One might be forgiven for thinking that the concept of ‘vernacular’ architecture is straightforward. First, it suggests a contemporary approach to building that uses local materials and crafts, as well as the indigenous architecture of tribal peoples, such as piledwellings over tropical waters, mud houses in the desert, or animal-hide teepees on the savannah. These buildings can be distinguished easily from other types of buildings that use industrialised construction techniques and materials, such as concrete, sheet glass, plastics and steel. Second, it might suggest an alternative and more wholesome set of values towards life, the environment and aesthetics, than that represented by the out-of-town retail park or the inner-city office tower. Why bother with the word ‘vernacular’, though, let alone ‘indigenous’ or the more problematic ‘primitive’, when ‘traditional’ works well enough? Nothing could be simpler.

On the one hand, architectural knowledge advances very rapidly, with new types of materials and technological innovations entering the field and multiplying architectural invention. On the other hand, urban experts, architects and engineers often debate publicly uncertain urban knowledge and technologies, risky plans and daring designs, polarising opinion - as witnessed on numerous blogs, citizen forums and architecture websites. This radical transformation in building technologies, in the reliance upon experts and in the expansion of architectural networks could have remained practically invisible were it not for the presence of another phenomenon: the digitalisation of architecture and the availability of enormous Internet databases. The digital technologies at our command provide us with abundant resources to follow architectural controversies.

The Jewish Museum in Berlin is the first major building of Daniel Libeskind [1,2]. The project for the museum has instigated a wealth of discussions in architectural circles and achieved a rare status of attracting the attention of scholars from other disciplines. Kurt W. Forster put the design for the Jewish Museum on a par with Piranesi's Carceri d'Invenzione, an unusual position for any building since very rarely does an architectural design ‘[…] bear this double burden of representing both actual buildings and mental structures, and which therefore have to submit to being measured by both standards: the durability of their ideas and the imaginative faculty of their designer.’

Our paper addresses how building design elucidates the connection between two definitions of politics: ‘Big Politics’ and micropolitics. We will seek to examine how these two versions of politics are imbricated; how, in other words, codified ideologies and political institutions circulate within the everyday practices by which new actors and sites of contestation enter the social collective. The conceptual space for this argument has already been mapped out by various authors, including Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Bruno Latour and Michel Foucault. These authors have variously proposed how powerful totalities always travel along small, fragile conduits. Or, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, ‘the boss's office is as much at the end of the hall as on top of the tower’.

The British architect John Voelcker (1927–72) was a founding member of the small international, avantgarde group, Team 10 (1953–81), an outgrowth of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM). Voelcker was one of six authors of the document, ‘Doorn Manifesto’, a ‘Statement on Habitat’ that emphasised ‘vital human associations’. The Manifesto appeared in 1954, one year after Voelcker exhibited the ‘Zone’, his Architectural Association senior thesis and one of the first acknowledged Team 10 efforts, in Aix-en-Provence at the ninth CIAM meeting (1953). The Zone (on which he collaborated with Pat Crooke and Andrew Derbyshire between 1951 and 1952), as well as a north London dwelling that he designed for Humphrey Lyttelton (1957–58), and his contribution to agricultural vernacular building projects in Kent, are prototypical examples of Team 10's work. Voelcker's distance from the large-scale, analytical rationalism of CIAM and his interest in a socialminded vernacular aligned him with Team 10. Voelcker eventually published three articles on Team 10: the most notable one in Arena (1965), as well as another in Architects' Year Book (1957) and a third in Carré bleu (February 1960). These situate him plausibly as a historian of the group. In one of these essays Voelcker advocates an ‘open aesthetic’ that is not clearly defined, but that implicitly calls on architects to avoid imposing pre-ordained symbols and to include references to the past in their designs without, however, being rigidly imitative, as was the case, he argues, with the deleterious medieval features of Milan's Torre Velasca (1957) designed by BBPR.

The Austrian philosopher Otto Neurath (Vienna 1882 - Oxford 1945) was the only non-architect who participated in the fourth CIAM conference (Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne) that took place in Athens in the summer of 1933. As we read in the minutes of the congress published in the journal of the Technical Chamber of Greece Technika Chronika (Technical Chronicles), it was at the meeting of 13 August 1933 that CIAM members decided to set up two categories of participants: a) partners (mainly young architects and students of architecture), and b) specific members (non-architects participating as full members). The one and only such member was Otto Neurath. Neurath was invited as a representative of the Mundaneum in Vienna in order to cooperate with the CIAM Committee of Statistics which had as its task to collect, review and process statistical data relating to some of the most important cities of the Western world. As noted in the minutes of the congress: ‘The Committee of Statistics in cooperation with the Vienna Mundaneum will collect, review and edit the necessary statistical material which will remain as the property of the Conference.’