There is ambiguity and confusion concerning the nomenclature of parallel projection. Today, such representations are often broadly identified as axonometrics. However, the actual history of parallel projection, delineated by oblique and axonometric projections, reveals inherent spatial differences. By clarifying the intrinsic demarcations between these two forms of parallel projection, one may bring into question anew the approaches and applications of parallel projection as an architectural form of representation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This is a short tale of two competing institutions and two of their most celebrated figures. On one side is Cooper Union – that hulking Manhattan brownstone, an island on the intersection of Lafayette Street and the Bowery where Ricardo Scofidio (1935) silently honed his art of drawing like an angel. On the other is Princeton University, where his partner (and partner), Elizabeth Diller (1954) is often resident. Princeton sits in the heart of the New Jersey woods, literally and metaphorically, and despite its baronial coniferous presence, is most notable in architectural circles for its rhetorical rather than physical manufacture. Diller + Scofidio's is a marriage whose vicissitudes are etched all over their work.

In the mid 1920s, a physiologist, a glass technologist, and a zoo embarked on an exciting new venture which promised to turn buildings into therapeutic devices. Their project was to devise an architectural glass which would admit the beneficial, therapeutic ultraviolet spectrum of sunlight into the building; they called their invention ‘Vitaglass’. Vitaglass was the first ultraviolet ray glass – one of the more curious products to emerge from the 1920s architectural glass industry. Its distinguishing feature was that it enabled the invisible ultraviolet radiation of the sun to be admitted into the building; its refined chemistry promised to ‘let health into the building’ where ordinary soda-lime glass had blocked it out [1]..

Jørn Utzon, designer of Sydney Opera House, the most famous and controversial building of the twentieth-century that unwittingly ushered in the contemporary fascination with ‘iconic’ buildings, died at his home in Denmark on 5 December 2008 at the age of ninety.

Juha Leiviskä, winner of the 2008 Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize for Architecture and Town planning, is widely recognised as Finland's leading architect. From the beginning of his career, his work has remained outside the mainstream of modern architecture, and it was already apparent in his competition entries in the 1960s that he was creating a characteristic language of form based on his own architectural values and experiences, and operating in a subtle interaction with the surroundings. Simo Paavilainen spoke to Juha Leiviskä at his home in Helsinki in spring 2004, and the interview appears here for the first time in translation.

In Nicolae Ceausescu's ‘Systematisation’ programme, implemented across Romania throughout the 1980s, power was played out in acts of building. The city of Bucharest provided a visible symbol of the centralisation of authority, manifest in the construction of the Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism and the House of the People. Beginning from this historical context, this paper revisits the work of one group of student architects in Romania, Form-Trans-Inform, who used spatial practices to question orthodoxies in architecture around them as protests against repressions under the monolithic Ceausescu regime.

‘Alternate Currents’, held in Sheffield's Showroom Cinema in late November, set out to politicise architectural practice. Part of an AHRC-funded project on alternative architectural practices, it was convened by the University of Sheffield's Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till (whose introduction follows this report). The event was an invitation to go beyond the normative, specifically by dealing with architecture's economic, political and social dimensions. Although it was mixed in all respects, for me, trained in social anthropology, two issues emerged as particularly interesting.

In March 2008 Kees Kaan, of Claus and Kaan Architects, gave his inaugural lecture as Practice Professor of Architectural Design at Delft Technical University – the school from which he graduated in 1987. He explained to his audience that after his student years spent designing imaginary projects he most wanted to design in order to build, to make ‘designs that were thicker than paper’. This was accomplished in 1987–97 in intensive daily co-operation with Felix Claus and then developed over the last decade in their offices in Amsterdam and Rotterdam with new partners. The following is an edited extract from his lecture where, after discussing practice, education, societal interest and the changed architectural market of the Netherlands, he turned to architectural vision, understanding and responsibility.

This paper sets out to challenge assumptions about both normative practice and alternative practice. A historical case study of alternative practice is used to re-read the nature of architectural production since the modern period, and a contemporary mode of alternative practice is proposed which operates within the established profession but is informed by this alternative reading [1, 2]. This proposal seeks to remain fully engaged with the production of the built environment, using to its advantage rather than resisting the mechanisms of the profession.

‘The Glimmer of Other Worlds’ was first written for the Alternate Currents conference at the University of Sheffield in Autumn 2007. It was prompted by my experiences as a teacher attempting to explain to students what the idea of an alternative to capitalist architectural and building production might mean.

‘Urban life suggests meetings, the confrontation of differences, reciprocal knowledge and acknowledgement (including ideological and political confrontation), ways of living, “patterns”, which coexist in the city’.

A different world is possible [1]. The work of an increasing number of architects reveals a renewed social interest and aspiration to define new instruments for coping with the issues of our cities. These architects do not subscribe to the agendas of bureaucrats, authorities and market players. Instead they listen to people's remarks, understand their problems and develop tools that stimulate people to think critically and actively about the built environment. For these activists, architecture goes beyond just designing buildings. It has to identify the needs of people and possible forms of aggregation, while stimulating processes that will enable us to live better. Groups like Team 10 and the movements of the '70s laid the bases of these practices, but unlike the past century, today every project becomes a sensitisation campaign that involves the community at the local level and that stimulates collective processes, spontaneous creativity and activism in order to incite a new political role for architecture.