At a time when digital culture touches on all aspects of life, it is surprising that its relationship to vernacular architecture has so far not been subject to much research. A common perception is that vernacular architecture is not made with or by computers but is rather ‘built by hand’, the result of the interplay between the human mind, traditional craft skills, and materials. In this essay I will argue that this perception is outdated and that the vernacular and digital realms in fact do come together in dynamic and often creative ways. Based on a review of the limited publications that are available, the essay outlines a number of ways in which both these realms converge all around the world. I conclude that this convergence should be high on the agenda of the field of vernacular architecture studies in an increasingly more interconnected, challenging, and unpredictable world.

Following the Second World War, German society sought to comprehensively reform itself. Children – through what, where and how they learned – were central to this process, and the occupying Allied powers regarded the transformation of schools as the best way for young Germans to alienate themselves from the Nazi past and to support a new democratic state structure. This essay explores architecture’s role in this reorientation by focussing on the Geschwister-Scholl school in Lünen, one of two schools designed by Hans Scharoun in the late-1950s. There is an evident compatibility between Scharoun’s design philosophy, including giving architectural form to pedagogical process, and aspects of German educational reform, particularly in his emphasis on spatial configuration as a determinant of social behaviour. The essay therefore investigates educational reform in both West Germany and the German Democratic Republic, where curriculum reform was also pursued with radically different means, to radically different ends.

Why do architects seek out philosophy, and how do they do so?An enormous variety of replies to this question have emerged throughout architecture and philosophy’s long history together, especially during the late-twentieth century when their interactions reached the most prolific, intense, radical, innovative, and transformative moment yet. This article analyzes three famous case studies from this period of philosophers’ thinking that influenced architects’ work: Martin Heidegger’s role in several of Kenneth Frampton’s texts, Michel Foucault’s discreet yet ineludible presence in a Rem Koolhaas design, and Jacques Derrida’s collaboration with Peter Eisenman. With their distinct approaches, aims, and outputs, each instance offers unique insights into the immense potentials, as well as the chronic problems, of the relationship between architecture and philosophy, which remains deeply ingrained in both design practice and theoretical discourse to this day.

PhD students working in the field of architectural design often miss the reference to a consistent theoretical framework and a proper system of inquiry while working with the research design of their projects. Simultaneously, some of the architectural research questions and hypotheses are formulated as addressing wicked problems which causes methodological challenges. The aim of the paper is to put research by design approaches in the broader context of systems of inquiry and to emphasize their possible role to examine and resolve wicked problems. The paper first reviews some of the underlying assumptions of architectural research versus the assumptions behind different research paradigms characteristic for other fields. Then, the approaches and the methods in architectural research relevant to the chosen ontological, epistemological, and axiological assumptions are discussed. The theory of wicked problems is recalled as a relevant one for the complex, uncertain, projective tasks of architectural research. Research by design is seen as a method suitable for the investigation of wicked problems. It can reduce the epistemic uncertainty. Approaches of research by design are becoming more acknowledged in third cycle education in architecture. Two examples of recent PhD theses are briefly discussed in the paper in relation to the wicked aspects of their research/design problems, the research paradigm adopted and the role of research by design methodology. More conscious delineations and elaborations of a proper system of inquiry and the conscious use of research by design methodology can help in developing academic rigor of research studies addressing complex societal challenges.

The toppling of slave trader Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol on 7th June 2020, and its dispatch into the waters of the nearby harbour – a defiant act of protest by members of Britain’s ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement – helped to raise international awareness that far too many statues and other artefacts within the urban realm carry troubling histories, even if their contentious associations might have been forgotten. Acting as quasi-Trojan horses, they can appear benign enough within their cultural landscapes while yet silently continuing to reinforce socio-economic inequalities. This essay investigates the incident in Bristol to offer a wider reassessment of those cultural legacies now seen as ‘difficult heritage’, particularly those associated with slave trading in the former British Empire. It looks at how the cultural value of the Colston statue, when viewed over time in relation to material and ideological conditions in Bristol as a declining port city, creates a real tension in their meaning today given that they so obviously represent a highly selective construction of local history. The increasingly vociferous demand globally for the removal of such sculptures, especially by the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, exposes the ongoing evasiveness and indecisiveness of official bodies in dealing with such artefacts. While the final outcome of the toppling of the Colston statue remains in the balance in terms of its legal resolution, the role of urban art as part of activism and protest clearly demands more attention. This essay traces the emergence of debates about ‘difficult heritage’ as a combination of social performance and civil disobedience. As this kind of struggle continues, the urgent questions become who should be allowed to determine what is considered history and how should it be displayed in our urban public spaces?

Photographic culture is a major part of the tourist experience, whether it is the drunken selfie posted in an online chatroom, or the carefully composed street scene published in an upmarket guidebook. The pictures shown here in this photographic study attempt to respond critically to the different dialectics of the camera, bodies, architecture, and light that prevail during the hours of night in Magaluf and Palma on the Spanish island of Mallorca. These images also aim to transgress the boundaries between the different visual cultures of these places because they seem to be outmoded in the way they socially categorise tourists, in what, on closer inspection, is evidently becoming part of a more ‘liquid modernity’ – to use Zygmunt Bauman’s term – than the one that is still being portrayed. (Note: This paper expands upon themes raised in a short article previously published in 2015) [2].

What is concrete? Loved and loathed in equal measure, this building material, as soon as we try to define it, to specify it, to describe it, becomes, well, not very concrete at all, but rather fluid and surprisingly abstract! Concrete is a material which has been going through an interesting intellectual and practical renaissance in recent years, in no small part driven by the convergence of several different kinds of technology-driven manufacturing changes - ranging from computer aided manufacturing of formworks, to photograph etching, to engineering software, to nano- and bio-chemistry to 3D printing - which have opened up new worlds of realizable, expressive and performance optimised form. The demands posed by anthropogenic climate change, energy use, resource scarcity, and the environmental question more generally, have equally transformed the technologies and industries that are now feeding into developments in this material. On its own though, that is not enough to understand the revival in interest. In this paper I will argue that there are indeed profound relationships between capital, modernity and concrete. However, I will suggest that in order to really start to grasp these relations, we will need to explore some ways of thinking about concrete that have not been developed so far within the recent literature on the material. Notably I will develop an ecological approach to thinking about what concrete is, and in so doing redefine this material as a particular form of mud, or mudcrete: a material which is deployed by both human and non-human builders. I will note the ecological energetics and extended materialities of mudcrete, and will reflect upon the conceptual 'forms' or ‘patterns’ of this matter as a particular modality of the production of nature. Mudcretes always internalise in particularly interesting ways I argue, their external relations, the extended networks of materials, skills, labours and energies that go into their production. Mudcretes frequently stage fascinating bio-semiotic performances, whichever species or processes are dominant. But when the mudcretes in question are the product of human labour, they always act as social media.

Introduction It is with great delight and pride that we announce that the good ship known as the ARENA Journal of Architectural Research, or AJAR for short, is now launched. A sizeable Editorial Team has created this new journal with help from an even larger and broader Editorial Board that spans around the world and includes many distinguished architects and academics. AJAR is an online Open Access peer-reviewed journal for all kinds of design research and scholarly research within the architectural field, and has been set up by the Architectural Research European Network Association (ARENA). This research network was established in late-2013 by leading researchers from 24 architectural schools across Europe, and since then the number of institutions involved has expanded to 30 schools and is rising steadily. ARENA now offers a shared platform that aims to promote, support, develop and disseminate high-quality research in all fields of architecture in the widest sense, including also its links to interior design, landscape architecture and urban design/urbanism. From the outset, the members of ARENA wanted above all to create a brand new online journal that would support the culture of European architectural research, especially by encouraging the exploration of emerging and transdisciplinary/interdisciplinary research fields. Today, with the launch of AJAR, we now have a major opportunity to exchange important ideas, communicate innovative forms of research, and generally strengthen the links between universities and architectural practices in Europe, as well as internationally. As is typical of the latest online journals, AJAR will not publish issues as such; instead we will upload all new material as soon as it has been approved and copy-edited, thereby creating a rolling programme of publication. Articles will be available in HTML for online reading and as PDFs for downloading. A number of key distinguishing features about AJAR ought to be stressed: