In the context of escalating global environmental pressures and ecological breakdown, current trajectories of material resource use in the construction sector are overwhelming the regenerative capacity of the biosphere, causing severe repercussions to the interdependencies of humans and ecosystems across different scales. Research into bio-based building materials such as hemp, straw, stone, and earth has received widespread attention as a holistic tool for envisioning human development on a stable and resilient planet. However, the supply of these materials at scale remains dependent upon the continuation (and expansion, in some cases) of an economic and political model that is based on large-scale extraction and dependent upon an infinite resource pool. We argue that materials are not fixed commodities but are continuous with the landscapes they come from: co-constituted by people's livelihoods, land ownership and cultivation models, and more-than-human inhabitants, so they should not be separated from these entangled relations. This research critically examines what the shift to a bio-based construction material palette means for current material-ecological systems, and what new natures are born from these interspecies sociomaterial relations. Focusing on bats (a high mobility, keystone species in the UK) to re-evaluate how the production and use of bio-based materials is an interspecies endeavour, here we map out the systemic cracks in land use, ecology, and conservation planning created by capitalist structures. We found that the excluded relations fall under three typologies: value, temporality, and knowledge. Our research also revealed how systems of material production can create spaces for alternative forms of cohabitation and non-extractive production, or interspecies repair. This critical study makes a case for a broader discussion of interspecies spatial-ecologies born out of new bio-based architectures.

Through a discussion of a place awaiting development this article asks: what is ecologically and culturally at stake in the production of large-scale, suburban housing? Examining a case study of a proposed 2,700-unit development in North Tyneside, UK, the article offers a multi-narrative account of the various political-economic, ecological, and cultural landscape factors at risk in these processes of building. The paper develops an approach which links a political-economy perspective - through a focus on the political and economic drivers and processes of housing development - to a micro-focus on affect and place attachment. Drawing on diary entries, ecological surveys, policy analysis, creative responses, interviews, and prose, the article highlights the cultural meaning the proposed development site holds for local people, and the importance of well-maintained arable environments for protecting biodiversity. The paper urges the need to rethink value and care in the production of housing, to get a better deal for both human and more-than-human nature.

Timber, forests, and plantations are increasingly positioned within global visions of architectural futures as critical to the future of architecture, both materially and discursively. Yet current global timber imaginaries tend to produce aestheticised environmental relations and rely heavily on desituated accounts given to the selection of materials for construction. This article resituates contemporary architectural knowledges of timber, following Araucaria cunninghamii (hoop pine) through a deep-dive case study into a complex web of ecological, historical, colonial, economic, aesthetic, and cultural relations. In thus resituating knowledges of hoop pine, a fuller entanglement with what is materially ongoing within colonial and ecological injustices is revealed, setting out a critical first step towards situated imaginaries in practice.

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.

In the twentieth century, the mobility of architects and ideas played an important role in the dissemination of an architecture culture characterised by modernity. Architectural ideas were disseminated through institutions and a variety of visual, verbal, and textual representations as well as physical encounters. Travel, with its associated architectural thinking and representation, became a generative practice through which the dissemination of architecture could be understood. The Grand Tour was one of the most well-studied examples of travel as a rite of passage, and Italy remained a dominant destination long after its peak in the eighteenth century. Italian architectural discourse entered Turkey through travels and publications, mostly in the prewar era. This article aims to show the role of architects’ travels in inducing architectural productions through a variety of representations from sketches to published media, scrutinising Turkish-speaking architects’ journeys to Italy in the postwar era. The study incorporates content analysis of selected media - such as photographs, articles, class notes, books, and memoirs - to review architects’ productions during and after their travels, as they facilitated the dissemination of an architecture culture ‘brought back’ after key experiences.

This article concentrates on the understudied years that the German architect Hermann Muthesius spent in London from 1896 to 1903. It argues that Muthesius's interpretation of English visual culture was foundational to the national style he envisioned for his homeland. Muthesius produced a vast literature on English architecture and design and is thus often mentioned as the connector between the arts and crafts and the Werkbund in the historiography of the modern movement. This stance is problematic, however, because it frames Muthesius’s appropriation in terms of reception and assumes that one man alone can connect two heterogeneous trends. Such a view overlooks the dialectic shaping involved in a cultural transfer. Muthesius’s engagement with English architecture was an active, deliberate process of selection and reinterpretation, rather than mere absorption. As such, this article establishes how Muthesius was both an agent of this cultural transfer through the prism of his own cultural framework of Wilhelmine entanglement of cultural and political concerns, and himself subject to a complex set of emulation and reciprocal influences within the transnational construction of national aesthetics. It demonstrates that Muthesius’rs experience in Britain represents a pivotal, though often mischaracterised, episode in the evolution of modern architectural thought.

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 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.

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.

This article develops within the ‘design model’ of neurodiversity that explores how the creative professions have aligned their work with and in contrast to the established ‘medical’ and ‘social models’ in critical disability scholarship. Architects have frequently encountered the limits of dementia-friendly design principles when engaging with them in practice. Buro Kade Architects’ De Hogeweyk project in Weesp, the Netherlands (2008-09), which falsifies everyday life in a small-town environment that masks the mechanisms of surveillance of its older residents, has also raised ethical questions. Such precedents have driven architects such as Níall McLaughlin and Yeoryia Manolopoulou to explore ways of working directly with people living with the condition in the Alzheimer’s Respite Centre in Dublin, Ireland (2009). This experience has also inspired Manolopoulou and McLaughlin to develop collaborative practices of drawing towards more inclusive design processes in co-producing architecture, which have so far been shared only with a limited number of neurotypical peers. Even in such creative approaches, however, the pervasive perception of dementia as a form of deficit frequently persists. This seems to be challenged by the way that architecture is deployed in Florian Zeller’s The Father, performed on stage (2012) and turned into a feature film (2020). Despite being a different form of creative output, Zeller’s staging can expand the imagination of professional architects regarding their creative engagement with dementia. Through its cultural agency, the affective porosity of architecture in The Father plays a positive role in foregrounding and validating the lived experience of people living with this condition by rendering it relatable to neurotypical audiences. If relatability is a first step towards empathy, then architecture can also drive the allyship that counters othering. In so doing, it also aids in expanding difficult discussions around questions of citizenship and political representation of neurodiverse constituencies.

This paper is a case study that reflects on the intricate process of crafting a specialised private training pool, located in Highgate, London. The client is KP, a woman in her 50s who developed Multiple Sclerosis (MS) more than a decade ago. In her everyday life, KP uses a wheelchair and relies on continuous support. She can navigate semi-independently without the wheelchair by using her arms and upper body to push and pull herself through space with sufficient support such as from (door) frames, furniture, handlebars, etc. She has one side that is more dependent with one foot less responsive. When overcoming thresholds, for example, she therefore often requires additional help lifting. Generally, independent movement through space is slow, and her navigation and speed are inherently determined by the availability of surrounding support. This paper explores the multifaceted journey of delivering a training pool that embraces a holistic approach and encompasses the physical, psychological, and aesthetic dimensions of the client’s needs. To reflect on these important issues, it draws on an interview between the client and author, who is also the architect.

In this article, I consider the planning, construction, and operation of Donaldson’s Hospital, an early purpose-built residential school for deaf (and hearing) children in Edinburgh. I propose that, from the initial concerted efforts to provide formal deaf education, space was at the centre of debates about what it meant to be a child who does not hear. I show that the architecture of deaf teaching was fiercely contested by educators, legislators, government organisations, financial donors - in other words by those who had the power to organise bodies in space. In doing so, I highlight the shifting cultural understandings of deafness in the second half of the nineteenth century and trace how these became spatial determinants of building designs and architectural discourse. As such, I argue that architecture was not merely a reactionary receptor of ideological currents but that individual buildings actively produced, expressed, and opposed cultural understandings of deafness at the time.

This article analyses the life and career of Olof Hanson (1862-1933), the earliest known deaf architect to practice in the United States. Drawing on Hanson’s unpublished papers in Gallaudet University Archives, the article provides the first comprehensive account of his innovative architectural design for deaf people and communities, intended to optimise manual communication, such as American Sign Language (ASL), in residences, schools, dormitories, and community buildings. These innovations included maximising natural light, designing electric light systems to highlight the hands and faces of speakers, and optimising sight lines to optimise manual communication. Hanson explicitly used this approach in his designs, notably for Kendall Hall at Gallaudet University, which used beveled windowsills in the basement, and at Charles Thompson Memorial Hall in Saint Paul, MN, which included numerous full to over-sized windows from the basement to the top floor. The hall also included a widened staircase and entryway designs that emphasised an open view between floor levels, allowing unimpeded manual communication as deaf people moved between floors and rooms. Hanson provided previews of space using interior glass partitions in community buildings and spindlework in residences. Three decades of architectural practice in Minnesota, Washington State, and elsewhere, along with a lifetime of personal experience, offered Hanson numerous opportunities to centre deaf people in his architectural designs. His design innovations were built upon and advanced by other deaf and hard-of-hearing architects who modified standard building plans to meet the needs of deaf clients. In turn, Hanson’s designs foreshadowed the late twentieth-century concept of DeafSpace. This article is accompanied by ‘Olof Hanson’s Architectural Legacy’, ArcGIS StoryMap that traces Hanson’s life and career.

This article recommends Foucault’s archaeological method as a means to challenge the dominant narrative of the British postwar social housing estate’s inevitable failure. Through this process, it is proposed that common historical and present-day rationalisations for the demolition of such places can be valuably problematised. An explanation of how archaeology can be applied to the postwar estate is provided, with a document pertaining to James Stirling’s Southgate estate analysed as an example. Conceived as an intrinsic part of Arthur Ling’s masterplan for Runcorn New Town and completed in 1978, Southgate was demolished just over a decade later in 1989. This happened despite an absence of structural faults and many residents expressing a preference to stay in their homes. As such, Southgate’s trajectory represents an extreme example of the legitimising effects that stem from the discourse of the failed postwar estate. Such framing continues to underpin arguments for the demolition of postwar social housing stock today. In this context, archaeology offers an opportunity to bypass the epistemological trap of speculating over causes of failure, instead illustrating the contingent nature of the rules that led to the postwar estate’s negative social construction.