Annetta Pedretti studied cybernetics and architecture early in the 1970s – beginning at the Architectural Association in London and later culminating in a Ph.D in 1981 at Brunel University – and her training continued to influence her lifelong practice just as much as her everyday surroundings. From 1980 to 2018, Pedretti’s life and work revolved around one particular site: 25 Princelet Street in Spitalfields, Tower Hamlets. During these years, Spitalfields was grappling withquestions of heritage, conservation, and change that were taking place in response to intensifying gentrification, all bound by particular ideas about futures and time. Pedretti spoke very early on about faulty assumptions about time and the need for ‘jerking ourselves out of the habit of taking time as a given’ and ‘extracting time from the relations, e.g., economics, in which we have allowed it to be seized up and used up’. In this paper, I turn to what Pedretti called her ‘intermedia’ practice. I follow a thread in her work – from her experiments in design writing and running a printing press, to flag-making as a form of protest, to the long-spanning project of repairing and remaking the house at Princelet Street – that points towards her interest in reclaiming time as a form of designerly resistance. In so doing, I will explore how these practices come together, exploring the broader challenges of navigating the dialectical complexity related to negotiating between the ‘lived time’ (experiential) of entities fundamental to their internal processes of unfolding and ‘clock time’(measurable time) that is significant for social negotiations such as design decisions related to conservation or development. Pedretti’s work is an invitation to imagine a reflexive practice in which claiming time and working contra to different forms of oppression becomes about writing, repairing, working with the evolving community, and working on the self. All of these processes are recursively entangled, unfolding, creating feedback and feedforward loops that connect in a myriad of different ways.

Do resonances of Cervantes's frustrated attempts to be granted a royal appointment in the Spanish Indies filter into the “Quijote”? Can the author be glimpsed in the novel of which he is also a reader? What holds Don Quijote and Sancho Panza together and gives this episodic novel its coherence? Attuned to the rich conversational exchanges between the two protagonists, I argue that Don Quijote's escalating promises and Sancho's dogged pursuit of an island to govern, together with the triangulated relationship of Don Quijote, Sancho, and the imagined Dulcinea, result in what can rightly be called Cervantes's anti-anthem to America.

Ralph Erskine Arkitektkontor’s project for a 2,000-unit housing estate in Byker, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1969–82) was the result of an unusually long and complex design process. The critical literature highlights Erskine’s humanist position and socialist inclination, but the operations of the project have never been explained in detail. Based on literature and archival research, this essay examines Erskine’s response to the challenges of the commission. As a reaction against the modernist ideals of efficiency and homogeneity, the project sought to absorb the pre-existing social structure, approximating the image of a medieval city, with its perimeter wall, and its houses and alleys of varied scales and irregular patterns. The term isomorphism – a structure-preserving map – is proposed here to capture the procedures that the architects deployed to give the project a theoretical and formal grounding, establishing continuities with the past that would soften the impact of the radical physical transformation imposed on the site. The ambiguous spatial and material qualities that characterise the project for Byker were fundamental in creating the conditions of reception that made this process viable.