This project began when one of my research colleagues, a civil engineer, pointed to his very thorough study of daylighting in buildings and said: ‘Here is all that architects need to know about light – why don't they use it?’ A discussion followed about what kind of knowledge is relevant, when, and for whom. It ended with the questions: ‘What kind of knowledge do architects really use in their design process?’ and ‘How can we as researchers provide the different kinds of knowledge that are useful for practice?’ These questions became the basis of a research project and this paper reports on its studies and discussions.

In a unique architectural style of the twentieth century, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) realised a new type of modern space defined by an unobstructed clear volume enclosed by framed glass skin. This is generally referred to as Mies's universal space and this paper will attempt to interpret Miesian universal space in terms of the idea of tectonically defining space. Mies referred to the term ‘tectonic’, or ‘architectonic’, as constructive appearance exposing the skeleton structure. For Mies, the concept of tectonic was connected to a glassy materiality that permitted the unambiguously constructed appearance of a skeletal structure. He regarded the glass skin as a ‘tectonic means’ and the instrument of a new art of building.

In the interwar years European historians and critics of architecture tried to assimilate science into architecture and arts. For example Sigfried Giedion's Space, Time, and Architecture (1941) attempted to bring Einsteinian spacetime into architectural theory, while Nikolaus Pevsner's An Outline of European Architecture (c. 1943) used space as a criterion to differentiate architecture from other art forms. These brought to the idea of ‘space’ a distinctly modern meaning, making it a universal signifier; whereas in the last decade, architectural historians have argued for the historical specificity of space and a deeper examination of the social and spatial practices embedded in the making of space. This study inquires into the atemporal readings of space, using Lefebvre's theory on the production of space by ‘interested subjects’.

This paper involves an analysis of the role of architectural projects which can be defined as ‘catalysts’ to urban renewal. The aims of this paper are twofold and the paper is divided accordingly into two main parts. The first aim is to discuss, with reference to the work of a number of urban and architectural thinkers, a range of ways in which the term ‘urban catalyst’ has been both conceptualised and applied. Discussion is structured in relation to the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of a ‘catalyst’ in the field of chemistry as,

[a] substance that when present in small amounts increases the rate of a chemical reaction or process but which is chemically unchanged by the reaction; a catalytic agent. (A substance which similarly slows down a reaction is occas. called a negative catalyst.)

The Ulster Museum is destined to remain a building that stands somewhat outside time and remote from its society. The building is in two parts that are merged into one: the first Classical, designed by James Wyness and built only in part by 1929, and the second, a transformative concrete extension designed by Francis Pym for a 1963 competition judged by Leslie Martin and opened in 1972 to the most violent year of the conflict in Northern Ireland. The extension is, as Paul Clarke, of the University of Ulster has written, ‘an icon to a period when architecture addressed at the very centre of its responsibility, the optimism of modern life, culture and public space’. Now, after decades of inept alterations and unimaginative curation, its doors are closed for a refurbishment that will disassemble its central ideas together with all the optimism that Clarke alludes to – and this at a time when Northern Ireland has the chance to build the open civil society that it never had and that the museum competition project symbolised in that brief period of opportunity for change forty-six years ago.

This edition of arq assembles a selection of papers presented at the Conference ‘Agency’ organised by the research group called ‘The Agency’ initiated in 2007 in the School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield. We offered to host the 5th AHRA International Conference, giving it the theme of ‘Agency’ and hoping that the submissions would energise the relationships between the humanities, the architectural profession, and society.

‘Agency’ is a beguiling word. It has the immediacy of a call-to-arms and the remoteness and anonymity of a bureaucratic function. Agency, as action in the world, underpins revolutionary social change, and the representation of someone else's interests – usually at a distance – in a governmental or business context. It is implicated in both the agitprop of the Reclaim the Streets network, or Brazil's Homeless Workers Movement, and in state bureaucracies such as the UK Border Agency, or commercial franchises such as the Western Union. The term encapsulates two quite distinctive forms of action: one individuated, collective and immediate; and the other systemic, anonymised and bureaucratic. It is no accident, then, that in academic literature ‘agency’ is often paired with ‘structure’, and in the binarised form, structure/agency, is used to refer to the tension between the creative actions of individuals and the social, political and economic structures that supposedly constrain them. The fact that architects are expected to exercise agency in both of these senses – as creative actors and as representatives of their clients' interests – gives the theme further significance.

‘Building Initiative’ is both the name adopted by a collaborative group of architects, urbanists and artists, and also the term they use to describe the ‘mode of agency’ chosen to inform and realise citizen-led urban regeneration in Belfast [1]. The necessity and forms of this praxis evolved in response to the city's spatial, social and policy environment, and the inability of conventional mechanisms of architectural practice to engage adequately with this context. Building Initiative explored and pursued specific modes of agency, which it termed ‘initiatives’, within a variety of sectors including architectural, planning, educational, academic and media, and at a range of scales from local to international. This created the opportunity to work with a diversity of partner organisations and to develop a correspondingly wide range of strategies. We will look briefly at the context of Belfast and Building Initiative's response to it, focusing specifically on the methods of working that were developed, before concentrating on one project to illustrate these methodologies and processes in application.

Recent criticisms in architectural pedagogy suggest that schools of architecture tend to privilege a narrow section of designers with limited skill-sets, neglecting individual differences. In order to encourage architectural pedagogy to become more inclusive, this paper revisits the value of multiple skill-sets in architectural design – following an original suggestion by Vitruvius – exploring it through the framework of multiple intelligences developed by cognitive psychologist Howard Gardner.

‘As it stands, the concept of popular culture is virtually useless, a melting pot of confused and contradictory meanings capable of misdirecting inquiry up any number of theoretical blind alleys’ […] popular culture is in effect an empty conceptual category, one which can be filled in a wide variety of often conflicting ways, depending on the context of use.

Tony Bennett [quoted] and John Storey in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture