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The concept of 'publicness' addresses the intersection between people and their physical surroundings, and the ways in which they affect each other in an ongoing process. This point of relational exchange is the core concept behind 'Public Space in European Social Housing' (PuSH), a three-year HERA-funded project conducted by a transnational, multidisciplinary team of researchers. Large-scale modernist postwar housing estates, often used for social, cooperative, or mass rental housing, tend to be problematised as places of segregation and disintegration in European cities. Yet they are potentially also primary sites for integration between people of different cultural origins and social backgrounds. By investigating publicness in relation to social housing, including cooperative housing and mass rental housing estates, PuSH aims to better understand how cultural encounters happen, and ultimately to reflect on how integration can be better sustained. In this paper, we take a relational conception of publicness as our point of departure to explore the differentiations and intersections between sites and modes of public life in relation to our approach and the social housing estates we investigate. Moreover, we present our conceptual contribution to the concept of publicness, both theoretically and methodologically using multidisciplinary theories and methodologies, and four analytical categories: heritage, practices/policies, democracy, informality, and moreover exhibitions are used as a research tool. This paper is a collaborative output whereby different researchers on the project present their theoretical developments and positions, identify the analytical categories and theoretical vocabularies on which they daw, and reflect on potential ways in which these concepts can be operationalised, and on the synergies that may develop between them. Taken together, our approach offers significant interpretations of publicness in relation to questions of public space, and tackles some of the most pronounced tensions in discussions of public space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates digital technology's influence on the technical description and ultimate construction of geometrically complex buildings. Focusing on the specific constructive example of Frank Gehry’s Weisman Art Museum through the lens of the building expansion’s executive project architect, the goal is to uncover advancements in the operating geometric, documentation, and construction methods used to build sculptural forms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Architectural practice has become considerably more complex in the last twenty years, not to mention since the days of Wright. Many more professions are involved in realising a building, and the construction industry has become professionalised in areas such as health and safety, management training and continuing professional development. Procurement methods for buildings are proliferating and roles for all involved changing, especially for the architect. Shorter timescales are common and there is a general consensus that, in the UK at least, there is a serious skills shortage in the industry and a decline in the quality of the building trades. The industry has become both more litigious and more international. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses spatial agency practice within a living lab in Hong Kong. Lab members work in Tai O Village, a historic fishing settlement receiving increased attention due to remnant vernacular housing there. The article presents historical and policy context for ongoing casework conducted with stakeholders in Tai O. It presents Tai O's history in brief, recent policy developments, and inherent conflicts arising from the interaction of the two. The third section of the article describes informal settlement land tenure conflicts as historical phenomena in Hong Kong. The paper follows this case-specific discussion with global literature review of selected regularisation and settlement upgrading efforts from around the world. These reviews present the article's thesis that third sector and design-led efforts are critically applicable methods to address informal settlement conflicts that remain due to colonial legacy policies and political inertia. The final section of the article presents ongoing living lab research and initiatives, including collaborative monitoring projects and strategic development proposals. Each living lab initiative presented elaborates the article's thesis on the interaction between architecture, research, and governance to negotiate complex development transitions. The article contributes to architectural scholarship by summarising unique interactions between history, policy, economics, and demography that engendered the development situation in Tai O. Further, it reflects upon response development methods through architectural science and spatial agency practice, including the role of architectural representation products and discursive distinctions at boundaries between architectural practice and spatial agency practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the course of an intensive day-long session, the authors combed the Drawing Matter archives for exemplary plan drawings. Their selections are presented here in pairs, based on visual rhymes or striking contrasts, on cross-historical comparisons or the persistence of plan-making techniques over time. The architectural plan drawing is a paradoxical sort of object. In principle, an instrument that should be rendered obsolete by the act of construction, it nonetheless remains the most intensive and compact description of an architectural idea. ‘Plan’ is a verb as well as a noun, and implies a path toward a specified outcome. The plan is fundamentally optimistic, countering entropy with order, and this anticipatory quality is embedded in the logic of the plan itself. Architects make drawings for buildings that do not yet exist. An architectural plan is an empty geometric scaffold that awaits both construction and inhabitation. But the plan also works retrospectively: it was the primary technical means employed in the measuring and recording of ancient architectures that was so fundamental to the education of a classical architect. And these drawings affirm that such reconstructions, far from being rote academic exercises, draw deeply on the architect's creative intelligence. In fact, we would argue that the conceptual power of the plan as a working instrument is precisely its capacity to function simultaneously as an analytical and projective device, poised between past histories and future possibilities. This collection of images makes a case for the continued relevance of the plan today as evidenced by the diversity, conceptual density and shear visual power of these artefacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Hill House by Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1902-04) is widely considered a seminal work of early modern architecture. Today, after more than a century of saturating Scottish weather, the house is crumbling from water damage and needing renovation. In 2019, the first stage of works to stabilise the house and rectify its damp walls began in radical fashion with the 'Hill House Box' by London-based architects Carmody Groarke. Like an oversized architectural raincoat, this roof and chainmesh-walled structure completely encases the house, allowing it to dry out before conservation works can begin. The design also incorporates a series of walkways through the interstitial volume, enabling visitors to observe the old building from new vantage points during its renovation. As such, the enclosure not only forms a protective case, but effectively turns the building - and its conservation - into a museological exhibit. The architectural interest of the Hill House Box, however, lies in its encounter with Mackintosh's temporally and stylistically distinct design, and the perverse strategy of placing one building inside another. For this essay, the Hill House and its new box highlight the underexamined architecture of buildings-in-buildings and, in particular, the creation of spaces that are neither interior nor exterior, but both, simultaneously. Drawing upon a diverse array of buildings and texts, this paper will attempt to outline a theoretical framework through which such composite constructions might be better understood. In particular, it will argue that, while there are countless ways that buildings have historically become encased within other buildings, it is within museums and sites of preservation, like the Hill House Box, that these fantastic architectural encounters find their most exciting and emphatic expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Half a decade past the consolidation of the first 'digital turn' in architecture, contemporary designers seem to have decidedly embraced the unprecedented power of machinic thinking, subsequently adopting its embedded logical processes. We may, however, pose a critical question in the context of this 'second computational turn' : Are there any non-computable elements of thought in the development of spatialised digital intelligence? As a partial response, this paper unpacks a series of productive relationships intersecting urban drawing and the passing of time in the context of a data-driven design environment. This enquiry looks into the processes carried out by a custom-built robotic drawing machine, tracing dynamic vector data streams collated from fieldwork developed via GPS tracking of individual urban displacements in Cagliari, Sardinia during April 2017. Its machinic drawing protocol re-enacts this continuous, heterogeneous, collectively constructed urban landscape as it slowly remaps its territorial occupation into the target surface of the paper. The hybrid digital-analogue apparatus draws from a long historical lineage of vector-based machinic systems designed for architectural drafting. Situating themselves between the human hand and the surface of the paper, those machines acted as carriers of embodied spatial knowledge that could be selectively actualised into specific design processes and materialisations. Deploying a range of intertwined digital and analogue media, this machinic environment is used to articulate a data-based urban drawing research practice and a subsequent 'anexact' drawing research methodology that further elaborates on the durational and multiplicitous aspects of the data-based drawings. This body of work is also reflected on as a visual research methodology, which taps into Bernard Cache's interest in architectural computation as a way to pursue philosophical knowledge 'by other means' and into Gilbert Simondon's notion of the 'technical ensemble' – emphasising the productive forms of indetermination emerging from its internal informational transfers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paradigmatic of a cultural shift in Irish education in the 1960s, St Brendan's Community School in Birr, County Offaly was designed by Peter and Mary Doyle as a flexible and extendable mat-building articulated by generous social spaces including exterior courtyards and an interior 'street'. Owned by the Department of Education and Skills, administered by a Board of Management and occupied by approximately one thousand staff and pupils daily, St Brendan's has been in continuous use since its opening in 1980. Generations of students have benefited from the intimate relationship between the cultural and social life of the school and the architectural form, fabric, and technology that facilitates it. But by the beginning of the twentieth-first century, due to the lack of consideration given to such aspects at the time it was conceived and constructed, the building was suffering from ongoing material degradation and issues in environmental performance. This article reflects on a research project undertaken on the school, which aimed to provide the means by which its learning environment and energy use could be improved and optimised in a manner consistent with the integrity of the architects' conceptual thinking and built design: the opportunity for St Brendan's to continue its course as a successful paradigm, this time for twenty-first-century education through the reconciliation of its future use with its social and education heritage. Guided by the 'three dimensions of modernity' - social, technical, and aesthetic - this process involved the development of new 'ways of seeing' and 'methods of action' applied to the school realised through the production of a series of representations that collectively identified, mapped, and re-presented the significances and values of the school, element by element. The relationships between these phenomena were complex and necessitated an innovative interdisciplinary approach. St Brendan's may have embodied a radical new social agenda for education and indeed society in twentieth-century Ireland in its architecture, but the building remains unlisted and, until recently, its significance (nationally and internationally) has been much overlooked. Part of this project's agenda, therefore, involved raising awareness in the value of the building among existing and potential future stakeholders. The creation of accessible forms of communication that would both synthesise and make clear the complex data generated and the relationships between them was of central importance to the team's approach. The paper ultimately argues that while attuned to a specific site, these techniques contain the possibility of a wider application, a new visual literacy for the conservation of twentieth-century buildings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the rising and falling significance of twenty-two topics in digital architectural research. These topics, which are divided into seven primary themes, are examined using a longitudinal analysis (1995 to 2017) of research in the CumInCAD database. This database, which indexes more than 12,000 publications spanning the last four decades, is the largest dedicated resource for digital architectural research. The primary themes examined in this paper include research into: documentation and representation; environmental immersion; transformative methods or approaches; industry applications and impacts; pedagogy and interaction; and cross-disciplinary and sub-disciplinary focus. Some of the specific topics examined within these themes include research trends in BIM, virtual reality, parametric design, rapid-prototyping, the design studio and space syntax. In addition to these primary themes and topics, the longitudinal analysis is also used to examine a further twenty social, cultural and philosophical topics. Some of these secondary themes include crime, homelessness, politics, poverty, gender, emotions, ethics and violence. From this two-part analysis of the prevalence (or lack thereof) of various themes in the last twenty-one years of digital architectural research, the paper identified several challenges for the future. These challenges include the dangers of self-referentiality and insularity, the possible loss of grounding in industrial or professional needs and applications, and the lack of consideration of a growing number of problems facing the modern world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Public spaces had been central to Cape Town's colonial planning and spatial order, but became marginalised in the twentieth century under modernist planning and apartheid policy. As apartheid came towards its close, architects and planners began to champion public space as a way of addressing the city's deficiencies. Books, articles, and policy documents were written celebrating public space as a humanist device and vehicle for democracy. The City of Cape Town's emerging Urban Design Branch instituted a major public space program: the Dignified Places Programme. This paper traces the history of public space as a terrain through which political aspirations, whether of domination or contestation, have been asserted in Cape Town. The paper will argue that at the end of apartheid, a public space turn occurred which reflected the specificities of post-apartheid democracy, in both its aspirations and limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out the socio-spatial practices of PS2 and Street Society in territorialised, post conflict Northern Ireland – whose work combines pedagogical and improvisation theory to prototype distinctive social models. These practices were formed by a continual process of practical involvement and reflection (through writing) and evaluation (funding permitting), alongside the author-practitioners' search for theoretical concepts that would bring clarity and an alternative perspective to the processes and outcomes. Concepts and approaches taken from pedagogical theory and, uniquely in the case of architecture, improvisational theory, will be used to explore critical aspects of the specific practices, and more generally assert that such socio-spatial 'street pedagogy' offers a space of rehearsal and ultimately, a site for the development of socially-just aesthetics. The paper thus proposes a theoretical scaffolding for practices which increase diversity and diminish resource consumption in the contexts of climate emergency and a politics of precarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article follows the fascinating mythology of grace and gift exchange to construct an argument about appearances as transcending the boundaries of things through a form of radiance or shining. The latter is based on the primary figure of the Graces, Aglaea, whose name literally signifies shining. The question arises how the obligatory rules of gift exchange - giving, receiving, and returning - apply to appearances, which leads to a cyclical 'alternating current' of shining and working. It now becomes clear why the ancient Greeks married the ethereal figure of Aglaea to the sweaty, club footed smithgod Hephaestus: shining things are necessarily linked to the making of shining things. In the magic realm of Hephaestus shining and automation are fully merged: automata are without exception made of gold or silver, while the abundantly embellished objects he creates always evoke movement. At this point in the essay the term 'phenotechnology' is coined: the work of making things lies in their overworking, which is sharply contrasted to the classic notion of ornament as parergon , as by-work, or in the words of Aby Warburg, as bewegtes Beiwerk. Instead of viewing movement as added on (Alberti) to structure we find that the figural movement of pliant motifs in fact creates structure, a structure that according to Gottfried Semper undergoes 'the mystery of transfiguration', which reverses the relationship between surface and space: space is the very depth of radiating surfaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are current definitions of ‘research’ stifling ideas that might be relevant to our discipline? This paper explores how a drive toward empirical research - while linking architecture to issues, facts, and data important to architecture's relevance - also drives architecture away from speculative ideas necessary to imagining a better future. This observation is briefly examined in the four spheres of design, history/theory, teaching, and advocacy. In design, the move in research from program to production to mapping may be seen as a form of avoiding the very thing most needing ideas/research – how to change the way we conceive of design work. In history/theory, the drive to archival specificity may be seen as fear of speculation. In teaching, empirical models emphasising sustainability that are evidence of ‘real research’ may leave behind theory altogether. And in advocating for a more empowered profession, the requirement for financial data and economic validation as proof for necessitating change may miss the larger problem of our current self-imposed identity as architects. Ideas that are not justified by current norms of research are still necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park (QEOP) opened to the public in 2013/2014. In the preceding ten years the future of this 250-hectare site in east London was subjected to intense debate, planning and envisioning. This paper analyses the evolving vision for the Park during this period. The analysis contributes to the literature on this significant case, but it also helps us to appreciate the challenges associated with event-led urban projects and the design and management of public parks in the twenty-first century. The paper is based on the author's attendance at over thirty seminars, conferences and public events 2004–2014 at which officials and relevant professionals presented their work and ideas about the Park. These presentations were analysed alongside the enormous number of policies, plans and strategies (and accompanying media coverage) published to reveal the sort of place that was envisioned by the professionals hired to shape it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From a starting point of Jay Swayze's extraordinary Underground Homes and Gardens project (1980) this paper explores and contextualises the bunker's significance and accelerated production under threat from atomic weapons in the Cold War. The nuclear bunker represents the end-point of a series of buried and semi-buried structures. Bulwarks since the early eighteenth century against increasingly sophisticated forms of ordnance, they emerge in increasing numbers throughout the twentieth century across a series of scales and spheres from the household to the civic and urban. In its proliferation as a building type and precise fitness to purpose, the bunker is arguably as emblematic of modernity as the department store, the great exhibition, the skyscraper or the machine-inspired domestic space advocated by Le Corbusier. It also represents the obverse – or perhaps a parodic iteration – of the preoccupations of early architectural modernism: a vast underground international style, cast in millions of tons of thick, reinforced concrete retaining walls, whose spatial relationship to the landscape above was strictly mediated through the periscope, the loop-hole, the range finder and the strategic necessity to both resist and facilitate the technologies and scopic regimes of weaponry. This paper critically uncoils Paul Virillo's observation that, once physically eclipsed in its topographical and technical settings, the bunker's efficacy would mutate to other domains, retaining and remaking its meaning in another topology. 'The essence of the new fortress', he writes, 'is elsewhere, underfoot, invisible from here on in'. Shaped by this impulse, this paper attempts to render visible the bunker's relationship to modernity and its architectural, cultural and urban contributions to the twentieth century. In doing so it excavates some of the relationships between the physical artefact, its implications and its enduring metaphorical and perceptual ghosts as domestic realms and whole cities and regions became atomic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exactly 50 years ago, the Council of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) launched a new policy and commitment to ‘architectural research.’ At its meeting on 7 December 1967, it set in motion a new programme to accelerate and coordinate the growth of research in architecture, not only in architectural schools but through research centres and in practices. In addition, it reinforced its commitment to building up the Institute's own competence in research, ‘so that it can speak authoritatively on behalf of the profession in the formulation of national research policies and investment programmes.This paper seeks to historicise the formation, development and promotion of architectural research – what we are terming the idea of architectural research – in light of the Institute's renewed commitment to a research agenda through the appointment in December 2017 of a Vice President for Research (an entirely new role) and the publication of a suite of resources aimed at ‘de-mystifying’ research in practice and promoting the evidencing of design quality and the value of the architect. These initiatives have their origin in the invention of architectural research as a distinct tradition and a post-rationalisation of what had gone before following on from the Oxford Conference in 1958. Furthermore, we situate the invention of this tradition not only within professional and educational debates of the post-war period, but also in the changing and fluctuating landscape of government policy on the promotion and funding of research, itself a response to a perceived cultural and political angst about the UK's shortcomings in productivity and development. In contextualising and problematising the creation and fostering of a ‘research culture’ in the UK architecture profession over the last 60 or so years, we also uncover some of the assumptions behind the contemporary self-conscious pre-occupation with developing the research culture of architects. The paper begins with a discussion of historiography and methodology before moving to the research context of construction history and the role played by the RIBA Research Group in developing the idea of architectural research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

arq's first editor returns to the origins of the journal and reflects on the period of his editorship from 1994-2003. He also reflects on the opening ‘leader’ in the first issue of arq, which is reprinted here. The journal's founding principles remain just as urgent today, he concludes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite the many studies on the everyday in social theory and in architecture, it remains wanting as to how the everyday – as an idea, concept or methodology – can be employed, if at all, for a new conceptualisation of architecture and a new ethic and aesthetic for design action. In this context, Jacques Rancière – who suggests that modern art is about daily life rather than formal abstraction and that a political aesthetic has been with us since the nineteenth century – stands out as a fresh and challenging voice that seems to have a great potential. This paper is a reading of Rancière for architecture, in the interest of searching for a new design agenda, and a new understanding of what was modern and progressive in architecture.After a reading of Lefebvre and others’ studies on the everyday, this paper introduces Rancière's understanding of a longer-standing visibility on the common and the anonymous in everyday life since the early nineteenth-century. To explain, Rancière's main framework is introduced; this includes his basic argument of a distribution of the sensible – a subjective, perceptive and material ordering of the socio-political world that is also aesthetic, his differentiation between police and politics, and his third regime of art in the European history, the ‘aesthetic regime of art’, dominating after 1800 and ongoing today. Emphasising a few points and providing a discussion on four issues, the paper concludes with the proposal of a new approach. This paper critically revises established views on Marxist critique of commodification and of modern architecture as abstraction. It promotes a political aesthetic of ‘horizontal’ perspective, with openness, inclusivity and heterogeneity. It discusses as well how a non-western world, such as China, can and should be incorporated into a heterogenous field of discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights the theoretical and critical implications of the everyday for contemporary Chinese architecture on two levels. On the one hand, against the background that – ever since the formation of the profession of architecture in the early twentieth century – there has been a recurrent preference for high definitions of Chinese architecture either in terms of its outer form or style, or its essential and metaphysical meanings. This paper thus aims to identify a quiet yet compelling awareness of the significance of the everyday to architecture in China over the past 15 years. Beginning with Jiakun Liu's declaration of Here and Now, illustrated by his recently completed project in Chengdu, Xicun Big Yard, this consciousness has been made apparent through architectural practice, research and education. To borrow Roland Barthes’ terminology, it is a ‘degree zero’ agenda that rests on the multiple yet ostensible unobtrusiveness of everyday reality in Chinese cities rather than the hot definition of form and overladen historical and metaphysical meanings. In the context of contemporary Chinese architecture, on the other hand, this agenda can also be seen as a resistance arising in response to the dramatic construction of large-scale urban redevelopments that have, in many cases, resulted in devastating consequences. As a ‘degree zero agenda’, the concern of the everyday not only offers a way to see around architecture's obsessions with buildings as autonomous objects but also calls for bottom-up urban processes in contrast to the top down approach that has prevailed in China. The paper calls for a Chinese architecture that, by transforming the purpose and activity of design, would better fulfil its social and architectural potentials through practical, poetic and critical operations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The predominant model of sustainable architecture is based on a sharp differentiation between technical and social realms that tends to situate architectural design practice in an ambiguous and marginalised position. Sustainable architecture as a whole has come to be dominated by a focus on engineering design with a related emphasis on energy efficiency and climate-change strategies that seek to improve the economic performance of buildings whilst providing little or no consideration of the wider contexts of architectural design and production. This paper argues for an expanded understanding of sustainable design and draws on ideas developed within the Philosophy of Technology to point to the broader cultural values and practices that surround particular design choices. From this perspective the work of engineers, architects, and other designers of the built environment provide settings upon which the ongoing dramas of political action are mounted.Through analysis of ‘live’ student design-build projects, the paper explores three distinct conceptualisations of sustainable design practice in which buildings are interpreted as physical manifestations of differentiated frames of design thinking that emphasise either de-contextualised, context-bound or re-contextualising design processes. Although these apparently distinct practices can be analytically differentiated, it is argued that the realisation of sustainable design practices inevitably involves a seamless interaction and interchange between the differentiated dimensions. The conclusion draws on the work of Andrew Feenberg to conceptualise sustainable design as a concrete practice whereby abstract technical concerns and social considerations seamlessly converge to produce artefacts that fit specific contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reflects on the contemporary design practice of Scottish rural housing, through a comparative and analytical approach, examining how three architects, including the author, devise architectural languages embedded in the countryside and locality as inspiration in addressing modern architectural design within a conservative planning tradition. While promoting innovative architectural and settlement design at national level, planning systems at local government level in Scotland often tend to promote versions of bastardised Georgian villas complete with dormer and astragal windows. The author's award-winning practice has challenged the approach, and this paper represents a practitioner's self-reflection in analysing key elements of the implicitly grounded concepts of his design ethos, while comparing this with other contemporary designers with similar but different approaches. The paper provides a brief overview of the planning context and the development of both rural built form and moral philosophies related to the religious traditions of differing localities, prior to a review of the work of the three practices and a reflection on the way in which these practices ‘ground’ their work within context. This, it is argued, has relevance not only for the planning system, but also for other practices, and wider relevance for embedding research within practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents a subscription form for the journal, a table of contents on topics including "Drawing Glasgow School of Art: The graphics of reconstruction" along with information on instructions for contributors on topics including length, style and format, and illustrations in articles.

This edition of arqassembles a selection of papers presented at the Conference ?Agency? organised by the research group called ?The Agency?initiated in 2007 in the School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield. We offered to host the 5th AHRA International Conference, giving it the theme of ?Agency? and hoping that the submissions would energise the relationships between the humanities, the architectural profession, and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the evolution of the structure of construction contract documentation over time, from ancient Greece through to the near future, in terms of the degree to which the contract documentation is integrated. Documentation might comprise anything from a single ‘integrated’ text to a range of ‘dis-integrated’ documents, fashioned by different players in the procurement process and not offering an easily appreciable integrated whole. The paper ends with the hope that new digital methods of information production will lead to better integrated and more easily readable ‘wholes’ in the new forms offered by building information modelling (BIM), which in turn will facilitate collaborative working.The paper shows that contract documentation has evolved through four stages of integration: Integrated: up to the end of the medieval period construction contract documentation was essentially fully integrated – everything that was required was stated in the one written document, which typically covered contract conditions, building layouts, assembly descriptions, quantities of components and requirements for quality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To show every minute portion of a building by drawing is next to impossible, and would be more laborious than useful, and therefore description in writing is resorted to, by which much labour is saved, and the intentions of the architect more readily conveyed to the mind of the operative.This paper investigates the changes in architectural practice following the introduction of contracting in gross for the execution of building work in early nineteenth-century England. This particular new form referred to two different agreements, either contracting for a whole undertaking by a single builder who agreed to erect the whole of an edifice at a predetermined price and time, or contracting for the work of a specific trade only.The changes in contracting the building work are understood as changes in building practice, whose material product would be the building. In a similar manner the building contracts are considered as the material products of the architectural practice, including not only the working drawings, but also the legal obligations and building specifications. This paper investigates the contract documents that were to be produced in the architectural office in order to build on site as evidence for a response of architectural practice to the changes in building practice. It traces this process in the adaptation of the writings of the legal documents to contracting in gross by comparing the specifications of John Soane's building contract for Tendring Hall of 1784 with the instructions and model specifications of the early nineteenth-century handbooks and practical guides. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Completed in the sixteenth century, the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul has long been regarded as one of the great works of Sinan, the Ottoman Empire's foremost architect. In recent years, as our understanding of Sinan's design strategies and sensitivities has improved, a number of influential scholars have argued that there is a singular formal layering pattern present in Sinan's elevations. With the advent of recent advances in computational analysis it is possible to quantify the degree of visual layering (the hierarchical relationship between form, ornamentation and materiality) present in Sinan's Süleymaniye Mosque and thereby provide evidence, either for or against, this proposition. Using an advanced version of the computational fractal analysis method, the paper investigates the four facades of the Süleymaniye Mosque, along with two facade details, to provide a mathematical description of the layering visible in this building. Through this process the paper provides, for the first time, quantifiable data supporting the theorised properties of this famous building. In doing so, the paper also offers a description of the most advanced demonstration of fractal analysis ever applied in architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Increasingly, healthcare providers are asking for evidence based design solutions in the construction of new facilities. But where does a designer begin when there is no credible evidence to support the design process because it has yet to gain the attention of researchers? Within this paper we reflect on a university-practice partnership undertaken to provide a feasibility study for the future redevelopment of an eight-bed paediatric hospice in Australia. In embarking on this project, the project team assumed that a thorough literature review would furnish a body of research to rigorously inform the feasibility study. The realisation that this research was not available necessitated an evidence gathering process from first principles, where methods from academic practice required translation and customisation to fit within commercial time frames and resourcing constraints. This article recommends a selection of research methods for use by architects working within healthcare settings where foundational research to inform the design process is not available. It also argues for a re-conceptualisation of the built environment's value relative to wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flexibility in housing design has social, economic and environmental advantages and yet is currently often ignored. The first of two papers sets out the history of this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainability is gaining a firm presence within the discipline of architecture in spite of the number of obstacles with which it has been challenged: either confronting detractors, sceptics, and the discredit resulting from the abusive use of the term as a marketing tactic, or dealing with the actual practicalities inherent to its implementation. This heightened environmental consciousness increasingly engrained within the profession is solidly supported by a growing social, political and media interest, which has impelled new regulations and the involvement of new experts like physicists, engineers, and ecologists in the design process. This phenomenon is transforming architectural practice and design techniques, moving the focus from a mechanical perspective of architecture (tectonics, construction, materiality, structure) to a biotechnical approach which attempts to equip the architect with instruments to regard buildings as living structures permanently exchanging energy with their environment. Using the environment as a creative generator for design has prompted the emergence of new aesthetic models in current architectural design. The access to new tools, together with new concerns and ways of thinking, have opened new lines of intervention that seem to affect the profession in a more fundamental way. The focus of this paper is to provide an account of these cultural constructs as experimental aesthetic systems, with the intention of not only clarifying their principles and objectives, but also reflecting on the design techniques associated to them. Ultimately, this paper provides a reflection on the role of aesthetics in sustainable design, and on the critical question: is sustainability finally becoming an intrinsic part of architecture? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper attempts to explore the social production of architecture in contemporary Chinese rural villages through a case study on the Community Centre in Xihe Village. This community project, designed and built in 2014, exemplifies a lesser-known type of Chinese architectural practice engaging in a local and specific context, which suddenly gave participation a dramatic image in current breakneck Chinese rural-urban transition of large scale and rapid speed. By looking at this highly specific case through a detailed description and critical evaluation, this paper takes this participatory architectural project as the very first critical example of the socially-engaged architecture in China; as presenting an alternative architecture of resistance in response to the top-down guiding principle ‘Construction of A New Socialist Countryside’ launched by the government in 2005. Source material was collected through fieldwork in the village, including observational study, photographic documentation, and intensive formal and informal interviews with practitioners, authorities, and villagers. The analysis emphasizes the social process and consequences of different stages of this building, in order to explore hidden potentials and methodologies tailoring the architectural design and construction to the site-specificity. The social consequence of the building process is much more important than the object produced. By investigating the architectural version within a broader framework combining anthropology and activism, the paper attempts to introduce a more socially resilient way of making architecture in the current Chinese rural-urban transition. On the one hand it addresses the contingencies in working with underprivileged village communities in inner rural China, which have scarce resources and fragile identities; on the other hand it cuts through the surface of rural vernacular China to expose the undercurrent of silent issues in architecture that constitute the indigenous, the everyday, resistance, transition, and resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The public abattoir emerged as an institution across the industrialized world in the mid-nineteenth century to centralize and control animal killing and meat processing, activities that had traditionally taken place in private slaughterhouses. The modern idea of the abattoir, however, is more than a place where animals are killed for human consumption. Designed to optimize a disassembling process that efficiently took apart the livestock into small pieces, the modern abattoir is one of the earliest building types where the production line was incorporated into the spatial layout. Modern abattoirs also separated livestock from people, and production from consumption, into special places removed from public view.This paper is concerned with the production of a public abattoir in 1930s colonial Shanghai. The Shanghai Municipal Abattoir, completed in 1933, was deliberately designed as a ‘machine for killing’, which applied production-line principles to the efficient slaughter of animals. The result of this functionalism was an extraordinary series of multi-storey concrete structures, dictated by the bloody business of slaughtering animals and processing their carcasses, set behind an art deco façade. In this paper we seek to tell the story of the production of a building that has previously been little researched, with most of the archival material in Shanghai Municipal Archives (SMA) and the limited published material available only in Mandarin. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Chinese architecture was for a long time ignored because it was not produced by architects and because it did not follow Western classical expectations, and vernacular architecture was little discussed until the 1960s, and only recently embraced by its own encyclopaedia. Yet the division of labour between drawing architect and practical builder was never wholly advantageous or inevitable, for specialisation of roles can lead to differentiation, inequality, and division, as well as constructional efficiency. Only in the last century has the division between office work and construction site become so complete, resulting in losses as well as gains. Most obviously it has removed design from making, the person with the drawing pen no longer obliged to experience the materials in their weight and texture, or to discover by handling them the best ways to work them. The designer who has never picked up a brick or wielded a chisel can possess little sensibility for the material, but as long as their duties are fulfilled on paper with apparent competence, the process is carried through. On the receiving end, bricklayer or carpenter must produce what drawings demand even when good sense seems lacking, so they carry the work through grumpily without conviction instead of participating in the creative process. This paper looks at oral architecture in the Dong culture, and the way in which buildings have traditionally been produced by carpenters along with the local community, accompanied by shared rituals which reinforce their significance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper examines the concept of Building Science through the role of emerging scientific research and technologies. The paper takes as its starting point the Technology Readiness Strategy which is a way of judging the state of a technology in terms of its readiness for environmental deployment and relevance to industry. The paper argues that this model is limited and uses the example of Synthetic Biology to argue for a type of building science which is both speculative and grounded and which may not lead to immediate or short-term applications but is driven by hypothetical contexts and imagined futures. The paper argues that both scientific knowledge and architectural research may be enhanced through deeper collaboration and gives the example of a project to develop a genetically engineered mechanical sensing bacteria capable of making materials which respond to physical forces in their environment. The paper suggests that, while initiated with an application domain in mind, the knowledge gained from the project has pointed to alternative avenues for creative design explorations. The paper concludes that an alternative form of Building Science may be possible in which the term ‘building’ is both a verb and a noun. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Much has been written on the impact of digital technology and its translation into architectural practice and education. This paper reconsiders this process of integration to question current trends in research and pedagogy. Recent efforts to expand architectural research in schools tend to focus on broadening its spectrum while reinforcing design as research. We argue that the relevance of digital technology to these discussions, and its role in expanding fields of research, depends on different cultures of investigation and their differing institutional contexts. Our interest is in cultures that, as lines of thought, broaden the field of architectural research and make it heterodox, thickening a line of research with multiple interpretations. Tracing early experiences in the ‘paperless’ studios of Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, this paper questions how architectural pedagogies are developing in response to the current normalisation of digital design, with a focus on the Architecture Association's Design Research Lab (DRL) and the Strelka Institute in Moscow.Ultimately, the main question is addressed: in what ways can the digital be political? By referring to the DRL and Strelka research programmes, two distinct approaches have been critically explored. On the one hand, DRL has been pushing to the limit the idea of research by design, considering autonomous form as the materialisation of change in the design process, while Strelka has been practicing research as the information for design. If digital technology contributes to form generation at DRL, at Strelka it potentiates opinion generation, and the research product is information, rather than form itself. The triangulation of both approaches could eventually suggest a more thorough political expression by means of a digital redux. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on submission rules, length, style and format of the articles to the periodical.

Ticks, crosses and amendments: revealing the design methods of Stirling's office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on miscellaneous topics including table of contents on architecture; information of publishing and submissions; and text conventions.

‘Translation’ is dealt with in this paper as a descriptor of the transformation that occurs as a concept, structure, image or notion is appropriated from one discipline to another. This understanding of translation as process or movement, rather than a field of overlap between disciplines, is facilitated by the work of the philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault considers disciplinarity as the structural demarcation of knowledge and information (discourse) and the demarcations that are disciplined by knowledge. This understanding may be expressed as: disciplines as a disciplining. Foucault rejects the idea of disciplines as bounded self-similar content, arguing instead that disciplinarity lies in the framing of logics applied to content. The disciplines in question are considered in their contingency and temporality yet are not entirely bound by them. Thus, a coherent and organised discipline such as biology dates from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Before then its subject matters either were comprehended within other disciplinary frameworks (natural history) or were considered outside science itself (natural theology). In The Order of Things (1966), Foucault groups several naturalists, including Buffon (French eighteenth century) and Darwin (British nineteenth century), as belonging to the same ‘discourse’ or discursive family. Separating disciplinarity from the origin of ideas and time of writing fosters the productive translation of concepts, images and artefacts between disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Fun Palace, a collaborative enterprise initiated by the radical theatre producer Joan Littlewood and architect Cedric Price in early 1960s London articulated a response to the 'increased leisure' available to postwar British society. A critical model for cultural production in which civics met pleasure, the Fun Palace project aimed to construct situations for playful exchange conducted through self-directed actions as a way to activate audiences. Pleasure for all – a 'breakthrough to total enjoyment', in opposition to what was seen as existing commodified leisure practices – became understood as a critical agenda pitched against the elitist and interventionist Labour government's 1965 White Paper, A Policy for the Arts: The First Steps. Enforcing class-based distinctions between the high arts and popular entertainment, state arts policy failed to address the key role played by the media in the rise of the leisure society. In analysing British communications in the 1960s, the cultural critic Raymond Williams argued that, rather than opposing fine art with popular entertainment, social growth could only be achieved through the circulation of public and independent media, opportunities for which were at the time limited within the corporate structure of British broadcasting and press. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most difficult challenges associated with an ageing population will be a significant increase in the number of people living with dementia. In Australia, this number is estimated to triple by 2050; a situation that is reflected globally. This will place increased demands on health and long-term care providers but it should also force an examination of the ability of contemporary cities to facilitate or constrain inclusion. Globally, designers and students of this discipline are contributing their skills to the challenge of dementia but solutions are typically proposed at a product, institutional or suburban scale. This paper will present two propositional projects, created using a speculative design methodology within a design studio at The University of Melbourne, that provoke architects to more seriously interrogate what it means for a city to support social inclusion, independence and choice for those who are ageing in place. These projects illuminate new avenues for critical and necessary research. This paper will begin with a reflection on the limitations of the Hogeweyk Dementia Village (Amsterdam), considered the current gold standard in dementia design, to highlight the value of thinking speculatively within the context of dementia; to disrupt the limitations of contemporary design thinking and ask what role the architect can play in improving the lives of those living with dementia? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines Kenzō Tange's visionary urban scheme, A Plan for Tokyo, 1960: Toward a Structural Reorganization (1961), in terms of its mobility rather than its much-discussed monumentality. The existing studies of this plan was too im-mersed in its unprecedented megalomaniac scale to pay sufficient attention to the fact that it was a complex design for urban mobility. While the issues of scale and speed might seem to be separate, in fact they are inextricably interconnected since the increasing speed and mobility brought about by new technology would make the existing human scale ob-solete and required the new scale of the machine. In this essay, I would like to revisit Tange's plan for Tokyo Bay as a highly nuanced plan for urban mobility. First, this essay defines A Plan for Tokyo, 1960 as a model city for an automobile society against the backdrop of Japan's rapid motorisation. Tange's unrealised urban scheme was driven by the architect's firm belief in mobility as a fundamental factor influencing the development of postwar Japanese economy and his strong ambition to provide a proper urban infrastructure for the efficient circulation of traffic. The essay then traces how Tange's interest in the visible network of transportation evolved into his preoccupation with the invisible networks of information flow by focusing on his Tokaido Megalopolis (1964), a colossal city that was organically connected by the linkup of physi-cal, social, and information networks. Although Tange's ambitious design was left only on paper and had little impact on the actual development of Tokyo, its historical im-plications lie in its radical configuration of a new concept of architecture and city not as hardware but as software in preparation for the nascent information society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early issues of arq in the mid-1990s were preoccupied with the possibilities for researching architecture through design: how design research might be constituted and communicated, and – practically for architecture schools at that time – how design might be counted as research in the newly-introduced metrics used to judge research quality in UK Universities.Debates around design research in arq in the 1990s reflected uncertainties about its position in both practice and academic culture at that time. Since then, design research has gained traction, becoming increasingly accepted and acquiring greater capital in architectural academe. Key texts in architectural design research are increasingly leaving behind the question ‘is design considered research or not?’ to search instead for how to secure the status of design as a rigorous mode of academic inquiry. There is increasing confidence in the architectural field about the potential and power of design as a research method. Yet the notion of design research in architecture remains broad, with a diversity of approaches echoed in a diversity of distinct but overlapping terminologies. Taking its cue from arq's early focus on design research, this paper sketches-out its contemporary methodological landscape in architecture, surveying key sources in design research scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses the ongoing process of internationalisation of scientific research, and its peculiar implications for the field of architecture and planning. I first consider this field's traditional ability of translating and code-switching, as well as the recent experience of adjusting its research practices to academic assessment systems. I then explore some views about the global spread of modern science, from the ideal of a scientific community to the recognition of a political economy of internationalised science, which defines central and peripheral positions, and the kind of knowledge we produce, how we do it and what for. Finally, I propose that in architecture and planning, unlike in most other scientific fields, the nodes of international research networks tend to have different empirical objects, i.e., their own geographical regions. Peripheral research aiming at international relevance can hardly avoid complying with agendas and theoretical frameworks derived from very different socio-spatial environments, thus focusing on problems of minor importance for its own context. Yet architecture, as a weak-science with a tradition of code-switching, still holds the possibility of international collaboration on other terms, stressing differences rather than similarities, and the thorough debate of concepts, methods and theories. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Richard Weston – Editor of arq from 2004 to 2013, and best known for his distinguished monographs on Alvar Aalto, Modernism and Utzon – reflects here on his more recent practice-led research into minerals, materials and digitisation. These studies explore the qualities of materials themselves but also the materialisation of imagery. This work is ‘practice-led’ in the way that the term is used in academe – meaning research which emerges out of a series of investigations – rather than ‘practice-led’ in the way architects might understand the term, as emerging from a professional office. As Weston reflects, however, this is work that would – most likely – be supported neither in the contexts of academe nor professional practice. It has been made possible instead by his ‘active retirement’. This paper explores how a chance encounter with an ammonite led Weston to Liberty's ‘Scarf Hall’, world-renowned in global fashion, a creative app for children called Molly's World, and virtual realities captured from microscopic mineral-worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates the radical approach to architectural representation of Bernard Tschumi in the late 1970s and its relationship to the literary and visual practices of Dada and Surrealism. Focussing on Tschumi's Advertisements for Architecture and Manhattan Transcripts, the paper demonstrates how the critique of avant-garde tactics in Peter Bürger and Walter Benjamin applies to a broader understanding of politics in architecture and its efficacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]