Paul Klee’s famous conception of drawing - as a ‘line [that] goes out for a walk’ - points to a significant question regarding agency and intentionality in design. In short, does the line ‘go out’ for a walk, or is it ‘taken’ for one? This paper questions whether the point, the line, and other potentially unconsidered actors, could have agency in the process of drawing, or whether this is something reserved for the intentional artist or architect alone. This paper engages the metaphysical framework of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) to explore this tension, suggesting that if the line were to sincerely ‘go out’ for a walk, then it is possible to imagine an expanded concept of agency beyond such intentional limitations. OOO is a philosophy founded on a realist structure of objects existing independently of their relations. In the object-oriented cosmos, everything is equally an object, including humans, nonhumans, non-living beings, and even non-physical and fictional entities. The radical levelling ambition of this ‘flat ontology’ highlights a curious and unresolved balancing of intentional humans alongside the many behavioural or inanimate ‘things’ of the cosmos. This paper thus engages the flat ontology of OOO alongside creative drawing practices, to reconsider agency as something not possessed by distinct beings engaged within any interaction, but rather in the interaction itself. This position critiques notions of control and certainty, offering a potential practice of kinship and collaboration in design, beyond the human sphere.

Paul Auster’s novel The Book of Illusions provides a meditation on to whom our deeds in a short life are known. In architecture, How to Play the Environment Game (HTPTEG) and its creator – Theo Crosby – are condensations of many of the same meditations. Fifty years after HTPTEG it is worth reflecting on what the exhibition, the book and the person tell us about architecture, its materialization, individual architects and even the value of canonical interpretations of architecture and its personalities. HTPTEG represented the impossibility of architectural intentionality in the production of the built environment and prompts the question of whether Crosby was content to disappear as an individual recognized in his own right and with his own distinct effects on the canon?

The idea of hospitals as machines for treatment still affects the way they are procured and designed, to the detriment of qualitative considerations that had been intrinsic to the evolution of hospitals since antiquity when they were first cast as cities of health. A return to the urban model is the inspiration behind a number of contemporary hospitals, where it not only creates a sense of place but provides a structure for meaningful user participation; our best hope of designing people rather than machine-centric buildings that are an appropriate, enduring response to function and context.

This article presents a methodology for identifying the influence of free Black women in a set of Spanish legal documents. In response to a 1574 decree imposing tribute on them, Panamá’s free men and women of African descent collectively petitioned for exemption on the basis of their poverty and decades of uncompensated military service. They presented sworn depositions from twenty of the city’s Spanish notables in support. This essay analyzes those depositions for patterns of grammatical and orthographic variances and interruptions that point to the influence of free Black women—who formed the majority of the city’s free Black population—in the preparation and performance of the successful legal case.