The document that follows was written by Iain Borden as the contribution on ‘Architecture’ to the Arts and Humanities Research Council's report for the UK Government on ‘The Value of Arts and Humanities Research to Life in the UK’ and offers a further contribution to arq's ongoing discussions about the nature of architectural research.

The Hydra drawings are the result of a research-by-design project involving architectural students. The drawings have been produced during intensive work sessions organised in March for the last four years on the Greek island of Hydra. The project has been run by architects Cort Ross Dinesen and Claus Peder Pedersen in close dialogue with contributors from other fields such as art history, literary criticism and philosophy: Henrik Oxvig, Fredrik Tygstrup, Steen Nepper Larsen and Malene Busk. The drawings that accompany the text published here were done by Tove Rosén, Emelie Saltas, Guro Sollid and Flemming Rafn Thomsen.

‘The Glimmer of Other Worlds’ was first written for the Alternate Currents conference at the University of Sheffield in Autumn 2007. It was prompted by my experiences as a teacher attempting to explain to students what the idea of an alternative to capitalist architectural and building production might mean.

By 1957, Denys Lasdun was bored:

‘We must try to get away from the sameness of English architecture. If you look at modern Italian work, for example, it is at least clear that architects have engaged in a terrible battle with architecture and certainly many of them have been disastrously defeated; but most English architects seem to have reached a gentlemanly understanding with their art that they should leave each other strictly alone.’

This is a short tale of two competing institutions and two of their most celebrated figures. On one side is Cooper Union – that hulking Manhattan brownstone, an island on the intersection of Lafayette Street and the Bowery where Ricardo Scofidio (1935) silently honed his art of drawing like an angel. On the other is Princeton University, where his partner (and partner), Elizabeth Diller (1954) is often resident. Princeton sits in the heart of the New Jersey woods, literally and metaphorically, and despite its baronial coniferous presence, is most notable in architectural circles for its rhetorical rather than physical manufacture. Diller + Scofidio's is a marriage whose vicissitudes are etched all over their work.

‘Urban life suggests meetings, the confrontation of differences, reciprocal knowledge and acknowledgement (including ideological and political confrontation), ways of living, “patterns”, which coexist in the city’.

The work and the life of the English architect Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens (1869–1944) have been extensively documented over the past hundred years and clearly show a career with at least two phases. The first is characterised by the design of private country houses in the Arts and Crafts style and, in collaboration with the horticulturalist Gertrude Jekyll, the development of their gardens. The second begins around 1900 and reflects a shift towards Neo-Classicism, initially in country houses and later in a wider range of larger public buildings and monuments both in England and abroad. Lutyens developed his use of the Neo-Classical idiom throughout the latter part of his career into a unique style of design which Arthur Stanley George Butler has termed his ‘elemental mode’. This was characterised by a highly controlled use of form and mass, apparent adherence to rules of Classical proportioning and the sparing use of symbolic Classical motifs. However, very little is known with any certainty about how Lutyens actually achieved this style, in particular what role was attributable to intuition and good taste, as is often assumed, and how much may have been attributable to quantitative and formalised methods of design. Circumstantial evidence exists that strongly suggests that quantitative analytical methods may have been used in a method which drew upon his interest in puzzles and mathematics, his interests in architectural history (particularly English Neo-Classicism), his leanings towards mysticism and his exposure to Theosophy.

Suburbia is dependent on a global economy but, in spite of this, suburban domesticity in the UK is still very often framed within images of the ‘local’ whereas other parts of suburbia, such as business parks and airports, seem to embrace globalisation through sleek, high-tech, ‘non-place’ aesthetics that seem to eschew the local. The way that these aesthetic differences polarise local and global imagery within suburbia is questionable.

Zaha Hadid's Kartal Pendik Masterplan (2006) for a new city centre on the east bank of Istanbul proposes the redevelopment of an abandoned industrial site located in a crucial infrastructural node between Europe and Asia as a connecting system between the neighbouring areas of Kartal in the west and Pendik in the east. The project is organised on what its architects call a soft grid, a flexible and adaptable grid that allows it to articulate connections and differences of form, density and use within the same spatial structure [1]. Its final overall design constitutes only one of the many possible configurations that the project may take in response to the demands of the different areas included in the masterplan, and is produced from a script that is able to generate both built volumes and open spaces, skyscrapers as well as parks. The soft grid in fact produces a ‘becoming’ rather than a finite and definitive form: its surface space does not look like a grid, but is derived from a grid operation which is best explained by the project presentation in video animation. The grid here is a process of ‘gridding’, enacted according to ancient choreographed linear movements of measuring, defining, adjusting, reconnecting spaces through an articulated surface rather than superimposed on an ignored given like an indifferent colonising carpet.

In March 2008 Kees Kaan, of Claus and Kaan Architects, gave his inaugural lecture as Practice Professor of Architectural Design at Delft Technical University – the school from which he graduated in 1987. He explained to his audience that after his student years spent designing imaginary projects he most wanted to design in order to build, to make ‘designs that were thicker than paper’. This was accomplished in 1987–97 in intensive daily co-operation with Felix Claus and then developed over the last decade in their offices in Amsterdam and Rotterdam with new partners. The following is an edited extract from his lecture where, after discussing practice, education, societal interest and the changed architectural market of the Netherlands, he turned to architectural vision, understanding and responsibility.

How might one construct a design studio project? In addition to achieving educational objectives, it must engage both the student and his or her teachers, but if it also involves the whole year as a group it can prove especially rewarding. Last session I looked for an Honours year programme whereby each student could evolve a project that would have similarities with those of their colleagues but that would also be different. If a project were to start with something conceptual – for example, a thematic thread – then there could be both common generic facilities and uniquely different facilities arising from data collected during field studies in particular locations. I've discovered that this sort of idea works well when a large group is doing a project over a whole academic year. On the one hand there is always a common level of interest across the studio because every student feels they are in the same boat as their mates, but on the other hand their own project has unique characteristics. This means that the type of collaboration between students isn't suffocating because no one is ever actually doing the same thing in the same place; everyone is doing both similar and different things in similar but different places. The title of the programme that emerged was ‘Stretched City – East meets West’.

In this article I will explore the relationship between space, language andobjects and interrogate the role of language as a signifier for thetransformation of space through cultural difference. My work is informed by thecontext and the methods of postcolonialism and specifically the notion ofhybridity. If the hybridity of a postcolonial identity is acknowledged, then thespace where these identities are negotiated could also be seen as sharingqualities of overlap and mixing. Influenced by psychoanalytic theories of theself and its relation to others, postcolonial theory has used strategies of‘mimicry’ and ‘hybridity’ as motifsto provide a vocabulary that shifts colonial relations out of the dialectic ofoppressor and oppressed. But following Lefebvre's idea that all spaceis social space, and Foucault's spatialisation of power, the movefrom the historic preoccupation with time to a spatialisation of the processesof knowledge production, allows postcolonial thinking to go beyond thecomplicities of identity politics, which has been one of the major criticisms ofthis mode of thought. As an architect, this opens up certain possibilities ofinterrogating postcolonial subjectivity through the spaces that are occupied andused by those who are implicated within it. This paper will focus on one suchspace: a park in East London.

In the mid 1920s, a physiologist, a glass technologist, and a zoo embarked on an exciting new venture which promised to turn buildings into therapeutic devices. Their project was to devise an architectural glass which would admit the beneficial, therapeutic ultraviolet spectrum of sunlight into the building; they called their invention ‘Vitaglass’. Vitaglass was the first ultraviolet ray glass – one of the more curious products to emerge from the 1920s architectural glass industry. Its distinguishing feature was that it enabled the invisible ultraviolet radiation of the sun to be admitted into the building; its refined chemistry promised to ‘let health into the building’ where ordinary soda-lime glass had blocked it out [1]..

In the nineteenth century, horticulturists such as John Claudius Loudon and Joseph Paxton, aware of the new environmental possibilities of glasshouses that had been demonstrated in the context of horticulture, contemplated the use of fully-glazed structures as a means to creating new types of environments for human beings. While Loudon suggested the use of large glass structures to immerse entire Russian villages in an artificial climate, Henry Cole and Paxton envisioned large-scale winter parks, to function as new types of public spaces. These indoor public spaces were intended to grant the urban population of London access to clean air, daylight and a comfortable climate. Although glasshouses had only been experienced in the immediate context of horticulture, designed in accordance with the specific environmental requirements of foreign plants, rather than the requirements of human comfort and health, they were perceived as a precedent for a new approach to architectural design primarily driven by environmental criteria. The environmental design principles of horticulture were discussed extensively in nineteenth-century horticultural literature such Loudon's Remarks on the Construction of Hothouses (1817), Paxton's Magazine of Botany (1834-49) and the Transactions of the Horticultural Society of London (1812-44). Since the purpose of glasshouses was to facilitate the cultivation of an increasing variety of foreign plants in the temperate climate of Northern Europe, the creation of artificial climates tailored to the specific environmental needs of plants became the primary object of the design.

This paper is part of a broader research agenda, which aims at an environmental re-reading of selected icons of Modern Architecture that share one characteristic, the development of a free-flow open section. The complex relationship between spatial composition and thermal and climatic conditions within buildings is explored both qualitatively, using analytic drawing, and quantitatively, using simulations with computational fluid dynamics. I am seeking patterns common to both and the work has become an investigation of the concept of architectural space at the intersection between art, technology, climate and perception. Most architects of the Modern Movement addressed this relationship in one way or another. They either praised technology and the emerging ‘machine age’ or rejected it. Today most architectural production appears to have an ambivalent and sometimes contradictory position on technology.

With war looming at the end of the 1930s, the government had resurrected most of the existing munition works, the Royal Ordnance Factories, and it had also established new sites. Production was being stepped up, and thousands of workers became employed in areas where accommodation was very difficult to find. Many workers were taken in as lodgers, and temporary buildings or ‘hutments’ were erected, as were hostels for single persons. Also, permanent dwellings for married couples, with or without children, were to be designed and built.

The Pop-Art doyens of the Independent Group (IG) and the British design establishment were in two minds about burgeoning British consumerism during the 1950s. Members of IG were busy collaging images appropriated from American consumer culture while members of the British design establishment were fiercely opposed to adopting principles of capitalist consumerism, such as expendability of goods and planning for obsolescence. Protests against consumerist values were voiced by figures of the Modernist design establishment such as historian Nikolaus Pevsner and Michael Farr, then editor of the Council of Industrial Design's publication Design. Their views were reinforced by the stances of the British Standards Institution, the Molony Committee, created in 1959 to review and revise consumer law, and the Consumers' Association, publisher of the popular product-review magazine Which? These organisations held paramount design's durability, function and use. However, such institutionally-sanctioned concerns, in the tradition of the nineteenth-century preoccupation with social empiricism and consumer education, hardly stemmed a rising fascination with what an increasing consumption of goods could teach design.

There is ambiguity and confusion concerning the nomenclature of parallel projection. Today, such representations are often broadly identified as axonometrics. However, the actual history of parallel projection, delineated by oblique and axonometric projections, reveals inherent spatial differences. By clarifying the intrinsic demarcations between these two forms of parallel projection, one may bring into question anew the approaches and applications of parallel projection as an architectural form of representation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.