Hybrid Practices: Practice/Design/Theory-Based Research in Architecture

Introduction

This special issue examines the intersections of architectural practice, design, and theory as critical modes of research, articulating how hybrid methodologies generate new knowledge for pressing issues. If there is anything that living in the Anthropocene tells us, it is that the stability of disciplinary certainties and methods may no longer be adequate. We seek contributions that amplify reflection within architectural theory and design research yet push at the discipline’s methodological and theoretical boundaries to address urgent ecological, political, and urban challenges. Too often, design research is constrained by ontological debates about its relevance, limiting disciplinary progress. Instead, this issue moves beyond those debates, foregrounding design research as both a critical and projective tool. We are interested in contributions that reconcile, mediate, or transgress those positions.

Architectural research must respond to pressing planetary, urban, and socio-political challenges, which are spatial crises demanding spatial knowledge and hence an architectural response. Recent scholarly work by Albert Pope (2024), Caroline Voet et al. (2022), Keller Easterling (2021), Andreas Lechner (2021), Elisa Iturbe (2019), Diana Agrest (2018), Paula Vigano (2016), and Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid (2015) examines architecture’s shifting epistemologies and the interplay between pedagogy, practice, theory, design, and representation. In different ways they explore the relations and practices of architectural knowledge. Initiatives such as the New European Bauhaus, UN-Habitat’s Urban Resilience Hub, the Anthropocene Commons global network, and the foundational ETH Studio Basel underscore the role of design in responding to systemic issues.  

This special issue on Hybrid Practices curates a selection of studies that critically engage with design research, speculative experimentation, and interdisciplinary inquiry. We encourage contributions that develop hybrid constructions, models of theory and practice, and propositional work that open new and alternative pathways. We are interested in, for example, how pragmatic problem-solving engages speculative thinking about alternative futures, or how theoretical close readings bear on the facts and forms of climate change, or how extraction critique and typological readings generate alternative approaches to peripheral urbanisation.

List of topic areas

1. Hybrid practices: pedagogy and knowledge production, conceptual speculation and practical application;
2. Tectonic hybrids: typological innovation, mixed-use and hybrid programs, post-extractive design strategies, circular economies.
3. Urban futures: peripheral and dispersed urbanism, zwischenstadt, città diffusa, after sprawl, policy-driven spatial interventions.
4. Planetary imaginaries: world-making and architectural imaginaries beyond growth-driven paradigms, alternative pedagogies that challenge traditional architectural education, design research in the time of the Anthropocene.

Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available at: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/archnet

Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see: https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/arch#jlp_author_guidelines

Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”.

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else while under review for this journal.

Key deadlines

Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 10/03/2025
Closing date for manuscripts submission: 15/12/2025    

Concise References

Agrest, Diana. Architecture of Nature/Nature of Architecture. Novato, CA: ORO Editions/Applied Research & Design, 2018.
Brenner, Neil, and Christian Schmid. “Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban?” City 19, no. 2+3 (2015): 151–82. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2015.1014712.
Easterling, Keller. Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2021.
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Iturbe, Elisa. “Architecture and the Death of Carbon Modernity.” Log 47 (2019): 10–23.
Gandelsonas, Mario. X-Urbanism: Architecture and the American City. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999.
Lechner, Andreas. Thinking Design: Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology. Zürich: Park Books, 2021.
McEwan, Cameron. Analogical City. Brooklyn, NY: punctum, 2024. 10.53288/0386.1.00.
Pope, Albert. Inverse Utopia: Urbanism and the Great Acceleration. Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag GmbH, 2024.
Viganò, Paola. Territories of Urbanism: The Project as Knowledge Producer. Translated by Stephen Piccolo. Lausanne: EPFL Press, 2016.
Viganò, Paola, and Chiara Cavalieri, eds. The Horizontal Metropolis: A Radical Project. Zürich: Park Books, 2020.
Voet, Caroline, Eireen Schreurs, and Helen Thomas, eds. The Hybrid Practitioner: Building, Teaching, Researching Architecture. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2022.
Wark, McKenzie. “Toward the Common Task.” In Sensoria: Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century, 1–8. New York: Verso, 2020.
Wong, Liliane. Adaptive Reuse in Architecture: A Typological Index. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2023.