In This Is What We Do: A Muf Manual, the partners of the firm muf architecture/art wrote that ‘paradoxically, in order to make the thing the collaboration has to be about the making of the relationship rather than the object.’1 This article takes this assertion as its basis and examines the implications of treating the individual and collective relationships that structure an architectural project – which I will refer to as the project’s relational field – as a site that can be manipulated in order to affect both production and outcome. This is achieved through the transposition of concepts from Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on creative activity, art, literature, and language to design using a case study of muf’s Barking Town Square project in London (2004–10).

The second decade of the twenty-first century has been distinguished by a renewed interest in James Stirling and his architectural heritage – a sort of ‘James Stirling Renaissance’ – with many authors characterising Stirling predominantly as a late modernist architect.

The efficiency demanded by the modern world affects most areas of life, including the organisation of space. Industrial production is an emblematic field for this phenomenon, having deeply affected architecture and the urban environment. Before industrial production began inspiring modern architecture, the modernisation of expanding European urban fabric in the nineteenth century was mostly driven by the implementation of new transportation infrastructure ensuring the effective functioning of metropolitan areas. The reorganisation of space at all scales and according to a rationale relating to economic drive, industrial production, mass consumption, or scientific management has been the defining characteristic of the modern era, coupled with and in relation to the unprecedented concentration of population, goods, and services. This rationale has since infiltrated, arguably, all spheres of life and has been so internalised by many that it is usually hard to discern.

The phenomenon of participatory architectural design is thought to have emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s in Europe. In 1969, Giancarlo De Carlo, one of its main advocates, presented a manifesto in which he asserted that ‘architecture is too important to be left to architects’, criticised architectural practice as a relationship of ‘the intrinsic aggressiveness of architecture and the forced passivity of the user’, and called for establishing ‘a condition of creative and decisional equivalence’ between the architect and the user, so that in fact both the architect and the user take on the architect’s role. He also argued for the ‘discovery of users’ needs’ and envisioned the process of designing as planning ‘with’ the users instead of planning ‘for’ the users.1 In the same year, De Carlo began working on a housing estate in Terni, Italy that involved future dwellers in design decisions. Among other participatory projects carried out around that time were Lucien Kroll’s medical faculty building for the University de Louvain (1970–6) and Ottaker Uhl‘s Fesstgasse Housing, a multi-storey apartment block in Vienna (1979).

If ever an architect bit the hand that fed, it was the young Arata Isozaki, a mercurial and uncompromising architectural talent who would go on to secure establishment respectability with the Pritzker Prize of 2019. But he made his renown with designs and exhibitions exploring themes of death and destruction, not least his ‘Fractures’ pavilion for the 1996 Venice Biennale, which sought to stage the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake from a year earlier, while also being a leading proponent of a playful, almost saccharine postmodernism, with projects including the Team Disney HQ of 1991. Immersed in the leading currents of Japanese architecture from the 1960s onwards, his tendency to snipe at the motives of his collaborators was legendary. Commentators have tried to account for these professional shifts and antagonisms, his dour and contrarian thematic obsessions, as well as his critiques of architectural traditionalism and technological progressivism. Why did he conduct his professional life and art this way? The conclusion seems to be that he was a nihilistic maverick pushing at the outer limits of architectural culture and even taste.

In contemporary Chinese architectural culture, Hua Li’s work stands out as a phenomenon. His architecture demonstrates little in the way of formalistic eccentricities, cultural symbolism, or indeed the ‘Chineseness’ that some others seek to pursue. Instead, what interests the architect is, most of all, the quality of material, construction, space, and place [1].

The work and thought of the Basque sculptor Jorge Oteiza (b. Orio, 1908 – d. San Sebastian, 2003) is an omnipresent reference point in the historiography of modern Spanish architecture. Since the Jorge Oteiza Museum Foundation was opened shortly after his death, a great number of studies have been published about him, mainly in Spanish and Basque. Oteiza’s artistic career was closely connected to the postwar Spanish architectural scene. During the 1950s, he participated in numerous projects and architecture competitions and published his work in specialised journals and magazines in the field. Spain was at that time under the regime of General Franco and, as a consequence of the Civil War (1936–9), the country was suffering an economic crisis that affected culture, art, and architecture.

As epitomised in the works of Renzo Piano, Frank Gehry, and Daniel Libeskind, the ‘new museum’ of art claims its own architectural typology. With asymmetrical silhouettes, gallery spaces that eschew the much derided ‘white cube’, and cleverly conceived circulation systems, the new museum has been heralded as revolutionising the display of art. Yet its function extends beyond the display and conservation of art. The new art museum is conceived as a multifaceted cultural centre – a public forum – where art and culture are democratised, and families, scholars, students, tourists, and teachers come together. At the same time, the new museum competes with other entertainment venues on a commercial level. As a cultural factory replete with an ambitious programme of temporary exhibitions, media facilities, restaurants, and shops, the new museum emphasises consumption as much as it does contemplation. In fact, the array of non-artrelated diversions contained in the new museum is often more important to the institution’s success than the art itself.

How long does the present moment last? Where and when does the past begin and how does the present end? In physics – or more precisely in the special theory of relativity – the present can be defined as the coordinate origin in a spacetime diagram – an unextended point that separates an observer’s past and future light cones. From that point of view, the present has no duration at all; the past instantly assimilates the future without any hesitation in between. However, time perception tells us that we actually experience a ‘here and now’. Psychologists believe that the time range we perceive as the present, the socalled specious present, lasts about three seconds – the interval duration after which the brain may be said to reset its attention. This is already infinitely more than no duration at all but this recognition is still not enough to explain concepts like the present time or ‘today’ as an indicator of the contemporary. In the domain of history, the present seems to be a much more complex construction. When we speak of phenomena as contemporary, we place them in an extended present. We concede that the present encompasses the recent past and the near future – a temporal range that provides a stage for the actions and reactions that shape our world.

In England, the establishment of art history as a professional discipline was consolidated by the foundation of the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1932, and the Warburg Library's move from Hamburg to London the following year due to the rise of the Nazi régime; a political situation that caused the emigration of German-speaking scholars such as Fritz Saxl, Ernst Gombrich and Rudolf Wittkower. Colin Rowe, an influential member of the second generation of historians of modern architecture, was educated as part of this cultural milieu in the postwar period, studying at the Warburg Institute in London. In the ‘Addendum 1973’ to his first published article ‘The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa’ (1947), Rowe acknowledged the Wölfflinian origins of his analysis – Saxl and Wittkower had studied under Heinrich Wölfflin – and the validity of his inherited German formal methods. This assumption, in the opinion of one of Rowe's students, the architectural historian and critic Anthony Vidler, indicated the ‘still pervasive force of the late nineteenth century German school of architectural history in England in the years after the Second World War’.

Complex design challenges exist in designing for a dynamic and ageing world. Designing for older adults is a timely and important issue. Understanding user requirements is vital and the appropriate exchange of this knowledge is crucial in the pursuit of supportive, sustainable buildings and the longevity of built-environment design.

Capturing reflections from Built Environment Professionals (BEPs) in the UK, this paper investigates the practitioners’ viewpoint on knowledge exchange by specifically focusing on the scenario of designing for the requirements of older people. Thematic analysis of BEP conversations (n=10) and the results from a questionnaire (N=35) are presented.

Findings uncover recommendations towards the enhancement of knowledge exchange. They highlight the fundamentals of good communication, the desire for structured knowledge, the value of contextual guidance, the importance of a visual format for BEPs, and the need for forms of guidance to support client motivations.

The design process can be enabled by equipping practitioners with information about user requirements. Interestingly, it was also found that BEPs find value in direct user-engagement although further support tools for these engagements with building users was desired.

Appropriate exchange of knowledge is essential for effective ‘real-world’ design impact. These findings, built from the scenario of designing for older adults, also apply to the broader context of all guidance used by Built Environment Professionals.

Sustainability is gaining a firm presence within the discipline of architecture in spite of the number of obstacles with which it has been challenged: either confronting detractors, sceptics, and the discredit resulting from the abusive use of the term as a marketing tactic, or dealing with the actual practicalities inherent to its implementation. This heightened environmental consciousness increasingly engrained within the profession is solidly supported by a growing social, political and media interest, which has impelled new regulations and the involvement of new experts like physicists, engineers, and ecologists in the design process. This phenomenon is transforming architectural practice and design techniques, moving the focus from a mechanical perspective of architecture (tectonics, construction, materiality, structure) to a biotechnical approach which attempts to equip the architect with instruments to regard buildings as living structures permanently exchanging energy with their environment. Using the environment as a creative generator for design has prompted the emergence of new aesthetic models in current architectural design. The access to new tools, together with new concerns and ways of thinking, have opened new lines of intervention that seem to affect the profession in a more fundamental way. The focus of this paper is to provide an account of these cultural constructs as experimental aesthetic systems, with the intention of not only clarifying their principles and objectives, but also reflecting on the design techniques associated to them. Ultimately, this paper provides a reflection on the role of aesthetics in sustainable design, and on the critical question: is sustainability finally becoming an intrinsic part of architecture?

This paper investigates architectural students’ ‘year-out’ learning experiences in architectural offices after completing RIBA Part I study within a UK university. By interviewing and analysing their reflections on the experience, the study examines how individual architecture students perceive and value their learning experience in architectural offices and how students understand and integrate what they have learned through two distinct elements of their training: in university and in offices.

The architectural offices that students worked with vary in terms of workforce size and projects undertaken. The students’ training experience is not unified. The processes of engaging with concrete situations in real projects may permit students to follow opportunities that most inspire them and to develop their differing expertise, but their development in offices can also be restricted by the vicissitudes of market economics.

This study has demonstrated that architectural students’ learning and development in architectural offices continued through ‘learning by doing’ and used drawings as primary design and communicative media. Working in offices gave weight to both explicit and tacit knowledge and used subjective judgments. A further understanding was also achieved about what architects are and what they do in practice. The realities of their architectural practice experience discouraged some Part I students from progressing into the next stage of architectural education, Part II, but for others it demonstrated that a career in architecture was ‘achievable’.

This study argues that creative design, practical and technical abilities are not separate skill-sets that are developed in the university and in architectural offices respectively. They are linked and united in the learning process required to become a professional architect. The study also suggests that education in the university should do more to prepare students for their training in practice.

An important theme in place marketing, branding, and architectural literature – and practice – is the development of a strong, attractive image, through (primarily) visual representation of a location. But considering that today we live in cities that are digital hybrids, in which we are connected to a wider system of information, how is an ‘image of the city’ constructed in this context, and are there other strategies and tactics that should be considered? Using Plato’s notion of chora and Claudius Ptolemy’s notion of chorography as points of departure that will lead us to consider Michel de Certeau’s concept of walking as an experiential and dialectic process through which we relate the spatial stories of places and moreover, in the context of digital locative media, we will point to ways by which this may be accomplished. In introducing the reader to the concept of digital chorographies as a means by which a place’s spatial narratives may be constructed, we suggest that a current emphasis on visual representation (for example, of attractive place product elements/attributes, such as architectural landmarks and cityscapes, etc.) should be considered in conjunction with the articulation and narration of qualities contributing to a place’s realm of meaning.