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.

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.

Austerity measures have been discussed widely since sweeping cuts have been made to local government budgets following the global financial crisis of 2007-08. More than a decade later, the impact of these measures on everyday lives of communities is still growing. We use the context of austerity to discuss our research in partnership with Community Place Initiatives in the city of Sheffield, UK, and to examine the approaches they use to attempt to overcome the shortcomings and challenges of precarity.

This article focuses on revealing the impacts that budget cuts have had and are still having, and speculates upon what these findings mean for the role that schools of architecture can play outside the academy. We draw on research conducted by Urban Education Live Sheffield - a team of researchers and educators from the School of Architecture, University of Sheffield in the UK, and the Department of Architecture, Technische Universität Braunschweig in Germany. The team is part of a broader international project, Urban Education Live (UEL), a multidisciplinary research project with partners from across Europe funded by the ERA-NET Cofund Smart Urban Futures (ENSUF) programme, established by the Joint Programming Initiative Urban Europe.

Through a multi-modal ethnographic and design-led approach combining interviews, case studies, and ‘live’ pedagogy, we examine how Community Place Initiatives in Sheffield deal with a context that has fundamentally changed the ways in which they operate in, or in relation to, their place over the past decade. We explore how collaborations between these local partners and architectural researchers and students can be mutually beneficial within this context, in order to speculate upon how such collaborations can be more effective in their contribution to local place-based urban capacity building and future resilience.

Among the legacy of Modernist architecture, the Danteum project is an extraordinary attempt to inscribe a literary expedition into architectural organism. Beyond its absolute form, the project makes use of the plastic effects of architectonics to create immersive ‘atmospheres’ that elicit states of mind and transform the continuous movement through the scheme into a dramatised journey. The coexistence of immersion and progression provides competing challenges to visitors' narrative sensemaking. This paper will analyse the Danteum as a hybrid system of episodic and situational narrations that turns this geometrical space int o a narrative labyrinth.

Healing gardens have been widely used in healthcare settings, but rarely to heal the psychological illnesses of youth in inner-city neighbourhoods who have lost friends and family to violent deaths. The Urban Ecology Sanctuary in a courtyard of Du Sable High School in Chicago serves as a model of what such a garden might be like, providing places in which young people can reflect upon their loss, regain a sense of purpose, and reconnect to the natural world. This Sanctuary shows how architecture and landscape architecture can buffer the worst effects of social disruption.

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.

Infrastructure has become a relatively established field of inquiry in architectural academia over the last two decades, insofar as it builds on the rational and generative overtones of the term. However, the contrasting possibility that infrastructure might represent an obstacle for the city and its architecture has often been overlooked. Simultaneously, the idea that the city might be considered as a piece of architecture that can be comprehended, controlled, and eventually designed as a whole (whether from scratch or incrementally), has recently resurfaced, echoing Aldo Rossi's concept of ‘primary elements’. In his seminal book The Architecture of the City, Rossi described the way these elements ‘participate in the evolution of the city over time in a permanent way, often becoming identified with the major artefacts constituting the city’. But, he noted:

Our paper examines the Brick House, completed by Caruso St John Architects in 2005. Nearly invisible from the street with its unusual form and ‘brick’ nomenclature, this clearly is no ordinary house. Despite or perhaps because of its elusive character, which confounds expectations, the house has won universal praise from commentators but has prompted little deeper analysis. The architects set out their agenda for the project in an allusive text that, despite intriguing contradictions, has remained largely unquestioned.

Recent scholarly work has shifted our attention to the ways in which gardens negotiated the particularities of their ecological situation. New studies look at the archaeology of gardens, a fundamentally architectural shift which excavates issues of resource use. Materially specific research which sets gardens back into their hydraulic and topographic context has illuminated new dimensions of their inventive praxis. Many gardens turn out, in fact, to have been very carefully constructed in relation to a sensitive reading of local hydrological conditions. What is more, the facts of these sources seem also to be integrally enmeshed with their spatial and poetic aspects, providing salutary examples as our attention returns to what we are now calling sustainability.

How might one construct a design studio project? In addition to achieving educational objectives, it must engage both the student and his or her teachers, but if it also involves the whole year as a group it can prove especially rewarding. Last session I looked for an Honours year programme whereby each student could evolve a project that would have similarities with those of their colleagues but that would also be different. If a project were to start with something conceptual – for example, a thematic thread – then there could be both common generic facilities and uniquely different facilities arising from data collected during field studies in particular locations. I've discovered that this sort of idea works well when a large group is doing a project over a whole academic year. On the one hand there is always a common level of interest across the studio because every student feels they are in the same boat as their mates, but on the other hand their own project has unique characteristics. This means that the type of collaboration between students isn't suffocating because no one is ever actually doing the same thing in the same place; everyone is doing both similar and different things in similar but different places. The title of the programme that emerged was ‘Stretched City – East meets West’.

Architecture in South Africa is at a crossroads. After years of repression and isolation during which contemporary architecture lost its way, there is now a desperate need for architects to respond to the social and cultural challenges of a society riven by massive material contrasts. Within architecture schools, a student body more representative of society than hitherto is engaged in projects which reflect the very diverse needs of the community. Central to the effectiveness of such teaching programmes is the presence of teachers fully engaged in practice, creating a responsible architecture for a renewed nation.

In the summer of 2009, while on vacation in Italy, I lay on a deck chair on a beach under the scorching sun reading Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. I had taken Mike Davis's book as holiday reading after becoming interested in attitudes to sustainability as represented in films through supervising the unpublished dissertation ‘The Science and Fiction of Sustainable Living’. The dissertation analysed approaches to the green movement of the 1970s versus those held today. It did this through the study of ecological science fiction movies made during the two periods. As someone grounded in humanities research, using film studies research methods rather than conventional building science methods seemed to me an engaging, original approach to sustainability. The dissertation compared the 1972 American environmental science fiction film Silent Running to the 2007 British science fiction film Sunshine. During this supervision, the student gave me a copy of the films. Because Silent Running resonated with me, I took it on that same Italian holiday and watched it again. I recall thinking that Silent Running offered a departure point for an alternative kind of sustainable design studio. Then and there, I selected a film clip that I screened – in the background and without volume – at studio presentations to students held in September 2009.

The utilization of solar energy involves an interplay between heating demand and the use of building materials. It is therefore important to use environmental analysis methodologies which take into account the effects of building materials. Two typical construction types, lightweight timber-based and heavyweight concrete-based, are therefore compared using specific housing forms. These forms represent differing passive solar strategies that can be seen in contemporary Danish housing. The results highlight the diversity of effective environmental design strategies available to architects.

Wishing to write about his work, I approached Peter Zumthor in February 1996. We agreed to do something substantial but still accessible, and eventually settled on the format of a long interview. We then chose three of his buildings that would raise different issues – the now famous Thermal Baths in Vals, the Wohnsiedlung Spittelhof and Topography of Terror in Berlin.Readers unfamiliar with these three buildings will find them comprehensively described and illustrated in the superb Peter Zumthor Works: buildings and projects 1979–97 with text by Peter Zumthor and photographs by Hélène Binet, published by Lars Müller Publishers, Baden, 1998, ISBN 3-907044-58-4. This and the related Thinking Architecture by Peter Zumthor were the subject of an extended review in arq 3/1.

The interviews were held in English on 22 July 1997 over the course of the day in his studio in Haldenstein. They are published in the order in which they were held. We edited them together in August 2000, resisting the desire to amend them.

I first learnt of his work in 1988 when he was a visiting professor at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Santa Monica where he first delivered the lecture later published as ‘A Way of Looking at Things’. I would like to thank him for agreeing to share his thoughts on architecture, and for the often difficult and unfashionable reminder that to do things well takes time.

Construction is by far the largest material-consuming activity in the UK. In 2016, the territory produced more than 800 kg of construction and demolition (C&D) waste per person.1 Most of these building materials are energy intensive to produce and environmentally costly to transport. Their premature replacement therefore contributes significantly to the increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

In this article, we argue that in order to properly assess the potentials, challenges, and implications of the digital transformation in architecture and construction, we need to better understand the political-economic dynamics behind it and examine it in light of the current reorganisation of global capitalism. The focus of this article is therefore on the larger political-economic and techno-economic conditions that are shaping the implementation of digital technologies in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) sector. Based on document analysis on the digital turn in architecture and construction, along with interviews with AEC professionals, we argue that the logic of platform capitalism is beginning to transform the industry, with Building Information Modelling (BIM) acting as an obligatory passage point and government policies as gate-openers. The article, first, discusses concepts of platform and platform capitalism and indicates how these apply to recent reconfigurations of actor and power relations in the field. Second, it reviews some of the developments in digital architecture from 2D drawings to BIM and beyond. Third, it examines the role of government policies as driving forces in the digital transformation. Forth, it takes a closer look at the case of software producer Autodesk and their BIM product Revit, which illustrates how the logic of platform capitalism has gained traction in architecture and construction. Finally, it concludes that some expectations can be derived from these observations: In the realm of design software, we can expect a further concentration of economic power and a near-monopolistic structure of the market. Moreover, we can expect a shift of focus and investment from architectural design to socio-digital modes of construction and urban planning that benefit primarily real estate owners, investors, developers, and construction companies. Furthermore, we can expect large construction firms to secure themselves a comfortable starting position as early adopters, while SMEs are facing bigger challenges to benefit from the digital transformation. Lastly, we can expect a further encroachment of tech giants and domain outsiders such as Alphabet into architecture and construction, turning buildings and cities into machines for data extraction.