Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts

On water: The aqueous in architecture

Jeanette Budgett — 2025-09-30

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Why can’t architecture be more like water?

Martin Schwartz — 2025-09-30

Explored in this paper are reflections on the importance of water to the work of American architect, educator and writer Charles W. Moore (1925–1993). Written by Martin Schwartz, whose Masters of Architecture degree was supervised by Moore in 1977, and who collaborated with him in the production of a series of drawings for a proposed book on water after graduation, the essay traces the persisting reference to water in Moore’s work—being the subject of both his PhD dissertation in 1957 and a book published posthumously in 1994. As Schwartz notes, both share the title Water and Architecture. The primary subject of the essay is twelve ‘medallions’ or ‘logos’ appearing in the drawing Schwartz and Moore conceived together, and which Schwartz drew, titled “The Qualities of Water.” The medallions themselves set out to capture the difficult-to-pin-down, and at times paradoxical, attributes of water, attributes, as Schwartz asserts, may be considered as “metaphors for architecture” itself.

Fonua as fakafelavai (intersection) of ‘uta (land) and tahi (sea)

Semesi Potauaine — 2025-09-30

Our short essay newly enquires into the Tongan philosophy of fonua, itself defined by fakafelavai (intersection) (i.e., fakahoko [connection] and fakamāvae [separation]) of ‘uta (land) and tahi (sea). In the Tongan material arts tufunga langafale (land-architecture) and tufunga fo‘uvaka (sea-architecture)—or what amounts to housebuilding and boat-building—are deeply rooted in this philosophy of fonua. Importantly, fonua addresses what is ontologically primary, as opposed to land-architecture and boat-architecture, which are socially produced and therefore capable of being grasped epistemologically. Given this, we initially survey the Tongan talatupu‘a (cosmogony and cosmology) of fonua as it defines the emergence of the landscape and seascape (and later skyscape). Following this emergence is the appearance of the first tangata (humans) succeeded by the ‘otua (deities), through their social and spiritual practices.

We draw on three examples of a rich body of Tongan ethnography related to Tāvāism or Tongan time-space philosophy of reality: firstly, there are the vaka (boat), fale (house), and ouau kava-tō (kava-sugarcane ceremony); secondly, there are falevaka (boathouse) or faletahi (sea-house), and faleafolau (houseboat; i.e., toho‘angavaka [boat-hangar/hanger]) or vaka‘uta (land-boat); and, thirdly, there is the fata‘ufi (yam pyramids, structures or platforms) and Vaka-‘a-Hina (Boat-of-Hina). These ethnographic examples, like all things in a single shared reality, behave in tā-vā (temporal-spatial) tafa‘akifā (four-dimensional) ways. As such, tā (time) is fakafuo (temporal definer) taken as a verb in the sense of being action-led, while vā (space) is, in turn, a fakauho (spatial composer), seen as a noun in the sense of being object-based. Both senses inseparably operate through sustained mālie/faka‘ofo‘ofa (beauty) and ‘aonga/ngāue (utility), in investigative, transformative, and communicative ways by means of both process and outcome.

Convergence, transition, and variability in a coproduced waterscape

Kate Church — 2025-09-30

This paper positions Moreton Bay, Quandamooka, as a dynamic waterscape shaped by hydrological volatility, ecological adaptation, socio-cultural interventions, and geological processes. Framed by convergence, transition, and variability, the bay is recast not as a degraded site but as a co-produced socio-natural system shaped through multiscalar human and more-than-human interactions. With little of its catchment untouched, the study examines how sediment regimes, hydrothermal variation, and infrastructural discharges compound stresses on already marginal ecologies. It identifies novel adaptations and emergent resilience in cases such as mangrove migration, co-constituted reef systems, and a manufactured river mouth—where ecological agency unfolds not apart from, but through entanglement with, anthropogenic influence. The bay’s extreme hydrological variability exposes the limits of control-based infrastructure and foregrounds uncertainty as foundational. In response, the paper calls for a paradigm shift in design practice—embracing flux, fostering adaptive capacity, and leveraging disturbance as a material force in crafting anticipatory waterscapes.

Sympoietic shores: An interscalar architecture for Sri Lanka’s coastal futures

Autumn Chelsea Dsouza — 2025-09-30

Coastlines, as vital cultural and ecological interfaces, were often at the forefront of colonial extraction. In Sri Lanka, coral lime extracted to construct colonial architecture played a devastating role in the demise of the country’s coral reef, leading to myriad ripple effects impacting millions of locals. This research explores the entanglements between architecture, coastal ecosystems, and community resilience, using Hikkaduwa as a case study. This town, known for its marine sanctuary and booming tourism, exemplifies the complex multispecies interactions that demand a shift from extractive to regenerative practices.

Representation is a critical tool in this research, used to communicate the layered histories and future possibilities of Sri Lanka’s coastlines. Inspired by Anna Tsing’s Feral Atlas, the project is anchored by a 12-foot by 8-foot mural which acts as a visual narrative. Collapsing time and space to reveal the intertwined stories of culture, capital, and colonial legacies, they are read through eight ‘interscalar objects’ as conceived by Gabrielle Hecht. These objects, nested within the graphic, coalesce in architectural interventions centred around a sympoietic liberatory future.

Flows to bytes: Digitising naval space

Dimitris Hartonas — 2025-09-30

Tracing the post-war tentative steps towards digital computation taken by the Royal Navy’s research arm, the Admiralty Experiment Works (AEW), this paper examines the contemporaneous and intertwined introduction of electronic computers and an aqueous architecture for ship-model manoeuvring trials. Narrated is a history of architecture’s nexus with water and computation, which articulates what is suggested to be a dialectic reformulation of experimental practices that facilitated computers’ transition from calculators to simulators. Positing the translation of modelled behaviour into computable entities as a process shaped by the material contingencies of architecture’s interface with water within the AEW’s mediatic apparatus, this paper reconstructs in detail the recording techniques and documenting technologies that made a digital space of naval experimental simulation possible. By means of a forensic archival inquiry into dead media objects and their evolving operationalisation within the AEW, this essay argues for the historiographic significance of maintaining architecture’s embeddedness in larger technological systems. Telling a story of flows being translated into bytes and of simulation technologies—architectural and computational—being re-codified as digital information, this paper also offers a tale of architecture’s agency viewed through its relational operations within a system comprising space, data, and water.

Changing currents: Industrialising water and hydrosocial experiences in nineteenth-century Berlin

Hannah Strothman — 2025-09-30

This paper explores the evolving social nature of water in nineteenth-century Berlin, building upon the idea that water is deeply intertwined with human meanings, values, and power relations. Focusing on the industrialisation of urban water environments, it traces the emergence of “modern water”—a conceptual abstraction that enabled water to be transformed into a manageable, industrial resource. Through a study of the eastern stretch of the river Spree, the paper examines how Berlin’s urban water environment became a site of complex hydrosocial change. The river developed into both an industrial core and a leisure zone, illustrating how the water’s biophysical and social dimensions were co-constituted within the urban fabric. This dual role of water challenged established social norms, as public access to water leisure intersected with gender and class dynamics. Furthermore, the design of waterways and new water infrastructures such as sewage systems comprising a governance strategy intended to establish spatial and social order in the urban sphere. The paper highlights how water infrastructures supported industrial and urban growth and simultaneously reinforced, negotiated, or occasionally disrupted social hierarchies. By addressing these contradictions, the paper argues for a more nuanced understanding of urban water histories and their lasting influence on urban development

Taming the Leviathan: The epic of the domestication of the world and Peter Behrens’s Gibraltar Dam

Gianluca Drigo — 2025-09-30

This article examines the symbolic and monumental significance of water infrastructure as an expression of humanity’s ambition to dominate nature. By exploring cases like Soviet hydrological projects and Peter Behrens’s Gibraltar Dam, it considers how water infrastructure has transcended its functional purpose, embodying the “domestication of the world” by asserting control over water, a force both essential and potentially destructive. As hallmarks of the Anthropocene, these structures represent modernity’s rationalising spirit, showcasing both technical prowess and a cultural ideology of human supremacy over natural forces. However, in the context of escalating environmental crises, this article questions whether the subjugation of water remains the only viable approach in contemporary design.

Aqueous place in the architecture of Luis Barragán: Dark Pink and surface-Other

Jack Wu — 2025-09-30

Staged here are two parallel accounts of visits to houses by Luis Barragán—Casa Ortega (1940–42), and Casa-Estudio Luis Barragán (1947–48)—both sitting side-by-side in the ‘uphill’ neighbourhood of Tacubaya within Ciudad de México. The accounts, initially conceived of as a means of ‘describing’ divergent visitation experiences by the authors to each other, have expanded asymmetrically here: one (“Dark Pink”), taking the form of a prose poem; the other (“surface-Other”), enacting a wandering narrative partly carried by impressions/recollections and partly by academically inclined trails. Both acknowledge and aim to work within the touristic window that occasioned the visits. Together they amount to a form of travel chronical (at once truncated and dilatated) in which visitation contextualises itself within echoes of other visitors, writers, and commentators. In concert, if not in harmony, the accounts aim to distill the appearance, the feel, the implications (aesthetically, culturally, socially, and politically) of an aqueous underpinning to Barragán’s work. This underpinning is acknowledged as being partly fictional and partly essential.

Spatial momentums

Hannah Brodie — 2025-09-30

A fixed and final architecture often follows the act of drawing, but what if architecture were to remain a drawing, with the vitality of an open sketch? Drawing brings performative gestures to life through records of its making—its traces. This research experiments with these traces, using their performative possibility to re-frame and alter conceptions of architecture, and in doing so, offers new perspectives on urban space. It is a contemporary critique on the relation between drawing and built space; it engages drawing’s capacity to be an ongoing, open process and directs it towards architecture, in an effort to discover sketch-like performative possibilities.

The Keeper of My Memories

Beth Williams — 2025-09-30

The Keeper of My Memories explores the imagined worlds created throughout my life to question whether childhood daydreaming can be harnessed through architectural narrative so that real and imaginary realms are bridged, sparking moments of reverie and nostalgia. The narrative is presented through three acts, and a series of imagined characters increasing in detail and scale as the story unfolds. Act I, The Installation, operates at the miniature scale of a doll’s house, transporting the viewer to an imagined realm. Act II explores an evolving domestic scene at 8–10 Lime Road, Bristol, England—my birthplace and childhood home. Act III sees the domestic scene shift to a mise-en-scène where the house is a character in the architectural fantasy. These narratives are woven into a story also sited at Lime Road. This house is never presented as a static piece of architecture but always evolving with its inhabitants.

To the Lighthouse

Leith Macfarlane — 2025-09-30

Aotearoa New Zealand has one of the highest rates of family violence in the developed world. It is an intergenerational issue that cuts across socio-economic boundaries, affecting people of all genders, ethnicities, ages, and sexualities. This research investigates and responds to the issue of family violence through an architectural lens, asking, how might architecture protest, give visibility to, and offer hope and care in response to family violence in Aotearoa New Zealand? Instead of reimagining current architectures associated with family violence, the work speculatively considers alternative ways architecture can play a role in our social sustainability. Using artefact making to give visibility to the open secret and pain of family violence, the work first explores the issue of family violence through making in empathy. Moving beyond this, the work looks to counter the pain of family violence by speculatively considering shifts in community spaces that might influence the context in which violence occurs. These speculative architectures take the form of lighthouses, intended to dot our suburban streets and act as everyday, functional community spaces and beacons of care. These speculative lighthouses embody an interrogation, critique, and protest of our current social field. They are also a call to care, challenging the architectural profession to imagine new ways in which architecture can help to address difficult social issues that ultimately affect us all.

The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra: Spatial Entanglements, Joseph Godlewski

Mark Jackson — 2025-09-30

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Experiencing water as a spectator: The art practices of innovative mid-century women from southern New Zealand

Megan Rule — 2025-09-30

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Our garden and its waters: A review of Derek Jarman: Delphinium Days (2024)

Jack Wu — 2025-09-30

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Biographies

Issue Editor — 2025-09-30

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Colophon

Issue Editor — 2025-09-30

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Interstices Issue 24: On water: The aqueous in architecture CFP

Jeanette Budgett — 2025-09-30

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