An event organised by the Architecture Exchange in London brought together four architectural practitioners and academics, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Reinhold Martin, Ines Weizman, and Sarah Whiting to discuss political theorist Chantal Mouffe’s conceptions of the space of politics and agonism. The discussions were followed by a response from Mouffe herself. Convened by Joseph Bedford and Jessica Reynolds, the event was held at the Architectural Association in London on 6 December 2014. It followed previous events in 2013 – dubbed Architecture Exchange #1 – at which the philosopher of ‘Object Oriented Ontology’, Graham Harman, participated in a debate about his work.

The Belgian housing discourse contains strong disagreement about how to deal with the legacy of the postwar housing model and how to continue with housing production in response to shifting housing demands. An important aspect of this discussion is how to intervene in existing sprawling settlement patterns that have resulted from postwar building practice. This contribution discusses how this housing question has been the topic of a research project on postwar, detached single-family houses in Flanders, Belgium.

The Mountain Dwellings project, located in the centre of the Ørestad district of southern Copenhagen, was built in 2008 by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). Together with BIG’s other housing projects nearby, namely the VM Houses and the 8 House, the building is a part of the urban development carried out under the ‘Ørestad act’, initiated by the Danish Parliament in the 1990s. This promoted the development of a new contemporary urban quarter of dwelling, studying, and working. With an attempt to reinforce the vibrant urban fabric of the district, various buildings of residential units and public spaces have been built, in addition to the improved green areas and rainwater canals.

Austerlitz was the German expatriate author W. G. Sebald’s last book before his untimely death in 2001. Greeted with great critical acclaim, the novel is a profound meditation on history, memory, and loss. Sebald’s larger attempt to represent and memorialise the lasting trauma of the Holocaust, in an oblique and understated rather than a literal way, led him to a new kind of literary expression described by Eric Homberger as ‘part hybrid novel, part memoir and part travelogue’. What is most interesting about Austerlitz, for the purposes of this article, is that it makes so much use of architecture. In this, it joins a tradition of literary works that treat architecture as a metaphor for human endeavour and artifice, social structures, and attempts to order and construct the world. But, there is more to the buildings in Austerlitz. The book offers insights into the larger meaning – often, but not always, melancholy – of architecture in culture and society, past and present. This is elucidated at a personal level, in the way that surroundings and spatial atmospheres can affect the emotional life of an individual, and also at a collective level, in the way that buildings bear witness to, and last beyond, the trials and duration of a single human life.

There are similarities between the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern (2000) by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, and the Central Nave of Musée d’Orsay (1986) by Pierre Colboc, Renaud Bardon and Jean-Paul Philippon. Both came into being through the conversion of defunct industrial and infrastructural facilities. Their scales are also similar to each other, as the Turbine Hall measures approximately 152 metres long, 22 metres wide and 35 metres high and the Central Nave of Musée d’Orsay, 138 metres long, 40 metres wide and 32 metres high.

The absolute consideration of the acoustic environment within architectural design praxis has traditionally been reserved only for those specialised listening facilities such as concert halls or recording studios. This is in spite of numerous recent calls from architects and theorists such as Juhani Pallasmaa, Ted Sheriden, Karen Van Lengen, and Björn Hellström that architectural praxis must seek to move beyond what Jeremy Till describes as the vanity of form, and what Rafael Pizarro acknowledges as the seductive immediacy of pure visual articulations of space. That architectural design has traditionally been in a more than willing position to seek out myriad influences, theories, and extra-architectural knowledge has even led Jean-Claude Guédon and Botond Bognar to argue that architecture has ceased to occupy a finite domain – its boundaries have dissipated as the definition of what architecture is continues to evolve and expand.

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.