A simple and now standardised method of project description linking architectural ideas to technical requirements enables sub-contractors to develop their proposals around their own proprietary technologies.

Frank O. Gehry and Associates' (FOG/A) sculptural approach to building form is widely known. Their geometrically complex designs and frequently unorthodox use of materials, as in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao [1], the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Experience Music Center in Seattle, and the Neue Zollhof office complex in Düsseldorf seem to have redefined the idea of what is possible in architecture.

An unorthodox and influential critique of the modern city was published in 1908 by August Endell, an autodidact in the field of architecture. Influenced by empathy theory, Impressionist ideas, contemporary sociology, and the literary and artistic circles of the time, Endell's small book Die Schönheit der Großen Stadt (The Beauty of the Metropolis) read the metropolis through a new way of ‘seeing’ [1,2]. What he saw was surprising for most readers: the city's centre was discovered in marginal sites, and its lasting identity was grasped in its fleeting moments. Although Endell never drew up encompassing schemes for the city, did not participate in the first city-building competitions of the time, and focused primarily on individual building projects, one of his major publications was entirely devoted to the city. The Beauty of the Metropolis takes the reader on a journey through a city that slowly reveals itself as Berlin. Throughout the book, Endell describes urban scenes such as streets, plazas, stations, and the margins of urbanity, such as the city's blank walls and outskirts.

In 2000, the UK Government Department for Education and Skills (DfES) piloted 27 new primary school projects around the country in an initiative called ‘Classrooms of the Future’. Starting with a polemical question: what is ‘a Classroom of the Future’?, it encouraged both a design-led approach and an exploration of where the theory of the classroom design meets teaching practice. David Miliband, the government minister involved, described the challenge as ‘designing inspiring buildings that can adapt to educational and technological change’ (DfES, 2002a). Chris Bissell from the DfES, the initiator of ‘Classrooms of the Future’ summed up his expectations: ‘to deliver the best and most effective education exploiting all the possibilities of the information age, school buildings need to reflect advances in technology. They need to provide a pleasant and comfortable environment for learning and to use architectural and design features to stimulate children's imaginations. And they need to be open to wider use, binding schools to their local communities.’ (DfES, 2002a)

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.

This paper traces the rising and falling significance of twenty-two topics in digital architectural research. These topics, which are divided into seven primary themes, are examined using a longitudinal analysis (1995 to 2017) of research in the CumInCAD database. This database, which indexes more than 12,000 publications spanning the last four decades, is the largest dedicated resource for digital architectural research. The primary themes examined in this paper include research into: documentation and representation; environmental immersion; transformative methods or approaches; industry applications and impacts; pedagogy and interaction; and cross-disciplinary and sub-disciplinary focus. Some of the specific topics examined within these themes include research trends in BIM, virtual reality, parametric design, rapid-prototyping, the design studio and space syntax. In addition to these primary themes and topics, the longitudinal analysis is also used to examine a further twenty social, cultural and philosophical topics. Some of these secondary themes include crime, homelessness, politics, poverty, gender, emotions, ethics and violence. From this two-part analysis of the prevalence (or lack thereof) of various themes in the last twenty-one years of digital architectural research, the paper identified several challenges for the future. These challenges include the dangers of self-referentiality and insularity, the possible loss of grounding in industrial or professional needs and applications, and the lack of consideration of a growing number of problems facing the modern world.

Waterside is one of a handful of recent British commercial buildings that will be remembered long after this decade is over. Its greatest significance is as a marker of the changing relationship between organizations and their office accommodation. The story of its development contains many generic lessons to be derived from the use of architecture as a catalyst in change management. It is hoped that a future paper will report on one of the most intractable problems in architectural research–whether office design (and Waterside in particular) can affect productivity.

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.

The rich, long history of scale as the imaginative inhabitation of a drawing provides a critique of the seductive but illusory exactness of ‘full scale’ representations in CAD.

The terms ‘age of consent’, ‘age of licence’ and ‘age of majority’ – often used interchangeably – give young adults legal and moral permission to drink, drive, vote, smoke, have sex and marry (among other rights). Depending on context, the threshold from being a minor to attaining majority – adulthood – is marked by a ritual or a ceremony, giving the threshold cul-tural as well as legal significance. But thresholds, as we already know, are places of action, movement, change … rarely comfortable or easy, and seldom precise. Drawing on the three years since the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg (GSA) was established in 2016, this essay traces the school's own ‘coming-of-age’ in a time of violent protest and popular uprising against an out-of-date and stubbornly Eurocentric curriculum. Whilst the issues facing young South African students – both black and white – have particular resonance inside South Africa, many of the initiatives that the school has pioneered under the banner of ‘Transformative Pedagogies’ hold meaning for the rest of the African continent. Using a mixture of conventional texts, videos, projects and transcripts, A Minor Majority details the GSA's attempts to seize both the site-specific ‘winds of change’ in South Africa and take advantage of global shifts in research culture and methodology to arrive at new insights and possibilities.

A significant development in urban history was the emergence of the Garden City movement at the end of the nineteenth century, inspired by the writings and actions of Ebenezer Howard. The movement would generate a broad range of urban typologies and various visionary models of the city during the twentieth century. The Garden City was a direct response to what were perceived to be the evils of large industrial cities and attempted to reunite country and town, particularly through the residential garden and the act of gardening. Using Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's assemblage theory I examine gardens and gardening, and the agencies inherent to these. By evoking the early history of the first Garden City at Letchworth, we can ask what role can gardens and gardeners play in addressing contemporary urban issues? [1].

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.

Despite drawing being the first-hand work of the architect, there has not been enough discussion about where architectural drawings and models belong, and the ways in which they move and develop between sites of production, storage, and revision. It is often assumed that the mobility of drawings in the Renaissance period implied the possibility of action at a distance, allowing the architect to be absent from the fabrication site. Earlier Medieval practices of incised stone drawings and plaster drawings traced on floors determined the immobility of drawings, which made them integral parts of the building and assured the presence of the architect. However, an alternate reading is possible, which is that immovable drawings and the presence of models freed the architect, because the tools that guide construction were, in fact, in situ.

In Book 3 of his Four Books on Architecture (1579), Palladio gives alternative designs for a wooden trussed bridge to span a river 100ft wide. The designs are ingenious, and analysis of Palladio's proposals shows that the bridges would have been effective. Some of the details, however, seem to be at variance with the expected structural action of the bridges, and there remain problems (not fully answered here) of practical construction.

This paper sets Alberti's rules of architectural proportioning in the context of Renaissance mathematical practice. While Alberti makes didactic use of the well developed theories of harmony from music, it is shown that his architectural usage is not analogous to musical systema, even though the arithmetical foundations are shared. The common base for fifteenth-century musical theory and Alberti's architectural recommendations is Pythagorean arithmetic, derived largely from Nicomachus. Alberti also develops a geometrical approach involving magnitudes derived from the cube. Neither the diagonal of a face, nor the diameter of the sphere which circumscribes the cube are commensurable with its side. Alberti makes use of rational estimates for the square roots of two and three, and these ratios are evident in his work. Some examples are indicated for the purpose of linking theory to practice, but it is not the intention of this paper to analyse specific buildings in depth. The purpose of the paper is to suggest a potent theoretical frame within which future empirical investigations might flourish.

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.

On 15 August 1965, The Beatles performed before more than 55,600 fans at Shea Stadium, New York, USA. In what was by far the biggest event to date of its type, that evening a dramatic revelation of the commercial possibilities of popular music took place, and changed the nature of the music business for ever. Simultaneously, despite using more powerful amplification than had been used before, the virtually non-existent connection between the musicians and their audience revealed the enormous technical and architectural challenges of large-scale concerts. Though this concert took place in a permanent building structure, the equipment it was hoped would temporarily alter its use for performance purposes was portable. That it was clearly inadequate for this task reinforced the need for new mobile facilities that would do the job better [1, 2].

Globalization, while extensively theorized and empirically studied by economic geographers, has yet to be seriously investigated in architecture. There are multiple forms of architectural practice in the United States and some significant changes are under way. In addition the local politics of urban architecture discloses a counterweight to balance globalism's homogenizing tendencies. This paper proposes strategies for a more experimental architecture that partakes of the global-local dialectic.

Architecture students tell stories about their work. These stories are meant to convey information regarding their convictions about design, the motivating concept for a specific design, and the intended meaning of the design. Such stories are calculated to have something to do with the work presented. Often, though, what is said is put forward and accepted as valid simply because it is said. Scrutiny of the relationship between such accounts and the visual or physical evidence frequently reveals a wide gap between intention and result. Credulity of such incongruity encourages a loose way of thinking that fosters a separation of thought (theory) from doing (practice). Concurrently, architecture students at the earliest stages of their education seem to require skill development above all else. But overemphasis on technique undervalues developing conceptual depth. If students are not introduced to design as an ill-defined problem, akin to formulating effective and persuasive arguments, their propensity is to produce work that tends to be ineffectively developed or represented while lacking theoretical sophistication.

In the case of conventional public housing, urban planners and policymakers design the layout of a housing project in a specific location and then estimate how many households can afford a home. This housing policy has been pursued as a legitimate solution for housing low- and middle-income households where the houses are individually financed by bank loans or mortgages raised by the occupants. John Turner criticised conventional housing solutions by affirming that ‘developing governments take the perspective of the elite and act as if the process of low-income houses were the same as in high-income countries and the same as for the small upper-middle class of their own countries’.1 Bruce Ferguson and Jesus Navarrete extend this argument with their critique of distributing finished houses to low-income populations and then requiring long-term payments, which are harmful to the beneficiaries. They note that ‘governments think of housing as complete units built by developers that households must purchase with a long-term loan rather than as a progressive process’.2

The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) to which every research-active UK university department has to submit every five years has fundamental resourcing implications for teaching and research – and thus, in the case of architecture, for the profession itself. Within the RAE, Architecture has always sat uneasily in a Built Environment ‘unit of assessment’ which appears to be dominated by construction and surveying – an unrepresentative state of affairs which can no longer be ignored. Leaders and letters in recent issues of arq (5/4, 6/1 and 2) have revealed the deep unease with which the results of the latest Exercise have been received. Now that full details of all RAE submissions have been published on the Web (www.hero.ac.uk/rae/ under ‘Submissions’), a fully informed analysis is at last possible. This article has been written in the light of this latest information.