Histories of architecture, design, exhibiting and curatorship are frequently siloed from each other, ignoring shared and overlapping influences, approaches, practitioners, and indeed their shared disciplinary lineage as Kulturwissenschaft, cultural histories of material objects.  In contrast, we seek to foreground the entwined histories and the traversing of professional boundaries (both conceptual and embodied) between the fields of design, architecture, exhibitions and curating.  We set out to explore these intersecting worlds, and the possibilities of reciprocal knowledge and methodological exchange between each field.  In the spirit of much new architectural history, exemplified by the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative and its interdisciplinary focus on architecture and its relationships, our methodological provocation is one that endeavours to cross yet connect these disciplinary boundaries and unearth richer and more complex cultural histories, in particular those that attempt to establish a broader conceptual framework for the discipline of architectural history.

We call for papers that connect or trade the concepts of architecture, exhibiting, curating and the fields, disciplines and practices that comprise design.  We are interested in design across media and disciplines from visual communication and digital design to performance, exhibitions and interiors, and from objects to infrastructure.  We emphasise that both tangible and non-tangible design such as systems, services, experiences, interactions, are equally important areas of enquiry for this special issue.  We also encourage contributions that consider the embodied practices of designers in the making of architecture, the role of architects producing design, and the labour that each entails.  Papers might consider architects, whether migrants or women, who found themselves excluded from the profession of architecture and turned to the design fields out of necessity, and feminist, trans-national or post-colonial readings of these histories.  Papers might address the way in which the curation and design of the interior intersect, or the architectonics of exhibition design.  Equally of interest is the role of the exhibition or archive as a promoter or voice for design and architecture.  We are interested in varying levels of scale, for example architects involved in the design of domestic objects such as Franco Albini’s radio design or the furniture design of Urmila Eulie Chowdhury, Jeet Malhotra and Aditya Prakash; to the larger scale of Nina Aleshin’s Moscow Metro design; up to the cosmic level such as that in Galina Balashova’s design of the Soyuz spacecraft and the Salyut and Mir space stations.

Issue Editors: Mirjana Lozanovska, and Cameron Logan