The spectacular surroundings of Kielder Water & Forest Park, in Northumberland, England, are a confluence of opposing states: the man-made and natural; the utilitarian and recreational; the beautiful and isolated; shaped by weather converging from east and west. Kielder Castle was built in 1775 as the Duke of Northumberland's hunting lodge. In recent years the territory has gained notoriety for a series of innovative art and architectural commissions including Belvedere by Softroom Architects (1999), Kielder Skyspace by the American artist James Turrell (2000), Minotaur by architect Nick Coombe and artist Shona Kitchen (2003), and Kielder Observatory by Charles Barclay Architects (2008). This paper outlines one of Kielder's most recent additions – a shelter entitled 55/02 – the result of a collaboration between sixteen*(makers) and manufacturers Stahlbogen GmbH. The work rekindles the symbiotic relationship between design and making once central to the production of architecture. The reawakening of this tradition has been stimulated by the mainstream adaptation of CAD/CAM as an industrial and disciplinary medium which binds the protocols of drawing with those of fabrication. However, as this account of the project shows, the relevance of an increasingly digitised world extends beyond the production of 55/02 as an artefact – it forms the basis of the architecture's relationship with its locality as an industrial, historical, social, cultural and manufactured landscape [1].

The Galerie Goetz is a small art gallery built between 1989 and 1992, one of the early works of Herzog & de Meuron which helped to win them such commissions as Tate Modern and launched their spectacular international career. At first sight this box-like building standing at the far end of a villa garden in a Munich suburb seems rather dead-pan and understated: from the street [2] you register only the upper floor, a box measured out in five bays, for the ground level is perfectly obscured by the garden fence, an apparently banal element carefully remade by the architects.

Traditionally, architecture mediates joints with mouldings whose qualities describe, like a human face, their character. In contrast, modern architecture uses a reveal or shadow to mark joints. This ubiquitous yet overlooked modern shadow has slipped between the cracks of architectural theory. Is the modern reveal, distained and beloved by architects, the sign of a building without quality?

This paper considers the problem of tradition in contemporary architectural practice in Turkey as well as in other countries of the world. When it is presented as the display of stylised historical images, tradition loses its relevance in the present and becomes perceived as something that always belongs to the past. In such a case tradition opposes itself against modernity as independent and sovereign. In her writings German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt considers the problem of modernity as a problem of tradition which is mainly caused by the polarisation and particularisation between past and future. Addressing her writings, in the architectural realm, tradition becomes past orientated when it is perceived as something completed as appearances. However, perhaps tradition is more future directed and continuously attempts to actualise itself between past and future.

In a unique architectural style of the twentieth century, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) realised a new type of modern space defined by an unobstructed clear volume enclosed by framed glass skin. This is generally referred to as Mies's universal space and this paper will attempt to interpret Miesian universal space in terms of the idea of tectonically defining space. Mies referred to the term ‘tectonic’, or ‘architectonic’, as constructive appearance exposing the skeleton structure. For Mies, the concept of tectonic was connected to a glassy materiality that permitted the unambiguously constructed appearance of a skeletal structure. He regarded the glass skin as a ‘tectonic means’ and the instrument of a new art of building.

In the interwar years European historians and critics of architecture tried to assimilate science into architecture and arts. For example Sigfried Giedion's Space, Time, and Architecture (1941) attempted to bring Einsteinian spacetime into architectural theory, while Nikolaus Pevsner's An Outline of European Architecture (c. 1943) used space as a criterion to differentiate architecture from other art forms. These brought to the idea of ‘space’ a distinctly modern meaning, making it a universal signifier; whereas in the last decade, architectural historians have argued for the historical specificity of space and a deeper examination of the social and spatial practices embedded in the making of space. This study inquires into the atemporal readings of space, using Lefebvre's theory on the production of space by ‘interested subjects’.

In this paper architectural Modernism is used to describe the unadorned flat-roofed houses constructed using modern materials such as concrete, reinforced concrete and steel, and built mainly in the period following the First World War. This is a sparse definition that fails to do justice to the much broader interpretation of Modernism, which affected not only architecture, but all the arts in the first quarter of the twentieth century, a movement that reached maturity around 1930. However, even though the definition fails to reflect the richness of the Modernist idiom, the houses have long been recognised as representing Britain's first inroads into Modernist architecture as acknowledged by, for example, Gould, Bentley, Collins and Bettley.

The US housing market is infamous on at least two counts: implicated in the global financial crisis and notorious for its unsustainable consumption of resources and consequent discharge of carbon dioxide. Lately anything like good news regarding housing in the USA is scarce. However, the pause resulting from the collapse of the market, and increasing concern regarding building's agency in the environment, combine to provide an opportunity to reconsider the form and performance of housing. This may yet create an opening for design.

This paper involves an analysis of the role of architectural projects which can be defined as ‘catalysts’ to urban renewal. The aims of this paper are twofold and the paper is divided accordingly into two main parts. The first aim is to discuss, with reference to the work of a number of urban and architectural thinkers, a range of ways in which the term ‘urban catalyst’ has been both conceptualised and applied. Discussion is structured in relation to the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of a ‘catalyst’ in the field of chemistry as,

[a] substance that when present in small amounts increases the rate of a chemical reaction or process but which is chemically unchanged by the reaction; a catalytic agent. (A substance which similarly slows down a reaction is occas. called a negative catalyst.)

This project began when one of my research colleagues, a civil engineer, pointed to his very thorough study of daylighting in buildings and said: ‘Here is all that architects need to know about light – why don't they use it?’ A discussion followed about what kind of knowledge is relevant, when, and for whom. It ended with the questions: ‘What kind of knowledge do architects really use in their design process?’ and ‘How can we as researchers provide the different kinds of knowledge that are useful for practice?’ These questions became the basis of a research project and this paper reports on its studies and discussions.

This theoretical paper addresses the persistence of architecture students in undergraduate design learning despite the considerable sacrifices that this frequently entails, and proposes a framework for some of the mechanisms that explain students' diligence in their love-hate relationship with the design studio. Such love-hate association is poorly understood, but is clearly a pervasive dilemma in architecture education. The proposed model includes a number of cognitive mechanisms that students may use to reconcile their idealised and romanticised self-image with the incoherent sacrifices of design studio.

A photograph by Robert Polidori, of a room within the city of Petra, shows a pristine cubic volume hewn out of the rock. The nature of the stone reveals different textural and figural qualities of the material when it becomes a floor, a wall or a ceiling. There is no need to ‘put’ the building together, to assemble it, because it is already exists. This, then, is the fantasy of the architect, to sculpt from a single substance that is both structure and surface, with the only remaining questions pertaining to shape and smoothness.