Historically, there are two main methods for applying evolutionary processes to architectural design in terms of utilised computation procedures. The first approach uses digital computation to represent computational models of evolutionary processes from micro to macro scales for form-finding experiments. The second approach proposes to go beyond the simulation of evolutionary processes by integrating physical evolutionary processes directly into architectural design. The novelty is in embedding physical evolution processes into architectural design through physical computation, which takes place through a direct interaction of living organisms or materials with their environment. One of the organisms that has started to be observed and utilised in architectural design processes is Physarum polycephalum, a single-celled and multi-headed slime mould.

Although many design theories and models have been proposed for using Physarum polycephalum in architectural design, more research is still needed to evaluate the role and critical limits of digital and physical computation as a bridge between evolutionary processes and architectural design. Bio-digital design arguments have been barely challenged by focusing on the capacities and limitations of the organism’s physical computation and its simulation through digital computation. This article foregrounds and evaluates various bio-digital design theories by focusing on the limits, potentials, and differences between physical and digital computation to critically review the relationship between evolution, computation, and the built environment.

The idea of introducing the cognitive capacity of Physarum polycephalum into architectural design is challenged by referring to the characteristics of both digital and physical computation procedures. Moreover, the challenges arising from scale and context differences between Physarum polycephalum and design project sites are discussed. The original contribution is the first comparative review of Physarum polycephalum’s applications in architectural design processes through a critical methodology founded upon the theory of digital and physical computation.

Design research in architecture has evolved significantly in the last three decades. This article traces a historical lineage of architectural design research in order to speculate on its contemporary trajectories. This article investigates two interrelated threads. The first provides an overview of significant moments in the history of architectural design research in the academic field in the UK and Western Europe, drawing from relevant literature. The second focuses on the 1995 book S,M,L,XL by OMA, Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce Mau, which coincided with the emergence of architectural design research discourse in academia. We demonstrate how the medium of this book contributed to a reorganisation of architectural design knowledge. Our article concludes by speculating on a similar paradigmatic turning point for design research that we are facing today. With the emergence of AI image generators and their expanding impact on architectural design, such as Midjourney and DALL-E, the field is confronted with a new horizon. If the birth of architectural design research was ushered in by a hypermediated format whose multiple narratives were co-constructed by the reader/viewer, then new media such as AI technologies signal a phase of post-mediation that challenges the authorship of the architect. The article ends by speculating on the role of architectural design research at a time when the very agency of the architect is challenged by such outside forces.

This article considers the work of Maddalena Scrovegni (ca. 1360–1429), discussing her formation as a writer in the social and intellectual context of late Trecento Padua, and her changing reputation in early Renaissance humanist circles. It presents her best-known surviving work, a composition written for Jacopo dal Verme (ca. 1350–1409) in 1388, in a modern translation by Joseph Spooner. It discusses how this composition relates to the emergence of oratorical humanism in Padua, to contemporary developments in the city’s art, and to the early fourteenth-century frescoes painted by Giotto (ca. 1267–1334) in the Scrovegni family chapel. The article offers suggestions as to how Scrovegni’s creativity may have been shaped by her experiences of social privilege, gendered marginality, humanist scholarship, and art.

In the last century, concrete has become the preferred construction material with which to densify cities by height. Yet, concrete - the most highly produced and consumed building material in human history - is a leading player in climate change and a candidate for marking the stratigraphic onset of the Anthropocene: the term proposed for a new geological epoch in which humans have become the leading geological force capable of altering irreversibly the course of Earth history. In recent years, wood has emerged as a renewable alternative to densify cities by altitude owing to its potential to generate a carbon-neutral cycle. This article reflects on the properties of these building materials in the context of the Anthropocene to argue for the need to shift from an emphasis on the life expectancy of buildings to what we term the vital cycle of the built environment, where architectural design is metabolically responsive to the deep geological history of building materials, on which the continuity of human life depends.

This study examines the interaction between virtual and material spaces and their impact on the embodied experience of architectural space, using the ‘augmented reality’ guide to the Louvre-Lens Museum as a case study. Drawing on the understanding of perception and action from the theory of embodied cognition - the so-called 4E approach (embodied, extended, embedded, and enacted) - the paper argues that a new layer of virtual/augmented experience not only provides access to more information but also expands bodily interaction between inhabitants and architecture. The virtual space offers another field of vision and visual stimulus to explore and understand the real space. It also serves as a temporal displacement of the real space, providing indeterminate open-endedness and possibilities for the use of the space. These hybrid environments inspire more active environment-initiated behaviours, adding the dimension of bodily reciprocity to the experience of space and information. Consequently, the ways in which we conceive of embodied space are transformed.