This article reflects on the visual, spatial, and textual devices deployed by the Architettura Radicale in the 1960s and 1970s through a discussion of a pedagogical project developed for undergraduate architecture students from Monash University, Australia, as part of a travelling intensive based in Prato, Italy. At the time, Prato became the subject of debate about the rapid expansion of consumer culture in Italy, as underscored in Claudio Greppi’s graduating project, ‘Territorial City-Factory’ (1964-5). This architectural proposal rendered the area between Prato and Florence as a totalising city-factory, a proposition that was later developed under Archizoom as ‘No-Stop City’ (1968-70). Greppi’s recasting of Prato as a site for political and architectural experimentation became the catalyst for a teaching-led research project, re-examining the work of the Radical movement in Tuscany. In collaboration with architect and artist Gianni Pettena, the intensive sought to draw out the performative and embodied approaches implicit in his own work and that of his peers including UFO and 9999, as well as the rhetorical devices embedded within the critical fictions of Superstudio and Archizoom. By first dissecting and then redeploying these techniques in response to a site-specific brief, the ultimate pedagogical aim was to expose the students to an expanded range of architectural approaches and to re-evaluate the nature of radical practices ‘within and against’ the omnipresent struggles of late capitalism, and the contemporary cultural and educational context of neoliberalism and the university.

Austerity measures have been discussed widely since sweeping cuts have been made to local government budgets following the global financial crisis of 2007-08. More than a decade later, the impact of these measures on everyday lives of communities is still growing. We use the context of austerity to discuss our research in partnership with Community Place Initiatives in the city of Sheffield, UK, and to examine the approaches they use to attempt to overcome the shortcomings and challenges of precarity.

This article focuses on revealing the impacts that budget cuts have had and are still having, and speculates upon what these findings mean for the role that schools of architecture can play outside the academy. We draw on research conducted by Urban Education Live Sheffield - a team of researchers and educators from the School of Architecture, University of Sheffield in the UK, and the Department of Architecture, Technische Universität Braunschweig in Germany. The team is part of a broader international project, Urban Education Live (UEL), a multidisciplinary research project with partners from across Europe funded by the ERA-NET Cofund Smart Urban Futures (ENSUF) programme, established by the Joint Programming Initiative Urban Europe.

Through a multi-modal ethnographic and design-led approach combining interviews, case studies, and ‘live’ pedagogy, we examine how Community Place Initiatives in Sheffield deal with a context that has fundamentally changed the ways in which they operate in, or in relation to, their place over the past decade. We explore how collaborations between these local partners and architectural researchers and students can be mutually beneficial within this context, in order to speculate upon how such collaborations can be more effective in their contribution to local place-based urban capacity building and future resilience.

Paradigmatic of a cultural shift in Irish education in the 1960s, St Brendan’s Community School in Birr, County Offaly was designed by Peter and Mary Doyle as a flexible and extendable mat-building articulated by generous social spaces including exterior courtyards and an interior ‘street’. Owned by the Department of Education and Skills, administered by a Board of Management and occupied by approximately one thousand staff and pupils daily, St Brendan’s has been in continuous use since its opening in 1980. Generations of students have benefited from the intimate relationship between the cultural and social life of the school and the architectural form, fabric, and technology that facilitates it. But by the beginning of the twentieth-first century, due to the lack of consideration given to such aspects at the time it was conceived and constructed, the building was suffering from ongoing material degradation and issues in environmental performance.

This article reflects on a research project undertaken on the school, which aimed to provide the means by which its learning environment and energy use could be improved and optimised in a manner consistent with the integrity of the architects’ conceptual thinking and built design: the opportunity for St Brendan’s to continue its course as a successful paradigm, this time for twenty-first-century education through the reconciliation of its future use with its social and education heritage. Guided by the ‘three dimensions of modernity’ - social, technical, and aesthetic - this process involved the development of new ‘ways of seeing’ and ‘methods of action’ applied to the school realised through the production of a series of representations that collectively identified, mapped, and re-presented the significances and values of the school, element by element. The relationships between these phenomena were complex and necessitated an innovative interdisciplinary approach.

St Brendan’s may have embodied a radical new social agenda for education and indeed society in twentieth-century Ireland in its architecture, but the building remains unlisted and, until recently, its significance (nationally and internationally) has been much overlooked. Part of this project’s agenda, therefore, involved raising awareness in the value of the building among existing and potential future stakeholders. The creation of accessible forms of communication that would both synthesise and make clear the complex data generated and the relationships between them was of central importance to the team’s approach. The paper ultimately argues that while attuned to a specific site, these techniques contain the possibility of a wider application, a new visual literacy for the conservation of twentieth-century buildings.

Contemporary ecological discourse in architecture is often built upon an approach based on quantitative parameters, characterised by the use of scientific data for environmentally sound architectural design. This article questions how such an ecological approach relates to the architectural image, experience, and inhabitation.

Through two archetypical projects - Siegfried Ebeling’s Wohnkubus (1926) and Cedric Price’s Generator (1976-9) – this article examines a possible theory of ecologically oriented architecture which engages aesthetic values related to the human experience of architectural space. The projects are separated by the same fifty-year gap that separates Generator from present day, and the article therefore tries to reveal if and how both archetypes could suggest the need for an updated model for environmental design. What can we learn from these projects, and how do the Wohnkubus and Generator unveil other modelling practices? Is architecture today capable of (or even entitled to) producing exemplary representations committed to the ethical dimension of the global change?

The design of domestic environments is fraught with decision-making, a process often dictated by fashion. The resulting inhabitation of domestic spaces blends the routine and the banal, with occasional forays into the extraordinary. The spaces of the domesticity range from single rooms to elaborate palaces. These can be functionally prescribed or open-ended, they support furniture, décor, behaviours, and narratives. The writer Georges Perec (1936–82) provides a way of looking at the domestic realm and ordinary life through his many inter-related writings on the subject. In his quest for an ‘anthropology of everyday life’, he explored notions of the ‘ordinary’ and ‘infraordinary’. In this text two important works by Perec are examined to explore how he framed and questioned notions of domesticity; can this reading be construed as a theory of domesticity?

Perec’s text Species of Spaces describes a spatial continuity between city and dwelling that is characterised by spatial types, thresholds/boundaries, objects, and everyday practices often of an autobiographical nature. He begins with the page, ascends through the apartment building and the city, and ends with the world in a sequence of embedded spatial conditions. A close read of Species of Spaces uncovers a kind of sociological work, a critique or manifesto, and an evolution from Perec’s previous writings. In the text he asks the most fundamental questions, such as ‘What does it mean, to live in a room?’

In his monumental text Life A User’s Manual, Perec examines the lives of residents in a typical Parisian apartment building, it remains one of the most significant imaginings of how a building, or work of architecture, can be occupied. Through the vast scope of Perec’s project the book captures the intertwining lives of the occupants of the building at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier, in Paris’s 17th arrondissement, at precisely 8:00 pm on 23 June 1975. To accomplish this Perec devised forty-two ‘preprogrammed’ factors to structure each of the ninety-nine chapters to ensure that he covered plot, actors, and setting in a systematic way. The apartment building ultimately provides an armature for the study of the very small to the very large.

Life A User’s Manual describes a domestic world, how we organise our residences into compartments of space, how we furnish the rooms, how our stories create our realities, and how the lives of people in an ordinary apartment building intertwine in so many ways. Although frozen in a moment, the novel captures the vagaries and complexities of the everyday. It describes the routines of living, unexpected happenings, the connections between people living together at close quarters, the role of interiors in defining a particular period, the histories that can support and damage a life, the common aspirations and tragedies of urban dwellers, and so on. Perec's work does not constitute an actual theory of domesticity, although it precisely describes a domestic order that provides a sense of place by attending to both the minor and major aspects of an environment.

This article provides an English translation of an unpublished German typescript found in the archive of the architect Julius Posener in the Akademie der Kunst, Berlin. Posener, a professor of architectural history at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (HBK), travelled with a colleague and fifteen students to England for a fortnight in March 1963. They met several prominent architects, saw a wide selection of their current and recently completed works, and attended events at the Architectural Association school. The typescript is an account of the trip that he wrote up from notes in his diary on 29 March, two days after their return. Posener, who had previously spent almost a decade teaching architecture in London, proves to have been a sympathetic observer of the scene, eager to compare and contrast what he saw in England with contemporary work in Germany; his account evokes subtle disagreements between himself and his colleague on conceptual and historical points, and gives us an insight into the day-to-day workings of Denys Lasdun’s office, the Architectural Association, the London County Council, and the Building Research Station in Garston.

In this article, we argue that in order to properly assess the potentials, challenges, and implications of the digital transformation in architecture and construction, we need to better understand the political-economic dynamics behind it and examine it in light of the current reorganisation of global capitalism. The focus of this article is therefore on the larger political-economic and techno-economic conditions that are shaping the implementation of digital technologies in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) sector. Based on document analysis on the digital turn in architecture and construction, along with interviews with AEC professionals, we argue that the logic of platform capitalism is beginning to transform the industry, with Building Information Modelling (BIM) acting as an obligatory passage point and government policies as gate-openers. The article, first, discusses concepts of platform and platform capitalism and indicates how these apply to recent reconfigurations of actor and power relations in the field. Second, it reviews some of the developments in digital architecture from 2D drawings to BIM and beyond. Third, it examines the role of government policies as driving forces in the digital transformation. Forth, it takes a closer look at the case of software producer Autodesk and their BIM product Revit, which illustrates how the logic of platform capitalism has gained traction in architecture and construction. Finally, it concludes that some expectations can be derived from these observations: In the realm of design software, we can expect a further concentration of economic power and a near-monopolistic structure of the market. Moreover, we can expect a shift of focus and investment from architectural design to socio-digital modes of construction and urban planning that benefit primarily real estate owners, investors, developers, and construction companies. Furthermore, we can expect large construction firms to secure themselves a comfortable starting position as early adopters, while SMEs are facing bigger challenges to benefit from the digital transformation. Lastly, we can expect a further encroachment of tech giants and domain outsiders such as Alphabet into architecture and construction, turning buildings and cities into machines for data extraction.

In 1955 Charles and Ray Eames gathered more than three hundred photographs of their Case Study House #8 in the Pacific Palisades to produce the experimental film House: After Five Years of Living. The film is a visual exploration in which craft and found objects contrast with the mass-produced industrial structure of their house, but also a constant tension between the frantic acceleration of its images and moments of slow pace.

Proceeding from a close reading of House: After Five Years of Living, this article analyses its film and editing technique to proposes how domesticity becomes a screen. This means, an ideological surface promoting the cultural, social, and economic changes of the Cold War period, while simultaneously screening out (obscuring) its anxieties, preoccupations, and fears in its mode of visual representation. In the film, the Case study House #8 exposes and covers, promotes and disguises, veiling some preoccupations and motivations while exhibiting an alternative reality.

This article investigates architectural responses to everyday sociospatial practices in public spaces in the postconflict urban landscape of Belfast, where public buildings and façades impact pedestrian flows and movement patterns in the public space. While the city has an extended history of vibrant public spaces and active urban life throughout the first half of the twentieth century, devastating memories of the so-called Troubles leave imprints of division across the city’s public spaces. Inscribed by memories of conflict and violence, ground floor façades are mainly solid, disengaging, and do not encourage fluid movement across their thresholds. This article argues that the architectural design of public buildings and spaces characterise attributes of a reciprocal reproduction of memories of fear. A comparative analysis of the architecture of four different public spaces in Belfast city centre highlights factors that inform the relationship between the building façades, ease of accessibility, and use of the public space.

Between the months of September and October, Kolkata celebrates the Hindu religious festival of Durgapuja on a grand scale. Organised by local clubs and neighbourhood voluntary associations, approximately 2,500 temporary structures – pandals – are built for the worship or puja of the goddess Durga and her entourage. Of these about two thousand occupy the city’s public spaces: streets, parks, green islands, and vacant lots. A large number of the pandals are finely engineered structures that are fabulously decorated and attract hundreds of thousands of visitors each day of the festivities. It takes anywhere between three months to three days to build these pavilions. After five days of festivities the pandals are dismantled and the clay deities destroyed by immersing them in the Hooghly River or another nearby body of water.

This article explores challenges that surround the implementation of conservation management strategies for living heritage in the context of two case study sites in India. Acknowledging that, in theory, ‘bottom-up’ strategies for expertise exist but are rarely constituted in practice, it presents two vivid but fragile examples where such possibilities might be observed. It first distinguishes the Indian Cultural Heritage context from many conventional conceptions of heritage, defined by its distance from the beholder. Vignettes illustrate how the complexity of simultaneous value systems and beliefs may confound precepts relating to the treatment of tangible heritage. A discussion of the role of the architect in drawing and model making in this context is promoted for the purpose of deeper documentation. It draws upon previous work, which has proposed the enhanced potential to record the ephemeral as well as the monumental using photogrammetry. Building on this, the role of 3D digital models has recently been suggested as a means to contribute to processes for mediating between contested conservation strategies. Challenges of heritage that is at risk of destruction from being overwhelmed by nature are separated from those associated with dereliction or, in this instance and most importantly, increased use. The two case studies, in north and south India – at Ajmer in Rajasthan and at Madurai in Tamil Nadu – are discussed in relation to other examples. These present the opportunity to consider in context how issues of the designation of value at a local or a global scale might relate to corresponding difficulties in terms of governance and control at local or global scales. It again emphasises the role and scope of deeper documentation for this purpose. In terms of safeguarding, it suggests that better means for deeper observation of existing practices of maintenance should specifically be incorporated in future work.

In around 1912 Gabriel Jouveau-Dubreuil, a young science teacher from French colonial Pondicherry in South India, visited the nearby town of Cuddalore in order to inspect the construction of a new Hindu temple. Since arriving in South India in 1909 he had been travelling to many temples and archaeological sites in order to understand the history of South Indian art. The modern temple that he visited in a suburb of Cuddalore at Tiruppappuliyur was not in fact new but a wholesale renovation of a nine-hundred-year-old shrine on a site sacred to Tamil Shaivas. This was just one of the many temples substantially rebuilt from the 1890s to the 1930s under the patronage of a wealthy merchant community, the Nattukkottai Chettiars, at a time of religious revival and growing Tamil cultural nationalism. The Nattukkottai Chettiars came from the villages and towns of Chettinadu, an arid region in southern Madras Presidency. This region was significant not only for being the provenance of the most prolific patrons of South Indian temple architecture in colonial Madras Presidency but also their builders, for many of the architects and craftsmen working on the temple at Tiruppappuliyur were from villages in Chettinadu. One of these men, M. S. Swaminathan of Pillaiyarpatti, was Jouveau-Dubreuil’s chief informant, one of the many ‘natives’ who were a critical and inextricable element of colonial knowledge production. The understanding of formal composition and terminology that Jouveau-Dubreuil learnt from contemporary architects and craftsmen and his observations of the evolution of architectural design contributed towards the first study of the Tamil temple for both a scholarly and wider public audience from the very earliest monuments of the seventh century through to those currently under construction. This article explores this architectural ‘renaissance’ in colonial Madras Presidency under Chettiar patronage and evaluates modern temple design through the pioneering scholarship of Jouveau-Dubreuil and his contemporaries.

The article discusses an approach taken for the design of a new temple in Karnataka, India, to be built in the medieval ‘Hoysala’ style, which followed the Karnata Dravida tradition of temple architecture. This style is unfamiliar to present-day traditional temple builders in India. The design needs to be based on research into architectural history, of a kind that aims to relive the processes through which temples were designed, assimilating the architectural language and its principles. This kind of architectural history involves re-creation, and this kind of design can contribute to architectural history as ‘design research’.

An application of such research is the reconstruction of temple designs from ruins. The temples can potentially be rebuilt, or they can be reconstructed graphically, and presented meaningfully on site. Re-creation of temples through drawing is also a key for understanding canonical Sanskrit texts on architecture. These texts are not illustrated but call for interpretation through drawing. Temple types are typically presented in sequences of evolution from simple to complex forms, one type emanating from another in way reminiscent of how the architectural traditions themselves develop. Texts provide a framework for a design, demanding interpretation, improvisation, and invention. The results are only partly determined by an individual architect, and the framework can stimulate creations that an individual would never have thought of, as if such temples are svayambhu, or ‘self-creating’.

A ’svayambhu’ approach has been taken in the design of the new Hoysala temple. No texts survive from the Karnata Dravida tradition, but the surviving creations of that tradition display the emanatory logic of its unfolding. A ‘self-creating’ design for this temple can be achieved by exploring formal possibilities inherent in the tradition and extrapolating a new form, while accommodating ritual and iconographic requirements, and being open to the unexpected.

Let us sit down here on this seat. We had it made as a sample for a temple in Junagadh. Now it has a place here at home. We call its back the kakshasan. Do you know why? Because the backrest supports the kaksh or the armpit, when you lean against it while sitting, just like this.

This article considers the relationship between architecture, bodies, and custodies in the making of Indian urban monuments. Monuments are created through a combination of design and designation. In this article I explore a religious architecture that is dynamic and iterative and at which monumental designation was attempted and quickly abandoned. I align three issues: what a monument looks like, what a monument does, and how both design and function connect to the custodian regimes at monumental, or potentially monumental, sites. In particular, I am concerned with architectures of divinity, and devotion, as both quotidian and monumental aspects of a city.

Modernity is easy to inhabit but difficult to define. If modernity is to be a definable, delimited concept, we must identify some people or practices or concepts as nonmodern.

The article explores the interpretation of sustainability from the Japanese perspective. Drawing from four case studies, the article asks: how is sustainability interpreted in the context of urban regeneration in Japan? Two case studies (Musashi Kosugi and Kashiwanoha) are high-rise, high-density developments that use new building technology but have little or no attention to the context. UR Yokodai danchi renovation and Kamakura ‘regional capitalism’ are community-led projects that preserve the existing buildings and the local community. These four developments are analysed in relation to sustainability criteria that includes socioeconomic targets and conservation of the townscape. The findings suggest that although Musashi Kosugi and Kashiwanoha are prime examples of urban densification and the use of smart technology, challenges posed by the post-population peak society, oversupply of housing, and consequences of the pandemic question the flexibility and sustainability of these developments. Yokodai danchi demonstrates the potential of postwar housing stock to accommodate sustainable renovation and provide affordable housing. Kamakura ‘regional capitalism’, rooted in joint venture between the local governance, entrepreneurs, and old residents, middle-density and mixed-use urban fabric, can develop into flexible, idiosyncratic, and family-friendly environments. The research suggests that the Japanese government’s new policies such as Super Cities Program should not restrict the vision of sustainable cities to new build developments and that urban densification should not always be taken as a synonym to sustainable city developments.

In November 2004, the University of Cambridge announced its intention to close the Architecture Department,1 following a drop from a 5 to a 4 in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), which aimed to measure the quality of research activity across the Higher Education sector in the UK.2 Other departments in the University of Cambridge achieved a 5 or a 5* rating in the same exercise. In 2004 the University’s General Board, which oversees academic standards within the University, came to the conclusion that the Department of Architecture was making ‘insufficient progress towards meeting Cambridge standards in terms of research quality’ and advised that it should be shut down.3 While this remained a recommendation, with no official action having yet been made, the threat of closure sparked an outrage both within and outside Cambridge. After a campaign in the national press, the architecture department was saved [1, 2].