As his friend Niall Hobhouse claimed, Cedric Price ‘wasn’t really an architect, but a social critic to the left of the Left who stumbled on the post-war ruins of modernism’.1 The role of Price’s unbuilt legacy for Western architectural culture has been praised extensively, with a special emphasis on the unorthodox nature of both his practice and academic contributions.2 Succeeding generations have found inspiration in Price’s personal view of the architectural profession, his work being positioned often within radical and utopian approaches yet involving a committed social agenda. The social role of architecture was for Price tightly linked to the capacity of the built environment to be adapted by its users. Buildings should be understood as temporary commodities, malleable objects with a short lifespan dictated by their usefulness for the community. Conceived as infrastructures, unbuilt projects such as the famous Fun Palace, Potteries Thinkbelt, or Magnet were formulated as productive objects with a profound commitment for socially regenerating the contexts into which they were to be inserted.

Suspend your disbelief for a second, and ask yourself: what is architectural about clouds? For many researchers, practitioners and students of the field, a concern with the architectural is a concern with stable forms, organised layouts, inert materials, and recognisable cultural expressions. Yet in recent decades, relational and process-oriented approaches to analysing ‘the social’ have advanced architectural concerns with intensities of human and nonhuman flows, regulating energy exchanges and microclimatic milieux, and territorialising space through built enclosures and envelopes. The notion of flows in architecture is not only a philosophical category but a practical and programmatic one.

Microbiome-Inspired Green Infrastructure (MIGI) was recently proposed as an integrative system to promote healthy urban ecosystems through multidisciplinary design. Specifically, MIGI is defined as nature-centric infrastructure restored, designed, and managed to enhance health-promoting interactions between humans and environmental microbiomes while sustaining microbially mediated ecosystem functionality and resilience. MIGI also aims to stimulate a research agenda that focuses on considerations for the importance of urban environmental microbiomes.

In this article, we provide details of what MIGI entails from a bioscience and biodesign perspective, highlighting the potential dual benefits for human and ecosystem health. We present ‘what is known’ about the relationship between urban microbiomes, green infrastructure, and environmental factors that may affect urban ecosystem health - taken here to mean ecosystem functionality and resilience, as well as human health. We discuss how to start operationalising the MIGI concept based on current available knowledge and present a horizon-scan of emerging and future considerations in research and practice.

We conclude by highlighting challenges to implementing MIGI and propose a series of workshops to discuss multi-stakeholder needs and opportunities. This research will enable urban landscape managers to incorporate initial considerations for the microbiome in their development projects to promote human and ecosystem health. However, overcoming the challenges to operationalising MIGI will be essential to furthering its practical development. Although the research is in its infancy, there is considerable potential for MIGI to help deliver sustainable urban development driven by considerations for reciprocal relations between humans and the foundations of our ecosystems – the microorganisms.

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 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).

Scholarly analysis of the writings on architecture of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) has largely focused on passages in Twilight of the Idols where he claims that ‘Architecture is a kind of eloquence of power in forms – now persuading, even flattering, now only commanding.’1 Yet, considering Nietzsche’s theory of the will-to-power – that an innate drive towards power, might, and self-overcoming is the dominant force of existence – architecture gets interpreted in this passage as he would likely have interpreted sculpture. Any recognition of the social, political, physical, and psychological accommodations of architecture are absent. However, in a passage in Joyful Wisdom entitled ‘Architecture for the Perceptive’, Nietzsche wrote of architecture as a carefully crafted space to inhabit. This discussion of architecture as a lived space has received considerably less attention.

Since 2000, when the Flemish Government Architect established the ‘Open Oproep’, an instrument for awarding large public building projects in Flanders, it has been relatively easy for foreign offices to compete for commissions that are more difficult to obtain in their own countries. Participating in a competition, however, is one thing, winning it is another. The prevailing building culture creates a certain pattern of expectations against which entries are measured; in a design competition, the architecture needs to connect to this culture to meet these (typically implicit) expectations. In terms of these cultural resonances, Dirk Somers has referred to the ‘brown banana’, a metaphor for an architecture of mutual interest stretching from London, via Flanders, Germany, and Switzerland to part of northern Italy. This is an architecture linked by a certain continuity, defined by both invention and convention. This article takes a closer look at the northwestern part of Somers’s brown banana: Flanders and Great Britain. It examines the work of four contemporary British firms that have featured prominently in the final selection since the ‘Open Oproep’ began; namely, Sergison Bates, Tony Fretton, Maccreanor Lavington, and Witherford Watson Mann. On the basis of publications and lectures about and by these firms, a comparison is made between Flemish architecture and building culture, on one hand, as it has been described in recent years and the theoretical position of the four British firms, on the other. Key concepts in this study are collective memory, accumulation, continuity, style, phenomenology, teaching, and writing.

Every architectural intervention joins a constellation of pre-existing conditions, which often constitute a fragile but valuable situation: the physical support of collective memory. The objective of this article is to explore contemporary ways of intervening in architectural heritage from the perspective of collective memory, through what is imagined to be a timeless grammar, towards design innovation. Works produced according to this strategy not only try to maintain the character of an architectural legacy but also to generate new models based on received precedents. The following article explores intervention projects from the last two decades of work by Swiss architect Peter Märkli, identifying key themes and strategies employed. The synthesis of these works allows us to identify a way of approaching heritage based on the continuity of architecture as a key to innovation.

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.

Chinese men of letters pursued the idea of a poetic life in feudal times, and this ideal was often embodied in traditional gardening and landscape paintings. However, it has been argued that the pursuit of this traditional notion of poetic life has been lost with the arrival of modernity. In this view, Chinese cities are seen as losing their identities and becoming Westernised. Wang Shu, the Pritzker Prize-winning Chinese architect, has taken great efforts to rebuild an understanding of Chinese cultural identity: by looking back to the idea of poetic life reflected in traditional gardens and landscape paintings, and attempting to recompose a sense of poetry for contemporary architecture. This article aims to examine Wang’s approaches to this sense of poetry in one of his projects, the design of Xiangshan campus while, at the same time, seeking to offer a Chinese reflection on the architecture of poetry.

However, Wang’s approach to using visual and metaphoric techniques in reviving the city’s poetic system can be questioned. His tactics, considered here in relation to the Xiangshan campus, arguably do not fully understand Chinese aesthetics, and do not pose fully a contemporary definition of the ‘sense of poetry’ in relation to the traditional Chinese mind. A holistic interpretation of architectural poetry should concern life, both as living and pleasure, material and spirit, rather than dealing primarily in visual composition. Nevertheless, his efforts in exploring Chinese-ness and his influence on Chinese architects remain highly significant.

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.

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.

The purpose of this article is to celebrate the exquisite moments when enclosed space at Hagia Sophia attains an illusory plastic state. The subject is the secularised amalgamation of the Byzantine cathedral of Hagia Sophia and the Turkish mosque of Ayasofya, prior to the restoration of the mosque in 2020. The article is intended as a visual study of intrinsic visual qualities, without the use of seductive imagery.

In June 1966 Hungarian-born French architect Yona Friedman travelled to the port town of Folkestone on the English Channel to join the International Dialogue of Experimental Architecture (IDEA). The event was a large two-day symposium on radical experiments in architecture and urbanism organised by the British architectural collective Archigram. A leading figure in experimental international groups of architects and artists crafting techno-futuristic visions of three-dimensionally expanding cities, Friedman seemed to be an essential participant in an event advertised as a convocation of ‘all Europe’s creative nuts’.

This article develops a theoretical framework for the relationship between the architectural magazine and architecture, understood as a profession, a discipline, and a culture. By developing David Abrahamson’s idea of ‘magazine exceptionalism’ from the field of magazines studies, it offers a definition of what constitutes an architectural magazine, arguing that to be architectural, a magazine must be a site of architectural production, as either a validator in the field of architecture or as an architectural project in its own right.

The article examines the neighbourhood of Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans following the Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It focuses on the rebuilding project initiated by Make it Right Foundation (2007-ongoing), founded by actor Brad Pitt. The article looks into media images of the rebuilding of Lower Ninth, and notes that the rebuilt architecture cannot be analysed outside of its relationship with media and images. The rebuilt architecture in Lower Ninth relates to image in multiple levels - it represents image of social justice and resilience, and aims to assign a new (image) value to the suburb. The article analyses the rebuilding within the framework of the relationships between contemporary architecture and media image and argues that these relationships are more complex than perceived by current architectural literature. It sees these relationships as productive in the case of this rebuilding, and aims to expand the space of their analysis.