This paper was written for a special issue of the Ekaterinburg Architecton devoted to the rich Constructivist heritage of that hitherto closed city beyond the Urals. Docomomo-Russia has an active working party there, but the combination of public poverty and vigorous real-estate pressures is making the fate of these buildings uncertain. This paper sought to offer some fundamental structuring ideas to the debate. We publish it here to stimulate discussion of problems also current elsewhere, but the author stresses that it should be read with its original purpose and audience in mind.

Pattern languages help us tackle the complexity of a variety of systems ranging from computer software, to buildings and cities. Each ‘pattern’ represents a rule governing one working piece of a complex system, and the application of pattern languages can be done systematically. Design that wishes to connect to human beings needs the information contained in a pattern language. This paper describes how to validate existing pattern languages, how to develop them, and how they evolve. The connective geometry of urban interfaces is derived from the architectural patterns of Christopher Alexander.

Although hailed by Sigfried Giedion as the leader of the Third Generation of modern architects, Jørn Utzon has generally been interpreted as a Nordic regionalist, in succession to Asplund and Aalto. Drawing on both familiar and unpublished material, taken from a monograph to be published by Edition Bløndal later this year, the paper explores striking, but previously neglected or ignored parallels between the work of Utzon and Le Corbusier. A comprehensive assessment of Utzon's work is long overdue, and should situate him in the mainstream of international modern architecture.

The necessity for lighting guidelines to be rewritten is becoming increasingly obvious, particularly as far as daylighting design is concerned. In this study, current lighting recommendations for the sport of fencing are examined alongside the typical environmental conditions in which it has been practised. A detailed review of the visual environment of a daylit building designed in the '30s, Luigi Moretti's fencing academy in Rome, demonstrates that a broad range of criteria need to be taken into account when lighting requirements are defined.

Architects are, with few exceptions, ‘school trained’. This paper traces the history of the relationship between architectural education and practice. It describes the approaches developed at Cambridge and the Bartlett in the 1960s - and the theories that each embodied: one based on architecture as a cultural manifestation and the other governing the science of building. The paper concludes with the view that we need to be more realistic in our attitude to artistic aspiration as a component of studying architecture while strengthening the ways by which building performance can be tested.

Architecture in South Africa is at a crossroads. After years of repression and isolation during which contemporary architecture lost its way, there is now a desperate need for architects to respond to the social and cultural challenges of a society riven by massive material contrasts. Within architecture schools, a student body more representative of society than hitherto is engaged in projects which reflect the very diverse needs of the community. Central to the effectiveness of such teaching programmes is the presence of teachers fully engaged in practice, creating a responsible architecture for a renewed nation.

The relationship between the creation and experience of architecture is a little discussed topic. If architectural ideas are only fully understood with the illumination of construction, what are the implications of teaching architectural design in the academic studio? Linked to this is the issue of time: how do materials weather and age and how in this youth-obsessed era (in both architectural society as well as society generally) can we rediscover the importance (and beauty) of building buildings which are enhanced as they grow old. Three small (in one case tiny) built projects are examined to consider these relationships.

In the first issue of arq, the author argued that the adoption of a model, or perhaps models, borrowed from the procedures of, respectively, the humanities and the sciences does not constitute a sufficient basis from which to define the nature and content of the discipline of Architecture. The present paper returns to this theme and develops further the proposition that design practice, both its processes and its products, constitutes the core, the centre, of the discipline and goes on to examine the implications of this for the form, content and delivery of architectural education.