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This article comprises a sociological analysis of how architects imagine the ageing body when designing residential care homes for later life and the extent to which they engage empathetically with users. Drawing on interviews with architectural professionals based in the United Kingdom, we offer insight into the ways in which architects envisage the bodies of those who they anticipate will populate their buildings. Deploying the notions of ‘body work’ and ‘the body multiple’, our analysis reveals how architects imagined a variety of bodies in nuanced ways. These imagined bodies emerge as they talked through the practicalities of the design process. Moreover, their conceptions of bodies were also permeated by prevailing ideologies of caring: although we found that they sought to resist dominant discourses of ageing, they nevertheless reproduced these discourses. Architects’ constructions of bodies are complicated by the collaborative nature of the design process, where we find an incessant juggling between the competing demands of multiple stakeholders, each of whom anticipate other imagined bodies and seek to shape the design of buildings to meet their requirements. Our findings extend a nascent sociological literature on architecture and social care by revealing how architects participate in the shaping of care for later life as ‘body workers’, but also how their empathic aspirations can be muted by other imperatives driving the marketisation of care. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers a profile of 20th-century British architect and urban planner Graeme Shankland. Information is provided on Shankland's connections with the British political left, his focus on preserving Britain's historical buildings is lauded, and criticism of Shankland's urban planning strategies by other architects is offered.

Aldo van Eyck, in an interview twenty-five years after John Voelcker died [1], remembered him as follows:There were, of course, other highly interesting men in Team 10, for their personality and intellect and passion; one of them was John Voelcker. He really thought about the great problems of urbanism. He was one of the first people, in Aix already, who talked about quantity, number and identity and in such a way that I thought ‘hey, now I have a new scale; somebody is tuned in rather differently, with a completely other approach […]He wasn't the kind of person to organise himself to build. He did build several things, but not much. He was younger […] and anyway with the kind of ideas he had it wasn't easy to hook onto British building practice. His ideas went very far, though they were not utopian. John was a quintessential Team 10 thinker. He was urbanistically the best of the Team 10 thinkers, by far. He knew a lot, he was interesting, inclined and open. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Eighteenth-century architect-builders were a small group, but important for understanding the market strategies of knowledge-based experts in an age of rapid growth in technical information before the creation of modern professions. This article confronts a teleological historiography of emerging professionalization. It is focused on Robert Mylne and several of his contemporaries in Edinburgh and London, including a number of successful London-based Scots who were active as architects, builders, engineers, and surveyors, and self-styled in all these areas when it suited them. It supplies an account of what it took for building experts to establish themselves and flourish in big cities and the ways in which such experts navigated, controlled, and accommodated an environment of unregulated expertise that largely suited contemporary practitioners. Individual, family, and collective market strategies are examined in detail and the final section is a close analysis of the activities of the Architects Club in the 1790s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Perhaps unexpectedly, architects are seldom talked about in terms of the building toys they once played with or what they constructed with them. Exceptions are Witold Rybczynski and Frank Lloyd Wright. The former describes John Ruskin mastering the laws of building for load-bearing towers and arches by the time he was seven or eight (around 1825) because of playing with wooden building blocks (introduced at the end of the 1700s). However, he also describes himself playing with Bayko. This was a Bakelite building set from the 1930s [1], probably modelled on Mobaco, a cardboard and wood Dutch construction toy [2]. Both of these toys are pre-dated by an 1887 English toy for house construction, the walls of which were made from wooden blocks threaded on to vertical wires. Rybczynski also describes watching his father and uncle build a real garden shed using concrete panels slipped between reinforcing bars, like the method used by the plastic toy but life-size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The repercussions of the results of the UK Government's highly controversial 2000 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) for architecture (arq 6/3, pp 203–207) continue to resonate. But this time the university architecture schools are not alone. For the first time ever, the RIBA, recognizing the seriousness of the situation for the profession, is giving architectural research the attention it deserves. Jack Pringle is masterminding the Institute's response. In late September, arq reminded him of his initial response to the RAE debacle (arq 6/3, pp 197–198), and asked him about current developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]