Squeezed into the narrow confines of a parasitic Mumbai dwelling; gathered around a ceramic tea-set in an elevated tea-house; trapped in the transparent void of a tree; and nestled in a vertical tower of fur, books and timber the 1:1 – Architects Build Small Spaces exhibition offered a tactile and intimate encounter with the intense experiences and emotions evoked by a series of small architectural spaces. Installed throughout the Victoria and Albert Museum, the exhibition ran from 15 June – 30 August 2010.

Mole Architects was set up by Meredith Bowles in 1997, and has become known for well-crafted, contextually responsive and ecologically sensitive projects. One of the claims that Mole make in their practice brochure is that their work is identified by a consistency of attitude rather than a ‘house style’. This claim emphasises thinking, analysis and process but this is balanced by the evidence presented in their realised work, which demonstrates an undeniable interest and delight in the materiality and making of buildings. Reflecting on the enduring influence of his architectural education, Bowles acknowledges this balance: ‘What I think these formative experiences refer to is a belief in the importance of things rather than ideas, or rather that ideas reside in the thing itself’.

In the context of the maturation of traditional concepts of identity into ‘new forms of plurality and spatiality’, this paper aims to explore the role of genius loci, memory, and ultimately identity in a particular gallery: the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, Orkney.

Initially, it considers ways in which regional and vernacular identities have informed and enriched the architectural project, instilling it with tangible and intangible traces of place, and the past and present people of that place. Formal and material influences from the abstract but poetic idea of north, the local topography and town, and the existent buildings on site, are revealed.

Among the legacy of Modernist architecture, the Danteum project is an extraordinary attempt to inscribe a literary expedition into architectural organism. Beyond its absolute form, the project makes use of the plastic effects of architectonics to create immersive ‘atmospheres’ that elicit states of mind and transform the continuous movement through the scheme into a dramatised journey. The coexistence of immersion and progression provides competing challenges to visitors' narrative sensemaking. This paper will analyse the Danteum as a hybrid system of episodic and situational narrations that turns this geometrical space int o a narrative labyrinth.

Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren's interest in ancient buildings has been noted by historians of architecture and natural philosophy alike. The two men used to meet to discuss descriptions – both verbal and visual – and models of ancient buildings that had long since disappeared and were known only through ancient accounts, or that remained only in a ruined or altered form. These included the Temple of Solomon, described at different places in the Bible, Porsenna's tomb, cited as an example of extravagance by Pliny the Elder, and the Hagia Sophia. In 1675, Hooke recorded such a meeting in his diary: ‘With Sir Chr. Wren. Long Discourse with him about the module [model] of the Temple at Jerusalem’.

The schism between our admiration of the artefacts of the great architectural practices of the twentieth century, and our lack of knowledge as to how those achievements were manifest, is one of the most enduring characteristics of modern architecture. Modern architectural practice and its sustaining historiography has typically focused on the image of the designed object at the expense of the skills and conditions that shaped it; a focus on reputation rather than comprehension. Indeed those constituting contingencies of design are more often seen as obstructing the architectural vision and true reality of experience; hence the fixation on a singular (and possibly post-rationalised) first ‘spark’ of conception and the photogenic qualities of the realised, and usually uninhabited, object. Dalibor Veseley is right to state that ‘instrumentality (techne) must always be subordinated to symbolic representation (poiesis), because techne refers only to a small segment of reality, while poiesis refers to reality as a whole'. Nevertheless, in the current climate the statement is likely to be understood as further legitimising the continuing neglect of what architects actually do.

This paper describes an A-level course (a two-year course for 16–19 year old students) which concentrates entirely on architecture using an art studies syllabus as its basis. The course has run since 2001, during which time it has grown considerably in popularity. The first year concentrates on the history of architecture and on how different histories are perceived from different viewpoints using a comparative analysis of several buildings. In the second year the emphasis is on how architecture emerges from and affects social interaction, through a close study of a single building. The paper goes on to discuss the value of the course and qualification, especially in relation to further architectural study at university.

A trade can be of two types depending on the observation skills of its workers: deception managers or truth revealers. The first group is composed of spies, con artists and negotiators: all of them try to show what is not while ambiguously hiding what really is. Artists mainly define the second group: for them, an artistic product only works when it opens up the reality it aims to describe. Art is or is not. There is no middle ground: period.