The nature of architectural design in the early twenty-first century is considered through a comparison between the author's recent design for a university hostel and earlier examples of the genre.

This project was designed by a Lecturer in Architecture at Cambridge for one of its Colleges. It is occupied by undergraduates, some of them architecture students, and during its construction it was used as a teaching case study. The design is somewhat ‘didactic’ in nature, attempting to be quite explicit in its thematic and formal procedures; stylistically, it can be seen as an examination of the possibilities inherent in a late modernist tradition. For this reason, and because of its privileged site and budget, it offers an opportunity for some reflections on architectural composition at the beginning of the twenty-first century, in relation to earlier traditions of formal manipulation.

‘A beacon of excellence in healthcare design’… ‘a symbol of civic pride in our community’ … ‘a “state of the art” building’ … ‘a building which could be magnificently innovative and visionary in its time, location and conception’. These phrases, taken from the ‘Aspirational Statement’ that introduces the competition brief, should have left no one in any doubt that the clients for the proposed new integrated care centre in Kentish Town were looking for something new and different. With hindsight, it is easy to see why Allford Hall Monaghan Morris's (AHMM) unusual design [1a–c] won the competition.

Archigram, the British architectural group that became arguably the pre-eminent architectural neoavant-garde of the 1960s and early 1970s, is usually remembered for its visions of a ‘Pop’ and ‘science fiction’ architecture. This article, however, recalls Archigram's relationship to architectural education. If this at first seems surprising, or even mundane, it has to be pointed out that to a great extent Archigram came out of, and was sustained by, the schools of architecture. Moreover, Archigram was nourished by a high ideal of what education, and architectural education in particular, should be about: the cultivation of individuals working in concert, without hierarchy, and free of social, spatial, or ideological institutions. This programme was apparent in many Archigram design projects – the title for this article is for instance borrowed from a piece by Archigram's David Greene [1] – and it is just as palpable in the more proactive role that Archigram took in trying to reform architectural education.

This March, the University of Bath Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering held a conference on the ways that computing can be used to generate architecture and engineering. Sponsored by RIBA Future Studies, Buro Happold and Ove Arup, and bringing together lecturers from a variety of disciplines, it considered both practical and philosophical aspects. A publication is planned, edited by the organizers, Neil Leach, Chris Williams and David Turnbull.

The Casbah concept was developed by a group of younger European architects in the late 1950s. It flourished over a period of no more than ten years but its influence continues to this day.

Design is central to the discipline of architecture. Despite this, the question as to whether design constitutes a form of research seems to raise more questions and strong feelings than any other aspect of the UK Government's research assessments of university architecture schools (arq 6/1, p5). No one is better fitted to set out the arguments than Bryan Lawson: an architect and psychologist, he has acted as an assessor for the last two exercises, has extensive knowledge of the university sector and has undertaken research on the design processes of such influential designers as Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Herman Hertzberger and Ken Yeang. (See also leader, p99, and letters, pp101–106 in this issue.)

The late seventeenth century saw massive shifts in construction techniques and practice. This was particularly true in structural carpentry and owed much to the innovations of a single architect.

Sir Christopher Wren occupies a central place in English architectural history. Yet he was also a mathematician and it is reasonable to assume that he took more than a passing interest in the structural aspects of his buildings. Starting from the work of David Yeomans (1992 et al), this article considers his involvement in one particular craft, carpentry. By returning to the original documents and from careful measurement and recording of the surviving works and other buildings of the time, it reveals that his office had a far greater influence than hitherto supposed.

Neutra's now forgotten Venetian lecture of 1949 reveals him as a polemicist with a sense of humour anxious to distance himself from Bruno Zevi's ‘Organic school of architecture of the United States’.

The 59-story, nearly 1.6 million gross square foot, Citicorp Center tower completed during 1977 in mid-town Manhattan was designed by the much-celebrated architect Hugh Stubbins of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The tower incorporated an array of notable technological features including doubledecker elevator cabs to reduce the number of elevator shafts and thereby increase the usable floor area, alternative energy source and reclamation systems, and low-brightness lighting that helped render the tower some 42% more energy efficient than comparable structures designed to conventional standards (http://www.loringengineers).

The human body once provided the fundamental measurements by which to gauge human creations – but the metric system offers ‘mere number without concrete being’. A synthesis is needed.

Measure: mens (L – mind), mensurare = measuring/measure

Metre: metron (Gk), metrum (L – measuring rod), mètre (Fr) = metre

Irony: eironeia (Gk – simulated ignorance), eiron – dissembler and simulator of power = irony

No civilization has existed without measures, and each has described measures in a manner specific to its needs. To exist at all, measures must be practical and useful, and most have their origins in everyday experience. At some stage in the development of a civilized society measures will be refined, standardized and regulated and represented physically. To endure and be accepted by hundreds, thousands, even millions of people – across great civilizations and around the globe – measures must reflect and extend the authority of leaders. Measure is therefore a statement and record of the changing balance of power and independence. It is an expression of culture.

In the Berkeley Prize essay competition for 2002 (see p119), architecture students were asked to consider the role of the street in fostering public life by addressing the following Question:

Throughout history, the Street has served as a mediator between our public and private lives. With rapid change occurring today in every culture, the traditional social value of the street is also undergoing change and in many instances is losing this human element. As an architect, how do you address this issue?

A third year student at the University of Waterloo, Thomas-Bernard Kenniff, was awarded the prize for the following essay.

Models are increasingly used in exhibitions on historical themes. However, far from being merely an aid to representation, architectural modelling invariably acts as a highly effective aid to research.

A simple and now standardised method of project description linking architectural ideas to technical requirements enables sub-contractors to develop their proposals around their own proprietary technologies.

Frank O. Gehry and Associates' (FOG/A) sculptural approach to building form is widely known. Their geometrically complex designs and frequently unorthodox use of materials, as in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao [1], the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Experience Music Center in Seattle, and the Neue Zollhof office complex in Düsseldorf seem to have redefined the idea of what is possible in architecture.

The building that for many incorporates the essence of twentieth-century Modern architecture existed for only six months. Critics have called the Barcelona Pavilion a myth, an icon, an image. In this book, Josep Quetglas claims that it is a stage where the performance can only be described by ‘emptiness and the future’. And although what is true for theatre might not apply to architecture, the dramatic dynamics inherent in modern theatre's concern that the stage set should never repeat the text of the play do help explain the varied and contradictory interpretations of the Barcelona Pavilion.

Steven Holl, Time Magazine's Architect of the Year, has had his own office in New York since 1976 and has taught at Columbia University since 1981. Winner of over 20 honour awards from the American Institute of Architects, he has published widely and become one of the most visionary architectural thinkers and practitioners of our time. Thomas Fisher interviewed him for arq

The expression of time is pervasive in Japanese culture and architecture. At the Chapel on Mount Rokko, Tadao Ando draws on native traditions to articulate a range of temporal phenomena.

Computers are now used routinely to create high-quality images of proposed buildings but the extent to which these images are contributing to the quality of the final product remains questionable.

Twenty-five years after its publication in 1977, David Watkin's ‘time-bomb’ demolition of Modernist architectural theory has appeared under the cliché-augmented title Morality and Architecture Revisited. Whether the book merits this jubilee re-issue is open to some debate. Of the reasons given on the flyleaf, the suggestion that ‘many of the old fallacies still persist’ seems at once an unnecessary admission of the author's failure or, at any rate, partial success in convincing us of his thesis, and an equally unnecessary concern for the recidivist views of a handful of unreconstructed Functionalists. Can there really be many who are not, after a quarter of a fast-moving century, persuaded that Pevsner was wrong and Popper right? When it comes to architectural theory, historicism in the strict philosophical sense is surely largely discredited.

This small pavilion and related earth-bound woodstore demonstrate how, on a modest budget, the necessary can rise to the level of the poetic. An appendix summarises the architect's design approach