‘Agency’ is a beguiling word. It has the immediacy of a call-to-arms and the remoteness and anonymity of a bureaucratic function. Agency, as action in the world, underpins revolutionary social change, and the representation of someone else's interests – usually at a distance – in a governmental or business context. It is implicated in both the agitprop of the Reclaim the Streets network, or Brazil's Homeless Workers Movement, and in state bureaucracies such as the UK Border Agency, or commercial franchises such as the Western Union. The term encapsulates two quite distinctive forms of action: one individuated, collective and immediate; and the other systemic, anonymised and bureaucratic. It is no accident, then, that in academic literature ‘agency’ is often paired with ‘structure’, and in the binarised form, structure/agency, is used to refer to the tension between the creative actions of individuals and the social, political and economic structures that supposedly constrain them. The fact that architects are expected to exercise agency in both of these senses – as creative actors and as representatives of their clients' interests – gives the theme further significance.

The spectacular surroundings of Kielder Water & Forest Park, in Northumberland, England, are a confluence of opposing states: the man-made and natural; the utilitarian and recreational; the beautiful and isolated; shaped by weather converging from east and west. Kielder Castle was built in 1775 as the Duke of Northumberland's hunting lodge. In recent years the territory has gained notoriety for a series of innovative art and architectural commissions including Belvedere by Softroom Architects (1999), Kielder Skyspace by the American artist James Turrell (2000), Minotaur by architect Nick Coombe and artist Shona Kitchen (2003), and Kielder Observatory by Charles Barclay Architects (2008). This paper outlines one of Kielder's most recent additions – a shelter entitled 55/02 – the result of a collaboration between sixteen*(makers) and manufacturers Stahlbogen GmbH. The work rekindles the symbiotic relationship between design and making once central to the production of architecture. The reawakening of this tradition has been stimulated by the mainstream adaptation of CAD/CAM as an industrial and disciplinary medium which binds the protocols of drawing with those of fabrication. However, as this account of the project shows, the relevance of an increasingly digitised world extends beyond the production of 55/02 as an artefact – it forms the basis of the architecture's relationship with its locality as an industrial, historical, social, cultural and manufactured landscape [1].

This edition of arq assembles a selection of papers presented at the Conference ‘Agency’ organised by the research group called ‘The Agency’ initiated in 2007 in the School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield. We offered to host the 5th AHRA International Conference, giving it the theme of ‘Agency’ and hoping that the submissions would energise the relationships between the humanities, the architectural profession, and society.

Le Corbusier – The Art of Architecture is the vague and loaded title given to a marvellous but somewhat random collection of Le Corbusier material that has been touring Europe, until recently housed in Lutyens' crypt in Liverpool Cathedral before landing in London this spring at the Barbican, where it feels at home in Brutalist surroundings. The exhibition has provided the inspiration for a festival of Le Corbusier events and talks, competitions and workshops across the country. The question, however, is why?

‘As it stands, the concept of popular culture is virtually useless, a melting pot of confused and contradictory meanings capable of misdirecting inquiry up any number of theoretical blind alleys’ […] popular culture is in effect an empty conceptual category, one which can be filled in a wide variety of often conflicting ways, depending on the context of use.

Tony Bennett [quoted] and John Storey in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

The Galerie Goetz is a small art gallery built between 1989 and 1992, one of the early works of Herzog & de Meuron which helped to win them such commissions as Tate Modern and launched their spectacular international career. At first sight this box-like building standing at the far end of a villa garden in a Munich suburb seems rather dead-pan and understated: from the street [2] you register only the upper floor, a box measured out in five bays, for the ground level is perfectly obscured by the garden fence, an apparently banal element carefully remade by the architects.

Architectural practice has become considerably more complex in the last twenty years, not to mention since the days of Wright. Many more professions are involved in realising a building, and the construction industry has become professionalised in areas such as health and safety, management training and continuing professional development. Procurement methods for buildings are proliferating and roles for all involved changing, especially for the architect. Shorter timescales are common and there is a general consensus that, in the UK at least, there is a serious skills shortage in the industry and a decline in the quality of the building trades. The industry has become both more litigious and more international.

This paper springs from some reflections in the context of the design studio on the meaning of miniature representations (such as drawings or scaled models, for example), in art and architecture. In the pre-reflective understanding of the world which characterises direct human experience, the size of things is an integral and deeply meaningful aspect of their phenomenal reality. Our primary perception of the size of things is, of course, a function of our embodied condition and is inseparable from their essential nature. Things seem great or small to us from the point of view of our moving body and its ability to act upon and manipulate objects of that scale. A mountain is large, difficult to see all at once from close by, and requires a great physical effort to climb. The size of a doll's house provides us with a marvellous power to see and control the life within, a power which is one of the reasons why the miniature pervades our daydream world. The size of a bacterium makes it invisible to the naked eye and immune to the manipulation of our hand, and this condition endows it for us with a degree of mystery and unreality in our daily life. The phenomenon of size, like most things we perceive, is given to us as situated in our experiential world.

Traditionally, architecture mediates joints with mouldings whose qualities describe, like a human face, their character. In contrast, modern architecture uses a reveal or shadow to mark joints. This ubiquitous yet overlooked modern shadow has slipped between the cracks of architectural theory. Is the modern reveal, distained and beloved by architects, the sign of a building without quality?