In a highly urban environment like Hong Kong, young architects progressively lose their physical connection with materials and manual construction skills and rely mostly on computer-aided design software to conceptualise their architectural design projects. This extreme condition exists within a global phenomenon that increasingly confines architecture to its mere scenographic character. This article presents and discusses the use of bamboo as a building material by second-year architecture students from Hong Kong engaged in an international design and build competition with peers from Southeast Asia. Over three consecutive academic years, students were exposed to the rediscovery of an artisanship tradition and the physical properties of bamboo as a construction material. The exercise allowed students to explore tectonics and reposition architecture as a culturally grounded act and art of construction. The experience achieved onsite is significant for the realisation of context-responsive, environmentally sensitive, and culturally orientated forms of architecture. In Southeast Asia, the use of bamboo enables the architectural project to arise from the roots of a long-standing vernacular tradition and as a result it can become a medium through which the essence of architecture can be discussed. This article investigates the extraordinary pedagogical value provided by student competitions, such as the one organised by the Nansha Wetland Bird Park and the South China University of Technology, which requires the use of local natural materials and the construction to be carried out by the designers.

In September of 2004, a museum was dedicated to honour the work of Bruno Gironcoli, one of the most idiosyncratic Austrian artists of the twentieth century who developed an unmistakable form of expression. The museum is in the Alpine Foothills and is joined by unexpected neighbours: a zoo, a castle, and historic gardens. The article explores Gironcoli’s relational networks as defined through invitation, transition, opposition, and perspective. The paper highlights the interplay of the physical, imaginative, and visual boundaries between Gironcoli’s work, the zoo, castle, and gardens. Visitors appreciate this unique setting, which enables them to formulate their own vision of Gironcoli’s hybrid sculptural forms.

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.

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.

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.

This article comes from a collaboration between the departments of Architecture, Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering, the College of Natural Resources at the University of Idaho (US), and a team from Auburn University’s (US) School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, known collectively as the PrinTimber Group. The focus of this work is to develop an additive manufacturing construction technique that repurpose the 20% of wood waste from wood-product manufacturing and wood construction waste that currently goes to landfills. The idea is to use this material in novel combinations with various additives in order to create a high-performance biobased construction material. This article discusses the challenges inherent to the development of this new building technology, with particular focus on the role of architecture within a multidisciplinary team. The discussion is structured around the thinking of French philosopher of technology, Gilbert Simondon.

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.

The platform, one of architecture’s essential forms in both design and theory, is shown to have purposes and meanings that are simultaneously practical and representational. The study begins with Louis I. Kahn’s design for the Salk Institute. After that, his deep interest in ancient Greek architecture provides a gateway into the Classical period of ancient Greek architecture. Temples, tholoi, and other types are interpreted as equivalent articulations of the platform theme. Where relevant, the ideas and work of other modern architects are considered, Louis Barragan and Le Corbusier particularly. Tectonic issues are addressed, but more largely matters of spatial and topographical definition. The built work’s interplay with forces of the natural environment, especially seasonality, is also addressed, particularly the moods that arise from this interplay. The study materials include the architects’ statements, ancient poetry, art, and myth. Boundaries between categorically distinct types are crossed in order to describe the platform’s polysemy and its several kinds of articulation.

The relationship between architects and project developers is typically viewed from within disciplinary boundaries as a polarised relationship of separation. This is captured in a prevailing view of architecture as a liberal art, and the myth of its position independent of commercial interests. In search of another way to study the intersection between the two professions, we study the trajectory of architect-developer Jean-Florian Collin in interwar Brussels. By recollecting the transactional spaces he operated in, we explore and interpret the societal conditions in which an emancipated architect-developer was able to make a meaningful and lasting contribution to building the city. This paper assesses the hypothesis that an urban society 'gets the kind of real estate it deserves', and adds to burgeoning scholarship in architecture and planning concerning the conditions needed for housing architecture to thrive.

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.

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.

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.

Since the American Deaf community’s formation in the early nineteenth century, ‘Deaf utopias’ have emerged across a wide range of tangible and fictional manifestations. These utopias have presented, on the one hand, as a fully accessible world in which deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals are integrated into the mainstream and, on the other, as a Deaf-centric world in which all or most inhabitants are Deaf and deafness constitutes the norm. These varied integrationist and separatist orientations have become spatially manifest, most notably, in the cultural narratives of ‘Eyeth’, John Jacobus Flournoy’s 1850s ‘Scheme for a Deaf Commonwealth’, Douglas Bullard’s 1986 novel Islay, and the signing community in Chilmark, Massachusetts, on the island of Martha’s Vineyard.

This article investigates the ‘up-island’ town of Chilmark as a site of cultural fantasy within the American Deaf community, positing its history as spatially expressive of enduring political ambivalences within American Deaf culture - namely, internal debates about the community’s desired cultural position relative to the mainstream. Chilmark’s most definitive spatial artefacts, including buildings in its town center, its transportation infrastructure, rural character, and isolated geography, are here analysed and subsequently compared with parallel Deaf utopias, aiming to situate Chilmark within a broader Deaf-utopian legacy.

Building on existing accounts of Chilmark’s signing community (Nora Ellen Groce, Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language, 1985) and literary analyses of ‘Deaf utopia’ (Kristen Harmon, ‘Beyond Islay: A Brief Literary History of Deaf Utopia and Dystopia’, 2023), as well as the architectural scholarship of Jeffrey Mansfield (‘The Architecture of Deafness’, 2017) and Hansel Bauman (‘DEAFSPACE: An Architecture Towards a More Livable and Sustainable World’, 2014), this article further elaborates on the politically ambiguous meaning of ‘Deaf space’ and ‘Deaf utopia’ by critically examining some of the Deaf community’s most prominent spatial artefacts.

Valerio Olgiati’s architecture is fascinating. At first sight, this fascination comes from the contradictions one faces when encountering the architecture. Along with the visible contradictions, Olgiati’s architecture also has this invisible and almost inexpressible effect on people – an archival familiarity, and a disquieting confusion – from where the fascination comes.

This paper reflects the inexpressible aspects of Valerio Olgiati’s architecture starting with its visible contradictions, through an encounter with the Bardill Studio. It proceeds by theorising this architectural approach in dialogue with the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the ‘diagram’, exemplified in conjunction with the works of the Irish painter, Francis Bacon.