The Arts Tower at the University of Sheffield was completed in 1961 to designs by Gollins Melvin and Ward and it has been dubbed by English Heritage ‘the most elegant University tower block of its period’. Its renovation, finished in 2012, can be understood as representative of wider debates about the attitudes and values attached to the future use of notable twentieth century modernist architecture. This paper explores the dilemmas and decision-making that characterised the complex negotiation processes involved in deciding how best to renovate this icon of modernity. It highlights the different perspectives and multiple voices within the University and explores the role of architectural values that privilege design in decision-making processes. It may be a familiar tale to anyone who has built or renovated a building involving a complex client and a diverse set of building users.

Through the analysis of four alternative narratives of participants, the complexity of a multi-voiced organisational process is exposed. These four narratives belong to four different players in the process, representing four different cultures. The first accounts for university management (the client); the second the School of Architecture and Department of Landscape (‘end-user’ clients); the third the estates department (the client's representative); and the fourth the expert architectural historian (an academic and end-user). This complexity was represented in the composition of the organisational body in charge of the project and the decision making process.

The images accompanying this paper also provide a short illustrated account of key aspects of the renovation from the perspective of the authors.

This paper seeks to establish a chiasmus between notions of site as something produced and buildings as sites of production. The focus is upon Herzog and De Meuron's Schaulager in Basel, cast from and on the ground of its site, and Peter Zumthor's Bruder Klaus Field Chapel at Wachendorf, cast on local trees in hand-mixed aggregate from the site, trodden in layers by locals. Both buildings involve moulding, where a tangible transposition of site to building is produced by imprint and material transformation.

These polarities of site and production, form and matter, trace and transformation are deployed as a heuristic device to unfurl a space for thinking possibilities especially those raised by Gilbert Simondon's distinction between Plato's and Aristotle's concepts of the genesis of things in making- ‘individuation’. The buildings' materials and the mud of the fields, masses worked by hand and foot, take form by not quite taking form; this is the potential of the plastic. The act of making is examined here in imprints and traces through their capacity for signification and, in acts of production, for revealing processes and potentialities remaining after actualisation. Interaction between site and production is found to achieve poetic quality through localisation of materials.

This paper explores how judges evaluate sustainability of buildings in RIBA award settings in the UK. A qualitative approach drawing on institutional theory is used to understand the ways judges legitimate particular evaluative views. Aesthetics and Sustainability focused logics are found to guide the evaluative legitimation process. An Aesthetics focused logic is characterised by reliance on expertise, ‘professionalism’ and perceptions of fair practice, whereas a Sustainability focused logic prioritises moral responsibility, scientific evidence and personal experience. Evaluating sustainability was characterised by conflict, concern and contradiction between and within the logics. Evaluation here is seen as a process of constant negotiation between conflicting priorities and managing wider expectations. Different perceptions of what counts in terms of judges’ understandings of legitimacy whether from the profession or wider society were found to provide a way of compliance or commitment to a particular evaluative view of sustainability.

Implications of the findings are threefold. First, the analysis shows a way of studying sustainability evaluation in the architectural domain that shifts the literature's dominant focus on technical features to a consideration of the social context, the profession, awards and other evaluative issues including aesthetics. Second, the discussion draws attention to the importance of examining understandings of sustainability evaluation in view of the legitimacy sources judges draw on from the profession, the awards or wider society to justify particular decisions. Finally the study reveals some of the often overlooked difficulties in evaluating sustainability including negotiating conflicts between competing values including aesthetics versus sustainability, challenges in judging scientific evidence and the need for expert legitimation regarding sustainability decisions. The paper concludes with a discussion of the contribution of empirical and theoretical analysis of sustainability evaluation for research in awards as well as the built environment more generally including the study of uncertainty in evaluative design practice.

Alvar Aalto's Vuoksenniska Church (1958) has been widely discussed in architectural literature, often in general terms of plasticity or ambiguity. Yet previous studies have given relatively little consideration to the approximately 800 archived sketches and drawings for the project. When a limited number of Aalto's sketches for the church have appeared previously, an isolated sketch has often been used to illustrate a single aspect or element of the church, such as a notable lighting or acoustic detail. The church's complexity and spatial qualities make it well suited for more detailed study, using sketches and drawings to clarify the design process of the church and provide new insights. The most important sketches and drawings from the church's design process are presented and discussed in this paper. They illustrate how the design process began with simple sketches, in plan and section, for folding and moveable partitions, highlighting Aalto's priority for balancing religious and social activities in the church through divisible meeting spaces. Acoustical considerations were also combined in these earlier plans, while section sketches show how the church's skylight and unique clerestory windows were gradually developed through several iterations. The threefold repetition of elements in both plan and section was consistent throughout the design process. The structure of the church was designed with simple organic motifs like frogs and fish, but was also intentionally combined with other key elements. While previous studies have emphasised one aspect of the church or another, Aalto's sketches taken together offer a more holistic understanding. They show the interrelated nature of different elements in the church and the relative relationships between different sketches and ideas in the design process. As a work of architecture, the church's definitive qualities of architectural harmony and coherence are far more compelling than any one particular feature or notable detail.

The architecturally radical Steiff teddy bear factory in Giengen, Germany is a three storey, double skin glass curtain wall building with a steel frame, built in 1903. It is almost unknown in architectural history. On the other hand the loadbearing brick Fagus factory built in 1911 to a design by Gropius and Meyer, in spite of its nineteenth century technology, has become a hallowed icon of modern architecture and a UNESCO World Heritage site. The article discusses the contested history of both buildings and offers some suggestions as to why one became famous and the other did not. It also discusses the equally contested history of the teddy bear, showing that in both cases, history tends to ignore facts in favour of good stories.

In the late 1960s and early 70s, many universities in Europe were designed and built using a system-oriented approach. This paper examines the specific case of the Instituto Politécnico Superior de Valencia on the basis of the documents and drawings for the scheme design competition and the production information by L35 Arquitectos, an architectural firm in Barcelona. The analysis addresses the university as an organised whole resulting from the interaction of a functional system, a construction system and an urban system.

Psychological needs and human wellbeing are aspects of sustainability that urgently need to be reconsidered in architecture. Too often, the concept of sustainability is connected to quantitative building performance, without enough consideration of how people use and enjoy spaces and how their wellbeing is influenced by their environment. This paper introduces the report Bo-miljø or Living Environment, written by Danish environmental psychologist Ingrid Gehl in 1971, into the current social sustainability discourse in architectural design as a way of gaining perspective into psychological wellbeing. The report is particularly relevant for considering the human dimension in housing design and identifies eight basic psychological needs that people have in relation to their living environments. The analysis of this report, and the synthesis of the findings with newer studies and definitions of social sustainability offer a framework for rethinking social sustainability. This essay analyses the findings from Gehl's report and contextualises it within current interdisciplinary research in this area. Critically analysing leading definitions and concepts in social sustainability and wellbeing, this essay offers an architectural perspective on design for social sustainability and wellbeing.