10 Projects for a Compliant Architecture

'Compliant Architecture' is a design, research and teaching project based at the University of Edinburgh. It conducts text-based research into the emergence of building regulations, design-research that illustrates the limits they impose, and taught design modules that explore the architectural potential of those limits. This document presents selected projects from a 10 week architectural design studio completed as part of the MA Architectural Design programme at the University of Edinburgh, 2008-09. Each projects begins with an analysis of a single clause of the Scottish Building Standards. Students provide a brief verbal and diagrammatic description of the regulation, coming to understand the hazard it represents, and seeks to limit; trips and slips on stairs and ramps, falls from height while cleaning windows, or lack of access to daylight. The projects continue by identifying an architectural potential in the limitation of these risks; that a regulated stair acts as an index of the familiarity of its users, that a window choreographs and represents the everyday act of its cleaning, that a window negotiates and represents a relation between programme and context. Each project concludes through the design of a mixed-use building in the centre of Edinburgh that enjoys playing-out the implications of the regulation in a range of circumstances.