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Shopping is history, in both senses of the word. As shopping shifts online and the economic shocks associated with the COVID-19 pandemic push bankruptcies to ­unprecedented levels, retail is facing its own version of the end of days. The arsenal of commercial techniques that retail has developed can no longer function as usual. The entangled worlds of architecture, fashion, business and art that supplied those techniques now appear to us in a new way, as a museum of a culture that is now ­becoming extinct. At the same time, retail's techniques of attraction and distraction have become visible in a new way. Stripped of their use value, they reveal themselves as techniques of pure display. Retail Apocalypse presents a compendium of case studies, interventions, and object lessons rescued from the bonfire of retail culture. It ranges from Friedrich Kiesler's display windows to Gae Aulenti's Fiat show­rooms, from J. G. Ballard's dystopian fantasies to TELFAR's critical utopias, from Rem Koolhaas to Herzog & de Meuron.

Vitruvius's De architectura, written in the first century BCE, has been revered as the first treatise on architectural theory. Since its resurrection during the Renaissance, its enigmatic text has been adjusted, refined, and redefined in subsequent iterations. The book at hand bypasses exegeses of the text to focus on the material history of the printed editions disseminated throughout Europe. It surveys overa hundred editions of Vitruvius from 1486 to the present, tracing the power of the printed page in establishing the Roman author as an authority. Focusing on the impact of the physical objects that embody the Vitruvian canon highlights how book history and architectural history cross paths and how a symbiotic relationship between the printed and the built emerges. The resulting picture is that of a zigzagging thread between practice and theory, an elusive network of fruitful carelessness in architecture.

The articulation of transitional space forms a key element in Japanese architecture and its relationship to landscape. Climate and cultural history have shaped myriad forms and expressions of these spaces, which connect as well as separate. We pass through or dwell within them; these transitional spaces differentiate between one space and another, inside and outside, public and private, our body and what surrounds it.This issue of Pamphlet documents a conversation about six residential houses in Kyoto, Osaka, and Tokyo. The houses and their surroundings were captured through sound recordings and Point Cloud laser scanning, the results of which were processed into short videos. Based on this material, architects, researchers, artists, and landscape architects from Japan and Europe discuss different modes of perceiving and representing transitional space in architecture and social interchanges, religion, and customs.

This issue of Pamphlet deals with the perception, visualization, and representation of distinct parts of Zurich and offers different ways of representing the city - both above ground and underground - by analyzing five unique sites, each of which represents a multifaceted, layered and spatially complex system: the ETH main building, Zurich main station, the Jelmoli department store, the Sihl River, and the Schanzengraben and adjacent Old Botanical Garden. Each site is approached from two perspectives: the visual aesthetic perspective of student works that accurately visualize the site through point cloud modelling; and the perspective of experts who have a special relation to the site or knowledge of the applied methods and technologies, thus contributing insights from urban history, city planning, architecture, and landscape architecture.

West German architecture underwent a phase of intense productivity from 1949 to 1964. In the immediate postwar years, architects confronted Nazi legacies in building culture amidst drastic privation that hampered construction. As industrial production recovered and a middle-class nation emerged, so too did a new architecture influenced by the American International Style model, especially as Bauhaus masters returned to Germany from the United States as advisers. But there was much more at stake than style. Construction details and other technical documents reveal that this was a moment when architectural practice aspired to calibrate social, material, and political norms through design. At the center of all these transformations were Hans Schwippert and Sep Ruf, two architects who shared political, religious, and professional allegiances. Schwippert, architect of the new Bonn parliament, worked to align economic redevelopment and a burgeoning consumer goods industry with design. Ruf, to whom Schwippert directed the commission for West Germany's first World's Fair pavilion, found ways to master architectural construction amidst both scarcity and largess. Photographs, drawings, and a broad range of unpublished documents introduce these two architects to an English-language audience.

The Lloyd's building in London was constructed in the early 1980s based on a vi­sion­ary design by Richard Rogers and Partners. Its planning and construction transformed the ideas of megastructure and intelligent environment into built reality. Mock-ups (prototypic full-size models) played a crucial role in this, enabling Rogers' team to test and refine the necessary novel constructions and procedures to minimize the risks of such an ­ambitious project. Lloyd's 1¿:¿1 is the first case study of one of the most important building projects of the late modern era. It showcases pre­viously unpublished ma­ter­ial from the ­archives of Rogers Stirk Harbour¿+¿Partners, Josef Gartner and Arup to reconstruct the planning process and demonstrate the working methods. Ex­amples of how mock-ups were used as research or planning ­instruments highlight their ­relevance for further developing building culture.

In der Arbeit von Michael Hopkins and Partners fand in den 1980er und 1990er Jahren ein Wandel statt, der sich in den fünf in diesem Buch untersuchten städtischen Gebäuden besonders deutlich widerspiegelt. Hopkins, ausserhalb Grossbritanniens relativ unbekannt, präsentiert seine damalige Perspektive in seinem Vortrag «Technology Comes to Town», der hier veröffentlicht und durch Baustudien von fünf zeitgenössischen europäischen Architekten ergänzt wird. Essays von Adam Caruso und Helen Thomas untersuchen die britische Szene, in der grundlegende Fragen zu Technologie, Stil und Kontext die Diskussionen über die Architektur des 20. Jahrhunderts pr.gen. Die Präsenz dieser Themen in Hopkins' Architektur wird durch neu angefertigte Zeichnungen und durch aktuelle Fotos von Hélène Binet deutlich.