The architectural profession lacks the infrastructure that enables other professions, such as mechanical engineering, to build a knowledge-base and share research results of use to practitioners. To create such an infrastructure, the profession needs to develop learning cycles that involve researchers, educators, and practitioners working in task groups to set research priorities, raise funds, publish findings, and disseminate knowledge through conferences and curricula.

Steven Hollwon an international competition for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland, based on the concept of intertwining or ‘chiasma’. That idea stems from the museum's site, which stands at the point where the city and Töölö Bay, the commercial core and the Parliament building come together. Intertwining also characterizes the form of the building, in which a gallery wing twists over and around a rectangular block, separated by a tall, curving entry hall dominated by a broad ramp. The museum has a few functional lapses, but is generally successful.

As disciplines, urban design and architecture often seem to be at cross purposes. Urban design tends to concern itself with the collective, architecture with isolated buildings. The Group 91 framework plan for Dublin's Temple Bar is an integrated proposal by architects for the creation of public urban spaces and for the insertion of new buildings into the historic fabric. In particular, the Printworks by Derek Tynan is a didactic model: it suggests how people can beneficially live and work in a quickly evolving city and offers an urbanism of collage and potent reciprocity.

The 1930s in the United States marked a turning point in the relationship of the architectural profession to both the government and corporations. The federal government and large corporations, began to hold design competitions to stimulate the building industry during the Depression. This caught the American Institute of Architects unprepared and led to the transformation of the profession from one grounded in the ideal of the architect-artist to one whose survival depends, in part, upon business acumen, technical competence, and public relations skill.

Modern environmentalism originates with the recognition of ecological connectivity and the negative effects of technological intervention. This paper examines critical concepts developed by the architect Frederick Kiesler and the critic-historian Sigfried Giedion for their relevance to that discourse. Kiesler's principle of Correalism and Giedion's appeal for Equipoise offer both a prehistory to the current mandates about sustainability and cautions about its limitations. The sustainable is ultimately a social condition that cannot be applied therapeutically nor ever wholly institutionalized.

CAD systems provide convenient tools for the creation of simple geometry by direct manipulation on the computer screen. They work well enough for two-dimensional construction, but are often inadequate for creating doubly-curved three-dimensional surfaces. The solution proposed here is to use the in-built programming language provided in most CAD systems for direct creation of geometry. Developed for didactic purposes, the stunning reconstructions of Gothic vaults suggest a method of working likely to be of great value to the geometrically adventurous architect.

Globalization, while extensively theorized and empirically studied by economic geographers, has yet to be seriously investigated in architecture. There are multiple forms of architectural practice in the United States and some significant changes are under way. In addition the local politics of urban architecture discloses a counterweight to balance globalism's homogenizing tendencies. This paper proposes strategies for a more experimental architecture that partakes of the global-local dialectic.

When I first went to teach at the Bartlett School of Architecture, Peter Cowan asked me what my research would be. I answered diffidently: ‘meaning in architecture’, and he grinned sceptically, and said: ‘your first job will be to find something to measure’. But I had been seduced by reading Stendhal's De l'amour into believing that measurement wasn't necessary for insight; and persuaded by reading Wellek and Warren on Theory of Literature that theory wasn't to be restricted to physical science. So I was soon giving a course called Meaning in Architecture, without measuring anything, but using lots of comparisons (twin slide projectors had become all the rage).