Architecture shows and biennales have proliferated in the last decade, accompanied by new courses and publications on architectural curation. The curation of an exhibition can be as complex and political as the realisation of a work of architecture. It can be presented as an effective vehicle for critical discourse, challenging the traditional definition of architectural practice as the design, procurement and construction of a building. In response, existing architecture exhibition spaces are adapting and new galleries are opening, reconceptualising modes of display. This review considers two contrasting architecture exhibitions on show in London at the turn of 2011, each with different agendas, ambitions and audiences.

Our paper examines the Brick House, completed by Caruso St John Architects in 2005. Nearly invisible from the street with its unusual form and ‘brick’ nomenclature, this clearly is no ordinary house. Despite or perhaps because of its elusive character, which confounds expectations, the house has won universal praise from commentators but has prompted little deeper analysis. The architects set out their agenda for the project in an allusive text that, despite intriguing contradictions, has remained largely unquestioned.

Perhaps unexpectedly, architects are seldom talked about in terms of the building toys they once played with or what they constructed with them. Exceptions are Witold Rybczynski and Frank Lloyd Wright. The former describes John Ruskin mastering the laws of building for load-bearing towers and arches by the time he was seven or eight (around 1825) because of playing with wooden building blocks (introduced at the end of the 1700s). However, he also describes himself playing with Bayko. This was a Bakelite building set from the 1930s [1], probably modelled on Mobaco, a cardboard and wood Dutch construction toy [2]. Both of these toys are pre-dated by an 1887 English toy for house construction, the walls of which were made from wooden blocks threaded on to vertical wires. Rybczynski also describes watching his father and uncle build a real garden shed using concrete panels slipped between reinforcing bars, like the method used by the plastic toy but life-size.

Modern architecture has always had a complex relationship with its own utopian roots. From Marinetti proclaiming that war is the most beautiful choreography in 1918 to Le Corbusier's famous concluding sentence from 1923, ‘architecture can avoid revolution’, the attempt to build a better world through architecture has constantly been tainted by skewed definitions of what exactly this new world should be. The case of Brazil is not much different. The architecture of the 1930s and '40s was much more successful in promoting a national image of modernisation than in addressing modernisation as such. Traditional gender roles abide in modern housing design, which sadly has also absorbed class (and racial) inequalities in its spatial organisation. This paper departs from the discussion of the origins of modern architecture in Brazil to discuss the extent to which certain inequalities were so thoroughly embedded in Brazilian society that they were even incorporated into a utopian discourse about modernity - a discourse that is still very much present.

When I first started researching the work of the Edwardian architect Horace Field (1861–1948), I soon realised that this was a man whose achievements could best be measured in terms quite antithetical to those conventionally used by architectural historians. Nearly all buildings are judged on the basis of their originality; and, if they are old, on the basis of their influence or their relationship to what subsequently became a significant direction in the arts or culture of their time. Even in a field such as the history of Victorian and Edwardian architecture, transformed by Mark Girouard and Alistair Service forty or more years ago, a story has only been worth telling when it is a story. If a collection of buildings adds up to very little, what then? Field's buildings are mostly incidental to other more interesting, more imaginative stories. Was he a failure, then, in designing buildings which fail to appear in their own right as part of a critical canon? Was he a failure too, in that his career started so promisingly and tailed away to nothing; that he was tucked away in rural Sussex, in Rye, fiddling about with old buildings and designing garages and cheap villas, while other architects of his generation spent their final years on some of the most enthralling projects of their lives? Or does the story of Field's career suggest that there are other ways to evaluate an architectural career than to tell the story of its conventionally-defined successes?

A classical church portico – say, St Paul's in London – implies a rite of passage and mediation between the city and the interior rituals of the institution; it beckons the street, while offering shelter to those who want to observe the crowd. In contrast, the spectacular interiors of Modernist churches are often entered without theatre – the plain outer door [1], for example, of Jørn Utzon's Bagsværd Church (Copenhagen, 1973), provides little hint of the magical cloud-like movement of vaulted space within. This is not simply a matter of the changing formal language of architecture (namely, interior space taking priority over exterior shell), but also how the church might be defined in wider civic and historical contexts. Here the Classical theory of decorum remains helpful, for Vitruvius proposed that identifying a building's theme (statione) – that is, the social and institutional destination of the building – was the first step in determining appropriate form, the prerequisite one before considering the related determinates of decor, namely stylistic coherence (consuetudine) and site (natura). The issue of thematic appropriateness is above all important for the front, which announces the building like a frontispiece does a text. Yet as the church portico demonstrates, a thematic motif was rarely the straightforward application of a code, for in the period when architectural decorum prevailed – loosely speaking the fifteenth to nineteenth century in Italy, France and England among other places – how a genre was defined and what constituted the repertoire of appropriate form were contested.

What is low-energy architecture? What at first glance would seem to be a simple question turns out to be rather more complex. Architectural practice does not exist in a vacuum, but responds to society's wider demands. In this way, low-energy architecture can be seen as developing in relation to the regulative framework that exists at any given time and which sets the boundaries for what is accepted as low-energy, or not.

The definition of research quality is directly linked to public funding access in countries like the United Kingdom, Australia and the Netherlands. Architecture, as a design discipline, faces the problem that it has limited access to these resources. It experiences a so-called evaluation gap. Its research performance does not easily fit the conventional moulds commonly used to assess quality. Assessments are increasingly based on the analysis of indexed journals, while indexes (such as the ISI) have, so far, mostly neglected the arts and humanities to which architecture may be assumed to belong. Schools of architecture have to face this matter head-on if they want to survive in times of austerity, and they need to do so sooner rather than later. They have to decide whether they want to continue to push for the acceptance of discipline-specific performance indicators or whether they would rather adapt to the standards and dissemination practices that characterise more established fields of scientific research. The direction they choose will inevitably shape future research in architecture.

Eugene (Gene) Kohn is one of the founders of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, or KPF. As the firm's website puts it, he has been responsible for developing ‘a global strategy that has made the firm into a global player’. Some idea of the scale of the operation may be gained from the fact that they are presently working in sixteen different cities in China and that their completed work there includes the world's third and fourth highest buildings (Shanghai World Financial Center, 2008, at 492 metres and the International Commerce Centre in Hong Kong, 2010, at 484 metres). By comparison, their spiralling Pinnacle building, on site in London just a mile from where I meet Gene Kohn, is a baby at 288 metres, though still comfortably within the world's tallest 100. Such league tables go with the territory. So it seems do jolly nicknames – such as Helter Skelter (for the Pinnacle), Shard, Walkie-Talkie, Cheese Grater and Gherkin – whose kindergarten quality belies the highly competitive market they represent for architects and their clients as well as their users. As a business, KPF itself was successful almost as soon as it opened its doors in 1976. The timing and manner of that beginning are revealing. Kohn's partners were both good friends but chosen for different reasons, in the case of Sheldon Fox because he was, as Kohn told me, ’more of a manager, a fine architect but extremely conservative … I thought it would be good if somebody who wasn't like me shared the balance‘ [with Bill Pedersen]