Volume wants to thank all of you who showed up at our events in New York and Amsterdam. Without you, it wouldn't have been as great as it was. We are looking forward for the next ten years!

Shelter is most immediately associated today with conditions of disaster, displacement and destitution. There is an inherent urgency to the word; it is first and foremost a necessity, a human right even. Yet thought of as the absolute minimum necessary to survive, shelter is an architectural stigma. Shelter is not a thing though; shelter is a verb; if there is such a thing as shelter, it is because whatever it is, shelters. Volume #46: Shelter is dedicated to the question of how shelter can be reformulated as an architectural project.

Learning by Doing: A digital interview with Francien van Westrenen, Willemijn Lofvers, Tim Devos and Hans Venhuizen, the intiatiors of Stroom Den Haag's project 'Stadsklas'.

From seventeenth-century painter Claude Lorrain to the modern-day Home Owners Association (HOA), the Picturesque has come a long way. Today it appears that the ineffable charms of what Kenneth Clark described as “the most enchanting dream that has ever consoled man”, is enshrined in the rules and regulations that make up most residential developments across the United States.

‘Radical Interiority’ is a masterful piece of storytelling. It is smart, taut, engaging and propulsive. It symbolizes one of the most genuine values of Volume: to show the forces that shape our world and habitat with and without the conscience intervention of professional designers and planners; to reveal how things are made; and, to claim the utility of architectural intelligence as a mode of thought, as a splendid tool not only to operate in the world but also to explain a state of things.

The housing question is about the system, the (no) rule, and the law. Aspects of it, such as displacement, privatization, (in)equality, crisis are relevant to all of us. In response to how to deal with the question, Ada Colau mentions that we need to look at it across disciplines, nations, relations. She also gives good clues for architects, as well as for architectural education.

Back closer to the turn of the decade, OMA/AMO was invited to help found Strelka, a new pedagogical initiative in Moscow that sought to erase the distinction between academic and practical knowledge. The glove seemed to fit the hand perfectly, seeing as how AMO has expanded the limits of architectural practice and application of research into ever-new territories ever since it began. Now that it's been taken off, we invited Reinier de Graaf to reflect about what it was like to actually put the glove on. What we got back was instead a high personal mediation on gloveness and the motives behind putting them on.

Radical Pedagogies is a project of collective intelligence. In that respect it is a scholarly and pedagogical experiment in its own right that questions traditional models of academic authorial production. It delves into the largely uncharted territory of extra-large collaborative projects that source expertise from a global network of scholars – a model with a large history in the academic fields of the sciences but rarely the humanities. Radical Pedagogies seeks to present a horizontal cut through architectural education throughout the second half of the twentieth century – a history of which, or multiple histories, has yet to be written.

The 2013 film The Competition follows an employee from Jean Nouvel office, a ‘head of projects’, navigating his level on the pyramidal scheme of organizing conventional contemporary architecture offices. (1) The image of this man, suffering the pressure of the genius-boss, trying to respond to deadlines with the effort of sufficiently trained and motivated young architects working behind him, neatly draws one of the professional glass ceilings that most accredited architects can expect in their working life.

It looks like all initiatives of self-reliant citizens seem to take place at the small scale of the house, the street or the neighborhood at most. But what does it mean for the larger scale of the city, the country or even transnationally? Archis Speaks Volumes #3 invites three experts to reflect on those larger scales and what kind of governing or ‘rules of the new game’ should be in place.

2015 marks our 10th anniversary! Volume has invited people from its network to select a favorite article/contribution. This week we highlight a personal favorite of Lina Stergiou, architect, co-founder of 4Life Strategies, Associate Professor at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China, and principal of LS/Architecture&Strategies.

For those who are in Brussels (or want to go there for joined celebrations) on Wednesday October 21, Volume editor-in-chief Arjen Oosterman will tell how and most of all why the project came into being and what he foresees for the future.