Parsing distinctions between architecture and “mere” building has been a preoccupation of thinkers and practitioners since ancient times. The very difficulty of defining neat disciplinary boundaries ...

In 1921, Loos titled his first essay collection Spoken into the Void; the work was intended as a critique of his Austrian contemporaries’ ignorance of modern lifestyles. Indirectly, the “void” in the ...

At a moment when the word “design” has come to refer to everything and thus nothing, this issue examines the hidden mechanics and visible output of design practice in order to track the shifting role ...

Before books, there were scrolls. The ancient Romans, like the Sumerians, stored their extensive scroll collections in “cells,” or pigeonholes (nidus, forulus, or loculamentum), or on pegmata, ...

It is increasingly clear that one of the major female architects of the 20th century was the Italian Lina Bo Bardi, […] ...

Harvard Design Magazine probes beyond the established design disciplines to enrich and diversify current discourse.

Forest City and its backstory are emblematic of an emerging issue of a transnational order. Less obvious than the increased capital flows across territories is the flow of territory itself. That is, ...

The house will sit in the middle of the meadow, like an object, without spoiling anything. To transform space . . . it is first necessary to eliminate rigid objects, conventional receptacles: one must ...

Redesign, for decades stigmatized by Modernist purists as an inferior architectural specialty reserved for the artistically timid and creatively challenged, has finally become a legitimate part of ...

The more stuff we accumulate, the more space we need to store it all. Vast portions of the landscape are claimed and governed by spaces of storage, their maintenance, and the goods that move through ...

Stefano Boeri Architetti, Bosco Verticale, Milan, Italy, 2014. The rhetoric surrounding these purpose-grown forests is that of performance and optimization. For example, RSHP’s sky gardens proposed to ...

Despite remarkable advancements in technology, the construction documents that architects produce for their clients to communicate a building design and its intent—what are called CD sets—have not ...