The Jewish Museum in Berlin is the first major building of Daniel Libeskind [1,2]. The project for the museum has instigated a wealth of discussions in architectural circles and achieved a rare status of attracting the attention of scholars from other disciplines. Kurt W. Forster put the design for the Jewish Museum on a par with Piranesi's Carceri d'Invenzione, an unusual position for any building since very rarely does an architectural design ‘[…] bear this double burden of representing both actual buildings and mental structures, and which therefore have to submit to being measured by both standards: the durability of their ideas and the imaginative faculty of their designer.’

In a 2009 interview, architect Peter St John of Caruso St John Architects defined a good architect as one who makes few compromises, highlighting precise instructions as imperative in achieving this. An architectural project, St John stated, 'is far more likely to work well if you put an enormous effort into defining what you want, to achieve quality’. At Caruso St John Architects' 2006 entrance addition to the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green, London [1], the precise specification of mortar and mastic joints throughout a cut-stone facade was employed to define expectations of quality in the constructed facade. These specifications, written in accordance with the recommendations of professional practice, set out stringent expectations of dimensional perfection. When dimensional variations during design development and construction threatened to disrupt these expectations, the precise definition of quality shifted, becoming less defined by dimensional perfection and more reliant upon the ‘architectural intentions’ underpinning the project. In referencing conceptual, ideological, historical and technological intentions which were difficult definitively to express, this critical phrase – ‘architectural intentions’ – is examined here in terms of its ambiguity in the context of the written specification [2].

Ambiguity in the written specification is emphatically rejected by regulatory and advisory bodies in the architectural profession, which frequently advise that the written specification must provide, above all else, certainty. In The Architects' Journal in 1989, author Francis Hall went as far as describing the properly drafted specification as the ‘one certain opportunity’ for an architect to set down a ‘definitive and enforceable expression of standard and quality’. ‘Properly drafted’ is typically translated as a prosaic language, specifically devoid of poetic content. The ability of the unambiguous written specification to convey adequately the poetic content of architectural intentions has, however, been under critique since its inception.

The Dutch architect and monk, Dom Hans van der Laan (1904–1991) leaves us with a legacy of architectural writings and realisations arising from his search for fundamental principles of architecture. His 1977 manifesto Architectonic Space aims to combine spatial philosophical concepts with practical design tools [1, 2]. The book is a series of fifteen lessons linking concepts, such as the relationships of inside-outside or mass-space, to his proportional series which he refers to as the Plastic Number. This article aims to offer an understanding and critical assessment of Dom van der Laan's poetics of order by unravelling how his buildings are made and how they are perceived [3]. I focus on the case study of the Jesu Moder Marias Convent in Tomelilla, Sweden.

In the summer of 2009, while on vacation in Italy, I lay on a deck chair on a beach under the scorching sun reading Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. I had taken Mike Davis's book as holiday reading after becoming interested in attitudes to sustainability as represented in films through supervising the unpublished dissertation ‘The Science and Fiction of Sustainable Living’. The dissertation analysed approaches to the green movement of the 1970s versus those held today. It did this through the study of ecological science fiction movies made during the two periods. As someone grounded in humanities research, using film studies research methods rather than conventional building science methods seemed to me an engaging, original approach to sustainability. The dissertation compared the 1972 American environmental science fiction film Silent Running to the 2007 British science fiction film Sunshine. During this supervision, the student gave me a copy of the films. Because Silent Running resonated with me, I took it on that same Italian holiday and watched it again. I recall thinking that Silent Running offered a departure point for an alternative kind of sustainable design studio. Then and there, I selected a film clip that I screened – in the background and without volume – at studio presentations to students held in September 2009.

The hammams (or Islamic bath-houses), commonly known as ‘Turkish baths’, are one of the key urban facilities in Islamic cities. They evolved from the Roman and Byzantine public baths, as these were assimilated when the Umayyad dynasty conquered Byzantine territories in the Middle East between AD 661 and 750. Early hammams were built in the eighth century by the Umayyad rulers who established their capital in Damascus. The most famous ones are Qusayr Amra, in today's north-eastern desert of Jordan and Khirbat al Mafjar. The period following the rise of Islam witnessed a rapid development in the architecture of baths and the change from Roman to Islamic bathing habits. Public Roman baths consisted of very large establishments, the thermae, which comprised not only bathing facilities but also recreational ones such as libraries, gymnasiums, exercise grounds and gardens, tanning rooms, ball courts and concert halls. The balnea were the smaller privately or publicly owned Roman baths, located in greater number within the city.

It was neither with music or an acoustic, but with a sense of origin that we wanted to build the work. A work that seeks, is still in the seeking, in search of establishing a road.

In this article I set out some of the distinct ways materials and components are described in architectural specifications. In many cases, as we might expect, materials are simply named, albeit in a great variety of ways from brand name to botanical species. In others, materials are specified via a reference to something else – to be built ‘like is the timbers of the Rente of Robert’, or to match a sample of stock bricks ‘marked No 1 to be seen with the Architect at No 1 Westminster Chambers’. We find many examples of what Bertrand Gille has called the ‘recipe’ – details about the ingredients and processes of making up a material or fixing it in site (Gille locates one in Vitruvius). And recently, and ever more pervasively, materials are prescribed in terms of their performance – how they are to behave in the finished building, whether acoustically or structurally or thermally and so on, with no mention at all of how the result is to be achieved. Indeed, the point may be precisely to avoid naming a particular material so that the responsibility for a compliant selection no longer rests with the architect. These descriptions, with their language of properties and materials science, could not be more different from the instructive prose-like sentences of the process-based specification. With one describing how to make up a given material, and the other how it is to behave, we might also suggest that they depend on very different, even incompatible, conceptualisations of the material – as artefact on the one hand and as actor on the other.

Differences between types of clause are recognised in contemporary technical literature and guides to specification practice, although the distinctions considered significant vary greatly. The typologies set out here, however, are drawn from my own survey of documents from the eighteenth century to the present day. In some cases, such as the performance clause, the type I identify maps directly onto a widely used industry category but in others, such as the process-based clause not so much in use today, it may only share some similarities with existing technical definitions.

On the one hand, architectural knowledge advances very rapidly, with new types of materials and technological innovations entering the field and multiplying architectural invention. On the other hand, urban experts, architects and engineers often debate publicly uncertain urban knowledge and technologies, risky plans and daring designs, polarising opinion - as witnessed on numerous blogs, citizen forums and architecture websites. This radical transformation in building technologies, in the reliance upon experts and in the expansion of architectural networks could have remained practically invisible were it not for the presence of another phenomenon: the digitalisation of architecture and the availability of enormous Internet databases. The digital technologies at our command provide us with abundant resources to follow architectural controversies.

One might be forgiven for thinking that the concept of ‘vernacular’ architecture is straightforward. First, it suggests a contemporary approach to building that uses local materials and crafts, as well as the indigenous architecture of tribal peoples, such as piledwellings over tropical waters, mud houses in the desert, or animal-hide teepees on the savannah. These buildings can be distinguished easily from other types of buildings that use industrialised construction techniques and materials, such as concrete, sheet glass, plastics and steel. Second, it might suggest an alternative and more wholesome set of values towards life, the environment and aesthetics, than that represented by the out-of-town retail park or the inner-city office tower. Why bother with the word ‘vernacular’, though, let alone ‘indigenous’ or the more problematic ‘primitive’, when ‘traditional’ works well enough? Nothing could be simpler.

It is a commonplace to describe twentieth-century Modernist architecture as utopian, but doing so arguably has less to do with putative social agendas than with explaining the failure of such work to deliver on extravagant promises. By interrogating utopian declarations for twentieth-century architecture and visionary urban representations, the aim of this article is to sharpen the loose pairing of Modernist architecture and Utopia. Consideration is also given to how undue emphasis on representation supports post-rationalisations of failure as the inevitable teleology of Utopia, which serves only to empty architecture of its ethical function. To conclude, some preliminary thoughts on the prospects of a more convincingly utopian modern architecture are advanced.

Completed in the sixteenth century, the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul has long been regarded as one of the great works of Sinan, the Ottoman Empire's foremost architect. In recent years, as our understanding of Sinan's design strategies and sensitivities has improved, a number of influential scholars have argued that there is a singular formal layering pattern present in Sinan's elevations. With the advent of recent advances in computational analysis it is possible to quantify the degree of visual layering (the hierarchical relationship between form, ornamentation and materiality) present in Sinan's Süleymaniye Mosque and thereby provide evidence, either for or against, this proposition. Using an advanced version of the computational fractal analysis method, the paper investigates the four facades of the Süleymaniye Mosque, along with two facade details, to provide a mathematical description of the layering visible in this building. Through this process the paper provides, for the first time, quantifiable data supporting the theorised properties of this famous building. In doing so, the paper also offers a description of the most advanced demonstration of fractal analysis ever applied in architecture.

To show every minute portion of a building by drawing is next to impossible, and would be more laborious than useful, and therefore description in writing is resorted to, by which much labour is saved, and the intentions of the architect more readily conveyed to the mind of the operative.

This paper investigates the changes in architectural practice following the introduction of contracting in gross for the execution of building work in early nineteenth-century England. This particular new form referred to two different agreements, either contracting for a whole undertaking by a single builder who agreed to erect the whole of an edifice at a predetermined price and time, or contracting for the work of a specific trade only.

The changes in contracting the building work are understood as changes in building practice, whose material product would be the building. In a similar manner the building contracts are considered as the material products of the architectural practice, including not only the working drawings, but also the legal obligations and building specifications. This paper investigates the contract documents that were to be produced in the architectural office in order to build on site as evidence for a response of architectural practice to the changes in building practice. It traces this process in the adaptation of the writings of the legal documents to contracting in gross by comparing the specifications of John Soane's building contract for Tendring Hall of 1784 with the instructions and model specifications of the early nineteenth-century handbooks and practical guides.

The aim of this study is to chart the manifestation of the Chapel at Ronchamp as a plastic organism and to identify its complex intrinsic visual qualities. To use Gordon Cullen's words, the work involves ‘charting the structure of the subjective world’. Although it has graphic and figurative aspects, the Chapel at Ronchamp achieves existential meaning primarily through plasticity, in other words the visual medium of form, space, polychromy (colour as a relative phenomenon) and texture, revealed in light. As in the case of all spatially rich unicellular works of architecture, the charting of the chapel has involved about ten three-day field studies over a three-year period, recording diurnal and seasonal variations and human activity; because this is uncharted territory it has first been necessary to ‘learn’ the building. The working method has involved recording observations, accompanied by photographic sketches at fifteen minute intervals; the observations have then been correlated with a heliodon model and indicative plans and sections, including sun-paths; the character of the light admitting apertures being of particular significance. Spatial and colour relationships have then been simulated in the studio.

The Rescue man was not only working on the incident, he became a part of it […] he was the vaguely apprehended shape which suddenly appeared from the surrounding chaos as a human being […].

This paper explores a very particular form of building activity: demolition work. My aim is to show that the peculiarities of demolition work challenge how construction history contends with certain ontological and epistemological problematics. In the first instance, I am concerned with how the historical activity of demolition produces subjects which are held in distinct social relationships and material processes. In the second instance, I am concerned with how knowledge is produced in those relationships and processes, and further how knowledge of those relationships and processes might be made historically available. These questions are developed through an examination of archival material related to the clearance of the South Bank in the late 1940s in preparation for the Festival of Britain Exhibition and the Royal Festival Hall. The archived contracts are shown to have a specific status and effect for such an enquiry.

The Austrian philosopher Otto Neurath (Vienna 1882 - Oxford 1945) was the only non-architect who participated in the fourth CIAM conference (Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne) that took place in Athens in the summer of 1933. As we read in the minutes of the congress published in the journal of the Technical Chamber of Greece Technika Chronika (Technical Chronicles), it was at the meeting of 13 August 1933 that CIAM members decided to set up two categories of participants: a) partners (mainly young architects and students of architecture), and b) specific members (non-architects participating as full members). The one and only such member was Otto Neurath. Neurath was invited as a representative of the Mundaneum in Vienna in order to cooperate with the CIAM Committee of Statistics which had as its task to collect, review and process statistical data relating to some of the most important cities of the Western world. As noted in the minutes of the congress: ‘The Committee of Statistics in cooperation with the Vienna Mundaneum will collect, review and edit the necessary statistical material which will remain as the property of the Conference.’

Aldo van Eyck, in an interview twenty-five years after John Voelcker died [1], remembered him as follows:

This paper looks at the evolution of the structure of construction contract documentation over time, from ancient Greece through to the near future, in terms of the degree to which the contract documentation is integrated. Documentation might comprise anything from a single ‘integrated’ text to a range of ‘dis-integrated’ documents, fashioned by different players in the procurement process and not offering an easily appreciable integrated whole. The paper ends with the hope that new digital methods of information production will lead to better integrated and more easily readable ‘wholes’ in the new forms offered by building information modelling (BIM), which in turn will facilitate collaborative working.

The paper shows that contract documentation has evolved through four stages of integration: Integrated: up to the end of the medieval period construction contract documentation was essentially fully integrated – everything that was required was stated in the one written document, which typically covered contract conditions, building layouts, assembly descriptions, quantities of components and requirements for quality.

The British architect John Voelcker (1927–72) was a founding member of the small international, avantgarde group, Team 10 (1953–81), an outgrowth of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM). Voelcker was one of six authors of the document, ‘Doorn Manifesto’, a ‘Statement on Habitat’ that emphasised ‘vital human associations’. The Manifesto appeared in 1954, one year after Voelcker exhibited the ‘Zone’, his Architectural Association senior thesis and one of the first acknowledged Team 10 efforts, in Aix-en-Provence at the ninth CIAM meeting (1953). The Zone (on which he collaborated with Pat Crooke and Andrew Derbyshire between 1951 and 1952), as well as a north London dwelling that he designed for Humphrey Lyttelton (1957–58), and his contribution to agricultural vernacular building projects in Kent, are prototypical examples of Team 10's work. Voelcker's distance from the large-scale, analytical rationalism of CIAM and his interest in a socialminded vernacular aligned him with Team 10. Voelcker eventually published three articles on Team 10: the most notable one in Arena (1965), as well as another in Architects' Year Book (1957) and a third in Carré bleu (February 1960). These situate him plausibly as a historian of the group. In one of these essays Voelcker advocates an ‘open aesthetic’ that is not clearly defined, but that implicitly calls on architects to avoid imposing pre-ordained symbols and to include references to the past in their designs without, however, being rigidly imitative, as was the case, he argues, with the deleterious medieval features of Milan's Torre Velasca (1957) designed by BBPR.