The concept of typology has recurred in architectural discourse since the term’s conception in the early nineteenth century. To describe an architectural object usually involves an act of typifying; a generalisation of built form to common characteristics. Both the analysis of architecture and its creation require this abstraction, which offers the potential to form types and expose initially unapparent relationships. Typology’s Enlightenment origins sought to link architecture to a natural order, but its terminology has subsequently been adopted in modernist rejections of mass culture and Neo-Rationalist pursuits of continua and meaning. Despite widespread use of the term, the role typology plays in the process of design remains unclear. Attempts to link its academic origins to the creation of architectural form (notably by Gottfried Semper in the nineteenth century, and Guilio Carlo Argan and Aldo Rossi in the twentieth century) have done little to synthesise the two and merely succeeded in alienating it from practice.

This article examines the emergence of a new materiality in Israeli architecture in the 1950s. I refer here to two distinct but interrelated senses of the word materiality. The first is predicated on the socioeconomic and geopolitical conditions in which architecture, like all fields of artistic production, takes shape; the second reflects the use, handling, and finishing of materials in construction. I show how several key figures in architectural circles in the recently founded State of Israel expressed this new materiality by developing a new style, characterised by restrained formal gestures, abstention from material extravagance, the use and exposure of local materials, an emphasis on the legibility of structure, and an appeal to rational building procedures. This style was a product of both pressing objective material constraints, which were acute in the postwar welfare state and its austerity regime, and ideological frameworks from the interwar period, the foundations of which were cultural as well as disciplinary.

Architectural models are reductive representations. Traits included or excluded from a model reflect designer intent as well as broader values held at the time of their construction. As such, models are reflective, acting as cultural mirrors of both conscious and unconscious priorities at the time of their construction. Models are also projective, offering new conceptions and interpretations about the subjects of their representations. Italo Calvino’s character Mr. Palomar reflects on the dialogic relationship between a model and reality.

In 2012 the Chinese architect Wang Shu won the distinguished Pritzker Architecture Prize. Since then, his buildings and his architectural thinking have received increasing international attention. Among his many written works, Wang’s PhD thesis ‘Fictionalising Cities’ – completed in 2000 under the supervision of Professor Jiwei Lu at Tongji University in Shanghai – is widely considered the definitive statement of his architectural thought and methodology. It comprises a structuralist study of the city and its architecture, doing so through the development of two key themes. The first is Wang’s theoretical discussion of the application of structuralist-semiotic approaches to architecture, urban research, and other areas in the humanities, and the second is his reading of the Chinese city and China’s landscape architecture tradition in the light of this theoretical discussion. Wang believes that traditional Chinese cities have their own structure, components and rules of combination, and refers to them as instances of ‘texture city’ (), a term that proposes an analogy between Roland Barthes’s notion of text and the city, both of which are understood as a ‘fabric of signifiers’.

The history of London has long been entwined with expansions of financial capital and the machinations of global plutocrats and their more proximate counterparts.1 However, what has happened in the decade since the global financial crisis is without precedent. London has been transformed into a city for global capital rather than one designed to meet the needs and aspirations of the majority of its denizens.2

Australia’s laid-back, sun-drenched beach lifestyle has been a celebrated and prominent part of its official popular culture for nigh on a century, and the images and motifs associated with this culture have become hallmarks of the country’s collective identity. Though these representations tend towards stereotype, for many Australians the idea of a summer holiday at the beach is one that is intensely personal and romanticised – its image is not at all urbanised. As Douglas Booth observed, for Australians the beach has become a ‘sanctuary at which to abandon cares – a place to let down one’s hair, remove one’s clothes […] a paradise where one could laze in peace, free from guilt, drifting between the hot sand and the warm sea, and seek romance’.1 Beach holidays became popular in the interwar years of the twentieth century, but the most intense burst of activity – both in touristic promotion and in the development of tourism infrastructure – accompanied the postwar economic boom, when family incomes were able to meet the cost of a car and, increasingly, a cheap block of land by the beach upon which a holiday home could be erected with thrift and haste. In subtropical southeast Queensland, the postwar beach holiday became the hallmark of the state’s burgeoning tourism industry; the state’s southeast coastline in particular benefiting from its warm climate and proximity to the capital, Brisbane. It was here – along the evocatively named Gold Coast (to Brisbane’s south) and Sunshine Coast (to its north) [1] – that many families experienced their first taste of what is now widely celebrated as the beach lifestyle [2]. As one reflection has it:

Almost every architecture school in China has its own university-run design institute, which functions as a platform for academics and students to engage with architectural practice.1 Design institutes play an active role in advancing, producing, and sharing architectural knowledge.2 Academic-architects, in the context of design institutes, tend to embed themselves within a complex academic-professional network, simultaneously engaging with scholarly inquiry, training young professionals and transforming cultural assets into capital in the market.3 It is the unique position of such educator-practitioners that has distinguished the work of university-run design institutes from that of numerous other state-backed design institutes.

Peppered with galleries, ateliers, and upscale designer boutiques, Tokyo’s Shibuya ward is often described as a commercial haven for Japan’s urban fashionistas and style-conscious visitors. Within it, a narrow park sits atop a 1960s parking structure that was once a refuge for nearly one hundred homeless city residents until most were forcibly removed in 2010 by city officials. Dozens of blue tarp tents, umbrellas, weathered shoes, and cherished belongings were discarded, and the people who had lived there were fenced out indefinitely. Although this striking contrast of urban socioeconomic disparity is one that characterises many cities across the globe, the juxtapositions in Shibuya have been made increasingly visible by strong cohorts of unrelenting activists who have ignited decades of discourse and scholarly debate about individual rights to cities, as well as the role and agency of architects in the designing of public spaces. This article combines participant observations of art activists, semi-structured and oral history interviews of homeless residents in Tokyo, as well as historical analysis, to examine these tensions as they have played out at Miyashita Park in Shibuya, including how perpetual redesigns of the park by architects and urban planners tasked with ‘re-activating’ the park in the 1960s, 2000s, and again in the late 2010s, have been vehemently opposed. More specifically, the article examines how a vocal group of art activists organised in opposition to the park’s most recent redesign efforts sponsored by Nike and the idea that such a public-private partnership could produce an inclusive public space. Instead, the activists worked to problematise the appropriateness of terms such as ‘public’ altogether. Through art installations, writing, impromptu concerts, sporting events, and protests that engaged with the politics of their own bodies, the activists turned to alternative genealogies and definitions of ‘public’ as a way to connect more particularly to Japanese urban form and to resist hegemonic and imported concepts of ‘public’ as reproduced and reinforced by architects often without challenge. By drawing on alternative terms, such as akichi, meaning ‘open land’, the activists argue for a different sense of spatial inclusivity than the supposedly universal democratic ideals associated with designs for public spaces in Tokyo.

If you want to know what society looks like, look at our cities, look at their distribution of spaces, their scales, their densities. Look at how cities curate events. This article sketches the basis for architectural thinking on individual/collective social formations as read through the texts of Vitruvius and Freud with support from Aristotle, Arendt, and Lacan, in parallel with city projects by the rooms+cities studio, a Master’s-level design research unit at the University of Dundee, which is itself a collective project that begins with the close reading of canonic city plans in search of the collective body of knowledge that comprises the discipline and practice of architecture. Teaching may not be the only way to change built environment thinking but it is one way. Vittorio Gregotti reckoned that the schools were best placed to challenge establishment practices with avantgarde thought. We use architecture to think the relation between the individual and the collective, and thereby to make a space for politics and public life. This article is thus comprised of two arguments, one predominantly textual, the other graphic, of complementary weight and importance, that run side by side and occasionally cross or mingle.

In 1972, David Prichard joined Richard MacCormac and Peter Jamieson to form the architectural practice of MacCormac Jamieson Prichard [1]. He has contributed to the design and delivery of residential masterplans and developments across the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, including in the New Towns of Milton Keynes, Cwmbrân, Warrington, Basildon and the London Docklands, and leading the Ballymun Regeneration Masterplan.

Mark Latham is an advocate of modern methods of construction in residential design and development. He reflects upon how contemporary approaches to modular housing can reshape residents’ experiences of suburban settings.

Construction is by far the largest material-consuming activity in the UK. In 2016, the territory produced more than 800 kg of construction and demolition (C&D) waste per person.1 Most of these building materials are energy intensive to produce and environmentally costly to transport. Their premature replacement therefore contributes significantly to the increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.