The painter Emil Nolde's studio was built in 1927 and, the following year, construction was begun on what was to become the house that he shared with his wife Ada in Seebüll. The building was located on a mound in the middle of the marsh, not far from the new border between Germany and Denmark that was made as a result of the vote in 1920. Nolde had designed the building according to the principle that it was to have ‘three facades following the passage of the sun’. Like a sunflower, the facades of the building were to reach out and take in the changing light in step with the sun's flight across the sky. There would be ample opportunity for both skylight and sunlight to enter the building as the positioning on a mound raised the building above the surroundings. In Nolde's view, up on the mound, ‘the entire celestial sphere was above us; it was greater than a semicircle - strange how even a small elevation in the flat landscape can make the vault of heaven seem larger’.

Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren's interest in ancient buildings has been noted by historians of architecture and natural philosophy alike. The two men used to meet to discuss descriptions – both verbal and visual – and models of ancient buildings that had long since disappeared and were known only through ancient accounts, or that remained only in a ruined or altered form. These included the Temple of Solomon, described at different places in the Bible, Porsenna's tomb, cited as an example of extravagance by Pliny the Elder, and the Hagia Sophia. In 1675, Hooke recorded such a meeting in his diary: ‘With Sir Chr. Wren. Long Discourse with him about the module [model] of the Temple at Jerusalem’.

In 1983, the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture mounted an exhibition of Zaha Hadid's work titled Planetary Architecture II. An image from this event shows Hadid as she points to one of the drawings on the wall surrounded by a group of listeners. The interior is saturated with drawings. As they unfold before the viewer, the drawings blur the boundaries between walls, floors and ceiling. An interior space wrapped in drawing, orchestrated by the exhibitor, the image of this show is nevertheless also an expression of the pedagogical ideas of Alvin Boyarsky, the chairman of the AA school between 1971 and 1990.

At first glance, it might seem counterintuitive to insist upon Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc's (1814-79) critical interest in the human body as a metaphor for style in architecture. Not only did he oppose the anthropomorphic metaphors for style touted by Neo-Classical theorists at the École des Beaux-Arts, but he was most widely known in the nineteenth century for his preoccupation with the monumental and structural potential of modern materials such as iron. This reception of Viollet-le-Duc's thought persisted in the twentieth century with Sir John Summerson's estimation of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier's debt to the constructive principles of his architectural organicism. Such accounts have made it possible to interpret construction and/or structure as the main ‘body’ of Viollet-le-Duc's architecture theory. However, this reading confuses the eclipse of Neo-Classical anthropomorphic metaphors for style - which translated the proportional relationships between the human body's constituent parts into a compositional system of design - with the complete eclipse of critical references to the human body in the French style debates of the nineteenth century. As we trace the role of the human body in Viollet-le-Duc's style theory, it becomes clear that the principles of human variation in biology and ethnography enabled him to account for the cultural variations of national peoples in his conception of style.

The schism between our admiration of the artefacts of the great architectural practices of the twentieth century, and our lack of knowledge as to how those achievements were manifest, is one of the most enduring characteristics of modern architecture. Modern architectural practice and its sustaining historiography has typically focused on the image of the designed object at the expense of the skills and conditions that shaped it; a focus on reputation rather than comprehension. Indeed those constituting contingencies of design are more often seen as obstructing the architectural vision and true reality of experience; hence the fixation on a singular (and possibly post-rationalised) first ‘spark’ of conception and the photogenic qualities of the realised, and usually uninhabited, object. Dalibor Veseley is right to state that ‘instrumentality (techne) must always be subordinated to symbolic representation (poiesis), because techne refers only to a small segment of reality, while poiesis refers to reality as a whole'. Nevertheless, in the current climate the statement is likely to be understood as further legitimising the continuing neglect of what architects actually do.

This paper describes an A-level course (a two-year course for 16–19 year old students) which concentrates entirely on architecture using an art studies syllabus as its basis. The course has run since 2001, during which time it has grown considerably in popularity. The first year concentrates on the history of architecture and on how different histories are perceived from different viewpoints using a comparative analysis of several buildings. In the second year the emphasis is on how architecture emerges from and affects social interaction, through a close study of a single building. The paper goes on to discuss the value of the course and qualification, especially in relation to further architectural study at university.

Although the general influence of the architecture of East Asian countries on the formation and development of modern architecture has been widely recognised, detailed evidence about the extent and nature of this influence has been accruing through a growing body of research. This began with Chinoiserie, a Chinese-style fashion around the eighteenth century in Europe, which was imprinted in the Rococo interior as well as in the jardin anglo-chinois with its Chinese pavilions. Then in the late nineteenth century there was a European zeal for Japanese art, Japonisme, which appeared in the Arts and Crafts Movement and Art Nouveau. Consequently, East Asian influences came to be reflected in the concepts and designs of numerous modern architects. The representative figure is the American master Frank Lloyd Wright, who adopted the spatial concept of Laozi (or Lao-Tzu) and the organic characteristics of Japanese architecture. China and Japan had also appeared in various publications and architecture played a typical role in the interchange. Also, some notable Westerners had visited China and Japan.

In 1935 I worked for Mendelsohn and Chermayeff on the Gilbey building for three months in the summer – and Birkin Haward took me under his wing.

By 1937, I'd finished my first three years at the Architectural Association and felt that I wasn't getting anywhere – producing schemes overnight. I wanted to work on real buildings.

We gazed with earnest hope for signs of recovery and longed for the airwaves to tell us that ‘the worst is past, economic Armageddon has been averted, and house prices are rising again’. What follows engages with debates on economic development and places the recent crisis in the architectural and building industry in historical context. It argues that it was irrational for architects and contractors to behave as if the boom would go on forever. Capitalist development has always been marked by periodic crises, and building production has always exhibited cycles of expansion and contraction.

Studio remains the physical and intellectual space at the heart of every good architectural school. It is a forum for the sharing of ideas and a place in which to work together in order to explore architecture and its role in shaping our environment, society and culture. It should reveal interesting contrasts and synergies between the particular and the universal, the individual and the collective.