This paper will present a study of John Miller’s teaching at the Royal College of Art between 1975 and 1978, examining how design exercises on ‘difficult sites’ turned physical, economic, and bureaucratic constraints into tools for architectural education. Taking Miller’s manifesto ‘The Restriction of Goals’, published in Lotus International in 1978, as its starting point, it will bring RCA studio projects into dialogue with the work of his architectural partnership, Colquhoun & Miller, and contemporary European pedagogical experiments.

The paper will first examine two ‘infill’ housing schemes completed by Colquhoun & Miller in 1978: one in an old village corner in Milton Keynes, the other in bomb-damaged gaps between Victorian residential streets in Kentish Town. It will consider how these projects revisited the infill experiments of James Stirling and Alison and Peter Smithson exhibited at CIAM X, giving renewed critical meaning to a practice becoming increasingly commonplace in the economic aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis.

It will then trace how Miller translated these concerns into teaching at the RCA’s School of Environmental Design, which operated outside the RIBA-chartered system of architectural education. Through briefs addressing constrained mews, brownfields, corner plots, derelict industrial areas, disused landscapes, and historical urban settings, the paper will examine how students were encouraged to work with existing conditions and question prevailing approaches to urban redevelopment.

By placing these studio experiments alongside contemporary European counterparts, the paper will explore how small-scale interventions offered a means of reassessing modernism’s dominant scales, processes, and bureaucracies. It will argue that Miller’s ‘restriction of goals’ framed constraint as a productive basis for design, connecting the reuse of difficult sites to a broader reconsideration of architectural practice and pedagogy.

In 1971, amid student protests over educational authority, the social critic Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society questioned the power of schools to decide whose knowledge counted. Within architectural education, where curricula and assessments authorised professional knowledge, this critique concerned who could challenge the assumptions through which architects learned to design. Where Illich contested institutional control, the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire connected dialogue with reflection and action. He retained an active role for educators, whose interpretations became available for collective examination alongside those of learners. In feminist consciousness-raising, women compared bodily experiences previously treated as private, showing how everyday judgements were socially learned. Across these practices, questioning familiar knowledge meant asking how it had acquired authority.

Unlearning begins when an acquired habit or judgement becomes perceptible and open to revision through embodied experience. For the postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1985), unlearning privilege meant recognising how social position limits the capacity to hear and understand others. The education scholar Erica McWilliam (2008) examined how teachers’ habits of explaining and helping could restrict students’ opportunities to develop their own ways of learning. Yet educators may recognise learners’ experience as knowledge while retaining control over its interpretation. The argument developed here therefore distinguishes unlearning acquired judgements from redistributing the authority to decide what follows. This distinction foregrounds the conditions of unlearning: who can speak, whose account receives recognition, and whether people have the time, resources and power to act on what they come to understand. The plural, unlearnings, keeps these processes attached to particular bodies and historical circumstances.

On 26th February 1846 a public meeting at the National School House in Cove, Ireland debated whether urban “improvements” could provide employment, stimulate the local economy, and relieve destitution during the Great Famine. Speakers included Edmund Burke Roche, MP for County Cork, the Reverend O’Regan, a local Roman Catholic vicar, and Bartholomew W. Verling, harbourmaster and Spanish consul. Their conflicting positions exposed tensions surrounding developments initiated in 1845 by Lord Midleton and Decimus Burton. O’Regan criticised the eviction of 350 tenants and inadequate workers’ pay, while Verling, an established local landowner, defended the evictions as necessary and the improvements as a means of directing investment into Cove. Drawing on a reconstruction of this public discussion and archival research in contemporary newspapers and other media, this paper examines urban development in Cove around 1846. It analyses competing claims for “improvement” as Famine relief, developing a critique of the relationship between architectural development, economic austerity, and coerced labour during the Great Famine.

In the early 1940s, fearing Japanese air attacks on the West Coast, the United States commissioned a mock village on the roof of Boeing’s Plant 2 in Seattle, Washington. Overseen by John Ohmer, a captain in the Engineer Officers Reserve Corps, and developed with Hollywood set designer John Stewart Detlie, the neighbourhood was designed to appear convincing from the air. Using aerial photographs and film-set techniques, the team fabricated streets, trees, fences, cars, and houses. Camouflage netting stretched over wooden scaffolding supported an artificial streetscape, disguising the aircraft factory below.

Known as Boeing Wonderland, the site raises questions about the relationship between military deception and entertainment. Could Disneyland and other theme parks, similarly dependent on illusion and manipulated perspective, be understood as its successors? When military camouflage and fictional environments drew on the same Hollywood expertise, what distinguished their spatial techniques? These parallels frame the third chapter of my thesis, which examines the entanglements of war and play, warfare and entertainment.

Although conceived for concealment rather than training, Boeing Wonderland demonstrates the military use of simulation and environmental manipulation. It also invites comparison with later simulated landscapes constructed as substitutes for distant theatres of war, connecting the disguise of existing infrastructure with the production of artificial environments.

In August 2016, the Metropolitan Police conducted a two-day Live Facial Recognition (LFR) trial at Notting Hill Carnival in London. This paper will take that deployment as a case study, drawing primarily on the Metropolitan Police’s LFR Trial Report, alongside government documents, commissioned reports, London Assembly questions and answers, Freedom of Information disclosures, journalism, NEC company publications, and personal and community archives.

The paper will argue that analysing a surveillance site can make the changes a fleeting deployment introduces to the architecture of public space more legible to those who passed through it, as well as those who were absent or unaware of its presence. It will also reflect on the limits of contemporary historical research into contentious practices such as public surveillance. Combining formal analysis with an examination of LFR within the context of ‘a practice of everyday life’, the paper will consider both the deployment’s everyday operation and its character as spectacle.

In architectural drawing, a section represents an object cut through by a vertical plane, exposing its interior. Whether depicting a proposed design or surveying an existing building, it follows graphic conventions that ensure consistency and legibility. At 1:10, the cut reveals thin decorative layers alongside structural materials. Yet line weights, hatching, labels and measurements leave the labour practices, supply chains and material cultures of construction largely outside the drawing.

This paper examines the material stratigraphy of the Casa del Fascio in Borgo Rizza, Sicily, one of eight buildings in a Fascist rural village built in 1939 and now protected as cultural heritage. It uses the cut as a methodological framework to reconnect materials with their production, symbolically and materially. Through a diffractive approach inspired by Karen Barad, it reads archival documentation, geological surveys, architectural expertise, preservation regulations, scholarship and photographs through one another, exploring how each constructs memory through materials. Tracing each stratum exposes contradictory narratives and the forces that legitimise some accounts while excluding others.

The section thus challenges the presumed neutrality of technical representation, offering a visualisation procedure that brings overlooked conditions of material production into readings of existing buildings and drawings of future ones.

This research explores the choreography between critical infrastructures and peripherality in Latin America and the Caribbean, using their relationship as a spatial and curatorial lens through which to examine the social, political and economic conditions of selected sites. Critical infrastructures and peripheral formations mediate relations with central authority through proximity, orientation and trajectory. These relationships unfold across different spaces, temporalities and scales.Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s thinking on peripherality and trajectories, the research proposes three movements: (i) centre to periphery, examining how authority, resources and infrastructural systems extend from centralised institutions; (ii) periphery to centre, exploring how peripheral formations approach, access and negotiate with centres of authority; and (iii) circular nomadism, tracing movements between peripheries through which each can become a centre. Peripheral formations are understood as spatial systems or infrastructures that emerge in relation to central authority. Operating across multiple scales, they produce environments in which power, desire, dependency and movement are negotiated. This paper will present to sites of exploration: the North Coast Road in Trinidad and Tobago and the Demerara River Bridge in Georgetown, Guyana.

Atlas Periférico is a practice-led investigation into the shifting edges of Mexico City, asking how the periphery of a metropolis that appears to have no discernible end might be observed, documented and understood. The research develops from an urban expedition undertaken along the 84-kilometre long Anillo Periférico, Mexico City’s orbital ring road. It adopts a performative mode of investigation that stems from a deliberate anti-velocity: because to walk a space that does not want to be walked is, in itself, an act of rebellion, allowing for a critical and meticulous observation of what might otherwise remain hidden by the speed imposed by its infrastructure. The road serves as both frame and quiet protagonist through which the city can be observed, acting as the starting point for a broader reflection on the peculiarities and absurdities of Mexico City, and on what its particular conditions might contribute to a wider urban discourse.

This paper will focus on recent findings in two very different yet curiously revealing infrastructures in Mexico City: first through a recently inaugurated lineal park, and secondly, to the Reclusorio Oriente (Eastern Penitentiary, the largest prison for men in Mexico), where a peculiar combination of conditions describe a lingering sense of criminality and secondary infrastructures that respond to this monumental structure. Lawyers’ offices, rooms for rent, food stalls, street altars and public parks reveal how the everyday lingers next to the tragic, the terrifying. These encounters introduce the notion of “occult infrastructures”: systems that are historically displaced to the margins of the city, physically imposing and essential to its operation, yet which remain outside the city’s dominant image. Through this fragment, the periphery emerges as a place where the metropolis’s underlying operations become explicit, a fertile terrain for experiments in social infrastructure by the government, and a case study for resilience in observing how its inhabitants seem to build a sense of home despite the extreme conditions they find themselves in.

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In the mid-twentieth century, a ‘new era for forest fire research’ was dawning for the United States Forest Service. Multi-fatality, so-called ‘tragedy fires’, alongside the threat of nuclear desolation, had elevated fire research to a matter of general public interest, leading to the construction of the Northern Forest Fire Laboratory in Missoula, Montana. As the nation’s first dedicated specialist fire research facility, the Forest Service claimed that the laboratory ‘would take the mystery out of fire, step-by-step, until there would no longer be “wildfires”.’

This paper considers a fragment of a thesis chapter titled The United States Forest Service and the Picture of Science, which examines the federal government's fire research facilities as subjects of spatial inquiry. Placing these novel architectures in conversation with the Sundance Fire of 1967, a ‘history book’ sized blaze that burned within sight of these facilities, the chapter argues that the Sundance Fire tested the intellectual and political underpinnings of fire research itself.

Analysis of archival materials will show how the Northern Forest Fire Laboratory’s distinct spatial and architectural vocabulary served a dual function: scientifically transforming the erratic complexities of fire processes into a stable and predictable phenomenon whilst also providing a backdrop for the agency’s broader public relations mission.

The example of the Northern Forest Fire Laboratory will demonstrate how federal scientific research culture and public relations were blended into a holistic visual campaign of photographic and motion-picture production. A campaign which worked to legitimise the agency as an effective and assured bureau, capable of bringing fire into governable order whilst reiterating the benefits of fire science in the consciousness of the American citizen.

In 2019, sales contracts for newly established residential plots in Aflenz an der Sulm, southern Austria, informed their purchasers of archaeological investigations into a former Nazi forced-labour camp. Yet the decision cited in every contract referred to two cadastral parcels whose boundaries had already been reconfigured through subdivision. The archaeological excavations themselves occupied only parts of the former camp area, while traces of its presumed structures extended across the newly constituted properties.

Following this seemingly minor documentary discrepancy, The Shape of the Gap examines how the same ground is differently defined through cadastral surveying, planning, archaeological investigation, and property law. Through a close reading of the contracts and a spatial reconstruction of changing parcel boundaries, the presentation asks what happens when historical knowledge remains attached to a landscape whose legal geometry has changed. It considers how histories of violence are acknowledged, spatially delimited, and carried forward through the ordinary administrative procedures of property development.