David Lea is known for his refined and sensitive designs and for his long-standing concern for issues of sustainability. Sadly, many of his projects remain unbuilt. The latest of these is a visitor centre for an internationally renowned garden and arboretum in southern England. The design, described by Peter Blundell Jones, marks a break from Lea's customary use of pitched roofs and embraces the planning freedom which flat roof allows. But its greatest significance lies in the inspired manner in which the building acts as gateway to a remarkable landscape described by Jan Woudstra.

Two competition designs have provided frameworks for ideas for the establishment of new communities. The projects provided the opportunity for the design team to consider core architecture (urban and architectural space) and its relationship with extended architectures (detailed design and construction). The building designs have been required to meet performance standards considerably in excess of recent UK norms. This paper describes the design approach and demonstrates how research (university and practice based) has contributed to the two submissions.

Beyond taste or fashion, there exists a lasting and common consensus for a perception of beauty linked to weight or weightlessness. This essay attempts to develop an understanding of different approaches to the issue of weight and weightlessness in architecture and civil engineering. In complex urban and programmatic settings, however, the question of gravity has to be integrated with many other issues, as exemplified by Albini and HeIg's La Rinascente department store in Rome.

One of Alvar Aalto's major preoccupations throughout his life's work was redefining the place of the individual in modern society in the face of industrialization, urbanization, and the political ideologies of extreme left and right. Unwilling to accept the Communist models of communal living and their rigid architectural suppression of individuality as well as Le Corbusian paradigms of platonic idealism, Aalto set out in MIT's Baker Dormitory to redefine the modern mass housing model with Le Corbusier's Swiss Pavilion as a point of departure.

In preparation for the Millennium Eve celebrations, a study was undertaken to predict crowd movement. The objectives were: to identify characteristics of crowd movement and congregation, and how this might be related to spatial layout; to evaluate, in consultation with risk management experts, how this might affect public safety; and to help develop and prepare effective crowd management measures. The study demonstrates how the observational techniques of space syntax have evolved to enable the investigation of the effect, if any, of spatial layout on crowd behaviour.

In the poetics of Álvaro Siza, the enriching experience of making architecture on site has always been very important; but even though his work has been widely recognized, published and discussed, little is known about the construction strategies employed. This paper reviews Siza's use of reinforced-concrete wall construction to create, through a process of subtraction and a search for the essential, building forms of a very particular kind.