Four of the papers collected in this issue of arq were first presented at a conference called Field/Work, held in November 2009 and jointly organised by the University of Edinburgh and AHRA, the Architectural Humanities Research Association. Here, the Conference Chair reflects on the event, reviewing the ideas behind it and its outcomes.

Reinhold Martin has been writing about industrial corporate architectures and the ways in which they function as technologies of organisation. Looking at the military industrial complex of the postwar period, he connects the discourses of cybernetics, system theory, and architecture. His studies offer a historical and theoretical understanding of architecture as a material complex with its own internal logic that integrates formats of vision, hearing, cognition, and communication into a semi-coordinated ensemble. In his publications on the history and theory of modern and contemporary architecture he deals with structures that characterise the design, the perception, and the communication of architecture, but are often beyond visibility and control. Rather than limit his scope to individual media, he takes up architecture as ‘apparatus of intermediation’.

One of the most conventional architectural elements is the plinth. Neither a specifically modern nor Western element, it is a familiar feature of religious buildings, and associated in premodern societies with the altar. The plinth is commonly understood as an expression of the elevation of the structure towards the sacred and its separation from profane daily life. A number of fairly recent publications have discussed the function of the architectural plinth in the twentieth century. The architectural historian Fritz Neumeyer, architectural historian and theorist K. Michael Hays, and architect and theorist Pier Vittorio Aureli have all argued that the role of the plinth in the work of Mies van der Rohe is mediation.1 In this, they modify a common modern conception of the plinth as an element that isolates and separates a building from its environment.

The publication, last December, of the ‘research ratings’ awarded to subject groups in each of the United Kingdom's higher education institutions provoked a shocked response in many Architecture schools. A fierce debate on the nature of architectural research and its implications for the future form of architectural education is now developing. With so many countries following the UK standard of a five-year period for full-time education in Architecture (and RIBA validation), this is a subject of more than local interest. Peter Carolin reports on the background to this debate.

This paper describes the structural principles of cantilevered staircases. A brief history is given of stone staircases built in England, and a number of particularly interesting examples are discussed in detail. Four new staircases, built during the last decade, are described, demonstrating the relevance of these long established principles to contemporary construction.

The phenomenon of participatory architectural design is thought to have emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s in Europe. In 1969, Giancarlo De Carlo, one of its main advocates, presented a manifesto in which he asserted that ‘architecture is too important to be left to architects’, criticised architectural practice as a relationship of ‘the intrinsic aggressiveness of architecture and the forced passivity of the user’, and called for establishing ‘a condition of creative and decisional equivalence’ between the architect and the user, so that in fact both the architect and the user take on the architect’s role. He also argued for the ‘discovery of users’ needs’ and envisioned the process of designing as planning ‘with’ the users instead of planning ‘for’ the users.1 In the same year, De Carlo began working on a housing estate in Terni, Italy that involved future dwellers in design decisions. Among other participatory projects carried out around that time were Lucien Kroll’s medical faculty building for the University de Louvain (1970–6) and Ottaker Uhl‘s Fesstgasse Housing, a multi-storey apartment block in Vienna (1979).

All too often, a fascination with ruins produces little more than reflection on the qualities of decay and abandonment that stimulate nostalgia for lost and vanquished pasts. In this exhibition by Witherford Watson Mann, a subtle reflection was provided on the potential for ruins of diverse kinds to have contemporary life and relevance. Indeed, the beauty of the exhibition belied the willingness of this practice to engage with places that would not often be regarded as ruins worthy of careful study or adaptation, and to transform them precisely by doing so.

Through an examination of the public art project Garden Service, in this text we explore possibilities of and obstacles to practices of agency. The project was commissioned by the art institution The Common Guild in Edinburgh for the exhibition Jardins Publics, which took place in connection with the Edinburgh International Festival in summer 2007. It was based on the participation of a community and the communication between different actors, from institutions and associations to individual local residents, communication which included solving conflicts as well as building partnerships.

This paper highlights the theoretical and critical implications of the everyday for contemporary Chinese architecture on two levels. On the one hand, against the background that – ever since the formation of the profession of architecture in the early twentieth century – there has been a recurrent preference for high definitions of Chinese architecture either in terms of its outer form or style, or its essential and metaphysical meanings. This paper thus aims to identify a quiet yet compelling awareness of the significance of the everyday to architecture in China over the past 15 years. Beginning with Jiakun Liu's declaration of Here and Now, illustrated by his recently completed project in Chengdu, Xicun Big Yard, this consciousness has been made apparent through architectural practice, research and education. To borrow Roland Barthes’ terminology, it is a ‘degree zero’ agenda that rests on the multiple yet ostensible unobtrusiveness of everyday reality in Chinese cities rather than the hot definition of form and overladen historical and metaphysical meanings. In the context of contemporary Chinese architecture, on the other hand, this agenda can also be seen as a resistance arising in response to the dramatic construction of large-scale urban redevelopments that have, in many cases, resulted in devastating consequences. As a ‘degree zero agenda’, the concern of the everyday not only offers a way to see around architecture's obsessions with buildings as autonomous objects but also calls for bottom-up urban processes in contrast to the top down approach that has prevailed in China. The paper calls for a Chinese architecture that, by transforming the purpose and activity of design, would better fulfil its social and architectural potentials through practical, poetic and critical operations.

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.

In 2012 the Chinese architect Wang Shu won the distinguished Pritzker Architecture Prize. Since then, his buildings and his architectural thinking have received increasing international attention. Among his many written works, Wang’s PhD thesis ‘Fictionalising Cities’ – completed in 2000 under the supervision of Professor Jiwei Lu at Tongji University in Shanghai – is widely considered the definitive statement of his architectural thought and methodology. It comprises a structuralist study of the city and its architecture, doing so through the development of two key themes. The first is Wang’s theoretical discussion of the application of structuralist-semiotic approaches to architecture, urban research, and other areas in the humanities, and the second is his reading of the Chinese city and China’s landscape architecture tradition in the light of this theoretical discussion. Wang believes that traditional Chinese cities have their own structure, components and rules of combination, and refers to them as instances of ‘texture city’ (), a term that proposes an analogy between Roland Barthes’s notion of text and the city, both of which are understood as a ‘fabric of signifiers’.

The Jewish Museum in Berlin is the first major building of Daniel Libeskind [1,2]. The project for the museum has instigated a wealth of discussions in architectural circles and achieved a rare status of attracting the attention of scholars from other disciplines. Kurt W. Forster put the design for the Jewish Museum on a par with Piranesi's Carceri d'Invenzione, an unusual position for any building since very rarely does an architectural design ‘[…] bear this double burden of representing both actual buildings and mental structures, and which therefore have to submit to being measured by both standards: the durability of their ideas and the imaginative faculty of their designer.’

Among Hugo Häring's papers in the Häring archive of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin are the minutes of six meetings entitled Discussions about Chinese Architecture held on Fridays and once on a Saturday dating from November 1941 to May 1942. The persons involved are Hugo Häring, Hans Scharoun, Chen Kuan Lee and John Scott. Of Scott, a Germanised American, we know little: it seems his wife Gerda worked at Häring's art school. But Chen Kuan Lee is a key figure in this story. Born in Shanghai in 1919, he had arrived in Berlin in 1935 to study architecture under Hans Poelzig, completing the course in 1939. He then became Scharoun's assistant until 1941, working on the private houses that provided a limited creative opportunity under the Nazis. Lee returned to Scharoun's office in 1949, remaining there until 1953, one of only four assistants during the crucial period of 1951/1952 when Scharoun's new architecture was under development with key projects such as the Darmstadt School and Kassel Theatre. In between, Lee served as an assistant to Ernst Boerschmann (1873–1949), the great German investigator of Chinese culture and author of several books on Chinese architecture. Boerschmann had visited China from 1906 to 1909, when he was sent by the German government to make a comprehensive cultural study, rather as Hermann Muthesius had been sent to England in 1896. To complete Lee's biography, in 1954 he set up as an architect on his own account, building several Chinese restaurants, more than 30 private houses and some apartment blocks in a Scharoun-like manner [1], some spatially very interesting, but this kind of work went out of fashion with the advent of postmodernism in the 1980s and Lee died quite recently in obscurity.

For architects, intellectual property (IP) law is vital. Without it plans, building designs and models would have no value as others could copy them without payment. But what are an architect's rights and how are those rights retained in order to avoid commercial exploitation?

The legislation for this area of law comes from the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA), the Registered Designs Act 1949, the Trade Marks Act 1994 and the Patents Act 1977. IP itself is divided into those rights that are registrable at the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) and those that are not. Rights that must be registered before the work is protected include trademarks, patents and registered designs; IP rights that cannot be registered include copyright and unregistered design rights.

Twentieth-century masterplans of Baalbeck tourism and fantasies of modernism and classical antiquity are privileged over the present everyday. How can an alternative be envisioned?