This perspective looks at the London Underground station building and proposes that it has a problematic status which is yet to be fully acknowledged in architectural writing. The emergence of the London Underground in the second half of the nineteenth century challenged some of the basic premises of what would become, by the twentieth century, the standard interpretations of Modernism and, yet, it remains insufficiently researched. In outlining a trajectory that leads from Crystal Palace via the railway station and the hybrid nature of the arcade to the London Underground, the aim is to indicate that the spatial and visual regimes of the Underground – and its main architectural object, the Underground station – trace a lineage that was never fully reconciled with the dominant narratives of Modernism.

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.

Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978), one of the lesser known architects of the second half of the twentieth century, studied architecture at Cornell University between 1962 and 1968. Although he had always been part of an active circle of artists and architects with whom he shared his radical ideas, Matta-Clark was generally excluded from the architectural milieu since his proposed interventions were thought to be unsuitable for accommodation. His exclusion from the architectural scene was marked; following his Window-Blow-Out(s) project in 1976, as Mary Jane Jacob has pointed out, his colleagues – including Peter Eisenman and the members of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) – found it very hard to accept an architect with a BB gun in hand. The removal of the facade in the 1974 Bingo project; the elimination of the thresholds in the 1973 Bronx Floors; or the cut to a suburban house in the 1974 Splitting project were all evaluated as temporary, and destructive in the making; and were thus regarded as artistic actions to transform buildings into objects. As such, his critical architectural productions remained overshadowed behind a series of seemingly violent artistic intrusions.

The Dutch architect and monk, Dom Hans van der Laan (1904–1991) leaves us with a legacy of architectural writings and realisations arising from his search for fundamental principles of architecture. His 1977 manifesto Architectonic Space aims to combine spatial philosophical concepts with practical design tools [1, 2]. The book is a series of fifteen lessons linking concepts, such as the relationships of inside-outside or mass-space, to his proportional series which he refers to as the Plastic Number. This article aims to offer an understanding and critical assessment of Dom van der Laan's poetics of order by unravelling how his buildings are made and how they are perceived [3]. I focus on the case study of the Jesu Moder Marias Convent in Tomelilla, Sweden.

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.

Completed in the sixteenth century, the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul has long been regarded as one of the great works of Sinan, the Ottoman Empire's foremost architect. In recent years, as our understanding of Sinan's design strategies and sensitivities has improved, a number of influential scholars have argued that there is a singular formal layering pattern present in Sinan's elevations. With the advent of recent advances in computational analysis it is possible to quantify the degree of visual layering (the hierarchical relationship between form, ornamentation and materiality) present in Sinan's Süleymaniye Mosque and thereby provide evidence, either for or against, this proposition. Using an advanced version of the computational fractal analysis method, the paper investigates the four facades of the Süleymaniye Mosque, along with two facade details, to provide a mathematical description of the layering visible in this building. Through this process the paper provides, for the first time, quantifiable data supporting the theorised properties of this famous building. In doing so, the paper also offers a description of the most advanced demonstration of fractal analysis ever applied in architecture.

The story goes that when the twenty-year old Brahms visited Liszt in Weimar in 1853, Liszt effortlessly sight-read the younger man's piano Sonata in C major (a work of considerable technical difficulty). Brahms was astounded by this feat of consummate musicianship. However, when Liszt then played his own, as yet unpublished, B minor Sonata, Brahms fell asleep. Liszt probably understood that the young composer was tired after his long journey, and of course the story may be apocryphal, but nevertheless the fact that they never met again may be read as a metaphor for a divergence of musical tendencies that came to characterise nineteenth-century high art music. Some describe this as ‘the war of the Romantics’, a bitter dispute between the New German School (principal figures, Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner) and traditionalists, such as Brahms, whose work was deemed oldfashioned. It was a spat that embroiled the whole of musical Europe.