Architecture in South Africa is at a crossroads. After years of repression and isolation during which contemporary architecture lost its way, there is now a desperate need for architects to respond to the social and cultural challenges of a society riven by massive material contrasts. Within architecture schools, a student body more representative of society than hitherto is engaged in projects which reflect the very diverse needs of the community. Central to the effectiveness of such teaching programmes is the presence of teachers fully engaged in practice, creating a responsible architecture for a renewed nation.

Leslie Martin’s ill-fated plan for a cohesive Government Centre assumes new relevance as growing traffic and the declining role of Parliament highlight Whitehall’s continuing problems.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In 1983, the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture mounted an exhibition of Zaha Hadid's work titled Planetary Architecture II. An image from this event shows Hadid as she points to one of the drawings on the wall surrounded by a group of listeners. The interior is saturated with drawings. As they unfold before the viewer, the drawings blur the boundaries between walls, floors and ceiling. An interior space wrapped in drawing, orchestrated by the exhibitor, the image of this show is nevertheless also an expression of the pedagogical ideas of Alvin Boyarsky, the chairman of the AA school between 1971 and 1990.

The schism between our admiration of the artefacts of the great architectural practices of the twentieth century, and our lack of knowledge as to how those achievements were manifest, is one of the most enduring characteristics of modern architecture. Modern architectural practice and its sustaining historiography has typically focused on the image of the designed object at the expense of the skills and conditions that shaped it; a focus on reputation rather than comprehension. Indeed those constituting contingencies of design are more often seen as obstructing the architectural vision and true reality of experience; hence the fixation on a singular (and possibly post-rationalised) first ‘spark’ of conception and the photogenic qualities of the realised, and usually uninhabited, object. Dalibor Veseley is right to state that ‘instrumentality (techne) must always be subordinated to symbolic representation (poiesis), because techne refers only to a small segment of reality, while poiesis refers to reality as a whole'. Nevertheless, in the current climate the statement is likely to be understood as further legitimising the continuing neglect of what architects actually do.

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.

In this article, we argue that in order to properly assess the potentials, challenges, and implications of the digital transformation in architecture and construction, we need to better understand the political-economic dynamics behind it and examine it in light of the current reorganisation of global capitalism. The focus of this article is therefore on the larger political-economic and techno-economic conditions that are shaping the implementation of digital technologies in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) sector. Based on document analysis on the digital turn in architecture and construction, along with interviews with AEC professionals, we argue that the logic of platform capitalism is beginning to transform the industry, with Building Information Modelling (BIM) acting as an obligatory passage point and government policies as gate-openers. The article, first, discusses concepts of platform and platform capitalism and indicates how these apply to recent reconfigurations of actor and power relations in the field. Second, it reviews some of the developments in digital architecture from 2D drawings to BIM and beyond. Third, it examines the role of government policies as driving forces in the digital transformation. Forth, it takes a closer look at the case of software producer Autodesk and their BIM product Revit, which illustrates how the logic of platform capitalism has gained traction in architecture and construction. Finally, it concludes that some expectations can be derived from these observations: In the realm of design software, we can expect a further concentration of economic power and a near-monopolistic structure of the market. Moreover, we can expect a shift of focus and investment from architectural design to socio-digital modes of construction and urban planning that benefit primarily real estate owners, investors, developers, and construction companies. Furthermore, we can expect large construction firms to secure themselves a comfortable starting position as early adopters, while SMEs are facing bigger challenges to benefit from the digital transformation. Lastly, we can expect a further encroachment of tech giants and domain outsiders such as Alphabet into architecture and construction, turning buildings and cities into machines for data extraction.

‘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.