Computer models of entire cities are becoming increasingly common. The uses to which these models are put are varied and include the visualisation of proposed changes, the marketing of the facilities a city has to offer, and the mapping of socio-economic data. Developments with the Internet mean that city models can be widely accessed and it is now possible to both construct and view these models on personal computers. This paper discusses some issues relating to the construction and use of large urban models and draws upon the authors' experience of constructing one for the City of Bath.

Computers are now used routinely to create high-quality images of proposed buildings but the extent to which these images are contributing to the quality of the final product remains questionable.

Scientific laboratories are increasingly becoming a collaborative place to design in an emergent biodesign practice, yet there is very little literature on the actual place and practice. This paper describes an empirical account of a laboratory-based, interdisciplinary design research practice, exploring the intersection with algal biotechnology. Aimed at generating multiple applications of microalgae, the author spent 3 years (2012-2015) working in close collaboration with algal scientists in their research laboratories at Imperial College London. It expounds on the laboratory space and facilities and discusses collaborative experimentation with the intersectional outcome: Algae Printing. It reports that the sum of resultant biotechnological artefacts are scientific, aesthetic, and ecosophical with potential for the domestication of algal biotechnology. It reflects on the interdisciplinary collaborative practice with literature reviews and addresses suggestions for future practices. The main finding is that the integration of a designer into the laboratory life can lead to co-invention and that a role of designer in early stages of scientific research can be demonstrated.

One of the sad oddities of academic life is that great and original contributions get cursorily noticed at the time of their appearance, and are then ignored. Leslie Martin's ‘The Grid as Generator’ is one such case. Published in the book he co-authored with Lionel March in 1972, this opening essay – and indeed the entire book – represented an extraordinary breakthrough in urban research. Yet neither has been properly recognized.

Is it possible to create successful ‘sky gardens’ – spaces which encourage outdoor living and communal interaction – as part of high-rise high-density apartment developments?

The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park (QEOP) opened to the public in 2013/2014. In the preceding ten years the future of this 250-hectare site in east London was subjected to intense debate, planning and envisioning. This paper analyses the evolving vision for the Park during this period. The analysis contributes to the literature on this significant case, but it also helps us to appreciate the challenges associated with event-led urban projects and the design and management of public parks in the twenty-first century. The paper is based on the author's attendance at over thirty seminars, conferences and public events 2004–2014 at which officials and relevant professionals presented their work and ideas about the Park. These presentations were analysed alongside the enormous number of policies, plans and strategies (and accompanying media coverage) published to reveal the sort of place that was envisioned by the professionals hired to shape it.

Some long-term historical, economic and social circumstances leading to marginalisation of the British architectural profession are described. A mismatch between demand for architectural services and their supply is suggested to have contributed to marginalisation. Possible reasons are advanced for a restrained response to marginalisation by the profession. In particular, aspects of the professional culture connected with insularity and aversion to management are suggested to have been significant. However, while aspects of the professional culture hindered long-term adjustment to changing demand, they also may have helped to support design activity in the shorter term.

The students and faculty affiliated with the Design Studios at MIT have conducted several experiments in geographically distributed design activities as part of the Design Studio of the Future research and education initiatives. Some of these experiments have involved collaboration among the studios within the institute while others have involved faculty and students in academic institutions from as far East as Singapore, Australia and Hong Kong. The goal of this paper is to describe our experiences to date with synchronous distributed collaborative design over the Internet, the World Wide Web, and other commercially available communication systems. In particular, we will outline technical and social requirements for successfully conducting remote design reviews. Such reviews require a shift in design content from physical to electronic media which brings with it associated changes in roles, responsibilities, tools, and feature set. These changes are identified in this paper. Finally, we provide helpful suggestions for others who want to try the virtual review format in their organisations.

In the nineteenth century, horticulturists such as John Claudius Loudon and Joseph Paxton, aware of the new environmental possibilities of glasshouses that had been demonstrated in the context of horticulture, contemplated the use of fully-glazed structures as a means to creating new types of environments for human beings. While Loudon suggested the use of large glass structures to immerse entire Russian villages in an artificial climate, Henry Cole and Paxton envisioned large-scale winter parks, to function as new types of public spaces. These indoor public spaces were intended to grant the urban population of London access to clean air, daylight and a comfortable climate. Although glasshouses had only been experienced in the immediate context of horticulture, designed in accordance with the specific environmental requirements of foreign plants, rather than the requirements of human comfort and health, they were perceived as a precedent for a new approach to architectural design primarily driven by environmental criteria. The environmental design principles of horticulture were discussed extensively in nineteenth-century horticultural literature such Loudon's Remarks on the Construction of Hothouses (1817), Paxton's Magazine of Botany (1834-49) and the Transactions of the Horticultural Society of London (1812-44). Since the purpose of glasshouses was to facilitate the cultivation of an increasing variety of foreign plants in the temperate climate of Northern Europe, the creation of artificial climates tailored to the specific environmental needs of plants became the primary object of the design.

This paper is an account of a study of existing arcade environments in London and Cardiff. Seasonal surveys were undertaken in order to understand both the arcades' thermal performance and their contribution to the environmental diversity of the city. Arcades, which are genuine bioclimatic buildings and urban spaces, appear to generate progressive environmental transients that draw on the ability of users to adapt and thus improve their comfort. The surveys were conducted using a portable sensor array. The results are analysed in terms of environmental transients and seasonal performance.

Energy from depleting fossil fuels consumed in the construction and operation of buildings accounts for approximately half of the UK's emissions of carbon dioxide. With global warming increasing, amplifying extreme weather conditions and frequency, buildings can no longer remain static and unresponsive to their surrounding environment. Architecture must become adaptive, reactive to changes in climate, and reducing CO2, not generating it.

As a tree responds to and moderates its surrounding environment, nature can become a key inspiration in developing mechanisms to reduce the impact of climate change and resource depletion. At Astudio, our research looks to incorporate fundamental processes in living and natural systems in the architectural design of responsive surfaces and building services. A form of synthetic biology, these ‘bio-responsive’ designs combine both biological and technical systems, which adapt to, and harvest from, the immediate climatic environment. This paper will demonstrate the potential of synthetic biology in improving the resilience of our built environment, documented through our practice research and our collaborations with industry and academic institutions to date.

Astudio are world-class architects focused on reducing our buildings’ impact on the environment. Our courage in the pursuit new ways to reduce carbon and change behaviors gained us the coveted title of Architectural Practice of the Year in 2012. This unprecedented achievement led us to establish our research and development group, whose role is to investigate new ways of seeing and thinking about the challenges we face in the industry. With this group, we explore visionary concepts that enable us to consider how we may cross boundaries taking us out of architecture and work with different fields of expertise that can help us solve sustainable construction in new ways. We look to the future to propose buildable solutions today.

Concepts of the sharing economy are gaining traction in retail, finance, business and law. What has it to do with architecture? We examine the sharing economy's basis in peer-to-peer exchange, and its relationship with the intriguing technology known as the ‘blockchain.’ We look critically as the practical applications of the technology to architecture in areas such as the exchange of digital assets and the automation of certain types of contracts, as well as the metaphors about the city it brings to light as a stimulus to design.

Since the World Trade Center Towers collapsed in full view of the watching world (FEMA, 2002), the improved safety of tall buildings has become of prime importance globally (Pearson, 2001). International groups such as the UK-based ‘Safety in Tall Buildings Working Group’ (Roberts, 2002), and Arups High Rise (Wainwright, 2002) which are considering these safety implications have made recommendations for improvement in three general areas:

1. structural systems, especially with respect to progressive collapse

2. fire proofing, to structure and fabric

3. evacuation systems, concentrating specifically on vertical evacuation systems such as elevators and stairs.

Parametric design is a paradigm for the more effective use of computers in architectural design and practice. Rather than focus on design as a holistic process of formal synthesis, the more localised issue of design development will be discussed, especially with regard to the resolution of complex geometry. The triforium of Gaudí's Sagrada Familia is taken as a case study. Parametric variation is used to define surface geometry consistent with the surviving fragments of plaster models, and what we know of Gaudí's technique.

In the UK, government policy has encouraged architecture schools to be more research active and there is pressure to make the two final years of the five year course more definitively postgraduate. The University of Sheffield has responded with an experiment that combines studio teaching with real research on the city and its history. Sheffield is Britain's fourth largest city with a population of around half a million. It grew very rapidly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, It now employs a fraction of the former labour force and the city is having to adjust its identity.

The question of the nature of knowledge is vital in understanding the relation between research and practice. This question is vital, not least for architectural researchers since they often have to struggle with a rationalist ideal that research-based knowledge must be context-independent. But architects ‘know’ that this kind of knowledge does not cover the need for knowledge in architecture and design, a field between the humanities, social sciences and technology. Several volumes of arq contain articles and letters on this subject.

Recent advancements in digital technology, have not only deeply transformed the production of film and architecture but brought the two disciplines closer than ever before. The digital has allowed ground-breaking, if not hasty, changes in the way that architecture is not only produced, but also designed and conceived. In contrast, however, to the extensive use of computational design to interrogate the formal, material and structural possibilities of architecture, this article explores how new time-based media and computer generated imagery in film can unlock the story-telling, political and philosophical potential of architecture. I will focus on three projects – Agit-Prop (2014) by Liam Davis, Wates House (2014) by Daniel Cotton and my project Déjà vu (2009) – which combine techniques and tropes from both cinema and design as a means for reflection and commentary in architecture.

Originally coined by the German artist Hans Richter in the 1940s, the term ‘essay film’ describes an intimate, allusive and idiosyncratic genre at the margins between fiction and documentary. Richter poignantly suggests that the essay film makes the invisible world of thoughts and ideas visible on the screen; it produces complex thought-reflections that are not necessarily bound to reality, but can also be contradictory, irrational, and fantastical. Dealing with political and philosophical issues, the essay film is cinema at its most engaged and liberated.

Examining the three projects in comparison to examples of essay films that reflect on architecture or the city, such as Dziga Vertov’s, Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Wim Wender’s, If Buildings Could Talk (2010), and Alain Resnais’s, Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), my aim is to propose a new hybrid genre lying at the boundaries between architectural design, theory and film, what I call: the ‘architectural essay film’.

Recent criticisms in architectural pedagogy suggest that schools of architecture tend to privilege a narrow section of designers with limited skill-sets, neglecting individual differences. In order to encourage architectural pedagogy to become more inclusive, this paper revisits the value of multiple skill-sets in architectural design – following an original suggestion by Vitruvius – exploring it through the framework of multiple intelligences developed by cognitive psychologist Howard Gardner.

The design of an urban area chosen to host a mega-event such as the Summer Olympics begs fundamental questions of scale, process and context. Not least since this is an international event whose physical impact is highly localised, where the tension between ‘permanent’ architecture, landscape and the temporal is being played out over an extended period of time. This paper covers the period from 2003 when the UK bid for the 2012 Games, followed by its award in 2005, from when the construction, compulsory land purchase and clean-up exercise began in earnest. Writing in the initial post-event legacy stage of this major placemaking project means that assessing any notions of sustainability and regeneration – and the role of design therein – is necessarliy provisional. Current visions and plans produced by the agencies responsible for transforming this event site into an established community project forward until 2030 so, in regeneration terms, a twenty-five year process is under way.