This case study reflects on Futuremakers, a summer-long festival on the theme of “play, make, build” held at the Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham, UK. Set in a municipal park, the event brought local community groups together with creative practitioners by making visual work and discussing stories of local heritage, representing these findings in a curated gallery context. The reflections draw out an understanding of the impact of creative acts: how they can help redraw perceived boundaries between public and private space, and redefine ideas about how and where art can be generated.

Extracts from Legend of the Necessary Dreamer." Architecture and Culture, 6(2), pp. 223–224<br/><br/>Additional information; Author information<br/><br/>Maria Fusco is an award-winning Belfast-born writer working across fiction, criticism and theory; her work is translated into ten languages. Recent works include: ECZEMA! (2018), commissioned by the National Theatre Wales to celebrate seventy years of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS); Master Rock, an experimental radio play performed and recorded inside a granite mountain on the west coast of Scotland, commissioned by Artangel and BBC Radio 4; the solo-authored books With A Bao A Qu Reading When Attitudes Become Form (2013) and Give Up Art (2018), both published in Los Angeles and Vancouver by New Documents; and The Mechanical Copula (2011) and Gonda (2012), both published in Berlin and New York by Sternberg Press. She is Professor of Interdisciplinary Writing at Northumbria University.

This article looks at the written stories The Revelation, The Sacred Spring and The Legend of the Living Rock that accompany three built works in India – the Husain Doshi Gufa (Ahmedabad, 1992–95), the National Institute of Fashion Technology (Delhi, 1997) and the Bharat Diamond Bourse (Mumbai, 1998) – of Indian architect Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi. The stories open up the process of architectural making, calling into question standard distinctions between author and reader, between architect and user or others involved in the making process, and between description, narration and built work. Through them, Doshi’s architecture acquires an elusive property of being not theirs, not his, neither this nor that. Its spaces are alive – they evolve, grow and tell stories themselves long after the architect has left.

In 2016, The Metropolitan Police moved from its famous headquarters at 10 Broadway, London, into the Curtis Green Building. Key to the move was the announcement by The Met that the iconic New Scotland Yard revolving sign would be kept, so important is it in communicating with the public. The author took the last opportunity to examine the sign in situ, in its high-tech “International Style” 1960s’ architectural setting at 10 Broadway. The aim was to understand how the designer, Edward Wright (1912–88), imbued the sign with expressive and symbolic qualities that have transcended styles and fashion in art and design.

Inviting audiences into the late-night, precarious world of (photo)shopping, we explore the way in which the ghostly figures of the Photoshop world – its exhausted architects, indebted consumers, and the two-dimensional cut-outs that populate its spaces – are all put to use in a project of producing subjectivities through environments. Feminist critiques of visuality provide a basis in understanding the play between bodies and worlds that set this production in motion. By looking at the mechanics of “pre-occupation” that allow us to inhabit such images, we speculate: could a re-theorization of this most commercial of “extra-architectural services” (visualization) allow the activity of shopping be put to more radical use?

Rosi Baidotti argues that in late neo-liberal capitalist society the nomadic subject is too easily equated with the "hyper-individualism" traits of advanced capitalism and conflated with "quantitative multiplications," rather than "qualitative differences and multiplicities." During the events and projects implemented by the feminist group taking place between 2000 and 2012, the nomadic subject was a key figuration that inspired discursive and material interventions into architectural and public institutions. Taking these interventions as starting point this paper is adapted from a transcript of a conversation presented at Architecture and Feminisms and focuses on a critical examination of a strand of feminist practice, spanning three decades, including Matrix, WAFER and taking place. In dialogue with these practices, the paper explores the demands on practice and subjectivities a nomadic mode of thinking and acting produces while questioning if these are still radical positions within feminist spatial practice today.

This text offers a writing experiment that aims to address the processes of gentrification. It employs a narrative mode of writing in the first person plural in order to demonstrate one possible way of capturing the complexities of everyday experiences of metropolitan conditions. The text challenges the assumed notions of authorial voice and supposed analytical objectivity of (academic) critique and proposes a way of tackling the ambiguities that lie at the core of the relationship forged between urban subjects and objects that partake in the flows of capitalism. The accompanying photographs, while depicting some of the places described (Bermondsey Street in London, UK), are not literal illustrations. Readers are encouraged to forge their own connections.

This paper examines the ways in which architectural authority and authorship were successfully commodified by an Australian homebuilder, Pettit & Sevitt, in the 1960s when the Royal Australian Institute of Architect’s Code of Professional Conduct still prohibited the advertising of an architect’s services. Drawing on the theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Paul du Gay, it argues that the independent architects who worked with Pettit & Sevitt assumed the role of “cultural intermediaries” within the company’s culture of production, facilitating the process of identification between product and target market while managing to avoid the issue of commercial “advertising.”

In this article comments by politician Boris Johnson and economist Edward Glaeser exemplify narratives of global urbanization that portray rural villages as redundant and perpetuate outdated notions of urban–rural division. Simultaneously, traditional urban–rural dialectics are distorted by divisive new urban projects like gated communities styled as villages. This paper argues for development models that acknowledge the vital environmental and economic roles played by rural villages, and opposes artificially created “villages” in cities. In so doing, alternative readings of rurality and villages by Rem Koolhaas, Brazilian land reformers, Mahatma Gandhi, and critics of contemporary Indian literature and urbanism are considered.

In the Republic of Ireland, architecture’s objective qualities, particularly its objectified aesthetic ones, are valued within the discipline above all others. Promoting collaborative and socially engaged practice in the field where art and architecture overlap can alter these existing paradigms by emphasizing instead architecture’s social, cultural, and political attributes. The ethnographic methods and theoretical frameworks of Pierre Bourdieu, Leon Festinger, and Ian McGilchrist are employed here to help assess and address current conditions of praxis critically, and to enable a holistic understanding of increasingly diverse modes of architectural practice (aesthetic, critical, technical, and social). This study proposes that adopting some of the mutually supportive systems from the field of art has the potential to subvert the way architectural knowledge is disseminated and produced, and to challenge disciplinary values in a fundamental way.