Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an emerging reality for the architectural discipline. Our work over the past three years has been to demonstrate AI’s relevance for architecture. Among many aspects, AI fundamentally opens up access to a new approach to formal experiments through the concept of ‘latent space’. We believe this concept represents a radical improvement in generating architectural forms, and comes at a time when cities are pressurised by the burning challenges they face: ecology, urban densification, the rapid mutation of modes of living, etc. In return, architecture is charged to come up with new typologies, able to handle these pressing concerns. AI invites us to reinvest in formal research in order to design the habitat of tomorrow.

Over the last decade, we have witnessed renewed interest in design as a socially engaged practice. Much of the debates around ‘social design’ point towards myriad approaches and disciplinary fields interwoven with grass-roots initiatives and social movements. Among these, design activism has gained traction as critical spatial practice that operates on the fringes of commercial and institutional spheres.

The temporal, spatial and experimental nature of design activism is well delineated in scholarship but its long-term effect on everyday urban environments remains elusive. Moreover, the influence of design activism on socio-spatial dynamics is indeed largely under researched. By mobilising social practice theory, this paper proposes a novel theorisation of design activism that sheds light on the social formations and collective practices catalysed through the activist impulse. This ontological shift embraces an understanding of the socio-material world through practice. Such characterisation of design activism underscores collective moments of integration of the constitutive elements of practice, encapsulated by Shove, Pantzar and Watson as ‘material, competence and meaning’.

The authors' own empirical research, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in the UK, reveals design activism as necessarily intertwined with other everyday practices – gardening, celebrating, playing – that coalesce around a shared sense of citizenship. It also advances the role of design activism in forging communities of practice: mutually supportive and self-sustaining groups emerging out of the personal relations sustained and organised around a practice of place making.

This article argues that the UK’s vanguard magazine Architectural Design (AD) promoted appropriate technology (AT) to prompt ‘architectural thinking’ about the late-modern crisis following the collapse of post-War consensus in the welfare state and its architecture. This was to be a crisis settled by the decade’s end in postmodernism and neoliberalism, a new consensus so overwhelming that it was heralded even in AT, especially those variants drawn from the Californian libertarianism of the Whole Earth Catalog. But British AT was also drawing from the UK’s eco-socialist Radical Technology group and its publication, whose chief artist, anarchist Clifford Harper, and editor Peter Harper, contributed to AD. At the beginning of the decade, the magazine’s sub-editor Martin Pawley insisted on the role of a lateral ‘architectural thinking’ of the sort inherent to AT, which pointed to futures by turn libertarian, socialist, and social democratic (its first advocate, Ernst Schumacher, had been a stalwart Keynesian and manager of nationalisation). Beyond politics per se, paradox and analogy were keynote to the decade’s epistemological uncertainty, from the ‘wickedness’ besetting design as a ‘problem-solving’ activity, to a post-structuralism eroding the long Enlightenment project, to a post-colonialism challenging Eurocentric technologies of exploitation. Indeed, AD could position design and AT as ‘non-aligned third way’ much as the so-called Third World indicated a ‘third way’ between the capitalism and communism of the so-called First and Second Worlds.

The early career of Sverre Fehn, the influential Norwegian architect, is marked by the designs of pavilions which were constructed shortly after each other for two major competitions: The Norwegian Pavilion for the World Exposition in Brussels (1956–1958) and The Nordic Pavilion at the Giardini site of the Venice Biennale (1958–1962). This paper studies the process which led from design to construction for both pavilions, identifies structural changes during that process, and investigates the causes and effects of such changes. A study of Fehn’s hand-drawn sketches and photos of models, made throughout the design and construction stages, reveals that despite functional and formal similarities the two pavilions’ development process and the changes which they underwent are noticeably different. The pursuit of ‘abstract space’ during the competition stage for the Brussels Pavilion was tested by considerations of construction only later on, creating a critical tension in the project. Not only did the organisation of structural components change significantly during the design process but the logic of construction underwent a complete transformation. Nevertheless, this transition between different iterations of the Brussels Pavilion suggested an alternative approach for the Venice Pavilion in which the initial thought of construction became a projection, rather than an abstract imitation of built reality. The spatial intention and construction-related considerations of the Venice Pavilion were addressed by a ‘synergetic’ structural principle, implicit in the competition scheme. This unprecedented feature significantly enlarged the ‘space of possibility’ of the roof structure, which provided for adaptation to indeterminacies without compromising the initial design intentions. Changes in the design of the Brussels and Venice Pavilions, therefore, differ in the ways in which they evolved from design to completion: sequential and abrupt, vs. gradual and continuous. This sheds light on a critical shift in the work of an influential architect and the way he approached design indeterminacies, rather than forcing them into submission.

In contemporary Chinese architectural culture, Hua Li’s work stands out as a phenomenon. His architecture demonstrates little in the way of formalistic eccentricities, cultural symbolism, or indeed the ‘Chineseness’ that some others seek to pursue. Instead, what interests the architect is, most of all, the quality of material, construction, space, and place [1].

This paper is not a comprehensive survey of the architectural career of Arata Isozaki, one of the most distinguished practicing architects in the world today and the 2019 winner of the Pritzker Prize, but a specific look at his formative years of the 1960s when he began to build his own design methodology. It delineates Isozaki’s encounter with the avant-garde art movement of the 1960s, collectively called “Anti-Art, ” against the backdrop of the “anti-spirit” of Japanese society. Although Isozaki’s artistic side has been overstated at times, previous studies rarely addressed how his intensive interactions with art circles played a role in shaping his design methodology. I would like to examine the convergence of creative individuals and cross-disciplinary connections to understand Isozaki’s architectural thinking.

This study examines how Isozaki’s collaborations with his artist contemporaries enabled him to formulate the notion of the “invisible city, ” a radically new design concept characterised by the expansion of the nature of architecture from producing isolated built-forms to all-encompassing natural and manmade environments. However, after drawing on communications and information theory, which prevailed in 60s architectural circles, Isozaki’s destructive and anarchistic connotation of “invisible city” was channeled into a systematic cybernetic model and eventually transformed into a constructive planning method. I will discuss the realisation of a cybernetic environment at the Festival Plaza of Expo’ 70 and trace the legacy of “invisible city” in his later postmodern work.

In the summer of 1945, Ernö Goldfinger produced a twenty-sheet exhibition entitled ‘Planning Your Neighbourhood’ (PYN) for the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA) [1]. It shows how Goldfinger continued to promote a vision of modern architecture that had evolved in the 1930s, by adapting it to planning for postwar urban reconstruction. The reach of PYN went beyond that of a public exhibition because of its role in Army education; for the majority of its audience it wasn’t a matter of choice – the sheets were brought to them. This article examines the strategies he adopted to communicate the validity of modernism in Britain. It will show how wartime circumstances provided Goldfinger with a remarkable opportunity to present modern architecture to a mass audience.

This article unveils and discusses a series of unknown photographs of the empty site in which Mies and Lilly Reich's 1929 German Pavilion in Barcelona had been built and dismantled, and shot by Ludwig Glaeser, curator of the Mies van der Rohe Archive at MoMA in 1979. It suggests that more than the manifestation of a desire to rematerialise the building through the agency of photography, Glaeser's photographs are, photographs of dust, but more importantly, a manifestation of the possibility of re-enacting the widely known 1929 Berliner Bild-Bericht photographs.

Repeating linear elements organised into arrays and lattices are commonly manifest in the work of Niall McLaughlin Architects. This paper describes a series of projects which explore the use of this ‘architecture of line’ in the work of the practice. Organised by formal development, rather than chronology, it identifies sequences that evolve from a two dimensional handling of line, as combs, to a thickened three dimensional handling that produces cat’s cradles, cages, naves, thickets and forests. The work of other architects, including Aalto Aalto, Kengo Kuma, Sverre Fehn, Peter Zumthor, Rudolf Schwarz and Karl Friedrich Schinkel, alongside the influence of Gottfried Semper’s writings, are placed within and alongside these sequences revealing common approaches and individual differences. Developed simultaneously through writing and drawing, the latter have been used to isolate elements of line within each architectural work, helping to understand their use and allowing a comparison to be made between McLaughlin’s work and the wider critical framework of other architect’s work. His particular spatial and temporal handling of line is revealed as a meteorological, environmental and poetic mediator between inner and outer worlds.

Half a decade past the consolidation of the first ‘digital turn’ in architecture, contemporary designers seem to have decidedly embraced the unprecedented power of machinic thinking, subsequently adopting its embedded logical processes. We may, however, pose a critical question in the context of this ‘second computational turn’ : Are there any non-computable elements of thought in the development of spatialised digital intelligence? As a partial response, this paper unpacks a series of productive relationships intersecting urban drawing and the passing of time in the context of a data-driven design environment. This enquiry looks into the processes carried out by a custom-built robotic drawing machine, tracing dynamic vector data streams collated from fieldwork developed via GPS tracking of individual urban displacements in Cagliari, Sardinia during April 2017. Its machinic drawing protocol re-enacts this continuous, heterogeneous, collectively constructed urban landscape as it slowly remaps its territorial occupation into the target surface of the paper.

The hybrid digital-analogue apparatus draws from a long historical lineage of vector-based machinic systems designed for architectural drafting. Situating themselves between the human hand and the surface of the paper, those machines acted as carriers of embodied spatial knowledge that could be selectively actualised into specific design processes and materialisations. Deploying a range of intertwined digital and analogue media, this machinic environment is used to articulate a data-based urban drawing research practice and a subsequent ‘anexact’ drawing research methodology that further elaborates on the durational and multiplicitous aspects of the data-based drawings. This body of work is also reflected on as a visual research methodology, which taps into Bernard Cache's interest in architectural computation as a way to pursue philosophical knowledge ‘by other means’ and into Gilbert Simondon's notion of the ‘technical ensemble’ – emphasising the productive forms of indetermination emerging from its internal informational transfers.

This paper reports on the primary school design processes carried out around the 1940s in the County of Hertfordshire in Great Britain, which later evolved into innovative strategies developed by Mary and David Medd in the Ministry of Education from the late 1950s. The whole process, undertaken during more than three decades, reveals a way of breaking with the traditional spatial conception of a school. The survey of the period covered has allowed an in-depth understanding of how learning spaces could be transformed by challenging the conventional school model of closed rooms, suggesting a new way of understanding learning spaces as a group of Centres rather than classrooms. Historians have thoroughly shown the ample scope of this process, which involved many professionals, fostering a true cross-disciplinary endeavour where the curriculum and the learning spaces were developed in close collaboration. A selection of schools built in the county has been used to typologically analyse how architectural changes began to arise and later flourished at the Ministry of Education. The Medds had indeed a significant role through the development of a design process known as the Built-in variety and the Planning Ingredients. A couple of examples will clarify some of these strategies, revealing how the design of educational space could successfully respond to an active way of learning.

The work and thought of the Basque sculptor Jorge Oteiza (b. Orio, 1908 – d. San Sebastian, 2003) is an omnipresent reference point in the historiography of modern Spanish architecture. Since the Jorge Oteiza Museum Foundation was opened shortly after his death, a great number of studies have been published about him, mainly in Spanish and Basque. Oteiza’s artistic career was closely connected to the postwar Spanish architectural scene. During the 1950s, he participated in numerous projects and architecture competitions and published his work in specialised journals and magazines in the field. Spain was at that time under the regime of General Franco and, as a consequence of the Civil War (1936–9), the country was suffering an economic crisis that affected culture, art, and architecture.