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.

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.

Kenneth Frampton, architectural critic and Columbia University professor, responds to the criticism that has been levelled at his notion of the ‘tectonic’ in this interview with Paulo Martins Barata. Frampton views the tectonic as a way of resisting both the ‘speculator’ economy of mass-produced construction and the ‘atectonic’ architecture of Post-Modernism and Post-Structuralism. At the same time, he acknowledges the quixotic nature of an idea that is ‘a kind of rearguard response to the commodification of architecture’. The interview is set in context by Martins Barata.

We live in ecologies in which the elements connect with one another. If we see elements in isolation then we can believe that we are doing well by proliferating or perfecting an element, but for the ecology to do well everything must be held in balance. We are part of the environment of others, just as they are part of ours. Buildings mediate our relations with one another and with the world. Even some buildings that seem visually isolated, such as the Farnsworth House, are connected to mains services and need the rest of a civilization to be in place if they are to be conceived and maintained. If we think of ourselves as participating in actor-networks, rather than as autonomous individuals with free will to act on our desires, then it becomes possible to articulate ways in which we are enmeshed in our milieu. Our connections in the world are an important part of who we are. The elements of our bodies work together to produce consciousness, but also much else besides. The conscious part of us can articulate how it feels, and what it thinks, so we give it a disproportionate level of attention. In turn, at a larger scale, we participate in entities that act as if they have a will of their own, but they do not necessarily articulate it, but we help them along without necessarily being aware of it. Buildings are involved in establishing functional connections and separations in networks, both domestically, in providing protection and shelter, and economically, in connecting us into the banking and property systems that do much to establish the pattern of our lives. The unit of survival is organism + habitat, and our habitats do not have easily defined local limits.

In the summer of 2009, while on vacation in Italy, I lay on a deck chair on a beach under the scorching sun reading Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. I had taken Mike Davis's book as holiday reading after becoming interested in attitudes to sustainability as represented in films through supervising the unpublished dissertation ‘The Science and Fiction of Sustainable Living’. The dissertation analysed approaches to the green movement of the 1970s versus those held today. It did this through the study of ecological science fiction movies made during the two periods. As someone grounded in humanities research, using film studies research methods rather than conventional building science methods seemed to me an engaging, original approach to sustainability. The dissertation compared the 1972 American environmental science fiction film Silent Running to the 2007 British science fiction film Sunshine. During this supervision, the student gave me a copy of the films. Because Silent Running resonated with me, I took it on that same Italian holiday and watched it again. I recall thinking that Silent Running offered a departure point for an alternative kind of sustainable design studio. Then and there, I selected a film clip that I screened – in the background and without volume – at studio presentations to students held in September 2009.

‘The Glimmer of Other Worlds’ was first written for the Alternate Currents conference at the University of Sheffield in Autumn 2007. It was prompted by my experiences as a teacher attempting to explain to students what the idea of an alternative to capitalist architectural and building production might mean.

Luis Barragán (Guadalajara, Mexico, 1902-1988) and José Antonio Coderch (Barcelona, Spain, 1913-1984), despite having different origins, shared a common ground. Their architecture – based on Mediterranean tradition – was adapted to similar mild climate conditions, where shadowed and protected open spaces played a role as transitional spaces between indoors and outdoors. Those spaces were not treated as traditional elements incorporated within the buildings’ repertories, but were spatial proposals with a goal – rooted in their cultural backgrounds – of enriching the relationship between both realms. In this essay, common features arise when comparing two paradigmatic houses built by Barragán (Casa Prieto López, Mexico City, Mexico, 1950) and Coderch (Casa Ugalde, Caldes d’Estrach, Spain, 1951), within subjects such as the role of tradition, the relationship to the place, or the explanation of their architecture as a plastic experience.

Private and public are clearly separated in both architects’ works, generally by a hermetic and neutral facade, behind which indoors and outdoors are interwoven, in such a way that open spaces take part of the interior of their houses and views towards the landscape or the sky break up the limits. Some of the spaces are settled in a kind of ambiguous category: there will be enclosed rooms with no ceiling, or patios and porches with windows in them.

The common Mediterranean heritage appears within plane and plastered abstract walls, where plasticity rises from roughness, colour, light and shadow. The nuances appear in the personal interpretation of the experience of space, as well as in answer to the local conditions, and it is then that a different position in relation to nature emerges; whereas the Mediterranean coast is naturally soft and mild, the Mexican vegetation and geological features introduce a brave contrast between the open and the built.

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.

In an attempt to make architectural education more relevant to professional architectural practice and as a response to increasing tuition fees, major changes to university curricula in the UK are afoot. This brings unprecedented opportunities to re-consider what and how universities teach - and to make architectural education more relevant to real-world challenges.

Last year, undergraduate design unit UG3 at the Bartlett School of Architecture completed an innovative project. The unit teamed-up with educational charity Global Generation to design and build a series of small buildings for a real client on a real site in King’s Cross. The article ‘Made in Architecture: Education as collaborative practice’ evaluates the emerging tradition of the live project as a vehicle for teaching architecture students about teamwork, collaboration and engagement. These skills - although increasingly significant to architectural practice - have until now been largely side-lined by university curricula.

Only if educators and practitioners together embrace new opportunities for architects to engage and empower communities can the profession reverse increasing marginalisation and re-define it’s remit in the face of new social and environmental challenges.

The utilization of solar energy involves an interplay between heating demand and the use of building materials. It is therefore important to use environmental analysis methodologies which take into account the effects of building materials. Two typical construction types, lightweight timber-based and heavyweight concrete-based, are therefore compared using specific housing forms. These forms represent differing passive solar strategies that can be seen in contemporary Danish housing. The results highlight the diversity of effective environmental design strategies available to architects.

This paper is intended as a contribution to the discussion of the declared topic of this journal, architectural research. It stems partly from the author's book From Idea to Building and is mainly an analysis of the similarity between architectural design and scientific research based on Karl Popper's hypothetico-deductive theory, and in particular the sequence from problem recognition through tentative solution and error elimination to an explanation which may become the problem in the next sequence of research.

Squeezed into the narrow confines of a parasitic Mumbai dwelling; gathered around a ceramic tea-set in an elevated tea-house; trapped in the transparent void of a tree; and nestled in a vertical tower of fur, books and timber the 1:1 – Architects Build Small Spaces exhibition offered a tactile and intimate encounter with the intense experiences and emotions evoked by a series of small architectural spaces. Installed throughout the Victoria and Albert Museum, the exhibition ran from 15 June – 30 August 2010.

Three small mews houses in a Dublin suburb are reviewed here in terms of their typological ambitions, formal preoccupations and vision of domesticity. Their nature and form is compared with an earlier project by Cleary and Hall in order to extrapolate a more general picture of the changing criteria and concerns guiding Dublin's architectural development. The project demonstrates how a repeating order can accommodate difference. The feeling of exposure in their unusually open upper floor living areas is tempered by the exhilarating sense of contact with the city.

The study of metaphor provides valuable insights into the workings of technology and how technology brings about change. This paper considers some current influential thinking about metaphor and how this impinges on understandings of technology and design.

Design can be viewed as a complex and on-going social accomplishment, a product of everyday trajectories between a milieu of human and material registers. Seen in this way the design practice serves as an arena for these quotidian activities. We seek to construct a more dynamic picture of architecture by connecting process and product, supplementing a project narrative with one of practice, highlighting the context in which the outcome was created. We address the research question: how does practice culture become intertwined within the designed product?

A research model emerged from the review of the literature and evolved as a loose framework to discuss the practices and projects at hand. The research focused on the particular design consideration of adaptability in an effort to direct and ground the study. The research was conducted in two stages –at first a set of interviews were conducted to gain broader insights into the everyday accounts of the practices and secondly, project case studies were selected to further investigate the topic.

The narratives reveal the culture of each practice to stress a particular meaning in each context: for Make it is about a beautiful object; for ABA a piece of social infrastructure and; for CGL a business asset. Adaptability finds itself subdued, promoted, compromised and sold as part of the design process and the resultant architecture. Our contribution extends the argument that design is entangled within its socio-cultural surroundings and grounds the culture of practice in the designed artefacts - the way in which a practice handles decision-making contingencies, both endogenous and exogenous forces, will together shape a practice disposition towards design (adaptability). Design that is driven by a strong culture that embeds exogenous influences in the approach tends to provide more adaptable solutions as part of a quest to satisfy long-term, societal concerns.

Tschumi’s experimental use of the literary text as part of design briefs for students at the Architectural Association in the late 1970s formed the basis for a preoccupation with what he termed the disjunction between space and the events that happen within it. For Coates, the literary briefs triggered a fixation with what was happening in space – but instead of focusing on its conceptual interaction with events, he moved towards the dramatisation of architecture. Grounded in the architects' shared teaching at the AA, the article discusses the early briefs and projects that shaped the directions they would each take.

In the above cited quote, Kevin Roche, a principal associate at Eero Saarinen’s architectural practice in 1957, recalls an early morning discussion about the design of the Trans World Airlines’ (TWA) Flight Center. Roche’s story about Saarinen reminds us that at the beginning of an architectural project, a solution may come from any variety of sources, not least of all from everyday objects. This was certainly the case for Saarinen, who found the seed for his design of the structural shells of the TWA Flight Center in the rind of a grapefruit. Despite its seeming novelty, Saarinen is not unique in his approach to the generation of architectural form with models; the Greek-French composer, architect and engineer Iannis Xenakis, who while working with Le Corbusier in 1957, used strings and thick wire to design the hyperbolic shell for their Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels Expo. That a model will play a defining role in an architect’s approach to structural design is also demonstrated by the ‘spherical solution’ that Jørn Utzon discovered while stacking models of his Sydney Opera House’s shell roofs. These explorations with the expression of structure emerged at a time when a new generation of designers, including Eduardo Torroja, Pier Luigi Nervi and Felix Candela, had realised a handful of buildings using models to study and test structural form.