The predominant model of sustainable architecture is based on a sharp differentiation between technical and social realms that tends to situate architectural design practice in an ambiguous and marginalised position. Sustainable architecture as a whole has come to be dominated by a focus on engineering design with a related emphasis on energy efficiency and climate-change strategies that seek to improve the economic performance of buildings whilst providing little or no consideration of the wider contexts of architectural design and production. This paper argues for an expanded understanding of sustainable design and draws on ideas developed within the Philosophy of Technology to point to the broader cultural values and practices that surround particular design choices. From this perspective the work of engineers, architects, and other designers of the built environment provide settings upon which the ongoing dramas of political action are mounted.

Through analysis of ‘live’ student design-build projects, the paper explores three distinct conceptualisations of sustainable design practice in which buildings are interpreted as physical manifestations of differentiated frames of design thinking that emphasise either de-contextualised, context-bound or re-contextualising design processes. Although these apparently distinct practices can be analytically differentiated, it is argued that the realisation of sustainable design practices inevitably involves a seamless interaction and interchange between the differentiated dimensions. The conclusion draws on the work of Andrew Feenberg to conceptualise sustainable design as a concrete practice whereby abstract technical concerns and social considerations seamlessly converge to produce artefacts that fit specific contexts.

As a discipline, architects pride themselves on the precision and exactitude of their spatial endeavors – no minutiae is too small, no details too inconsequential. However, when exactitude becomes the representational aspiration of architecture, when the images architects produce ‘almost exactly’ deliver the reality they hope to soon conjure, a tautology ensues. This article explores the exigencies of the ⅞ scale – a scale that is almost exactly but not quite the same as reality. It is the remaining ⅛ that eschews representational tautology, that produces the effect of exactness, and that populates architecture's historical and spatial imaginaries. Through the lens of one highly symbolic and historically configured room, the Oval Office, this article attempts to map the hazards and pitfalls of realism as a disciplinary aspiration, while simultaneously embracing the figurative realm of the ⅛ and the promise of its imaginative potential.

The architectural theories of Lebbeus Woods present a number of philosophical problems. Of particular interest in this paper is Woods' thinking about autonomy and self-determinism in architecture. He claims that the architect should ‘recognise his own autonomy’ before ‘designing for other self-determining individuals’. The logical impossibility inherent in the juxtaposition of these claims is investigated with reference to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein provides a critique of metaphysics that is based on a strong valuing of socio-cultural context. Woods, on the other hand, proposes theoretical accounts of architecture that contain the fallacious appeal to autonomy. The appeal, however logically false, is critical to the theoretical position cast in terms of ‘heterarchy’. The appeal also supports the presupposition of society and culture that in turn allows for a sense of architectural solution. In the case of Woods' proposals for Berlin and Sarajevo projects, it is shown that the sense of architectural solution cannot amount to a real solution to the socio-cultural problems facing the people of these war torn cities.

According to the architectural theorist Charles Jencks, a major problem in architecture at this moment is the spiritual crisis, and the loss of a shared metaphysics. He believes that it is the task of architects to take responsibility for the public and esoteric meanings of a civic building, although this is an especially difficult task in a global culture where many believe there is no shared value system. Jencks is aware of the problem but at the same time he believes that a new paradigm in architecture is emerging. He describes this new paradigm as follows:

We have moved from a mechanistic view of the universe to one that is self-organising at all levels from the atom to the galaxy. Illuminated by the computer, this new worldview is paralleled by changes now occurring in architecture.

Jencks concedes that this shift in worldview is only beginning, that there is no widespread cultural movement under way, but one can discern the beginnings of a shift in architecture that relates to a profound transformation in science. Jencks is particularly interested in new sciences of complexity: fractals, nonlinear dynamics, self-organising systems, and the new cosmology. At the core of this new worldview is the new cosmology, ‘cosmogenesis’, which reveals the universe as a single, unfolding, creative event perpetually striving for new levels of self-organisation. Cosmogenesis tells us a new story of the universe and therefore Jencks perceives it as our new Genesis.

Troppo Architects was established in Darwin, northern Australia, in 1981. The radical ‘Troppo Style’ of their houses designed in the 1980s blur edges between indoors and outdoors, formality and informality, and enclosure and openness. In this paper a corpus of ten of those houses is examined through the lens of philosopher Warwick Fox's concept of responsive cohesion. This is a unique quality of the relations between the internal components of a ‘thing’ and also between the ‘thing’ and its contexts. The houses are exemplary in demonstrating this quality of mutual and subtle response through the interactions between their form and local environmental and cultural contexts, including the idea of responsible hedonism as a design principle.

The research utilises original documents, site visits and interviews with stakeholders, particularly the architects and the residents. The outcomes reveal interlocking links between the dwelling, the place, the values of the architects and their clients, and the global bio-physical world. They show objectives of personal enjoyment of life and environmental responsibility could co-exist in harmony. However, the research also shows how these houses change over time depending on their location and on the attitudes of their owners. They would not work elsewhere, or for clients without a similar attitude to life and the pleasures offered by everyday living close to the variety and stimuli of the outdoors.

The announcement that American architect Steven Holl had won the competition to design a new building for the Glasgow School of Art opposite Charles Rennie Mackintosh's original (built 1897–1909), and the revelation of his plans to the public, provoked plenty of criticism about the possible relationship between the two buildings. Professor William Curtis first wrote on the topic in the Architects' Journal almost a year from the announcement, and his opinions on the relationship were forthright: ‘Rather than dialogue’, he argued, ‘there is a dumb lack of articulation in construction and material.’ A response came in the following issue of the AJ from David Porter, then Professor at the Mackintosh School of Architecture. He disagreed with Curtis, claiming that the new building will have ‘an extraordinary spatial richness’ and that ‘the original sketch Curtis saw in Glasgow last December has progressed very rapidly’, for it was but an early stage in ‘a design strategy driven forward with a mixture of poetics and ruthless pragmatics: qualities that are singularly appropriate in this context, and developed with artistry and skill’.

Curtis subsequently wrote a further open letter to ‘the Governors, the Director, the Faculty, Students, Staff, Alumnae and Alumni’ of Glasgow School of Art, which was published in facsimile in the Architects' Journal on 3 March 2011:

What a disappointment then to contemplate Steven Holl's proposed addition. It is horrendously out of scale, it dominates Mackintosh, it does not create a decent urban space, it fails to deal with the context near and far, it is clumsy in form and proportion, it lacks finesse in detail, has no relationship to the human figure, and is a stillborn diagram dressed up in Holl clichés such as ‘iceberg’ glass.

This paper is intended as a contribution to current debates about the changing conditions of urban space and uneven development. It will analyse the functions of the architectural professions in this process and how their productions prefigure the social and economic arrangement of space. It will examine these notions through analysis of Cardiff Bay and will analyse the changes occurring under late capitalism in the shift to Post-Fordist modes of accumulation. While the paper will examine the local space of Cardiff Bay, the analytical ground will be extended to the ongoing restructuring of space under the new global economies at a macro scale.

Urban restructuring is most evident in the decentred metropolis of the post-modern city, the new cities for consumption. The growth or collapse of multinational capital needs to be seen as framing the occupation of space, its investment and disinvestment, and as an ongoing process, part of a systematic reprogramming of space that can and should be examined at every stage of its operations.

Relocating the economic, political and social into considerations of space means that the paper will also incorporate historical analysis of modes of production and social formations. To consider space as ideological means that transfigured space must also be considered. The paper will therefore raise ideas that are directed towards the transformation of social and political space, and will examine that which identifies Lefebvre's distinction between appropriated and dominated space.

In 2000, the Crown Street redevelopment in Glasgow's New Gorbals area was completed following a masterplan by Piers Gough and building designs by Page and Park, Elder and Cannon, Hypostyle Architects and others. Built on symbolically contested ground previously occupied by the Gorbals tenements (1870s–1960s) and the high-rise Hutchesontown flats (1960s–1990s), the new development is a textbook example of neotraditional design. The project features ornamented facades, bay windows, courtyards and corridor streets along with local references to the heyday of Glasgow tenements during the late nineteenth century.

This paper shows that the new tenements on Crown Street contributed to Glasgow's economic revival strategies by reconfiguring the site and supporting a positive view of Glasgow's Victorian era. In this sense, the architects adapted design preferences – which at the time were evident all over Europe and North America – to a local agenda.

The new tenements reconcile conflicting perspectives: on the one hand a break almost as comprehensive as the urban renewal of the 1960s, and on the other hand an idea of historical continuity and long-lasting community life, which rested on a revised conception of the city's industrial past. Conveying a historical image cleared of imperfections they communicate a message of permanence that stands in stark contrast to the area's historic upheavals, but nonetheless contributed to the viability of the new neighbourhood.

What is material as such in architecture? To contribute an answer to this question, the article examines sources from the eighteenth century to today. Discussing Vitruvius' remarks on materiality, Francesco Algarotti cites his Venetian teacher Carlo Lodoli in a 1756 pamphlet on architecture: “For which reason does stone not represent stone, wood [not represent] wood, each material itself and not another?” The paper illuminates the background of this citation, and its adoption and interpretation by successive architectural theorists, such as Gottfried Semper(“Brick should appear as brick, wood as wood, iron as iron”), Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, and Frank Lloyd Wright, the latter emphasizing the importance “to see concrete or glass or metal each for itself and all as themselves.” The thread continues with Adolf Loos' statement that no material “may lay claim for itself to the forms of another material” and the Bauhaus model as taught by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Further investigations will concern Louis Kahn's question “What do you want, brick?” and end with Peter Zumthor's discussion of the “reality of building materials.” Discussing rationalist and sensualist approaches to material characteristics such as inner structure and outer surface, the article compares divers positions concerning the question of what can be understood as concrete materiality.