ENCOUNTERING ECHOES: ECHOING ENCOUNTER
Following Rolf Hughes’ notion of exposition (2015) as the act of creating a field of encounter, this inaugural issue reframes exposition as a space of echoing—a resonance between the seen and unseen, the said and unsaid. To encounter is to come up against what resists assimilation—an idea, a material, a history, a theory, or another being. To echo is to let that encounter reverberate and transform. Between encountering and echoing lies an ethics of care, speculation, and reciprocity—a willingness to stay with what is incomplete, uncertain, or even misread.
In line with the Arts of the contact zone (Pratt 1991), encounters are never neutral; they unfold in zones of tension, translation, and transformation. Similarly, Studio Note treats encounter and echo as creative and critical forces that shape our practices, pedagogies, and therefore our identities.
We invite contributions that explore encountering and echoing as speculative and performative acts of research.
Studio Note Journal Nº 1
Editors-in-Chief | Alphabetic Order:
Niloofar Amini
Gareth Jones
Jorge Valdovinos
Laura Yuile
Associate Editors | Alphabetic Order:
Eman AlHabashneh
Francesca Brunetti
Ruehl Muller
Mohammed Ali Sharieff
Raynal Somiah
Yvan Tina
Zihong Yue
Typeset in:
Editorial Team
Copy Editing:
Editorial Team
Proof Reading:
Editorial Team
Design:
Editorial Team
Published by:
University for the Creative Arts | ICI
Publication location:
Farnham, Surrey, UK
Xiamen, Fujian Province, China
Online publication date:
Summer 2026
ISSN: 2978-8080 (Print)
E-ISSN: 2978-8099 (Online)
studionote@uca.ac.uk
www.studionotejournal.org
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Architecture as Living History: Precedent and the Collective Experiment of the AE Foundation
Samuel Penn - samuel.penn@uca.ac.uk
The 2010 Venice Biennale included the cycle Teaching Architecture – 3 Positions Made in Switzerland, staged at the Istituto Svizzero di Roma’s Venice venue as three consecutive exhibitions. It presented studio work from the leading schools of architecture in Switzerland, represented by Christ & Gantenbein at ETH Zürich, Raphael Zuber at the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio, and Ulrich Kirchhoff at EPFL Lausanne. Structured through a repeatable poster–publication–exhibition format, with graphic design by Ludovic Balland, two of these positions—Christ & Gantenbein and Zuber—placed precedent at the centre of architectural education, articulated through the books Hong Kong Typology (Christ & Gantenbein, 2010a) and Important Buildings (Zuber, 2010), not as background knowledge but as an operative condition through which architectural judgement is formed (Fig. 1).
At the ETHZ, Christ & Gantenbein’s students mapped ordinary high-rise housing through precise CAD drawings. The work catalogued recurring residential forms—'Pencil Tower’, ‘Star Shape Tower’, and others—producing what the architects described as an atlas of urban anonymity (Christ & Gantenbein, 2010b). From this analytical base, students proposed projects for Zürich, using the generic logic of housing to test assumptions about density, repetition, and urban form.
Raphael Zuber’s studio in Mendrisio took a different route. The world was divided into nineteen geographical quadrants by lottery. Each student identified ten buildings within their assigned territory and then reduced this selection to one through sustained collective critique. Design was suspended. The work consisted of redrawing and abstract modelling (Penn, 2011). In interview, Zuber describes architectural understanding as arriving in two registers: an immediate, instinctive experience, and a secondary conceptual reading for those who choose to think. He frames this as a question of relation—whether a building encloses its occupants within a constructed world or leaves them feeling part of ‘everything else’: the immediate outside, the neighbouring plot, the city, the world (Zuber, 2019). Judgement is trained not through invention but through attention: learning to recognise essential ideas through description, comparison, and argument. The exhibition gives this process a public form: a single wall of numbered cases, each building presented as a comparative claim rather than a project proposal (Fig. 2). Zuber’s own account of historical work makes clear that this is not a call to import images. Precedent matters to him as a way of understanding the world rather than as a repertory of forms.
Despite their differences, both positions treat precedent as method rather than archive. One uses it to exert pressure on the present, forcing new projects to emerge from existing urban logics. The other slows the present down, resisting the demand for production in favour of discernment. In both cases, precedent does not operate as a stable example to be followed. It returns altered by distance, delay, and repetition. This understanding aligns with Dalibor Veselý’s account of tradition as a symbolic order that mediates past and present, holding inherited forms as horizons of meaning rather than templates for replication (Veselý, 2004). Precedent, in this sense, conditions architectural thought without determining its outcomes. What matters is less the authority of the past than the timing of its influence. Material gathered in practice can lie dormant for years before resurfacing and organising judgement, becoming legible only once work has shifted enough for it to be read differently.
If history is the record, precedent is how architects work with it. Peter Collins compared architectural precedent to common law, where judgement develops case by case rather than through abstract principle (Collins, 1971). Understanding accumulates through use, debate, and revision. Robin Evans clarifies the mechanism by focusing on drawing. Drawing is not neutral transfer. Even the most faithful redrawing produces new knowledge, because translation inevitably transforms what it touches (Evans, 1997). Precedent, therefore, is not what one possesses; it is what one does.
The past can also ensnare. When past and future are treated as mirrors endlessly reflecting one another, architecture risks producing models derived from curated histories. In such cases, precedent ceases to function as a method and becomes a stabilising device. Manfredo Tafuri warned against history used as an operative instrument for maintaining ideological continuity rather than questioning it (Tafuri, 1976). Escaping this loop requires an encounter with the present, where forms and conditions appear that no canon has prepared us to name.
The Foundation for Architecture and Education, established in 2011, was conceived within this tension. It operated as a public forum for architectural discourse. From its outset, the Foundation foregrounded architecture’s public dimension. Peter Märkli’s provocation that ‘nothing is private’ states a basic condition of building: once made, architecture enters a shared world and cannot be insulated from collective consequence (Märkli, 2020). Raphael Zuber’s more contentious claim that ‘beautiful buildings make beautiful people’ presses further, proposing an effect of form on conduct and sensibility rather than treating programme as the sole ethical measure (R. Zuber, personal communication, March 2012). Read through Arendt, both remarks concern the public realm: the space of appearance in which making is exposed to others, and therefore to judgement (Arendt, 1958). Under these conditions, precedent is not an authority to cite but a responsibility to handle.
Treating history as a disruptive resource rather than a stabilising one starts from Rossi’s claim that the city is the locus of collective memory (Rossi, 1982). Collective memory, in this sense, is not a coherent story but the persistence of built forms through use, repetition, alteration, and survival. Read this way, the city records not continuity alone but accumulated decisions and unresolved conflicts embedded in form. Benjamin (1968) sharpens the point by refusing the consolations of developmental narrative: what is presented as ‘progress’ leaves behind accumulation, loss, and debris that cannot be gathered into a single account. Taken together, these positions shift precedent from proof to problem. Historical reference cannot guarantee legitimacy or continuity; it introduces tension and interpretive risk.
Later AE discussions make explicit that the question is not whether history matters, but what kind of historical consciousness architectural education can sustain without collapsing into either amnesia or citation. A recurring diagnosis is that history is pulled in two directions at once: treated as a discipline with its own rigour and obligations and treated as a studio resource that can be bent into service of design intent. The resulting friction is not incidental. It is structural, and it is pedagogical. When history is reduced to a survey performed under time pressure, it becomes detached from studio thinking and experienced as an external demand rather than an internal necessity. When it is imported into studio as an immediately usable store of forms, it risks flattening time into a single visual field where distance, conflict, and contingency disappear (Davidovici et al., 2020). Both failures are familiar. One produces ignorance under the guise of coverage. The other produces fluency without responsibility.
A more productive account emerges when history is understood as a mode of judgement that requires distance as much as intimacy. The argument is not that design should stop using history, but that the use must remain exposed to interpretation, not protected by recognition. Historical knowledge gains force when it is not simply available but earned through the effort of translation. This preserves the distinction between history’s claims and architecture’s needs while allowing traffic between them. It also repositions the architectural historian: not as a supplier of motifs, nor as a detached specialist, but as a figure charged with maintaining methodological pressure, reminding the school that buildings do not arrive as facts, but as interpretations shaped by power, omission, and positionality (Davidovici et al., 2020). Curriculum, on this account, becomes an instrument of selection: deciding what gets time, what gets authority, and what remains unnamed.
This emphasis on judgement also explains why debates around authorship mattered in the same context: authorship is where agency and responsibility for decisions are usually located. The point was less the romance of the individual than agency under contemporary conditions of production. If architecture is a political act, the architect is better grasped as an actor authorised to decide within a field of obligations, rather than as a solitary origin of meaning. Talk of marginalisation registers shifting regimes of responsibility: who decides, who carries risk, and how intent survives organisational complexity. Digital workflows intensify this dispersion by multiplying points of intervention and separating the writing of systems from the setting of values (Carpo et al., 2020). The issue, then, is how decision remains possible when the work is necessarily collective.
Here history returns, not as reassurance, but as a way of locating decision within continuity. One formulation is that design cannot proceed without an intellectual topography: a sense of where one stands within the last two centuries of architectural knowledge, and therefore what any given move is doing in cultural and political terms. This does not imply determinism. It implies that every apparently new decision has a lineage, whether recognised or not, and that agency begins by making those lineages thinkable. The design problem then becomes a trigger for historical inquiry rather than an occasion for stylistic borrowing. A façade edge, a span, an entrance sequence: each force contact with a history of solutions and with the values embedded in those solutions (Meili, 2020). In this sense, precedent behaves exactly like the case-law model Collins described, but with a crucial difference: architectural cases are not judgements handed down; they are materials re-entering practice, to be re-read under altered conditions (Collins, 1971).
For architectural education, the question is not whether to teach history, but what students are expected to do with it—how to teach enough history to give common ground for critique, and to make it work through studio practice: description, comparison, and argument. That is the point at which precedent stops being material behind the project and becomes part of how judgement is formed inside it.
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Collins, P. (1971). Architectural judgement. Faber & Faber.
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Gantenbein, C. (2020). Interview (January 2012) [Interview]. In S. Penn & C. McEwan (Eds.), Accounts. Pelinu Books.