As colleagues in the School of Architecture at the University ofTechnology in Sydney (UTS), Adrian Lahoud (Master ofAdvanced Architecture, Urban Design), Charles Rice(Associate Professor) and Anthony Burke (Associate Professorand Head of School) have developed an approach to urban researchwhich recognises the city as an unstable, though highly organised,environment. The particular theme of this issue of 1 allows thisresearch to frame trauma and its aftermath as the most current andwidely understood manifestation of urban instability. As a practising architect and Course Director of the Master ofAdvanced Architecture, Urban Design, Lahoud s work rangesacross a number of scales with a particular emphasis on the MiddleEast. As a researcher he explores the relationship between design,conflict and politics. He is a member of the OCEAN design researchnetwork and is completing a doctorate entitled 'The Life of Formsin the City'. Rice's research considers the interior as a spatial andexperiential category in domestic and urban culture. His book The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity,Domesticity was published by Routledge in 2007, and he iscurrently working on a book manuscript provisionally titled Atrium Effects: John Portman and Architecture's Discipline.Here he will consider how questions of urban renewal have, sincethe 1970s, been linked to particular design strategies whichemphasise heightened interior effects. With current thinking andpractice so focused on the envelope, climate control and security,thinking through the increasing interiority of urbanism has becomea pressing issue. Burke's research addresses questions of computational media andtechnology, and its implications for architecture and urbanism. Agraduate of Columbia University's GSAPP in 2000, he has focused inparticular on networks and systems logics within contemporarydesign, recently co-editing Network Practices: New Strategies inArchitecture and Design (Princeton Architectural Press, 2007)with Therese Tierney. His practice, Offshore Studio, like Lahoud'spractice, works across scales to test this research-led designthinking. In this issue of 1, Lahoud, Rice and Burke aim to wed designexperimentation to politics. Their day-to-day collaboration inresearch and teaching promotes the consideration of advancedtechniques, criticality and the reality of the urban together asthe context for architecture's disciplinary development.