Some artists have a sense of architecture, using it in or around their work. I am thinking of Antony Gormley whose casts of his own body are almost always located in relation to a setting – whether a beach, the courtyard of a gallery or the precipitous edges of high buildings. I am thinking too of James Turrell whose light spaces are works of architecture, places in which to contemplate the sky, to watch the sunlight pan slowly around the space. I would cite too Martin Creed whose fugitive sprinters ran approximately along the axis of the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain in London, framed by them, avoiding visitors as they rushed from one end to the other; and Anish Kapoor for his bulbous walls or his vast ‘trumpet’ – Marsyas – in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern.

Casa Rustici was a building I admired when I lived in Milan in the mid 1980s, so the opportunity to stay there for a week when it registered on a list of apartments for rent was appealing [1]. Before I undertook the visit I was well aware of the prestige of the building as an important Rationalist project, and after some initial research became intrigued by the divergent accounts of it given by different commentators. The best known critique of Terragni's work is Eisenman's investigation of its abstract composition. Patetta exposes the constraints on the design process imposed by the building codes, while others emphasise the historical precedents that underpinned the Rationalist project. Vitale and Bell provide an insight into the ambiguous character of the central court or lightwell of the building. What I hope to add to these is an account which addresses not just the abstract quality of the building, but also its phenomenal qualities, and its social and historical origins. My intention is that this material will present the building in a way which is relevant for current practice.

The popularity of the concept of evidence-based design (EBD) has exploded over the past five years, picking up speed as a topic of attention in environmental design conferences, papers and articles, and books. Rooted in the healthcare environment, the EBD concept has now bridged out to design of long-term care settings, housing and workplaces, as well as facilities management. While evidence-based design is indeed a seductive term for those of us interested in advancing research-informed design – portending linkages between research-derived evidence and environmental design – we cautiously note that, as of this writing, in its current conceptualisation, its clout is stronger than its clarity. This paper is a clarion invitation to the environmental design research community to consider the concept of evidence-based design as emergent, warranting careful, critical examination regarding its meaning and underlying assumptions.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the growing recognition of the plurality of history and the constructive nature of monuments, in conjunction with a more general realisation of the intellectual problems of war, resulted in a widespread interrogation – both intellectually and aesthetically – of concepts of memorialisation and commemoration. This interrogation is credited as the catalyst for a series of new approaches to monument-making, famously exemplified by Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington (1982) in addition to a series of holocaust-related memorials, such as those theorised in the seminal writings of James E. Young. These memorials, in conjunction with post-modern discussions of the politics of memory and issues of counter-memory, complicated the culture of commemoration, seeing the emergence of new commemorative types known as counter-monuments, which Young defines as ‘memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premise of the monument’. These are often also identified by terms such anti-memorials or progressive memorials. Among these, new sub-genres also emerged in response to particular methods of commemoration such as living and spontaneous memorials, in addition to more gestural methods of commemoration involving, for example, services or performances that transcend the categories of sculpture and architecture.

This paper presents the comparative analysis of the National Museum of Modern Art, in the Pompidou Centre, Paris, designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano (1972–77), and the Tate Modern art gallery, London, the conversion of an industrial building by Swiss practice Herzog & de Meuron (1995–2000). The two museums share a set of conspicuous similarities so that their parallel investigation seems self-evident. Both are large-scale national museums of modern art, extending over two floors, in buildings that constitute urban landmarks and are often seen as examples of the museum as a box [1a–b]. Their ground floors are conceived as a space you walk through, as a ‘piazza’; their spatial organisation is modular and flexible; their visual construction, punctuated by powerful views to the city. Moreover, they are guided by similar spatial ideas and share common fundamental morphological properties. Interestingly, their affinities extend to their collections – both begin with the turn of the twentieth century and extend to the twenty-first century; and their curatorial practices – as, for instance, the practice of reprogramming the galleries on a regular basis. But the experience of visiting the two museums is entirely different and each appears to have its own idiosyncratic spatial character, quite distinct from the other (described metaphorically by the museum designers as the museum as a city in the case of the Pompidou and as a machine for showing art in the case of Tate Modern). So, could these obvious similarities hide critical differences between the two museums?

As the existing housing stock ages throughout Europe, retrofitting offers many opportunities for the substantial improvement of the energy performance of residential buildings and the provision of sustainable alternatives to conventional heating and cooling. The effect of global warming is leading to a widespread use of air conditioning in existing and new residential buildings. This potentially implies an increase in cooling energy and adverse environmental effects on an unprecedented scale. In the hot and dry climate of many south European cities, this could be avoided with the use of an innovative wall integrated passive evaporative cooling system, which harnesses air, water and porous ceramic to provide comfortable indoor conditions. Dr Rosa Schiano-Phan discusses the applicability of such a system to the urban context of Seville in the light of the current Spanish regulatory framework and recent developments of European energy performance standards.

In 1984 Colin Rowe was finally persuaded to write an introduction for a book on the work of James Stirling. In his text, Rowe claimed that he had previously resisted a similar invitation in 1973, due in part to an inability at that time to account for Stirling's lack of interest in facades. He wrote: ‘According to my reading, these [Le Corbusier's Villa Schwob and Garches] were all masters of the vertical surface; and clearly, it must have been the relative absence of this concern in Stirling which arrested my writing in 1973 and which remains my reservation about Stuttgart’. For Rowe, the missing facade of Stirling's museum extension to the Staatsgalerie stood metonymically for the absence of Stirling's visible engagement with the articulation of an ideal world, because the facade was ‘the existential interface between eye and idea’. Without a facade Rowe could not be sure that Stirling adhered to the sort of idealism that satisfied his own architectural and philosophical concerns.

In 1983, the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture mounted an exhibition of Zaha Hadid's work titled Planetary Architecture II. An image from this event shows Hadid as she points to one of the drawings on the wall surrounded by a group of listeners. The interior is saturated with drawings. As they unfold before the viewer, the drawings blur the boundaries between walls, floors and ceiling. An interior space wrapped in drawing, orchestrated by the exhibitor, the image of this show is nevertheless also an expression of the pedagogical ideas of Alvin Boyarsky, the chairman of the AA school between 1971 and 1990.

Studio remains the physical and intellectual space at the heart of every good architectural school. It is a forum for the sharing of ideas and a place in which to work together in order to explore architecture and its role in shaping our environment, society and culture. It should reveal interesting contrasts and synergies between the particular and the universal, the individual and the collective.