This essay examines Kenzō Tange's visionary urban scheme, A Plan for Tokyo, 1960: Toward a Structural Reorganization (1961), in terms of its mobility rather than its much-discussed monumentality. The existing studies of this plan was too im-mersed in its unprecedented megalomaniac scale to pay sufficient attention to the fact that it was a complex design for urban mobility. While the issues of scale and speed might seem to be separate, in fact they are inextricably interconnected since the increasing speed and mobility brought about by new technology would make the existing human scale ob-solete and required the new scale of the machine. In this essay, I would like to revisit Tange's plan for Tokyo Bay as a highly nuanced plan for urban mobility. First, this essay defines A Plan for Tokyo, 1960 as a model city for an automobile society against the backdrop of Japan's rapid motorisation. Tange's unrealised urban scheme was driven by the architect's firm belief in mobility as a fundamental factor influencing the development of postwar Japanese economy and his strong ambition to provide a proper urban infrastructure for the efficient circulation of traffic. The essay then traces how Tange's interest in the visible network of transportation evolved into his preoccupation with the invisible networks of information flow by focusing on his Tokaido Megalopolis (1964), a colossal city that was organically connected by the linkup of physi-cal, social, and information networks. Although Tange's ambitious design was left only on paper and had little impact on the actual development of Tokyo, its historical im-plications lie in its radical configuration of a new concept of architecture and city not as hardware but as software in preparation for the nascent information society.

In this paper we establish a dialogue with Living with Buildings to contextualise NOTBAD (Niches for Organic Territories in Bio-Augmented Design), a multidisciplinary research project at the intersection of architecture and microbiology, sited within a wider historical discourse connecting architecture and health. Living with Buildings (2018) was organised by the Wellcome Trust to trace the changing landscape of health and architecture, setting out to show how connections between the ways we feel and the places in which we spend our lives have historically evolved as our ideas about health and disease have changed. Taking our cue from the pieces at the exhibition, we discuss how the eighteenth century saw the emergence of an imaginary of cleanliness linked to miasma theory, locating bad smells and odours as the origin of disease and resulting in the adoption of rituals of purification in buildings. Treatments of plastering, coating and whitewashing popularised in the nineteenth century are testament to a shift from olfactory to visual codes of hygiene and to the ‘antibiotic turn’ in architecture.

We extend the historical analysis to suggest that architecture finds itself at a crossroads. Although there is a growing understanding of how much architecture influences our wellbeing, architectural thought still clings to the antibiotic turn. Following the tradition of exchange between architecture and medicine, we propose the notion of Probiotic Architecture as a way of framing the shifting understanding of health in architectural design, suggesting that the microorganisms that colonise humans (the human microbiome) and our built environment (the built environment microbiome) have the potential to influence our health and the resilience of our buildings. Against the backdrop of the design research project Niches for Organic Territories in Bio-Augmented Design (NOTBAD), we suggest the need to reverse notions that all microbes are bad, to and propose instead materials and prototypes that encourage benign microbial growth.

Wang Shu (b. 1963) is a locally trained Chinese architect who has received widespread media coverage in the last decade, especially after receiving the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2012, often considered the Nobel Prize of architecture. Numerous articles and interviews have been published concerning Wang Shu and his design practice, however, there is a lack of analysis of his work from what might be called the perspective of his ecological phenomenology. Wang acknowledges his interest in phenomenological thinking and expresses an ongoing concern about human relationships with place and nature, the continuity of craftsmanship in the face of technological development, as well as the materiality and tactility of bodily perception. Before analysing Wang's work, relevant ideas of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) and their influence on architectural discourse are firstly examined. Both of them were seminal philosophers who offered inspiring insights to ecological discourse.

In this paper the authors propose a conceptual model and a bio-computational design method to articulate the world's Urbansphere, suggesting new terms for its co-evolution with the Biosphere.

The proposed model responds to principles of biological self-organisation, and operates by embedding a numerical/computational engine, a living Physarum polycephalum, onto a spatial/morphogenetic substratum, a Satellite driven informational territory. This integration is embodied in the Physarum Machine, a bio-digital design apparatus conceived by the authors and further developed within the Urban Morphogenesis Lab at the UCL in London.

The use of specifically designed apparatus of material computation to demonstrate and solve problems of urban morphogenesis is not new and the authors refer to the work of German Architect Frei Otto and his theory for the occupation and connection of territories.

This research leads to a notion of bio-city of the future where manmade infrastructures and non-human biological systems will constitute parts of a single biotechnological whole. To this respect it can be read as a manifesto for the extension of biotechnology to the scale of the Biosphere (biosphere geo-engineering) by expanding the scope and material articulation of global informational and energetic infrastructures (the internet of things and the internet of energy).

In the tradition of design based research, the paper also suggests an application of the proposed model to a specific case study demonstrating its efficacy in the re-conceptualization of the post-industrial and ecologically depleted landscapes of eastern Arizona. In conclusion the experiment describes the potential of augmenting materiality through sensors and microprocessors so that it would become possible to harvest the computational power latent in micro-organisms like the slime mould.

The dream outlined here is for an era where descriptive computation will be superseded by our capability to simulate and compute through the world that surrounds us.

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.

Since the Renaissance, descriptive geometry has become a generative architectural idea and a systematic representation of production. CAD’s precision is the apotheosis of this trajectory.

In the early twentieth century, Modernists problematised ornament in their refashioning of architecture for the industrial age. Today, architects are formulating different responses to image and its (re)production in the information age. In both discourses of ornament and image, surfaces are often the perpetrators: visual boundaries that facilitate false appearances, imprisoning humanity in a shadowy cave of illusion. The negativity and shallowness associated with superficiality is also closely related to the separation of images from the real, where the former is seen to be a deficient representation of the latter. Such views follow a familiar metaphysical model characterised by the opposition between inside and outside and the opaque boundary that acts as a barrier. This model determines the traditional philosophical approach, which follows a distinct hierarchical order and a perpendicular movement of thought that seeks to penetrate appearances to get to the essence of things.

One might be forgiven for thinking that the concept of ‘vernacular’ architecture is straightforward. First, it suggests a contemporary approach to building that uses local materials and crafts, as well as the indigenous architecture of tribal peoples, such as piledwellings over tropical waters, mud houses in the desert, or animal-hide teepees on the savannah. These buildings can be distinguished easily from other types of buildings that use industrialised construction techniques and materials, such as concrete, sheet glass, plastics and steel. Second, it might suggest an alternative and more wholesome set of values towards life, the environment and aesthetics, than that represented by the out-of-town retail park or the inner-city office tower. Why bother with the word ‘vernacular’, though, let alone ‘indigenous’ or the more problematic ‘primitive’, when ‘traditional’ works well enough? Nothing could be simpler.

Decorum refers to the suitability of a building's design and was a commonplace principle of architectural theory from the Renaissance to the beginnings of modernism. It was relevant to ornament, shaping the way a building articulated its status within civic and social order. This essay examines decorum as part of the history of ideas, with phases of growth, codification, and decline. Its fading was not unresisted, being part of a critical debate that emerged in the wake of the Industrial Revolution – namely, the role architecture might play in creating a cohesive environment for the modern world.

Microbiome-Inspired Green Infrastructure (MIGI) was recently proposed as an integrative system to promote healthy urban ecosystems through multidisciplinary design. Specifically, MIGI is defined as nature-centric infrastructure restored, designed, and managed to enhance health-promoting interactions between humans and environmental microbiomes while sustaining microbially mediated ecosystem functionality and resilience. MIGI also aims to stimulate a research agenda that focuses on considerations for the importance of urban environmental microbiomes.

In this article, we provide details of what MIGI entails from a bioscience and biodesign perspective, highlighting the potential dual benefits for human and ecosystem health. We present ‘what is known’ about the relationship between urban microbiomes, green infrastructure, and environmental factors that may affect urban ecosystem health - taken here to mean ecosystem functionality and resilience, as well as human health. We discuss how to start operationalising the MIGI concept based on current available knowledge and present a horizon-scan of emerging and future considerations in research and practice.

We conclude by highlighting challenges to implementing MIGI and propose a series of workshops to discuss multi-stakeholder needs and opportunities. This research will enable urban landscape managers to incorporate initial considerations for the microbiome in their development projects to promote human and ecosystem health. However, overcoming the challenges to operationalising MIGI will be essential to furthering its practical development. Although the research is in its infancy, there is considerable potential for MIGI to help deliver sustainable urban development driven by considerations for reciprocal relations between humans and the foundations of our ecosystems – the microorganisms.

It is a commonplace to describe twentieth-century Modernist architecture as utopian, but doing so arguably has less to do with putative social agendas than with explaining the failure of such work to deliver on extravagant promises. By interrogating utopian declarations for twentieth-century architecture and visionary urban representations, the aim of this article is to sharpen the loose pairing of Modernist architecture and Utopia. Consideration is also given to how undue emphasis on representation supports post-rationalisations of failure as the inevitable teleology of Utopia, which serves only to empty architecture of its ethical function. To conclude, some preliminary thoughts on the prospects of a more convincingly utopian modern architecture are advanced.

With the exciting period of construction following German reunification now over, German post-war reconstruction has finally come to an end. For a brief period, reunification enlivened the building market with great visions, but now the demand for architecture and employment in the construction industry has sunk dramatically.

Our paper addresses how building design elucidates the connection between two definitions of politics: ‘Big Politics’ and micropolitics. We will seek to examine how these two versions of politics are imbricated; how, in other words, codified ideologies and political institutions circulate within the everyday practices by which new actors and sites of contestation enter the social collective. The conceptual space for this argument has already been mapped out by various authors, including Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Bruno Latour and Michel Foucault. These authors have variously proposed how powerful totalities always travel along small, fragile conduits. Or, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, ‘the boss's office is as much at the end of the hall as on top of the tower’.

This paper – like those following it in this issue of arq – focuses on the shifting notion of ‘flow’ and the significance of that notion for the practice, critique and theorisation of architecture.

The architects of the Modern Movement in the late 1920s found new sources of form through the pursuit of technical and functional issues in design. They sought shaping agents in functional organization, in the admission of light, in efficiency of structure and construction, and many other physical issues of this kind. At the same time, they felt the need to escape from traditional rules of architectural composition involving Classical orders of columns, symmetry and axes. They were ready to discover a new and surprising identity for buildings precisely to defy the historicist conventions that until then dominated architecture as a cultural tradition. Acoustics is an area in which many interesting claims were made, and some famous Modernist designs were supposedly formed, or at very least inspired, by acoustic forces. These historical instances beg the question whether acoustics is really a legitimate and helpful formal determinant of buildings. Perhaps instead, the acoustic arguments put forward by architects to justify their formal choices were just convenient alibis. This is a far more complex issue than at first it seems.

Framing the question of a research and innovation (R&I) strategy for the UK construction industry requires careful consideration of several key issues: pluralism, vision and recognition of the significance of product (place and its constituent components) as well as process. Much of the groundwork for specific research topics has been undertaken and identified elsewhere (Macmillan, 2002), so this paper does not reinvent the wheel or list all the relevant research issues. Any discussion informing an R&I strategy should provide continuity and not jettison previous work in order to provide continuity. Too much structural change in past funding mechanisms has led to uncertainty for researchers and has adversely affected medium- and long-term projects.

Interactive rendering combines the geometrical precision of classical computer graphics with the representational freedom of a paint program. It is more sympathetic to the ways in which designers use images, and overcomes many of the frustrations experienced in rendering from CAD models. The scene is generated in a standard viewing application, but saved as a specially enhanced raster image. The extra information allows the interactive renderer to apply brushed-on rendering effects which are sensitive to the perspective of the image. Effects can be applied locally or overall, and may be overlaid, blended and erased to create complex combinations. A huge range of treatments is obtainable, both photorealistic and not.

The definition of research quality is directly linked to public funding access in countries like the United Kingdom, Australia and the Netherlands. Architecture, as a design discipline, faces the problem that it has limited access to these resources. It experiences a so-called evaluation gap. Its research performance does not easily fit the conventional moulds commonly used to assess quality. Assessments are increasingly based on the analysis of indexed journals, while indexes (such as the ISI) have, so far, mostly neglected the arts and humanities to which architecture may be assumed to belong. Schools of architecture have to face this matter head-on if they want to survive in times of austerity, and they need to do so sooner rather than later. They have to decide whether they want to continue to push for the acceptance of discipline-specific performance indicators or whether they would rather adapt to the standards and dissemination practices that characterise more established fields of scientific research. The direction they choose will inevitably shape future research in architecture.

‘Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road. Healthy, free, the world before me, the long brown path before leading wherever I choose.’

(Walt Whitman)