‘This is an extraordinary group of buildings’, wrote Philip Johnson (then a Mies van der Rohe follower) when The Architectural Review published Alison and Peter Smithson's School at Hunstanton in September 1954. ‘… Here we have an unknown team … being allowed to win and build. Most surprising they are allowed to build not a conventional school, not even a Hertfordshire plan, but something quite the opposite of the prevailing trend … The plan is not only radical but good Mies van der Rohe, yet the architects have never seen Mies's work …’ In this paper, based upon a talk given at the Architectural Association School and on conversations with the Editor, Peter Smithson recalls the background to the project, its design and construction, his later visits to Chicago and a 1973 revisit to the building.

A concise report about the landform, architectural, and detail design concepts for the recently completed modernisation of the Bishopsfield Housing Estate in Harlow, Essex. The objective was to develop proposals for new interventions which are directly based on, and give emphasis and new life in a contemporary way to the architectural and urban design conceptions of the original architects and town planner.

The late seventeenth century saw massive shifts in construction techniques and practice. This was particularly true in structural carpentry and owed much to the innovations of a single architect.

Sir Christopher Wren occupies a central place in English architectural history. Yet he was also a mathematician and it is reasonable to assume that he took more than a passing interest in the structural aspects of his buildings. Starting from the work of David Yeomans (1992 et al), this article considers his involvement in one particular craft, carpentry. By returning to the original documents and from careful measurement and recording of the surviving works and other buildings of the time, it reveals that his office had a far greater influence than hitherto supposed.

The expression of time is pervasive in Japanese culture and architecture. At the Chapel on Mount Rokko, Tadao Ando draws on native traditions to articulate a range of temporal phenomena.

Columbia University's recent interdisciplinary conference on transparency aimed, according to the convenors, to ‘bring an ordinarily extraordinary material back before our eyes’.

This study arose from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded ‘Connected Communities’ project. It was apparent at the outset that the AHRC had not considered that architecture might be important, if not central, to discussions on communities, and it became obvious that this attitude was prevalent throughout the academic and media worlds. Despite evidence that the formal and conceptual structures of architecture permeated numerous disciplines, and that the built environment permeated our personal and social lives, other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences did not think architecture was relevant to the humanities in general.

This belief is represented within the institutional structure of the AHRC itself. The AHRC Joint Electronic Submissions funding application process organises research into a three-tiered system of research areas: there are seventy-eight primary research areas including Visual Arts with twelve subcategories, Dance with five, Drama with six, and Design with six, of which architecture is one. There is no other research classification for the spatial environment, built or unbuilt. On the other hand a search for ‘architecture’ gives six primary research areas, encompassing thirty-six third level subject areas. Except for the architecture subcategory under Design, the others have to do with information, computing and software.

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?

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.

Are the sinuous forms of the Disney Hall by Frank O. Gehry concrete testimonies of architectural ideology, or are they demonstrations of sound engineering and construction?

Analysis of the detailed design of a primary school classroom suggests that intelligent sustainable design can be both environmentally beneficial and cost effective.

‘Where the pastoral meets the post-industrial’. London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) Chief of Design, Kathryn Firth's words to describe the area that the Corporation inherited as part of its remit following the Summer Olympic Games in 2012. Seeming to exemplify this, the former industrial warehouses of Hackney Wick, such as the Counter Café [2], allow shrubbery growth and sprawling ivy; their brick exerior walls emblazoned with art work reminiscent of William Morris. What we have here is recognition of the area's pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial episodes; a narrative that serves to provide some temporal coherence to what is a complex and fragmented landscape.

There is nothing, no ‘naked life’, no external standpoint, that can be posed outside this field permeated by money, nothing escapes money.

In 2009, an international masterclass at the Berlage Institute studied a street market in a deprived Rotterdam neighbourhood, the Afrikaanderplein. Headed by Teddy Cruz and supported by Jeanne van Heeswijk and Miguel Robles-Duran – three socially and politically committed architects and artists – the group produced a critique of the tight control and regulation of the market by authorities. The group's proposals were, basically, to liberalise and deregulate the market.

Whether the Afrikaanderplein market is a case which merits deregulation depends, of course, on the specific conditions the group detected in the area. More important here, however, is that the proposals appear, at least superficially, to contrast the anti-neoliberal and radical positions of the three individuals directing the group.

This paper investigates the history and programme of the Chinese architectural journal Time + Architecture (Shidai Jianzhu). As one of the newly established architectural periodicals in post-Mao China, the journal was launched in 1984 by academics Luo Xiaowei, Wang Shaozhou and their colleagues at the Department of Architecture in Tongji University, Shanghai. The journal's close association with academic institutions and commercial design firms shaped its dual nature; that is, both scholarly and professional. At the turn of the millennium, the journal's substantial reform of editorial policy redefined its character from a ‘presenter’ of received materials to a ‘producer’ of selected collaborative work, and enabled it to maintain editorial distinctiveness in the Chinese architectural publishing scene.

This paper argues that Time + Architecture constructed a significant place for critical practice in contemporary China through the presentation of critical architecture and architectural criticism. Over the past few decades, the journal, under the editorship of Zhi Wenjun, published a number of special issues on the work of emerging independent architects such as Yung Ho Chang, Wang Shu, Liu Jiakun and others. The thematic topics, projects and criticisms presented by the journal exemplified an editorial agenda to publish innovative and exploratory work and demonstrated the editors' and contributors' collective endeavours to develop a critical discourse that confronted the dominant ideology of architecture.