As generative AI reshapes architectural practice, a critical paradox emerges: while new computational tools offer unprecedented creative possibilities, the physical resources essential to building grow increasingly scarce. This paper investigates how architecture can productively engage this tension through novel approaches to material recycling and digital transformation. Rather than treating physical and virtual domains separately, this research proposes an integrative framework where design emerges through continuous feedback between material manipulation and computational processing. The exhibition Train Yourself demonstrates this methodology, presenting a series of experimental artifacts that evolve through iterative exchanges between physical material, AI-driven formal exploration, and imaging techniques. These hybrid objects gain definition through recursive operations that blur boundaries between physical construction and digital representation. Beyond resource conservation, this approach reveals how architectural practice might cultivate new forms of creative intelligence capable of navigating between material constraints and computational possibilities. The findings of this research suggest a mode of practice where designers orchestrate dynamic interactions between physical matter, algorithmic processes, and human intention, pointing toward a more nuanced understanding of ecological sensitivity in contemporary design practice.

This essay critically examines the continuing relevance of the archipelago city – as theorized by Oswald Mathias Ungers in the 1970s – as a morphological and conceptual framework for understanding contemporary urban conditions. Originally developed in response to the fragmentation and depopulation of post-war Berlin, the archipelago city posits a model of urban organization based on autonomous, differentiated spatial units or ‘islands’ within a continuous green matrix. The essay situates this model within a broader theoretical lineage, drawing connections with Colin Rowe’s “collage city,” Aldo Rossi’s theories of typology and memory, and Rem Koolhaas’s concept of “junkspace.” Through morphological and compositional analysis, it explores how Ungers’ vision has been reinterpreted in projects from the 1990s to the present, including proposals by Franco Purini and Laura Thermes. These case studies highlight the adaptability of the archipelago paradigm in the contexts of accelerated urbanization, formal heterogeneity, and socio-political complexity. Finally, the essay reflects on the limitations and potentials of the model in an age marked by globalized urban development, the rise of the zone and the increasing marginalization of architectural agency.

We are honored to receive, and proudly publish, Tom Fisher’s acceptance speech for his 2025 AIA/ACSA Topaz Medallion award. [MS]

ABSTRACT - The political and social disruptions that often follow pandemics have accelerated many countries, including the United States, toward what Jane Jacobs described in her last book, entitled Dark Age Ahead (2004). This essay looks at Jacobs’ description of the characteristics of cultures that fall into a dark age and how we can see signs of them arising around the world today. Following that analysis, this essay explores what Jacobs calls the “five pillars” that stand against such cultural collapse and how the architecture and design community can help reinforce those pillars.

Contemporary alpine chapels have emerged over the past decade driven by the dialogue between the inner world of personal experience and the outer world of the built environment. These chapels are gems located in the pre-alps, where livestock still graze on mountain pastures in the warmer months. The seven alpine chapels discussed in this article take on various forms and purposes, such as a place for prayer, a destination for a pilgrimage, and a place for baptisms and burials. As sacred architecture, chapels were perhaps not seen as epochal creations, but these spaces change the definition and understanding of what a contemporary chapel can be. The seven contemporary award-winning European chapels included in this essay introduce a new architectural vocabulary that challenge the traditional notions of a chapel and its function. The paper articulates a specific relational network (Beziehungsgeflecht) as it explores an analogy between outside nature (physical features) and internal nature (the human organism) that is woven between the human, personal, and emotional experiences one may have while visiting these structures.

Innovation in climate adaptation and resilience practices is among the most critical issues in architecture, design, and planning. This essay explores how coastal adaptation and resilience planning processes may be informed by the Y02A patent classification scheme to design advanced forms of site-specific coastal infrastructure. The Y02A scheme covers the “technologies for adaptation to climate change,” organizing coastal, riverine, and urban climate adaptation innovations into distinct sub-classes, with the aim of building technical capacity and coordinating discovery in related sectors. The mechanisms and processes through which these novel technologies are invented, tested, translated, and implemented within environmental design and planning praxis remain largely unknown, creating opportunities for new methods of knowledge exchange to be developed. To address the unique, and potentially transformative relationship, important aspects of the Y02A classification scheme are introduced in conjunction with a case study analysis from 2017/18 Resilience by Design Bay Area Challenge in California, during which the Common Ground Team utilized patent innovation studies to conceptualize site-based adaptation and resilience strategies for the San Pablo Baylands.

In 2012, Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) was announced winner for the competition to design the Japan National Stadium, the main venue for the 2020 Olympics. Over the years, the project faced a range of controversy that ended with the scrapping of ZHA’s proposal in 2015, and the adoption of a non-iconic stadium designed by Kengo Kuma, one that is more integrated with its context. The critique against ZHA’s project involved Japanese architects led by Fumihiko Maki; it stemmed from the urban consequences such an architectural object would have, bringing the protagonists into conflict at the very intersection of their nature as architects and urban planners. This paper aims to analyze the reasons behind this controversy, which lies within the theoretical debate between a phenomenological approach on one hand and the autonomy of design on the other. Despite her established status as an archistar, Hadid’s proposal seemed to suffer the side effects of Koolhaasian “bigness”; the heritage discipline of preserving the built and natural environment of the neighborhood suddenly became a matter such an important structure had to deal with.

 This article focuses on the French architect Claude Parent’s exploration of oblique architecture during a series of traveling programs pursued between 1969 and 1975. Based on a theory of the inclined plane developed in the 1960s with Paul Virilio as part of the group Architecture Principe, Parent conducted this exploration through temporary installations and staged public events hosted by cultural centers throughout France. This article examines the institutional context within which Parent’s traveling repertoire took place as well as the government policies, social movements, and cultural forces that shaped it. Through such an approach, the article develops a perspective on the relationship between Parent’s practice and the cultural centers’ objectives as mutually beneficial, and of his interventions as site specific, both architecturally and socially. The article furthermore provides evidence that these participatory experiences had a lasting effect on the architect’s attitude toward experimental architecture, shifting his priorities from form to subject. 

Digital representations of architectural details and their linking with digital fabrication processes were initially expected to form a seamless transition from design to construction. In order to investigate this transition, this paper initially discusses the nature and types of representations of details, both as tools of thinking about materials and construction and as means of communication throughout the process from design to construction. It traces their evolution through history and looks for changes, new concepts and procedures of detailing that have arisen from the adoption of digital tools of design and fabrication. The relation of digital images of details with decisions on issues of materiality and building construction is discussed as well as new concepts and prospects for a tighter connection between design and construction. 

Urban development faces a critical choice between building cities from scratch and revitalizing existing urban areas. This paper examines this dichotomy in the context of rapid urbanization, climate change, and economic pressures. By analyzing the debate through economic, environmental, technological, and political lenses, the study explores the far-reaching implications of each approach. Cities built from scratch offer a blank canvas for implementing cutting-edge technologies and sustainable practices. However, they carry substantial financial risks and may intensify social inequalities. In contrast, upgrading existing cities can yield immediate benefits for current residents and preserve cultural heritage, though it may encounter obstacles in enacting broad changes. Political considerations often drive decisions in urban development. The choice between new city construction and urban revitalization can serve as a mechanism for national rebranding, redistributing power, or creating symbols of progress. This study aims to enhance the theoretical understanding of urban development strategies by critically examining the tension between de novo city creation and existing urban revitalization. 

Throughout history, cities have always been extended towards the countryside without contemplating the other direction. While current urban farming practice tends to play a remedial role in our urban design processes and strategies, it is time for a paradigm shift between cities and the organic worlds that sustain them. Meanwhile, emerging eco-cities, such as the Masdar City project, were devised with ecological mechanisms almost exclusively driven by economic imperatives of the dominating political power. As posited by Federico Cugurullo, this kind of ecological modernization “does not change the traditional capitalistic patterns of production and consumption, and thus replicates the same environmental issues intrinsic to capitalism” (2016). This design research experiments ethnographic method in Toledo, Ohio, to generate urban farming prototypes as localized cultural practice. In response to the “Impossible Dream,” a new urban design initiative of the African American Legacy Project of Northwest Ohio, visual narratives of urban farming urbanism are created to address ecological urbanism and social-economic impacts, as well as building programming and cultural events initiatives, with a focus on public and interactive communal spaces. 

Since early 2021, the discourse concerning the potential and impacts of artificial intelligence on architecture has radically expanded. Discussions have largely focused on the heightened levels of productivity or efficiency that can be achieved within the existing ecology of architectural production processes, as well as the potential disruptions that may arise through human–AI co-authorship of the built world. What this paper asserts is that these dominant narratives appear to be extensions of quite conventional storylines which either frame artificial intelligence as a hyper-computational prosthetic for the enhancement of the architect or architectural office or as a critically disruptive force that will trigger micro- to macro-scale reconfigurations of the domain of built- environmental authorship. The dilemma is that we appear to be thinking of AI on old models of brute-force computation (i.e., Deep Blue) or dystopian conceptions of AI systems that can readily cross-pollinate with and radically disrupt existing societal configurations and dynamics (i.e., HAL-9000). What we have not quite considered are the real capacities and limits exhibited by artificial neural networks anchored around self-play reinforcement learning models (i.e., AlphaZero).