The exhibition ‘Black Spaces Matter’, conceived by architectural historian Pamela Karimi and brought to life through extensive curatorial collaborations, presents a series of vignettes exploring the past, present, and future of New Bedford, Massachusetts, a hotbed of abolitionist activity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and a haven for freed and escaped slaves at the end of the so-called ‘underground railroad’. Through a mix of media – objects, photographs, videos, and a virtual reality rig – the show presents a compelling picture of a vital, historic, and living African-American community that first thrived prior to the US Civil War, and its continued grassroots struggle to preserve its architectural heritage. The stories and images presented collate an important and overlooked chapter of New England architectural history, suggesting the utility of new media in historical documentation and highlighting the continued need to explore positive examples of communities of colour through the dimensions of space and place.

Over the course of an intensive day-long session, the authors combed the Drawing Matter archives for exemplary plan drawings. Their selections are presented here in pairs, based on visual rhymes or striking contrasts, on cross-historical comparisons or the persistence of plan-making techniques over time.

The architectural plan drawing is a paradoxical sort of object. In principle, an instrument that should be rendered obsolete by the act of construction, it nonetheless remains the most intensive and compact description of an architectural idea.

‘Plan’ is a verb as well as a noun, and implies a path toward a specified outcome. The plan is fundamentally optimistic, countering entropy with order, and this anticipatory quality is embedded in the logic of the plan itself. Architects make drawings for buildings that do not yet exist. An architectural plan is an empty geometric scaffold that awaits both construction and inhabitation.

But the plan also works retrospectively: it was the primary technical means employed in the measuring and recording of ancient architectures that was so fundamental to the education of a classical architect. And these drawings affirm that such reconstructions, far from being rote academic exercises, draw deeply on the architect's creative intelligence. In fact, we would argue that the conceptual power of the plan as a working instrument is precisely its capacity to function simultaneously as an analytical and projective device, poised between past histories and future possibilities.

This collection of images makes a case for the continued relevance of the plan today as evidenced by the diversity, conceptual density and shear visual power of these artefacts.

The 1980s witnessed a sudden rise of writing and thinking about architectural drawings and their conventions. At about the same time, there also emerged a trend of a new type of presentational drawing in architecture, in which drawings were very complex to the point of undecipherability, graphically sophisticated, and sometimes seemingly created for their own sake rather than to represent a particular architectural project. Upon reviewing the texts on drawings from this period, two important insights are made about the use of presentational drawings in architectural practice and their relation to theory. First, that making of architectural drawings can constitute practice in its own right and such practice, if developed experimentally, leads theory, rather than lagging it and serving to validate it. Second, architectural drawings, over and above communicating information about their subject matter, can also function as a means to create social networks of discursive practice. These insights lead to an unexpected question concerning the distinctiveness of architectural practice itself.

This article investigates architecture's ‘expanded field’ – its turn towards culture during the 1980s when the profession expanded its interest to the softer practices of architectural culture. It looks in particular at the emerging enterprises of exhibitions, competitions and awards, publications, and symposia and lectures in the ‘long 1980s’, taken as the Academy years of AD magazine from 1977 – 1992.

This period of AD is synonymous with architectural Post-Modernism, as Academy published much of Charles Jencks’ work on Post-Modernism, including six of the seven ever-larger editions of The Language of Post-Modern Architecture.

However, by analysing the content and context of AD magazine and the wider context of architectural institutions during these years, this article argues that the Post-Modernisation of architecture should be understood not only as a mere style, but equally as the emphasis on a growing architectural culture, discourse, and the ‘ideal’, and the retreat from building and the ‘real’. In other words, this period witnessed the establishment of architectural culture as a new type of practice, and furthermore, AD was instrumental in this cultural turn.

In recent years, there has been a spate of posthumously built works by Frank Lloyd Wright. Using the architect's archive as a kind of repository of designs that can be adapted for new clients, programmes and sites, these buildings stake out an ambiguous claim upon Wright's name and legacy. The growing body of posthumous architecture presents a range of often unacknowledged and unexamined challenges to Wright's celebrated canon of built works, and to the architectural discipline more generally, troubling conservationists, historians, tourists and foundations alike. These problematic buildings are the subject of this essay, which examines the contemporary appeal of Wright's archive and “brand,” to open up serious questions about the authenticity, authorship and authorisation of an architect's works realised long after their death.

This article offers a step by step analysis of an undiscussed note written by Christian Nor-berg-Schulz 18 April 1979, titled Translation, as I ask what role the notion of transla-tion played in his theory of genius loci. Scholars have recently shown interest in the way the field of translation and architecture intersect and can inform each other. Norberg-Schulz is widely read and researched, but the role of translation in his authorship has to date been undiscussed. Springing from my discovery of the note in the archive, I revisit Norberg-Schulz's phenomenological approach to architecture with a specific focus upon the notion of translation.

I uncover his references from this note and see these in light of his published work, particularly his landmark treatise Genius Loci: towards a phenomenology of architecture (1980). Building upon a long tradition of architectural theory, involving ideas from Vitruvius and Gottfried Semper, I argue that the theme of translation is recurrent throughout Norberg-Schulz's theoretical authorship, appearing in his theory of genius loci, his understanding of continuity and change, accounts of Norwegian architectural culture, and writings about the architecture of Louis Kahn.

Here, translation is seen as a tool for gathering, in the Heideggerian sense, which gives birth to an architecture in which the architectural outcome is not inferior to its pre-cursor, but simply different and from which something constructive might emerge. Seen in relation to the notion of architecture as language, it could even be argued to be a vital core to Norgerg-Schulz's longstanding interest in the meaning of architecture and place and how design must negotiate continuity and change. Understanding the genius loci as vital in architectural appropriation, as design, thus, implies a process of transla-tion, arguably a vital contribution to the ongoing interest in the intersection of architecture and translation.