Jørn Utzon, designer of Sydney Opera House, the most famous and controversial building of the twentieth-century that unwittingly ushered in the contemporary fascination with ‘iconic’ buildings, died at his home in Denmark on 5 December 2008 at the age of ninety.

‘Alternate Currents’, held in Sheffield's Showroom Cinema in late November, set out to politicise architectural practice. Part of an AHRC-funded project on alternative architectural practices, it was convened by the University of Sheffield's Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till (whose introduction follows this report). The event was an invitation to go beyond the normative, specifically by dealing with architecture's economic, political and social dimensions. Although it was mixed in all respects, for me, trained in social anthropology, two issues emerged as particularly interesting.

Columbia University's recent interdisciplinary conference on transparency aimed, according to the convenors, to ‘bring an ordinarily extraordinary material back before our eyes’.

I've always thought that Leibniz's monadology offers comfort during parallel session conferences. Assuring us that each monad reflects the whole, although from its particular point of view, Leibniz makes the sanguine case that one can make sense of things even if one's viewpoint is sadly singular. In the mad rush from one paper session to the next, knowing that at best one gets to hear a third of what is being said, it helps to invoke a bit of Leibnizian optimism. And indeed, Dublin seemed like a best possible world during the three days of the Defining Space conference taking place in October 2007. Generously hosted and meticulously organised, the University College Dublin-led event succeeded not only in attracting more than eighty papers that contributed to elucidate the concept of space in relation to architecture, art, and the city, but also in creating an atmosphere of conviviality and intellectual generosity which gave the event an unusual sense of sharing.

This paper explores the contribution made to debates over the redevelopment of the nineteenth-century Bishopsgate goodsyard site in Spitalfields, London, by an experimental architectural artwork entitled Intact by Office for Subversive Architecture. Readings of the urban character of Spitalfields are reviewed, as imagined and captured in film and in literary narrative. Applying in this way an approach related to what Luckhurst terms ‘the spectral turn’ in urban historiography, I use these readings as a background for examining the site's recent development. Over the last twenty years, it has been subject to a variety of urban proposals. While some have pressed for virtually complete demolition of existing structures, others have focused on aspects of urban character and possibilities for intensifying use through intervention. The Intact project involves a reinterpretation of a small fragment of railway architecture. I argue that it suggests, playfully, the potential for re-imagining the site that interacts nonetheless with readings of the past.

Juha Leiviskä, winner of the 2008 Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize for Architecture and Town planning, is widely recognised as Finland's leading architect. From the beginning of his career, his work has remained outside the mainstream of modern architecture, and it was already apparent in his competition entries in the 1960s that he was creating a characteristic language of form based on his own architectural values and experiences, and operating in a subtle interaction with the surroundings. Simo Paavilainen spoke to Juha Leiviskä at his home in Helsinki in spring 2004, and the interview appears here for the first time in translation.

A different world is possible [1]. The work of an increasing number of architects reveals a renewed social interest and aspiration to define new instruments for coping with the issues of our cities. These architects do not subscribe to the agendas of bureaucrats, authorities and market players. Instead they listen to people's remarks, understand their problems and develop tools that stimulate people to think critically and actively about the built environment. For these activists, architecture goes beyond just designing buildings. It has to identify the needs of people and possible forms of aggregation, while stimulating processes that will enable us to live better. Groups like Team 10 and the movements of the '70s laid the bases of these practices, but unlike the past century, today every project becomes a sensitisation campaign that involves the community at the local level and that stimulates collective processes, spontaneous creativity and activism in order to incite a new political role for architecture.

As its title suggests, ‘The Oxford Conference 2008: 50 Years on – Resetting the Agenda for Architectural Education’ aimed to influence architectural education. Five decades ago, in 1958, fifty delegates representing British members of the profession, industry and teaching institutions attended the first and only other Oxford Conference on Architectural Education organised by the RIBA. Several visitors from abroad and from Commonwealth countries also attended. The 1958 conference articulated the demand to shift architectural education from polytechnics or art schools to universities, and fifty years later the notion that we live in a ‘climate of change’ permeated Oxford Conference 2008 (Oxford 2008). With delegates from forty-two countries representing every continent there was a manifest change in the composition of the delegates, and on the face of it this would suggest that a more diverse attendance made a difference in the spectrum of issues coming to the forefront: but did it?

We spoke about the usability and further development of the Chinese roof profile in Chinese buildings today. How did this roof, this remarkable Chinese roof, which gives Chinese architecture a special signature against which other features pale into insignificance, come about? It is a saddle roof with an exaggerated rounding of the ridge and wide out-swinging eaves, and the surface is raised to the highest shine through the intensity of gleaming glazed tiles which display all the colours of nature: light and dark red, lemon yellow and golden yellow, sky blue and peacock blue, rare green and brown glazes of every kind. Through the wave profile of the over- and under-lapping tiles – which all adds to the formal effect – it survives every kind of weather.

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.

This paper sets out to challenge assumptions about both normative practice and alternative practice. A historical case study of alternative practice is used to re-read the nature of architectural production since the modern period, and a contemporary mode of alternative practice is proposed which operates within the established profession but is informed by this alternative reading [1, 2]. This proposal seeks to remain fully engaged with the production of the built environment, using to its advantage rather than resisting the mechanisms of the profession.

‘I have long been dreaming a dream: that I am a drop of dew on the leaf of a nameless plant deep in the valley of some far-off mountain range. The dewdrop rolls down into a little brook and mingles with its waters; the brook flows into a river which in turn discharges into the sea, and the waves of the sea in their turn lave the coasts of all the countries of the earth. Thus I picture to myself the cultural interchange of all peoples, and it has been my wish to take part, even if only as one little drop, in this important work.’

(Tetsuro Yoshida, 1955)

In Nicolae Ceausescu's ‘Systematisation’ programme, implemented across Romania throughout the 1980s, power was played out in acts of building. The city of Bucharest provided a visible symbol of the centralisation of authority, manifest in the construction of the Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism and the House of the People. Beginning from this historical context, this paper revisits the work of one group of student architects in Romania, Form-Trans-Inform, who used spatial practices to question orthodoxies in architecture around them as protests against repressions under the monolithic Ceausescu regime.