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.

Up Up—Stories of Johannesburg’s Highrises presents a selection of buildings in the inner city of Johannesburg. The focus lies on tall modernist towers that stood out at the time they were constructed. Witnesses to profound shifts in the political history of the metropolis, the buildings have gone through immense changes. They are documented in two distinct sections: on the one hand the formal architecture is presented with facts, floor plans, archival discoveries, and contemporary images of the interior and the exterior. On the other hand each building is accompanied by a reportage or subjective essay on the inner workings of the building. Interviews with residents, research based texts on contemporary issues, and independent contributions from invited writers, artists, and photographers allow brief insights into the old and new lives of these towers.

Up Up: Stories of Johannesburg's Highrises

‘On Delvers Street’

Publications

To be a radical is to inspire both admiration and contempt. Radical change is by definition far-reaching and fundamental. In other words, it offers a prospect equally liberating or terrifying depending on your vantage point and stake in the prevailing system. In the expanded field of architecture, the radical repertoire – provocation, agitation, infiltration, subversion, emancipation – is a cyclically recurring phenomenon. Urbanization generates a shifting landscape of winners and losers, and this dichotomy inevitably gives birth to alternative modes of practice, thought, and action.

UABB 2015 Volume II: Radical Urbanism

‘Free Radicals’

Architecture has always been intimately intertwined with its social, political, and economic contexts; major events in world history have had correspondingly dramatic effects on the discipline. The Great Depression, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Hurricane Katrina, for example, were all catalysts for architectural response and resulted in a diversification of the architect’s portfolio. Yet far too often, architects simply react to changes in the world, rather than serving as agents of change themselves. This issue takes a broader view, using the concept of agency to explore the future of architecture. The retreat from liability, the barricade of theory, and the silos of specialization have generated a field that is risk-averse and reactive, rather than bold and active. Instead of assuming that architects can only throw up their hands in despair, the editors invite them to roll up their sleeves and get to work.

Title	Design as Scholarship (Journal of Architectural Education 70:1)
Authors	Urban-Think Tank & Jack Isles
Release	March 2016
Editor	Marc J Neveu
Publisher	Taylor & Francis Group
Pages	184

‘Drawing on the Public Good’

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