In this article the design of Mendelsohn's famous Expressionist tower at Potsdam is shown to have been shaped by the cosmology of Albert Einstein informed, however, by the apparently conflicting occult philosophy of Rudolf Steiner.

Over fifty years ago at the RIBA’s 1958 Oxford Conference, discussions about architectural research and science posed seminal questions about the very nature of creativity in architectural research and education. Leslie Martin observed that research is the tool by which theory is advanced. For more than half a century, we have seen traces of scientific research fuelling the advancement of architectural knowledge and its feedback loops into practice. Yet, interrogations around how architectural creativity is affected by intersections with the sciences are not new. The Bauhaus, for example, sought to integrate scientific thought in architectural education in 1936. Thus, why are emerging interdisciplinary collaborations where architecture, engineering and science converge at the inception of design potentially transformative?

Increasing attempts to accelerate the pace of innovation in sustainable building technology is engendering pioneering intersections between architecture, engineering and natural science disciplines such as bioengineering and chemistry. The broad disciplinary breadth of these research processes inevitably requires mediating the diverse values, perspectives and research methodologies of disciplines that pursue innovation in different ways. However, to what extent is this new interdisciplinary convergence possibly transformative? Could it be that these processes, particularly in building technology innovation, may be influencing scientists and engineers to rethink how design problems are conceptualised and researched?

This winning design in the 1998 Lichterfelde Süd International Landscape and Urban Design Competition is for the regeneration of a former military training ground on the southern boundary of Berlin. The brief was for a new urbanism of the periphery, with 3200 dwellings on a 115 hectare site. The design is a continuation of research embracing conditions of uncertainty and change on mainly post-industrial or former military sites. It could be described as a fragment of an infrastructural urbanism in preparation for an unpredictable diversity of architectures.

The relationship between architecture, the body and the computer is considered in this paper. Whereas the body has been related traditionally to architecture through concepts of geometry and proportion, the computer also brings to light the valorization of craft, McLuhan's philosophy of the changing sensorium, the projection of digital utopias, Freud's construction of the relationships between repetition, obsession and the uncanny, and the residence of the body in concepts of mind. The examination of these issues is productive in the context of the design studio.

The prompt circulation of images and representations of buildings has not only expanded the audience for architecture, but has also become a critical tool which – quite beyond the architect's reach – is more influential than the ideas, concepts and buildings they represent. Images have become such an important element that they are not only the primary medium through which most architectural works first engage an audience, but their circulation has come to precede the act of building. The mass dissemination of architectural imagery has enabled a consumption of architecture which has not only transformed buildings into culture, but also ensured a significant displacement in architectural reception. While in prior years the dissemination of images took place after the built object, recently, the diffusion of imagery not only precedes the building, but also conditions its reception.

‘I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.’

(Chinese proverb)

In Nicolae Ceausescu's ‘Systematisation’ programme, implemented across Romania throughout the 1980s, power was played out in acts of building. The city of Bucharest provided a visible symbol of the centralisation of authority, manifest in the construction of the Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism and the House of the People. Beginning from this historical context, this paper revisits the work of one group of student architects in Romania, Form-Trans-Inform, who used spatial practices to question orthodoxies in architecture around them as protests against repressions under the monolithic Ceausescu regime.

A group organised by the University of Edinburgh, led by Mark Dorrian, and CNRS Paris, led by Frédéric Pousin is exploring the history and the cultural meanings of the aerial view. It aims to investigate how the aerial view can be defined, how images are produced, how ‘elevated’ one has to be in order to produce or experience an aerial view, and how images are used and consumed. Jointly funded by the British Academy and CNRS, a numberof meetings will be held over the next two years. The following account reports on the first meeting held in Edinburgh on 3 February 2007.

The Austrian philosopher Otto Neurath (Vienna 1882 - Oxford 1945) was the only non-architect who participated in the fourth CIAM conference (Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne) that took place in Athens in the summer of 1933. As we read in the minutes of the congress published in the journal of the Technical Chamber of Greece Technika Chronika (Technical Chronicles), it was at the meeting of 13 August 1933 that CIAM members decided to set up two categories of participants: a) partners (mainly young architects and students of architecture), and b) specific members (non-architects participating as full members). The one and only such member was Otto Neurath. Neurath was invited as a representative of the Mundaneum in Vienna in order to cooperate with the CIAM Committee of Statistics which had as its task to collect, review and process statistical data relating to some of the most important cities of the Western world. As noted in the minutes of the congress: ‘The Committee of Statistics in cooperation with the Vienna Mundaneum will collect, review and edit the necessary statistical material which will remain as the property of the Conference.’

Felix Candela’s hyperbolic paraboloid reinforced concrete structures - also known as hypars - were not only masterly used in his well-known religious buildings but they were also ingeniously and profusely employed to roof a vast number of industrial buildings during the Mexican industrialisation era. Candela’s inverted hypar shells prototype for industrial buildings became a trademark for a systematic and standardised construction method which crossed the Mexican borders to reach and influence the work of other architects and engineers further afield. In the United Kingdom this is exemplified by the John Lewis Warehouse (JLW) at Stevenage in which Candela worked as co-designer and consultant of the post-War architectural firm Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall (YRM) and the engineers Clarke Nicholls and Marcel.

The JLW represents a unique structure in the repertoire of Candela’s work outside Mexico for two main reasons. Firstly, it stands as Candela’s first European project and secondly it represents a structure in which ‘automatic beauty’ was achieved through economic efficiency and the use of more sophisticated construction methods than those conventionally used in Mexico. Moreover, and beyond its structural and constructional merits the JLW yields a spatial richness which transformed the ephemeral of the working day to forge spaces of mnemonic identification. Built in 1963, the JLW is an epitome of structural art amongst the industrial buildings of Britain's post-Austerity period. Candela’s first European project is analysed not only in terms of its structural and constructional merits but also in relation to its spatial poetics.

Buckminster Fuller's work has traditionally been divided into the early ‘Dymaxion’ projects, and the later ‘geodesics’. This paper focuses on the 1942 Dymaxion Map as a connection between these careers. The Map was an innovation, substituting local projections for a ‘global’ one. Visualizing the earth's surface as a series of facets, connected by ‘great circles’, he approached the ideal of an interdependent, spherical system of tension and compression. The military development of geodesics suggests interplay between the geometry of the geodesic skin and its potential as a metaphor for global action.

Architectural Practice: a critical view,Gutman, R., Architectural Practice: a critical view, Princeton Architectural Press, Princeton, 1988, 160pp., ISBN 0-910413-45-2, price $12.95 £7.95 (pb). Robert Gutman's seminal survey of the architectural profession, was published 13 years ago. In it, he discussed the changes that were occurring within architecture and the building industry. Although based largely on the American experience, it both echoed and foreshadowed changes elsewhere.

In his concluding paragraph, Gutman wrote: ‘To deal with the challenges in coming decades, the adoption of ingenious management techniques by individual offices or the use of clever public relations programs by the architectural community, is unlikely to prove sufficient. Intensive research, thought and policy initiatives focusing on these challenges are needed … Architecture is too important to the quality of American life for us to assume that the knowledge of architects working alone is adequate to address it … [Other interested] groups must be involved … Only if joint programs with this scope and on this scale are undertaken, is the profession likely to formulate persuasive policies that will assure the independence of architectural practice in future years.’

The RIBA Future Studies Group was established in 1999 to stimulate radical thinking on strategic architectural issues. It has close links with a number of other organizations and research institutions. It describes its purpose as ‘to improve the quality of architecture through the initiation, commissioning and dissemination of research studies … intended to inform the climate within which architects work …’ Full details of the group can be found at

www.site.yahoo.net/future-studies/purandin.html

Last year, Future Studies published its first two studies. Robert Gutman reviewed them for arq.

What is a ‘Smartcity’? [1] The Smartcity differentiates itself from the ‘Eco-city’ by embracing new paradigms of programme, form and sociological interaction. It is neither a fixed place nor a singular approach but rather a manifesto for the production of a space relevant for the twenty-first century.

The Smartcity is not a creation from a blank slate, but an evolution of long-standing sustainable principles that intertwine with contemporary desires for a healthier physical, mental and social existence in an increasingly alienating world. It aims to preserve and enhance natural and cultural resources, expand the range of eco-transportation, employment and housing choice, and values long-term regional sustainability over short-term focus. The currency of an ‘eco-’ prefix has become devalued through overuse and abuse, and ‘sustainability’ is a blanket expression – clearly, some aspects of our lifestyle are worth sustaining and others are not. Deciding and acting on which category they fall into, however, is not as straightforward as it appears. Conservation of energy and the environment are key priorities, but so too is the conservation of heritage, tradition and human interaction. Each generation is the proprietor of its own values, and the current zeitgeist has reacted against the mass-produced and anodyne, whether in the guise of housing, jobs and clothing or fruit and vegetables. Without ignoring technological advances, the Smartcity embraces leanness and the low-tech by adopting an operating system that filters out excess and reboots our social space. Smartcity living does not ask for ‘more’ but determines how to use less in the creation of a healthier mental and physical existence [2].

In 1961, a group of young designers practising under the name of Atelier 5 completed Siedlung Halen near Berne. This private housing development was the first built example of the compact, low-rise housing type conceived by Le Corbusier for vacation use in the south of France. It was the forerunner of the newly resurgent carpet or mat planning form. In addition, Halen was a social experiment likened by its designers to the Unité d'Habitation at Marseilles, reinterpreted to fit closely with the local topography. Beyond its undisputed claim to history, its success resides, as in the case of the Unité, in having raised the standards of a particular housing form. Attention to the welfare of users has since become a hallmark of the work of Atelier 5. This paper describes the genesis of the project, its form and social outlook.

Workers in Hong Kong made plastic flowers, incense before that, and consumer goods throughout the city's provincial, Imperial, and colonial periods. Kowloon Peninsula's deep harbour and proximity to shipping lanes gave rise to exportoriented industries long before imperialistic conflicts changed their ownership from Chinese to British, and back again. Making things in this context served to define self-motivated enterprise. Hong Kong Chinese people made most of their export goods following a low material investment, labour-intensive model. Workers hand-painted ceramics and toys more often than their employers invested in better plant to replace their work.

A current issue in architectural scholarship is the rethinking of the origins of Modernism. As a formative exemplar of early architectural Modernism, Bruno Taut's seminal exhibition pavilion, the Glashaus (1914) [1] is understandably part of this debate. In 1959, Reyner Banham in his article, ‘The Glass Paradise’ suggested that it would be appropriate to investigate the origins of the Glashaus, as it was both vastly dissimilar to and exceeded any of Taut's previous designs. In an effort to answer this question, Banham subsequently introduced the unique role played by the Bohemian poet Paul Scheerbart in the design of the Glashaus. As a result of Banham's inference, Rosemarie Haag Bletter systematically explored the Taut/Scheerbart relationship in ‘Bruno Taut and Paul Scheerbart's Vision: Utopian Aspects of German Expressionist Architecture’ in 1973.

This paper sets out the socio-spatial practices of PS2 and Street Society in territorialised, post conflict Northern Ireland – whose work combines pedagogical and improvisation theory to prototype distinctive social models. These practices were formed by a continual process of practical involvement and reflection (through writing) and evaluation (funding permitting), alongside the author-practitioners' search for theoretical concepts that would bring clarity and an alternative perspective to the processes and outcomes. Concepts and approaches taken from pedagogical theory and, uniquely in the case of architecture, improvisational theory, will be used to explore critical aspects of the specific practices, and more generally assert that such socio-spatial ‘street pedagogy’ offers a space of rehearsal and ultimately, a site for the development of socially-just aesthetics. The paper thus proposes a theoretical scaffolding for practices which increase diversity and diminish resource consumption in the contexts of climate emergency and a politics of precarity.

The Museum of Natural History in London exemplified the state of environmental services when it was built in 1873. Although the admirable qualities of the building's natural lighting have sometimes been noticed, other aspects of its environmental design have drawn little comment. This paper explores the fabric of the building behind the scenes, related to the integral construction for ventilation. Recent on-site investigations under the floor of the basement, within the attics and elsewhere, reveal the former presence of a comprehensive fresh-air ventilation system of surprising versatility before the advent of electrically-driven fans. Archival documents provide details. The design and performance of such fresh-air systems inform us about the evolution of building services and about the practice of architecture and engineering as distinct professions. And the forgotten knowledge revealed may serve to help in the design of natural and low energy systems for large buildings today.