Beyond taste or fashion, there exists a lasting and common consensus for a perception of beauty linked to weight or weightlessness. This essay attempts to develop an understanding of different approaches to the issue of weight and weightlessness in architecture and civil engineering. In complex urban and programmatic settings, however, the question of gravity has to be integrated with many other issues, as exemplified by Albini and HeIg's La Rinascente department store in Rome.

This paper was written for a special issue of the Ekaterinburg Architecton devoted to the rich Constructivist heritage of that hitherto closed city beyond the Urals. Docomomo-Russia has an active working party there, but the combination of public poverty and vigorous real-estate pressures is making the fate of these buildings uncertain. This paper sought to offer some fundamental structuring ideas to the debate. We publish it here to stimulate discussion of problems also current elsewhere, but the author stresses that it should be read with its original purpose and audience in mind.

In the first issue of arq, the author argued that the adoption of a model, or perhaps models, borrowed from the procedures of, respectively, the humanities and the sciences does not constitute a sufficient basis from which to define the nature and content of the discipline of Architecture. The present paper returns to this theme and develops further the proposition that design practice, both its processes and its products, constitutes the core, the centre, of the discipline and goes on to examine the implications of this for the form, content and delivery of architectural education.

Oficinas saliteras (nitrate works) were company towns developed to extract and process nitrates in the Antofagasta region of Chile's Atacama desert, one of the world's harshest environments. The two last of these oficinas were María Elena (founded in 1925) and Pedro de Valdivia (1931), whose development marked the introduction of the Guggenheim industrial system. Their urban design was closely related to the industrial cities of Europe and the United States, as well as the Spanish urban tradition. María Elena used an octagonal street plan, while Pedro de Valdivia is based on a crossing pattern.

One of Alvar Aalto's major preoccupations throughout his life's work was redefining the place of the individual in modern society in the face of industrialization, urbanization, and the political ideologies of extreme left and right. Unwilling to accept the Communist models of communal living and their rigid architectural suppression of individuality as well as Le Corbusian paradigms of platonic idealism, Aalto set out in MIT's Baker Dormitory to redefine the modern mass housing model with Le Corbusier's Swiss Pavilion as a point of departure.

Pattern languages help us tackle the complexity of a variety of systems ranging from computer software, to buildings and cities. Each ‘pattern’ represents a rule governing one working piece of a complex system, and the application of pattern languages can be done systematically. Design that wishes to connect to human beings needs the information contained in a pattern language. This paper describes how to validate existing pattern languages, how to develop them, and how they evolve. The connective geometry of urban interfaces is derived from the architectural patterns of Christopher Alexander.

In architecture the link between life and art can be so strong that one can see them as fused, as Heidegger did. We encounter buildings in connection with the life that inhabits them, but the relationship between building and life is not that of cause and effect. The building is a tool, for which a variety of uses might be found. Gilles Deleuze saw ideas as tools, and valued ‘nomadism’ – moving between sets of ideas. He deployed a rhetoric of mobility and invention that encourages the free play of ideas, while effectively resisting the lure of Heideggerís ‘blood and soil’ nostalgia.

The relationship between the creation and experience of architecture is a little discussed topic. If architectural ideas are only fully understood with the illumination of construction, what are the implications of teaching architectural design in the academic studio? Linked to this is the issue of time: how do materials weather and age and how in this youth-obsessed era (in both architectural society as well as society generally) can we rediscover the importance (and beauty) of building buildings which are enhanced as they grow old. Three small (in one case tiny) built projects are examined to consider these relationships.

A close inspection was made of the vault of Henry VII Chapel, Westminster Abbey, when it was scaffolded for repair and maintenance in 1994–95. Defects were seen which appear to be peculiar to fan vaults, and this paper attempts to explain these defects. The discussion involves an understanding of the behaviour of masonry, from the simplest arch form to barrel vaults, rib vaults and the complex fan structure, with an examination of the ‘pathology’ of these forms.

The necessity for lighting guidelines to be rewritten is becoming increasingly obvious, particularly as far as daylighting design is concerned. In this study, current lighting recommendations for the sport of fencing are examined alongside the typical environmental conditions in which it has been practised. A detailed review of the visual environment of a daylit building designed in the '30s, Luigi Moretti's fencing academy in Rome, demonstrates that a broad range of criteria need to be taken into account when lighting requirements are defined.

In preparation for the Millennium Eve celebrations, a study was undertaken to predict crowd movement. The objectives were: to identify characteristics of crowd movement and congregation, and how this might be related to spatial layout; to evaluate, in consultation with risk management experts, how this might affect public safety; and to help develop and prepare effective crowd management measures. The study demonstrates how the observational techniques of space syntax have evolved to enable the investigation of the effect, if any, of spatial layout on crowd behaviour.

Architects are, with few exceptions, ‘school trained’. This paper traces the history of the relationship between architectural education and practice. It describes the approaches developed at Cambridge and the Bartlett in the 1960s - and the theories that each embodied: one based on architecture as a cultural manifestation and the other governing the science of building. The paper concludes with the view that we need to be more realistic in our attitude to artistic aspiration as a component of studying architecture while strengthening the ways by which building performance can be tested.

In the poetics of Álvaro Siza, the enriching experience of making architecture on site has always been very important; but even though his work has been widely recognized, published and discussed, little is known about the construction strategies employed. This paper reviews Siza's use of reinforced-concrete wall construction to create, through a process of subtraction and a search for the essential, building forms of a very particular kind.

This article traces the development of American copyright law as it applies to architectural works from its earliest foundations in the United States Constitution until the enactment of the Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act in 1990. By focusing on the outcomes of the latest legislation through recent case law affecting residential design, the authors evaluate the effectiveness of the protection and illustrate some unintended consequences. In addition, they discuss architectural originality and its relationship to legal protection in the context of individual design freedom.

Architecture in South Africa is at a crossroads. After years of repression and isolation during which contemporary architecture lost its way, there is now a desperate need for architects to respond to the social and cultural challenges of a society riven by massive material contrasts. Within architecture schools, a student body more representative of society than hitherto is engaged in projects which reflect the very diverse needs of the community. Central to the effectiveness of such teaching programmes is the presence of teachers fully engaged in practice, creating a responsible architecture for a renewed nation.

In Book 3 of his Four Books on Architecture (1579), Palladio gives alternative designs for a wooden trussed bridge to span a river 100ft wide. The designs are ingenious, and analysis of Palladio's proposals shows that the bridges would have been effective. Some of the details, however, seem to be at variance with the expected structural action of the bridges, and there remain problems (not fully answered here) of practical construction.