Traditionally, architecture mediates joints with mouldings whose qualities describe, like a human face, their character. In contrast, modern architecture uses a reveal or shadow to mark joints. This ubiquitous yet overlooked modern shadow has slipped between the cracks of architectural theory. Is the modern reveal, distained and beloved by architects, the sign of a building without quality?

By any measure Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a landmark in recent influential ideas. The very term ‘paradigm shift’, now common parlance, derives from this 1962 work. Structure redirected its own domain, the philosophy of science, from a logical positivist orientation in its evaluation of scientific progress to one that accommodates a complex mix of sociological, linguistic and psychological factors. Perhaps because of this interdisciplinary inclusiveness, Kuhn's insights have informed theory in many disciplines. A survey of the recent literature includes works in anthropology, comparative literature, criminal justice, art history, education and feminist studies.

This paper sets out to introduce the notion of self-organisation in spatial, social and political terms, as a form of spatial agency in response to issues of subjectivity and the politics of urban space. Self-organisation – a complex notion, with multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings and implications – has gained increased relevance in contemporary political and urban discourses. In this sense, self-organisation can be understood as ‘a collective process of taking on political functions and addressing tasks that have been excluded from the field of real politics or pushed out of public space’. This reading is representative of the view taken here, particularly in its (perhaps unintentional) conflation of the political and the spatial. Indeed, the political functions that it speaks of are also, for this paper, spatial functions; and the field of politics, is also the field of architecture and urban planning.

This paper considers the problem of tradition in contemporary architectural practice in Turkey as well as in other countries of the world. When it is presented as the display of stylised historical images, tradition loses its relevance in the present and becomes perceived as something that always belongs to the past. In such a case tradition opposes itself against modernity as independent and sovereign. In her writings German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt considers the problem of modernity as a problem of tradition which is mainly caused by the polarisation and particularisation between past and future. Addressing her writings, in the architectural realm, tradition becomes past orientated when it is perceived as something completed as appearances. However, perhaps tradition is more future directed and continuously attempts to actualise itself between past and future.

In a unique architectural style of the twentieth century, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) realised a new type of modern space defined by an unobstructed clear volume enclosed by framed glass skin. This is generally referred to as Mies's universal space and this paper will attempt to interpret Miesian universal space in terms of the idea of tectonically defining space. Mies referred to the term ‘tectonic’, or ‘architectonic’, as constructive appearance exposing the skeleton structure. For Mies, the concept of tectonic was connected to a glassy materiality that permitted the unambiguously constructed appearance of a skeletal structure. He regarded the glass skin as a ‘tectonic means’ and the instrument of a new art of building.

In early 1949, Eugéne Claudius-Petit, the new Minister of Reconstruction and Urbanism, had announced a campaign to build 20,000 dwellings a year for forty years, a measure of his determination to shift priorities from post-war reconstruction to the longer-term goals of renovation and modernisation of France's cities. For Claudius-Petit, the State had a duty to offer assistance not just to the sinistrés de la guerre but, as he put it, to the sinistrés de la vie, to the long suffering victims of France's inadequate housing conditions. To do so France had to build more housing and to do so more quickly. Since the Liberation there had been general agreement that the only way to achieve this was to transform the way that housing was built and that ‘industrialisation’ in one form or another was critical to doing so.

Through an examination of the public art project Garden Service, in this text we explore possibilities of and obstacles to practices of agency. The project was commissioned by the art institution The Common Guild in Edinburgh for the exhibition Jardins Publics, which took place in connection with the Edinburgh International Festival in summer 2007. It was based on the participation of a community and the communication between different actors, from institutions and associations to individual local residents, communication which included solving conflicts as well as building partnerships.

‘Building Initiative’ is both the name adopted by a collaborative group of architects, urbanists and artists, and also the term they use to describe the ‘mode of agency’ chosen to inform and realise citizen-led urban regeneration in Belfast [1]. The necessity and forms of this praxis evolved in response to the city's spatial, social and policy environment, and the inability of conventional mechanisms of architectural practice to engage adequately with this context. Building Initiative explored and pursued specific modes of agency, which it termed ‘initiatives’, within a variety of sectors including architectural, planning, educational, academic and media, and at a range of scales from local to international. This created the opportunity to work with a diversity of partner organisations and to develop a correspondingly wide range of strategies. We will look briefly at the context of Belfast and Building Initiative's response to it, focusing specifically on the methods of working that were developed, before concentrating on one project to illustrate these methodologies and processes in application.

This paper presents changes in the vertical circulation and organisation of merchant palaces, and their influence on multi-family architecture in Venice from 1450 to 1600. Just prior to this period buildings underwent a substantial change in the vertical distribution of floors; this marked the transfer of the commercial-residence casa fondaco prototype into a more complex multi-level building with two semi-autonomous piani nobili palatial apartments. The resulting vertical expansion led to a departure away from the external courtyard staircase as the primary means of vertical circulation. Many Late Gothic palatial buildings incorporated double courtyard staircases that provided individual access to each palatial apartment. However, this scheme consumed a great deal of developable land resulting in the widespread utilisation of interior monumental dog-leg staircases by the Early Renaissance. This simplified internal staircase fitted cleanly into the existing structural logic of both new and remodelled palace buildings.

In the interwar years European historians and critics of architecture tried to assimilate science into architecture and arts. For example Sigfried Giedion's Space, Time, and Architecture (1941) attempted to bring Einsteinian spacetime into architectural theory, while Nikolaus Pevsner's An Outline of European Architecture (c. 1943) used space as a criterion to differentiate architecture from other art forms. These brought to the idea of ‘space’ a distinctly modern meaning, making it a universal signifier; whereas in the last decade, architectural historians have argued for the historical specificity of space and a deeper examination of the social and spatial practices embedded in the making of space. This study inquires into the atemporal readings of space, using Lefebvre's theory on the production of space by ‘interested subjects’.

‘It was the happiest moment of my life, I didn't know’, begins Orhan Pamuk in his novel The Museum of Innocence, translated into English in October 2009. The Museum of Innocence is the most recent novel by Pamuk, Turkish novelist and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature (its Turkish title is Masumiyet Müzesi, 2008) [1].

In this paper architectural Modernism is used to describe the unadorned flat-roofed houses constructed using modern materials such as concrete, reinforced concrete and steel, and built mainly in the period following the First World War. This is a sparse definition that fails to do justice to the much broader interpretation of Modernism, which affected not only architecture, but all the arts in the first quarter of the twentieth century, a movement that reached maturity around 1930. However, even though the definition fails to reflect the richness of the Modernist idiom, the houses have long been recognised as representing Britain's first inroads into Modernist architecture as acknowledged by, for example, Gould, Bentley, Collins and Bettley.

The US housing market is infamous on at least two counts: implicated in the global financial crisis and notorious for its unsustainable consumption of resources and consequent discharge of carbon dioxide. Lately anything like good news regarding housing in the USA is scarce. However, the pause resulting from the collapse of the market, and increasing concern regarding building's agency in the environment, combine to provide an opportunity to reconsider the form and performance of housing. This may yet create an opening for design.

Recent criticisms in architectural pedagogy suggest that schools of architecture tend to privilege a narrow section of designers with limited skill-sets, neglecting individual differences. In order to encourage architectural pedagogy to become more inclusive, this paper revisits the value of multiple skill-sets in architectural design – following an original suggestion by Vitruvius – exploring it through the framework of multiple intelligences developed by cognitive psychologist Howard Gardner.

This paper involves an analysis of the role of architectural projects which can be defined as ‘catalysts’ to urban renewal. The aims of this paper are twofold and the paper is divided accordingly into two main parts. The first aim is to discuss, with reference to the work of a number of urban and architectural thinkers, a range of ways in which the term ‘urban catalyst’ has been both conceptualised and applied. Discussion is structured in relation to the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of a ‘catalyst’ in the field of chemistry as,

[a] substance that when present in small amounts increases the rate of a chemical reaction or process but which is chemically unchanged by the reaction; a catalytic agent. (A substance which similarly slows down a reaction is occas. called a negative catalyst.)

Early architects paid much attention to the relationship between space and time: the earliest buildings had structures linked to the cycle of the heavenly clock. Indeed, the notion of time emerges naturally from the diurnal rise and fall of the Sun as well as the more leisurely progression of the seasons. Space, on the other hand, is defined by the relationship between objects, implicit as a void. What is more, there is no natural scale, no spatial equivalent of the length of the day.