The ‘Compact City’ model of sustainable development relies almost exclusively on transport energy analysis to justify the raising of low residential densities by the insertion of higher density dwellings within them. Higher densities mean more people per hectare, which makes public transport more economically viable, which cuts down on car use, which saves transport energy. Suburbs are very popular, however - over 80% of the populations of the UK and the US would prefer to live in them - and they can't all be bulldozed or ‘densified’. Turning the Compact City model on its head frees us to ask what environmental advantages low densities might have. Most suburbs have abundant open land, and land can perform: grow food and fuel, collect and recycle water, modify harsh microclimates, save and generate energy. The ‘performative’ potential of the suburban landscape can transform it into a grown infrastructure contributing to the reduction of the overall environmental impact of a city region, justifying its relatively low densities.

In 2005 the Arts and Humanities Research Council initiated a review of practice-led research in art, design and architecture. The purpose of the review was to develop a ‘comprehensive map of recent and current research activity in the area’. What quickly became obvious to the team that won the bid to run the review (led by the three authors) was that to map activity one first had to attempt to define it. The term ‘practice-led research’ means many different things to different people and so immediately raises debate. The positions range from those who believe that the act of making or designing alone constitutes research, to those who believe that research (as analytical activity) is incommensurable with design (as synthetic activity). For the former, the knowledge contained within the artefact is self-evident and beyond the need for additional explication; for the latter, knowledge resides outside the artefact and in the realm of its dissemination and interpretation. The importance of the AHRC review is not that it will settle these arguments, but that it will provide a much firmer context in which to place them.

This paper deals with issues and possibilities of cross-cultural study in architectural education, especially the teaching of architecture history and theory in schools with students of diverse cultural background. The paper argues that responding to cultural diversity involves not only a more comprehensive curriculum, but also a correlated view of curriculum content, skills, course structure and interdisciplinarity, and a sensitivity towards differences that cannot be accounted for in a universalist frame of reference. Instances of the cultural possibilities offered by the Chinese tradition to contemporary architectural education are given as examples and these are related to a geo-cultural landscape of Chinese communities in which Western schools might exercise a significant role.

This paper is not a comprehensive survey of the architectural career of Arata Isozaki, one of the most distinguished practicing architects in the world today and the 2019 winner of the Pritzker Prize, but a specific look at his formative years of the 1960s when he began to build his own design methodology. It delineates Isozaki’s encounter with the avant-garde art movement of the 1960s, collectively called “Anti-Art, ” against the backdrop of the “anti-spirit” of Japanese society. Although Isozaki’s artistic side has been overstated at times, previous studies rarely addressed how his intensive interactions with art circles played a role in shaping his design methodology. I would like to examine the convergence of creative individuals and cross-disciplinary connections to understand Isozaki’s architectural thinking.

This study examines how Isozaki’s collaborations with his artist contemporaries enabled him to formulate the notion of the “invisible city, ” a radically new design concept characterised by the expansion of the nature of architecture from producing isolated built-forms to all-encompassing natural and manmade environments. However, after drawing on communications and information theory, which prevailed in 60s architectural circles, Isozaki’s destructive and anarchistic connotation of “invisible city” was channeled into a systematic cybernetic model and eventually transformed into a constructive planning method. I will discuss the realisation of a cybernetic environment at the Festival Plaza of Expo’ 70 and trace the legacy of “invisible city” in his later postmodern work.

This paper, which is based upon a talk given to the Martin Centre Research Society at the Department of Architecture at Cambridge in October 1994, examines the continuing relevance of the model of architectural research which was proposed at the Oxford Conference on architectural education in 1958. It suggests that the Oxford model, with its roots in the procedures of the sciences, in which ‘fundamental’ research precedes ‘development’, before leading into practical application, fails to account for the role of the designer in the evolution of the state of architecture. It also proposes that developments in architectural education, in particular the growth of the unit system of studio instruction, have added a further element to the productive and investigative potential of the schools of architecture, and that this must be accounted for in any valid model of research.

The 59-story, nearly 1.6 million gross square foot, Citicorp Center tower completed during 1977 in mid-town Manhattan was designed by the much-celebrated architect Hugh Stubbins of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The tower incorporated an array of notable technological features including doubledecker elevator cabs to reduce the number of elevator shafts and thereby increase the usable floor area, alternative energy source and reclamation systems, and low-brightness lighting that helped render the tower some 42% more energy efficient than comparable structures designed to conventional standards (http://www.loringengineers).

That architects leave the profession is something that seems ‘known’. In addition, there has been continuous concern that women in particular leave. However, the extent of departure is unclear. Much of the information around these observations come from surveys, is anecdotal or study women in isolation from men. This paper provides some firmer data on the movement of men and women into and out of the profession using Australia as a case study. It collates and analyses historical and contemporary data to delineate the complex patterns of participation in and leaving of architecture.

While the sources of data are often limited and approximate, this analysis nonetheless highlights a number of factors affecting the tenure of architects in their profession. The economy is an obvious factor and the data mirrors the economic fate of the country. The paper firmly demonstrates that gender is a factor with a strong impact on leaving the profession – a movement that clearly adversely affects the diversity of the profession. A further factor in leaving is age, which interacts with gender: women begin to leave when young and men when older. Diversity is increasingly proving to be an important factor in the ability of an organisation or a profession to survive, let alone meet, the challenges and opportunities of the globalised twenty-first century.

The paper concludes with a plea for better data sources to better clarify how, and to what extent, biases nudge many architects out of the profession. Understanding the extent and nature of these biases helps the formulation of tactics to foster greater diversity to engender a more resilient profession.

From a starting point of Jay Swayze's extraordinary Underground Homes and Gardens project (1980) this paper explores and contextualises the bunker's significance and accelerated production under threat from atomic weapons in the Cold War. The nuclear bunker represents the end-point of a series of buried and semi-buried structures. Bulwarks since the early eighteenth century against increasingly sophisticated forms of ordnance, they emerge in increasing numbers throughout the twentieth century across a series of scales and spheres from the household to the civic and urban. In its proliferation as a building type and precise fitness to purpose, the bunker is arguably as emblematic of modernity as the department store, the great exhibition, the skyscraper or the machine-inspired domestic space advocated by Le Corbusier. It also represents the obverse – or perhaps a parodic iteration – of the preoccupations of early architectural modernism: a vast underground international style, cast in millions of tons of thick, reinforced concrete retaining walls, whose spatial relationship to the landscape above was strictly mediated through the periscope, the loop-hole, the range finder and the strategic necessity to both resist and facilitate the technologies and scopic regimes of weaponry.

This paper critically uncoils Paul Virillo's observation that, once physically eclipsed in its topographical and technical settings, the bunker's efficacy would mutate to other domains, retaining and remaking its meaning in another topology. ‘The essence of the new fortress’, he writes, ‘is elsewhere, underfoot, invisible from here on in’. Shaped by this impulse, this paper attempts to render visible the bunker's relationship to modernity and its architectural, cultural and urban contributions to the twentieth century. In doing so it excavates some of the relationships between the physical artefact, its implications and its enduring metaphorical and perceptual ghosts as domestic realms and whole cities and regions became atomic.

A close inspection was made of the vault of Henry VII Chapel, Westminster Abbey, when it was scaffolded for repair and maintenance in 1994–95. Defects were seen which appear to be peculiar to fan vaults, and this paper attempts to explain these defects. The discussion involves an understanding of the behaviour of masonry, from the simplest arch form to barrel vaults, rib vaults and the complex fan structure, with an examination of the ‘pathology’ of these forms.

The housing estate of Julino Brdo was built in the late 1960s in the Čukarica municipality of Belgrade, and housed the ‘middle class’ of Yugoslav selfmanagement socialism – managers, experts, and administrators, in an area that was also populated by the improvised homes of illegal settlers. Approaching the estate from the north, the observer first notices two clusters of homogeneous masses rising out of a plateau known as ‘Grujina Strana’. As the observer moves forward, the estate briefly disappears from sight, only to reappear as a single cluster merged with the steep sides of the plateau.

The Jewish Museum in Berlin is the first major building of Daniel Libeskind [1,2]. The project for the museum has instigated a wealth of discussions in architectural circles and achieved a rare status of attracting the attention of scholars from other disciplines. Kurt W. Forster put the design for the Jewish Museum on a par with Piranesi's Carceri d'Invenzione, an unusual position for any building since very rarely does an architectural design ‘[…] bear this double burden of representing both actual buildings and mental structures, and which therefore have to submit to being measured by both standards: the durability of their ideas and the imaginative faculty of their designer.’

The architecturally radical Steiff teddy bear factory in Giengen, Germany is a three storey, double skin glass curtain wall building with a steel frame, built in 1903. It is almost unknown in architectural history. On the other hand the loadbearing brick Fagus factory built in 1911 to a design by Gropius and Meyer, in spite of its nineteenth century technology, has become a hallowed icon of modern architecture and a UNESCO World Heritage site. The article discusses the contested history of both buildings and offers some suggestions as to why one became famous and the other did not. It also discusses the equally contested history of the teddy bear, showing that in both cases, history tends to ignore facts in favour of good stories.

This paper is part of a broader research agenda, which aims at an environmental re-reading of selected icons of Modern Architecture that share one characteristic, the development of a free-flow open section. The complex relationship between spatial composition and thermal and climatic conditions within buildings is explored both qualitatively, using analytic drawing, and quantitatively, using simulations with computational fluid dynamics. I am seeking patterns common to both and the work has become an investigation of the concept of architectural space at the intersection between art, technology, climate and perception. Most architects of the Modern Movement addressed this relationship in one way or another. They either praised technology and the emerging ‘machine age’ or rejected it. Today most architectural production appears to have an ambivalent and sometimes contradictory position on technology.

This conference, which took place 25–27 November 2004, was held by the Bartlett School of Architecture in association with the Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA). Its stated aim was to examine the relationship between critical practice in architecture and architectural criticism, intending to place architecture in an interdisciplinary context with reference to modes of criticism in other disciplines, specifically art criticism, and to explore modes of critical practice in architecture: buildings, drawings and texts. Brian Hatton attended the second day of the conference; his comments on the first day are based on discussions with colleagues and reading of transcripts.

Drawings are often accorded intellectual status in architecture while models are associated with the material. A levitating model reappraises assumptions about materiality.

Rudolph Michael Schindler (1887–1953) designed a beach house for Henry Braxton and Viola Brothers Shore in 1930. The house was to have been sited on Ocean Front Walk, Venice, Los Angeles [1]. It was never built, but remains a paper project. In the architectural drawings archives at University of California, Santa Barbara, there are both sketch plans and detailed plans for four levels: the ground floor, the main floor, the balcony floor and the roof level. There are drawings for each of the four elevations as well as sections. Constructional details are provided on five sheets. All told there are 13 extant drawings. In his signature upper case, Schindler typed a brief written description of the house [Table 1].

Like the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) that preceded it, the UK government's proposed Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a means of allocating funding in higher education to support research. As with any method for the competitive allocation of funds it creates winners and losers and inevitably generates a lot of emotion among those rewarded or penalised. More specifically, the ‘winners’ tend to approve of the method of allocation and the ‘losers’ denigrate it as biased against their activities and generally unfair. An extraordinary press campaign has been consistently waged against research assessment and its methods by those involved in architectural education, which I will track over a decade and a half. What follows will question whether this campaign demonstrates the sophistication and superior judgment of those who have gone into print, or conversely whether its mixture of misinformation and disinformation reveals not just disenchantment and prejudice, but a naivety and a depth of ignorance about the fundamentals of research that is deeply damaging to the credibility of architecture as a research-based discipline. With the recent consultation process towards a new cycle of research assessment, the REF, getting under way, I aim to draw attention to the risk of repeating past mistakes.

This paper investigates the interaction between reality and imagination in the architectural design process. It engages with four inter-related inquiries. First, the interplay between reality and imagination in the architectural design process in student design-build live projects. Second, the interplay of reality and imagination for different agents in the architectural design process. Third, how the work of John Hejduk (1929-2000) enables a reappraisal of conceptions of reality and imagination in architectural design. Fourth, we address a live project for The Story Museum in Oxford, UK – a physical architectural space concerned with imaginary spaces – that suggests how an understanding of reality and imagination might be deepened in the architectural design process.

The text reappraises the interplay of reality and imagination in architectural design as a cognitive process. There are two aims: to reassess empirical responses and received wisdom about what is real and what is imagined in architectural design; and to reassess the perception of differences between imagination and reality occurring across education and practice. ‘Thing Theory’ is proposed as a conceptual framework which allows us to improve our understanding of how architectural designs emerge, are transformed in the designer's mind, how architects communicate them to others and how they are understood and shared by others. Reference is also made to interviews with prominent architects. The term ‘thing’ was repeatedly used by these architects to describe moments in the design process when a break from reality had occurred. In these moments, subject and object seemed at their most intertwined. This moment is strong because it is so flexible in responding to change and managing complexity. It is also weak because it is a time when the designer tends to neglect vital everyday constraints such as occupation and ethics. However, this is a key moment because it allows possible future realities to emerge.

The Belgian housing discourse contains strong disagreement about how to deal with the legacy of the postwar housing model and how to continue with housing production in response to shifting housing demands. An important aspect of this discussion is how to intervene in existing sprawling settlement patterns that have resulted from postwar building practice. This contribution discusses how this housing question has been the topic of a research project on postwar, detached single-family houses in Flanders, Belgium.