“From 15-17 November 2021, the ETH Zürich Department of Architecture will host the conference ‘Histories of Urban Design: Global Trajectories and Local Realities’. This conference is organised jointly with the TUDelft Department of Architecture. 2021 will mark the 65th anniversary of the first conference on urban design, held at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 1956. Today, more than six decades later, urban design, as a discipline and practice, remains as relevant as ever – perhaps even more relevant than ever before. It is widely acknowledged that our time is an urban age. More people live in cities than ever…

“Toxics. Toxins. Toxicants. Toxicity. These terms slip in and out of architecture, design, and urban planning discussions, shifting between scientific, medical, legal, and social meanings. But what does the history of toxics reveal about the history of architecture? From nineteenth-century arsenic-laden wallpaper to present-day chemical sensitivity–inducing formaldehyde, increasingly industrialized building practices have created both new products and new modes of consumption, production, regulation, and disposal. Over the last one hundred years, building materials have become increasingly composite—made by cutting, mixing, extrusion, cross-lamination, and even nanomaterial microscopic manipulation. These processes can covertly introduce toxic substances into the architectural spaces we inhabit….

“The AHRA PhD Symposium 2021, hosted by Sheffield Hallam University School of Architecture, seeks to ask how architectural research might be embedded within different organisations, places and networks in multiple ways, thus beginning to redefine the role of such research and its relationship to the city. While embedded and ethnographic methods have become more widespread, we see potential in further exploring the particular approaches, relations, networks and collaborations that emerge from socio-spatial studies within or between urban organisations, agencies, Municipalities and groups. The organisers welcome contributions from PhD students in architecture, urbanism, landscape and related disciplines to share the methodologies,…