The prompt circulation of images and representations of buildings has not only expanded the audience for architecture, but has also become a critical tool which – quite beyond the architect's reach – is more influential than the ideas, concepts and buildings they represent. Images have become such an important element that they are not only the primary medium through which most architectural works first engage an audience, but their circulation has come to precede the act of building. The mass dissemination of architectural imagery has enabled a consumption of architecture which has not only transformed buildings into culture, but also ensured a significant displacement in architectural reception. While in prior years the dissemination of images took place after the built object, recently, the diffusion of imagery not only precedes the building, but also conditions its reception.

I wanted to get into the real world – not that the Jane Drew world was very real, considering what was going on. We were fiddling around with six, I think it was, wartime agricultural cottages and then Jane got this famous job of Kitchen Consultant to the Gas Council. She was appointed to do kitchens because women architects were supposed to know about kitchens.

There is little question that we live in an age of images, in a mediated environment in which the image is ever-present – with its effects nevertheless still growing [1]. This essay – as an introduction to the four papers that follow – examines aspects of the complex questions surrounding the image and those that accompany the shift from print to pixel.

The question of the nature of knowledge is vital in understanding the relation between research and practice. This question is vital, not least for architectural researchers since they often have to struggle with a rationalist ideal that research-based knowledge must be context-independent. But architects ‘know’ that this kind of knowledge does not cover the need for knowledge in architecture and design, a field between the humanities, social sciences and technology. Several volumes of arq contain articles and letters on this subject.

The work of the American painter Jackson Pollock speaks to us not only through exhibitions of paintings hung on gallery walls, but also through the films and photographs [1] of Hans Namuth which exposed Pollock's phased working process to the public. In the first of two distinct phases Pollock is seen immersed in, and in intimate interaction with, a large horizontal canvas. This records traces of his movement and expressive gestures in heterogeneous media. A second phase is then triggered by a pivotal operation: the horizontal recording and working surface is transposed to a vertical viewing plane. Leo Steinberg recounts that Pollock: ‘would tack the canvas on to a wall – to get acquainted with it, he used to say; to see where it wanted to go. He lived with the painting in its uprighted state, as with a world confronting his human posture’.

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.

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.

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.

If we ask ourselves the question, ‘why does Jim Stirling loom so large in the landscape of British and continental architecture?’, the answer does not come easily. We will begin by saying that Leicester alone – its clarity, its curious fragility, its wit and inventiveness – earned him a singular place in modern architectural history. It seemed to have arrived just at the moment when modern architecture had reached its expiry date. Next we will probably remember the straightforward intelligence of his essays on Le Corbusier's post-war work. But we will just as quickly disown one or another of the later buildings: the Tate, the Fogg, or most often, the elephantine competition entry for the Bibliothèque Nationale. We will ignore the fine restraint of the architecture building at Rice University and instead bemoan the cartoonish (but astonishing) facades of the Berlin Wissenschaftszentrum. We will uneasily ponder his lifelong love of quotation and self-quotation, recognising the wit but wondering about the line where quotation becomes laziness or theft.