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.

This project began when one of my research colleagues, a civil engineer, pointed to his very thorough study of daylighting in buildings and said: ‘Here is all that architects need to know about light – why don't they use it?’ A discussion followed about what kind of knowledge is relevant, when, and for whom. It ended with the questions: ‘What kind of knowledge do architects really use in their design process?’ and ‘How can we as researchers provide the different kinds of knowledge that are useful for practice?’ These questions became the basis of a research project and this paper reports on its studies and discussions.

Concern with economic performance dominates the urban agenda of most modern cities, but this objective is pursued differently according to the ideology of the community. Amman follows distinctive development trajectories that reflect both the interactions of global forces and the local community. The primary global force affecting Amman is the competitive international environment engendered by economic globalisation that makes the city an increasingly attractive location for investment. This competition is manifested in city marketing strategies that reflect the desire to attract multinational corporations and specialists. The political ideology of the city plays an important role in the globalisation process currently taking place in Amman. In the USA, city planning is undertaken by different developmental agencies with limited participation of the city-region scale, while in Western Europe the state is involved in urban development and planning. Amman's situation is a mixture between state control and economic liberalism in which urban development is determined by the planning vision of attracting foreign investment and reduced restrictions to free enterprise.

On the one hand, architectural knowledge advances very rapidly, with new types of materials and technological innovations entering the field and multiplying architectural invention. On the other hand, urban experts, architects and engineers often debate publicly uncertain urban knowledge and technologies, risky plans and daring designs, polarising opinion - as witnessed on numerous blogs, citizen forums and architecture websites. This radical transformation in building technologies, in the reliance upon experts and in the expansion of architectural networks could have remained practically invisible were it not for the presence of another phenomenon: the digitalisation of architecture and the availability of enormous Internet databases. The digital technologies at our command provide us with abundant resources to follow architectural controversies.

At a time when the architectural profession in the United Kingdom and elsewhere is undergoing considerable change, a clear understanding of the relationship between the services that architects can, and want to, provide and those desired and valued by our clients is vital. The architect's unique skill has been described as that of design. What does that mean today? We may all believe in the value of design but we must be sure that we can afford to offer such services at a realistic cost if we are to stay in business. This paper seeks to discover the linkages between the cost of design and its value.

Japanese culture, through its art, language and religion, is a result of accumulated flows of knowledge from China and Korea. The traditions of garden design and garden construction, similarly, are ‘a space of flows’ from classical Chinese models though, after centuries of development and refinement, have become distinctly reflective of Japanese culture and aesthetics. The first recorded instance of this knowledge flow reaching Japan appears in the eleventh century. The first treatise on Japanese garden design, Sakuteiki (garden making), is attributed to Tachibana no Toshitsuna, a court official and designer of gardens. Though the treatise contains no illustrations, much of the text is precise, and its content reflective of the cultural and aesthetic predilections of the Confucianist Heien court. Other treatises may have been extant during the Heien period (794–1185), though they are now lost.

A two stage international landscape and urban regeneration design competition was held last year for the site of a former Brikettfabrik at Witznitz near Borna in the south Leipzig region of Germany. The design of the winning entry was based on architectural, urban and landscape design strategies developed over the past five years. This paper opens with an introduction to these ideas and related theoretical precedents. There follows a description of the project's context and of the design itself.

The hammams (or Islamic bath-houses), commonly known as ‘Turkish baths’, are one of the key urban facilities in Islamic cities. They evolved from the Roman and Byzantine public baths, as these were assimilated when the Umayyad dynasty conquered Byzantine territories in the Middle East between AD 661 and 750. Early hammams were built in the eighth century by the Umayyad rulers who established their capital in Damascus. The most famous ones are Qusayr Amra, in today's north-eastern desert of Jordan and Khirbat al Mafjar. The period following the rise of Islam witnessed a rapid development in the architecture of baths and the change from Roman to Islamic bathing habits. Public Roman baths consisted of very large establishments, the thermae, which comprised not only bathing facilities but also recreational ones such as libraries, gymnasiums, exercise grounds and gardens, tanning rooms, ball courts and concert halls. The balnea were the smaller privately or publicly owned Roman baths, located in greater number within the city.

Spurred on by the post-'69 generation, theory in architecture reached its high-point in the '80s and '90s. Continental European tracts were welcomed as a ‘wondrous new mode of contemporary thought’. Derrida and Deconstruction dominated. The journals filled their pages with philosophy. Today, the theoreticians find themselves outfaced by the ‘intellectual entrepreneurs and managers of change’ confronting the highly competitive forces of globalization. Michael Speaks writes from a Californian perspective.

‘It was the happiest moment of my life, I didn't know’, begins Orhan Pamuk in his novel The Museum of Innocence, translated into English in October 2009. The Museum of Innocence is the most recent novel by Pamuk, Turkish novelist and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature (its Turkish title is Masumiyet Müzesi, 2008) [1].

The term ‘architectural promenade’ has become a part of the language of modern architecture, yet it has been little discussed or investigated. We find it insufficient as a generic term to express a concern with the experience of moving through a building, for the promenade can mean different things to different people. To illustrate this point we make a comparison of the promenade in the Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier – perhaps the promenade par excellence – and that of the almost contemporary Schminke House by Hans Scharoun. We have found many distinct differences. The emphasis in this essay is on the meaning and manipulation of space, something of deep concern to both architects and a topic that each of us has explored separately elsewhere.

Developments in computer-aided design and manufacturing are breaking down divisions between designing and making, opening up radical new opportunities for the practice of architecture.

The language of the architectural specification raises questions for philosophical accounts of matter and highlights the cultural construction of building materials.

As funding for research in British universities is now dependent upon an assessment of research productivity (made every four years), departments of architecture are finding that design, which used to be considered as the equivalent of research for architectural teachers, may not be regarded as such for the purposes of this assessment. The arguments both for and against considering design as a research activity are discussed, as is the need for a recognised way of grading the quality of work. Suggestions are made for the direction in which design as research in schools of architecture might take.

The term ‘sustainability’ is often used as a woolly term for everything that is good and desirable. Besides, ‘sustainability’ is a subjective area, which can be difficult to quantify. Any construction project has a wide range of environmental impacts, each of which may have been measured in a different way. Energy may have been measured in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, whereas wood or mineral extraction is generally measured volumetrically, making comparisons between environmental impacts difficult to determine. Various methodologies seek to standardise impacts for comparative purposes and the guiding principle for any environmental assessment is a comparison to the existing building stock, and a result is invariably in terms of a building's relative sustainability. However, to some it is not a matter of being ‘more’ or ‘less’ sustainable. You either are or you are not, therefore relative sustainability is not a valid concept. The discussion of sustainability in this paper is not a debate on the semantics of the term, but ultimately the purist's view does lead to the question whether there can ever be such a thing as a sustainable building and indeed what the role of architecture in the context of sustainability is.

Reception is an idea which deals with the reinterpretation of knowledge. Reception therefore appears as an important issue in studies of historiography that see textual forms of history as representations of the past. Reception in history varies from agent to agent: different subjects who hold different ideological positions, in different positions with respect to power relations, receive the same object differently. Public reception, for instance, plays an important role in shaping the spatial representations of architecture and cities, which can be regarded as textual forms of history and therefore as a form of historiography which reinterprets and integrates the facts of the past. The work of Ackbar Abbas, in his depiction of the skyscrapers in Hong Kong which inscribe capitalism in the fabric of that city, offers a remarkable example. He illustrates how Hong Kong's spatial routine plays out in the reception of styles; for example, design oriented towards economy, the phenomenon of constant building and rebuilding, and the pursuit of hyper-density in Hong Kong's built environment. In different time periods, locations and cultural-political contexts, therefore, the public reception of architecture and cities differs. This paper takes Taiwan as an example. It examines a transformational period – from Taiwan's post-Second World War development to the present – scrutinising the reception of its history, architecture and cities.

This essay examines Kenzō Tange's visionary urban scheme, A Plan for Tokyo, 1960: Toward a Structural Reorganization (1961), in terms of its mobility rather than its much-discussed monumentality. The existing studies of this plan was too im-mersed in its unprecedented megalomaniac scale to pay sufficient attention to the fact that it was a complex design for urban mobility. While the issues of scale and speed might seem to be separate, in fact they are inextricably interconnected since the increasing speed and mobility brought about by new technology would make the existing human scale ob-solete and required the new scale of the machine. In this essay, I would like to revisit Tange's plan for Tokyo Bay as a highly nuanced plan for urban mobility. First, this essay defines A Plan for Tokyo, 1960 as a model city for an automobile society against the backdrop of Japan's rapid motorisation. Tange's unrealised urban scheme was driven by the architect's firm belief in mobility as a fundamental factor influencing the development of postwar Japanese economy and his strong ambition to provide a proper urban infrastructure for the efficient circulation of traffic. The essay then traces how Tange's interest in the visible network of transportation evolved into his preoccupation with the invisible networks of information flow by focusing on his Tokaido Megalopolis (1964), a colossal city that was organically connected by the linkup of physi-cal, social, and information networks. Although Tange's ambitious design was left only on paper and had little impact on the actual development of Tokyo, its historical im-plications lie in its radical configuration of a new concept of architecture and city not as hardware but as software in preparation for the nascent information society.

Wang Shu (b. 1963) is a locally trained Chinese architect who has received widespread media coverage in the last decade, especially after receiving the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2012, often considered the Nobel Prize of architecture. Numerous articles and interviews have been published concerning Wang Shu and his design practice, however, there is a lack of analysis of his work from what might be called the perspective of his ecological phenomenology. Wang acknowledges his interest in phenomenological thinking and expresses an ongoing concern about human relationships with place and nature, the continuity of craftsmanship in the face of technological development, as well as the materiality and tactility of bodily perception. Before analysing Wang's work, relevant ideas of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) and their influence on architectural discourse are firstly examined. Both of them were seminal philosophers who offered inspiring insights to ecological discourse.

‘Urban life suggests meetings, the confrontation of differences, reciprocal knowledge and acknowledgement (including ideological and political confrontation), ways of living, “patterns”, which coexist in the city’.