In this paper we establish a dialogue with Living with Buildings to contextualise NOTBAD (Niches for Organic Territories in Bio-Augmented Design), a multidisciplinary research project at the intersection of architecture and microbiology, sited within a wider historical discourse connecting architecture and health. Living with Buildings (2018) was organised by the Wellcome Trust to trace the changing landscape of health and architecture, setting out to show how connections between the ways we feel and the places in which we spend our lives have historically evolved as our ideas about health and disease have changed. Taking our cue from the pieces at the exhibition, we discuss how the eighteenth century saw the emergence of an imaginary of cleanliness linked to miasma theory, locating bad smells and odours as the origin of disease and resulting in the adoption of rituals of purification in buildings. Treatments of plastering, coating and whitewashing popularised in the nineteenth century are testament to a shift from olfactory to visual codes of hygiene and to the ‘antibiotic turn’ in architecture.

We extend the historical analysis to suggest that architecture finds itself at a crossroads. Although there is a growing understanding of how much architecture influences our wellbeing, architectural thought still clings to the antibiotic turn. Following the tradition of exchange between architecture and medicine, we propose the notion of Probiotic Architecture as a way of framing the shifting understanding of health in architectural design, suggesting that the microorganisms that colonise humans (the human microbiome) and our built environment (the built environment microbiome) have the potential to influence our health and the resilience of our buildings. Against the backdrop of the design research project Niches for Organic Territories in Bio-Augmented Design (NOTBAD), we suggest the need to reverse notions that all microbes are bad, to and propose instead materials and prototypes that encourage benign microbial growth.

Increasingly, healthcare providers are asking for evidence based design solutions in the construction of new facilities. But where does a designer begin when there is no credible evidence to support the design process because it has yet to gain the attention of researchers? Within this paper we reflect on a university-practice partnership undertaken to provide a feasibility study for the future redevelopment of an eight-bed paediatric hospice in Australia. In embarking on this project, the project team assumed that a thorough literature review would furnish a body of research to rigorously inform the feasibility study. The realisation that this research was not available necessitated an evidence gathering process from first principles, where methods from academic practice required translation and customisation to fit within commercial time frames and resourcing constraints. This article recommends a selection of research methods for use by architects working within healthcare settings where foundational research to inform the design process is not available. It also argues for a re-conceptualisation of the built environment’s value relative to wellbeing.

Once a prosperous manufacturing town, Geelong in Victoria, Australia is undergoing a process of deindustrialisation and, in turn, redefining its identity to better retain viability in a globalised world. For instance, the town bid to host a Guggenheim museum on its Eastern Beach shore at the turn of the millennium, and has recently become a UNESCO City of Design (2017). Like so many declining regional industrial towns, Geelong has been undercut by the new economic forces, and has sought a new identity in cultural economies. The ‘Vacant Geelong’ project, which began at Deakin University in 2015 and is ongoing, evolved as a response to vacant industrial architecture in Geelong. Major industries including Ford (vehicles), Alcoa (aluminium), timber sawmills, wool mills, Pilkington Glass, cement works, and the oil refinery once defined the town and its history as an industrial architectural landscape.1 Major industries transformed the architectural and cultural terrain. Despite these cycles of transformation and erasure, and counter to a progressive and chronological approach to change, the ‘Vacant Geelong’ project explored this vacancy of industrial operation, yet presence of industrial architecture. Through inscriptions – artworks, design projects, creative research, installations, texts – it addressed those material realities that did not leave, the industrial structures – silos, ducts, chimneys, warehouses – that give Geelong its continuing industrial architectural character.

Alison & Peter Smithson's Economist Building in London (1960–1964) has been much written about, but one of its most distinctive features – the Roach bed Portland stone cladding – has been relatively little discussed. Although there have been various retrospective explanations for the choice of this previously unused stone, whose surface is marked by cavities of now vanished shells, no direct evidence from the time fully accounts for the decision. Reliance upon inference, and upon retrospective statements, mean that no definitive explanation for the choice is now possible. Some new evidence from archives and interviews, and a re-examination of the contemporary concerns of the Smithsons, and of their artist friends Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson, fellow members of the Independent Group during the 1950s, however, suggest a plausible, though speculative, interpretation. When considered in light of the Smithsons' and their friends' interests in pattern, in hidden orders, and in the problems of ‘human association’, the choice of Roach bed Portland stone seems less surprising. More than just ‘pretty’, as Peter Smithson was later to describe the material, it can be seen to connect with a fascination with underlying, non-human, systems of order, while at the same time providing a particularly expressive form of protection for human identity in the modern city.

In the case of conventional public housing, urban planners and policymakers design the layout of a housing project in a specific location and then estimate how many households can afford a home. This housing policy has been pursued as a legitimate solution for housing low- and middle-income households where the houses are individually financed by bank loans or mortgages raised by the occupants. John Turner criticised conventional housing solutions by affirming that ‘developing governments take the perspective of the elite and act as if the process of low-income houses were the same as in high-income countries and the same as for the small upper-middle class of their own countries’.1 Bruce Ferguson and Jesus Navarrete extend this argument with their critique of distributing finished houses to low-income populations and then requiring long-term payments, which are harmful to the beneficiaries. They note that ‘governments think of housing as complete units built by developers that households must purchase with a long-term loan rather than as a progressive process’.2

Public spaces had been central to Cape Town’s colonial planning and spatial order, but became marginalised in the twentieth century under modernist planning and apartheid policy. As apartheid came towards its close, architects and planners began to champion public space as a way of addressing the city’s deficiencies. Books, articles, and policy documents were written celebrating public space as a humanist device and vehicle for democracy. The City of Cape Town’s emerging Urban Design Branch instituted a major public space program: the Dignified Places Programme. This paper traces the history of public space as a terrain through which political aspirations, whether of domination or contestation, have been asserted in Cape Town. The paper will argue that at the end of apartheid, a public space turn occurred which reflected the specificities of post-apartheid democracy, in both its aspirations and limitations.

This paper sets out the socio-spatial practices of PS2 and Street Society in territorialised, post conflict Northern Ireland – whose work combines pedagogical and improvisation theory to prototype distinctive social models. These practices were formed by a continual process of practical involvement and reflection (through writing) and evaluation (funding permitting), alongside the author-practitioners' search for theoretical concepts that would bring clarity and an alternative perspective to the processes and outcomes. Concepts and approaches taken from pedagogical theory and, uniquely in the case of architecture, improvisational theory, will be used to explore critical aspects of the specific practices, and more generally assert that such socio-spatial ‘street pedagogy’ offers a space of rehearsal and ultimately, a site for the development of socially-just aesthetics. The paper thus proposes a theoretical scaffolding for practices which increase diversity and diminish resource consumption in the contexts of climate emergency and a politics of precarity.

For months we have been locked out of Junkspace. So, who’s complaining? Confined to domestic spaces, #stayhome has given many of us a forced opportunity to rethink the type of spaces that are not only functional and useful, but that make us feel comfortable. Our own residential arena may have felt restrictive and even – for some – oppressive at times, but who would say that they truly missed their daily passage through the endlessly stale air of check-in desks, departure gates, and duty frees at the airport; the epic journeys through low ceiling corridors and passageways of railway terminals and subway stations; and the blinding hallucinatory proliferation of brands and franchises in malls…?