According to the architectural theorist Charles Jencks, a major problem in architecture at this moment is the spiritual crisis, and the loss of a shared metaphysics. He believes that it is the task of architects to take responsibility for the public and esoteric meanings of a civic building, although this is an especially difficult task in a global culture where many believe there is no shared value system. Jencks is aware of the problem but at the same time he believes that a new paradigm in architecture is emerging. He describes this new paradigm as follows:

We have moved from a mechanistic view of the universe to one that is self-organising at all levels from the atom to the galaxy. Illuminated by the computer, this new worldview is paralleled by changes now occurring in architecture.

Jencks concedes that this shift in worldview is only beginning, that there is no widespread cultural movement under way, but one can discern the beginnings of a shift in architecture that relates to a profound transformation in science. Jencks is particularly interested in new sciences of complexity: fractals, nonlinear dynamics, self-organising systems, and the new cosmology. At the core of this new worldview is the new cosmology, ‘cosmogenesis’, which reveals the universe as a single, unfolding, creative event perpetually striving for new levels of self-organisation. Cosmogenesis tells us a new story of the universe and therefore Jencks perceives it as our new Genesis.

The announcement that American architect Steven Holl had won the competition to design a new building for the Glasgow School of Art opposite Charles Rennie Mackintosh's original (built 1897–1909), and the revelation of his plans to the public, provoked plenty of criticism about the possible relationship between the two buildings. Professor William Curtis first wrote on the topic in the Architects' Journal almost a year from the announcement, and his opinions on the relationship were forthright: ‘Rather than dialogue’, he argued, ‘there is a dumb lack of articulation in construction and material.’ A response came in the following issue of the AJ from David Porter, then Professor at the Mackintosh School of Architecture. He disagreed with Curtis, claiming that the new building will have ‘an extraordinary spatial richness’ and that ‘the original sketch Curtis saw in Glasgow last December has progressed very rapidly’, for it was but an early stage in ‘a design strategy driven forward with a mixture of poetics and ruthless pragmatics: qualities that are singularly appropriate in this context, and developed with artistry and skill’.

Curtis subsequently wrote a further open letter to ‘the Governors, the Director, the Faculty, Students, Staff, Alumnae and Alumni’ of Glasgow School of Art, which was published in facsimile in the Architects' Journal on 3 March 2011:

What a disappointment then to contemplate Steven Holl's proposed addition. It is horrendously out of scale, it dominates Mackintosh, it does not create a decent urban space, it fails to deal with the context near and far, it is clumsy in form and proportion, it lacks finesse in detail, has no relationship to the human figure, and is a stillborn diagram dressed up in Holl clichés such as ‘iceberg’ glass.

In 2000, the Crown Street redevelopment in Glasgow's New Gorbals area was completed following a masterplan by Piers Gough and building designs by Page and Park, Elder and Cannon, Hypostyle Architects and others. Built on symbolically contested ground previously occupied by the Gorbals tenements (1870s–1960s) and the high-rise Hutchesontown flats (1960s–1990s), the new development is a textbook example of neotraditional design. The project features ornamented facades, bay windows, courtyards and corridor streets along with local references to the heyday of Glasgow tenements during the late nineteenth century.

This paper shows that the new tenements on Crown Street contributed to Glasgow's economic revival strategies by reconfiguring the site and supporting a positive view of Glasgow's Victorian era. In this sense, the architects adapted design preferences – which at the time were evident all over Europe and North America – to a local agenda.

The new tenements reconcile conflicting perspectives: on the one hand a break almost as comprehensive as the urban renewal of the 1960s, and on the other hand an idea of historical continuity and long-lasting community life, which rested on a revised conception of the city's industrial past. Conveying a historical image cleared of imperfections they communicate a message of permanence that stands in stark contrast to the area's historic upheavals, but nonetheless contributed to the viability of the new neighbourhood.

Architecture in Northern Ireland in the twentieth century followed much the same pattern as elsewhere in the British Isles moving, broadly, from historic styles around the turn of the century, through a phase of Arts and Crafts activity for a decade or so, until settling down to a concentrated period of interest in Neo-Georgian styling in the 1920s and '30s. This inter-war era included, however, some examples of Modernism, primarily of an ornamented Art Deco type but occasionally of a more plain variety which ranged between Functionalism and the International Style. Examples of this type of modern architecture – characterised by flat roofs, white walls, large horizontal windows and a general avoidance of ornamentation – formed only a comparatively small part of the overall output of the period in Northern Ireland, and, for most architects who were involved, their contribution amounted to little more than a building or two; such was the prevailing tradition-bound architectural mood of the time.

One architect in Northern Ireland, however, demonstrated a commitment to the Modern Movement that appears to have been greater than most. That was Philip Bell, whose name has been mentioned from time to time by various commentators, whether as a designer of Modernist houses or as the architect of one other particularly well-known building of the 1930s in Northern Ireland, the Strangford Lough Yacht Club House, which was an accomplished and stylish enough building to have been featured in the English architectural press at the time.

As to the isothermicity of the translucent walls, experimental laboratories will be able in the near future to give us a new translucent material whose isothermal properties will be equal to that of the thickest wall. From then on, we will witness the inauguration of a new era: buildings will be altogether hermetically closed. Windows will no longer be needed on the façade; consequently neither dust nor flies nor mosquitoes will enter the houses; nor will noise.

Le Corbusier's fascination with light and glass formed a continuing thread throughout his career. After his maxim ‘architecture is lighted floors’ came the passionate discourses to defend the building's openness, first with his fenêtre en longueur, the ribbon window, and ultimately with his emblematic pan de verre, the glass wall that would not only provide sunlight-flooded interiors but would also most significantly contribute to shape the Modernist imagery. Despite the profuse explorations invested in this concept, Le Corbusier would always lament his failure to execute his ‘pan de verre 100%’ in the way he would have desired: ‘as a mur neutralisant constituted by a double glass-wall with an internal cavity through which conditioned air would circulate, hot in winter, cold in summer’.

The idea of the mur neutralisant was born as part of a challenging environmental theory for buildings, termed either respiration exacte or air exact [1], proposed by Le Corbusier in collaboration with his cousin and practice partner Pierre Jeanneret in 1928. Le Corbusier would describe this theory in two of his most dogmatic publications: first, as one of his lectures (5 October 1929) collected in Précisions (1930) and, second, as part of La Ville Radieuse (1935), his manifesto on modern habitation.

Ian Fleming's recently-opened Floridiana Hotel, in Miami Beach, where James Bond's client, Mr Junius du Pont, ‘promise[s] to make [him] comfortable’, was correctly matched in the film adaptation of Goldfinger with Morris Lapidus's Modernist Fontainebleau Hotel (1952–54) rather than with Miami's Mediterranean-style Hotel Floridian. Fleming was not enthusiastic about the architecture of the most expensive hotel in the world (at the time of its opening), nor about its ‘rich and dull’ gardens. He obviously chose it as a representation of the ‘easy, soft, high’ life of 1959 in Miami, and as the perfect setting for a gathering of American millionaires and secret agents, gamblers, gangsters, hitmen and prostitutes.

Directly below Bond['s Aloha Suite], the elegant curve of the Cabana Club swept down to the beach – two storeys of changing-rooms below a flat roof dotted with chairs and tables and an occasional red and white striped umbrella. Within the curve was the brilliant green oblong Olympic-length swimming-pool fringed on all sides by row upon row of mattressed steamer chairs on which the customers would soon be getting their fiftydollar-a-day sunburn.

The evening before, Bond had ‘the most delicious meal […] in his life’, at the most expensive restaurant of Miami. But the thought of ‘eating like a pig […] the easy life, the rich life revolted him. He felt momentarily ashamed of his disgust […] It was the puritan in him that couldn't take it'. It was also Fleming's nod to his readers, barely out of the grim austerity of postwar Britain, where food was rationed until 1954, bombsites abounded, housing was severely substandard or temporary, smog was thick and yellow, and wartime shortages lingered to the end of the decade. Despite Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's optimistic 1957 assurance to his fellow Conservatives that most of them had ‘never had it so good’, outside lavatories and no central heating were still common. His calls for ‘restraint and common sense’ were hardly answered by Bond's life of oyster-and-champagne dining and air-conditioned vacationing.