This paper presents changes in the vertical circulation and organisation of merchant palaces, and their influence on multi-family architecture in Venice from 1450 to 1600. Just prior to this period buildings underwent a substantial change in the vertical distribution of floors; this marked the transfer of the commercial-residence casa fondaco prototype into a more complex multi-level building with two semi-autonomous piani nobili palatial apartments. The resulting vertical expansion led to a departure away from the external courtyard staircase as the primary means of vertical circulation. Many Late Gothic palatial buildings incorporated double courtyard staircases that provided individual access to each palatial apartment. However, this scheme consumed a great deal of developable land resulting in the widespread utilisation of interior monumental dog-leg staircases by the Early Renaissance. This simplified internal staircase fitted cleanly into the existing structural logic of both new and remodelled palace buildings.

Early architects paid much attention to the relationship between space and time: the earliest buildings had structures linked to the cycle of the heavenly clock. Indeed, the notion of time emerges naturally from the diurnal rise and fall of the Sun as well as the more leisurely progression of the seasons. Space, on the other hand, is defined by the relationship between objects, implicit as a void. What is more, there is no natural scale, no spatial equivalent of the length of the day.

Architectural practice has become considerably more complex in the last twenty years, not to mention since the days of Wright. Many more professions are involved in realising a building, and the construction industry has become professionalised in areas such as health and safety, management training and continuing professional development. Procurement methods for buildings are proliferating and roles for all involved changing, especially for the architect. Shorter timescales are common and there is a general consensus that, in the UK at least, there is a serious skills shortage in the industry and a decline in the quality of the building trades. The industry has become both more litigious and more international.

With war looming at the end of the 1930s, the government had resurrected most of the existing munition works, the Royal Ordnance Factories, and it had also established new sites. Production was being stepped up, and thousands of workers became employed in areas where accommodation was very difficult to find. Many workers were taken in as lodgers, and temporary buildings or ‘hutments’ were erected, as were hostels for single persons. Also, permanent dwellings for married couples, with or without children, were to be designed and built.

In the internal world of the novel, the writer makes all the decisions. The starting point may be a story, an image, an opening sentence, or an idea. In my case, it was a painting: Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe. I cannot remember when I first saw it; the image of the naked woman staring out of the picture has haunted me for many years. Although she is in the company of fully dressed men, she doesn't appear vulnerable. Her body language, and her eyes in particular, unmistakably reveal a powerful, self-confident and intelligent woman.

This paper is part of a broader research agenda, which aims at an environmental re-reading of selected icons of Modern Architecture that share one characteristic, the development of a free-flow open section. The complex relationship between spatial composition and thermal and climatic conditions within buildings is explored both qualitatively, using analytic drawing, and quantitatively, using simulations with computational fluid dynamics. I am seeking patterns common to both and the work has become an investigation of the concept of architectural space at the intersection between art, technology, climate and perception. Most architects of the Modern Movement addressed this relationship in one way or another. They either praised technology and the emerging ‘machine age’ or rejected it. Today most architectural production appears to have an ambivalent and sometimes contradictory position on technology.

Suburbia is dependent on a global economy but, in spite of this, suburban domesticity in the UK is still very often framed within images of the ‘local’ whereas other parts of suburbia, such as business parks and airports, seem to embrace globalisation through sleek, high-tech, ‘non-place’ aesthetics that seem to eschew the local. The way that these aesthetic differences polarise local and global imagery within suburbia is questionable.

In this article I will explore the relationship between space, language andobjects and interrogate the role of language as a signifier for thetransformation of space through cultural difference. My work is informed by thecontext and the methods of postcolonialism and specifically the notion ofhybridity. If the hybridity of a postcolonial identity is acknowledged, then thespace where these identities are negotiated could also be seen as sharingqualities of overlap and mixing. Influenced by psychoanalytic theories of theself and its relation to others, postcolonial theory has used strategies of‘mimicry’ and ‘hybridity’ as motifsto provide a vocabulary that shifts colonial relations out of the dialectic ofoppressor and oppressed. But following Lefebvre's idea that all spaceis social space, and Foucault's spatialisation of power, the movefrom the historic preoccupation with time to a spatialisation of the processesof knowledge production, allows postcolonial thinking to go beyond thecomplicities of identity politics, which has been one of the major criticisms ofthis mode of thought. As an architect, this opens up certain possibilities ofinterrogating postcolonial subjectivity through the spaces that are occupied andused by those who are implicated within it. This paper will focus on one suchspace: a park in East London.

As its title suggests, ‘The Oxford Conference 2008: 50 Years on – Resetting the Agenda for Architectural Education’ aimed to influence architectural education. Five decades ago, in 1958, fifty delegates representing British members of the profession, industry and teaching institutions attended the first and only other Oxford Conference on Architectural Education organised by the RIBA. Several visitors from abroad and from Commonwealth countries also attended. The 1958 conference articulated the demand to shift architectural education from polytechnics or art schools to universities, and fifty years later the notion that we live in a ‘climate of change’ permeated Oxford Conference 2008 (Oxford 2008). With delegates from forty-two countries representing every continent there was a manifest change in the composition of the delegates, and on the face of it this would suggest that a more diverse attendance made a difference in the spectrum of issues coming to the forefront: but did it?

In the past two decades numerous large-scale informal markets have emerged on the fringes of European cities in the wake of global geopolitical transformations. Relying on individualised long-distance connections and adapting to diverse local situations, they produce a proliferating array of unregulated urban architectures while providing habitats for millions of undocumented existences. One such case is the infamous Arizona Market not far from the north Bosnian town of Brko, a place that has been transformed from a border guard post into a major hub for people trafficking and prostitution and now into a multi-ethnic centre of ubiquitous consumption. Another one, Izmailovo Market in the north-east of Moscow, the largest informal trading centre in the region with links to all parts of the Russian Federation and beyond, has grown into a Babylonian site of 15 specialised trading areas that rivals the Moscow Kremlin both in terms of size and visitor attractiveness. And when the 22nd World Congress of Architecture was held in Istanbul under the motto ‘Grand Bazaar of Architectures’, a bazaar of a very different kind traded outside the tourist centres: a vast network of provisional, informal street markets that establish themselves right alongside the building sites of official urban regeneration, beneath terraces of motorways and next to newly constructed tram lines. Before exploring the dynamics of these spaces in more detail, let us address briefly the socio-economic conditions underlying the rise of informal markets.

The Pop-Art doyens of the Independent Group (IG) and the British design establishment were in two minds about burgeoning British consumerism during the 1950s. Members of IG were busy collaging images appropriated from American consumer culture while members of the British design establishment were fiercely opposed to adopting principles of capitalist consumerism, such as expendability of goods and planning for obsolescence. Protests against consumerist values were voiced by figures of the Modernist design establishment such as historian Nikolaus Pevsner and Michael Farr, then editor of the Council of Industrial Design's publication Design. Their views were reinforced by the stances of the British Standards Institution, the Molony Committee, created in 1959 to review and revise consumer law, and the Consumers' Association, publisher of the popular product-review magazine Which? These organisations held paramount design's durability, function and use. However, such institutionally-sanctioned concerns, in the tradition of the nineteenth-century preoccupation with social empiricism and consumer education, hardly stemmed a rising fascination with what an increasing consumption of goods could teach design.

Zaha Hadid's Kartal Pendik Masterplan (2006) for a new city centre on the east bank of Istanbul proposes the redevelopment of an abandoned industrial site located in a crucial infrastructural node between Europe and Asia as a connecting system between the neighbouring areas of Kartal in the west and Pendik in the east. The project is organised on what its architects call a soft grid, a flexible and adaptable grid that allows it to articulate connections and differences of form, density and use within the same spatial structure [1]. Its final overall design constitutes only one of the many possible configurations that the project may take in response to the demands of the different areas included in the masterplan, and is produced from a script that is able to generate both built volumes and open spaces, skyscrapers as well as parks. The soft grid in fact produces a ‘becoming’ rather than a finite and definitive form: its surface space does not look like a grid, but is derived from a grid operation which is best explained by the project presentation in video animation. The grid here is a process of ‘gridding’, enacted according to ancient choreographed linear movements of measuring, defining, adjusting, reconnecting spaces through an articulated surface rather than superimposed on an ignored given like an indifferent colonising carpet.

The Hydra drawings are the result of a research-by-design project involving architectural students. The drawings have been produced during intensive work sessions organised in March for the last four years on the Greek island of Hydra. The project has been run by architects Cort Ross Dinesen and Claus Peder Pedersen in close dialogue with contributors from other fields such as art history, literary criticism and philosophy: Henrik Oxvig, Fredrik Tygstrup, Steen Nepper Larsen and Malene Busk. The drawings that accompany the text published here were done by Tove Rosén, Emelie Saltas, Guro Sollid and Flemming Rafn Thomsen.

In the nineteenth century, horticulturists such as John Claudius Loudon and Joseph Paxton, aware of the new environmental possibilities of glasshouses that had been demonstrated in the context of horticulture, contemplated the use of fully-glazed structures as a means to creating new types of environments for human beings. While Loudon suggested the use of large glass structures to immerse entire Russian villages in an artificial climate, Henry Cole and Paxton envisioned large-scale winter parks, to function as new types of public spaces. These indoor public spaces were intended to grant the urban population of London access to clean air, daylight and a comfortable climate. Although glasshouses had only been experienced in the immediate context of horticulture, designed in accordance with the specific environmental requirements of foreign plants, rather than the requirements of human comfort and health, they were perceived as a precedent for a new approach to architectural design primarily driven by environmental criteria. The environmental design principles of horticulture were discussed extensively in nineteenth-century horticultural literature such Loudon's Remarks on the Construction of Hothouses (1817), Paxton's Magazine of Botany (1834-49) and the Transactions of the Horticultural Society of London (1812-44). Since the purpose of glasshouses was to facilitate the cultivation of an increasing variety of foreign plants in the temperate climate of Northern Europe, the creation of artificial climates tailored to the specific environmental needs of plants became the primary object of the design.

I've always thought that Leibniz's monadology offers comfort during parallel session conferences. Assuring us that each monad reflects the whole, although from its particular point of view, Leibniz makes the sanguine case that one can make sense of things even if one's viewpoint is sadly singular. In the mad rush from one paper session to the next, knowing that at best one gets to hear a third of what is being said, it helps to invoke a bit of Leibnizian optimism. And indeed, Dublin seemed like a best possible world during the three days of the Defining Space conference taking place in October 2007. Generously hosted and meticulously organised, the University College Dublin-led event succeeded not only in attracting more than eighty papers that contributed to elucidate the concept of space in relation to architecture, art, and the city, but also in creating an atmosphere of conviviality and intellectual generosity which gave the event an unusual sense of sharing.

The document that follows was written by Iain Borden as the contribution on ‘Architecture’ to the Arts and Humanities Research Council's report for the UK Government on ‘The Value of Arts and Humanities Research to Life in the UK’ and offers a further contribution to arq's ongoing discussions about the nature of architectural research.