If we ask ourselves the question, ‘why does Jim Stirling loom so large in the landscape of British and continental architecture?’, the answer does not come easily. We will begin by saying that Leicester alone – its clarity, its curious fragility, its wit and inventiveness – earned him a singular place in modern architectural history. It seemed to have arrived just at the moment when modern architecture had reached its expiry date. Next we will probably remember the straightforward intelligence of his essays on Le Corbusier's post-war work. But we will just as quickly disown one or another of the later buildings: the Tate, the Fogg, or most often, the elephantine competition entry for the Bibliothèque Nationale. We will ignore the fine restraint of the architecture building at Rice University and instead bemoan the cartoonish (but astonishing) facades of the Berlin Wissenschaftszentrum. We will uneasily ponder his lifelong love of quotation and self-quotation, recognising the wit but wondering about the line where quotation becomes laziness or theft.

On 15 August 1965, The Beatles performed before more than 55,600 fans at Shea Stadium, New York, USA. In what was by far the biggest event to date of its type, that evening a dramatic revelation of the commercial possibilities of popular music took place, and changed the nature of the music business for ever. Simultaneously, despite using more powerful amplification than had been used before, the virtually non-existent connection between the musicians and their audience revealed the enormous technical and architectural challenges of large-scale concerts. Though this concert took place in a permanent building structure, the equipment it was hoped would temporarily alter its use for performance purposes was portable. That it was clearly inadequate for this task reinforced the need for new mobile facilities that would do the job better [1, 2].

While Le Corbusier's spiral plan projects have long been debated for their symbolic and rhetorical meaning - dealing with initiation, procession, ritual, generative nature, unlimited growth and so on - little attention is paid to their actual production as designs. If we look for the emergence of the spiral plan as a production of Le Corbusier's studio then we might begin with a sketch design for the Villa La Roche made in 1923 and not with the project for the Mundaneum (1928) generally credited as the point at which the architect 'invents' the spiral type [1]. Taking the Villa La Roche spiral experiment as a tentative beginning marks a much longer history of the spiral plan type in Le Corbusier's work that links the architect's early domestic projects to later major public building proposals such as the Venice Hospital (1964).

The painter Emil Nolde's studio was built in 1927 and, the following year, construction was begun on what was to become the house that he shared with his wife Ada in Seebüll. The building was located on a mound in the middle of the marsh, not far from the new border between Germany and Denmark that was made as a result of the vote in 1920. Nolde had designed the building according to the principle that it was to have ‘three facades following the passage of the sun’. Like a sunflower, the facades of the building were to reach out and take in the changing light in step with the sun's flight across the sky. There would be ample opportunity for both skylight and sunlight to enter the building as the positioning on a mound raised the building above the surroundings. In Nolde's view, up on the mound, ‘the entire celestial sphere was above us; it was greater than a semicircle - strange how even a small elevation in the flat landscape can make the vault of heaven seem larger’.

At first glance, it might seem counterintuitive to insist upon Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc's (1814-79) critical interest in the human body as a metaphor for style in architecture. Not only did he oppose the anthropomorphic metaphors for style touted by Neo-Classical theorists at the École des Beaux-Arts, but he was most widely known in the nineteenth century for his preoccupation with the monumental and structural potential of modern materials such as iron. This reception of Viollet-le-Duc's thought persisted in the twentieth century with Sir John Summerson's estimation of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier's debt to the constructive principles of his architectural organicism. Such accounts have made it possible to interpret construction and/or structure as the main ‘body’ of Viollet-le-Duc's architecture theory. However, this reading confuses the eclipse of Neo-Classical anthropomorphic metaphors for style - which translated the proportional relationships between the human body's constituent parts into a compositional system of design - with the complete eclipse of critical references to the human body in the French style debates of the nineteenth century. As we trace the role of the human body in Viollet-le-Duc's style theory, it becomes clear that the principles of human variation in biology and ethnography enabled him to account for the cultural variations of national peoples in his conception of style.

Although the general influence of the architecture of East Asian countries on the formation and development of modern architecture has been widely recognised, detailed evidence about the extent and nature of this influence has been accruing through a growing body of research. This began with Chinoiserie, a Chinese-style fashion around the eighteenth century in Europe, which was imprinted in the Rococo interior as well as in the jardin anglo-chinois with its Chinese pavilions. Then in the late nineteenth century there was a European zeal for Japanese art, Japonisme, which appeared in the Arts and Crafts Movement and Art Nouveau. Consequently, East Asian influences came to be reflected in the concepts and designs of numerous modern architects. The representative figure is the American master Frank Lloyd Wright, who adopted the spatial concept of Laozi (or Lao-Tzu) and the organic characteristics of Japanese architecture. China and Japan had also appeared in various publications and architecture played a typical role in the interchange. Also, some notable Westerners had visited China and Japan.

We gazed with earnest hope for signs of recovery and longed for the airwaves to tell us that ‘the worst is past, economic Armageddon has been averted, and house prices are rising again’. What follows engages with debates on economic development and places the recent crisis in the architectural and building industry in historical context. It argues that it was irrational for architects and contractors to behave as if the boom would go on forever. Capitalist development has always been marked by periodic crises, and building production has always exhibited cycles of expansion and contraction.

The facts of thematic life are that every manifestation of a theme tends to divide into two parts. This is irrespective of whatever tonality is employed. In the West, even the simplest diatonic melody (that is one which we perceive to be in a tonality derived from major and minor scales) does this. For example there is a ‘natural’ tendency to gravitate between one note (the tonic) and another note a fifth higher or a fourth lower (the dominant); but such a modulation is not necessary to qualify part of a theme as a different phrase in the musical sentence; there may simply be a moment where the music pauses, reaching a recognisable point before moving to another independent fragment. Moreover, in sophisticated examples of bipartite form, such as the sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, the duality is engendered not so much by a single theme as by an ensemble of aspects to the initial material, which in their turn form a group by themselves - a section - and where the borders between such sections are not always clearly definable.