At the time of his premature death in 1942, Rex Martienssen, the gifted South African architect who had helped make Johannesburg an outpost of modernism, had just completed a seminal PhD thesis on Greek space, and was documenting the layout of remote African settlements in South Africa's highlands. Martienssen's writings suggest that the link between these disjunct projects was topographical thinking, a form of architectural seeing and thinking that ontologically articulates time, place and culture. His research project was informed by the white colonial national intellectual search for an alternative to the racialised imaginary geography being promoted by white nationalism in the 1930s, a paradoxical modernity that would be progressive and cosmopolitan, yet also respected a timeless order threatened by European modernity. This re-envisioning of the 'place' of Western culture in Africa was encouraged by two seemingly-unrelated engagements with the sub-continent's terrain: archaeology and commercial aviation. Both practices came into their own in Southern Africa during this period, deploying Western technique and rationality in ways that constructed a vision of the subcontinent that unsettled the territorial limits and historical narratives of the post-colony, and inaugurated perceptions of the African landscape as modern and transcultural, yet situated in the Hegelian geographical movement of history. This made it possible to imagine, for the first time, that the topographical organisation of indigenous settlements might yield a spatial logic for new urban areas. A key figure in understanding this multiscalar geo-historical subjectivity was Le Corbusier, who had close ties with Martienssen and what he called le Groupe Transvaal. Le Corbusier's global journeys during the 1930s had made him increasingly interested in the anthropo-geographic traces left by the 'natural order of things' in human environments, and the possibility of a neo-syndicalist world order based on geo-political regions that were latitudinally complementary.

The Mountain Dwellings project, located in the centre of the Ørestad district of southern Copenhagen, was built in 2008 by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). Together with BIG’s other housing projects nearby, namely the VM Houses and the 8 House, the building is a part of the urban development carried out under the ‘Ørestad act’, initiated by the Danish Parliament in the 1990s. This promoted the development of a new contemporary urban quarter of dwelling, studying, and working. With an attempt to reinforce the vibrant urban fabric of the district, various buildings of residential units and public spaces have been built, in addition to the improved green areas and rainwater canals.

This paper presents, through text and the design project ‘The Silt House’, an alternative architecture for flood landscapes.

The investigation sets out the context for current forms of infrastructure and architecture planned in response to the increased threat of flooding in and around the Thames Estuary. In particular, it looks to certain experimental flood defence systems, suggesting, that instead of building bigger and bigger sea walls, we should look to use the landscape as a hybrid landscape infrastructure where salt marshes can act as a storage point for excess water and the flora can dispel energy from flood tides. Within this context, the text and design work seek to address the questions: what formal and spatial logics might be appropriate for architecture if sited in such a hybridised landscape like the tidal marsh; and, how might these logics mirror the particular conditions of this new model of infrastructure?

To help answer this question, the work looks to the architect and poet Raimund Abraham and, in particular, his 10 Houses projects developed between 1970 and 1973 for an alternative architectural model that uses natural processes to create enclosure and define architectural space. The design project seeks to explore how the direct use of such a historical reference can itself be seen as a means to not only develop an architecture that demonstrates a symbiotic relationship between nature and architecture, but also between the social and the political.

Sustainability is the most significant force to change architecture since the breakthrough of modernism a century ago. So far the contributions of architects to this mandate have largely amounted to technological interventions. Yet the urgent call for sustainability demands going beyond merely technological solutions to modify behavioral patterns, cultural habits and even our deeply ingrained ideas about ourselves. The very notion that architecture could modify behavioral patterns, or the sedimentation of habits seems far-fetched in an epistemological framework that has drawn strict lines between outside and inside, subject and object, body and mind — all the dualities that the cognitive and neurosciences have been gradually working to undermine. Our practice as architects has been unconsciously shaped by centuries of formalist thinking that have turned buildings into inanimate objects; a habit of thinking that has weakened our role and contributed to the sense that architecture is a luxury item, one among many consumable commodities — though we can no longer deny that it is the very fabric of our survival and flourishing.

Further, the once healthy plurality of our architectural theory has left us without a coherent philosophical framework with which to confront the climate crisis. For John Dewey, theory and practice were not ontologically separate domains, but two distinct yet inseparable and necessary aspects of engaging in the world. This essay explores how Dewey's pragmatic philosophy could help to build a theoretical framework that would allow us to apply and integrate the findings of the cognitive and neurosciences into our architectural practice and education, so that we might respond not only to the constraints and opportunities of the given context — site, program and energy resources—but also to the limits and affordances of our perceptual systems and the whole of our body and mind.

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 study explores a formative period in the development of Gangnam, an exclusive district south of the Han River that was conceived of and shaped in the context of South Korea's militaristic and capitalist urban culture of the late 1960s. Created in imitation of what was at the time considered to be a highly modern urbanism that had been transplanted not only from the West but also from neighboring countries such as Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore, Gangnam was meant to provide an urban zone that would be secure from the threat of North Korean aggression while simultaneously proclaiming South Korea's ambitions to become a modern nation. This drive to create a new identity for Korea as a capitalist and developed nation, combined with the strong authoritarian nature of the South Korean state, meant that the implementation of modernist architecture and urbanism in Gangnam was primarily made to serve the nation-building and entrepreneurial ambitions of the state. Gangnam thus provides an example of the implementation of modernist structures and planning concepts that were originally envisioned as ways of providing meaningful public space by countering unchecked private speculation (i.e. massive apartment complexes, neighborhood units, superblocks, and automobile-oriented roadways) in the service of materialism at its most flamboyant. This perplexing condition could be said to be the result of what happens when architectural or urban forms are emptied of their publically-oriented ethical impulse, particularly in state-led large-scale urbanisation. While Gangnam can in some respects be considered to be a successful implementation of a modernist cityscape in the sense that it continues to be developed and thrive, it has become the centre of a segregated and unequal urbanity characterized by a highly materialist and extremely competitive culture that is diametrically opposed to the original intentions of those earlier modernist avant-gardes.

Recent advancements in digital technology, have not only deeply transformed the production of film and architecture but brought the two disciplines closer than ever before. The digital has allowed ground-breaking, if not hasty, changes in the way that architecture is not only produced, but also designed and conceived. In contrast, however, to the extensive use of computational design to interrogate the formal, material and structural possibilities of architecture, this article explores how new time-based media and computer generated imagery in film can unlock the story-telling, political and philosophical potential of architecture. I will focus on three projects – Agit-Prop (2014) by Liam Davis, Wates House (2014) by Daniel Cotton and my project Déjà vu (2009) – which combine techniques and tropes from both cinema and design as a means for reflection and commentary in architecture.

Originally coined by the German artist Hans Richter in the 1940s, the term ‘essay film’ describes an intimate, allusive and idiosyncratic genre at the margins between fiction and documentary. Richter poignantly suggests that the essay film makes the invisible world of thoughts and ideas visible on the screen; it produces complex thought-reflections that are not necessarily bound to reality, but can also be contradictory, irrational, and fantastical. Dealing with political and philosophical issues, the essay film is cinema at its most engaged and liberated.

Examining the three projects in comparison to examples of essay films that reflect on architecture or the city, such as Dziga Vertov’s, Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Wim Wender’s, If Buildings Could Talk (2010), and Alain Resnais’s, Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), my aim is to propose a new hybrid genre lying at the boundaries between architectural design, theory and film, what I call: the ‘architectural essay film’.

Felix Candela’s hyperbolic paraboloid reinforced concrete structures - also known as hypars - were not only masterly used in his well-known religious buildings but they were also ingeniously and profusely employed to roof a vast number of industrial buildings during the Mexican industrialisation era. Candela’s inverted hypar shells prototype for industrial buildings became a trademark for a systematic and standardised construction method which crossed the Mexican borders to reach and influence the work of other architects and engineers further afield. In the United Kingdom this is exemplified by the John Lewis Warehouse (JLW) at Stevenage in which Candela worked as co-designer and consultant of the post-War architectural firm Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall (YRM) and the engineers Clarke Nicholls and Marcel.

The JLW represents a unique structure in the repertoire of Candela’s work outside Mexico for two main reasons. Firstly, it stands as Candela’s first European project and secondly it represents a structure in which ‘automatic beauty’ was achieved through economic efficiency and the use of more sophisticated construction methods than those conventionally used in Mexico. Moreover, and beyond its structural and constructional merits the JLW yields a spatial richness which transformed the ephemeral of the working day to forge spaces of mnemonic identification. Built in 1963, the JLW is an epitome of structural art amongst the industrial buildings of Britain's post-Austerity period. Candela’s first European project is analysed not only in terms of its structural and constructional merits but also in relation to its spatial poetics.

There are similarities between the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern (2000) by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, and the Central Nave of Musée d’Orsay (1986) by Pierre Colboc, Renaud Bardon and Jean-Paul Philippon. Both came into being through the conversion of defunct industrial and infrastructural facilities. Their scales are also similar to each other, as the Turbine Hall measures approximately 152 metres long, 22 metres wide and 35 metres high and the Central Nave of Musée d’Orsay, 138 metres long, 40 metres wide and 32 metres high.

Both before and after his forced resignation from the charge of the Sydney Opera House (1956–66)in 1966, Danish Architect Jørn Utzon (1918–2008) has cited Chinese architecture as one of the most important inspirational sources of his unfinished masterpiece. However, the significance of Chinese building culture has largely been overlooked in historical accounts of Utzon's Opera House design. This is despite ample evidences suggesting several direct analogies of Chinese architecture in Utzon's design proposals. The evidence also indicates that one of the key Chinese sources for Utzon comes from the written works of Finland-born and Sweden-based art historian Osvald Sirén 喜龍仁 (1879–1966). Accordingly, this paper aims to identify Utzon's perception of Chinese architecture from Sirén's interpretation of this subject, and Utzon's eventual reinterpretation of this notion in his design of the Sydney Opera House.

The article poses four questions. First, what were the socio-political contexts both of Sirén and Utzon's approach to Chinese architecture? Second, how did Sirén interpret Chinese architecture in his scholarly work? Third, what was the interrelationship between Sirén and Utzon? And fourth, how did Utzon reinterpret Sirén's concept in his design for the Sydney Opera House? To respond to these questions, the authors surveyed the literature associated with Sirén and Utzon, reviewed their private collections, and undertook interviews with their friends, colleagues and followers. On this basis, the authors constructed a series of ideological analogies between Sirén and Utzon's work, with particular emphasis on Utzon's design for the Sydney Opera House.

Conceiving a design as both a history and a fiction is not exclusive to the analogy of architecture to landscape. But it is central to this tradition because of the simultaneous and interdependent emergence in the early eighteenth century of new art forms, each of them a creative and questioning response to empiricism's detailed investigation of subjective experience and the natural world: the picturesque landscape, analytical history and English novel, which its early advocates conceived as a fictional autobiography and characterised as a history not a story. The conjunction of new art forms stimulated a lyrical environmentalism that profoundly influenced subsequent centuries, and is increasing relevant today due to anthropogenic climate change, which is now the principal means to consider the relations between nature and culture.

While a prospect of the future is implicit in many histories and novels, it is explicit in a design, which is always imagined before it is built. Creative architects have often looked to the past to imagine the future, studying an earlier architecture not to replicate it but to understand and transform it, revealing its relevance to the present. Twenty-first century architects need to appreciate the shock of the old as well as the shock of the new.

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.

This paper investigates architectural students’ ‘year-out’ learning experiences in architectural offices after completing RIBA Part I study within a UK university. By interviewing and analysing their reflections on the experience, the study examines how individual architecture students perceive and value their learning experience in architectural offices and how students understand and integrate what they have learned through two distinct elements of their training: in university and in offices.

The architectural offices that students worked with vary in terms of workforce size and projects undertaken. The students’ training experience is not unified. The processes of engaging with concrete situations in real projects may permit students to follow opportunities that most inspire them and to develop their differing expertise, but their development in offices can also be restricted by the vicissitudes of market economics.

This study has demonstrated that architectural students’ learning and development in architectural offices continued through ‘learning by doing’ and used drawings as primary design and communicative media. Working in offices gave weight to both explicit and tacit knowledge and used subjective judgments. A further understanding was also achieved about what architects are and what they do in practice. The realities of their architectural practice experience discouraged some Part I students from progressing into the next stage of architectural education, Part II, but for others it demonstrated that a career in architecture was ‘achievable’.

This study argues that creative design, practical and technical abilities are not separate skill-sets that are developed in the university and in architectural offices respectively. They are linked and united in the learning process required to become a professional architect. The study also suggests that education in the university should do more to prepare students for their training in practice.

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.

Much has been written on the impact of digital technology and its translation into architectural practice and education. This paper reconsiders this process of integration to question current trends in research and pedagogy. Recent efforts to expand architectural research in schools tend to focus on broadening its spectrum while reinforcing design as research. We argue that the relevance of digital technology to these discussions, and its role in expanding fields of research, depends on different cultures of investigation and their differing institutional contexts. Our interest is in cultures that, as lines of thought, broaden the field of architectural research and make it heterodox, thickening a line of research with multiple interpretations. Tracing early experiences in the ‘paperless’ studios of Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, this paper questions how architectural pedagogies are developing in response to the current normalisation of digital design, with a focus on the Architecture Association's Design Research Lab (DRL) and the Strelka Institute in Moscow.

Ultimately, the main question is addressed: in what ways can the digital be political? By referring to the DRL and Strelka research programmes, two distinct approaches have been critically explored. On the one hand, DRL has been pushing to the limit the idea of research by design, considering autonomous form as the materialisation of change in the design process, while Strelka has been practicing research as the information for design. If digital technology contributes to form generation at DRL, at Strelka it potentiates opinion generation, and the research product is information, rather than form itself. The triangulation of both approaches could eventually suggest a more thorough political expression by means of a digital redux.

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.

The article investigates digital technology's influence on the technical description and ultimate construction of geometrically complex buildings. Focusing on the specific constructive example of Frank Gehry’s Weisman Art Museum through the lens of the building expansion’s executive project architect, the goal is to uncover advancements in the operating geometric, documentation, and construction methods used to build sculptural forms.

This essay attempts to outline the ways in which contemporary videogames produce spatial experiences, and how architects might interrogate their unique media form. Framing videogames as both computational constructions and cultural artefacts, the paper places the study in a lineage of architectural thinkers examining ‘pop-culture’ and technology. This draws from the Smithson's writings on advertisements as technical images, Venturi Scott-Brown's studies on symbolism, through to Reyner Banham's definition of mass produced gizmos. The paper first outlines the importance of videogames on society and their Smithsonian impulses towards architectural design. To support this, I examine the work of game theorists such as Espen Aarseth and Ian Bogost. Aarseth argues that game spaces sever certain ties and ‘deviate’ from reality in order to become playable spaces. Bogost contends that game rules produce ‘procedural rhetoric’ - games may advance arguments through the playing of their rules. Reading from these theories I argue that these rule-based breaks from the real are a potent site for architectural speculation.

The second section comprises design case studies scrutinising existing game worlds and producing new videogames as architectural experiments. I begin by examining the significance of symbolism in videogame worlds, and how this might provide alternative trajectories for digital architectural design. I subsequently explore Atkinson and Willis’ concept of the ludodrome, slippages between virtual and real, and discuss Ubiquity, a game I produced to explore this condition. I return to Banham's Great Gizmo, alongside PW Singer's writings on military robotics, to see the gamepad as a new order of gizmo for colonising space. And I discuss ‘Grand Theft Auto V’'s loading screen as a manifestation of satellite imagery aesthetics that collapse space. The paper concludes that games are powerful media for spatial experimentation and we must prepare for new generations of designers highly influenced by such ‘deviated’ architectures.

An important theme in place marketing, branding, and architectural literature – and practice – is the development of a strong, attractive image, through (primarily) visual representation of a location. But considering that today we live in cities that are digital hybrids, in which we are connected to a wider system of information, how is an ‘image of the city’ constructed in this context, and are there other strategies and tactics that should be considered? Using Plato’s notion of chora and Claudius Ptolemy’s notion of chorography as points of departure that will lead us to consider Michel de Certeau’s concept of walking as an experiential and dialectic process through which we relate the spatial stories of places and moreover, in the context of digital locative media, we will point to ways by which this may be accomplished. In introducing the reader to the concept of digital chorographies as a means by which a place’s spatial narratives may be constructed, we suggest that a current emphasis on visual representation (for example, of attractive place product elements/attributes, such as architectural landmarks and cityscapes, etc.) should be considered in conjunction with the articulation and narration of qualities contributing to a place’s realm of meaning.