Two buildings constructed in early twentieth-century Shanghai, one by a U.S. bank, the other by a shipping company, and both designed by a New York architect reveal the complex aesthetic and cultural issues that architecture must address in a global setting. These issues go beyond the buildings' facades to their construction, use, layout, leasing, and imagery. These two examples suggest that more comprehensive analyses of early twentieth-century commercial buildings in many global settings should lead to a clearer understanding of their significance.

With the coming of computers and the Internet, the relationship of the physical and virtual worlds has shifted. Virtual environments will not replace physical ones, but the nature, location, and function of the latter will change, creating both challenges and opportunities for architects.

Practice for us began with a series of near dilapidated cottages in East Anglia which were to be renovated with the help of a housing improvement grant and much labour from the clients and sometimes even the architects. This must have appealed to the officer who handed out the grants as whenever anyone arrived at his door with a cottage that had a demolition order on it they were sent to us. To aid this practice we soon purchased a copy of Handisyde's Everyday Details. With all respect to Handisyde, the most memorable image to come out of this book was a drawing of a thatched dovecote made from an old barrel. This drawing, in the Foreword, was attributed to Edwin Gunn, the author of Little Things that Matter forthose Who Build, published by The Architectural Press in 1923. Gunn's book had been the inspiration for the new Everyday Details.

Aalto's Viipuri library and Terragni's Como kindergarten were built at about the same time in two very different climates. Architectural theory rarely considers environmental moderation as part of the task of architecture and yet the spatial and poetic stances and attitudes to natural light in these two buildings are, in part, informed by their response to very differing climates. Today, when so much environmental moderation is self-conscious and explicit, these buildings show how it can become an enriched part of a wider spatial and compositional whole.

This winning design in the 1998 Lichterfelde Süd International Landscape and Urban Design Competition is for the regeneration of a former military training ground on the southern boundary of Berlin. The brief was for a new urbanism of the periphery, with 3200 dwellings on a 115 hectare site. The design is a continuation of research embracing conditions of uncertainty and change on mainly post-industrial or former military sites. It could be described as a fragment of an infrastructural urbanism in preparation for an unpredictable diversity of architectures.

In the UK, government policy has encouraged architecture schools to be more research active and there is pressure to make the two final years of the five year course more definitively postgraduate. The University of Sheffield has responded with an experiment that combines studio teaching with real research on the city and its history. Sheffield is Britain's fourth largest city with a population of around half a million. It grew very rapidly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, It now employs a fraction of the former labour force and the city is having to adjust its identity.

Systems of proportion provoked much controversy in the 1950s. Recent research has moved away from the study of musical theory, to that of number. Applying Classical arithmetic techniques to analyze Alberti's Tempio Malatestiano, this paper demonstrates that its design corresponds to Alberti's system based on geometrical features of the cube depicting ‘natural relationships that cannot be defined as numbers’. For today's practitioners, the paper asserts that architectural works are geometric constructs and reminds them that CAD is based on the arithmeticization of geometry.

This paper defines an architectural position in which the concept of tolerance provides a strategy for making work. It also represents a moment in time within a continuing assessment and re-assessment of the ideas of the practice we established three years ago. Ideas are explored through built and speculative projects and tested through critical discussion with collaborators. The source of these ideas within a historical context is acknowledged and their application in a number of our recent projects and buildings is illustrated.