‘How can an entity with no discernible beginning or end be a place?”

Fumihiko Maki

Architecture has long provided concrete expression for ideals such as home, nation, justice, democracy and spirituality. In so doing, it has helped to place them within society. The placing of these ideals has been an important aspect of both ancient and modern cultures, helping to focus, gather and structure many aspects of daily life, to mesh practices and customs with the assets of particular locales, and provide grounding for human existence.

‘I myself do not believe in explaining anything’, wrote Shel Silverstein. It seems that architecture is always looking to explain itself. Definitions of architecture seem almost common knowledge; ask a bartender, biologist, computer scientist, economist, legislator, birdwatcher, quilter or scientist, each of whom analogises their field with respect to architecture. And several within the profession can themselves define architecture's limits quite elegantly. Most recently Steven Holl defined architecture as consisting simply of abstract, use, space and idea. However, seeking a rationale or explanation for architecture – its role in society, its impact, its value – remains an open debate. This debate has consumed the field, in academia and practice, for centuries. It suggests a dire insecurity.

Shifts in architecture's self-perception and self-explanation often relate to formal styles. Any text on architectural history covers these styles, from Neolithic to contemporary, including accompanying sub-movements such as, for the early modern category, Expressionist architecture, Art Deco, and the so-called ‘International Style’. Each style is often imagined a product of, or reaction to, a preceding style, and much the same can be said of accompanying trends in the explanation of architecture. This essay, and its underlying argument, is itself a reaction to the current state of affairs.

The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in east London has a fantastic opportunity to lead the way in sustainable living for its neighbours across London and beyond. However, sustainability in the Park goes beyond the environment. It is also a story of social equality and employment, and of economic growth and prosperity.

All too often, a fascination with ruins produces little more than reflection on the qualities of decay and abandonment that stimulate nostalgia for lost and vanquished pasts. In this exhibition by Witherford Watson Mann, a subtle reflection was provided on the potential for ruins of diverse kinds to have contemporary life and relevance. Indeed, the beauty of the exhibition belied the willingness of this practice to engage with places that would not often be regarded as ruins worthy of careful study or adaptation, and to transform them precisely by doing so.

This paper discusses Peter Zumthor's project for the Topography of Terror foundation in Berlin, an institution that aims to research, and communicate, the atrocity of Nazi crimes and to work against the forgetting of history. The site where Topography of Terror is based, in the centre of the city, once housed the major institutions from which the Third Reich wrought terror over Europe and from where genocide was organised /1/. It is thus a unique site where the victims are absent and the perpetrators cannot be commemorated: the primary challenge in dealing with the site.

In the late autumn of 2004, Zumthor's project came to an unfortunate end. After eleven years of planning, arguing and constructing, the authorities of Berlin decided to abandon the partially constructed Topography of Terror building and to commission an alternative, while newspapers speculated about spiralling costs, technical problems and the disagreements of those involved. Eventually, in December of the same year, the early stages of Zumthor's construction were demolished. Nevertheless, the project's unique approach to history and remembrance should be discussed further. Unlike most memorials, Zumthor's project did not seek to represent a historical event mimetically or allegorically, but rather tried to embody the limits of representation by confronting the visitor with a non-representational approach to history.

For the 2012 Olympics, London was announced to us in images and words which combined sophisticated rhetoric and crude simplification. Two related promises emerged from the compact between design and politics: to replace a fragmented, neglected and polluted area with a smooth, harmonious new city district; and to bequeath an enduring foundation, a ‘legacy’, to the future. The references to ecology and inequality can be identified with their early twenty-first century moment, but the spatial strategy of a city in a park was something of a throwback to the twentieth and nineteenth centuries: a techno-pastoral in which nature redeems the city from its fallen state. In short: a vision of the future inherited from the past.

I cannot recall when and how I first heard of Ralph Erskine, but by 1975 I was well aware of his work and included Byker in an article on architecture for the Chambers Encyclopaedia Yearbook, setting it among the most significant British architectural events of the year.

The September 1965 meeting of Team 10 in Berlin was another occasion on which the ‘family’ gathered to present and discuss projects and ideas. Like other Team 10 meetings, issues of modernisation, inhabitation, post-war reconstruction, the welfare state, consumer society and the role of the architect were subjects of heated debate. After the famous 1959 meeting in Otterlo at which Team 10 emerged out of CIAM, the core group members were still trying to determine the character and size of their group, which would enable them to reach some kind of unity while maintaining a diversified outlook. The list of 30 invitees included familiar names alongside a few newcomers, among them the Israeli, German-born planner-architect Artur Glikson, who had been invited to join the meeting by Aldo van Eyck. The gathering was to be informal but, unlike invitations to previous meetings, this one, sent by Shadrach Woods, did not propose any specific theme. The meeting was motivated partly by the establishment of the new branch office of Candilis-Josic-Woods in Berlin, set up to supervise construction of the Free University. Presentations took place at the Akademie der Künste, in the Hansaviertel, the showcase district for modern architecture built in the latter half of the 1950s [1, 2].

Architects, engineers and researchers alike often cite practical reasons for building with wood. Since the development of curved glulam beams and columns over a century ago, the widespread use of massive structural timber elements has allowed architects and engineers to design and build in wood with unprecedented speed and scale. Moreover, rising concerns of climate change and the carbon-dioxide emissions associated with construction encourage the use of wood as a viable alternative to steel and concrete, due to CO2 sequestration in trees.

In mid- and high-rise buildings, the current shift from steel and concrete towards massive structural timber elements like glulam, laminated-veneer lumber (LVL) and cross-laminated timber (CLT) is evident in a number of recently completed timber buildings in Europe, ranging from seven to nine storeys. Several speculative design proposals have also been made for ‘timber towers’ of thirty, fortytwo and even sixty-five storeys, recognising that designing with massive structural timber elements in high-rise buildings is still in its infancy. This paper offers a new perspective on building with wood at this scale, beyond carbon sequestrationand construction.

This is an extract from the daybook kept by the architects working in the on-site project office which Ralph Erskine and his partner Vernon Gracie established in a former shop during the redevelopment of the Byker area of Newcastle upon Tyne in the 1970s [2]. About the office, Erskine wrote:

In his influential review of the redevelopment in Byker, Peter Malpass claimed that ‘the office represented an unusually thorough attempt by architects to immerse themselves in the culture of a particular set of clients’.

The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park (QEOP) opened to the public in 2013/2014. In the preceding ten years the future of this 250-hectare site in east London was subjected to intense debate, planning and envisioning. This paper analyses the evolving vision for the Park during this period. The analysis contributes to the literature on this significant case, but it also helps us to appreciate the challenges associated with event-led urban projects and the design and management of public parks in the twenty-first century. The paper is based on the author's attendance at over thirty seminars, conferences and public events 2004–2014 at which officials and relevant professionals presented their work and ideas about the Park. These presentations were analysed alongside the enormous number of policies, plans and strategies (and accompanying media coverage) published to reveal the sort of place that was envisioned by the professionals hired to shape it.