The announcement that American architect Steven Holl had won the competition to design a new building for the Glasgow School of Art opposite Charles Rennie Mackintosh's original (built 1897–1909), and the revelation of his plans to the public, provoked plenty of criticism about the possible relationship between the two buildings. Professor William Curtis first wrote on the topic in the Architects' Journal almost a year from the announcement, and his opinions on the relationship were forthright: ‘Rather than dialogue’, he argued, ‘there is a dumb lack of articulation in construction and material.’ A response came in the following issue of the AJ from David Porter, then Professor at the Mackintosh School of Architecture. He disagreed with Curtis, claiming that the new building will have ‘an extraordinary spatial richness’ and that ‘the original sketch Curtis saw in Glasgow last December has progressed very rapidly’, for it was but an early stage in ‘a design strategy driven forward with a mixture of poetics and ruthless pragmatics: qualities that are singularly appropriate in this context, and developed with artistry and skill’.

Curtis subsequently wrote a further open letter to ‘the Governors, the Director, the Faculty, Students, Staff, Alumnae and Alumni’ of Glasgow School of Art, which was published in facsimile in the Architects' Journal on 3 March 2011:

What a disappointment then to contemplate Steven Holl's proposed addition. It is horrendously out of scale, it dominates Mackintosh, it does not create a decent urban space, it fails to deal with the context near and far, it is clumsy in form and proportion, it lacks finesse in detail, has no relationship to the human figure, and is a stillborn diagram dressed up in Holl clichés such as ‘iceberg’ glass.

Architecture in Northern Ireland in the twentieth century followed much the same pattern as elsewhere in the British Isles moving, broadly, from historic styles around the turn of the century, through a phase of Arts and Crafts activity for a decade or so, until settling down to a concentrated period of interest in Neo-Georgian styling in the 1920s and '30s. This inter-war era included, however, some examples of Modernism, primarily of an ornamented Art Deco type but occasionally of a more plain variety which ranged between Functionalism and the International Style. Examples of this type of modern architecture – characterised by flat roofs, white walls, large horizontal windows and a general avoidance of ornamentation – formed only a comparatively small part of the overall output of the period in Northern Ireland, and, for most architects who were involved, their contribution amounted to little more than a building or two; such was the prevailing tradition-bound architectural mood of the time.

One architect in Northern Ireland, however, demonstrated a commitment to the Modern Movement that appears to have been greater than most. That was Philip Bell, whose name has been mentioned from time to time by various commentators, whether as a designer of Modernist houses or as the architect of one other particularly well-known building of the 1930s in Northern Ireland, the Strangford Lough Yacht Club House, which was an accomplished and stylish enough building to have been featured in the English architectural press at the time.

As to the isothermicity of the translucent walls, experimental laboratories will be able in the near future to give us a new translucent material whose isothermal properties will be equal to that of the thickest wall. From then on, we will witness the inauguration of a new era: buildings will be altogether hermetically closed. Windows will no longer be needed on the façade; consequently neither dust nor flies nor mosquitoes will enter the houses; nor will noise.

Le Corbusier's fascination with light and glass formed a continuing thread throughout his career. After his maxim ‘architecture is lighted floors’ came the passionate discourses to defend the building's openness, first with his fenêtre en longueur, the ribbon window, and ultimately with his emblematic pan de verre, the glass wall that would not only provide sunlight-flooded interiors but would also most significantly contribute to shape the Modernist imagery. Despite the profuse explorations invested in this concept, Le Corbusier would always lament his failure to execute his ‘pan de verre 100%’ in the way he would have desired: ‘as a mur neutralisant constituted by a double glass-wall with an internal cavity through which conditioned air would circulate, hot in winter, cold in summer’.

The idea of the mur neutralisant was born as part of a challenging environmental theory for buildings, termed either respiration exacte or air exact [1], proposed by Le Corbusier in collaboration with his cousin and practice partner Pierre Jeanneret in 1928. Le Corbusier would describe this theory in two of his most dogmatic publications: first, as one of his lectures (5 October 1929) collected in Précisions (1930) and, second, as part of La Ville Radieuse (1935), his manifesto on modern habitation.