The sudden adoption of working from home (WFH) during the COVID-19 pandemic has required the reconfiguration of home spaces to fit space for remote work into existing spaces already filled with other domestic functions. This resulted in blurring of home and work boundaries, the potential lack of space for telecommuting from home, and telecommuters’ feelings of crowding. Numerous studies have shown the negative effects of crowding feelings on workers’ responses. This study focused on the issue of crowding in the residential workspace. An online survey was conducted to investigate how features of the home workspace correlate with telecommuters’ feelings of crowding and how these feelings affect satisfaction, health, and productivity. As a result, we found that various environmental features of home workspaces (e.g., house size, purpose of workspace, accessible balcony, lighting, noise, etc.), as well as psychological aspects (e.g., individual control over space use), had significant effects on telecommuters’ feelings of crowdedness. It was also found that feelings of crowding in the WFH environment can directly and indirectly affect teleworkers’ satisfaction with work environments, well-being, and work performance. Based on the results, we offered various potential ways to alleviate overcrowding issues in the WFH context.

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This article follows the hypothesis that the migration movements of artists, architects and intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century had a profound and long-term impact on art and architectural production and history. During the first half of the twentieth century artists, architects and intellectuals from Europe sought refuge in global metropolises. As hubs of globalizing modernism these cities were places of entrance, transition and creativity for people fleeing their native countries due to changes in political systems, dictatorships and wars, repression, persecution and violence. In the metropolises new transcultural places of artistic encounter were established. Flight, exile and migration brought artistic and architectural concepts, objects and actors around the world into contact, resulting in transformations that are legible in the topographies and structures of cities, particularly in the ”target“ cities. Their urban topographies contain neighbourhoods, places and spaces that were populated, frequented and run by migrants. In addition to providing the migrants with income, employment and exposure, urban institutions, academies, associations and museums were crucial settings for interaction and exchange between the local and migrant populations. In the following we discuss preliminary findings on the connections between exile, modernism and the urban environment in Istanbul and Bombay (now Mumbai). The essay draws on ongoing research from the European Research Council funded project Relocating Modernism. Global Metropolises, Modern Art and Exile (Metromod).

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Drawing on experiences of researching India's architectural history, this article explores the affect generated by architectural archives as a source of knowledge. It traces the affective life of the archives and practices of a singular historical figure: Otto Koenigsberger, the chief architect and town planner of the princely state Mysore, the architect of Jamshedpur (a.k.a. Tatanagar, the “Steel City,” India's first planned industrial town), the first director of housing of the federal government of India, cofounder and director of the Department of Tropical Studies of the Architectural Association in London, and architecture and planning consultant at-large to the United Nations. Arguing that the affective archive has disruptive historiographical potential, the article posits that it exists fundamentally beyond the architectural object and archival documents themselves, and indeed fully in discourse with its users. The article argues for a more expansive and inclusive understanding of what constitutes an archive, designating the “archival habitat” as a place of active scholarly engagement.