In a highly urban environment like Hong Kong, young architects progressively lose their physical connection with materials and manual construction skills and rely mostly on computer-aided design software to conceptualise their architectural design projects. This extreme condition exists within a global phenomenon that increasingly confines architecture to its mere scenographic character. This article presents and discusses the use of bamboo as a building material by second-year architecture students from Hong Kong engaged in an international design and build competition with peers from Southeast Asia. Over three consecutive academic years, students were exposed to the rediscovery of an artisanship tradition and the physical properties of bamboo as a construction material. The exercise allowed students to explore tectonics and reposition architecture as a culturally grounded act and art of construction. The experience achieved onsite is significant for the realisation of context-responsive, environmentally sensitive, and culturally orientated forms of architecture. In Southeast Asia, the use of bamboo enables the architectural project to arise from the roots of a long-standing vernacular tradition and as a result it can become a medium through which the essence of architecture can be discussed. This article investigates the extraordinary pedagogical value provided by student competitions, such as the one organised by the Nansha Wetland Bird Park and the South China University of Technology, which requires the use of local natural materials and the construction to be carried out by the designers.

Ralph Erskine Arkitektkontor’s project for a 2,000-unit housing estate in Byker, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1969–82) was the result of an unusually long and complex design process. The critical literature highlights Erskine’s humanist position and socialist inclination, but the operations of the project have never been explained in detail. Based on literature and archival research, this essay examines Erskine’s response to the challenges of the commission. As a reaction against the modernist ideals of efficiency and homogeneity, the project sought to absorb the pre-existing social structure, approximating the image of a medieval city, with its perimeter wall, and its houses and alleys of varied scales and irregular patterns. The term isomorphism – a structure-preserving map – is proposed here to capture the procedures that the architects deployed to give the project a theoretical and formal grounding, establishing continuities with the past that would soften the impact of the radical physical transformation imposed on the site. The ambiguous spatial and material qualities that characterise the project for Byker were fundamental in creating the conditions of reception that made this process viable.

The relationship between architects and project developers is typically viewed from within disciplinary boundaries as a polarised relationship of separation. This is captured in a prevailing view of architecture as a liberal art, and the myth of its position independent of commercial interests. In search of another way to study the intersection between the two professions, we study the trajectory of architect-developer Jean-Florian Collin in interwar Brussels. By recollecting the transactional spaces he operated in, we explore and interpret the societal conditions in which an emancipated architect-developer was able to make a meaningful and lasting contribution to building the city. This paper assesses the hypothesis that an urban society 'gets the kind of real estate it deserves', and adds to burgeoning scholarship in architecture and planning concerning the conditions needed for housing architecture to thrive.

Annetta Pedretti studied cybernetics and architecture early in the 1970s – beginning at the Architectural Association in London and later culminating in a Ph.D in 1981 at Brunel University – and her training continued to influence her lifelong practice just as much as her everyday surroundings. From 1980 to 2018, Pedretti’s life and work revolved around one particular site: 25 Princelet Street in Spitalfields, Tower Hamlets. During these years, Spitalfields was grappling withquestions of heritage, conservation, and change that were taking place in response to intensifying gentrification, all bound by particular ideas about futures and time. Pedretti spoke very early on about faulty assumptions about time and the need for ‘jerking ourselves out of the habit of taking time as a given’ and ‘extracting time from the relations, e.g., economics, in which we have allowed it to be seized up and used up’. In this paper, I turn to what Pedretti called her ‘intermedia’ practice. I follow a thread in her work – from her experiments in design writing and running a printing press, to flag-making as a form of protest, to the long-spanning project of repairing and remaking the house at Princelet Street – that points towards her interest in reclaiming time as a form of designerly resistance. In so doing, I will explore how these practices come together, exploring the broader challenges of navigating the dialectical complexity related to negotiating between the ‘lived time’ (experiential) of entities fundamental to their internal processes of unfolding and ‘clock time’(measurable time) that is significant for social negotiations such as design decisions related to conservation or development. Pedretti’s work is an invitation to imagine a reflexive practice in which claiming time and working contra to different forms of oppression becomes about writing, repairing, working with the evolving community, and working on the self. All of these processes are recursively entangled, unfolding, creating feedback and feedforward loops that connect in a myriad of different ways.

Christopher Alexander famously maintained that traditional architecture is inherently more ‘whole’ – and consequently more beautiful and alive – than modern architecture because the former is the product of organic processes, while the latter is the product of mechanistic processes. The central concept in Alexander’s theory – that architecture can be more or less whole – has only rarely been quantitatively examined. Furthermore, his claims about the superior wholeness of organic architecture have similarly remained untested. In response, this paper critically re-examines Alexander’s definition of wholeness in the context of A Pattern Language, along with previous attempts to quantify its properties. From this basis, the paper proposes a new pattern-based quantitative method for examining and measuring wholeness. This method is then tested through the analysis of seven ‘organic’ houses by Frank Lloyd Wright and seven ‘mechanistic’ villas by Le Corbusier. Through this process, the paper demonstrates a method for measuring wholeness, and quantitatively tests Alexander’s assertion that organic environments are more whole than mechanistic ones.