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.

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.

Squeezed into the narrow confines of a parasitic Mumbai dwelling; gathered around a ceramic tea-set in an elevated tea-house; trapped in the transparent void of a tree; and nestled in a vertical tower of fur, books and timber the 1:1 – Architects Build Small Spaces exhibition offered a tactile and intimate encounter with the intense experiences and emotions evoked by a series of small architectural spaces. Installed throughout the Victoria and Albert Museum, the exhibition ran from 15 June – 30 August 2010.

In the summer of 2009, while on vacation in Italy, I lay on a deck chair on a beach under the scorching sun reading Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. I had taken Mike Davis's book as holiday reading after becoming interested in attitudes to sustainability as represented in films through supervising the unpublished dissertation ‘The Science and Fiction of Sustainable Living’. The dissertation analysed approaches to the green movement of the 1970s versus those held today. It did this through the study of ecological science fiction movies made during the two periods. As someone grounded in humanities research, using film studies research methods rather than conventional building science methods seemed to me an engaging, original approach to sustainability. The dissertation compared the 1972 American environmental science fiction film Silent Running to the 2007 British science fiction film Sunshine. During this supervision, the student gave me a copy of the films. Because Silent Running resonated with me, I took it on that same Italian holiday and watched it again. I recall thinking that Silent Running offered a departure point for an alternative kind of sustainable design studio. Then and there, I selected a film clip that I screened – in the background and without volume – at studio presentations to students held in September 2009.

The schism between our admiration of the artefacts of the great architectural practices of the twentieth century, and our lack of knowledge as to how those achievements were manifest, is one of the most enduring characteristics of modern architecture. Modern architectural practice and its sustaining historiography has typically focused on the image of the designed object at the expense of the skills and conditions that shaped it; a focus on reputation rather than comprehension. Indeed those constituting contingencies of design are more often seen as obstructing the architectural vision and true reality of experience; hence the fixation on a singular (and possibly post-rationalised) first ‘spark’ of conception and the photogenic qualities of the realised, and usually uninhabited, object. Dalibor Veseley is right to state that ‘instrumentality (techne) must always be subordinated to symbolic representation (poiesis), because techne refers only to a small segment of reality, while poiesis refers to reality as a whole'. Nevertheless, in the current climate the statement is likely to be understood as further legitimising the continuing neglect of what architects actually do.

This article considers the legacies of place revealed by critical walking journeys through the city and the potential for transforming their interpretation through the distribution of new forms of map. As Francesco Careri implies in Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice, walking pre-dates the city and nomadism is the original condition of civilised living. Put simply, settlement is the process of civilisation becoming static.

In 1983, the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture mounted an exhibition of Zaha Hadid's work titled Planetary Architecture II. An image from this event shows Hadid as she points to one of the drawings on the wall surrounded by a group of listeners. The interior is saturated with drawings. As they unfold before the viewer, the drawings blur the boundaries between walls, floors and ceiling. An interior space wrapped in drawing, orchestrated by the exhibitor, the image of this show is nevertheless also an expression of the pedagogical ideas of Alvin Boyarsky, the chairman of the AA school between 1971 and 1990.

In an attempt to make architectural education more relevant to professional architectural practice and as a response to increasing tuition fees, major changes to university curricula in the UK are afoot. This brings unprecedented opportunities to re-consider what and how universities teach - and to make architectural education more relevant to real-world challenges.

Last year, undergraduate design unit UG3 at the Bartlett School of Architecture completed an innovative project. The unit teamed-up with educational charity Global Generation to design and build a series of small buildings for a real client on a real site in King’s Cross. The article ‘Made in Architecture: Education as collaborative practice’ evaluates the emerging tradition of the live project as a vehicle for teaching architecture students about teamwork, collaboration and engagement. These skills - although increasingly significant to architectural practice - have until now been largely side-lined by university curricula.

Only if educators and practitioners together embrace new opportunities for architects to engage and empower communities can the profession reverse increasing marginalisation and re-define it’s remit in the face of new social and environmental challenges.

We live in ecologies in which the elements connect with one another. If we see elements in isolation then we can believe that we are doing well by proliferating or perfecting an element, but for the ecology to do well everything must be held in balance. We are part of the environment of others, just as they are part of ours. Buildings mediate our relations with one another and with the world. Even some buildings that seem visually isolated, such as the Farnsworth House, are connected to mains services and need the rest of a civilization to be in place if they are to be conceived and maintained. If we think of ourselves as participating in actor-networks, rather than as autonomous individuals with free will to act on our desires, then it becomes possible to articulate ways in which we are enmeshed in our milieu. Our connections in the world are an important part of who we are. The elements of our bodies work together to produce consciousness, but also much else besides. The conscious part of us can articulate how it feels, and what it thinks, so we give it a disproportionate level of attention. In turn, at a larger scale, we participate in entities that act as if they have a will of their own, but they do not necessarily articulate it, but we help them along without necessarily being aware of it. Buildings are involved in establishing functional connections and separations in networks, both domestically, in providing protection and shelter, and economically, in connecting us into the banking and property systems that do much to establish the pattern of our lives. The unit of survival is organism + habitat, and our habitats do not have easily defined local limits.

Archigram, the British architectural group that became arguably the pre-eminent architectural neoavant-garde of the 1960s and early 1970s, is usually remembered for its visions of a ‘Pop’ and ‘science fiction’ architecture. This article, however, recalls Archigram's relationship to architectural education. If this at first seems surprising, or even mundane, it has to be pointed out that to a great extent Archigram came out of, and was sustained by, the schools of architecture. Moreover, Archigram was nourished by a high ideal of what education, and architectural education in particular, should be about: the cultivation of individuals working in concert, without hierarchy, and free of social, spatial, or ideological institutions. This programme was apparent in many Archigram design projects – the title for this article is for instance borrowed from a piece by Archigram's David Greene [1] – and it is just as palpable in the more proactive role that Archigram took in trying to reform architectural education.

The crisis in modern architecture in the middle of the twentieth century brought about a reaction to total Utopian solutions and ideas and the realization of the importance of ‘place’ and identity. These notions found expression, among others, in a renewed interest in vernacular construction. Vernacular construction is evolutionary and contains key, a priori, aspects of identity and place. As such it constituted a focus of attention and gained special exposure and popularity after the exhibition ‘Architecture without Architects’, held in MoMA, New York in 1964. As a result of this attention, the patio, that external room constituting the heart of the house in the Middle East, in the Mediterranean basin and in the Far East, gained architectural significance. At the same time it found a place in modern housing in the Western world.

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.

The utilization of solar energy involves an interplay between heating demand and the use of building materials. It is therefore important to use environmental analysis methodologies which take into account the effects of building materials. Two typical construction types, lightweight timber-based and heavyweight concrete-based, are therefore compared using specific housing forms. These forms represent differing passive solar strategies that can be seen in contemporary Danish housing. The results highlight the diversity of effective environmental design strategies available to architects.