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Traditional architectural thought and practice decrees that buildings should be spatially homogeneous, revealing themselves to their viewers and users as episodic and carefully orchestrated wholes. Giacomo Pala argues that the world is more complex than this, and that the digital has further enhanced its heterogeneous festival of formal, semiotic and spatial jump‐cutting to establish conjunctions from which we can be architecturally inspired. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Letting us into a side of Alsop seldom seen, Will's son Ollie Alsop relates small vignettes of domestic and close working life, including at the family's apparently ad hoc Norfolk house. The improvised homely home seems at odds perhaps with the chimera of a successful architects' residence where material and space are held in taught alignment. Paradoxically, Will's personal habits were concerned with the exactitude of repetitively laying out his drawing, drinking and smoking accoutrements on the kitchen table each morning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we first review current Japanese urban and regional sociological literature on the COVID‐19 pandemic. Some empirical studies of the current conditions, challenges, and difficulties faced by urban communities with the pandemic have loomed large. Although urban governance of infectious disease control has been generally an important research topic in urban studies, there is limited research on this aspect, particularly in Japan. Then, we briefly examine the urban governance of the pandemic in Japan, with a focus on the case of Osaka. Specifically, by analyzing the meeting minutes of Osaka Prefectural Government's countermeasure headquarters, we shed light on what issues were mainly dealt with and what main organizational actors were involved. The results indicate that, in addition to the administrative and political collaboration between central, prefectural, and municipal governments, the involvement of industrial and professional organizations (e.g., medical and economic associations) is particularly salient. This is because the governmental sector in Japan lacks a strong legal framework and a policy implementation capacity for infectious disease control. Consequently, it has requested (through intermediary associations) that residents, businesses, and hospitals cooperate with the government to control the spread of the virus. With regard to the characteristics of the Japanese urban governance of the pandemic, more comparative research between cities and regions in the country and those in other countries will be one of the important issues for future Japanese urban and regional sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If composed of rigid voxels, Discrete structures can only approximate at curves. But what if the building blocks are made of flexible materials? As co‐founder of the Design Computation Lab at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London and cofounding principal of MadMDesign, Manuel Jimenez García has been leading parallel initiatives to develop and test structure‐generating software that explores this proposition. Here he outlines its potential by showcasing some of the Discrete struct prototypes and installations that the new software has produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of traditional Chinese architecture's most distinctive features is the partition of interior spaces by multiple, mostly moveable screens. These offer many benefits in terms of not only the practical aspects of spatial flexibility and climate control, but also less tangible aural, psychological and ornamental effects. Guest‐Editor Pingping Dou explores their history and function, and illustrates their potential for use in today's search for architectural adaptability through three recent projects in Beijing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the guest editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the design of virtual pavilions, temporary architecture in cities, and pavilions, pop-ups and parasols as temporary shelter after natural disasters.

As architects compete on the world stage through the very diversity and disparateness of their expression, how might it be possible to develop an experimental approach that has value and credibility at a local level? Guest-Editors Michael Hensel and Christian Hermansen Cordua explore the possibilities for locally specific experimental architecture - past and present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The architecture of the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) is renowned internationally for the formal refinement of its components and detailing as well as for its sensitive responses to context, both in terms of its physical surroundings and local construction traditions. But, as architectural author and Piano specialist Peter Buchanan reminds us, the central concern of the practice remains focused on the original core impetus of expandingthe bounds of what technology and materials can achieve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) and high-resolution shallow reflection seismic surveying were carried out to investigate the subsurface geology in and around the Uemachi Fault zone in the Yamato River area, Osaka, Japan. Shallow drilling in the area showed a major displacement event during the middle Pleistocene. The main Uemachi Fault plane could be clearly imaged on the seismic section, except for the most shallow 200 m. Several shallow normal fault planes with less displacement could be detected on both sides of the fault plane. GPR profiles confirmed the presence of several shallow normal faults within the area near the fault zone. These shallow faults could be followed in all of the GPR profiles crossing the fault zone. The integration of seismic section, GPR profiles and drilling data led to a conceptual model that explains the evolution of the Uemachi Fault system. The proposed model suggests the occurrence of several cycles of small vertical displacement along the deep part of the fault plane caused by the regional east–west compressional stress. The ductile nature of the shallow sedimentary cover and the absence of confining pressure in the shallow part allow for a considerable amount of plastic bending before failing in the shallow sedimentary layers. This bending generates stretching force within the shallow sedimentary cover, which in time, along with gravitational force, gives rise to the formation of the swarm of normal faults within the shallow layers near the fault zone. Some of the detected faults extend to a depth of less than 3 m below the ground surface, suggesting that the last tectonic activity along the fault plane may have occurred recently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the late 1960s, Japan's postwar housing boom had resulted in supply exceeding demand. But these buildings were poor quality and short-lived. Since then, the country has seen various initiatives - both public and private - to improve the building stock and make it sustainable. Ranging from construction guidelines, to tax incentives, to technical innovations, they have achieved considerable success. Kazunobu Minami - Professor of Architecture at the Shibaura Institute of Technology in Tokyo, who has worked as an architect for the Japanese government since 1981 - tells their story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'open building' approach grew out of research and early projects starting in the 1960s, aimed at overcoming the rigidity of the prevailing top-down housing process in the Netherlands. Geared to ensuring user control and sustainability in the built stock, it involves coordinating stakeholders in the real estate development process, enabling variety and change to become efficient. Architect, researcher and educator Stephen Kendall explains the approach and describes pioneering projects in Europe, Japan, China, the US and Russia, as well as detailing instances around the world where it has become part of public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pachytraga Paquier, 1900, the stratigraphically oldest genus of caprinine caprinid rudist, was previously known from only two chronospecies from a single lineage, that is the Hauterivian P. tubiconcha Astre, 1961 and the early Aptian P. paradoxa (Pictet and Campiche, 1869). Here, a new species, Pachytraga? tanakahitoshii, is erected on the basis of isolated left valves recovered from the Osaka and Sanchu areas, south-west Japan. This species has a moderate shell size (antero-posterior commissural diameter c. 30 mm), and its left valve is characterized by at least one possibly autapomorphic character (narrow anterior myophore, inclined inwards), as well as a mosaic of primitive (single longitudinal carina developed on the anterior side) and derived (simple marginal canals in the antero-dorsal valve margin) characters of Mediterranean and Middle East Tethyan Pachytraga. The Japanese Pachytraga? represents the first probable record of this genus outside the Mediterranean/Middle Eastern Tethyan province, and its early Barremian age partly fills the 'gap' in its previously known stratigraphical record, although the evolutionary relationship of the Japanese form with Mediterranean and Middle East Tethyan Pachytraga remains unsolved. However, the discovery of early Barremian Pachytraga? in Japan indicates that the evolutionary history of the genus is more complex than previously thought and should thus be discussed in a broader palaeogeographical context that must now include the Pacific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]