Design can be viewed as a complex and on-going social accomplishment, a product of everyday trajectories between a milieu of human and material registers. Seen in this way the design practice serves as an arena for these quotidian activities. We seek to construct a more dynamic picture of architecture by connecting process and product, supplementing a project narrative with one of practice, highlighting the context in which the outcome was created. We address the research question: how does practice culture become intertwined within the designed product?

A research model emerged from the review of the literature and evolved as a loose framework to discuss the practices and projects at hand. The research focused on the particular design consideration of adaptability in an effort to direct and ground the study. The research was conducted in two stages –at first a set of interviews were conducted to gain broader insights into the everyday accounts of the practices and secondly, project case studies were selected to further investigate the topic.

The narratives reveal the culture of each practice to stress a particular meaning in each context: for Make it is about a beautiful object; for ABA a piece of social infrastructure and; for CGL a business asset. Adaptability finds itself subdued, promoted, compromised and sold as part of the design process and the resultant architecture. Our contribution extends the argument that design is entangled within its socio-cultural surroundings and grounds the culture of practice in the designed artefacts - the way in which a practice handles decision-making contingencies, both endogenous and exogenous forces, will together shape a practice disposition towards design (adaptability). Design that is driven by a strong culture that embeds exogenous influences in the approach tends to provide more adaptable solutions as part of a quest to satisfy long-term, societal concerns.

Chinese architecture was for a long time ignored because it was not produced by architects and because it did not follow Western classical expectations, and vernacular architecture was little discussed until the 1960s, and only recently embraced by its own encyclopaedia. Yet the division of labour between drawing architect and practical builder was never wholly advantageous or inevitable, for specialisation of roles can lead to differentiation, inequality, and division, as well as constructional efficiency. Only in the last century has the division between office work and construction site become so complete, resulting in losses as well as gains. Most obviously it has removed design from making, the person with the drawing pen no longer obliged to experience the materials in their weight and texture, or to discover by handling them the best ways to work them. The designer who has never picked up a brick or wielded a chisel can possess little sensibility for the material, but as long as their duties are fulfilled on paper with apparent competence, the process is carried through. On the receiving end, bricklayer or carpenter must produce what drawings demand even when good sense seems lacking, so they carry the work through grumpily without conviction instead of participating in the creative process. This paper looks at oral architecture in the Dong culture, and the way in which buildings have traditionally been produced by carpenters along with the local community, accompanied by shared rituals which reinforce their significance.

In the above cited quote, Kevin Roche, a principal associate at Eero Saarinen’s architectural practice in 1957, recalls an early morning discussion about the design of the Trans World Airlines’ (TWA) Flight Center. Roche’s story about Saarinen reminds us that at the beginning of an architectural project, a solution may come from any variety of sources, not least of all from everyday objects. This was certainly the case for Saarinen, who found the seed for his design of the structural shells of the TWA Flight Center in the rind of a grapefruit. Despite its seeming novelty, Saarinen is not unique in his approach to the generation of architectural form with models; the Greek-French composer, architect and engineer Iannis Xenakis, who while working with Le Corbusier in 1957, used strings and thick wire to design the hyperbolic shell for their Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels Expo. That a model will play a defining role in an architect’s approach to structural design is also demonstrated by the ‘spherical solution’ that Jørn Utzon discovered while stacking models of his Sydney Opera House’s shell roofs. These explorations with the expression of structure emerged at a time when a new generation of designers, including Eduardo Torroja, Pier Luigi Nervi and Felix Candela, had realised a handful of buildings using models to study and test structural form.

‘The power of architecture (the potential of architecture) is integral to the spirit that orders the grouping of the elements that make up the house; – because architecture emanates, and does not clad; it is more an odour than a drapery, a state of aggregations, more than an enveloping surface.’ (Le Corbusier)

Oficinas saliteras (nitrate works) were company towns developed to extract and process nitrates in the Antofagasta region of Chile's Atacama desert, one of the world's harshest environments. The two last of these oficinas were María Elena (founded in 1925) and Pedro de Valdivia (1931), whose development marked the introduction of the Guggenheim industrial system. Their urban design was closely related to the industrial cities of Europe and the United States, as well as the Spanish urban tradition. María Elena used an octagonal street plan, while Pedro de Valdivia is based on a crossing pattern.

A concise report about the landform, architectural, and detail design concepts for the recently completed modernisation of the Bishopsfield Housing Estate in Harlow, Essex. The objective was to develop proposals for new interventions which are directly based on, and give emphasis and new life in a contemporary way to the architectural and urban design conceptions of the original architects and town planner.

This article approaches three architectural facts, three works of architecture: three embassies designed by the same architect. They are the centre and horizon of the article and its goal is to make explicit the architectural processes, strategies, and decisions of conceiving and designing them. Therefore, this article gives words to things above all, while citing one or two insightful ideas from other authors. Its immanent verbs are to show and to reveal. Through dense descriptions and critical redrawings, this article seeks to prove that the creative design process of Guillermo Jullian de la Fuente is a continuous one, which can be seen through a deep examination of his buildings’ courtyards, the apparently empty residual useless spaces. The idea of courtyard is what gives purpose to Jullian's whole design process. Jullian's game is to decide their formal characteristics through a series of abstract matrices of lines and patches. In his design process, every step and every work is a possibility for evolution, variation, or disruption. There are no intellectual causes behind these foral studies but a set of creative decisions. This article also tries to show when and where those decisions occur. It seeks to contribute to the practice of design research.

The concluding part of a conservation study of a 455-year-old Venetian double house reveals its fascinating, multi-layered construction history.

Are the sinuous forms of the Disney Hall by Frank O. Gehry concrete testimonies of architectural ideology, or are they demonstrations of sound engineering and construction?

In the late 1960s and early 70s, many universities in Europe were designed and built using a system-oriented approach. This paper examines the specific case of the Instituto Politécnico Superior de Valencia on the basis of the documents and drawings for the scheme design competition and the production information by L35 Arquitectos, an architectural firm in Barcelona. The analysis addresses the university as an organised whole resulting from the interaction of a functional system, a construction system and an urban system.

According to the architectural theorist Charles Jencks, a major problem in architecture at this moment is the spiritual crisis, and the loss of a shared metaphysics. He believes that it is the task of architects to take responsibility for the public and esoteric meanings of a civic building, although this is an especially difficult task in a global culture where many believe there is no shared value system. Jencks is aware of the problem but at the same time he believes that a new paradigm in architecture is emerging. He describes this new paradigm as follows:

We have moved from a mechanistic view of the universe to one that is self-organising at all levels from the atom to the galaxy. Illuminated by the computer, this new worldview is paralleled by changes now occurring in architecture.

Jencks concedes that this shift in worldview is only beginning, that there is no widespread cultural movement under way, but one can discern the beginnings of a shift in architecture that relates to a profound transformation in science. Jencks is particularly interested in new sciences of complexity: fractals, nonlinear dynamics, self-organising systems, and the new cosmology. At the core of this new worldview is the new cosmology, ‘cosmogenesis’, which reveals the universe as a single, unfolding, creative event perpetually striving for new levels of self-organisation. Cosmogenesis tells us a new story of the universe and therefore Jencks perceives it as our new Genesis.