Architectural practice has become considerably more complex in the last twenty years, not to mention since the days of Wright. Many more professions are involved in realising a building, and the construction industry has become professionalised in areas such as health and safety, management training and continuing professional development. Procurement methods for buildings are proliferating and roles for all involved changing, especially for the architect. Shorter timescales are common and there is a general consensus that, in the UK at least, there is a serious skills shortage in the industry and a decline in the quality of the building trades. The industry has become both more litigious and more international.

The film From a Classical Position (1997) is a fully collaborative work between a notable dancer and performer and a notable choreographer, being danced, directed, and edited by Dana Caspersen and William Forsythe of the late Ballett Frankfurt. By looking closely at the film, its origins, and its process of creation, we gain an understanding of Caspersen and Forsythe's way of collaborating and their interest in working with other media and formats. Uncompromising if not difficult for a general dance audience, it is also somewhat didactic and offers insights into some of the Ballett Frankfurt's methods of generating movement, choreographic structures, and the importance of classical technique to a distinctive movement vocabulary:

[The film] was also a little message to the British, who I'm sure were curious about us. It was a little missile to them, saying yes we are the Frankfurt Ballet, yes we perform before so many seats in the Opera House. We are the same people and this is what we do … There is the obvious classical training and this is how we are dealing with it. (Forsythe 1999)

This paper briefly describes the principle of operation and science goals of the AMANDA high energy neutrino telescope located at the South Pole, Antarctica. Results from an earlier phase of the telescope, called AMANDA-BIO, demonstrate both reliable operation and the broad astrophysical reach of this device, which includes searches for a variety of sources of ultrahigh energy neutrinos: generic point sources, Gamma-Ray Bursts and diffuse sources. The predicted sensitivity and angular resolution of the telescope were confirmed by studies of atmospheric muon and neutrino backgrounds. We also report on the status of the analysis from AMANDA-II, a larger version with far greater capabilities. At this stage of analysis, details of the ice properties and other systematic uncertainties of the AMANDA-II telescope are under study, but we have made progress toward critical science objectives. In particular, we present the first preliminary flux limits from AMANDA-II on the search for continuous emission from astrophysical point sources, and report on the search for correlated neutrino emission from Gamma Ray Bursts detected by BATSE before decommissioning in May 2000. During the next two years, we expect to exploit the full potential of AMANDA-II with the installation of a new data acquisition system that records full waveforms from the in-ice optical sensors.

Wishing to write about his work, I approached Peter Zumthor in February 1996. We agreed to do something substantial but still accessible, and eventually settled on the format of a long interview. We then chose three of his buildings that would raise different issues – the now famous Thermal Baths in Vals, the Wohnsiedlung Spittelhof and Topography of Terror in Berlin.Readers unfamiliar with these three buildings will find them comprehensively described and illustrated in the superb Peter Zumthor Works: buildings and projects 1979–97 with text by Peter Zumthor and photographs by Hélène Binet, published by Lars Müller Publishers, Baden, 1998, ISBN 3-907044-58-4. This and the related Thinking Architecture by Peter Zumthor were the subject of an extended review in arq 3/1.

The interviews were held in English on 22 July 1997 over the course of the day in his studio in Haldenstein. They are published in the order in which they were held. We edited them together in August 2000, resisting the desire to amend them.

I first learnt of his work in 1988 when he was a visiting professor at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Santa Monica where he first delivered the lecture later published as ‘A Way of Looking at Things’. I would like to thank him for agreeing to share his thoughts on architecture, and for the often difficult and unfashionable reminder that to do things well takes time.

Tight Roaring Circle, a 1997 Artangel installation at the Roundhouse in London, was a collaboration between choreographers and a musician, as well as with the curators and the audience. Through the installation Dana Caspersen, William Forsythe, and Joel Ryan furthered their explorations into engendering, ordering, and composing movement. By obscuring each individual's contribution they also raised issues of authorship, disciplinary boundaries, and autonomy. Many of the issues provoked by the installation are also being pursued at the Ballett Frankfurt, where Caspersen is a dancer and choreographer, Forsythe is artistic director and choreographer, and for which Ryan often writes music. Having first studied philosophy, Steven Spier is a senior lecturer in architecture in the School of Urban Development and Policy at South Bank University. He has written an article on Forsythe's relationship to classical ballet for the Journal of Architecture, and a book that brings together an architect's and a novelist's work.