Columbia University's recent interdisciplinary conference on transparency aimed, according to the convenors, to ‘bring an ordinarily extraordinary material back before our eyes’.

This paper explores the contribution made to debates over the redevelopment of the nineteenth-century Bishopsgate goodsyard site in Spitalfields, London, by an experimental architectural artwork entitled Intact by Office for Subversive Architecture. Readings of the urban character of Spitalfields are reviewed, as imagined and captured in film and in literary narrative. Applying in this way an approach related to what Luckhurst terms ‘the spectral turn’ in urban historiography, I use these readings as a background for examining the site's recent development. Over the last twenty years, it has been subject to a variety of urban proposals. While some have pressed for virtually complete demolition of existing structures, others have focused on aspects of urban character and possibilities for intensifying use through intervention. The Intact project involves a reinterpretation of a small fragment of railway architecture. I argue that it suggests, playfully, the potential for re-imagining the site that interacts nonetheless with readings of the past.

We spoke about the usability and further development of the Chinese roof profile in Chinese buildings today. How did this roof, this remarkable Chinese roof, which gives Chinese architecture a special signature against which other features pale into insignificance, come about? It is a saddle roof with an exaggerated rounding of the ridge and wide out-swinging eaves, and the surface is raised to the highest shine through the intensity of gleaming glazed tiles which display all the colours of nature: light and dark red, lemon yellow and golden yellow, sky blue and peacock blue, rare green and brown glazes of every kind. Through the wave profile of the over- and under-lapping tiles – which all adds to the formal effect – it survives every kind of weather.

Among Hugo Häring's papers in the Häring archive of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin are the minutes of six meetings entitled Discussions about Chinese Architecture held on Fridays and once on a Saturday dating from November 1941 to May 1942. The persons involved are Hugo Häring, Hans Scharoun, Chen Kuan Lee and John Scott. Of Scott, a Germanised American, we know little: it seems his wife Gerda worked at Häring's art school. But Chen Kuan Lee is a key figure in this story. Born in Shanghai in 1919, he had arrived in Berlin in 1935 to study architecture under Hans Poelzig, completing the course in 1939. He then became Scharoun's assistant until 1941, working on the private houses that provided a limited creative opportunity under the Nazis. Lee returned to Scharoun's office in 1949, remaining there until 1953, one of only four assistants during the crucial period of 1951/1952 when Scharoun's new architecture was under development with key projects such as the Darmstadt School and Kassel Theatre. In between, Lee served as an assistant to Ernst Boerschmann (1873–1949), the great German investigator of Chinese culture and author of several books on Chinese architecture. Boerschmann had visited China from 1906 to 1909, when he was sent by the German government to make a comprehensive cultural study, rather as Hermann Muthesius had been sent to England in 1896. To complete Lee's biography, in 1954 he set up as an architect on his own account, building several Chinese restaurants, more than 30 private houses and some apartment blocks in a Scharoun-like manner [1], some spatially very interesting, but this kind of work went out of fashion with the advent of postmodernism in the 1980s and Lee died quite recently in obscurity.

‘I have long been dreaming a dream: that I am a drop of dew on the leaf of a nameless plant deep in the valley of some far-off mountain range. The dewdrop rolls down into a little brook and mingles with its waters; the brook flows into a river which in turn discharges into the sea, and the waves of the sea in their turn lave the coasts of all the countries of the earth. Thus I picture to myself the cultural interchange of all peoples, and it has been my wish to take part, even if only as one little drop, in this important work.’

(Tetsuro Yoshida, 1955)

By 1957, Denys Lasdun was bored:

‘We must try to get away from the sameness of English architecture. If you look at modern Italian work, for example, it is at least clear that architects have engaged in a terrible battle with architecture and certainly many of them have been disastrously defeated; but most English architects seem to have reached a gentlemanly understanding with their art that they should leave each other strictly alone.’

The work and the life of the English architect Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens (1869–1944) have been extensively documented over the past hundred years and clearly show a career with at least two phases. The first is characterised by the design of private country houses in the Arts and Crafts style and, in collaboration with the horticulturalist Gertrude Jekyll, the development of their gardens. The second begins around 1900 and reflects a shift towards Neo-Classicism, initially in country houses and later in a wider range of larger public buildings and monuments both in England and abroad. Lutyens developed his use of the Neo-Classical idiom throughout the latter part of his career into a unique style of design which Arthur Stanley George Butler has termed his ‘elemental mode’. This was characterised by a highly controlled use of form and mass, apparent adherence to rules of Classical proportioning and the sparing use of symbolic Classical motifs. However, very little is known with any certainty about how Lutyens actually achieved this style, in particular what role was attributable to intuition and good taste, as is often assumed, and how much may have been attributable to quantitative and formalised methods of design. Circumstantial evidence exists that strongly suggests that quantitative analytical methods may have been used in a method which drew upon his interest in puzzles and mathematics, his interests in architectural history (particularly English Neo-Classicism), his leanings towards mysticism and his exposure to Theosophy.

How might one construct a design studio project? In addition to achieving educational objectives, it must engage both the student and his or her teachers, but if it also involves the whole year as a group it can prove especially rewarding. Last session I looked for an Honours year programme whereby each student could evolve a project that would have similarities with those of their colleagues but that would also be different. If a project were to start with something conceptual – for example, a thematic thread – then there could be both common generic facilities and uniquely different facilities arising from data collected during field studies in particular locations. I've discovered that this sort of idea works well when a large group is doing a project over a whole academic year. On the one hand there is always a common level of interest across the studio because every student feels they are in the same boat as their mates, but on the other hand their own project has unique characteristics. This means that the type of collaboration between students isn't suffocating because no one is ever actually doing the same thing in the same place; everyone is doing both similar and different things in similar but different places. The title of the programme that emerged was ‘Stretched City – East meets West’.