As a discipline, architects pride themselves on the precision and exactitude of their spatial endeavors – no minutiae is too small, no details too inconsequential. However, when exactitude becomes the representational aspiration of architecture, when the images architects produce ‘almost exactly’ deliver the reality they hope to soon conjure, a tautology ensues. This article explores the exigencies of the ⅞ scale – a scale that is almost exactly but not quite the same as reality. It is the remaining ⅛ that eschews representational tautology, that produces the effect of exactness, and that populates architecture's historical and spatial imaginaries. Through the lens of one highly symbolic and historically configured room, the Oval Office, this article attempts to map the hazards and pitfalls of realism as a disciplinary aspiration, while simultaneously embracing the figurative realm of the ⅛ and the promise of its imaginative potential.

The article focuses on a critique of three different approaches to undergraduate architecture design studio teaching around the scenario of post-conflict reconstruction in Lebanon following the Hezbollah-Israeli war in 2006. Broadly, the author argues for the value of their own politically-engaged/critical teaching method over politically ‘neutral’ humanitarian, or radical but politically pre-disposed approaches. In addition to the relevance of how the topic of post-conflict reconstruction in architectural teaching relates to questions of political ‘positionality’, the article also offers an insight into the challenging political environment faced by academics in Lebanon and how this highlights the ethical limits of ‘apoliticality’.

What is material as such in architecture? To contribute an answer to this question, the article examines sources from the eighteenth century to today. Discussing Vitruvius' remarks on materiality, Francesco Algarotti cites his Venetian teacher Carlo Lodoli in a 1756 pamphlet on architecture: “For which reason does stone not represent stone, wood [not represent] wood, each material itself and not another?” The paper illuminates the background of this citation, and its adoption and interpretation by successive architectural theorists, such as Gottfried Semper(“Brick should appear as brick, wood as wood, iron as iron”), Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, and Frank Lloyd Wright, the latter emphasizing the importance “to see concrete or glass or metal each for itself and all as themselves.” The thread continues with Adolf Loos' statement that no material “may lay claim for itself to the forms of another material” and the Bauhaus model as taught by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Further investigations will concern Louis Kahn's question “What do you want, brick?” and end with Peter Zumthor's discussion of the “reality of building materials.” Discussing rationalist and sensualist approaches to material characteristics such as inner structure and outer surface, the article compares divers positions concerning the question of what can be understood as concrete materiality.

The architectural theories of Lebbeus Woods present a number of philosophical problems. Of particular interest in this paper is Woods' thinking about autonomy and self-determinism in architecture. He claims that the architect should ‘recognise his own autonomy’ before ‘designing for other self-determining individuals’. The logical impossibility inherent in the juxtaposition of these claims is investigated with reference to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein provides a critique of metaphysics that is based on a strong valuing of socio-cultural context. Woods, on the other hand, proposes theoretical accounts of architecture that contain the fallacious appeal to autonomy. The appeal, however logically false, is critical to the theoretical position cast in terms of ‘heterarchy’. The appeal also supports the presupposition of society and culture that in turn allows for a sense of architectural solution. In the case of Woods' proposals for Berlin and Sarajevo projects, it is shown that the sense of architectural solution cannot amount to a real solution to the socio-cultural problems facing the people of these war torn cities.

The predominant model of sustainable architecture is based on a sharp differentiation between technical and social realms that tends to situate architectural design practice in an ambiguous and marginalised position. Sustainable architecture as a whole has come to be dominated by a focus on engineering design with a related emphasis on energy efficiency and climate-change strategies that seek to improve the economic performance of buildings whilst providing little or no consideration of the wider contexts of architectural design and production. This paper argues for an expanded understanding of sustainable design and draws on ideas developed within the Philosophy of Technology to point to the broader cultural values and practices that surround particular design choices. From this perspective the work of engineers, architects, and other designers of the built environment provide settings upon which the ongoing dramas of political action are mounted.

Through analysis of ‘live’ student design-build projects, the paper explores three distinct conceptualisations of sustainable design practice in which buildings are interpreted as physical manifestations of differentiated frames of design thinking that emphasise either de-contextualised, context-bound or re-contextualising design processes.Although these apparently distinct practices can be analytically differentiated, it is argued that the realisation of sustainable design practices inevitably involves a seamless interaction and interchange between the differentiated dimensions.The conclusion draws on the work of Andrew Feenberg to conceptualise sustainable design as a concrete practice whereby abstract technical concerns and social considerations seamlessly converge to produce artefacts that fit specific contexts.

This paper is intended as a contribution to current debates about the changing conditions of urban space and uneven development. It will analyse the functions of the architectural professions in this process and how their productions prefigure the social and economic arrangement of space. It will examine these notions through analysis of Cardiff Bay and will analyse the changes occurring under late capitalism in the shift to Post-Fordist modes of accumulation. While the paper will examine the local space of Cardiff Bay, the analytical ground will be extended to the ongoing restructuring of space under the new global economies at a macro scale.

Urban restructuring is most evident in the decentred metropolis of the post-modern city, the new cities for consumption. The growth or collapse of multinational capital needs to be seen as framing the occupation of space, its investment and disinvestment, and as an ongoing process, part of a systematic reprogramming of space that can and should be examined at every stage of its operations.

Relocating the economic, political and social into considerations of space means that the paper will also incorporate historical analysis of modes of production and social formations. To consider space as ideological means that transfigured space must also be considered. The paper will therefore raise ideas that are directed towards the transformation of social and political space, and will examine that which identifies Lefebvre's distinction between appropriated and dominated space.

‘Conventions of a competition system: jury reports and competition briefs published in Wettbewerbe Aktuell’ is part of a broader enquiry into the relationship between architectural competitions in Germany in the 1970's, 1980's and 1990's and the dissemination of competition results in the form of drawings, model photographs, abbreviated contents of competition briefs and jury reports, in the journal Wettbewerbe Aktuell. The paper briefly introduces the German competition system and its regulations relevant at the time, before charting Wettbewerbe Aktuell's beginnings and publishing format. A close reading of primary school and museum competitions published in the journal then provides the platform for an analysis of the content and format of the briefs and jury reports published with the prize-winning schemes. The objective of the paper is to identify principles, similarities and regularities and their possible effects on competition architecture, in the texts – briefs and jury reports – which describe and analyse architectural competitions in Wettbewerbe Aktuell.

Transparency, translucency and surface reflectance are material qualities that underpin modernist aesthetics. The lightness and transparency of buildings remain manifestly contemporary and the walls of our cities continue to open up, as the default material of choice is glass. From London to Los Angeles, from the Shard to the Crystal Mall, the potency and immateriality of the crystal image is a liberation of the modern imagination. This paper concerns the crystal imagination as represented in the architectural interiors and poetry of Belgian symbolism. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, aesthetic theory and output in Brussels was, remarkably, more developed than that of other European capitals. For the Symbolist artists, coloured and patterned glass, mirrors and rare stones were deeply fascinating as they were at once transparent (see-through) and also contained an interior mysteriously closed to the world outside. As a reflection on the dominance of the visible in contemporary architecture, this paper explores the dual aspects of the crystal image – as both open and closed - and the notion of interior as it matures in the work of the architect Victor Horta. Here, a highly subjective taste for the artificial is combined with themes that surround the crystal and which continue into the materialism of modernist movement through German expressionism. Bruno Taut's Cologne Werkbund Exhibition Glashaus (1914) embodied Scheerbart's crystal visions, and went on to inspire the activist movement that was to deliver such dreams into political action. The paper comments on the development of Taut's ideas in modernism, and the correlation of glass and crystal to the singular experience of vision. It suggests that the crystal imagination of the late nineteenth century, and the potential for those crystal metaphors to disclose worlds not available to sight, still may provide rich inspiration for tomorrow's architectural visions.