In the post-Second World War period, Italian architects opened up a debate on the role of history and time in architectural discourse that resulted in multiple interpretations of historical time in their work. Vittorio Gregotti, one of the main protagonists of the discussion, offered an interpretation of time based on an assemblage of intellectual tendencies, from phenomenology to structuralism and the history of the longue durée. This paper traces ideas that Gregotti developed in his less known and as-yet un-translated texts such as Il territiorio dell’architettura from 1966 as well as in his project for the University of Calabria from 1972. In these, Gregotti makes an original contribution to the problem of history in relationship to urban and natural environments.

Infrastructure has become a relatively established field of inquiry in architectural academia over the last two decades, insofar as it builds on the rational and generative overtones of the term. However, the contrasting possibility that infrastructure might represent an obstacle for the city and its architecture has often been overlooked. Simultaneously, the idea that the city might be considered as a piece of architecture that can be comprehended, controlled, and eventually designed as a whole (whether from scratch or incrementally), has recently resurfaced, echoing Aldo Rossi's concept of ‘primary elements’. In his seminal book The Architecture of the City, Rossi described the way these elements ‘participate in the evolution of the city over time in a permanent way, often becoming identified with the major artefacts constituting the city’. But, he noted:

This article investigates architectural responses to everyday sociospatial practices in public spaces in the postconflict urban landscape of Belfast, where public buildings and façades impact pedestrian flows and movement patterns in the public space. While the city has an extended history of vibrant public spaces and active urban life throughout the first half of the twentieth century, devastating memories of the so-called Troubles leave imprints of division across the city’s public spaces. Inscribed by memories of conflict and violence, ground floor façades are mainly solid, disengaging, and do not encourage fluid movement across their thresholds. This article argues that the architectural design of public buildings and spaces characterise attributes of a reciprocal reproduction of memories of fear. A comparative analysis of the architecture of four different public spaces in Belfast city centre highlights factors that inform the relationship between the building façades, ease of accessibility, and use of the public space.

In around 1912 Gabriel Jouveau-Dubreuil, a young science teacher from French colonial Pondicherry in South India, visited the nearby town of Cuddalore in order to inspect the construction of a new Hindu temple. Since arriving in South India in 1909 he had been travelling to many temples and archaeological sites in order to understand the history of South Indian art. The modern temple that he visited in a suburb of Cuddalore at Tiruppappuliyur was not in fact new but a wholesale renovation of a nine-hundred-year-old shrine on a site sacred to Tamil Shaivas. This was just one of the many temples substantially rebuilt from the 1890s to the 1930s under the patronage of a wealthy merchant community, the Nattukkottai Chettiars, at a time of religious revival and growing Tamil cultural nationalism. The Nattukkottai Chettiars came from the villages and towns of Chettinadu, an arid region in southern Madras Presidency. This region was significant not only for being the provenance of the most prolific patrons of South Indian temple architecture in colonial Madras Presidency but also their builders, for many of the architects and craftsmen working on the temple at Tiruppappuliyur were from villages in Chettinadu. One of these men, M. S. Swaminathan of Pillaiyarpatti, was Jouveau-Dubreuil’s chief informant, one of the many ‘natives’ who were a critical and inextricable element of colonial knowledge production. The understanding of formal composition and terminology that Jouveau-Dubreuil learnt from contemporary architects and craftsmen and his observations of the evolution of architectural design contributed towards the first study of the Tamil temple for both a scholarly and wider public audience from the very earliest monuments of the seventh century through to those currently under construction. This article explores this architectural ‘renaissance’ in colonial Madras Presidency under Chettiar patronage and evaluates modern temple design through the pioneering scholarship of Jouveau-Dubreuil and his contemporaries.

This article investigates architecture's ‘expanded field’ – its turn towards culture during the 1980s when the profession expanded its interest to the softer practices of architectural culture. It looks in particular at the emerging enterprises of exhibitions, competitions and awards, publications, and symposia and lectures in the ‘long 1980s’, taken as the Academy years of AD magazine from 1977 – 1992.

This period of AD is synonymous with architectural Post-Modernism, as Academy published much of Charles Jencks’ work on Post-Modernism, including six of the seven ever-larger editions of The Language of Post-Modern Architecture.

However, by analysing the content and context of AD magazine and the wider context of architectural institutions during these years, this article argues that the Post-Modernisation of architecture should be understood not only as a mere style, but equally as the emphasis on a growing architectural culture, discourse, and the ‘ideal’, and the retreat from building and the ‘real’. In other words, this period witnessed the establishment of architectural culture as a new type of practice, and furthermore, AD was instrumental in this cultural turn.

Austerity measures have been discussed widely since sweeping cuts have been made to local government budgets following the global financial crisis of 2007-08. More than a decade later, the impact of these measures on everyday lives of communities is still growing. We use the context of austerity to discuss our research in partnership with Community Place Initiatives in the city of Sheffield, UK, and to examine the approaches they use to attempt to overcome the shortcomings and challenges of precarity.

This article focuses on revealing the impacts that budget cuts have had and are still having, and speculates upon what these findings mean for the role that schools of architecture can play outside the academy. We draw on research conducted by Urban Education Live Sheffield - a team of researchers and educators from the School of Architecture, University of Sheffield in the UK, and the Department of Architecture, Technische Universität Braunschweig in Germany. The team is part of a broader international project, Urban Education Live (UEL), a multidisciplinary research project with partners from across Europe funded by the ERA-NET Cofund Smart Urban Futures (ENSUF) programme, established by the Joint Programming Initiative Urban Europe.

Through a multi-modal ethnographic and design-led approach combining interviews, case studies, and ‘live’ pedagogy, we examine how Community Place Initiatives in Sheffield deal with a context that has fundamentally changed the ways in which they operate in, or in relation to, their place over the past decade. We explore how collaborations between these local partners and architectural researchers and students can be mutually beneficial within this context, in order to speculate upon how such collaborations can be more effective in their contribution to local place-based urban capacity building and future resilience.

In the above cited quote, Kevin Roche, a principal associate at Eero Saarinen’s architectural practice in 1957, recalls an early morning discussion about the design of the Trans World Airlines’ (TWA) Flight Center. Roche’s story about Saarinen reminds us that at the beginning of an architectural project, a solution may come from any variety of sources, not least of all from everyday objects. This was certainly the case for Saarinen, who found the seed for his design of the structural shells of the TWA Flight Center in the rind of a grapefruit. Despite its seeming novelty, Saarinen is not unique in his approach to the generation of architectural form with models; the Greek-French composer, architect and engineer Iannis Xenakis, who while working with Le Corbusier in 1957, used strings and thick wire to design the hyperbolic shell for their Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels Expo. That a model will play a defining role in an architect’s approach to structural design is also demonstrated by the ‘spherical solution’ that Jørn Utzon discovered while stacking models of his Sydney Opera House’s shell roofs. These explorations with the expression of structure emerged at a time when a new generation of designers, including Eduardo Torroja, Pier Luigi Nervi and Felix Candela, had realised a handful of buildings using models to study and test structural form.

Wishing to write about his work, I approached Peter Zumthor in February 1996. We agreed to do something substantial but still accessible, and eventually settled on the format of a long interview. We then chose three of his buildings that would raise different issues – the now famous Thermal Baths in Vals, the Wohnsiedlung Spittelhof and Topography of Terror in Berlin.Readers unfamiliar with these three buildings will find them comprehensively described and illustrated in the superb Peter Zumthor Works: buildings and projects 1979–97 with text by Peter Zumthor and photographs by Hélène Binet, published by Lars Müller Publishers, Baden, 1998, ISBN 3-907044-58-4. This and the related Thinking Architecture by Peter Zumthor were the subject of an extended review in arq 3/1.

The interviews were held in English on 22 July 1997 over the course of the day in his studio in Haldenstein. They are published in the order in which they were held. We edited them together in August 2000, resisting the desire to amend them.

I first learnt of his work in 1988 when he was a visiting professor at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Santa Monica where he first delivered the lecture later published as ‘A Way of Looking at Things’. I would like to thank him for agreeing to share his thoughts on architecture, and for the often difficult and unfashionable reminder that to do things well takes time.

Three small mews houses in a Dublin suburb are reviewed here in terms of their typological ambitions, formal preoccupations and vision of domesticity. Their nature and form is compared with an earlier project by Cleary and Hall in order to extrapolate a more general picture of the changing criteria and concerns guiding Dublin's architectural development. The project demonstrates how a repeating order can accommodate difference. The feeling of exposure in their unusually open upper floor living areas is tempered by the exhilarating sense of contact with the city.

This paper is intended as a contribution to the discussion of the declared topic of this journal, architectural research. It stems partly from the author's book From Idea to Building and is mainly an analysis of the similarity between architectural design and scientific research based on Karl Popper's hypothetico-deductive theory, and in particular the sequence from problem recognition through tentative solution and error elimination to an explanation which may become the problem in the next sequence of research.

The study of metaphor provides valuable insights into the workings of technology and how technology brings about change. This paper considers some current influential thinking about metaphor and how this impinges on understandings of technology and design.

Luis Barragán (Guadalajara, Mexico, 1902-1988) and José Antonio Coderch (Barcelona, Spain, 1913-1984), despite having different origins, shared a common ground. Their architecture – based on Mediterranean tradition – was adapted to similar mild climate conditions, where shadowed and protected open spaces played a role as transitional spaces between indoors and outdoors. Those spaces were not treated as traditional elements incorporated within the buildings’ repertories, but were spatial proposals with a goal – rooted in their cultural backgrounds – of enriching the relationship between both realms. In this essay, common features arise when comparing two paradigmatic houses built by Barragán (Casa Prieto López, Mexico City, Mexico, 1950) and Coderch (Casa Ugalde, Caldes d’Estrach, Spain, 1951), within subjects such as the role of tradition, the relationship to the place, or the explanation of their architecture as a plastic experience.

Private and public are clearly separated in both architects’ works, generally by a hermetic and neutral facade, behind which indoors and outdoors are interwoven, in such a way that open spaces take part of the interior of their houses and views towards the landscape or the sky break up the limits. Some of the spaces are settled in a kind of ambiguous category: there will be enclosed rooms with no ceiling, or patios and porches with windows in them.

The common Mediterranean heritage appears within plane and plastered abstract walls, where plasticity rises from roughness, colour, light and shadow. The nuances appear in the personal interpretation of the experience of space, as well as in answer to the local conditions, and it is then that a different position in relation to nature emerges; whereas the Mediterranean coast is naturally soft and mild, the Mexican vegetation and geological features introduce a brave contrast between the open and the built.

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.