Suspend your disbelief for a second, and ask yourself: what is architectural about clouds? For many researchers, practitioners and students of the field, a concern with the architectural is a concern with stable forms, organised layouts, inert materials, and recognisable cultural expressions. Yet in recent decades, relational and process-oriented approaches to analysing ‘the social’ have advanced architectural concerns with intensities of human and nonhuman flows, regulating energy exchanges and microclimatic milieux, and territorialising space through built enclosures and envelopes. The notion of flows in architecture is not only a philosophical category but a practical and programmatic one.

Every architectural intervention joins a constellation of pre-existing conditions, which often constitute a fragile but valuable situation: the physical support of collective memory. The objective of this article is to explore contemporary ways of intervening in architectural heritage from the perspective of collective memory, through what is imagined to be a timeless grammar, towards design innovation. Works produced according to this strategy not only try to maintain the character of an architectural legacy but also to generate new models based on received precedents. The following article explores intervention projects from the last two decades of work by Swiss architect Peter Märkli, identifying key themes and strategies employed. The synthesis of these works allows us to identify a way of approaching heritage based on the continuity of architecture as a key to innovation.

The second decade of the twenty-first century has been distinguished by a renewed interest in James Stirling and his architectural heritage – a sort of ‘James Stirling Renaissance’ – with many authors characterising Stirling predominantly as a late modernist architect.

In June 1966 Hungarian-born French architect Yona Friedman travelled to the port town of Folkestone on the English Channel to join the International Dialogue of Experimental Architecture (IDEA). The event was a large two-day symposium on radical experiments in architecture and urbanism organised by the British architectural collective Archigram. A leading figure in experimental international groups of architects and artists crafting techno-futuristic visions of three-dimensionally expanding cities, Friedman seemed to be an essential participant in an event advertised as a convocation of ‘all Europe’s creative nuts’.

Architectural production relies on form that can be drawn, quantified, and analysed through geometry. The incorporation of calculus-based form in the 1990s and the more recent incorporation of physics simulation has pushed the edge of formal and mathematical analysis, as well as of architectural production. Yet, mathematics remains largely invisible in the current landscape – rarely addressed in discourse and hidden behind software interfaces in daily practice. As Antoine Picon has noted, architecture has unprecedented access to mathematical objects, while at the same time remaining indifferent to its relation to mathematics.

In This Is What We Do: A Muf Manual, the partners of the firm muf architecture/art wrote that ‘paradoxically, in order to make the thing the collaboration has to be about the making of the relationship rather than the object.’1 This article takes this assertion as its basis and examines the implications of treating the individual and collective relationships that structure an architectural project – which I will refer to as the project’s relational field – as a site that can be manipulated in order to affect both production and outcome. This is achieved through the transposition of concepts from Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on creative activity, art, literature, and language to design using a case study of muf’s Barking Town Square project in London (2004–10).

In November 2004, the University of Cambridge announced its intention to close the Architecture Department,1 following a drop from a 5 to a 4 in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), which aimed to measure the quality of research activity across the Higher Education sector in the UK.2 Other departments in the University of Cambridge achieved a 5 or a 5* rating in the same exercise. In 2004 the University’s General Board, which oversees academic standards within the University, came to the conclusion that the Department of Architecture was making ‘insufficient progress towards meeting Cambridge standards in terms of research quality’ and advised that it should be shut down.3 While this remained a recommendation, with no official action having yet been made, the threat of closure sparked an outrage both within and outside Cambridge. After a campaign in the national press, the architecture department was saved [1, 2].