The Natural Forces Laboratory: Ralph Knowles and the Instrumentalized Studio is part of Studies in the Design Laboratory, a series of digital publications produced by the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design that investigates case studies of the laboratory environment as an incubator for the integration of digital tools into design practice in the second half of the twentieth century.

The Routledge Companion for Architecture Design and Practice provides an overview of established and emerging trends in architecture practice. Contributions of the latest research from international experts examine external forces applied to the practice and discipline of architecture. Each chapter contains up-to-date and relevant information about select aspects of architecture, and the changes this information will have on the future of the profession. The Companion contains thirty-five chapters, divided into seven parts: Theoretical Stances, Technology, Sustainability, Behavorism, Urbanism, Professional Practice and Society. Topics include: Evidence-Based Design, Performativity, Designing for Net Zero Energy, The Substance of Light in Design, Social Equity and Ethics for Sustainable Architecture, Universal Design, Design Psychology, Architecture, Branding and the Politics of Identity, The Role of BIM in Green Architecture, Public Health and the Design Process, Affordable Housing, Disaster Preparation and Mitigation, Diversity and many more. Each chapter follows the running theme of examining external forces applied to the practice and discipline of architecture in order to uncover the evolving theoretical tenets of what constitutes today’s architectural profession, and the tools that will be required of the future architect. This book considers architecture’s interdisciplinary nature, and addresses its current and evolving perspectives related to social, economic, environmental, technological, and globalization trends. These challenges are central to the future direction of architecture and as such this Companion will serve as an invaluable reference for undergraduate and postgraduate students, existing practitioners and future architects.

What do modern academic economists do? What currently is mainstream economics? What is neoclassical economics? And how about heterodox economics? How do the central concerns of modern economists, whatever their associations or allegiances, relate to those traditionally taken up in the discipline? And how did economics arrive at its current state? These and various cognate questions and concerns are systematically pursued in this new book by Tony Lawson. The result is a collection of previously published and new papers distinguished in providing the only comprehensive and coherent account of these issues currently available. The financial crisis has not only revealed weaknesses of the capitalist economy but also highlighted just how limited and impoverished is modern academic economics. Despite the failings of the latter being more widely acknowledged now than ever, there is still an enormous amount of confusion about their source and true nature. In this collection, Tony Lawson also identifies the causes of the discipline’s failings and outlines a transformative solution to its deficiencies. Amongst other things, Lawson advocates for the adoption of a more historical and philosophical orientation to the study of economics, one that deemphasizes the current focus on mathematical modelling while maintaining a high level of analytical rigour. In so doing Lawson argues for a return to long term systematic and sustained projects, in the manner pursued by the likes of Marx, Veblen, Hayek and Keynes, concerned first and foremost with advancing our understanding of social reality. Overall, this forceful and persuasive collection represents a major intervention in the on-going debates about the nature, state and future direction of economics.

An investigation of mathematics as it was drawn, encoded, imagined, and interpreted by architects on the eve of digitization in the mid-twentieth century. In Formulations, Andrew Witt examines the visual, methodological, and cultural intersections between architecture and mathematics. The linkages Witt explores involve not the mystic transcendence of numbers invoked throughout architectural history, but rather architecture’s encounters with a range of calculational systems—techniques that architects inventively retooled for design. Witt offers a catalog of mid-twentieth-century practices of mathematical drawing and calculation in design that preceded and anticipated digitization as well as an account of the formal compendia that became a cultural currency shared between modern mathematicians and modern architects. Witt presents a series of extensively illustrated “biographies of method”—episodes that chart the myriad ways in which mathematics, particularly the mathematical notion of modeling and drawing, was spliced into the creative practice of design. These include early drawing machines that mechanized curvature; the incorporation of geometric maquettes—“theorems made flesh”—into the toolbox of design; the virtualization of buildings and landscapes through surveyed triangulation and photogrammetry; formal and functional topology; stereoscopic drawing; the economic implications of cubic matrices; and a strange synthesis of the technological, mineral, and biological: crystallographic design. Trained in both architecture and mathematics, Witt uses mathematics as a lens through which to understand the relationship between architecture and a much broader set of sciences and visual techniques. Through an intercultural exchange with other disciplines, he argues, architecture adapted not only the shapes and surfaces of mathematics but also its values and epistemic ideals.