For architects, intellectual property (IP) law is vital. Without it plans, building designs and models would have no value as others could copy them without payment. But what are an architect's rights and how are those rights retained in order to avoid commercial exploitation?

The legislation for this area of law comes from the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA), the Registered Designs Act 1949, the Trade Marks Act 1994 and the Patents Act 1977. IP itself is divided into those rights that are registrable at the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) and those that are not. Rights that must be registered before the work is protected include trademarks, patents and registered designs; IP rights that cannot be registered include copyright and unregistered design rights.

This paper describes the structural principles of cantilevered staircases. A brief history is given of stone staircases built in England, and a number of particularly interesting examples are discussed in detail. Four new staircases, built during the last decade, are described, demonstrating the relevance of these long established principles to contemporary construction.

The desire to learn about buildings, cities and cultural artefacts by journeying to experience them in situ pervades architectural history. It can be seen in the rise of the grand tour in the eighteenth century, subsequent formalised academic study tours, the ascendancy of cultural museums in the nineteenth century, and the institutionalisation of heritage sites and attractions in the twentieth century. More informally, such journeys are pursued in personal and less prescriptive ways through habitual urban strolling and site-seeing.

Through an examination of the public art project Garden Service, in this text we explore possibilities of and obstacles to practices of agency. The project was commissioned by the art institution The Common Guild in Edinburgh for the exhibition Jardins Publics, which took place in connection with the Edinburgh International Festival in summer 2007. It was based on the participation of a community and the communication between different actors, from institutions and associations to individual local residents, communication which included solving conflicts as well as building partnerships.

The publication, last December, of the ‘research ratings’ awarded to subject groups in each of the United Kingdom's higher education institutions provoked a shocked response in many Architecture schools. A fierce debate on the nature of architectural research and its implications for the future form of architectural education is now developing. With so many countries following the UK standard of a five-year period for full-time education in Architecture (and RIBA validation), this is a subject of more than local interest. Peter Carolin reports on the background to this debate.

Twentieth-century masterplans of Baalbeck tourism and fantasies of modernism and classical antiquity are privileged over the present everyday. How can an alternative be envisioned?

This paper looks at the evolution of the structure of construction contract documentation over time, from ancient Greece through to the near future, in terms of the degree to which the contract documentation is integrated. Documentation might comprise anything from a single ‘integrated’ text to a range of ‘dis-integrated’ documents, fashioned by different players in the procurement process and not offering an easily appreciable integrated whole. The paper ends with the hope that new digital methods of information production will lead to better integrated and more easily readable ‘wholes’ in the new forms offered by building information modelling (BIM), which in turn will facilitate collaborative working.

The paper shows that contract documentation has evolved through four stages of integration: Integrated: up to the end of the medieval period construction contract documentation was essentially fully integrated – everything that was required was stated in the one written document, which typically covered contract conditions, building layouts, assembly descriptions, quantities of components and requirements for quality.

This paper highlights the theoretical and critical implications of the everyday for contemporary Chinese architecture on two levels. On the one hand, against the background that – ever since the formation of the profession of architecture in the early twentieth century – there has been a recurrent preference for high definitions of Chinese architecture either in terms of its outer form or style, or its essential and metaphysical meanings. This paper thus aims to identify a quiet yet compelling awareness of the significance of the everyday to architecture in China over the past 15 years. Beginning with Jiakun Liu's declaration of Here and Now, illustrated by his recently completed project in Chengdu, Xicun Big Yard, this consciousness has been made apparent through architectural practice, research and education. To borrow Roland Barthes’ terminology, it is a ‘degree zero’ agenda that rests on the multiple yet ostensible unobtrusiveness of everyday reality in Chinese cities rather than the hot definition of form and overladen historical and metaphysical meanings. In the context of contemporary Chinese architecture, on the other hand, this agenda can also be seen as a resistance arising in response to the dramatic construction of large-scale urban redevelopments that have, in many cases, resulted in devastating consequences. As a ‘degree zero agenda’, the concern of the everyday not only offers a way to see around architecture's obsessions with buildings as autonomous objects but also calls for bottom-up urban processes in contrast to the top down approach that has prevailed in China. The paper calls for a Chinese architecture that, by transforming the purpose and activity of design, would better fulfil its social and architectural potentials through practical, poetic and critical operations.

The Further Reading Required event – subtitled Building Specifications, Contracts and Technical Literature – was focused on the role and status of the non-pictorial documents that establish the relations and responsibilities of those involved in building, and that describe the materials and processes to be used in construction. A one-day symposium, held on 17 February at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, organised by Tilo Amhoff, Nick Beech and Katie Lloyd Thomas, it sought to examine the various regulatory documents and processes in relation to which architecture is historically constituted; to interpret how they distribute competencies and negotiate the various agencies and interests involved in building; and to explore the particular kinds of productivity that they make available or alternatively foreclose.

In 2012 the Chinese architect Wang Shu won the distinguished Pritzker Architecture Prize. Since then, his buildings and his architectural thinking have received increasing international attention. Among his many written works, Wang’s PhD thesis ‘Fictionalising Cities’ – completed in 2000 under the supervision of Professor Jiwei Lu at Tongji University in Shanghai – is widely considered the definitive statement of his architectural thought and methodology. It comprises a structuralist study of the city and its architecture, doing so through the development of two key themes. The first is Wang’s theoretical discussion of the application of structuralist-semiotic approaches to architecture, urban research, and other areas in the humanities, and the second is his reading of the Chinese city and China’s landscape architecture tradition in the light of this theoretical discussion. Wang believes that traditional Chinese cities have their own structure, components and rules of combination, and refers to them as instances of ‘texture city’ (), a term that proposes an analogy between Roland Barthes’s notion of text and the city, both of which are understood as a ‘fabric of signifiers’.

In the past two decades numerous large-scale informal markets have emerged on the fringes of European cities in the wake of global geopolitical transformations. Relying on individualised long-distance connections and adapting to diverse local situations, they produce a proliferating array of unregulated urban architectures while providing habitats for millions of undocumented existences. One such case is the infamous Arizona Market not far from the north Bosnian town of Brko, a place that has been transformed from a border guard post into a major hub for people trafficking and prostitution and now into a multi-ethnic centre of ubiquitous consumption. Another one, Izmailovo Market in the north-east of Moscow, the largest informal trading centre in the region with links to all parts of the Russian Federation and beyond, has grown into a Babylonian site of 15 specialised trading areas that rivals the Moscow Kremlin both in terms of size and visitor attractiveness. And when the 22nd World Congress of Architecture was held in Istanbul under the motto ‘Grand Bazaar of Architectures’, a bazaar of a very different kind traded outside the tourist centres: a vast network of provisional, informal street markets that establish themselves right alongside the building sites of official urban regeneration, beneath terraces of motorways and next to newly constructed tram lines. Before exploring the dynamics of these spaces in more detail, let us address briefly the socio-economic conditions underlying the rise of informal markets.

When asked ‘what is your most exciting/important job’ my answer would always be ‘the next one’. The struggle necessary to finish any serious building project is so overwhelming that once the certificate of completion is signed, the last thing one wants to do is reflect on or pontificate about it. I was 34 when given Southfield [2] to design and am now more than twice that age. I was flattered when Fiona McLachlan told me she wanted to do research on my practice and initially to study Southfield and I was later a little scared when the Editor asked me to write an introduction to this study. But I have found it fascinating to read Fiona's paper and to ponder those heady days in the mid 1960s when Southfield dominated my life. It seems to me the most useful contribution I can make is to relate how I came to be doing this job and where the ideas came from which I can now appreciate were and are very important.

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.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's idea of a modern courtyard house is explored in this article considering three aspects: context stimuli, development, and practical applications. In this manner, this article provides significant contributions to the understanding of Mies's courtyard house idea. In fact, so far the stimuli and motivations behind his studies on this house type have been insufficiently explored. This obscurity has facilitated hypotheses such as that some of the courtyard house projects that Mies attributed to himself were not designed by him, but by his students and assistants. This article offers an alternative view of this issue that supports the architect's original claims by clarifying his teaching approach, creative process, and historical context. This article also clarifies the development of Mies's courtyard house idea through several projects that he designed on this theme, including the Courtyard House with Round Skylight (1934), which has been little explored in previous literature. Ultimately, this article examines the practical applications of Mies's courtyard house idea, both as a motif of student exercise and as an architectural solution for low dwellings, showing that this idea has maintained its relevance throughout the decades.