‘I have long been dreaming a dream: that I am a drop of dew on the leaf of a nameless plant deep in the valley of some far-off mountain range. The dewdrop rolls down into a little brook and mingles with its waters; the brook flows into a river which in turn discharges into the sea, and the waves of the sea in their turn lave the coasts of all the countries of the earth. Thus I picture to myself the cultural interchange of all peoples, and it has been my wish to take part, even if only as one little drop, in this important work.’

(Tetsuro Yoshida, 1955)

The work of the American painter Jackson Pollock speaks to us not only through exhibitions of paintings hung on gallery walls, but also through the films and photographs [1] of Hans Namuth which exposed Pollock's phased working process to the public. In the first of two distinct phases Pollock is seen immersed in, and in intimate interaction with, a large horizontal canvas. This records traces of his movement and expressive gestures in heterogeneous media. A second phase is then triggered by a pivotal operation: the horizontal recording and working surface is transposed to a vertical viewing plane. Leo Steinberg recounts that Pollock: ‘would tack the canvas on to a wall – to get acquainted with it, he used to say; to see where it wanted to go. He lived with the painting in its uprighted state, as with a world confronting his human posture’.

Chinese men of letters pursued the idea of a poetic life in feudal times, and this ideal was often embodied in traditional gardening and landscape paintings. However, it has been argued that the pursuit of this traditional notion of poetic life has been lost with the arrival of modernity. In this view, Chinese cities are seen as losing their identities and becoming Westernised. Wang Shu, the Pritzker Prize-winning Chinese architect, has taken great efforts to rebuild an understanding of Chinese cultural identity: by looking back to the idea of poetic life reflected in traditional gardens and landscape paintings, and attempting to recompose a sense of poetry for contemporary architecture. This article aims to examine Wang’s approaches to this sense of poetry in one of his projects, the design of Xiangshan campus while, at the same time, seeking to offer a Chinese reflection on the architecture of poetry.

However, Wang’s approach to using visual and metaphoric techniques in reviving the city’s poetic system can be questioned. His tactics, considered here in relation to the Xiangshan campus, arguably do not fully understand Chinese aesthetics, and do not pose fully a contemporary definition of the ‘sense of poetry’ in relation to the traditional Chinese mind. A holistic interpretation of architectural poetry should concern life, both as living and pleasure, material and spirit, rather than dealing primarily in visual composition. Nevertheless, his efforts in exploring Chinese-ness and his influence on Chinese architects remain highly significant.

Half a decade past the consolidation of the first ‘digital turn’ in architecture, contemporary designers seem to have decidedly embraced the unprecedented power of machinic thinking, subsequently adopting its embedded logical processes. We may, however, pose a critical question in the context of this ‘second computational turn’ : Are there any non-computable elements of thought in the development of spatialised digital intelligence? As a partial response, this paper unpacks a series of productive relationships intersecting urban drawing and the passing of time in the context of a data-driven design environment. This enquiry looks into the processes carried out by a custom-built robotic drawing machine, tracing dynamic vector data streams collated from fieldwork developed via GPS tracking of individual urban displacements in Cagliari, Sardinia during April 2017. Its machinic drawing protocol re-enacts this continuous, heterogeneous, collectively constructed urban landscape as it slowly remaps its territorial occupation into the target surface of the paper.

The hybrid digital-analogue apparatus draws from a long historical lineage of vector-based machinic systems designed for architectural drafting. Situating themselves between the human hand and the surface of the paper, those machines acted as carriers of embodied spatial knowledge that could be selectively actualised into specific design processes and materialisations. Deploying a range of intertwined digital and analogue media, this machinic environment is used to articulate a data-based urban drawing research practice and a subsequent ‘anexact’ drawing research methodology that further elaborates on the durational and multiplicitous aspects of the data-based drawings. This body of work is also reflected on as a visual research methodology, which taps into Bernard Cache's interest in architectural computation as a way to pursue philosophical knowledge ‘by other means’ and into Gilbert Simondon's notion of the ‘technical ensemble’ – emphasising the productive forms of indetermination emerging from its internal informational transfers.

In architecture the link between life and art can be so strong that one can see them as fused, as Heidegger did. We encounter buildings in connection with the life that inhabits them, but the relationship between building and life is not that of cause and effect. The building is a tool, for which a variety of uses might be found. Gilles Deleuze saw ideas as tools, and valued ‘nomadism’ – moving between sets of ideas. He deployed a rhetoric of mobility and invention that encourages the free play of ideas, while effectively resisting the lure of Heideggerís ‘blood and soil’ nostalgia.

This paper investigates Gottfried Semper's use of comparative science as a basis for a theory of architecture. It traces Semper's reliance on the works of Jean-Nicholas-Louis Durand and the zoologist Georges Cuvier. Following Michel Foucault's argument that the emergence of comparative science entails a decisive transition in modern thought, the paper explores the origins and implications of Semper's comparative theory of architecture. Through this focus, the paper attempts to identify and explore an essential tension inherent in Semper's work between, on the one hand, his sensitive recognition of the symbolic significance of architecture, and on the other, the proto-positivism implied in his ‘science of invention’. This dilemma still conditions our contemporary architectural culture, making the study of Semper's complex and conflicting ideas more relevant than ever.

Architects rely on conceptual models of users during the design process, but if these models are inadequate the buildings may fail to meet user needs. User research, carried out by architects themselves or by specialist researchers, can improve architects' understanding of user needs. The dissemination of specialists' research findings to practising architects is crucial. Examples of user research on five topics are summarised.

The Museum of Natural History, London, typified the state of environmental service design in large public buildings when construction started in 1873, as described in an earlier paper in arq, vol. 2. Its exemplary systems included both ventilation with heating and the architect's use of towers, especially the novel multi-sleeved versions which he described as ‘thermosyphonic’, as ventilation exhausts. This paper describes how, both in critical design decisions during construction and in physical adjustments made after its occupation in 1881, the Museum reveals both contemporary practices and the professional skills of its architect and engineer.

The work of Amsterdam architects Felix Claus and Kees Kaan is moving away from formulae associated with modern architecture. This paper studies their attempt to find meaning which is at once more abstract and more direct, and notes that a guiding light in their search is a fundamental concern with the physical realities and compromises of the building process.

This paper describes the use of timber as a rainscreen cladding on David Chipperfield's River and Rowing Museum at Henley. The extensive use of green oak in this way is the key to a precise and beautifully crafted building and was the result of collaboration between the architects and the Timber Research and Development Association. This use of timber represents a major shift in the work of David Chipperfield from concrete toward a wider palette of materials. Henley is also an important example of a recent trend in the development of timber as an external cladding material. Timber cladding as a rainscreen will be discussed in the context of the Henley project in terms of its performance factors and the design and construction process, and analysed with a view to drawing some conclusions for its future use.

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.

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.

In 1554 the Renaissance architectural master, Andrea Palladio (born Andrea della Gondola, or ‘di Pietro’), produced two little-known guidebooks to the city of Rome. These were unillustrated texts, one of which described the ancient wonders of the city while the other concentrated on the later medieval churches. Guidebooks of this kind had existed since medieval times but Palladio introduced a new kind of structure to the guide by organising the material into logical routes which the tourist could follow. Since then architectural guidebooks have proliferated and the introduction of photography and high quality graphics has changed their appearance significantly. However, in many respects things have not altered a great deal. Architectural guidebooks still present a view of a city which is that of a single individual (or small group of authors) and the selection of the material determines what is deemed to be of significance. Some guides, such as those by Nikolaus Pevsner, attempt to present the buildings in as neutral a way as possible in order to give the work a degree of objectivity but, nonetheless, the visitor is still being presented with a particular view of the city.

By any measure Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a landmark in recent influential ideas. The very term ‘paradigm shift’, now common parlance, derives from this 1962 work. Structure redirected its own domain, the philosophy of science, from a logical positivist orientation in its evaluation of scientific progress to one that accommodates a complex mix of sociological, linguistic and psychological factors. Perhaps because of this interdisciplinary inclusiveness, Kuhn's insights have informed theory in many disciplines. A survey of the recent literature includes works in anthropology, comparative literature, criminal justice, art history, education and feminist studies.

Every architectural design emerges from a process. The different tools and media constitutive of these processes in turn foster approaches to architecture, as well as the creation of new categories of knowledge. With the progressive development of computer-based design techniques, the contemplation of the procedural aspects of architecture becomes increasingly significant for the production and reception of architecture.

It is from this perspective that this special issue sets out to examine the specific roles that processes and practices play in computer-based design by seeking to illuminate those techno-cultural contexts and historical and intellectual bonds that unite them. Which traditions and strategies, and what historical correlations among architecture, culture, and technology, have motivated and shaped the development of computer-based design processes?

Building, furniture design and the decorative arts collaborate to embody Fascist political values and mass identity in an icon of modern architecture.

The paper examines the concept of Building Science through the role of emerging scientific research and technologies. The paper takes as its starting point the Technology Readiness Strategy which is a way of judging the state of a technology in terms of its readiness for environmental deployment and relevance to industry. The paper argues that this model is limited and uses the example of Synthetic Biology to argue for a type of building science which is both speculative and grounded and which may not lead to immediate or short-term applications but is driven by hypothetical contexts and imagined futures. The paper argues that both scientific knowledge and architectural research may be enhanced through deeper collaboration and gives the example of a project to develop a genetically engineered mechanical sensing bacteria capable of making materials which respond to physical forces in their environment. The paper suggests that, while initiated with an application domain in mind, the knowledge gained from the project has pointed to alternative avenues for creative design explorations. The paper concludes that an alternative form of Building Science may be possible in which the term ‘building’ is both a verb and a noun.

Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978), one of the lesser known architects of the second half of the twentieth century, studied architecture at Cornell University between 1962 and 1968. Although he had always been part of an active circle of artists and architects with whom he shared his radical ideas, Matta-Clark was generally excluded from the architectural milieu since his proposed interventions were thought to be unsuitable for accommodation. His exclusion from the architectural scene was marked; following his Window-Blow-Out(s) project in 1976, as Mary Jane Jacob has pointed out, his colleagues – including Peter Eisenman and the members of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) – found it very hard to accept an architect with a BB gun in hand. The removal of the facade in the 1974 Bingo project; the elimination of the thresholds in the 1973 Bronx Floors; or the cut to a suburban house in the 1974 Splitting project were all evaluated as temporary, and destructive in the making; and were thus regarded as artistic actions to transform buildings into objects. As such, his critical architectural productions remained overshadowed behind a series of seemingly violent artistic intrusions.