Research at KSAP

Last year, KSAP was ranked 6th in the national assessment of research excellence, which recognised the value and impact generated through our research activities. KSAP operates across three research groups: CREATE, CASE and DARC that have delivered ground-breaking research in architectural history and theories, sustainable buildings and environments, resilience planning and digital architecture. Over the last year KSAP worked to expand the outreach of its work while augmenting its interdisciplinarity. Urban challenges are complex and require a breadth of knowledge and innovation in methods of investigation that merge quantitative and qualitative approaches. The new centre will include colleagues across our Division of Arts and Humanities as well as other Divisions across the University. The Centre for the Sustainable Built Environment will operate in collaboration with our research groups and become the space for research and debate on the built environment, with the aim of informing relevant local and national policies on issues related to urban regeneration and placemaking, sustainable renovation of heritage buildings and more.

But this is not our only project and we have recently completed and currently working on several monographs and funded research projects. A description of some of these can be found over the following pages. They provide evidence of the critical importance of our work as researchers.

Gerald ADLER – research grant

Funder: British Academy/Leverhulme Small Grant

Title: Heinrich Tessenow: words, building and drawings

This grant was awarded to enable the completion of the writing of a book on Heinrich Tessenow for the ‘Bloomsbury Studies in Modern Architecture’ series. This culminates with a symposium on Tessenow and on those working in his spirit. This summer, as one of four members of the Heinrich Tessenow Society Medal Committee, I am bringing the Society to England for the first time – the home of the garden city movement which so influenced Tessenow.

Samer BAGAEEN – development programme

Funder: DCMS Cultural Development Fund

Title: Creative Estuary

Creative Estuary is a programme aiming to transform the Thames Estuary across Essex and Kent into an exciting cultural hubs. It is managed by a consortium of public sector and cultural organisations. Professor Samer Bagaeen coordinates within the broader programme a project called ‘Cultural Co-Location for Creative Estuary’. A key output from this project is the Cultural Planning Toolkit, an aid commissioned by Creative Estuary, in partnership with Kent County Council and designed to enable the delivery of cultural infrastructure through development. The toolkit can be accessed online here: https://www.creativeestuary.com/culturalplanningtoolkit/

Silvio CAPUTO – research grant

Funder: AHRC

Title: Circular Economy and Food Waste

This project is a partnership between KSAP and a UK enterprise implementing anaerobic digestion systems and waste food collection in cities. The partnership enabled the co-design of a circular bio-economy waste food system (anaerobic digestion, composting and food growing) which was capable of improving the quality of the communal open spaces of a social estate by locating waste collection, processing and food growing places in strategic locations. Making the value of waste spatially and visually tangible is necessary to collectively reduce carbon emissions over the coming decades.

Silvio CAPUTO – Monograph

Title: Small scale soil-less urban agriculture in Europe

Publisher: Springer Nature

The book focuses on the new approaches that urban agriculture offers to grow food in cities. It paints a dynamic picture of soil-less and indoor techniques that are currently emerging. A growing number of small scalesmall-scale community-led and entrepreneurial initiatives are using such techniques for diverse objectives: to increase resource efficiency; to strengthen food security; to educate and inform or to exploit new market opportunities. The described studies demonstrate how technologies that are typically used in high-tech food production can also be harnessed in small projects to generate social and economic benefits at a local level.

Flow chart mapping food waste collection, processing and food production for the project Circular Economy and Food Waste

Book cover of Small scale soil-less urban agriculture in Europe

Manolo GUERCI – monograph

Title: London’s “Golden Mile”. Great Houses of the Strand, 1550-1650

Publisher: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies

This book reconstructs the so-called “Strand palaces”—eleven great houses that once stood along the Strand in London. Between 1550 and 1650, this was the capital’s “Golden Mile”: home to a unique concentration of patrons and artists, and where England’s early-modern and post-Reformation elites jostled to establish themselves by building and furnishing new, secular cathedrals. Their inventive, eclectic, and yet carefully-crafted mix of vernacular and continental features not only shaped some of the greatest country houses of the day, but also the image of English power on the world stage. It also gave rise to a distinctly English style, which was to become the symbol of a unique architectural period.

Book cover of London’s “Golden Mile”

Manolo GUERCI – monograph (forthcoming)

Title: The Book of Architecture of John Thorpe

Publisher: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies

The Book of Architecture of John Thorpe (c.1565-1655) consists of some 295 drawings ranging primarily from the 1590s to the 1620s and covering 168 buildings, mainly but not only English, and amongst the greatest of the period. The drawings include plans, elevations, some full-size sections of mouldings, and a depiction of the five orders derived from Hans Blum’s 1550 treatise on the orders.