe these environments as constructed (formal arrangements; architecture and urbanism) and policed (institutional arrangements; governments and state authorities) in manners which acutely—and problematically—emphasize market laissez-faire and self-interest. In the third section of the paper, I link this portrait of the contemporary city to survival-of-the-fittest jungle-like spaces, commenting on rivalrous competition between dwellers and, in the fourth and concluding section, I briefly propose one possible, normatively desirable form of urban market regulations.

Today, housing remains a paradigmatic site of debate about broad socio-political matters: individual autonomy and responsibility, state perfectibility, democratic health, leisure, and familial reproduction. This essay revisits Friedrich Engels’s canonical pamphlet 'The Housing Question' (1872) to interrogate the enduring association between home ownership, place attachment, and conservation—or conservatism. I demonstrate that strong and productive connections exist between the Housing Question debate, contemporary politics, and contemporary housing discourse. Engels’s rebuke of Proudhonist housing-related commendations continues to hold significance in discourses on what housing is, and what it should and should not be. Drawing on his pamphlet, I conceptualize the figures of the Engelsian “unfettered jailbird” and the Proudhonist homeowner as respectively embodying revolutionary mobility and idle rootedness. Idle rootedness is conceived as freedom in the Proudhonist approach. This directly contrasts with the Engelsian approach which casts home ownership as unfreedom.! These two opposed approaches are also two perspectives on the impacts of being housed. In Engels’s account, housing participates in encouraging or preventing man’s idleness and unfreedom. Proprietorship and place attachment, in this latter sense, are conceptualized as practically antithetical to emancipatory futures.

In this paper, I explore how the architecture of homes—defined minimally by walls, doors, and a roof—structures not only physical shelter but also the conditions for basic human functioning, privacy, and autonomy. Drawing on Jeremy Waldron and Richard Epstein, I show that adequate dwelling is a precondition for the exercise of fundamental freedoms: without a secure, delimited space, individuals are exposed to the arbitrary control of others and deprived of the capabilities necessary for a minimally dignified life. The article distinguishes between housing rights and the moral right to housing, emphasizing that statutory recognition alone does not secure the substantive functions that homes enable. I further engage Alejandra Mancilla’s reasoning on the right of necessity to address extreme cases of housing deprivation, highlighting the tension between private property and urgent human needs. By situating dwelling within the broader architecture of public and private spaces, this study elucidates the moral duties of states in ensuring access to adequate housing and, importantly, contends that failure to do so generates conditions in which violations of property may be justified.