This study examines the interaction between virtual and material spaces and their impact on the embodied experience of architectural space, using the ‘augmented reality’ guide to the Louvre-Lens Museum as a case study. Drawing on the understanding of perception and action from the theory of embodied cognition - the so-called 4E approach (embodied, extended, embedded, and enacted) - the paper argues that a new layer of virtual/augmented experience not only provides access to more information but also expands bodily interaction between inhabitants and architecture. The virtual space offers another field of vision and visual stimulus to explore and understand the real space. It also serves as a temporal displacement of the real space, providing indeterminate open-endedness and possibilities for the use of the space. These hybrid environments inspire more active environment-initiated behaviours, adding the dimension of bodily reciprocity to the experience of space and information. Consequently, the ways in which we conceive of embodied space are transformed.

This article concentrates on the understudied years that the German architect Hermann Muthesius spent in London from 1896 to 1903. It argues that Muthesius's interpretation of English visual culture was foundational to the national style he envisioned for his homeland. Muthesius produced a vast literature on English architecture and design and is thus often mentioned as the connector between the arts and crafts and the Werkbund in the historiography of the modern movement. This stance is problematic, however, because it frames Muthesius’s appropriation in terms of reception and assumes that one man alone can connect two heterogeneous trends. Such a view overlooks the dialectic shaping involved in a cultural transfer. Muthesius’s engagement with English architecture was an active, deliberate process of selection and reinterpretation, rather than mere absorption. As such, this article establishes how Muthesius was both an agent of this cultural transfer through the prism of his own cultural framework of Wilhelmine entanglement of cultural and political concerns, and himself subject to a complex set of emulation and reciprocal influences within the transnational construction of national aesthetics. It demonstrates that Muthesius’rs experience in Britain represents a pivotal, though often mischaracterised, episode in the evolution of modern architectural thought.

In the twentieth century, the mobility of architects and ideas played an important role in the dissemination of an architecture culture characterised by modernity. Architectural ideas were disseminated through institutions and a variety of visual, verbal, and textual representations as well as physical encounters. Travel, with its associated architectural thinking and representation, became a generative practice through which the dissemination of architecture could be understood. The Grand Tour was one of the most well-studied examples of travel as a rite of passage, and Italy remained a dominant destination long after its peak in the eighteenth century. Italian architectural discourse entered Turkey through travels and publications, mostly in the prewar era. This article aims to show the role of architects’ travels in inducing architectural productions through a variety of representations from sketches to published media, scrutinising Turkish-speaking architects’ journeys to Italy in the postwar era. The study incorporates content analysis of selected media - such as photographs, articles, class notes, books, and memoirs - to review architects’ productions during and after their travels, as they facilitated the dissemination of an architecture culture ‘brought back’ after key experiences.

Historically, there are two main methods for applying evolutionary processes to architectural design in terms of utilised computation procedures. The first approach uses digital computation to represent computational models of evolutionary processes from micro to macro scales for form-finding experiments. The second approach proposes to go beyond the simulation of evolutionary processes by integrating physical evolutionary processes directly into architectural design. The novelty is in embedding physical evolution processes into architectural design through physical computation, which takes place through a direct interaction of living organisms or materials with their environment. One of the organisms that has started to be observed and utilised in architectural design processes is Physarum polycephalum, a single-celled and multi-headed slime mould.

Although many design theories and models have been proposed for using Physarum polycephalum in architectural design, more research is still needed to evaluate the role and critical limits of digital and physical computation as a bridge between evolutionary processes and architectural design. Bio-digital design arguments have been barely challenged by focusing on the capacities and limitations of the organism’s physical computation and its simulation through digital computation. This article foregrounds and evaluates various bio-digital design theories by focusing on the limits, potentials, and differences between physical and digital computation to critically review the relationship between evolution, computation, and the built environment.

The idea of introducing the cognitive capacity of Physarum polycephalum into architectural design is challenged by referring to the characteristics of both digital and physical computation procedures. Moreover, the challenges arising from scale and context differences between Physarum polycephalum and design project sites are discussed. The original contribution is the first comparative review of Physarum polycephalum’s applications in architectural design processes through a critical methodology founded upon the theory of digital and physical computation.

In the last century, concrete has become the preferred construction material with which to densify cities by height. Yet, concrete - the most highly produced and consumed building material in human history - is a leading player in climate change and a candidate for marking the stratigraphic onset of the Anthropocene: the term proposed for a new geological epoch in which humans have become the leading geological force capable of altering irreversibly the course of Earth history. In recent years, wood has emerged as a renewable alternative to densify cities by altitude owing to its potential to generate a carbon-neutral cycle. This article reflects on the properties of these building materials in the context of the Anthropocene to argue for the need to shift from an emphasis on the life expectancy of buildings to what we term the vital cycle of the built environment, where architectural design is metabolically responsive to the deep geological history of building materials, on which the continuity of human life depends.

Design research in architecture has evolved significantly in the last three decades. This article traces a historical lineage of architectural design research in order to speculate on its contemporary trajectories. This article investigates two interrelated threads. The first provides an overview of significant moments in the history of architectural design research in the academic field in the UK and Western Europe, drawing from relevant literature. The second focuses on the 1995 book S,M,L,XL by OMA, Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce Mau, which coincided with the emergence of architectural design research discourse in academia. We demonstrate how the medium of this book contributed to a reorganisation of architectural design knowledge. Our article concludes by speculating on a similar paradigmatic turning point for design research that we are facing today. With the emergence of AI image generators and their expanding impact on architectural design, such as Midjourney and DALL-E, the field is confronted with a new horizon. If the birth of architectural design research was ushered in by a hypermediated format whose multiple narratives were co-constructed by the reader/viewer, then new media such as AI technologies signal a phase of post-mediation that challenges the authorship of the architect. The article ends by speculating on the role of architectural design research at a time when the very agency of the architect is challenged by such outside forces.