When preparation for the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) + Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Architecture Gallery was underway about 25 years ago, external consultation was carried out with a variety of different audiences to determine which architectural subjects potential visitors wanted to see represented in what was then the UK’s first permanent architecture gallery.

From the mid-nineteenth century, successful artists gravitated to studio houses in prosperous Chelsea and Kensington. The less affluent artists tended to work in left-over industrial spaces in the more insalubrious parts of town. In the 1860s, when Hampstead became part of the suburban railway system and joined up with the city, some less-established artists began to move to Belsize Park, down-hill from Hampstead village, where earlier generations of artists including Constable, had lived and worked.

Through this short article, Atarah Adams, our 2022-2023 MA scholar, shares her experiences from her Master’s in Conservation of the Built Environment at Birmingham City University.

As a leading critic of the theory and praxis of mainstream post-war architecture, Christopher Alexander’s place in the history of design theory is clearly unconventional. As such, any recollection of his extensive career and influence must fall outside of the typical architectural obituary which tends to a) focus on the most iconic structures they designed and b) place them within an art-historical ‘arc’ narrative.

Florida-based architectural historian Tamara Morgenstern - one of the contributors to ‘The New History of the American Renaissance’ - recounts the steps that led her from the shores of Lake Worth to the pages of Architectural History.

If architectural history books play a significant role in convening the culture, norms, and values of the architectural discipline to newcomers, then how they teach where we find feminism; from whom we find feminism matters.

Recent discussion on Coventry’s iconic town centre have highlighted the vulnerability of the architectural - and landscape architectural heritage of the post-war period. In this final post of the series Luca Csepely-Knorr and Karen Fitzsimon highlight a few examples that have already gone, have been altered irreversibly or are under threat to be lost.

In her new book, Building Brands: Corporations and Modern Architecture, Grace Ong Yan discusses the evolution of architectural branding in mid-twentieth century America. Through in-depth case studies, she demonstrates how clients and architects together crafted buildings to reflect their company’s brand, carefully considering consumers’ perception and their emotions towards the architecture and the messages they communicated.

For better or worse, histories of health architecture have long remained tied up with the narrative of progress stemming from the Early Modern period.

The role played by women design professionals in shaping the modern Danish welfare state has long been ignored, while a select band of male architects is ceaselessly glorified.

Confronted by the scarce imprints of Indian women in the provincial towns of 19th-century Bengal, can the evolving spatial complexity of urban domestic spaces cast light on the territorial gendering of the wider landscape, and allow us to recognise even this absence as a material presence?

What do a stadium and an active volcano in Costa Rica have in common? Turning to geoaesthetics, Valeria Guzmán Verri examines this encounter to reframe discussions about the impact China’s foreign-aid projects are having in the Global South.

The Hungarian architect Mariann Simon discusses the frictions between egalitarian ideologies and gendered realities that faced women architects pursuing their careers in the post-war Eastern Bloc states.

Luca Csepely-Knorr and Karen Fitzsimon look at the far-ranging impacts of Sylvia Crowe and Janet Jack, influential not just for their radical projects and publications, but also for shattering the barriers facing women in the profession, and helping others in their wake

To mark LGBT History Month, the  SAHGB's LGBTQ+ Network is delighted to present an excerpt from Lizzie Osborne’s ‘Cesspits of Filth’ project. In this investigation of Huddersfield’s Gemini club, the ‘Studio 54 of the North’, Osborne writes that the project aimed to 'reappropriate British vernaculars in a way that expressed the subliminal coding of desire and expression’ by offering a spatial and experiential reconstruction of the former queer night club.

How might writing groups broaden the mandate of academic societies to better support not just the dissemination and recognition of research, but also its production? Discussing their ambitions in organising a writing group, Sonali Dhanpal, Sben Korsh and Y.L. Lucy Wang explain how this format is especially suited to nurture emerging projects on architecture and empire.