A number of years ago, my practice Sergison Bates was invited to take part in a competition for a housing project in north London. At some point in the competitive interview, I stated that every project we undertake is unique in the set of interests it investigates, and could be understood as a form of research. I still believe that this is true, although I would be cautious about making the same comment again in such circumstances. We did not win the competition and found out later that a number of members of the members of the jury took issue with my statement. They misconstrued it, thinking that what we had in mind was some form of speculative enterprise with implicit risks and an uncertain outcome, which they would be funding. I now understand the difficulty the client had. Naturally, they wanted to be assured that we had the experience and competence to deliver a building that would serve their needs and be fit for purpose.

When we set up in practice – at about the same time as arq was launched – Stephen Bates and I had learnt some things about building from working for a number of established architects in practice. When we formally founded our own practice, we accepted a future of uncertainty, although this was countered by great optimism on our part. Looking back, it is clear that a series of events that were wholly out of our control have shaped the practice we now have. Many of the projects we worked on in the early years took on issues for the first time, and this partly explains why it feels that we undertook more research then than we do now. I do, however, believe that we are constantly building upon a set of shared interests, and while the knowledge we have acquired through building is cumulative, our restless curiosity to explore new themes and ideas remains unchanged.

This paper discusses the ongoing process of internationalisation of scientific research, and its peculiar implications for the field of architecture and planning. I first consider this field's traditional ability of translating and code-switching, as well as the recent experience of adjusting its research practices to academic assessment systems. I then explore some views about the global spread of modern science, from the ideal of a scientific community to the recognition of a political economy of internationalised science, which defines central and peripheral positions, and the kind of knowledge we produce, how we do it and what for. Finally, I propose that in architecture and planning, unlike in most other scientific fields, the nodes of international research networks tend to have different empirical objects, i.e., their own geographical regions. Peripheral research aiming at international relevance can hardly avoid complying with agendas and theoretical frameworks derived from very different socio-spatial environments, thus focusing on problems of minor importance for its own context. Yet architecture, as a weak-science with a tradition of code-switching, still holds the possibility of international collaboration on other terms, stressing differences rather than similarities, and the thorough debate of concepts, methods and theories.

arq's first editor returns to the origins of the journal and reflects on the period of his editorship from 1994-2003. He also reflects on the opening ‘leader’ in the first issue of arq, which is reprinted here. The journal's founding principles remain just as urgent today, he concludes.

What has been the trajectory of architectural research in the UK (as reflected in arq: Architectural Research Quarterly) as compared to the United States (as reflected in the Journal of Architectural Education, or JAE) over the past two decades? To answer this question several quantitative methods were used to construct a frame analysis of the various grammars associated with each journal. First we quantify the grammars employed by arq according to the editors’ own categories. Second, we provide a word frequency analysis of arq's article titles and abstracts. Third, we assess the similarities and differences of the content in arq and JAE using the grammars reconstructed in the latter. Fourth, we use these data to reconstruct the trajectory of architectural research in arq. As a final analysis we place arq within the context of the historic emergence of journals recognised by the Avery Index of Architectural Periodicals from 1837 to the present. Our findings reveal numerous conflicts and similarities of content as a representation of the field as a whole and we conclude that these data provide at least three salient patterns worth considering as a foundation for the next two decades: (1) accelerated alienation of research from practice; (2) movement away from literary grammars toward ecological ones; and (3) the explosion of new publication venues and specialised grammars.

Exactly 50 years ago, the Council of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) launched a new policy and commitment to ‘architectural research.’ At its meeting on 7 December 1967, it set in motion a new programme to accelerate and coordinate the growth of research in architecture, not only in architectural schools but through research centres and in practices. In addition, it reinforced its commitment to building up the Institute's own competence in research, ‘so that it can speak authoritatively on behalf of the profession in the formulation of national research policies and investment programmes.

This paper seeks to historicise the formation, development and promotion of architectural research – what we are terming the idea of architectural research – in light of the Institute's renewed commitment to a research agenda through the appointment in December 2017 of a Vice President for Research (an entirely new role) and the publication of a suite of resources aimed at ‘de-mystifying’ research in practice and promoting the evidencing of design quality and the value of the architect. These initiatives have their origin in the invention of architectural research as a distinct tradition and a post-rationalisation of what had gone before following on from the Oxford Conference in 1958. Furthermore, we situate the invention of this tradition not only within professional and educational debates of the post-war period, but also in the changing and fluctuating landscape of government policy on the promotion and funding of research, itself a response to a perceived cultural and political angst about the UK's shortcomings in productivity and development. In contextualising and problematising the creation and fostering of a ‘research culture’ in the UK architecture profession over the last 60 or so years, we also uncover some of the assumptions behind the contemporary self-conscious pre-occupation with developing the research culture of architects. The paper begins with a discussion of historiography and methodology before moving to the research context of construction history and the role played by the RIBA Research Group in developing the idea of architectural research.

Early issues of arq in the mid-1990s were preoccupied with the possibilities for researching architecture through design: how design research might be constituted and communicated, and – practically for architecture schools at that time – how design might be counted as research in the newly-introduced metrics used to judge research quality in UK Universities.

Debates around design research in arq in the 1990s reflected uncertainties about its position in both practice and academic culture at that time. Since then, design research has gained traction, becoming increasingly accepted and acquiring greater capital in architectural academe. Key texts in architectural design research are increasingly leaving behind the question ‘is design considered research or not?’ to search instead for how to secure the status of design as a rigorous mode of academic inquiry. There is increasing confidence in the architectural field about the potential and power of design as a research method. Yet the notion of design research in architecture remains broad, with a diversity of approaches echoed in a diversity of distinct but overlapping terminologies. Taking its cue from arq's early focus on design research, this paper sketches-out its contemporary methodological landscape in architecture, surveying key sources in design research scholarship.

Are current definitions of ‘research’ stifling ideas that might be relevant to our discipline? This paper explores how a drive toward empirical research - while linking architecture to issues, facts, and data important to architecture's relevance - also drives architecture away from speculative ideas necessary to imagining a better future. This observation is briefly examined in the four spheres of design, history/theory, teaching, and advocacy. In design, the move in research from program to production to mapping may be seen as a form of avoiding the very thing most needing ideas/research – how to change the way we conceive of design work. In history/theory, the drive to archival specificity may be seen as fear of speculation. In teaching, empirical models emphasising sustainability that are evidence of ‘real research’ may leave behind theory altogether. And in advocating for a more empowered profession, the requirement for financial data and economic validation as proof for necessitating change may miss the larger problem of our current self-imposed identity as architects. Ideas that are not justified by current norms of research are still necessary.

Vincent Scully's recent death serves as reminder that the discipline of architectural history is not so old, with only a few intellectual generations needed to skip back to the turn of the twentieth century. Heinrich Wölfflin died in 1945 and Scully started writing his dissertation the following year, under the supervision of Henry-Russell Hitchcock. James Ackerman, whose death was also recent, co-taught with Scully in those years while being advised by Richard Krautheimer, who had completed his own dissertation under Paul Frankl. Students of both Scully and Ackerman are today adjusting the contours of the field with their books, articles, and lectures.

The scope of the development of architectural history is perhaps more limited than chronological age might suggest, and certainly that in comparison to the existence of its presumed subject matter – architecture – has barely made it to infancy. Without diminishing the hours of archival labour, field work, and writing that have been undertaken over the past century and a half, and without understating the contributions to knowledge and understanding those efforts have produced, the implication should be admitted: there really isn't very much architectural history. Not that many architectural historians, not that many books, not that much history, relatively speaking. This is not necessarily to say that architectural history is marginal, for it has attained points of instrumentality and effect along the way, but the admission is the necessary starting point for reflection on the future of the discipline, because architectural history needs to think about how to get bigger.

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.

The entwined relationships between the physical and the computational continue to produce sensibilities where our understanding of the division between them is becoming blurred. The prolog to Rustic Figurations identifies a growing interest in disciplinary questions on the role of history and the history of digital tools and techniques of representation to support and understand the cultural context of architecture. The second part of the text tries to describe, define and situate rustic figuration as an aesthetic and material concept in architecture that has developed through the architectural design research of the practices servo and Brrum, in parallel with research into the history of rustication.

The notion of rustic figuration is imbued with architectural qualities that oscillate between the legibility of form and geometry and the disappearance of that legibility. Aspects of legibility are discussed in relation to related discourses in architectural history, as well as in the context of a few contemporary practices and projects that engage both computational and analogue techniques for design, communication and fabrication. The qualities of rustic figuration in the projects are neither bound by the unique properties of the building materials, nor by the computational information but happen in the translations between digital information and material manifestation or vice versa.

Concepts of the sharing economy are gaining traction in retail, finance, business and law. What has it to do with architecture? We examine the sharing economy's basis in peer-to-peer exchange, and its relationship with the intriguing technology known as the ‘blockchain.’ We look critically as the practical applications of the technology to architecture in areas such as the exchange of digital assets and the automation of certain types of contracts, as well as the metaphors about the city it brings to light as a stimulus to design.

Richard Weston – Editor of arq from 2004 to 2013, and best known for his distinguished monographs on Alvar Aalto, Modernism and Utzon – reflects here on his more recent practice-led research into minerals, materials and digitisation. These studies explore the qualities of materials themselves but also the materialisation of imagery. This work is ‘practice-led’ in the way that the term is used in academe – meaning research which emerges out of a series of investigations – rather than ‘practice-led’ in the way architects might understand the term, as emerging from a professional office. As Weston reflects, however, this is work that would – most likely – be supported neither in the contexts of academe nor professional practice. It has been made possible instead by his ‘active retirement’. This paper explores how a chance encounter with an ammonite led Weston to Liberty's ‘Scarf Hall’, world-renowned in global fashion, a creative app for children called Molly's World, and virtual realities captured from microscopic mineral-worlds.

Today, there is an increasing use of terms such as ‘transnational architecture’, ‘architecture beyond Europe’, ‘architecture of China, Japan and Korea’, ‘China in Africa’ and ‘Socialist architecture in Africa’. This signals a change in the basic outlook in thinking and research around architecture towards a problematic concerning geography and geopolitical relations. Michel Foucault, as early as 1967, had already said that ‘history’ was being replaced by ‘geography’, and a historical outlook on an endless timeline was being replaced by a new awareness of a finite world, of a world geography, of things happening ‘here and there’, of space and place, and of a ‘network’ we were all located within (in a speech published later as ‘Of Other Spaces: Principles of Heterotopia’).13 My contention is that, due to many factors, today more than any other time, a world-historical paradigm in architectural research is being replaced, or at least radically reformed, by a new one that methodologically privileges local and material happenings as horizontally connected to other sites and happenings, in a networked geographic spread: it involves a cartographic perspective that challenges endogenous, national and formalist categories.

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.

Various New York architecture studios have research entities, or labs, which are each unique in their scope, funding and their stakeholders. They do not offer alternative or tangential ways to practice architecture. Instead, these units live and work in the studio context and adhere to the protocols and cultures of architecture offices. They follow similar design-think/problem-solve paradigms but operate with different frameworks and business models, providing different services. They challenge the binary division of client and architect, and are located in a different position in the decision-making process.

Research units like this are growing in number, with architecture studios diversifying their work portfolio in an attempt to amplify their popularity and influence. As a result, architects’ creative and political interests have produced new exploratory platforms with stable financial performance within their business models. Thornton Tomasetti's CORE Studio has collaborated with Autodesk on cutting-edge design software almost since its inception. Snøhetta's brand design unit was commissioned to design Norwegian banknotes, and Prada/AMO, as a design-powerhouse duo, has had significant influence. The field of architectural design, often relegated to intellectual isolation or wrongly commodified, is thus finding innovative ways to detach product and process, and capitalising it in novel and sophisticated ways. Such initiatives seem to have launched the studios concerned into new markets and disciplines, harnessing the transdisciplinary nature of the profession while expanding the scope of their curiosity.

In 2014, I interviewed leading protagonists from successful in-house research units in New York. We discussed their methods and how they manage their financial and human resources. I explored with them what prompted their bold exploration into new, creative territories. This paper presents excerpts from four interviews with: Shogei Shigematsu, OMA/AMO; Richard Olcott, ennead/Lab; Jonatan Schumacher, Thorton Tomasetti/CORE Studio and; Michael Sorkin, Terreform.