Cadbury-Brown's designs for new buildings for the Royal College of Art offer fascinating insights into both his own development and wider professional and social contexts.

Cadbury-Brown's design principles are examined through a text, buildings and projects, and the case presented for alternative readings of both his work and of English post-war modernism.

This symposium, held at Building Design Partnership's offices on 21 September, was jointly organised by the International Committee of Architectural Critics (CICA), and its Chair, Dennis Sharp, and the Architecture Foundation, represented on the panel by its Director, Rowan Moore. The topic under investigation was the challenges posed to the critic by a period of massive architectural production: are critics being swamped by the quantity of new buildings, thus reducing the quality of criticism? In addition, is honest criticism held in check by the corporate power of architects, in a world where even ‘art house’ partnerships are now commonly ten times larger than their 1960s counterparts? In a panel of six distinguished critics, one might have expected to find at least six different opinions on any subject. The surprising thing about this symposium was the level of consensus that emerged.

Luigi Snozzi is one of several Ticinese architects who came to prominence during the late 1970s, and is best known for his projects in Monte Carasso, a suburb of the Ticinese cantonal capital of Bellinzona. His attitude is based on a critical reading of site; a concern for the creation of place, specifically on peripheral sites; and the reinforcing of existing settlement patterns. His involvement in Monte Carasso over thirty years has transformed the previously low density, centre-less dormitory settlement, offering an alternative to the suburban model. Through his interventions, Snozzi has won the support of the inhabitants and been able to restructure the town's planning process.

An exploration of how public narratives about Highland architectural identity and private narratives about sustainability and return have informed the construction of a new house.

H. T. Cadbury-Brown's architecture in the public sector in Britain is placed in the context of his background and the work of his contemporaries.

The design of a brick house draws on English and Danish building cultures to challenge the growing tendency to divorce expression from structure and obsession with surface styling.

In his Unitarian Church at Rochester, Kahn manipulates the lighting of the interior to make manifest the ‘form’ of the space, thus participating in the Christian Neoplatonic tradition.

The constraints of packing rooms together, and the flexibility of dimensioning allowed by rectangular arrangements, explain the predominance of the right angle in architectural plans.

Twentieth-century masterplans of Baalbeck tourism and fantasies of modernism and classical antiquity are privileged over the present everyday. How can an alternative be envisioned?