‘Alternate Currents’, held in Sheffield's Showroom Cinema in late November, set out to politicise architectural practice. Part of an AHRC-funded project on alternative architectural practices, it was convened by the University of Sheffield's Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till (whose introduction follows this report). The event was an invitation to go beyond the normative, specifically by dealing with architecture's economic, political and social dimensions. Although it was mixed in all respects, for me, trained in social anthropology, two issues emerged as particularly interesting.

Juha Leiviskä, winner of the 2008 Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize for Architecture and Town planning, is widely recognised as Finland's leading architect. From the beginning of his career, his work has remained outside the mainstream of modern architecture, and it was already apparent in his competition entries in the 1960s that he was creating a characteristic language of form based on his own architectural values and experiences, and operating in a subtle interaction with the surroundings. Simo Paavilainen spoke to Juha Leiviskä at his home in Helsinki in spring 2004, and the interview appears here for the first time in translation.

A different world is possible [1]. The work of an increasing number of architects reveals a renewed social interest and aspiration to define new instruments for coping with the issues of our cities. These architects do not subscribe to the agendas of bureaucrats, authorities and market players. Instead they listen to people's remarks, understand their problems and develop tools that stimulate people to think critically and actively about the built environment. For these activists, architecture goes beyond just designing buildings. It has to identify the needs of people and possible forms of aggregation, while stimulating processes that will enable us to live better. Groups like Team 10 and the movements of the '70s laid the bases of these practices, but unlike the past century, today every project becomes a sensitisation campaign that involves the community at the local level and that stimulates collective processes, spontaneous creativity and activism in order to incite a new political role for architecture.

This paper sets out to challenge assumptions about both normative practice and alternative practice. A historical case study of alternative practice is used to re-read the nature of architectural production since the modern period, and a contemporary mode of alternative practice is proposed which operates within the established profession but is informed by this alternative reading [1, 2]. This proposal seeks to remain fully engaged with the production of the built environment, using to its advantage rather than resisting the mechanisms of the profession.

In Nicolae Ceausescu's ‘Systematisation’ programme, implemented across Romania throughout the 1980s, power was played out in acts of building. The city of Bucharest provided a visible symbol of the centralisation of authority, manifest in the construction of the Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism and the House of the People. Beginning from this historical context, this paper revisits the work of one group of student architects in Romania, Form-Trans-Inform, who used spatial practices to question orthodoxies in architecture around them as protests against repressions under the monolithic Ceausescu regime.

‘The Glimmer of Other Worlds’ was first written for the Alternate Currents conference at the University of Sheffield in Autumn 2007. It was prompted by my experiences as a teacher attempting to explain to students what the idea of an alternative to capitalist architectural and building production might mean.

‘Urban life suggests meetings, the confrontation of differences, reciprocal knowledge and acknowledgement (including ideological and political confrontation), ways of living, “patterns”, which coexist in the city’.

In March 2008 Kees Kaan, of Claus and Kaan Architects, gave his inaugural lecture as Practice Professor of Architectural Design at Delft Technical University – the school from which he graduated in 1987. He explained to his audience that after his student years spent designing imaginary projects he most wanted to design in order to build, to make ‘designs that were thicker than paper’. This was accomplished in 1987–97 in intensive daily co-operation with Felix Claus and then developed over the last decade in their offices in Amsterdam and Rotterdam with new partners. The following is an edited extract from his lecture where, after discussing practice, education, societal interest and the changed architectural market of the Netherlands, he turned to architectural vision, understanding and responsibility.