While Le Corbusier's spiral plan projects have long been debated for their symbolic and rhetorical meaning - dealing with initiation, procession, ritual, generative nature, unlimited growth and so on - little attention is paid to their actual production as designs. If we look for the emergence of the spiral plan as a production of Le Corbusier's studio then we might begin with a sketch design for the Villa La Roche made in 1923 and not with the project for the Mundaneum (1928) generally credited as the point at which the architect 'invents' the spiral type [1]. Taking the Villa La Roche spiral experiment as a tentative beginning marks a much longer history of the spiral plan type in Le Corbusier's work that links the architect's early domestic projects to later major public building proposals such as the Venice Hospital (1964).

The facts of thematic life are that every manifestation of a theme tends to divide into two parts. This is irrespective of whatever tonality is employed. In the West, even the simplest diatonic melody (that is one which we perceive to be in a tonality derived from major and minor scales) does this. For example there is a ‘natural’ tendency to gravitate between one note (the tonic) and another note a fifth higher or a fourth lower (the dominant); but such a modulation is not necessary to qualify part of a theme as a different phrase in the musical sentence; there may simply be a moment where the music pauses, reaching a recognisable point before moving to another independent fragment. Moreover, in sophisticated examples of bipartite form, such as the sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, the duality is engendered not so much by a single theme as by an ensemble of aspects to the initial material, which in their turn form a group by themselves - a section - and where the borders between such sections are not always clearly definable.

On 15 August 1965, The Beatles performed before more than 55,600 fans at Shea Stadium, New York, USA. In what was by far the biggest event to date of its type, that evening a dramatic revelation of the commercial possibilities of popular music took place, and changed the nature of the music business for ever. Simultaneously, despite using more powerful amplification than had been used before, the virtually non-existent connection between the musicians and their audience revealed the enormous technical and architectural challenges of large-scale concerts. Though this concert took place in a permanent building structure, the equipment it was hoped would temporarily alter its use for performance purposes was portable. That it was clearly inadequate for this task reinforced the need for new mobile facilities that would do the job better [1, 2].

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’.