Ian Fleming's recently-opened Floridiana Hotel, in Miami Beach, where James Bond's client, Mr Junius du Pont, ‘promise[s] to make [him] comfortable’, was correctly matched in the film adaptation of Goldfinger with Morris Lapidus's Modernist Fontainebleau Hotel (1952–54) rather than with Miami's Mediterranean-style Hotel Floridian. Fleming was not enthusiastic about the architecture of the most expensive hotel in the world (at the time of its opening), nor about its ‘rich and dull’ gardens. He obviously chose it as a representation of the ‘easy, soft, high’ life of 1959 in Miami, and as the perfect setting for a gathering of American millionaires and secret agents, gamblers, gangsters, hitmen and prostitutes.

Directly below Bond['s Aloha Suite], the elegant curve of the Cabana Club swept down to the beach – two storeys of changing-rooms below a flat roof dotted with chairs and tables and an occasional red and white striped umbrella. Within the curve was the brilliant green oblong Olympic-length swimming-pool fringed on all sides by row upon row of mattressed steamer chairs on which the customers would soon be getting their fiftydollar-a-day sunburn.

The evening before, Bond had ‘the most delicious meal […] in his life’, at the most expensive restaurant of Miami. But the thought of ‘eating like a pig […] the easy life, the rich life revolted him. He felt momentarily ashamed of his disgust […] It was the puritan in him that couldn't take it'. It was also Fleming's nod to his readers, barely out of the grim austerity of postwar Britain, where food was rationed until 1954, bombsites abounded, housing was severely substandard or temporary, smog was thick and yellow, and wartime shortages lingered to the end of the decade. Despite Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's optimistic 1957 assurance to his fellow Conservatives that most of them had ‘never had it so good’, outside lavatories and no central heating were still common. His calls for ‘restraint and common sense’ were hardly answered by Bond's life of oyster-and-champagne dining and air-conditioned vacationing.

In 2000, the Crown Street redevelopment in Glasgow's New Gorbals area was completed following a masterplan by Piers Gough and building designs by Page and Park, Elder and Cannon, Hypostyle Architects and others. Built on symbolically contested ground previously occupied by the Gorbals tenements (1870s–1960s) and the high-rise Hutchesontown flats (1960s–1990s), the new development is a textbook example of neotraditional design. The project features ornamented facades, bay windows, courtyards and corridor streets along with local references to the heyday of Glasgow tenements during the late nineteenth century.

This paper shows that the new tenements on Crown Street contributed to Glasgow's economic revival strategies by reconfiguring the site and supporting a positive view of Glasgow's Victorian era. In this sense, the architects adapted design preferences – which at the time were evident all over Europe and North America – to a local agenda.

The new tenements reconcile conflicting perspectives: on the one hand a break almost as comprehensive as the urban renewal of the 1960s, and on the other hand an idea of historical continuity and long-lasting community life, which rested on a revised conception of the city's industrial past. Conveying a historical image cleared of imperfections they communicate a message of permanence that stands in stark contrast to the area's historic upheavals, but nonetheless contributed to the viability of the new neighbourhood.

According to the architectural theorist Charles Jencks, a major problem in architecture at this moment is the spiritual crisis, and the loss of a shared metaphysics. He believes that it is the task of architects to take responsibility for the public and esoteric meanings of a civic building, although this is an especially difficult task in a global culture where many believe there is no shared value system. Jencks is aware of the problem but at the same time he believes that a new paradigm in architecture is emerging. He describes this new paradigm as follows:

We have moved from a mechanistic view of the universe to one that is self-organising at all levels from the atom to the galaxy. Illuminated by the computer, this new worldview is paralleled by changes now occurring in architecture.

Jencks concedes that this shift in worldview is only beginning, that there is no widespread cultural movement under way, but one can discern the beginnings of a shift in architecture that relates to a profound transformation in science. Jencks is particularly interested in new sciences of complexity: fractals, nonlinear dynamics, self-organising systems, and the new cosmology. At the core of this new worldview is the new cosmology, ‘cosmogenesis’, which reveals the universe as a single, unfolding, creative event perpetually striving for new levels of self-organisation. Cosmogenesis tells us a new story of the universe and therefore Jencks perceives it as our new Genesis.

It was neither with music or an acoustic, but with a sense of origin that we wanted to build the work. A work that seeks, is still in the seeking, in search of establishing a road.

It is not often that a generation of people are offered the opportunity to decide the future course of a nation. In a little over a year around four million people living across Scotland will be afforded the monumental chance to decide whether the place they call home should be an independent country. As both ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ campaigns debate with claim and counterclaim over a wide range of emotive issues neither side can definitively answer, the grassroots campaigns of the pro-independence side are offering imaginative visions of a different Scotland building upon the cultural gains of devolution.

We must build for this nation a big passion for innovation. We must make the development of the creative mind a national agenda. Unless we get really serious about cultivating creativity and promoting innovation, the transformation to an innovation economy will not really happen.

It is a commonplace to describe twentieth-century Modernist architecture as utopian, but doing so arguably has less to do with putative social agendas than with explaining the failure of such work to deliver on extravagant promises. By interrogating utopian declarations for twentieth-century architecture and visionary urban representations, the aim of this article is to sharpen the loose pairing of Modernist architecture and Utopia. Consideration is also given to how undue emphasis on representation supports post-rationalisations of failure as the inevitable teleology of Utopia, which serves only to empty architecture of its ethical function. To conclude, some preliminary thoughts on the prospects of a more convincingly utopian modern architecture are advanced.

This paper reflects on the contemporary design practice of Scottish rural housing, through a comparative and analytical approach, examining how three architects, including the author, devise architectural languages embedded in the countryside and locality as inspiration in addressing modern architectural design within a conservative planning tradition. While promoting innovative architectural and settlement design at national level, planning systems at local government level in Scotland often tend to promote versions of bastardised Georgian villas complete with dormer and astragal windows. The author's award-winning practice has challenged the approach, and this paper represents a practitioner's self-reflection in analysing key elements of the implicitly grounded concepts of his design ethos, while comparing this with other contemporary designers with similar but different approaches. The paper provides a brief overview of the planning context and the development of both rural built form and moral philosophies related to the religious traditions of differing localities, prior to a review of the work of the three practices and a reflection on the way in which these practices ‘ground’ their work within context. This, it is argued, has relevance not only for the planning system, but also for other practices, and wider relevance for embedding research within practice.

The aim of this study is to chart the manifestation of the Chapel at Ronchamp as a plastic organism and to identify its complex intrinsic visual qualities. To use Gordon Cullen's words, the work involves ‘charting the structure of the subjective world’. Although it has graphic and figurative aspects, the Chapel at Ronchamp achieves existential meaning primarily through plasticity, in other words the visual medium of form, space, polychromy (colour as a relative phenomenon) and texture, revealed in light. As in the case of all spatially rich unicellular works of architecture, the charting of the chapel has involved about ten three-day field studies over a three-year period, recording diurnal and seasonal variations and human activity; because this is uncharted territory it has first been necessary to ‘learn’ the building. The working method has involved recording observations, accompanied by photographic sketches at fifteen minute intervals; the observations have then been correlated with a heliodon model and indicative plans and sections, including sun-paths; the character of the light admitting apertures being of particular significance. Spatial and colour relationships have then been simulated in the studio.

In the summer of 2009, while on vacation in Italy, I lay on a deck chair on a beach under the scorching sun reading Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. I had taken Mike Davis's book as holiday reading after becoming interested in attitudes to sustainability as represented in films through supervising the unpublished dissertation ‘The Science and Fiction of Sustainable Living’. The dissertation analysed approaches to the green movement of the 1970s versus those held today. It did this through the study of ecological science fiction movies made during the two periods. As someone grounded in humanities research, using film studies research methods rather than conventional building science methods seemed to me an engaging, original approach to sustainability. The dissertation compared the 1972 American environmental science fiction film Silent Running to the 2007 British science fiction film Sunshine. During this supervision, the student gave me a copy of the films. Because Silent Running resonated with me, I took it on that same Italian holiday and watched it again. I recall thinking that Silent Running offered a departure point for an alternative kind of sustainable design studio. Then and there, I selected a film clip that I screened – in the background and without volume – at studio presentations to students held in September 2009.