The purpose of this paper is to investigate the feasibility of the adaptive reuse of a particular case study, and the evaluation of it within the context of international research done on similar projects. It aims to highlight the reuse potential of industrial structures by private developers, and the financial, environmental and social advantages that they could hold. A literature review that explores these themes is followed by the post-occupancy analysis of the case study. Data were gathered primarily through interviews with key role players in the project, site visits and an analysis of the relevant project documentation. While there are a number of international examples of the reuse of power stations in particular, these are mostly on a large scale, dependent mostly on government funding, lottery funding and donations and generally stripped of most of their machinery. The case study is a smaller-scale example which demonstrates that a project of this nature can be entirely funded by a private developer, that it can be sustainable and that it can be done while keeping most of the original machinery in place. The case study confirms a number of findings that are revealed in current research in the field, and it also shows the relative advantages of adaptive reuse when compared to new-build projects. There is fairly limited information and published research about adaptive reuse, especially in South Africa, so the paper builds on international knowledge on the subject while exposing a suitable local example. It is hoped that the study will not only lead to further research and post-occupancy analysis of similar projects in South Africa in particular, but also support international research that indicates the feasibility of adaptive reuse. The Thesen Islands power station (or the Turbine Hotel as it is now known) could potentially be used as a precedent for similar redevelopments, and it could shed some light on the opportunities and constraints related to the management of fixed engineering assets.

This paper discusses spatial agency practice within a living lab in Hong Kong. Lab members work in Tai O Village, a historic fishing settlement receiving increased attention due to remnant vernacular housing there. The article presents historical and policy context for ongoing casework conducted with stakeholders in Tai O. It presents Tai O’s history in brief, recent policy developments, and inherent conflicts arising from the interaction of the two. The third section of the article describes informal settlement land tenure conflicts as historical phenomena in Hong Kong. The paper follows this case-specific discussion with global literature review of selected regularisation and settlement upgrading efforts from around the world. These reviews present the article’s thesis that third sector and design-led efforts are critically applicable methods to address informal settlement conflicts that remain due to colonial legacy policies and political inertia. The final section of the article presents ongoing living lab research and initiatives, including collaborative monitoring projects and strategic development proposals. Each living lab initiative presented elaborates the article’s thesis on the interaction between architecture, research, and governance to negotiate complex development transitions. The article contributes to architectural scholarship by summarising unique interactions between history, policy, economics, and demography that engendered the development situation in Tai O. Further, it reflects upon response development methods through architectural science and spatial agency practice, including the role of architectural representation products and discursive distinctions at boundaries between architectural practice and spatial agency practice.

For this special issue, sustainability and safety are discussed through the tropes of both material and work process substitution. As an architecture and industrial design team, we examine the potential of William McDonough’s and Michael Braungart’s “cradle to cradle” material methodology, and David Pye’s “the workmanship of certainty” as relevant to the construction industry. Locating and revisiting the tenets of Gottfried Semper’s Stoffwechseltheorie, alongside contemporary critiques, demonstrates that if historically, material and technique substitution led to architectural innovation, the same conditions exist today. To demonstrate a contemporary Stoffwechsel (material substitution) a formwork prototype was constructed at the University of Canberra’s Workshop 7, by substituting timber with plastic, and 3D-printing the formwork. This prototype demonstrates a type of “technical nutrient” that is both recyclable as plastic, and reusable as formwork. This reveals the potential of substituting materials and processes not only to achieve material recovery, but rather, aiming for material recycling, reuse, or upcycling, therefore reducing socio-environmental risks in construction.

Boundaries are spaces of contestation and encounter. When considering contemporary architecture in the global South, particularly in Africa, these spaces of encounter are especially pronounced. There is a body of architectural work in Africa produced by architects who are crossing physical boundaries between the global North and the global South, and the boundaries between global and local ways of making; some of them have also begun to blur the boundaries between the digital and the analogue. Drawing on previous empirical research in Africa, and building on literature about deborderisation, hybridisation, and tectonics, the space of encounter is positioned as a necessary and productive one. Analysis of representative building case studies in three African countries shows how architects are combining global and local tectonics in an effort to engage with social, economic, and environmental limitations. This can be read as a conscientious objection to reckless technological production that is, at times, ignorant of both local conditions and the planetary resource limitations that the world is facing. This paper will argue that the shift towards the tectonic hybridisation of computational design and digital fabrication with the use of local materials, traditions, and skills can further contribute towards this engagement. It emphasises the importance of tectonic ethics as a prerequisite for more equitable forms of exchange and encounter when working across boundaries, and it demonstrates how hybrid tectonics is a potentially useful and transferable strategy to begin to address some of these limitations.

This photo essay explores the possibility of radically shifting the understanding of the design studio as a spatial construct. By considering the seven-year evolution of a (socalled) design-build project known as the Imizamo Yethu Water Platforms, it recognises the possibility of dislocating the design studio from its traditionally centralised space in the academy and moving it to the site of its investigation or intervention for the duration of a project. The Imizamo Yethu Water Platforms aimed to improve water and sanitation infrastructure in a severely under-resourced informal settlement in Cape Town, South Africa, through the insertion of small permanent public spaces. Due to a number of reasons, including the physical characteristics of the sites selected for these spaces, the design studio gradually shifted its physical location to such an extent that virtually the entire design, documentation and construction process took place in-situ.