This special themed issue of the *Journal of Visual Culture *has two aims. First, to present a collection of essays and shorter provocations about the failure of contemporary architecture to address the full complex of issues engaged by visual culture studies. Second, these lines of inquiry are meant not merely to critique architecture and its discursive conceits, but rather any critique is only valid to the degree that it identifies what is significant and vital about architecture for visual culture. This is a critical examination of architecture (as both object and discourse) in contemporary visual culture: its failures, blind spots, refusals, and symptoms, yes, but also its successes, minor discourses, and alternative models of practice. In short, the contributors to this issue are invested in discovering an ‘outside’. A passage beyond ‘starchitect’ vanity/ideological projects in favor of a critical—vital—interest in architecture as a socio-cultural and historical means of transmitting unforeseen aesthetic possibilities and modes of knowledge.

Architecture! (Journal of Visual Culture 15:3)

‘Architecture in the Age of Digital Reproduction’

Publications

As Robin Evans observed in his seminal 1986 essay, ‘Translations from Drawing to Building’, architects don’t make buildings they make drawings. Although much has changed since he made this observation, particularly with respect to disciplinary representational practices, drawings and constructed images remain primary media of architectural design. Discursive images are loaded – they are full of information, replete with spatial articulation, jam-packed with representational conceits and conventions, and overflowing with interpretive possibilities – while simultaneously concise in their delivery, refined in their graphic language, minimal in their aesthetic, and pithy in their communicative potential. Within their fulsome compositions, they retain both clues and tools for their own unpacking.

Design as Scholarship (Journal of Architectural Education 70:1)

‘Drawing on the Public Good’

Scaling Infrastructure presents the proceedings of the second and final conference of MIT’s Center for Advanced Urbanism biennial theme of infrastructure. The conference brought together political leaders, engineers, designers, and academics to investigate how critical the issues of appropriate infrastructural investments and scales have become to the future of urbanized territories when faced with new economic, political, and environmental challenges. This companion volume to Infrastructural Monument explores the phenomenon of growing and shrinking cites in response to population shifts. How do we deal with cities like Detroit, whose once thriving population and economy have been drastically reduced, leaving a city built for a large capacity to adjust to this decline? Or how do cities grow quickly in response to greater demands for housing and transportation?

Scaling Infrastructure

‘Resilient Infrastructure’

Nonformal urbanization will be the dominant mode of urban growth in the coming decades. The results of this growth go by many well-known names, including: slums, favelas, and shantytowns. The precarious conditions of these settlements, excluded from formal legal, social, and infrastructural systems, present a central challenge—and opportunity—in our current and future cities. In this volume, short texts explain a range of projects and initiatives, complimented by photographs and personal insights, to present a diversity of responses to the global phenomenon known here as “Metropolis Nonformal”.

Title	Metropolis Nonformal
Authors	Hubert Klumpner
Release	January 2016
Editors	Christian Werthmann & Jessica Bridger
Publisher	Applied Research + Design Publishing
Pages	238

‘Constructing Cities’

Metropolis Nonformal