Jørn Utzon, designer of Sydney Opera House, the most famous and controversial building of the twentieth-century that unwittingly ushered in the contemporary fascination with ‘iconic’ buildings, died at his home in Denmark on 5 December 2008 at the age of ninety.

I've always thought that Leibniz's monadology offers comfort during parallel session conferences. Assuring us that each monad reflects the whole, although from its particular point of view, Leibniz makes the sanguine case that one can make sense of things even if one's viewpoint is sadly singular. In the mad rush from one paper session to the next, knowing that at best one gets to hear a third of what is being said, it helps to invoke a bit of Leibnizian optimism. And indeed, Dublin seemed like a best possible world during the three days of the Defining Space conference taking place in October 2007. Generously hosted and meticulously organised, the University College Dublin-led event succeeded not only in attracting more than eighty papers that contributed to elucidate the concept of space in relation to architecture, art, and the city, but also in creating an atmosphere of conviviality and intellectual generosity which gave the event an unusual sense of sharing.

As its title suggests, ‘The Oxford Conference 2008: 50 Years on – Resetting the Agenda for Architectural Education’ aimed to influence architectural education. Five decades ago, in 1958, fifty delegates representing British members of the profession, industry and teaching institutions attended the first and only other Oxford Conference on Architectural Education organised by the RIBA. Several visitors from abroad and from Commonwealth countries also attended. The 1958 conference articulated the demand to shift architectural education from polytechnics or art schools to universities, and fifty years later the notion that we live in a ‘climate of change’ permeated Oxford Conference 2008 (Oxford 2008). With delegates from forty-two countries representing every continent there was a manifest change in the composition of the delegates, and on the face of it this would suggest that a more diverse attendance made a difference in the spectrum of issues coming to the forefront: but did it?

The document that follows was written by Iain Borden as the contribution on ‘Architecture’ to the Arts and Humanities Research Council's report for the UK Government on ‘The Value of Arts and Humanities Research to Life in the UK’ and offers a further contribution to arq's ongoing discussions about the nature of architectural research.

The Hydra drawings are the result of a research-by-design project involving architectural students. The drawings have been produced during intensive work sessions organised in March for the last four years on the Greek island of Hydra. The project has been run by architects Cort Ross Dinesen and Claus Peder Pedersen in close dialogue with contributors from other fields such as art history, literary criticism and philosophy: Henrik Oxvig, Fredrik Tygstrup, Steen Nepper Larsen and Malene Busk. The drawings that accompany the text published here were done by Tove Rosén, Emelie Saltas, Guro Sollid and Flemming Rafn Thomsen.

This is a short tale of two competing institutions and two of their most celebrated figures. On one side is Cooper Union – that hulking Manhattan brownstone, an island on the intersection of Lafayette Street and the Bowery where Ricardo Scofidio (1935) silently honed his art of drawing like an angel. On the other is Princeton University, where his partner (and partner), Elizabeth Diller (1954) is often resident. Princeton sits in the heart of the New Jersey woods, literally and metaphorically, and despite its baronial coniferous presence, is most notable in architectural circles for its rhetorical rather than physical manufacture. Diller + Scofidio's is a marriage whose vicissitudes are etched all over their work.

Suburbia is dependent on a global economy but, in spite of this, suburban domesticity in the UK is still very often framed within images of the ‘local’ whereas other parts of suburbia, such as business parks and airports, seem to embrace globalisation through sleek, high-tech, ‘non-place’ aesthetics that seem to eschew the local. The way that these aesthetic differences polarise local and global imagery within suburbia is questionable.

Zaha Hadid's Kartal Pendik Masterplan (2006) for a new city centre on the east bank of Istanbul proposes the redevelopment of an abandoned industrial site located in a crucial infrastructural node between Europe and Asia as a connecting system between the neighbouring areas of Kartal in the west and Pendik in the east. The project is organised on what its architects call a soft grid, a flexible and adaptable grid that allows it to articulate connections and differences of form, density and use within the same spatial structure [1]. Its final overall design constitutes only one of the many possible configurations that the project may take in response to the demands of the different areas included in the masterplan, and is produced from a script that is able to generate both built volumes and open spaces, skyscrapers as well as parks. The soft grid in fact produces a ‘becoming’ rather than a finite and definitive form: its surface space does not look like a grid, but is derived from a grid operation which is best explained by the project presentation in video animation. The grid here is a process of ‘gridding’, enacted according to ancient choreographed linear movements of measuring, defining, adjusting, reconnecting spaces through an articulated surface rather than superimposed on an ignored given like an indifferent colonising carpet.

In this article I will explore the relationship between space, language and objects and interrogate the role of language as a signifier for the transformation of space through cultural difference. My work is informed by the context and the methods of postcolonialism and specifically the notion of hybridity. If the hybridity of a postcolonial identity is acknowledged, then the space where these identities are negotiated could also be seen as sharing qualities of overlap and mixing. Influenced by psychoanalytic theories of the self and its relation to others, postcolonial theory has used strategies of ‘mimicry’ and ‘hybridity’ as motifs to provide a vocabulary that shifts colonial relations out of the dialectic of oppressor and oppressed. But following Lefebvre's idea that all space is social space, and Foucault's spatialisation of power, the move from the historic preoccupation with time to a spatialisation of the processes of knowledge production, allows postcolonial thinking to go beyond the complicities of identity politics, which has been one of the major criticisms of this mode of thought. As an architect, this opens up certain possibilities of interrogating postcolonial subjectivity through the spaces that are occupied and used by those who are implicated within it. This paper will focus on one such space: a park in East London.

In the mid 1920s, a physiologist, a glass technologist, and a zoo embarked on an exciting new venture which promised to turn buildings into therapeutic devices. Their project was to devise an architectural glass which would admit the beneficial, therapeutic ultraviolet spectrum of sunlight into the building; they called their invention ‘Vitaglass’. Vitaglass was the first ultraviolet ray glass – one of the more curious products to emerge from the 1920s architectural glass industry. Its distinguishing feature was that it enabled the invisible ultraviolet radiation of the sun to be admitted into the building; its refined chemistry promised to ‘let health into the building’ where ordinary soda-lime glass had blocked it out [1]..

In the nineteenth century, horticulturists such as John Claudius Loudon and Joseph Paxton, aware of the new environmental possibilities of glasshouses that had been demonstrated in the context of horticulture, contemplated the use of fully-glazed structures as a means to creating new types of environments for human beings. While Loudon suggested the use of large glass structures to immerse entire Russian villages in an artificial climate, Henry Cole and Paxton envisioned large-scale winter parks, to function as new types of public spaces. These indoor public spaces were intended to grant the urban population of London access to clean air, daylight and a comfortable climate. Although glasshouses had only been experienced in the immediate context of horticulture, designed in accordance with the specific environmental requirements of foreign plants, rather than the requirements of human comfort and health, they were perceived as a precedent for a new approach to architectural design primarily driven by environmental criteria. The environmental design principles of horticulture were discussed extensively in nineteenth-century horticultural literature such Loudon's Remarks on the Construction of Hothouses (1817), Paxton's Magazine of Botany (1834-49) and the Transactions of the Horticultural Society of London (1812-44). Since the purpose of glasshouses was to facilitate the cultivation of an increasing variety of foreign plants in the temperate climate of Northern Europe, the creation of artificial climates tailored to the specific environmental needs of plants became the primary object of the design.

This paper is part of a broader research agenda, which aims at an environmental re-reading of selected icons of Modern Architecture that share one characteristic, the development of a free-flow open section. The complex relationship between spatial composition and thermal and climatic conditions within buildings is explored both qualitatively, using analytic drawing, and quantitatively, using simulations with computational fluid dynamics. I am seeking patterns common to both and the work has become an investigation of the concept of architectural space at the intersection between art, technology, climate and perception. Most architects of the Modern Movement addressed this relationship in one way or another. They either praised technology and the emerging ‘machine age’ or rejected it. Today most architectural production appears to have an ambivalent and sometimes contradictory position on technology.

With war looming at the end of the 1930s, the government had resurrected most of the existing munition works, the Royal Ordnance Factories, and it had also established new sites. Production was being stepped up, and thousands of workers became employed in areas where accommodation was very difficult to find. Many workers were taken in as lodgers, and temporary buildings or ‘hutments’ were erected, as were hostels for single persons. Also, permanent dwellings for married couples, with or without children, were to be designed and built.

The Pop-Art doyens of the Independent Group (IG) and the British design establishment were in two minds about burgeoning British consumerism during the 1950s. Members of IG were busy collaging images appropriated from American consumer culture while members of the British design establishment were fiercely opposed to adopting principles of capitalist consumerism, such as expendability of goods and planning for obsolescence. Protests against consumerist values were voiced by figures of the Modernist design establishment such as historian Nikolaus Pevsner and Michael Farr, then editor of the Council of Industrial Design's publication Design. Their views were reinforced by the stances of the British Standards Institution, the Molony Committee, created in 1959 to review and revise consumer law, and the Consumers' Association, publisher of the popular product-review magazine Which? These organisations held paramount design's durability, function and use. However, such institutionally-sanctioned concerns, in the tradition of the nineteenth-century preoccupation with social empiricism and consumer education, hardly stemmed a rising fascination with what an increasing consumption of goods could teach design.

There is ambiguity and confusion concerning the nomenclature of parallel projection. Today, such representations are often broadly identified as axonometrics. However, the actual history of parallel projection, delineated by oblique and axonometric projections, reveals inherent spatial differences. By clarifying the intrinsic demarcations between these two forms of parallel projection, one may bring into question anew the approaches and applications of parallel projection as an architectural form of representation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

In the past two decades numerous large-scale informal markets have emerged on the fringes of European cities in the wake of global geopolitical transformations. Relying on individualised long-distance connections and adapting to diverse local situations, they produce a proliferating array of unregulated urban architectures while providing habitats for millions of undocumented existences. One such case is the infamous Arizona Market not far from the north Bosnian town of Brko, a place that has been transformed from a border guard post into a major hub for people trafficking and prostitution and now into a multi-ethnic centre of ubiquitous consumption. Another one, Izmailovo Market in the north-east of Moscow, the largest informal trading centre in the region with links to all parts of the Russian Federation and beyond, has grown into a Babylonian site of 15 specialised trading areas that rivals the Moscow Kremlin both in terms of size and visitor attractiveness. And when the 22nd World Congress of Architecture was held in Istanbul under the motto ‘Grand Bazaar of Architectures’, a bazaar of a very different kind traded outside the tourist centres: a vast network of provisional, informal street markets that establish themselves right alongside the building sites of official urban regeneration, beneath terraces of motorways and next to newly constructed tram lines. Before exploring the dynamics of these spaces in more detail, let us address briefly the socio-economic conditions underlying the rise of informal markets.