The exhibition ‘Alternative Histories’ was a collaboration between the Architectural Foundation, the Drawing Matter archive, and curators Jantje Engels and Marius Grootveld, in which over eighty contemporary architectural practices were invited to make an architectural model in response to an historical architectural drawing.

By 1911, Rudolph Schindler had concluded that all architecture in the West leading up to the early twentieth century had been fixated on structure and mass, in stark contrast to the new ‘space architecture’ he championed. His dismissive categorisation of the traditional room as some kind of evolutionary relative of the cave is a reminder of the moment when a strand of Western architecture blossomed from containment into openness; from a predictable past to an exciting and uncertain future – the gift of modern architecture.

Gilles Deleuze sought an ontology that did not, according to Todd May, ‘reduce being to the knowable’. Instead he sought a widening of thought that would allow one ‘to palpate the unknowable’. Key to this expanded field of thought is an ability to think the ‘material synthetic unity’ of ‘sensation’. Deleuze drew upon art in general, and painting in particular, to describe both the nuances of sensation and how to think sensation.

How long does the present moment last? Where and when does the past begin and how does the present end? In physics – or more precisely in the special theory of relativity – the present can be defined as the coordinate origin in a spacetime diagram – an unextended point that separates an observer’s past and future light cones. From that point of view, the present has no duration at all; the past instantly assimilates the future without any hesitation in between. However, time perception tells us that we actually experience a ‘here and now’. Psychologists believe that the time range we perceive as the present, the socalled specious present, lasts about three seconds – the interval duration after which the brain may be said to reset its attention. This is already infinitely more than no duration at all but this recognition is still not enough to explain concepts like the present time or ‘today’ as an indicator of the contemporary. In the domain of history, the present seems to be a much more complex construction. When we speak of phenomena as contemporary, we place them in an extended present. We concede that the present encompasses the recent past and the near future – a temporal range that provides a stage for the actions and reactions that shape our world.

The concept of typology has recurred in architectural discourse since the term’s conception in the early nineteenth century. To describe an architectural object usually involves an act of typifying; a generalisation of built form to common characteristics. Both the analysis of architecture and its creation require this abstraction, which offers the potential to form types and expose initially unapparent relationships. Typology’s Enlightenment origins sought to link architecture to a natural order, but its terminology has subsequently been adopted in modernist rejections of mass culture and Neo-Rationalist pursuits of continua and meaning. Despite widespread use of the term, the role typology plays in the process of design remains unclear. Attempts to link its academic origins to the creation of architectural form (notably by Gottfried Semper in the nineteenth century, and Guilio Carlo Argan and Aldo Rossi in the twentieth century) have done little to synthesise the two and merely succeeded in alienating it from practice.

In 2012 the Chinese architect Wang Shu won the distinguished Pritzker Architecture Prize. Since then, his buildings and his architectural thinking have received increasing international attention. Among his many written works, Wang’s PhD thesis ‘Fictionalising Cities’ – completed in 2000 under the supervision of Professor Jiwei Lu at Tongji University in Shanghai – is widely considered the definitive statement of his architectural thought and methodology. It comprises a structuralist study of the city and its architecture, doing so through the development of two key themes. The first is Wang’s theoretical discussion of the application of structuralist-semiotic approaches to architecture, urban research, and other areas in the humanities, and the second is his reading of the Chinese city and China’s landscape architecture tradition in the light of this theoretical discussion. Wang believes that traditional Chinese cities have their own structure, components and rules of combination, and refers to them as instances of ‘texture city’ (), a term that proposes an analogy between Roland Barthes’s notion of text and the city, both of which are understood as a ‘fabric of signifiers’.

Peppered with galleries, ateliers, and upscale designer boutiques, Tokyo’s Shibuya ward is often described as a commercial haven for Japan’s urban fashionistas and style-conscious visitors. Within it, a narrow park sits atop a 1960s parking structure that was once a refuge for nearly one hundred homeless city residents until most were forcibly removed in 2010 by city officials. Dozens of blue tarp tents, umbrellas, weathered shoes, and cherished belongings were discarded, and the people who had lived there were fenced out indefinitely. Although this striking contrast of urban socioeconomic disparity is one that characterises many cities across the globe, the juxtapositions in Shibuya have been made increasingly visible by strong cohorts of unrelenting activists who have ignited decades of discourse and scholarly debate about individual rights to cities, as well as the role and agency of architects in the designing of public spaces. This article combines participant observations of art activists, semi-structured and oral history interviews of homeless residents in Tokyo, as well as historical analysis, to examine these tensions as they have played out at Miyashita Park in Shibuya, including how perpetual redesigns of the park by architects and urban planners tasked with ‘re-activating’ the park in the 1960s, 2000s, and again in the late 2010s, have been vehemently opposed. More specifically, the article examines how a vocal group of art activists organised in opposition to the park’s most recent redesign efforts sponsored by Nike and the idea that such a public-private partnership could produce an inclusive public space. Instead, the activists worked to problematise the appropriateness of terms such as ‘public’ altogether. Through art installations, writing, impromptu concerts, sporting events, and protests that engaged with the politics of their own bodies, the activists turned to alternative genealogies and definitions of ‘public’ as a way to connect more particularly to Japanese urban form and to resist hegemonic and imported concepts of ‘public’ as reproduced and reinforced by architects often without challenge. By drawing on alternative terms, such as akichi, meaning ‘open land’, the activists argue for a different sense of spatial inclusivity than the supposedly universal democratic ideals associated with designs for public spaces in Tokyo.

If you want to know what society looks like, look at our cities, look at their distribution of spaces, their scales, their densities. Look at how cities curate events. This article sketches the basis for architectural thinking on individual/collective social formations as read through the texts of Vitruvius and Freud with support from Aristotle, Arendt, and Lacan, in parallel with city projects by the rooms+cities studio, a Master’s-level design research unit at the University of Dundee, which is itself a collective project that begins with the close reading of canonic city plans in search of the collective body of knowledge that comprises the discipline and practice of architecture. Teaching may not be the only way to change built environment thinking but it is one way. Vittorio Gregotti reckoned that the schools were best placed to challenge establishment practices with avantgarde thought. We use architecture to think the relation between the individual and the collective, and thereby to make a space for politics and public life. This article is thus comprised of two arguments, one predominantly textual, the other graphic, of complementary weight and importance, that run side by side and occasionally cross or mingle.

Mark Latham is an advocate of modern methods of construction in residential design and development. He reflects upon how contemporary approaches to modular housing can reshape residents’ experiences of suburban settings.