Kieran Timberlake Architects have demonstrated in a series of built projects the constructive logic of architecture and the ability of buildings to alter our perception of a site. Their work exemplifies a respect for materials and assemblies and an interest in the idea of ‘instauration’, which views a place as one of continuous inhabitation. In an era in which architects often try to express non-architectural ideas through their buildings, KTA's return to the expressive power of construction and materials, of sensitive siting and understated form comes as a welcome change.

The new Jersey Archive is superbly designed and beautifully crafted. It is also one of the largest repositories in the world to use a passive environmental control system. Here, one of the architects, David Prichard, describes the design and its development and the services engineer, Chris Twinn, concludes with an account of the physics behind the building design.

This is a translation of the inaugural lecture Asplund gave as Professor of Architecture at Stockholm's Tekniska Högskolan in 1931.E. G. Asplund. ‘Var arkitektoniska rumsuppfattning’, Byggmästeren: Arkitektupplagan 1931, pp.203—210. There is a photograph of Asplund giving this talk, in Christina Engfors' book E. G. Asplund: arkitekt, Arkitektur Forlag, Stockholm, 1990, p.69. Asplund used the opportunity to affirm his support for the ‘new conception of space’ in contemporary architecture. His acknowledgement of the influence of Le Corbusier is expected; but the emphasis on Spengler's The Decline of the West,Oswald Spengler. Der Untergang des Abendlandes, (Vol.1) Gestalt und Wirklichkeit (1918), (Vol.2) Welthistorische Perspektiven (1922), C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Munchen, translated by C. F. Atkinson as The Decline of the West, (Vol.1) Form and Actuality (1926), (Vol.2) Perspectives of World-History (1928), George Allen & Unwin, London.Spengler's ‘theory of historical cycles’ was broadly dismissed as unsound by contemporary academic historians (cf. R. G. Collingwood — ‘Oswald Spengler and the Theory of Historical Cycles’, in Antiquity, 1927), but his use of the generic spatial organizations evident in architectures of the past, as evidence of the ‘culture souls’ of the civilizations that produced them, retains interest from an architect's point of view. and to its identification of ‘infinite space’ as the ‘prime symbol’ of Western culture, suggests that maybe Spengler's work had more influence on architects in Europe during the 1920s than is generally recognized.

The work of the American painter Jackson Pollock speaks to us not only through exhibitions of paintings hung on gallery walls, but also through the films and photographs [1] of Hans Namuth which exposed Pollock's phased working process to the public. In the first of two distinct phases Pollock is seen immersed in, and in intimate interaction with, a large horizontal canvas. This records traces of his movement and expressive gestures in heterogeneous media. A second phase is then triggered by a pivotal operation: the horizontal recording and working surface is transposed to a vertical viewing plane. Leo Steinberg recounts that Pollock: ‘would tack the canvas on to a wall – to get acquainted with it, he used to say; to see where it wanted to go. He lived with the painting in its uprighted state, as with a world confronting his human posture’.

‘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.

The work of Amsterdam architects Felix Claus and Kees Kaan is moving away from formulae associated with modern architecture. This paper studies their attempt to find meaning which is at once more abstract and more direct, and notes that a guiding light in their search is a fundamental concern with the physical realities and compromises of the building process.

This paper is intended as a contribution to current debates about the changing conditions of urban space and uneven development. It will analyse the functions of the architectural professions in this process and how their productions prefigure the social and economic arrangement of space. It will examine these notions through analysis of Cardiff Bay and will analyse the changes occurring under late capitalism in the shift to Post-Fordist modes of accumulation. While the paper will examine the local space of Cardiff Bay, the analytical ground will be extended to the ongoing restructuring of space under the new global economies at a macro scale.

Urban restructuring is most evident in the decentred metropolis of the post-modern city, the new cities for consumption. The growth or collapse of multinational capital needs to be seen as framing the occupation of space, its investment and disinvestment, and as an ongoing process, part of a systematic reprogramming of space that can and should be examined at every stage of its operations.

Relocating the economic, political and social into considerations of space means that the paper will also incorporate historical analysis of modes of production and social formations. To consider space as ideological means that transfigured space must also be considered. The paper will therefore raise ideas that are directed towards the transformation of social and political space, and will examine that which identifies Lefebvre's distinction between appropriated and dominated space.

As a discipline, architects pride themselves on the precision and exactitude of their spatial endeavors – no minutiae is too small, no details too inconsequential. However, when exactitude becomes the representational aspiration of architecture, when the images architects produce ‘almost exactly’ deliver the reality they hope to soon conjure, a tautology ensues. This article explores the exigencies of the ⅞ scale – a scale that is almost exactly but not quite the same as reality. It is the remaining ⅛ that eschews representational tautology, that produces the effect of exactness, and that populates architecture's historical and spatial imaginaries. Through the lens of one highly symbolic and historically configured room, the Oval Office, this article attempts to map the hazards and pitfalls of realism as a disciplinary aspiration, while simultaneously embracing the figurative realm of the ⅛ and the promise of its imaginative potential.

‘Conventions of a competition system: jury reports and competition briefs published in Wettbewerbe Aktuell’ is part of a broader enquiry into the relationship between architectural competitions in Germany in the 1970's, 1980's and 1990's and the dissemination of competition results in the form of drawings, model photographs, abbreviated contents of competition briefs and jury reports, in the journal Wettbewerbe Aktuell. The paper briefly introduces the German competition system and its regulations relevant at the time, before charting Wettbewerbe Aktuell's beginnings and publishing format. A close reading of primary school and museum competitions published in the journal then provides the platform for an analysis of the content and format of the briefs and jury reports published with the prize-winning schemes. The objective of the paper is to identify principles, similarities and regularities and their possible effects on competition architecture, in the texts – briefs and jury reports – which describe and analyse architectural competitions in Wettbewerbe Aktuell.

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.

‘I have long been dreaming a dream: that I am a drop of dew on the leaf of a nameless plant deep in the valley of some far-off mountain range. The dewdrop rolls down into a little brook and mingles with its waters; the brook flows into a river which in turn discharges into the sea, and the waves of the sea in their turn lave the coasts of all the countries of the earth. Thus I picture to myself the cultural interchange of all peoples, and it has been my wish to take part, even if only as one little drop, in this important work.’

(Tetsuro Yoshida, 1955)

This paper sets out to introduce the notion of self-organisation in spatial, social and political terms, as a form of spatial agency in response to issues of subjectivity and the politics of urban space. Self-organisation – a complex notion, with multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings and implications – has gained increased relevance in contemporary political and urban discourses. In this sense, self-organisation can be understood as ‘a collective process of taking on political functions and addressing tasks that have been excluded from the field of real politics or pushed out of public space’. This reading is representative of the view taken here, particularly in its (perhaps unintentional) conflation of the political and the spatial. Indeed, the political functions that it speaks of are also, for this paper, spatial functions; and the field of politics, is also the field of architecture and urban planning.

Austerity measures have been discussed widely since sweeping cuts have been made to local government budgets following the global financial crisis of 2007-08. More than a decade later, the impact of these measures on everyday lives of communities is still growing. We use the context of austerity to discuss our research in partnership with Community Place Initiatives in the city of Sheffield, UK, and to examine the approaches they use to attempt to overcome the shortcomings and challenges of precarity.

This article focuses on revealing the impacts that budget cuts have had and are still having, and speculates upon what these findings mean for the role that schools of architecture can play outside the academy. We draw on research conducted by Urban Education Live Sheffield - a team of researchers and educators from the School of Architecture, University of Sheffield in the UK, and the Department of Architecture, Technische Universität Braunschweig in Germany. The team is part of a broader international project, Urban Education Live (UEL), a multidisciplinary research project with partners from across Europe funded by the ERA-NET Cofund Smart Urban Futures (ENSUF) programme, established by the Joint Programming Initiative Urban Europe.

Through a multi-modal ethnographic and design-led approach combining interviews, case studies, and ‘live’ pedagogy, we examine how Community Place Initiatives in Sheffield deal with a context that has fundamentally changed the ways in which they operate in, or in relation to, their place over the past decade. We explore how collaborations between these local partners and architectural researchers and students can be mutually beneficial within this context, in order to speculate upon how such collaborations can be more effective in their contribution to local place-based urban capacity building and future resilience.

This article investigates architecture's ‘expanded field’ – its turn towards culture during the 1980s when the profession expanded its interest to the softer practices of architectural culture. It looks in particular at the emerging enterprises of exhibitions, competitions and awards, publications, and symposia and lectures in the ‘long 1980s’, taken as the Academy years of AD magazine from 1977 – 1992.

This period of AD is synonymous with architectural Post-Modernism, as Academy published much of Charles Jencks’ work on Post-Modernism, including six of the seven ever-larger editions of The Language of Post-Modern Architecture.

However, by analysing the content and context of AD magazine and the wider context of architectural institutions during these years, this article argues that the Post-Modernisation of architecture should be understood not only as a mere style, but equally as the emphasis on a growing architectural culture, discourse, and the ‘ideal’, and the retreat from building and the ‘real’. In other words, this period witnessed the establishment of architectural culture as a new type of practice, and furthermore, AD was instrumental in this cultural turn.

In the post-Second World War period, Italian architects opened up a debate on the role of history and time in architectural discourse that resulted in multiple interpretations of historical time in their work. Vittorio Gregotti, one of the main protagonists of the discussion, offered an interpretation of time based on an assemblage of intellectual tendencies, from phenomenology to structuralism and the history of the longue durée. This paper traces ideas that Gregotti developed in his less known and as-yet un-translated texts such as Il territiorio dell’architettura from 1966 as well as in his project for the University of Calabria from 1972. In these, Gregotti makes an original contribution to the problem of history in relationship to urban and natural environments.

For Hugo Häring, the role of geometry was one of the central issues in architecture. For him, geometric ordering systems were a deadening force. He rejected Le Corbusier's view that ‘geometry is the daughter of the universe’ and doubted the aesthetic efficacy of proportional systems. He believed that there was no absolute: geometry had different meanings at different times and places and was often present for purely technical reasons. This essay on proportion was written shortly after the Nazis came to power and Häring lost all his work. It was then that he turned to writing, both as a means of legitimating his Modernism as not un-German and, as in the case of this essay, of setting out his developing theories. Peter Blundell Jones' introduction gives the background to this, the first translation of this important work to be published in English.