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The fact that architecture is intellectually defined through intentional design, while institutions and cities usually come into being out of multiple actions over long periods of time positions us between on the one hand aesthetically authored objects, and on the other, the city and institutions as authorless, socio-economic processes. As a consequence, architecture and cities are confined in exceptional cases to the status of iconic projects, or more generally to the status of buildings and urban plans as instruments of economic production, serving the knowledge economy (offices/universities) and the experience economy (museums/waterfront developments/theme parks, etc.). As to institutions, they are often disembodied into organisational frameworks, activities, rituals and norms of behaviour without a basic understanding of how space and society are bound to one another.

Fundamental as these issues are, they are rarely addressed within a single theoretical and analytical framework. Instead, they are fragmented into separate paradigms. Descriptions within the history and theory of architecture have traditionally tended – with a few exceptions - to privilege the ways in which architecture isÌýconceivedÌýalongside the products and discourse of architectural design. In terms of cities, the historiography of urbanism tends to discuss urbanistic theories and ideas and rarely the spatial forms of cities and the place of institutions within them. In contrast to this framework, the field of spatial morphology (e.g. space syntax and typo-morphology) mainly addresses buildings and cities asÌýfound, that is, as authorless places of the everyday without examining the history of institutions, the discourses used by designers and their intentions.

Focusing on individual projects, design influences, periods, styles or how historiography is produced, research in the Humanities often eschews the opportunity for more generalisable and systemic modes of understanding. Through mapping and analysis, space syntax often reveals generic properties, recognising shared patterns across a large sample of buildings and cities. What it may leave out of consideration is the processes by which the conscious imagination of the designer combines precedents and invents new designs.

Architectural Phenomena addresses the relationship between institutions, architecture, buildings and the city as we use them in rituals and everyday life (as found) and as we define them intellectually through architectural and urban design (as ideas, texts, drawings and concepts).

The objective of the module is to explore theoretical and analytical concepts used in foundational space syntax literature throughÌýa comparative methodÌýthat juxtaposes them with similar concepts found in key texts by architectural theorists (and social theorists) outside the space syntax discipline. Ìý