Series: Architectural Design

The intersection of architecture and the machine has a history that stretches back to the Industrial Revolution; however, the machine has recently begun to appear in new ways in speculative architectural drawing and modelling. This issue of The Allegorical Architectural Machine considers the influence of the machine as an allegorical device for exploring alternative architectural practices, and includes a cross-section...

Guest-edited by Owen Hopkins Multispace exists at the intersection of the physical and digital, and in the blurring of their previously clear dividing lines. Multispace is not a single space, but a hybrid space where, in effect, we occupy multiple spaces simultaneously. We enter it on a Zoom call, when we are in our office and in a meeting with...

The Industrial Revolution caused a paradigm shift from an agrarian economy to a manufacturing economy, giving birth to the industrial city. City became synonymous with a concentration of factories causing unfiltered scenes between centres of production and urban dwellings. The corrupted image of the city ultimately led to the displacement and separation of production away from residential zones in the...

It is not without irony that in an age characterised by the dissolution of certainty – a consequence of digital dematerialisation and the catastrophic destabilisation of our social institutions and natural world – architecture, for so long the repository for our myths and the vessel for our intangible narratives and rituals, has been stripped bare. Increasingly preoccupied with the physical,...

Given the ongoing climate and socio-ecological emergencies, it is paramount to support a socially just rethinking of the world we inhabit, which is intrinsically dependent on the health of the earth’s systems. This requires a radical transformation of the role of environmental designers in developing propositions, mitigation strategies and advocacy initiatives. This issue of AD explores the principles behind the...

American architect Lebbeus Woods (1940–2012) remains a quiet hero not only among his colleagues, but also for architectural students intrigued by the ideas and fluent beauty of his powerful graphic verve, as well as of his writing. His projects from the mid-1980s until the end of his life have been widely published. However, this AD, in collaboration with the Estate...

The Posthuman is the new paradigm of architecture. Encompassing related topics such as the post-Anthropocene, more-than-human, non-human, trans-human, anti-human, and meta-human, this AD presents a synthesis of the architectural Posthuman. Proliferating and diversifying, the Posthuman is now as planetary as it is everyday, and as disruptive, contested, and contradictory as it is sublime. From the detail to the interplanetary, and...

Guest-edited by Gretchen Wilkins The renowned Cranbrook Architecture, located near Detroit, Michigan, has been described as the epicentre of American Modernism. When it opened in 1932, it combined a stunning Eliel Saarinen-designed campus with a radically open educational philosophy to attract and produce some of the most influential artists, designers, and architects in US history, including Charles and Ray Eames,...

Guest-edited by Agostino De Rosa, Alessio Bortot and Francesco Bergamo In Praise of Penumbra explores the concept of penumbra, stemming from the Latin paene (almost) and umbra (shadow). It is an intermediate zone of transition between light and shadow. This space, both physical and imaginary, is where everything is possible: it is the place of the uncanny, where presence and/or...

The 1960s and 1970s avant-garde has been likened to an ‘architectural Big Bang’, such was the intensity of energy and ambition in which it exploded into the postwar world. Marked out by architectural projects that redefined the discipline, it remains just as influential today. References to the likes of Archizoom, Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk and Superstudio abound. Highly diverse, the...

This issue of AD looks at the work of Stufish Entertainment Architects. Founded by the late Mark Fisher, the legendary British architect known for his rock music stage sets for bands including the Rolling Stones, U2, and Pink Floyd, the studio is a recognised leader in entertainment architecture. The Stufish team of architects, designers, visualisers, production managers, technical specialists, and...

In a world that is missing a central theoretical voice in architecture, now more than ever it is time to solicit emergent voices on the topic of alternative formalisms (Alt-Form). This issue of AD aims to reach peripheral disciplines in order to support an architecture that no longer operates as a standalone field of study, and is rather one that...

Design for Health: Sustainable Approaches to Therapeutic Architecture Guest-Edited by Terri Peters This issue of AD seeks out innovative and varied sustainable architectural responses to designing for health, such as: Integrating sensory gardens and landscapes into the care environment; Specifying local materials and passive technologies; Reinvigorating aging postwar facilities. Contributors include: Anne-Marie Adams, Sean Ahlquist, Giuseppe Boscherini, Robin Guenther, Charles...

Evoking Through Design: Contemporary Moods in Architecture is visually stunning, featuring built work and speculative projects, highlighting how contemporary practices are using devices such as spatial compositing, surface articulation, and novel manipulations of materials to constitute spatial conditions that radiate with delicate and sophisticated atmospheres. Contributors: Benjamin Bratton, Jeffrey Kipnis, Neil Leach, Silvia Levin, Frederic Migayrou, Juhani Pallasmaa, David Ruy,...

Guest-edited by Jill Stoner and Ozayr Saloojee Over the past decade, and in a more concentrated form over the past two years, there has been increasing recognition of architecture’s systemic complicity in constructing and upholding hierarchies of race and class, and privileging colonial paradigms that perpetuate spatial and economic inequity. This AD issue reveals how designers, practitioners, scholars and architects...

Every year, nearly 100 billion tonnes of raw material globally is extracted from the earth – approximately half of it for construction purposes. The construction industry is responsible for an estimated third of global waste, while reuse of construction materials is not increasing fast enough. The same sector accounts for at least 40 per cent of global carbon-dioxide emissions. There...

This issue of AD explores the working discipline of architecture as it impacts the material culture within which it is always embedded. An architecture of impact uses advanced digital techniques in such a way that its material assembly supersedes its use of the digital. Until now, this type of architecture has been formally and materially bound by restrictive conventional methodologies....

Architectural research is being redefined in practice. Whereas once the value of a piece of research was solely measured by the number of citations it received from fellow academics, shifting funding models and new societal concerns are forcing academia to question its structure and this mode of evaluation. At the same time, a wave of practitioners and new types of...

The link between architecture and art and the sublimity it can create has a history that stretches back millennia. From cave paintings to the stained glass and saintly icons in churches and cathedrals, to the geometric and calligraphic treatments of mosques and contemporary artists channelling architecture and vice versa, and so much else. This AD is about the contemporary interactions...

AI is already part of our lives even though we might not realise it. It is in our phones, filtering spam, identifying Facebook friends, and classifying our images on Instagram. It is in our homes in the form of Siri, Alexa, and other AI assistants. It is in our cars and our planes. AI is literally everywhere. Artworks generated by...