In the literature that has dealt to date with architecture and urban design related to London's 2012 Olympics and their urban legacy, emphasis has been placed on questions of where and what has been built or envisioned, and on how this can be viewed as reflective of broader political agendas, economic contexts and accompanying issues. In this, there has been relatively little emphasis on design processes and ideas, and particularly on questions of how these are oriented toward and help construct urban legacy as a future – as a matter of how and when. An urban legacy design process was established in 2008 to facilitate the transition of the Olympic Park to a set of new neighbourhoods by 2031 and, through it, to help fulfil a promise of long-term sustainable regeneration for east London. The twenty-three year timeframe and its intended outcome raise questions concerning the urban and architectural imagination of distant futures as of the possible processes of their realisation. Indeed, the ability to design for legacy depends on ways of anticipating the social, political and economic realities that will shape development in east London in the future and of using these to both chart and represent possible paths and conceptual approaches to desired outcomes.

Created by David Simon in 2002, the HBO series The Wire presents the established moral code of a society that lies outside mainstream America and depicts institutions designed to maintain the status quo. Terry Eagleton suggests of Dickens, that his ‘grotesque realism is a stylistic distortion in the service of truth, a kind of astigmatism which allows us to see more accurately.’ The content of Simon's programme operates in a similar way. It proposes an alternative to academic narratives able to disseminate knowledge beyond the closed-off world of peer review.

The richness, uniqueness and intricacy of The Wire has made it difficult to trace its thematic and stylistic heritage. The programme has been referred to as a ‘lyrical sociology’, ‘a type of urban sociology’, ‘a rendering of urban theory’, a ‘fontless social science’, a ‘theoretical archetype’, a ‘Dickensian show’, and more. At an aesthetic level, The Wire has been qualified as a work of ‘psychological realism’, ‘social realism’, as something aspiring to Fredric Jameson's aesthetics of ‘cognitive mapping’, or even a ‘rich counterpart to actor-network-theory’.

There is nothing, no ‘naked life’, no external standpoint, that can be posed outside this field permeated by money, nothing escapes money.

In 2009, an international masterclass at the Berlage Institute studied a street market in a deprived Rotterdam neighbourhood, the Afrikaanderplein. Headed by Teddy Cruz and supported by Jeanne van Heeswijk and Miguel Robles-Duran – three socially and politically committed architects and artists – the group produced a critique of the tight control and regulation of the market by authorities. The group's proposals were, basically, to liberalise and deregulate the market.

Whether the Afrikaanderplein market is a case which merits deregulation depends, of course, on the specific conditions the group detected in the area. More important here, however, is that the proposals appear, at least superficially, to contrast the anti-neoliberal and radical positions of the three individuals directing the group.

In the early twentieth century, Modernists problematised ornament in their refashioning of architecture for the industrial age. Today, architects are formulating different responses to image and its (re)production in the information age. In both discourses of ornament and image, surfaces are often the perpetrators: visual boundaries that facilitate false appearances, imprisoning humanity in a shadowy cave of illusion. The negativity and shallowness associated with superficiality is also closely related to the separation of images from the real, where the former is seen to be a deficient representation of the latter. Such views follow a familiar metaphysical model characterised by the opposition between inside and outside and the opaque boundary that acts as a barrier. This model determines the traditional philosophical approach, which follows a distinct hierarchical order and a perpendicular movement of thought that seeks to penetrate appearances to get to the essence of things.

Martin Heidegger begins his lecture ‘… Poetically Man Dwells …’ by denying poetry is a marginal practice whose imaginings are ‘mere fancies and illusions’. ‘[T]he poetic’, he states, is not ‘merely an ornament and bonus added on to dwelling’. On the contrary, Heidegger boldly claims that poetry is the source of all human dwelling on earth: ‘[…] poetry first causes dwelling to be dwelling. Poetry is what really lets us dwell.’

The connective tissue of Heidegger's argument in ‘… Poetically Man Dwells …’ is the concept of ‘measure’. In the English translation of the lecture, permutations of the term ‘measure’ (Maß/messen) appear a remarkable ninety-four times, not including dozens more uses of its synonyms: ‘dimension’, ‘span’, ‘meter’ and ‘gauge’. What seems surprising, given that the set-up of the lecture revolves around poetry and measure, is that the commonest understanding of measure related to poetry – poetic measure itself – is not discussed thematically by Heidegger. Rather, Heidegger's incessant word play produces meanings that include ‘measuring against’ in the sense of comparing to a standard, ‘measuring up’ a space by ‘stepping-out’ (durchmessen), ‘measuring out’ in the sense of dividing-up or apportioning (das Zu-Gemessene), ‘being measured’ in the sense of having propriety, ‘taking measures’ (die Maß-Nahme) in response to a situation, and ‘measuring between’ as a distance or span. These meanings are of course related to common poetic measure, and might even be claimed to be its ground.

In the 1960s and '70s Ralph Erskine wrote a number of articles where he manifested and developed his view on architecture and its role in society. These articles are important to understand his oeuvre, but have not received the same attention as his built work. This essay aims at explicating the central themes as well as tracing changes and recurrences in the articles during the most important decades of his lifelong career.

The articles were published in a range of different magazines, some in rather marginal ones with a limited distribution, others only in the Swedish language. This accounts in part for the reason his thoughts are primarily known through secondary sources. Nonetheless, his writings present significant and sometimes even original thoughts on architecture.

‘Where the pastoral meets the post-industrial’. London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) Chief of Design, Kathryn Firth's words to describe the area that the Corporation inherited as part of its remit following the Summer Olympic Games in 2012. Seeming to exemplify this, the former industrial warehouses of Hackney Wick, such as the Counter Café [2], allow shrubbery growth and sprawling ivy; their brick exerior walls emblazoned with art work reminiscent of William Morris. What we have here is recognition of the area's pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial episodes; a narrative that serves to provide some temporal coherence to what is a complex and fragmented landscape.

‘Translation’ is dealt with in this paper as a descriptor of the transformation that occurs as a concept, structure, image or notion is appropriated from one discipline to another. This understanding of translation as process or movement, rather than a field of overlap between disciplines, is facilitated by the work of the philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault considers disciplinarity as the structural demarcation of knowledge and information (discourse) and the demarcations that are disciplined by knowledge. This understanding may be expressed as: disciplines as a disciplining. Foucault rejects the idea of disciplines as bounded self-similar content, arguing instead that disciplinarity lies in the framing of logics applied to content. The disciplines in question are considered in their contingency and temporality yet are not entirely bound by them. Thus, a coherent and organised discipline such as biology dates from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Before then its subject matters either were comprehended within other disciplinary frameworks (natural history) or were considered outside science itself (natural theology). In The Order of Things (1966), Foucault groups several naturalists, including Buffon (French eighteenth century) and Darwin (British nineteenth century), as belonging to the same ‘discourse’ or discursive family. Separating disciplinarity from the origin of ideas and time of writing fosters the productive translation of concepts, images and artefacts between disciplines.

The design of an urban area chosen to host a mega-event such as the Summer Olympics begs fundamental questions of scale, process and context. Not least since this is an international event whose physical impact is highly localised, where the tension between ‘permanent’ architecture, landscape and the temporal is being played out over an extended period of time. This paper covers the period from 2003 when the UK bid for the 2012 Games, followed by its award in 2005, from when the construction, compulsory land purchase and clean-up exercise began in earnest. Writing in the initial post-event legacy stage of this major placemaking project means that assessing any notions of sustainability and regeneration – and the role of design therein – is necessarliy provisional. Current visions and plans produced by the agencies responsible for transforming this event site into an established community project forward until 2030 so, in regeneration terms, a twenty-five year process is under way.

A current issue in architectural scholarship is the rethinking of the origins of Modernism. As a formative exemplar of early architectural Modernism, Bruno Taut's seminal exhibition pavilion, the Glashaus (1914) [1] is understandably part of this debate. In 1959, Reyner Banham in his article, ‘The Glass Paradise’ suggested that it would be appropriate to investigate the origins of the Glashaus, as it was both vastly dissimilar to and exceeded any of Taut's previous designs. In an effort to answer this question, Banham subsequently introduced the unique role played by the Bohemian poet Paul Scheerbart in the design of the Glashaus. As a result of Banham's inference, Rosemarie Haag Bletter systematically explored the Taut/Scheerbart relationship in ‘Bruno Taut and Paul Scheerbart's Vision: Utopian Aspects of German Expressionist Architecture’ in 1973.

This study arose from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded ‘Connected Communities’ project. It was apparent at the outset that the AHRC had not considered that architecture might be important, if not central, to discussions on communities, and it became obvious that this attitude was prevalent throughout the academic and media worlds. Despite evidence that the formal and conceptual structures of architecture permeated numerous disciplines, and that the built environment permeated our personal and social lives, other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences did not think architecture was relevant to the humanities in general.

This belief is represented within the institutional structure of the AHRC itself. The AHRC Joint Electronic Submissions funding application process organises research into a three-tiered system of research areas: there are seventy-eight primary research areas including Visual Arts with twelve subcategories, Dance with five, Drama with six, and Design with six, of which architecture is one. There is no other research classification for the spatial environment, built or unbuilt. On the other hand a search for ‘architecture’ gives six primary research areas, encompassing thirty-six third level subject areas. Except for the architecture subcategory under Design, the others have to do with information, computing and software.

Reception is an idea which deals with the reinterpretation of knowledge. Reception therefore appears as an important issue in studies of historiography that see textual forms of history as representations of the past. Reception in history varies from agent to agent: different subjects who hold different ideological positions, in different positions with respect to power relations, receive the same object differently. Public reception, for instance, plays an important role in shaping the spatial representations of architecture and cities, which can be regarded as textual forms of history and therefore as a form of historiography which reinterprets and integrates the facts of the past. The work of Ackbar Abbas, in his depiction of the skyscrapers in Hong Kong which inscribe capitalism in the fabric of that city, offers a remarkable example. He illustrates how Hong Kong's spatial routine plays out in the reception of styles; for example, design oriented towards economy, the phenomenon of constant building and rebuilding, and the pursuit of hyper-density in Hong Kong's built environment. In different time periods, locations and cultural-political contexts, therefore, the public reception of architecture and cities differs. This paper takes Taiwan as an example. It examines a transformational period – from Taiwan's post-Second World War development to the present – scrutinising the reception of its history, architecture and cities.

Why should architects be involved in humanitarian work and the often-complex projects needed to deal with the recovery of post-disaster emergencies? How can the design profession contribute to the longterm reconstruction processes needed to ensure the effective rebuilding of vulnerable communities after disaster?

The sun control device has to be on the outside of the building, an element of the facade, an element of architecture. And because this device is so important a part of our open architecture, it may develop into as characteristic a form as the Doric column.

Victor Olgyay (1910–1970), a Hungarian architect who came to the United States in 1947 with his twin brother and collaborator, Aladár (1910–1963), is best known today as the author of Design with Climate: Bioclimatic Approach to Architectural Regionalism (1963), an important book often referenced in the environmental building design field [1]. As leaders in research in bioclimatic architecture from the early 1950s to the late 1960s, the Olgyay brothers could be considered the ‘fathers’ of contemporary environmental building design. Their research and publications laid the foundation for much of the building simulation software in use today. Other than the difference between working on graph paper and using computer-generated graphics, there is little difference between Autodesk's Ecotect Analysis (simulation and building energy analysis software) and the Olgyays' techniques for the analysis of environmental factors and graphical representation of climate. The manner in which the Olgyays established connections between building design and the science of climate laid the foundation for the development of environmental simulation, one of contemporary architecture's leading methods of form generation. Victor Olgyay's teaching, however, represents another kind of thinking, a broader concern for architecture, beyond energy performance. ‘The primary task of architecture,’ Olgyay announced to his students, ‘is to act in man's favour; to interpose itself between man and his natural surroundings in order to remove the environmental load from his shoulders.

As soon as the bid to host the 2012 Olympics was won by London in 2005, and the plans to build the Olympic site in the Lower Lea Valley were announced, an inconspicuous yet steady stream of artistic projects started to interrogate the impact that the transformation of the area would have on its inhabitants, landscape and social life. This undercurrent of criticality, largely invisible to the mainstream, offered an alternative to the official account of the process – one that spoke of displacement, surveillance and the effacement of local history. Through a myriad of art works, images, events and discussions, an important space of dissent was produced in the lead up to the Games. The relational, collective and public dimension of these artistic practices is explored in the first part of this article, via an analysis of Jim Woodall's Olympic State project in Hackney Wick.

Over fifty years ago at the RIBA’s 1958 Oxford Conference, discussions about architectural research and science posed seminal questions about the very nature of creativity in architectural research and education. Leslie Martin observed that research is the tool by which theory is advanced. For more than half a century, we have seen traces of scientific research fuelling the advancement of architectural knowledge and its feedback loops into practice. Yet, interrogations around how architectural creativity is affected by intersections with the sciences are not new. The Bauhaus, for example, sought to integrate scientific thought in architectural education in 1936. Thus, why are emerging interdisciplinary collaborations where architecture, engineering and science converge at the inception of design potentially transformative?

Increasing attempts to accelerate the pace of innovation in sustainable building technology is engendering pioneering intersections between architecture, engineering and natural science disciplines such as bioengineering and chemistry. The broad disciplinary breadth of these research processes inevitably requires mediating the diverse values, perspectives and research methodologies of disciplines that pursue innovation in different ways. However, to what extent is this new interdisciplinary convergence possibly transformative? Could it be that these processes, particularly in building technology innovation, may be influencing scientists and engineers to rethink how design problems are conceptualised and researched?

This article considers the legacies of place revealed by critical walking journeys through the city and the potential for transforming their interpretation through the distribution of new forms of map. As Francesco Careri implies in Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice, walking pre-dates the city and nomadism is the original condition of civilised living. Put simply, settlement is the process of civilisation becoming static.

The first chapter of Nikolaus Pevsner's The Englishness of English Art is entitled ‘The Geography of Art’. In this he presents a reflection on the validity of geography as a means of interpreting art and architecture and in it he proposes that, ‘there is a whole string of facts from art and literature [that are] tentatively derived from climate’. The instrumental connection of architecture and climate is widely accepted in the literature of socalled ‘architectural science’. But the influence of geography and the specific conditions of climate may be shown to have a more fundamental influence on architecture than simple pragmatism.