In 1972 the famous diagram of the ‘Decorated Shed’ was introduced into the architectural discourse; it implied a definition of ‘architecture as shelter with decoration on it’ [1]. The diagram was part of urban research into the commercial environment of Las Vegas that was interpreted by the researchers – Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour – as ‘a new type of urban form’ that they meant ‘to understand’ in order ‘to begin to evolve techniques for its handling’. Yet the critique on this and other research and designs by Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown focused essentially on questions of form and more specifically of the image of architecture.

Histories of the advent of architectural computation typically describe a moment of transition from physical models and drawings to codes, information and data, leading almost inevitably to the digital technologies of the present. However, the trajectory from material form and its calculated representation was not always so direct. The work of Frei Otto, and the Institute for Lightweight Structures (IL) that he founded in 1964 at the University of Stuttgart, is an example of how material experimentation, media techniques, and calculation came together in novel ways. This history is distinguished by the fact that calculating machines played a minor role. In the 1960s and 1970s, researchers at the Institute for Lightweight Structures arrived at ways of making and calculating architectural form that was arguably proto-digital. But this began with entirely material processes that were not easily turned into numerical data, nor were they limited to the immaterial ‘space’ of the screen where every coordinate position – and thus every form – had to be numerically accounted for. Experiments, devices, tools, and modes of representation were developed to serve as means of translation between incalculable materiality and calculable information. Unlike early experiments with computation that happened largely within the black box of the computer, here the interaction between material objects and data took place in physical laboratories and workshop spaces.

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.

As a discipline, architects pride themselves on the precision and exactitude of their spatial endeavors – no minutiae is too small, no details too inconsequential. However, when exactitude becomes the representational aspiration of architecture, when the images architects produce ‘almost exactly’ deliver the reality they hope to soon conjure, a tautology ensues. This article explores the exigencies of the ⅞ scale – a scale that is almost exactly but not quite the same as reality. It is the remaining ⅛ that eschews representational tautology, that produces the effect of exactness, and that populates architecture's historical and spatial imaginaries. Through the lens of one highly symbolic and historically configured room, the Oval Office, this article attempts to map the hazards and pitfalls of realism as a disciplinary aspiration, while simultaneously embracing the figurative realm of the ⅛ and the promise of its imaginative potential.

Created by David Simon in 2002, the HBO series The Wire presents the established moral code of a society that lies outside mainstream America and depicts institutions designed to maintain the status quo. Terry Eagleton suggests of Dickens, that his ‘grotesque realism is a stylistic distortion in the service of truth, a kind of astigmatism which allows us to see more accurately.’ The content of Simon's programme operates in a similar way. It proposes an alternative to academic narratives able to disseminate knowledge beyond the closed-off world of peer review.

The richness, uniqueness and intricacy of The Wire has made it difficult to trace its thematic and stylistic heritage. The programme has been referred to as a ‘lyrical sociology’, ‘a type of urban sociology’, ‘a rendering of urban theory’, a ‘fontless social science’, a ‘theoretical archetype’, a ‘Dickensian show’, and more. At an aesthetic level, The Wire has been qualified as a work of ‘psychological realism’, ‘social realism’, as something aspiring to Fredric Jameson's aesthetics of ‘cognitive mapping’, or even a ‘rich counterpart to actor-network-theory’.

In the post-Second World War period, Italian architects opened up a debate on the role of history and time in architectural discourse that resulted in multiple interpretations of historical time in their work. Vittorio Gregotti, one of the main protagonists of the discussion, offered an interpretation of time based on an assemblage of intellectual tendencies, from phenomenology to structuralism and the history of the longue durée. This paper traces ideas that Gregotti developed in his less known and as-yet un-translated texts such as Il territiorio dell’architettura from 1966 as well as in his project for the University of Calabria from 1972. In these, Gregotti makes an original contribution to the problem of history in relationship to urban and natural environments.

How refreshing to re-read Leslie Martin's classic ‘The Grid as Generator’ (arq 4/4). Where did it hide during the last 28 years? How useful it would have been as a measure for the proliferation of approaches to the city that have followed in a period that includes Krier's journey from the Royal Mint Square perimeter block to Poundbury, and Koolhaas' from Manhattan to the new dense megacities of the Far East.

Martin's essay is in many ways exemplary. Coming from a cultured architectural position, but open to the possibility that certain parameters of design can usefully be quantified, he opens the possibility of a middle way for architectural research between the established numerically-based model of the physical sciences and the emerging discursive models of cultural studies.

‘When you go into a room and see a box of cigars, a computer and a horse you look for similarities, but if the room contains only one object you look for differences.’ (Luciano Berio, introducing a BBC Symphony Orchestra weekend of his music at The Barbican in 1990)

This paper considers the problem of tradition in contemporary architectural practice in Turkey as well as in other countries of the world. When it is presented as the display of stylised historical images, tradition loses its relevance in the present and becomes perceived as something that always belongs to the past. In such a case tradition opposes itself against modernity as independent and sovereign. In her writings German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt considers the problem of modernity as a problem of tradition which is mainly caused by the polarisation and particularisation between past and future. Addressing her writings, in the architectural realm, tradition becomes past orientated when it is perceived as something completed as appearances. However, perhaps tradition is more future directed and continuously attempts to actualise itself between past and future.

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.

There is a growing interest in applying principles of biological morphogenesis to architectural practice. Biological morphogenesis differs from conventional architectonics in several important ways; architecture is teleological, biology has no purpose; architecture is blueprinted and top-down, morphogenesis is bottom-up and emergent; construction uses external agents and skills (builders) whereas embryos build themselves from largely internal information; control of construction sites is hierarchical while morphogenesis uses rich feedback and distributed control; biological systems show adaptation and self-repair. Many materials are, however, common to the two, and both use techniques of scaffolding. There are several ways in which the fields can be brought together, either using biological systems directly (for example in synthetic biological approaches), or by engineering inorganic systems to realize the potentially useful processes characteristic of living things, such as automatic adaptation to the environment, and self-repair.

Cybernetic simulation programs that renewed the development process of urban agglomerations began to emerge as part of a paradigm shift that took place in the 1960s. During this period, changes in urban planning evolved in the context of cybernetically-informed research methods, in which architects and systems scientists focused on the environmental control of social and cultural planning processes. As such, the urban fabric became an object of planning and regulation. These events in turn generated the need for ‘big data’ processing in architecture. Consequently, the reconfiguration of urban architectural fabric emerged as a topic of scientific operation.

In this context, in 1967, the Architecture Machine Group developed ‘Urban 5’, a planning program for urban participation based on man-machine dialogue. In the late 1960s, systems scientist Jay Wright Forrester also developed ‘Urban Dynamics’, a computer simulation exploring the interdependence of urban population, housing, and industry in the urban fabric. It was in this same 1967 environment that the Austrian architect Bernhard Hafner began to work autonomously, and without any personal relation to the other two projects, on a program for the ‘Comparative Simulation of Alternative Urban Prototypes’, based on the assumption that the design of urban forms had to be accompanied by the simulation of fields of urban dispersion.

The painter Emil Nolde's studio was built in 1927 and, the following year, construction was begun on what was to become the house that he shared with his wife Ada in Seebüll. The building was located on a mound in the middle of the marsh, not far from the new border between Germany and Denmark that was made as a result of the vote in 1920. Nolde had designed the building according to the principle that it was to have ‘three facades following the passage of the sun’. Like a sunflower, the facades of the building were to reach out and take in the changing light in step with the sun's flight across the sky. There would be ample opportunity for both skylight and sunlight to enter the building as the positioning on a mound raised the building above the surroundings. In Nolde's view, up on the mound, ‘the entire celestial sphere was above us; it was greater than a semicircle - strange how even a small elevation in the flat landscape can make the vault of heaven seem larger’.

Once a prosperous manufacturing town, Geelong in Victoria, Australia is undergoing a process of deindustrialisation and, in turn, redefining its identity to better retain viability in a globalised world. For instance, the town bid to host a Guggenheim museum on its Eastern Beach shore at the turn of the millennium, and has recently become a UNESCO City of Design (2017). Like so many declining regional industrial towns, Geelong has been undercut by the new economic forces, and has sought a new identity in cultural economies. The ‘Vacant Geelong’ project, which began at Deakin University in 2015 and is ongoing, evolved as a response to vacant industrial architecture in Geelong. Major industries including Ford (vehicles), Alcoa (aluminium), timber sawmills, wool mills, Pilkington Glass, cement works, and the oil refinery once defined the town and its history as an industrial architectural landscape.1 Major industries transformed the architectural and cultural terrain. Despite these cycles of transformation and erasure, and counter to a progressive and chronological approach to change, the ‘Vacant Geelong’ project explored this vacancy of industrial operation, yet presence of industrial architecture. Through inscriptions – artworks, design projects, creative research, installations, texts – it addressed those material realities that did not leave, the industrial structures – silos, ducts, chimneys, warehouses – that give Geelong its continuing industrial architectural character.

The wall, as constructed, is 519.5mm thick, plus or minus the irregularities of reused flagstone. It consists of 12.5mm plasterboard, a vapour barrier, 145mm timber studs, 150mm ‘Rockwool’ insulation, 12mm Far Eastern marine grade plywood, ‘Tyvek’ building membrane, a 50mm cavity, stainless-steel wall ties, an unforeseen leaf of 100mm concrete block, and a heavily debated skin of 200–300mm reused flagstone. It follows the original footprint of an 1840s longhouse, now reduced, perhaps, to a representational role. Built by a team of three – two architects and a marine biologist – this wall is the result of five years of planning, sketching, drawing, specifying, sourcing, shipping, and self-building. It contains adaptations, compromises, guilt and uncertainties. The project draws both from phenomenological beliefs concerning a site embedded with accumulated memories, and rationalised predictions developed from a Modernist architectural education. The constructed result stands as a negotiation between theoretical aims and the pragmatics of a self-build on an exposed island.

Architectural debates of the 1950s – particularly between ‘empirical’ and ‘formal’ strands of Modernism – are highlighted by a study of the architectural projects, biography and milieu of Colin St John Wilson.

For Hugo Häring, the role of geometry was one of the central issues in architecture. For him, geometric ordering systems were a deadening force. He rejected Le Corbusier's view that ‘geometry is the daughter of the universe’ and doubted the aesthetic efficacy of proportional systems. He believed that there was no absolute: geometry had different meanings at different times and places and was often present for purely technical reasons. This essay on proportion was written shortly after the Nazis came to power and Häring lost all his work. It was then that he turned to writing, both as a means of legitimating his Modernism as not un-German and, as in the case of this essay, of setting out his developing theories. Peter Blundell Jones' introduction gives the background to this, the first translation of this important work to be published in English.

In 1960, Belgian artist Rene Magritte painted La Corde Sensible. In the background is a natural landscape, characterised by mountains and by a river. At the front is a champagne glass topped by a cloud. It prompts questions: does the cloud have its own weight? Is the glass mediating between the liquid state of the river and the gaseous state of the cloud? A few years later in 1972, the Viennese group Haus-Rucker-Co depicted a similar provocative scenario in ‘Big Piano’. In place of a champagne glass, a ladder with many steps – each with a different sound – reaches towards a cloud, which is a site of immersion and the loss of orientation.

These two examples, along with other artistic manifestations from the same period, reveal the rise of an aesthetic sensibility, which for the first time, questioned traditional physical and perceptual boundaries seemingly fixed by tradition, pursuing a sort of material evanescence. They illustrate a process of formal and conceptual dematerialisation. Generally, one may say that, from the second half of the twentieth century, the discipline of aesthetics experienced a radical change: shifting away from semantic or hermeneutic interpretations back to its original meaning: aesthetics as aisthesis, the ancient Greek word for perception. This implied a rediscovery of the body, the rehabilitation of the senses, and a renewed interest in phenomenology.