"Have you ever been in the Alps? To understand how a single house can stand for a nation, read Bart Lootsma's article on the Tyrolean House. It looks vernacular, but in fact it is an invented tradition which dates back to 1900 – it simulates tradition, which works pretty well for tourism, and produces an interesting form of camouflage architecture."

Refugee camps are, by definition, meant to be temporary. Yet in Palestine refugee camps have existed for well over half a century, and architecture plays an exceptionally symbolic role. Every stone set is a representation of permanence and undermines the refugee's political existence as such. Within these constraints, DAAR members were asked to design a girl's school in the Shu'fat refugee camp in East Jerusalem. The architectural result is a statement about life in exile and a vision beyond the tired dialectic of temporariness and permanence.

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.

Today we feature a personal favorite of Gianluca Croce, an avid Volume reader. Gianluca is currently finishing his Masters of Science in Architecture at the Facoltà di Architettura, Università degli Studi di Trieste, Italy.

Fabrizio Gallanti talks with Hans Ulrich Obrist for Volume #44.

Brendan Cormier, Lead Curator of 20th and 21st Century Design for the Shekou Partnership at Victoria and Albert Museum and former managing editor at Volume, has picked a head-to-head between Rem Koolhaas and Larry Beasley that was published in Volume #23 Al Manakh Gulf Continued.

Volume has invited people from its network to select a favorite article/contribution and indicate in a few lines why. The coming weeks and months we’ll republish their choices with their motivation. If you feel tempted to highlight a personal favorite with a brief motivation.

Everything comes from somewhere. It’s a fact so self-evident it hardly feels worth saying. But beyond this obvious truth, provenance is a powerful industry. As a capitalist tactic, it addresses the problem of anonymous mass-production through the added-value of meaning. And it is everywhere. As such, our daily routines have fundamentally changed. No longer a simple succession of actions, they are now a complex sequence of meaningful objects, objects that reveal stories reflecting our moral and personal character. In the shower we lather with locally produced handcrafted soap. Our coffee packaging reassures us that the Ethiopian crop worker – his name is Abraham – earns a living wage. The mug we drink from, as told by the sales clerk, is a Scandinavian classic. We slice into a tomato, knowing that at the farmer’s market we shook the farmer’s hand. These things make us feel good; they reaffirm our egos, assuage our guilt, and remind us that we are interested and interesting individuals. It is 8:30 in the morning.

The Modern subject is usually defined by its epistemological capacity. Enlightened at heart, it is composed of a body and a mind evolving in an homogeneous space and time; it is mostly conscious, aware of the world to the extent of his/her knowledge.