In this episode of Deconstructed, host Matthew Lloyd Roberts is joined by Shukri Sultan, a lecturer at Westminster University, to explore the story of Almanaar Mosque in West London. Together, they unpack how this unassuming building became a vital hub for faith, community, and resilience — especially in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire.

Shahed Saleem leads a conversation, unpacking the themes and ideas of his latest published collection of essays and photographs, Building Futures: The Counter Architecture of the British Mosque. The discussion will explore how migrants and diasporas create space and community, and how the post-war multicultural consensus in Britain has been shaped and challenged through the intersections of race, politics and architecture.

When heritage sites are destroyed or damaged, such catastrophic events often prompt calls for restoration. Globally, the number of heritage sites at risk or already lost is staggering. Notre Dame has been expensively restored since the 2019 fire, but such care is not always possible or appropriate. In restoring a building, what and when is being restored? The building the day before the fire or the bomb? Or the building upon the day of completion? These questions were considered through a discussion of Clandon Park – an 18th century National Trust property, almost totally destroyed by fire in 2015.

This is the recently uploaded YouTube video of Sean Griffith’s conference paper, “Towards a Sellarsian Theory of Architecture”, delivered in June 2024 at the Marxism and the Pittsburgh School Conference, organized by the New Centre for Practice and Research at UCL in June 2024.

The presentation discussed Jörn Janssen’s theoretical and pedagogical efforts to analyse architecture from a Marxist-Leninist perspective in the early 1970s. Janssen scientifically situated architecture in the socio-economic dynamics of capitalist development, and examined it as an instrument of profit accumulation and workers’ exploitation. This understanding allowed him and his students to develop a clear agenda, aiming, to unveil the opposition between capital and labour at the core of every capitalist building; and to demonstrate that only revolutionary change could address this structural contradiction and liberate architecture from being an instrument of class exploitation.

Over the last 4 years I have held public events in galleries and museums where architectural themes and ideas have been displayed, narrated and discussed. In the presentation I describe some of these events, and how they were both a representation of traditional research, and also generators of new architectural knowledge co-produced through engagement with the public.

This paper was presented at the AHRA 2024 international conference, Body Matters (session: Contained Bodies). It critically revisited the history of London’s ‘tube shelters’ as a means of addressing the condition of civilians in the age of aerial warfare. By reappraising the transformation of the London Underground into a mass shelter during the Blitz, the paper highlighted the role of human experience, agency and resistance in the production of space.

This lecture explores the unique qualities that made Aalto furniture so appealing to architects and the public in London, the actors and agents involved in promoting it, such as Laszló Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Read and Philip Morton-Shand, how Finmar became the model for the Aaltos when they later set up Artek in Helsinki, and how furniture became the basis for the enduring connection between Finnish and British architecture.

This article discusses women as architectural clients through an examination of Roman Catholic nuns as patrons, designers and in some cases builders of religious architecture. The paper offers two case studies to explore the roles that women assumed in religious communities: the first, a chapel commissioned and built by a community of Carmelite nuns in Wales during the 1950s and the second, a recently completed abbey in the North of England. The examples highlight the evolution of female agency in the built environment and how this has been impacted by the professionalisation of architecture.

The starting point for this Special Issue of Architecture and Culture was a conference hosted by the University of Westminster in association with the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in 2019, entitled “Spiritual Sacred Secular: The Architecture of Faith in Modern Britain.” While the conference focused on Britain, we were aware of an important gap in the literature on global faith spaces in late modernity, and sought to explore it through a collection of written papers. The contributions to this issue have been selected to highlight the wide diversity of methods and practices used to read faith spaces.

The article explores the evolution of architectural and urban theory in the wake of the 1960s politicisation of the architecture faculties of TU Berlin and ETH Zürich. Focusing on Oswald Mathias Ungers, Jörn Janssen, and their students, it examines a symposium, an exhibition, and a seminar that shaped divergent perspectives on architectural theory.

In the UK, as in countries across the world, former cinemas have been widely reused as places of worship. While there has been some research into the reuse of cinemas as churches, there has been little work on the broad repurposing of this building type for different faith groups. This article considers the way that buildings offer a snapshot of faith and society in the twenty-first century and reveals the extent to which religious adherence is, in fact, growing in many of Britain’s cities.

Feature article on research findings from the project ‘Moving pictures: reusing cinemas as places of worship in the diaspora.’

As Liverpool’s Birkenhead Park is placed on the UK government’s Tentative List for consideration as a World Heritage site, this article explores the park’s important global role as a pioneer in public park provision. It demonstrates the design lineage with Central Park, New York City, and confirms the bold assertion that “without Birkenhead Park there would be no Central Park, and without Central Park there would be no New York City.” The article explores how the scale and concept of such historic parks is still relevant to contemporary life, especially in urban responses to climate change.

In a journal issue dedicated to ‘Landscapes for Living’, this article argues for the role of pocket parks as part of green space provision for urban housing. The article explores two important modernist pocket parks – influential Paley Park in New York City, created via philanthropy, and Crabtree Fields in central London – a park forged through the power of community activity.

This Open Access anthology examines how photobooks have variously been deployed to read, analyse and interpret cities through curated sequences of images – often in conjunction with literary or critical texts. Stemming from an urban history conference that was held in Bologna, a broad range of illustrated essays shed light on this particular genre of publication. The contents are organised into four sections: framing modernities; urban imaginaries; visual journeys; and politics of representation.