Issue's articles | The Plan Journal
 Open Access
THEORY
Book Review

Representation Restricted Reality (RRR). Marianna Charitonidou on Architectural Drawings

by: Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa VOLUME 10/2025 - Issue 1 , Pages: 185 - 190 published: 2025-07-09

 

Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices. 

Architecture’s Changing Scope in the 20th Century

By Marianna Charitonidou

Foreword by Gevork Hartoonian

Routledge, 2023

6 x 0.75 x 9.25 in. [15.2 x 2 x 23.5 cm]

39 B/W illustrations

298 pages

US$133.00 (hardback)

US$54.99 (paperback)

US$49.49 (eBook)

November 28, 2023

ISBN: 978-1-032-43110-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-44418-5 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-003-37208-0 (ebk)

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THEORY
Essay

Train Yourself: Architectural Recycling Between Digital and Physical Realities

by: Andy Bako VOLUME 10/2025 - Issue 1 , Pages: 1 - 23 published: 2025-06-30

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.

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PEDAGOGY
Article

Buildings as Educators. The Pedagogical Value of the School of Architecture Building

by: Roberto Castillo Melo VOLUME 10/2025 - Issue 1 , Pages: 1 - 23 published: 2025-06-30

In the field of architectural education, unlike other college majors, learners and educators can search their immediate physical environment for evidence of inspiration for design ideas. As a building type, the school of architecture does not just provide a learning environment, but it can also influence design and pedagogical agendas. This paper examines the influence of the school of architecture and design building on the pedagogical experience of faculty and students by considering its role as physical evidence of design philosophies and its impact on the development of specific pedagogical agendas. The investigation looked into three case studies located in diverse geographical and cultural contexts that are also representative of multiple approaches to design education, focusing on understanding the relationship between formal and spatial systems and pedagogical directions.

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THEORY
Essay

The Contemporary City as Archipelago: From O.M. Ungers’ Berlin to the Global Collage City

by: Gregorio Froio , Monica Manicone , Matteo Benedetti VOLUME 10/2025 - Issue 1 , Pages: 1 - 21 published: 2025-06-23

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.

 Open Access
CROSS-DISCIPLINARY STUDIES
Essay

Rain, Rain, Go Away: Geoengineering and the Illusion of Control

by: Hannibal Newsom VOLUME 10/2025 - Issue 1 , Pages: 1 - 22 published: 2025-06-17

“Geoengineering” is increasingly seen as the best, perhaps even last, hope in the fight against global warming. Calls for such practices as Solar Radiation Management are becoming urgent as the effects of the climate crisis make themselves visible. This essay uses California’s Salton Sea, a geo-engineered palimpsest of once natural terrain turned toxic and inhospitable through human intervention, as a case study against the illusion of control. Through the critical lens of Magical Realism and the visual language of the architecture studio, this essay calls into question the desire to exert human control over natural systems, illustrating that the unintended consequences of such efforts will only serve to compound the problems they were initially meant to resolve.

 Open Access
CRITICISM
Polemic

The Monstrous Hybrids in Our Midst. Jane Jacobs and the Dark Age Ahead

by: Thomas Fisher VOLUME 10/2025 - Issue 1 , Pages: 1 - 11 published: 2025-06-10

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.

 Open Access
TECTONICS
Article

Opus Luteum: Incorporating a Third Dimension to Tilt-up Concrete Wall Panels

by: Pablo Moyano Fernandez VOLUME 10/2025 - Issue 1 , Pages: 1 - 19 published: 2025-06-10

Tilt-up concrete wall construction is a casting alternative to cast-in-place and precast systems. The panels are cast horizontally on site and tilted up to a vertical position, forming strong building envelopes. Some remarkable features of the tilt-up system are the durability, speed, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of the process compared to other conventional construction systems. Tilt-up construction is characterized by the simplicity of the casting method; using a flat floor slab as formwork on site, the outcome is typically flat panels. This article showcases the design and construction of tilt-up concrete panels that incorporate a third dimension to the typical flat panel using soil as formwork. Earth, the most primitive and basic construction material, can support an efficient mold-making system that is environmentally sensitive. This innovative approach utilizes an accessible, economical, and reusable local material that allows the configuration of molds with double-curvature surfaces that can provide additional structural rigidity and stability to the concrete panels. The production of concrete building envelopes with complex geometries opens a range of design possibilities for load-bearing building envelopes with simple and affordable means.

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CRITICISM
Essay

Seven Charging Stations of the Soul

by: Andreas Luescher VOLUME 10/2025 - Issue 1 , Pages: 1 - 22 published: 2025-06-18

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.

 Open Access
THEORY
Book Review

Boredom and the Architectural Imagination. Rudofsky, Venturi, Scott Brown, and Steinberg in Andreea Mihalache’s Research

by: Luis Miguel [Koldo] Lus Arana VOLUME 10/2025 - Issue 1 , Pages: 191 - 199 published: 2025-07-09

 

Boredom and the Architectural Imagination. 

Rudofsky, Venturi, Scott Brown, and Steinberg

By Andreea Mihalache

University of Virginia Press, 2024

7 x 1.25 x 8 in. [17.8 cm x 3.2 x 20.3 cm]

45 illustrations (35 b/w, 10 color)

238 pages (hardback & paperback)

288 pages (eBook)

US$115.00 (hardback)

US$34.50 (paperback)

US$34.50 (eBook)

August 5, 2024

ISBN: 978-0-813-95156-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-813-95157-7 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-813-95158-4 (ebk)

 

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LANDSCAPE URBANISM
Article

Knowledge Infrastructure for Coastal Infrastructure: The Y02A Patent Initiative and Site-Based Climate Adaption Strategies

by: Richard L. Hindle VOLUME 10/2025 - Issue 1 , Pages: 1 - 25 published: 2025-06-11

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.

 Open Access
Editorial

In This Issue [1/2024]

by: Maurizio Sabini VOLUME 9/2024 - Issue 1 , Pages: 5 - 7 published: 2024-07-09
 Open Access
CRITICISM
Opinion

Interview with Kenneth Frampton

by: Kenneth Frampton , Yehuda Safran , Daniel Sherer VOLUME 9/2024 - Issue 1 , Pages: 9 - 33 published: 2024-02-06
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CRITICISM
Essay

Vernacular Architecture on Display: From Exhibited Artifact to Operative Discourse

by: Stamatina Kousidi VOLUME 9/2024 - Issue 1 , Pages: 35 - 56 published: 2024-06-11

This article sets out to interrogate the exhibition as an essential form of critical discourse in architecture, looking at how it has engendered new conceptual and operative approaches to the vernacular notion. Focusing on the late 20th century, it explores how the exhibition space contributed to the praise of the vernacular as a valid design reference, by creating a platform for its renewed, consistent, and systematic reinterpretation. This praise did not entail the recovery of history but the redefinition of the relation between tradition and concepts of modernity, building and pre-existent context. The exhibition space thus served as a catalyst to the return of the vernacular model; it enabled new connections between project, travel, and theoretical discourse, engaging ever more international audiences. In recent exhibitions such a model manifests itself again through full-scale models, mock-ups, and pavilions that prioritize issues of materiality, construction, and experience. The article, ultimately, explores the vernacular as a cogent theme which may hold the key for a more inclusive, culturally-rooted, and holistic approach to the design of the built environment and its interpretation.

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CRITICISM
Article

The Japan National Stadium: Between Architectural Bigness and Urban Smallness

by: Aya Jazaierly , Andrea Canclini VOLUME 9/2024 - Issue 1 , Pages: 57 - 77 published: 2024-06-19

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.

 Open Access
TECTONICS
Article

Opus Versatilium: A Meta Vernacular Approach for Contemporary Load-Bearing Walls

by: Pablo Moyano Fernandez VOLUME 9/2024 - Issue 1 , Pages: 129 - 151 published: 2024-06-25

The load-bearing wall has historically served as the primary enclosure and structural component of buildings. However, the Industrial Revolution brought about technological advancements that allowed structural frames to be separated from non-structural enclosures. Today, questions of building resilience and the sustainability of materials and resources are challenging the separation of the wall in terms of its structural, performance, and aesthetic properties. This article explores the hybridization of vernacular knowledge and building construction methods with emerging digital and material technologies as an alternative to current construction practices. The overarching goal is to position the load-bearing wall as a more efficient, resilient, and high-performance enclosure. The material of choice is concrete due to its versatility, strength, durability, availability, affordability, and resiliency. As the result of applied research, the author presents Opus Versatilium (OV), an innovative casting methodology. The commission and construction of a bird blind was essential to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method. Capitalizing on the fluidity and versatility of concrete, OV advances load-bearing walls and mobilizes formwork as an active and accessible design tool for innovation in building envelopes.

 Open Access
THEORY
Essay

Claude Parent’s Oblique Travels: From Architectural Form to Social Participation

by: Igor Siddiqui VOLUME 9/2024 - Issue 1 , Pages: 79 - 101 published: 2024-06-18

 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. 

 Open Access
HOUSING
Essay

Fine-Tuning the Intensity of Modifications to Revitalize Brutalist Mass Housing: Learning from Park Hill and Bijlmermeer

by: Fabio Lepratto VOLUME 9/2024 - Issue 1 , Pages: 103 - 128 published: 2024-06-28

This essay investigates design opportunities associated with the revitalisation of Brutalist mass housing megastructures. Through a comparative analysis of two sets of projects – one pair in the Park Hill Estate (Sheffield, UK) and one pair in the Bijlmermeer district (Amsterdam) – the text theorizes an implicit process where intensity of modification is honed from one experience to the next. This process responds to the need for change brought by new social, spatial, environmental, and figurative requirements while simultaneously addressing conceptual and material integrity issues of these controversial architectures. The essay takes as its starting point the dilemmas ideally present in a practitioner’s mind when adopting an inventive approach to modifying these buildings, overcoming a purely conservative mindset. Following a reflection on possible actions, it emphasises four lessons derived from four design themes: the ground floor as a link between building and city; inner circulation as a relational experience; dwelling interiors as variable spaces; and façade design as a means of expressing change. The reflections thus offer interpretative and operational contributions to imagine actions for similar housing structures.

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TECTONICS
Article

Architectural Details and Materiality in the Era of Digital Representations

by: Eleni Vlachonasiou VOLUME 9/2024 - Issue 1 , Pages: 153 - 170 published: 2024-06-12

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. 

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DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY
Article

Object as Portal: Actual-Virtual Multi-Space of Temporary Urban Games Space

by: Bramasta Putra Redyantanu , Yandi Andri Yatmo , Paramita Atmodiwirjo VOLUME 9/2024 - Issue 1 , Pages: 171 - 194 published: 2024-06-17

This study proposes utilizing AI text-to-image technology to project virtual multi-space onto the spatial operations of actual objects. The foundation of this research lies in demonstrating multi-space within urban game spatial practices. The interplay between actual and virtual notions of space recalls the multi-space concept. The actual-virtual relationship is infinite, potentially giving rise to virtual entities mirrored through spatial mechanisms and operations. Alun-alun, a public space in Indonesia, undergoes everyday time-based temporal-spatial alterations. Notably, it transforms into an imaginative game space at night. By constructing temporary spaces with simple game objects and mechanisms, we observe the potential for multi-space presence based on spatial operations. Generative AI, particularly text-to-image operations in architecture, can project game objects and their properties, revealing various virtual, imaginative multi-space alterations. The study’s findings contribute to expanding spatial design methods in architecture, envisioning collaboration between multi-non-physical spaces within the actual-virtual framework in a future digital realm.

 Open Access
URBANISM
Essay

The Dichotomy of Cities: Build on Legacy or Start from Scratch

by: Taraneh Meshkani  VOLUME 9/2024 - Issue 1 , Pages: 195 - 204 published: 2024-07-12

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. 

 Open Access
Editorial

A New Era

by: Maurizio Sabini VOLUME 8/2023 - Issue 2 , Pages: 205 - 206 published: 2024-02-23
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LANDSCAPE URBANISM
Article

Beyond Eco-City: Re-Envisioning the Impossible Dream of Dorr Street, Toledo, Ohio

by: Yong Huang VOLUME 9/2024 - Issue 1 , Pages: 206 - 222 published: 2024-06-11

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. 

 Open Access
Position Paper

AI Time, Timing, and Timelessness

by: Phil Bernstein VOLUME 8/2023 - Issue 2 , Pages: 207 - 213 published: 2024-01-12
 Open Access
Essay

Jarvis, Hal, or AlphaZero? Looking Beyond Conventional Narratives Concerning AI and Architecture

by: Cem S. Kayatekin , June Aoun , Yusuf Sühan Bozkurt , Daphné Fournel VOLUME 8/2023 - Issue 2 , Pages: 217 - 236 published: 2024-01-18

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). 

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SUSTAINABILITY
Article

Unkapani Upcycle: Cultivating Grassroots Enterprise and Urbanism in Istanbul

by: Jeff Balmer , Demet Mutman Uluengin , Mehmet Bengü Uluengin , Peter Wong VOLUME 9/2024 - Issue 1 , Pages: 223 - 238 published: 2024-06-13

Pervasive environmental and social crises necessitate the invention of new models for conceptualizing architecture. In pursuit of a more sustainable and equitable paradigm, our research lies at the intersection of social equity through community engagement, the adaptive enhancement of architecture and urban fabric, and sustainable practices centered on the salvage and reuse of materials and infrastructure. Our research questions are prompted by this same approach: can the emergent conditions and needs of a fully contemporary project help inform its expression, use, and cycle of life in more advantageous ways than the two positions above? How might we structure an a posteriori methodology that allows for flexible project-making alongside the changing conditions of buildings in time? The current locus for our research is the city of Istanbul, a metropolitan region unique in its historical, cultural, and political contexts, yet simultaneously representative of pervasive social, economic, and environmental conditions in cities across the globe.

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