The experience of the exhibition On the Surface – a retrospective of the work of Metis, the Edinburgh-based atelier of Mark Dorrian and Adrian Hawker, presented in the exhibition space of The Aarhus School of Architecture – is choreographed as a walk over superimposed fragments of architectural representations. This action of walking, of following the drawing on the ground, enables the erasure of the specific time/place chronotopes of the seven exhibited projects, allowing new itineraries to be drawn through the crossing of this complex context.

This issue of arq explores how academic researchers are practicing design, and how architectural practitioners are researching design. Pedagogy has emerged as a theme bridging these two distinct subfields. Likewise, they are connected through explorations of the nature of architectural representation and process, examining how ideas, strategies, and spaces are communicated across academia and practice. The ever-changing field of architectural representation, and how we engage with it, often escapes close reading. By drawing particular attention to it, the issue aims to highlight the state of design research in the discipline today.

Standing on the bridge of an enormous container ship, watching Hong Kong harbour emerge blinking out of a South China Sea pregnant with ships and into the radar screen dawn as we approach nearby Chinese port of Yantian … barrelling along a dirt road tracing oil pipes through the Ecuadorean Amazon atop the roof rack of a minivan, the gas flares of oil refineries visible over jungle canopy … passing a bar of solid metal more valuable than a London house and less useful than a brick between eager hands in the Gold Room of an Australian Outback mine … Standing in a chilled and humming room with the supercomputer ‘Pac-man’ as it crunches climate change data … Feeling the bass wave rumble from a rocket launch at a space city in the Kazakh Steppe … Breathless at 5,000m as a radio array turns gracefully to face the beginnings of the universe … We are in the field. These are sites built from stories. Unfamiliar landscapes forged from familiar wants and needs. They are landscapes and infrastructures as cultural artefacts. Each ripe with its own absurdities and contradictions, and each born of a critical mass of habits, beliefs, and desires.

An event organised by the Architecture Exchange in London brought together four architectural practitioners and academics, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Reinhold Martin, Ines Weizman, and Sarah Whiting to discuss political theorist Chantal Mouffe’s conceptions of the space of politics and agonism. The discussions were followed by a response from Mouffe herself. Convened by Joseph Bedford and Jessica Reynolds, the event was held at the Architectural Association in London on 6 December 2014. It followed previous events in 2013 – dubbed Architecture Exchange #1 – at which the philosopher of ‘Object Oriented Ontology’, Graham Harman, participated in a debate about his work.

The private house has perhaps always been a prototype for more elaborate architecture, but never more so than in the heyday of the Modern Movement, when it provided both the opportunity for experiment and the chance to explore creatively the changing essence of dwelling. This article, based on a keynote lecture given to the Alvar Aalto Foundation in February 2015, compares the generating principles of Alvar and Aino Aalto's own house of 1936 with those of built and unbuilt houses by Hugo Häring, underlining the importance of specific planning and spatial relationships as the essential generators, to which the making of façades remained subordinate or at least secondary. Häring's Woythaler House of 1927 also appears here for the first time in a properly comprehensible form, thanks to information recovered from drawings now available in the public realm.

Tschumi’s experimental use of the literary text as part of design briefs for students at the Architectural Association in the late 1970s formed the basis for a preoccupation with what he termed the disjunction between space and the events that happen within it. For Coates, the literary briefs triggered a fixation with what was happening in space – but instead of focusing on its conceptual interaction with events, he moved towards the dramatisation of architecture. Grounded in the architects' shared teaching at the AA, the article discusses the early briefs and projects that shaped the directions they would each take.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's idea of a modern courtyard house is explored in this article considering three aspects: context stimuli, development, and practical applications. In this manner, this article provides significant contributions to the understanding of Mies's courtyard house idea. In fact, so far the stimuli and motivations behind his studies on this house type have been insufficiently explored. This obscurity has facilitated hypotheses such as that some of the courtyard house projects that Mies attributed to himself were not designed by him, but by his students and assistants. This article offers an alternative view of this issue that supports the architect's original claims by clarifying his teaching approach, creative process, and historical context. This article also clarifies the development of Mies's courtyard house idea through several projects that he designed on this theme, including the Courtyard House with Round Skylight (1934), which has been little explored in previous literature. Ultimately, this article examines the practical applications of Mies's courtyard house idea, both as a motif of student exercise and as an architectural solution for low dwellings, showing that this idea has maintained its relevance throughout the decades.

Architectural representation – concerned as it is with things at levels of abstraction, scales of ‘bigness’, and already complex, intertwined and multi-layered contexts – often overlooks or presupposes the seemingly straightforward attributes of its engagement. Acts of looking at (or into) architectural imagery, objects and other phenomena are principally concerned with the spaces held within, rather than asking us to reflect on the experience of interacting with the representational device itself. In this way, architectural imagery attempts to mask its own presence. By always gesturing to the thing that is distant or unbuilt, it asks us, perversely, to pretend that it isn't there – that we are in fact engaging directly with the spaces and structures depicted rather than their likenesses in paper, card or otherwise. Our own practice (STASUS) and teaching concerns itself with the relationship between the observer and the architectural project, and the complex set of coded meanings which are engaged with in this encounter. We are particularly interested in the affecting nature of the space in which design processes are undertaken. In this paper, we reflect on the experience of encountering architectural projects through their representation, both in a state of completion and in process. We set out to reframe an idea of architectural design as the performance of a dialogue between recognisable, image-able things, held and staged by objects and media that don't meet or exceed expectations, but defy them, by demanding to be noticed.

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.

The article seeks to generate a more nuanced version of environmental ethics than the current positivistic approach taken towards the ecological crisis by referring to the sense of ecology as evident in the practice and writings of Richard Neutra. Despite the whiteness of his architecture, Neutra's architecture was ecological in a profound way in which the ethics of the inter-personal and related dwelling activities of inhabitants are as important as measuring energy performance. For him, more fundamental than man's relationship with nature or natural resources was the inter-personal sharing of ‘we’, in which scarcity itself is the medium of a proportionate joining. Put differently, the reciprocity between the natural and the inter-personal, in which the former reinforces the latter, was the key to an ecological setting.

In the process of underpinning Neutra's sense of the reciprocity between the natural and the inter-personal, as well as the shared inter-personal communication in an atmosphere, this article draws ideas from Japanese intellectual tradition such as Tetsuro Watsuji&s notion of fudo, or climate, and its correlate inter-personal ethics, and Kitaro Nishida's account of a trans-subjective mode of communication of the ‘we’. Referring to this Japanese tradition in which Neutra was deeply interested, the article interprets Neutra's architecture based not upon the ego-oriented mode of the ‘I’ but upon the ego-less mode of ‘ek-sistere’ that reinstates the condition of the human being as a pre-reflective corporeal being, or what I would like to call a ‘common subjectivity’ to be articulated into different, yet conjoined, ‘I’s to form a joint measure. In this fashion, the article demonstrates how one's relationship with the natural necessarily involves the dimension of the inter-personal, while illuminating the goal of Neutra's practice: securing a place for the inter-personal through the coordination of natural forces.