Le Corbusier – The Art of Architecture is the vague and loaded title given to a marvellous but somewhat random collection of Le Corbusier material that has been touring Europe, until recently housed in Lutyens' crypt in Liverpool Cathedral before landing in London this spring at the Barbican, where it feels at home in Brutalist surroundings. The exhibition has provided the inspiration for a festival of Le Corbusier events and talks, competitions and workshops across the country. The question, however, is why?

Architectural practice has become considerably more complex in the last twenty years, not to mention since the days of Wright. Many more professions are involved in realising a building, and the construction industry has become professionalised in areas such as health and safety, management training and continuing professional development. Procurement methods for buildings are proliferating and roles for all involved changing, especially for the architect. Shorter timescales are common and there is a general consensus that, in the UK at least, there is a serious skills shortage in the industry and a decline in the quality of the building trades. The industry has become both more litigious and more international.

This paper springs from some reflections in the context of the design studio on the meaning of miniature representations (such as drawings or scaled models, for example), in art and architecture. In the pre-reflective understanding of the world which characterises direct human experience, the size of things is an integral and deeply meaningful aspect of their phenomenal reality. Our primary perception of the size of things is, of course, a function of our embodied condition and is inseparable from their essential nature. Things seem great or small to us from the point of view of our moving body and its ability to act upon and manipulate objects of that scale. A mountain is large, difficult to see all at once from close by, and requires a great physical effort to climb. The size of a doll's house provides us with a marvellous power to see and control the life within, a power which is one of the reasons why the miniature pervades our daydream world. The size of a bacterium makes it invisible to the naked eye and immune to the manipulation of our hand, and this condition endows it for us with a degree of mystery and unreality in our daily life. The phenomenon of size, like most things we perceive, is given to us as situated in our experiential world.

By any measure Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a landmark in recent influential ideas. The very term ‘paradigm shift’, now common parlance, derives from this 1962 work. Structure redirected its own domain, the philosophy of science, from a logical positivist orientation in its evaluation of scientific progress to one that accommodates a complex mix of sociological, linguistic and psychological factors. Perhaps because of this interdisciplinary inclusiveness, Kuhn's insights have informed theory in many disciplines. A survey of the recent literature includes works in anthropology, comparative literature, criminal justice, art history, education and feminist studies.

In early 1949, Eugéne Claudius-Petit, the new Minister of Reconstruction and Urbanism, had announced a campaign to build 20,000 dwellings a year for forty years, a measure of his determination to shift priorities from post-war reconstruction to the longer-term goals of renovation and modernisation of France's cities. For Claudius-Petit, the State had a duty to offer assistance not just to the sinistrés de la guerre but, as he put it, to the sinistrés de la vie, to the long suffering victims of France's inadequate housing conditions. To do so France had to build more housing and to do so more quickly. Since the Liberation there had been general agreement that the only way to achieve this was to transform the way that housing was built and that ‘industrialisation’ in one form or another was critical to doing so.

This paper presents changes in the vertical circulation and organisation of merchant palaces, and their influence on multi-family architecture in Venice from 1450 to 1600. Just prior to this period buildings underwent a substantial change in the vertical distribution of floors; this marked the transfer of the commercial-residence casa fondaco prototype into a more complex multi-level building with two semi-autonomous piani nobili palatial apartments. The resulting vertical expansion led to a departure away from the external courtyard staircase as the primary means of vertical circulation. Many Late Gothic palatial buildings incorporated double courtyard staircases that provided individual access to each palatial apartment. However, this scheme consumed a great deal of developable land resulting in the widespread utilisation of interior monumental dog-leg staircases by the Early Renaissance. This simplified internal staircase fitted cleanly into the existing structural logic of both new and remodelled palace buildings.

Early architects paid much attention to the relationship between space and time: the earliest buildings had structures linked to the cycle of the heavenly clock. Indeed, the notion of time emerges naturally from the diurnal rise and fall of the Sun as well as the more leisurely progression of the seasons. Space, on the other hand, is defined by the relationship between objects, implicit as a void. What is more, there is no natural scale, no spatial equivalent of the length of the day.