Independently this week, we have written elsewhere on the idea of the architect as urban explorer. Edwin’s piece ‘Intellectual Disaster Tourism‘ is featured over on Archined, where he casts the architect as contemporary urban archaeologist, continually seeking the ‘perverse pleasure’ of studying the next city in decline. With Detroit as his example, hollowed out by [...]

A brief roundup of ‘extra/ordinary’, the Australian Institute of Architects national conference, Sydney, April 2010 Although delivered simply as an amusing anecdote, when taken out of context, this crude piece of wisdom from the elder statesman Peter Corrigan seemed to capture the essence of ‘extra/ordinary’. This was a conference about engaged practitioners; engaged in the [...]

From my archive, an essay I wrote in 2006, which is relevant to the theme of this blog. The essay deals with the discrepancies between theory and practice , and the role of criticality in this relation. Two of the main source texts which functioned as the point of departure for The Projective Landscape conference [...]

A short fiction story on the architectural cognition laboratory and their findings …

Albena Yaneva took up Banham’s challenge as formulate 20 years ago in his Black Box essay; to venture into what architects actually ‘do’.