All too often, a fascination with ruins produces little more than reflection on the qualities of decay and abandonment that stimulate nostalgia for lost and vanquished pasts. In this exhibition by Witherford Watson Mann, a subtle reflection was provided on the potential for ruins of diverse kinds to have contemporary life and relevance. Indeed, the beauty of the exhibition belied the willingness of this practice to engage with places that would not often be regarded as ruins worthy of careful study or adaptation, and to transform them precisely by doing so.

Architects, engineers and researchers alike often cite practical reasons for building with wood. Since the development of curved glulam beams and columns over a century ago, the widespread use of massive structural timber elements has allowed architects and engineers to design and build in wood with unprecedented speed and scale. Moreover, rising concerns of climate change and the carbon-dioxide emissions associated with construction encourage the use of wood as a viable alternative to steel and concrete, due to CO2 sequestration in trees.

In mid- and high-rise buildings, the current shift from steel and concrete towards massive structural timber elements like glulam, laminated-veneer lumber (LVL) and cross-laminated timber (CLT) is evident in a number of recently completed timber buildings in Europe, ranging from seven to nine storeys. Several speculative design proposals have also been made for ‘timber towers’ of thirty, fortytwo and even sixty-five storeys, recognising that designing with massive structural timber elements in high-rise buildings is still in its infancy. This paper offers a new perspective on building with wood at this scale, beyond carbon sequestrationand construction.

There is nothing, no ‘naked life’, no external standpoint, that can be posed outside this field permeated by money, nothing escapes money.

In 2009, an international masterclass at the Berlage Institute studied a street market in a deprived Rotterdam neighbourhood, the Afrikaanderplein. Headed by Teddy Cruz and supported by Jeanne van Heeswijk and Miguel Robles-Duran – three socially and politically committed architects and artists – the group produced a critique of the tight control and regulation of the market by authorities. The group's proposals were, basically, to liberalise and deregulate the market.

Whether the Afrikaanderplein market is a case which merits deregulation depends, of course, on the specific conditions the group detected in the area. More important here, however, is that the proposals appear, at least superficially, to contrast the anti-neoliberal and radical positions of the three individuals directing the group.

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.

This study arose from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded ‘Connected Communities’ project. It was apparent at the outset that the AHRC had not considered that architecture might be important, if not central, to discussions on communities, and it became obvious that this attitude was prevalent throughout the academic and media worlds. Despite evidence that the formal and conceptual structures of architecture permeated numerous disciplines, and that the built environment permeated our personal and social lives, other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences did not think architecture was relevant to the humanities in general.

This belief is represented within the institutional structure of the AHRC itself. The AHRC Joint Electronic Submissions funding application process organises research into a three-tiered system of research areas: there are seventy-eight primary research areas including Visual Arts with twelve subcategories, Dance with five, Drama with six, and Design with six, of which architecture is one. There is no other research classification for the spatial environment, built or unbuilt. On the other hand a search for ‘architecture’ gives six primary research areas, encompassing thirty-six third level subject areas. Except for the architecture subcategory under Design, the others have to do with information, computing and software.

Reception is an idea which deals with the reinterpretation of knowledge. Reception therefore appears as an important issue in studies of historiography that see textual forms of history as representations of the past. Reception in history varies from agent to agent: different subjects who hold different ideological positions, in different positions with respect to power relations, receive the same object differently. Public reception, for instance, plays an important role in shaping the spatial representations of architecture and cities, which can be regarded as textual forms of history and therefore as a form of historiography which reinterprets and integrates the facts of the past. The work of Ackbar Abbas, in his depiction of the skyscrapers in Hong Kong which inscribe capitalism in the fabric of that city, offers a remarkable example. He illustrates how Hong Kong's spatial routine plays out in the reception of styles; for example, design oriented towards economy, the phenomenon of constant building and rebuilding, and the pursuit of hyper-density in Hong Kong's built environment. In different time periods, locations and cultural-political contexts, therefore, the public reception of architecture and cities differs. This paper takes Taiwan as an example. It examines a transformational period – from Taiwan's post-Second World War development to the present – scrutinising the reception of its history, architecture and cities.

Over fifty years ago at the RIBA’s 1958 Oxford Conference, discussions about architectural research and science posed seminal questions about the very nature of creativity in architectural research and education. Leslie Martin observed that research is the tool by which theory is advanced. For more than half a century, we have seen traces of scientific research fuelling the advancement of architectural knowledge and its feedback loops into practice. Yet, interrogations around how architectural creativity is affected by intersections with the sciences are not new. The Bauhaus, for example, sought to integrate scientific thought in architectural education in 1936. Thus, why are emerging interdisciplinary collaborations where architecture, engineering and science converge at the inception of design potentially transformative?

Increasing attempts to accelerate the pace of innovation in sustainable building technology is engendering pioneering intersections between architecture, engineering and natural science disciplines such as bioengineering and chemistry. The broad disciplinary breadth of these research processes inevitably requires mediating the diverse values, perspectives and research methodologies of disciplines that pursue innovation in different ways. However, to what extent is this new interdisciplinary convergence possibly transformative? Could it be that these processes, particularly in building technology innovation, may be influencing scientists and engineers to rethink how design problems are conceptualised and researched?

At the Royal Academy's exhibition, Sensing Spaces: Architecture Reimagined, curator Kate Goodwin sets a loose brief to seven international architects: to create works that ‘encourage visitors to question their ideas about architecture and test its capacity to move them’. While the resulting large-scale installations fulfil the brief's open agenda (what work doesn't deal with the field of sensory experience?), the exhibition goes no further to challenge the larger political issues at stake in architecture and the city today, which is problematic given that it is presented at a major London art institution and geared towards educating the general public about the importance of architecture.