Across culture and time, architects have interrogated the built environment and their role in shaping it. Questions of artistic agency, political power, social control, and cultural preservation all contribute to the fundamental debate of what architecture is—and is for. This syllabus aims to introduce students to the expansive theory, practice, and study of architecture. At once an examination of disciplinary history and theory, this course will investigate the diverse ways architects have understood their world (and situated their profession within it) by actively negotiating between written ideas, drawings, and built projects. To do so, this syllabus adopts an explicitly transnational perspective, challenging the Euro-American canon of architectural theory by presenting it as just one tradition amongst a range of cultural, geographic, and historical perspectives. Through exposure to a range of thinkers, students will be able to consider their own work within a diverse spectrum of theories concerning architecture, urbanism, and space.

The challenge of architecture is to focus on architecture itself — buildings, drawings, and models— as its locus of knowledge and, specifically, on how that knowledge can became a tool of the design process. One of the first attempts to do so, Précis and Recueil, appeared in the early nineteenth century elaborated by Durand. They represented the hinge for an epistemological validation of the discipline, taking further the Vitruvian axiom architectura est sciencia, and answering Enlightenment’s anxiety for demonstration and systematization of knowledge. Durand sought to clarify the fundamentals of architectural praxis and the genealogies of what it produces by taking history as its material and, through techniques of decomposing and recomposing, established the principles of the design process. Although his effort to refocus the discipline in its inaugural act, the deterioration and oversimplification of Durand’s teachings resulted in their direct implementation by those who aspired to a definition of specific methods in order to relieve the architect’s practice, partially because of their normative and hermetic character. Architectural schools keep struggling to find ways of improving their student’s skills, having shifted its focus from architectural objects to the process of creating those, which had an enormous impact in architectural representation as a way of validating its objects, but not in the process of architectural investigation itself. Re-elaborating Durand’s questions implies reflecting on techniques of using architectural knowledge both in a creative and generative way. Through processes of transformation, transposition and variation architects have, throughout history, conferred new meanings to what is already known. It is the use of architectural knowledge as a simulacrum, and of those techniques as a way of constructing critical arguments within the discipline that will potentially improve students’ capabilities of reasoning about past and contemporary architecture, and therefore integrate aspects of theory and practice.

An online bi-monthly architecture journal interrogating the vocation and activity of those positioned on the fringe of the formal architecture sector, publishing thought pieces from those who work inside and outside of 'architecture-proper'. www.edgecondition.net //CONTENTS //LETTERS: 04 - Jacklynn Niemiec & Jason Austin evaluate new methods for the ominous ‘final review’ in architecture schools in PRESENTING ARCHITECTURE IN REVERSE. 08 - Engineer Bruno Tonelli shares his thoughts about BEING ON THE EDGE of architecture. 09 - Graeme Brooker highlights the absence of the presentation of surface in university education in PRESENTING SURFACE. 10 - Recruitment Consultant and design graduate Fred Vinall shares his experiences of the employment circle in OUT OF THE FRYING PAN. 11 - Film critic Armen Karaoghlanian tells of his practice analysing films in terms of architectural space in FIGHT CLUB. //FEATURES: 12 - Creative agency SQUINT/OPERA deliver a fascinating tale of threshold between the image and the reality in BEING THERE. 16 - Commissioning editor Helen Castle explores the realm of digital publishing in CANNY COMMUNICATION IN THE ARCHITECTURE IN THE AGE OF ‘MESSY MEDIA’ - part one.. 23- 5 visual responses to the Ted Landrum poem ARCHITECTURE & LANGUAGE. Featuring Federico Babina, Paul Karalius,Thomas Lear Grace, Catrina Stewart, Kyle Branchesi //AN INTERVIEW WITH... 36 - Lead graphic designer on Wes Anderson’s blockbuster The Grand Budapest Hotel, ANNIE ATKINS //FROM PERSONAL EXPERIENCE: 42 - Myra Stewart discusses her thoughts and theories on alternative methods of site analysis in AT PLAY. 43 - Athanasiou Geolas & Evangelina Guerra Lujan share their passion for words and images in IT ALWAYS BEGINS WTH AN ARCHIVE 46 - Art Director Patrick Myles tells us how to put a building on a page in CHANGING THE DIMENSIONS OF ARCHITECTURE. //OP-EDS 50 - Our editor Gem Barton talks about the changing face of architectural representation in THE EVIL WITCH OF BANALITY. 60 - Architect George Wade questions the need for neatness in BLESS THIS MESS. 64 - Cass PhD candidate Rachel O’Grady analyses the re-use of a 1914 North Indian guesthouse in PRESENTING THE PERIPHERAL AND THE EXISTING. 70 - Lawrence Bird explores the depiction of the built environment in movies, manga and anime in ONCE BY WATER, ONCE BY FIRE. PHOTO-ESSAYS 76 - Portrait photographer Valerie Bennett gives us the stunning personal stories behind photographing famous architects. in THE STORIES BEHIND THE LENS 86 - Jim Stephenson ON ARCHITECTURAL PHOTOGRAPHY 101 - EDGECONDITION CURATE FREERANGE

An issue of Architectural Theory Review guest-edited by Gevork Hartoonian, with new articles by Bernard Cache, Rita Risser, David Leatherbarrow, Jin Baek, Açalya Allmer, and Non Arkaraprasertkul; with book reviews by Gevork Hartoonian and Alison Fisher.