‘I myself do not believe in explaining anything’, wrote Shel Silverstein. It seems that architecture is always looking to explain itself. Definitions of architecture seem almost common knowledge; ask a bartender, biologist, computer scientist, economist, legislator, birdwatcher, quilter or scientist, each of whom analogises their field with respect to architecture. And several within the profession can themselves define architecture's limits quite elegantly. Most recently Steven Holl defined architecture as consisting simply of abstract, use, space and idea. However, seeking a rationale or explanation for architecture – its role in society, its impact, its value – remains an open debate. This debate has consumed the field, in academia and practice, for centuries. It suggests a dire insecurity.

Shifts in architecture's self-perception and self-explanation often relate to formal styles. Any text on architectural history covers these styles, from Neolithic to contemporary, including accompanying sub-movements such as, for the early modern category, Expressionist architecture, Art Deco, and the so-called ‘International Style’. Each style is often imagined a product of, or reaction to, a preceding style, and much the same can be said of accompanying trends in the explanation of architecture. This essay, and its underlying argument, is itself a reaction to the current state of affairs.

This paper discusses Peter Zumthor's project for the Topography of Terror foundation in Berlin, an institution that aims to research, and communicate, the atrocity of Nazi crimes and to work against the forgetting of history. The site where Topography of Terror is based, in the centre of the city, once housed the major institutions from which the Third Reich wrought terror over Europe and from where genocide was organised /1/. It is thus a unique site where the victims are absent and the perpetrators cannot be commemorated: the primary challenge in dealing with the site.

In the late autumn of 2004, Zumthor's project came to an unfortunate end. After eleven years of planning, arguing and constructing, the authorities of Berlin decided to abandon the partially constructed Topography of Terror building and to commission an alternative, while newspapers speculated about spiralling costs, technical problems and the disagreements of those involved. Eventually, in December of the same year, the early stages of Zumthor's construction were demolished. Nevertheless, the project's unique approach to history and remembrance should be discussed further. Unlike most memorials, Zumthor's project did not seek to represent a historical event mimetically or allegorically, but rather tried to embody the limits of representation by confronting the visitor with a non-representational approach to history.

The September 1965 meeting of Team 10 in Berlin was another occasion on which the ‘family’ gathered to present and discuss projects and ideas. Like other Team 10 meetings, issues of modernisation, inhabitation, post-war reconstruction, the welfare state, consumer society and the role of the architect were subjects of heated debate. After the famous 1959 meeting in Otterlo at which Team 10 emerged out of CIAM, the core group members were still trying to determine the character and size of their group, which would enable them to reach some kind of unity while maintaining a diversified outlook. The list of 30 invitees included familiar names alongside a few newcomers, among them the Israeli, German-born planner-architect Artur Glikson, who had been invited to join the meeting by Aldo van Eyck. The gathering was to be informal but, unlike invitations to previous meetings, this one, sent by Shadrach Woods, did not propose any specific theme. The meeting was motivated partly by the establishment of the new branch office of Candilis-Josic-Woods in Berlin, set up to supervise construction of the Free University. Presentations took place at the Akademie der Künste, in the Hansaviertel, the showcase district for modern architecture built in the latter half of the 1950s [1, 2].

Created by David Simon in 2002, the HBO series The Wire presents the established moral code of a society that lies outside mainstream America and depicts institutions designed to maintain the status quo. Terry Eagleton suggests of Dickens, that his ‘grotesque realism is a stylistic distortion in the service of truth, a kind of astigmatism which allows us to see more accurately.’ The content of Simon's programme operates in a similar way. It proposes an alternative to academic narratives able to disseminate knowledge beyond the closed-off world of peer review.

The richness, uniqueness and intricacy of The Wire has made it difficult to trace its thematic and stylistic heritage. The programme has been referred to as a ‘lyrical sociology’, ‘a type of urban sociology’, ‘a rendering of urban theory’, a ‘fontless social science’, a ‘theoretical archetype’, a ‘Dickensian show’, and more. At an aesthetic level, The Wire has been qualified as a work of ‘psychological realism’, ‘social realism’, as something aspiring to Fredric Jameson's aesthetics of ‘cognitive mapping’, or even a ‘rich counterpart to actor-network-theory’.

Martin Heidegger begins his lecture ‘… Poetically Man Dwells …’ by denying poetry is a marginal practice whose imaginings are ‘mere fancies and illusions’. ‘[T]he poetic’, he states, is not ‘merely an ornament and bonus added on to dwelling’. On the contrary, Heidegger boldly claims that poetry is the source of all human dwelling on earth: ‘[…] poetry first causes dwelling to be dwelling. Poetry is what really lets us dwell.’

The connective tissue of Heidegger's argument in ‘… Poetically Man Dwells …’ is the concept of ‘measure’. In the English translation of the lecture, permutations of the term ‘measure’ (Maß/messen) appear a remarkable ninety-four times, not including dozens more uses of its synonyms: ‘dimension’, ‘span’, ‘meter’ and ‘gauge’. What seems surprising, given that the set-up of the lecture revolves around poetry and measure, is that the commonest understanding of measure related to poetry – poetic measure itself – is not discussed thematically by Heidegger. Rather, Heidegger's incessant word play produces meanings that include ‘measuring against’ in the sense of comparing to a standard, ‘measuring up’ a space by ‘stepping-out’ (durchmessen), ‘measuring out’ in the sense of dividing-up or apportioning (das Zu-Gemessene), ‘being measured’ in the sense of having propriety, ‘taking measures’ (die Maß-Nahme) in response to a situation, and ‘measuring between’ as a distance or span. These meanings are of course related to common poetic measure, and might even be claimed to be its ground.

‘Translation’ is dealt with in this paper as a descriptor of the transformation that occurs as a concept, structure, image or notion is appropriated from one discipline to another. This understanding of translation as process or movement, rather than a field of overlap between disciplines, is facilitated by the work of the philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault considers disciplinarity as the structural demarcation of knowledge and information (discourse) and the demarcations that are disciplined by knowledge. This understanding may be expressed as: disciplines as a disciplining. Foucault rejects the idea of disciplines as bounded self-similar content, arguing instead that disciplinarity lies in the framing of logics applied to content. The disciplines in question are considered in their contingency and temporality yet are not entirely bound by them. Thus, a coherent and organised discipline such as biology dates from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Before then its subject matters either were comprehended within other disciplinary frameworks (natural history) or were considered outside science itself (natural theology). In The Order of Things (1966), Foucault groups several naturalists, including Buffon (French eighteenth century) and Darwin (British nineteenth century), as belonging to the same ‘discourse’ or discursive family. Separating disciplinarity from the origin of ideas and time of writing fosters the productive translation of concepts, images and artefacts between disciplines.

The sun control device has to be on the outside of the building, an element of the facade, an element of architecture. And because this device is so important a part of our open architecture, it may develop into as characteristic a form as the Doric column.

Victor Olgyay (1910–1970), a Hungarian architect who came to the United States in 1947 with his twin brother and collaborator, Aladár (1910–1963), is best known today as the author of Design with Climate: Bioclimatic Approach to Architectural Regionalism (1963), an important book often referenced in the environmental building design field [1]. As leaders in research in bioclimatic architecture from the early 1950s to the late 1960s, the Olgyay brothers could be considered the ‘fathers’ of contemporary environmental building design. Their research and publications laid the foundation for much of the building simulation software in use today. Other than the difference between working on graph paper and using computer-generated graphics, there is little difference between Autodesk's Ecotect Analysis (simulation and building energy analysis software) and the Olgyays' techniques for the analysis of environmental factors and graphical representation of climate. The manner in which the Olgyays established connections between building design and the science of climate laid the foundation for the development of environmental simulation, one of contemporary architecture's leading methods of form generation. Victor Olgyay's teaching, however, represents another kind of thinking, a broader concern for architecture, beyond energy performance. ‘The primary task of architecture,’ Olgyay announced to his students, ‘is to act in man's favour; to interpose itself between man and his natural surroundings in order to remove the environmental load from his shoulders.