The book operates as a critical and propositional enquiry, moving fluidly between architectural design practice, art practice, and historical and theoretical research. Structured around three main chapters, it focuses on four of Matthew Butcher’s speculative architectural design projects: Flood House (2016), Silt House (2015), Bang Bang House(2017) and Measure House (2017). These works exist as drawings, models and 1:1 built structures, and are presented in dialogue with the practices of environmental architects and artists who influenced them, such as architects Raimund Abraham and Gianni Pettena, artists Alan Kaprow and Robert Morris, and performance artist Joan Jonas. Butcher argues that these historical figures offer vital inspiration for alternative forms of architectural design today. Their work viscerally emphasizes – through physical and emotional experience – natural processes such as growth and decay, entropy, weather patterns and celestial forces.

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Constructions of Progressive Learning tells the story of the institution through its architecture – a perspective largely overlooked in histories of progressive education. The book demonstrates how Dartington’s learning environments both shaped and reflected changing ideas about the body, gender, democracy, pedagogy and class. It argues that the architecture of progressive education was not fixed, but evolved in response to shifts in leadership, policy and educational philosophy. Drawing on Dartington’s innovations in performance writing, the book weaves archival research, oral history and site writing practices into a richly layered narrative. The method brings marginalised voices of forgotten staff and students into dialogue with more dominant accounts of headmasters and architects. In doing so, the book offers a timely reflection on how educational environments might centre wellbeing, relationships and lived experience, rather than performance metrics alone.

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This book explores the fertile tension between these poles. Around the world, governments now regulate for beauty, planners and designers are tasked with delivering it, and communities increasingly demand it. But how do we pursue something that resists clear definition?

Structured in four parts across eight chapters, the book traces beauty’s rise as a public mission, probes its contested meaning, investigates what people prefer in their built environments and reports on innovative experiments that have sought to test out the delivery of a beauty agenda. Six guiding questions shape the journey, culminating in a seventh: can the unknowable ever be made knowable? Rather than offering one final answer, the book maps a rich and unsettled terrain, showing why urban beauty matters, and how it might guide the creation of more humane cities.

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Moving from theory to practice, the book unpacks the political economy behind these projects: value capture tools, density bonuses, long-term ground leases, negotiated obligations and creative public–private–non-profit partnerships. It looks closely at ownership and management arrangements, conflicts over access and costs and the shifting ‘publicness’ of spaces that function as urban commons. Rather than celebrating verticality uncritically, the volume foregrounds questions of equity, exclusion and asks who really benefits when public services are interwoven with private development. For planners, urban designers, lawyers, policymakers and scholars, it offers a rare comparative framework, conceptual language and concrete design and governance lessons for making vertically mixed cities more just, legible and accessible.

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Practising Ethics bridges the gap between research volume and textbook. The book’s two-part structure creates a dialogue between ethical concepts derived from decolonial, ecological, feminist and queer theory, and lived ethical experiences that are explored through specific situations. A series of opening essays present hotspots, touchstones, keystones, blindspots, moonshots and milestones as different ethical orientations in a six-point methodology. This is followed by six case studies in which practitioners and researchers navigate these orientations through narrative figurations that describe ethical deliberations arising from social science, humanities, practice-led and participatory art and architectural design research in El Salvador, India, Nigeria, Peru and the United Kingdom.

The book acts as a companion to an award-winning online toolkit and is illustrated by Judit Ferencz who offers creative exercises for readers to develop their own poethic infrastructures.

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It was the Vajrasana Buddhist Retreat Centre project that enabled Walters & Cohen Architects to shift the focus away from the ideal pavilion to the social pavilion. While pavilions are usually seen as finished objects, this book argues that they can be seen as a process, namely a social process. The book describes how shared experience defines a new way of working towards an architecture that rediscovers and enriches its communal purpose. The ethos of Walters & Cohen’s practice has thus become one that encourages a broader conversation about architecture, with buildings seeking to convey a raw sense of place and to reduce the many complexities of site and programme to the simplest arrangement and expression.

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Having been part of UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture since 2013, the Survey of London is uniquely placed to offer the first comprehensive account of the university’s buildings and the evolution of its historic Bloomsbury campus. This monograph, published in 2026 to coincide with the bicentenary of UCL’s foundation, provides a new understanding of this significant estate in central London, bringing to light a complex and engaging architectural story with many facets that have been previously overlooked or neglected. It charts a progression in UCL’s architecture from the Greek Revival classicism of the early nineteenth century, through Victorian experimentation and inter-war Neo-Georgian, to post-war Brutalism and today to the high-tech, energy efficient and adaptable buildings expected of a modern university.

Based on original documentary research and site investigation, and generously illustrated with more than 270 photographs, maps and drawings, many of them specially commissioned, the Survey’s monograph provides a valuable record and analysis of UCL’s Bloomsbury campus for the future.

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Through an interdisciplinary approach that merges architectural design, contemporary art and Jewish studies, Romik’s experimental research addresses the complex social issues of former shtetls by combining theoretical discussions with artistic performances and architectural interventions. The book documents projects ranging from subtle, mirror-clad interventions – such as the Nomadic Shtetl Archive, JAD, and Hurdy-Gurdy – to practical renovations that transform derelict synagogues and Jewish pre-burial houses into historical museums and cultural centres. These efforts confront the ‘present absence’ of these towns by merging theoretical discourse with archival research, artistic performances and architectural interventions, aimed at investigating the lost Jewish communities’ spectral architecture.

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Space Syntax: Selected papers by Bill Hillier provides a canon of works that reflects the progression of Hillier’s ideas from the early publications of the 1970s to his most recent work, published before his death in 2019. This selection of influential works ranges from his papers on architecture as a professional and research discipline, through to his later papers that present a theory of the spatial structure of the city and its social functions. By bringing together writing from across his career-span of half a century, with specially commissioned introductions by a wide range of international experts in the field, we are able to contextualise and show the range and evolution of Hillier’s key ideas.

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Building on the shift towards a collaborative and qualitative analysis of architectural production, Between Design and Making re-evaluates the social and professional fabric that binds design to making, and reflects on the asymmetry that has emerged between architecture and craft. Combining analysis of buildings, archival material and eighteenth-century writings, the authors draw out the professional, pedagogical and social links between architectural practice and workmanship. They argue for a process-oriented understanding of architectural production, exploring the obscure centre ground of the creative process: the scribbled, sketched, hatched and annotated beginnings of design on the page; the discussions, arguments and revisions in the forging of details; and the grappling with stone, wood and plaster on the building site that pushed projects from conception to completion.

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