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This paper ? like those following it in this issue of arq? focuses on the shifting notion of ?flow? and the significance of that notion for the practice, critique and theorisation of architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That architects leave the profession is something that seems ‘known’. In addition, there has been continuous concern that women in particular leave. However, the extent of departure is unclear. Much of the information around these observations come from surveys, is anecdotal or study women in isolation from men. This paper provides some firmer data on the movement of men and women into and out of the profession using Australia as a case study. It collates and analyses historical and contemporary data to delineate the complex patterns of participation in and leaving of architecture. While the sources of data are often limited and approximate, this analysis nonetheless highlights a number of factors affecting the tenure of architects in their profession. The economy is an obvious factor and the data mirrors the economic fate of the country. The paper firmly demonstrates that gender is a factor with a strong impact on leaving the profession – a movement that clearly adversely affects the diversity of the profession. A further factor in leaving is age, which interacts with gender: women begin to leave when young and men when older. Diversity is increasingly proving to be an important factor in the ability of an organisation or a profession to survive, let alone meet, the challenges and opportunities of the globalised twenty-first century. The paper concludes with a plea for better data sources to better clarify how, and to what extent, biases nudge many architects out of the profession. Understanding the extent and nature of these biases helps the formulation of tactics to foster greater diversity to engender a more resilient profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is not a comprehensive survey of the architectural career of Arata Isozaki, one of the most distinguished practicing architects in the world today and the 2019 winner of the Pritzker Prize, but a specific look at his formative years of the 1960s when he began to build his own design methodology. It delineates Isozaki's encounter with the avant-garde art movement of the 1960s, collectively called "Anti-Art, " against the backdrop of the "anti-spirit" of Japanese society. Although Isozaki's artistic side has been overstated at times, previous studies rarely addressed how his intensive interactions with art circles played a role in shaping his design methodology. I would like to examine the convergence of creative individuals and cross-disciplinary connections to understand Isozaki's architectural thinking. This study examines how Isozaki's collaborations with his artist contemporaries enabled him to formulate the notion of the "invisible city, " a radically new design concept characterised by the expansion of the nature of architecture from producing isolated built-forms to all-encompassing natural and manmade environments. However, after drawing on communications and information theory, which prevailed in 60s architectural circles, Isozaki's destructive and anarchistic connotation of "invisible city" was channeled into a systematic cybernetic model and eventually transformed into a constructive planning method. I will discuss the realisation of a cybernetic environment at the Festival Plaza of Expo' 70 and trace the legacy of "invisible city" in his later postmodern work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project began when one of my research colleagues, a civil engineer, pointed to his very thorough study of daylighting in buildings and said: ‘Here is all that architects need to know about light – why don't they use it?’ A discussion followed about what kind of knowledge is relevant, when, and for whom. It ended with the questions: ‘What kind of knowledge do architects really use in their design process?’ and ‘How can we as researchers provide the different kinds of knowledge that are useful for practice?’ These questions became the basis of a research project and this paper reports on its studies and discussions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The spectacular surroundings of Kielder Water & Forest Park, in Northumberland, England, are a confluence of opposing states: the man-made and natural; the utilitarian and recreational; the beautiful and isolated; shaped by weather converging from east and west. Kielder Castle was built in 1775 as the Duke of Northumberland's hunting lodge. In recent years the territory has gained notoriety for a series of innovative art and architectural commissions including Belvedere by Softroom Architects (1999), Kielder Skyspace by the American artist James Turrell (2000), Minotaur by architect Nick Coombe and artist Shona Kitchen (2003), and Kielder Observatory by Charles Barclay Architects (2008). This paper outlines one of Kielder's most recent additions – a shelter entitled 55/02 – the result of a collaboration between sixteen*(makers) and manufacturers Stahlbogen GmbH. The work rekindles the symbiotic relationship between design and making once central to the production of architecture. The reawakening of this tradition has been stimulated by the mainstream adaptation of CAD/CAM as an industrial and disciplinary medium which binds the protocols of drawing with those of fabrication. However, as this account of the project shows, the relevance of an increasingly digitised world extends beyond the production of 55/02 as an artefact – it forms the basis of the architecture's relationship with its locality as an industrial, historical, social, cultural and manufactured landscape [1]. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the poetics of Alvaro 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many disciplines have taken an 'affectual' turn, from the philosophical lineage of Spinoza, Nietzsche to Deleuze & Guattari where affects constitute bodies according to capacities and processes of becoming, to more recent engagements with 'new materiality' that has redirected attention to the expressive properties of materials - matter's relational, interactive and affective capacities. Affect and its indeterminacy as a concept encourage different interpretations. This paper is situated in this complex theoretical landscape. Although numerous studies have examined how affect emerges in- and through- the occupation of architectural spaces, little analytical attention has been paid to the creative process of design and the role that affect plays in the many contingencies that arise in the process. In this context and specifically, this article explores the production and circulation of affect within architectural practices invested in image-making processes. Importantly, it illustrates how affective aspects of image-making in architecture plays a role in the process of design. The study concentrates first on the work of Sara Ahmed who provides a critical engagement with affect as a sticky process, and then extending this to incorporate such things as sticky images. An analysis of the architectural practice of Reiser +Umemoto, RUR Architecture DPC and their project for Kaohsiung Port Terminal is put forward to show how images and image-making can inform and be informed by the design process, and moreover, how they can produce certain affective economies. The article explores the usefulness affect theory in architectural discourse to provide other ways of conceptualising architectural practice beyond being governed by the generations of actual objects and clear processes of production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an English translation of an unpublished German typescript found in the archive of the architect Julius Posener in the Akademie der Kunst, Berlin. Posener, a professor of architectural history at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (HBK), travelled with a colleague and fifteen students to England for a fortnight in March 1963. They met several prominent architects, saw a wide selection of their current and recently completed works, and attended events at the Architectural Association school. The typescript is an account of the trip that he wrote up from notes in his diary on 29 March, two days after their return. Posener, who had previously spent almost a decade teaching architecture in London, proves to have been a sympathetic observer of the scene, eager to compare and contrast what he saw in England with contemporary work in Germany; his account evokes subtle disagreements between himself and his colleague on conceptual and historical points, and gives us an insight into the day-to-day workings of Denys Lasdun's office, the Architectural Association, the London County Council, and the Building Research Station in Garston. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the post-Second World War period, Italian architects opened up a debate on the role of history and time in architectural discourse that resulted in multiple interpretations of historical time in their work. Vittorio Gregotti, one of the main protagonists of the discussion, offered an interpretation of time based on an assemblage of intellectual tendencies, from phenomenology to structuralism and the history of the longue durée. This paper traces ideas that Gregotti developed in his less known and as-yet un-translated texts such as Il territiorio dell’architettura from 1966 as well as in his project for the University of Calabria from 1972. In these, Gregotti makes an original contribution to the problem of history in relationship to urban and natural environments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Felix Candela’s hyperbolic paraboloid reinforced concrete structures - also known as hypars - were not only masterly used in his well-known religious buildings but they were also ingeniously and profusely employed to roof a vast number of industrial buildings during the Mexican industrialisation era. Candela’s inverted hypar shells prototype for industrial buildings became a trademark for a systematic and standardised construction method which crossed the Mexican borders to reach and influence the work of other architects and engineers further afield. In the United Kingdom this is exemplified by the John Lewis Warehouse (JLW) at Stevenage in which Candela worked as co-designer and consultant of the post-War architectural firm Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall (YRM) and the engineers Clarke Nicholls and Marcel.The JLW represents a unique structure in the repertoire of Candela’s work outside Mexico for two main reasons. Firstly, it stands as Candela’s first European project and secondly it represents a structure in which ‘automatic beauty’ was achieved through economic efficiency and the use of more sophisticated construction methods than those conventionally used in Mexico. Moreover, and beyond its structural and constructional merits the JLW yields a spatial richness which transformed the ephemeral of the working day to forge spaces of mnemonic identification. Built in 1963, the JLW is an epitome of structural art amongst the industrial buildings of Britain's post-Austerity period. Candela’s first European project is analysed not only in terms of its structural and constructional merits but also in relation to its spatial poetics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A cover of the March 2011 issue of the journal "ARQ: Architectural Research Quarterly" is presented.

?Agency? is a beguiling word. It has the immediacy of a call-to-arms and the remoteness and anonymity of a bureaucratic function. Agency, as action in the world, underpins revolutionary social change, and the representation of someone else's interests ? usually at a distance ? in a governmental or business context. It is implicated in both the agitprop of the Reclaim the Streets network, or Brazil's Homeless Workers Movement, and in state bureaucracies such as the UK Border Agency, or commercial franchises such as the Western Union. The term encapsulates two quite distinctive forms of action: one individuated, collective and immediate; and the other systemic, anonymised and bureaucratic. It is no accident, then, that in academic literature ?agency? is often paired with ?structure?, and in the binarised form, structure/agency, is used to refer to the tension between the creative actions of individuals and the social, political and economic structures that supposedly constrain them. The fact that architects are expected to exercise agency in both of these senses ? as creative actors and as representatives of their clients' interests ? gives the theme further significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the influence of the religious and symbolic dimensions of traditional Chinese architecture on the works of Hugo Häring and Hans Scharoun. Among Häring's papers in the Häring archive of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, Germany include minutes of six meetings entitled "Discussions About Chinese Architecture. Chen Kuan Lee, born in Shanghai, China and studied and practiced architecture in Germany is the key figure in introducing Chinese architecture to Häring and Scharoun.

One of the most neglected and urgent issues facing architecture -- the substantial fracture between thinking about architecture and engaging in professional practice -- was addressed at a two day conference in Cambridge this March (2004). Organized by RIBA East/University of Cambridge CPD for Architects, in association with the University's Department of Architecture and Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, it attracted a sizeable audience of practising architects, senior academics and students. This mix reflected the organizers' ambition to bring together professional and academic perspectives in this interdisciplinary area. The proceedings will be published by Spon during 2005. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June 1966 Hungarian-born French architect Yona Friedman travelled to the port town of Folkestone on the English Channel to join the International Dialogue of Experimental Architecture (IDEA). The event was a large two-day symposium on radical experiments in architecture and urbanism organised by the British architectural collective Archigram. A leading figure in experimental international groups of architects and artists crafting techno-futuristic visions of three-dimensionally expanding cities, Friedman seemed to be an essential participant in an event advertised as a convocation of 'all Europe's creative nuts'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phenomenon of participatory architectural design is thought to have emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s in Europe. In 1969, Giancarlo De Carlo, one of its main advocates, presented a manifesto in which he asserted that 'architecture is too important to be left to architects', criticised architectural practice as a relationship of 'the intrinsic aggressiveness of architecture and the forced passivity of the user', and called for establishing 'a condition of creative and decisional equivalence' between the architect and the user, so that in fact both the architect and the user take on the architect's role. He also argued for the 'discovery of users' needs' and envisioned the process of designing as planning 'with' the users instead of planning 'for' the users.1 In the same year, De Carlo began working on a housing estate in Terni, Italy that involved future dwellers in design decisions. Among other participatory projects carried out around that time were Lucien Kroll's medical faculty building for the University de Louvain (1970–6) and Ottaker Uhl's Fesstgasse Housing, a multi-storey apartment block in Vienna (1979). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about several papers discussed during the 13th International Design Seminar in Monte Carasso, Bellinzona from July 2-15, 2006 is presented. The seminar was lead by Ticinese architect Luigi Snozzi and he discussed his projects in the centre of Monte Carasso and rendered a background to the work that the students were attempting, which includes the conversion of the Augustinian convent into an elementary school and community facilities.

Here was the house, its heavy walls built of the stone of the mountain, plastered over by groping hands – in feeling and material nothing but an artificial reproduction of one of the many caverns in the mountain-side. I saw that essentially all architecture of the past, whether Egyptian or Roman, was nothing but the work of a sculptor dealing with abstract forms. The architect's attempt really was to gather and pile up masses of building material, leaving empty hollows for human use [...]. The room itself was a by-product. (R. M. Schindler) By 1911, Rudolph Schindler had concluded that all architecture in the West leading up to the early twentieth century had been fixated on structure and mass, in stark contrast to the new 'space architecture' he championed. His dismissive categorisation of the traditional room as some kind of evolutionary relative of the cave is a reminder of the moment when a strand of Western architecture blossomed from containment into openness; from a predictable past to an exciting and uncertain future – the gift of modern architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the exhibition "The University is Now on Air: Broadcasting Modern Architecture" held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, Quebec from November 15, 2017-April 1, 2018, curated by architect Joaquim Moreno.

The author discusses that the appropriate communication of architectural value originates from the innate knowledge of architect about material composition of the built environment.

An obituary of an architect Dalibor Vesely is presented.

Aldo van Eyck, in an interview twenty-five years after John Voelcker died [1], remembered him as follows:There were, of course, other highly interesting men in Team 10, for their personality and intellect and passion; one of them was John Voelcker. He really thought about the great problems of urbanism. He was one of the first people, in Aix already, who talked about quantity, number and identity and in such a way that I thought ‘hey, now I have a new scale; somebody is tuned in rather differently, with a completely other approach […]He wasn't the kind of person to organise himself to build. He did build several things, but not much. He was younger […] and anyway with the kind of ideas he had it wasn't easy to hook onto British building practice. His ideas went very far, though they were not utopian. John was a quintessential Team 10 thinker. He was urbanistically the best of the Team 10 thinkers, by far. He knew a lot, he was interesting, inclined and open. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Letters to the editor are presented in response to articles previously published in "Architectural Research Quarterly" (ARQ), addressing topics including issues associated with managing production specifications, the philosophy of buildings, and the social place of architects.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Herman Hertzberger on ideas which architects carry with them in order to design and another by Chris L. Smith and Andrew Ballantyne on the impact of an exploration of ideas on architectural design.

Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978), one of the lesser known architects of the second half of the twentieth century, studied architecture at Cornell University between 1962 and 1968. Although he had always been part of an active circle of artists and architects with whom he shared his radical ideas, Matta-Clark was generally excluded from the architectural milieu since his proposed interventions were thought to be unsuitable for accommodation. His exclusion from the architectural scene was marked; following his Window-Blow-Out(s) project in 1976, as Mary Jane Jacob has pointed out, his colleagues – including Peter Eisenman and the members of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) – found it very hard to accept an architect with a BB gun in hand. The removal of the facade in the 1974 Bingo project; the elimination of the thresholds in the 1973 Bronx Floors; or the cut to a suburban house in the 1974 Splitting project were all evaluated as temporary, and destructive in the making; and were thus regarded as artistic actions to transform buildings into objects. As such, his critical architectural productions remained overshadowed behind a series of seemingly violent artistic intrusions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Perhaps unexpectedly, architects are seldom talked about in terms of the building toys they once played with or what they constructed with them. Exceptions are Witold Rybczynski and Frank Lloyd Wright. The former describes John Ruskin mastering the laws of building for load-bearing towers and arches by the time he was seven or eight (around 1825) because of playing with wooden building blocks (introduced at the end of the 1700s). However, he also describes himself playing with Bayko. This was a Bakelite building set from the 1930s [1], probably modelled on Mobaco, a cardboard and wood Dutch construction toy [2]. Both of these toys are pre-dated by an 1887 English toy for house construction, the walls of which were made from wooden blocks threaded on to vertical wires. Rybczynski also describes watching his father and uncle build a real garden shed using concrete panels slipped between reinforcing bars, like the method used by the plastic toy but life-size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When I first started researching the work of the Edwardian architect Horace Field (1861–1948), I soon realised that this was a man whose achievements could best be measured in terms quite antithetical to those conventionally used by architectural historians. Nearly all buildings are judged on the basis of their originality; and, if they are old, on the basis of their influence or their relationship to what subsequently became a significant direction in the arts or culture of their time. Even in a field such as the history of Victorian and Edwardian architecture, transformed by Mark Girouard and Alistair Service forty or more years ago, a story has only been worth telling when it is a story. If a collection of buildings adds up to very little, what then? Field's buildings are mostly incidental to other more interesting, more imaginative stories. Was he a failure, then, in designing buildings which fail to appear in their own right as part of a critical canon? Was he a failure too, in that his career started so promisingly and tailed away to nothing; that he was tucked away in rural Sussex, in Rye, fiddling about with old buildings and designing garages and cheap villas, while other architects of his generation spent their final years on some of the most enthralling projects of their lives? Or does the story of Field's career suggest that there are other ways to evaluate an architectural career than to tell the story of its conventionally-defined successes? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We gazed with earnest hope for signs of recovery and longed for the airwaves to tell us that ???the worst is past, economic Armageddon has been averted, and house prices are rising again???. What follows engages with debates on economic development and places the recent crisis in the architectural and building industry in historical context. It argues that it was irrational for architects and contractors to behave as if the boom would go on forever. Capitalist development has always been marked by periodic crises, and building production has always exhibited cycles of expansion and contraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the creation of Aalto atelier as a corporate masterpiece of Aino Marsio-Aalto, Elissa Aalto, and Alvar Aalto to identify specific skills and roles on the partners in Finland. It states that the atelier's interior architecture and materials are catered by Aino-Marsio's expertise while Alissa manages the artistic and managerial responsibility. Meanwhile, Alvar pronounces the prevailing characteritis of the atelier's intent and process.

The article focuses on the relevance of traditional designs in contemporary architectural practice in Turkey and all across the world. It mentions that with the changes in architectural styles and growing modernity, traditional designs and art has become a thing of the past and has lost its importance and significance. It also discusses an architect Le Corbusier's views on Turkish architecture. According to Corbusier, traditional designs loses its value when repeated and, hence, it should be used as an inspiration to develop a new design and art.

The article focuses on the style and features of modern architecture. It mentions that modern architecture makes, use of reveal or shadow to mark joints. It mentions that reveal is a unique distinctive architectural shadow, and is a shadowed joint created by gaps, delineating seams and three-dimensional spaces. It further mentions that reveal or shadow to mark joints have received a mixed response from architects from around the globe. Some architects feel that the use of reveals must be stopped since it decay the quality of architectural design, construction and detailing.

The article focuses on the use of knowledge by the architects while creating an architectural design. The different kind of knowledge used in the field of architecture are explicit knowledge and implicit knowledge. It mentions that implicit knowledge is gained through experience whereas research based knowledge is called explicit knowledge. It mentions that professional experience in architectural design is not the only criteria for selecting an architect but also the architect's interest in research-based knowledge plays a major role.

The article focuses on the architectural projects which are considered to be catalysts for urbanization in Great Britain. It also discusses the Thames Barrier Park in the London Dockland, at London, England. According to architect Aldo Rossi, artifacts which aid in the process of growth and development of urban collections. It mentions that the Thames Barrier Park was developed by the London Docklands Development Corp. (LLDC), after the decline in industrialization and criticisms faced by LLDC regarding its urban planning projects.

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? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

?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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the confusion surrounding the use of oblique and parallel projections through econometrics in the 21st century architecture. It aims to clarify the existing confusion concerning parallel projections outlined by oblique and axonometric projections as well its underlying spatial differences. It highlights the development of these applications based on different perspective, including the French, English and German. Moreover, the article explains how Auguste Choisy, an architectural historian, who was the first one to integrate these architectural theories into practice.

The article explains that the musical concepts of Luigi Nono, who was a close friend of the Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa, offers new insights into Scarpa's concepts about time in architectural conservation. It is observed that when Scarpa was asked for a plan to renovate the 14th-century Castelvecchio in Verona, he also considered the fourth dimension of time in addition to the usual three dimensions.

The article points out that the concept of "terrain vague," in Ignasi de Solà-Morales' architectural culture employs landscapes to represent urban politics. It is observed that the principles of indeterminacy, emptiness and occupation can be gleaned from the concept in the effort to develop principles for designing a city's public spaces.

Architects should learn to communicate more through their architecture. The commercial vernacular architecture of the American ‘strip’ – motels, gas stations, fast food outlets – communicates loud and clear. In comparison, high architecture, particularly the high architecture of Modernism, is sullen and silent. This, roughly, is the thesis of Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Stephen Izenour (1972 and 1977), one of the key texts of the Post-Modernist movement in architectural theory of the early 1970s. Venturi et al thought architects could learn a lot about symbolism and communication from the sort of non-judgmental study of roadside architecture that their students had undertaken at Yale. In the second half of the book the idea was developed into a theory and encapsulated into a universal building concept, ‘the decorated shed’, which has since become a cliché of architectural criticism. The decorated shed was designed to overthrow the most cherished beliefs and rituals of Modernism. Expression through form was to be replaced by the ‘persuasive heraldry’ of the totem and the billboard; articulation of detail was to be replaced by old-fashioned applied ornament; and the ‘heroic and original’ was to be replaced by the ‘ugly and ordinary’. But the emphasis was on the decoration rather than the shed. Learning from Las Vegas did not have much to say about the way that the sheds of the commercial strip were constructed, other than describing them vaguely as ‘system built’, or about the implications that the technology of their construction might have for architectural practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many striking examples of Modernist buildings that house sculptures that are much more traditional than the architecture that surrounds them. To some extent these disparities can be explained by the uncontrolled installation of sculpture, the result either of a lack of concern on the part of the architect or of ignorance of what was to come. Of more interest here, however, is the deliberate positioning of 'non-Modernist' sculpture in Modernist buildings. To some extent such juxtapositions require that we reconsider our definition of Modern sculpture. Beyond this, we can ask what figurative sculpture gave abstract architects, and why they used it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years there has been mounting curiosity about how architects and engineers work with one another to make buildings. Studies of such collaborations have their present use for furthering technique and efficiency in construction. As a historical exercise, one might view the tendency as part of a broader, revisionist trend – an overdue project for setting the record straight, and releasing architecture from the velvet manacles of art history. Acquaintance with the making of any sizeable building soon teaches that the Vasarian concept of disegno – of a creative process anterior to and set apart from construction – suits only a minority of architecture's modes and moments. As an explanation even of the more imaginative paths that lead from the blank sheet to the occupied building, it is intellectually reductive, humanly ungenerous, and actually untruthful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For architects, intellectual property (IP) law is vital. Without it plans, building designs and models would have no value as others could copy them without payment. But what are an architect's rights and how are those rights retained in order to avoid commercial exploitation?The legislation for this area of law comes from the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA), the Registered Designs Act 1949, the Trade Marks Act 1994 and the Patents Act 1977. IP itself is divided into those rights that are registrable at the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) and those that are not. Rights that must be registered before the work is protected include trademarks, patents and registered designs; IP rights that cannot be registered include copyright and unregistered design rights. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A photograph by Robert Polidori, of a room within the city of Petra, shows a pristine cubic volume hewn out of the rock. The nature of the stone reveals different textural and figural qualities of the material when it becomes a floor, a wall or a ceiling. There is no need to ‘put’ the building together, to assemble it, because it is already exists. This, then, is the fantasy of the architect, to sculpt from a single substance that is both structure and surface, with the only remaining questions pertaining to shape and smoothness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

arq's interview with Jack Pringle (6/3, pp104-106) puts a strong case for why the profession needs to engage with education and research, if it is to sustain a robust body of knowledge relevant to its clients' continuously changing demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The repercussions of the results of the UK Government's highly controversial 2000 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) for architecture (arq 6/3, pp 203–207) continue to resonate. But this time the university architecture schools are not alone. For the first time ever, the RIBA, recognizing the seriousness of the situation for the profession, is giving architectural research the attention it deserves. Jack Pringle is masterminding the Institute's response. In late September, arq reminded him of his initial response to the RAE debacle (arq 6/3, pp 197–198), and asked him about current developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article on literature about architect Alvar Aalto by Harry Charrington in the September 2010 issue.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including one about the monograph of a leading architect, one about architectural research, and one about the creativity of architects.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to an article about the involvement of architects on issues related to the profession.