The entwined relationships between the physical and the computational continue to produce sensibilities where our understanding of the division between them is becoming blurred. The prolog to Rustic Figurations identifies a growing interest in disciplinary questions on the role of history and the history of digital tools and techniques of representation to support and understand the cultural context of architecture. The second part of the text tries to describe, define and situate rustic figuration as an aesthetic and material concept in architecture that has developed through the architectural design research of the practices servo and Brrum, in parallel with research into the history of rustication.

The notion of rustic figuration is imbued with architectural qualities that oscillate between the legibility of form and geometry and the disappearance of that legibility. Aspects of legibility are discussed in relation to related discourses in architectural history, as well as in the context of a few contemporary practices and projects that engage both computational and analogue techniques for design, communication and fabrication. The qualities of rustic figuration in the projects are neither bound by the unique properties of the building materials, nor by the computational information but happen in the translations between digital information and material manifestation or vice versa.

Concepts of the sharing economy are gaining traction in retail, finance, business and law. What has it to do with architecture? We examine the sharing economy's basis in peer-to-peer exchange, and its relationship with the intriguing technology known as the ‘blockchain.’ We look critically as the practical applications of the technology to architecture in areas such as the exchange of digital assets and the automation of certain types of contracts, as well as the metaphors about the city it brings to light as a stimulus to design.

Richard Weston – Editor of arq from 2004 to 2013, and best known for his distinguished monographs on Alvar Aalto, Modernism and Utzon – reflects here on his more recent practice-led research into minerals, materials and digitisation. These studies explore the qualities of materials themselves but also the materialisation of imagery. This work is ‘practice-led’ in the way that the term is used in academe – meaning research which emerges out of a series of investigations – rather than ‘practice-led’ in the way architects might understand the term, as emerging from a professional office. As Weston reflects, however, this is work that would – most likely – be supported neither in the contexts of academe nor professional practice. It has been made possible instead by his ‘active retirement’. This paper explores how a chance encounter with an ammonite led Weston to Liberty's ‘Scarf Hall’, world-renowned in global fashion, a creative app for children called Molly's World, and virtual realities captured from microscopic mineral-worlds.

Today, there is an increasing use of terms such as ‘transnational architecture’, ‘architecture beyond Europe’, ‘architecture of China, Japan and Korea’, ‘China in Africa’ and ‘Socialist architecture in Africa’. This signals a change in the basic outlook in thinking and research around architecture towards a problematic concerning geography and geopolitical relations. Michel Foucault, as early as 1967, had already said that ‘history’ was being replaced by ‘geography’, and a historical outlook on an endless timeline was being replaced by a new awareness of a finite world, of a world geography, of things happening ‘here and there’, of space and place, and of a ‘network’ we were all located within (in a speech published later as ‘Of Other Spaces: Principles of Heterotopia’).13 My contention is that, due to many factors, today more than any other time, a world-historical paradigm in architectural research is being replaced, or at least radically reformed, by a new one that methodologically privileges local and material happenings as horizontally connected to other sites and happenings, in a networked geographic spread: it involves a cartographic perspective that challenges endogenous, national and formalist categories.

The terms ‘age of consent’, ‘age of licence’ and ‘age of majority’ – often used interchangeably – give young adults legal and moral permission to drink, drive, vote, smoke, have sex and marry (among other rights). Depending on context, the threshold from being a minor to attaining majority – adulthood – is marked by a ritual or a ceremony, giving the threshold cul-tural as well as legal significance. But thresholds, as we already know, are places of action, movement, change … rarely comfortable or easy, and seldom precise. Drawing on the three years since the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg (GSA) was established in 2016, this essay traces the school's own ‘coming-of-age’ in a time of violent protest and popular uprising against an out-of-date and stubbornly Eurocentric curriculum. Whilst the issues facing young South African students – both black and white – have particular resonance inside South Africa, many of the initiatives that the school has pioneered under the banner of ‘Transformative Pedagogies’ hold meaning for the rest of the African continent. Using a mixture of conventional texts, videos, projects and transcripts, A Minor Majority details the GSA's attempts to seize both the site-specific ‘winds of change’ in South Africa and take advantage of global shifts in research culture and methodology to arrive at new insights and possibilities.

Various New York architecture studios have research entities, or labs, which are each unique in their scope, funding and their stakeholders. They do not offer alternative or tangential ways to practice architecture. Instead, these units live and work in the studio context and adhere to the protocols and cultures of architecture offices. They follow similar design-think/problem-solve paradigms but operate with different frameworks and business models, providing different services. They challenge the binary division of client and architect, and are located in a different position in the decision-making process.

Research units like this are growing in number, with architecture studios diversifying their work portfolio in an attempt to amplify their popularity and influence. As a result, architects’ creative and political interests have produced new exploratory platforms with stable financial performance within their business models. Thornton Tomasetti's CORE Studio has collaborated with Autodesk on cutting-edge design software almost since its inception. Snøhetta's brand design unit was commissioned to design Norwegian banknotes, and Prada/AMO, as a design-powerhouse duo, has had significant influence. The field of architectural design, often relegated to intellectual isolation or wrongly commodified, is thus finding innovative ways to detach product and process, and capitalising it in novel and sophisticated ways. Such initiatives seem to have launched the studios concerned into new markets and disciplines, harnessing the transdisciplinary nature of the profession while expanding the scope of their curiosity.

In 2014, I interviewed leading protagonists from successful in-house research units in New York. We discussed their methods and how they manage their financial and human resources. I explored with them what prompted their bold exploration into new, creative territories. This paper presents excerpts from four interviews with: Shogei Shigematsu, OMA/AMO; Richard Olcott, ennead/Lab; Jonatan Schumacher, Thorton Tomasetti/CORE Studio and; Michael Sorkin, Terreform.