The popularity of the concept of evidence-based design (EBD) has exploded over the past five years, picking up speed as a topic of attention in environmental design conferences, papers and articles, and books. Rooted in the healthcare environment, the EBD concept has now bridged out to design of long-term care settings, housing and workplaces, as well as facilities management. While evidence-based design is indeed a seductive term for those of us interested in advancing research-informed design – portending linkages between research-derived evidence and environmental design – we cautiously note that, as of this writing, in its current conceptualisation, its clout is stronger than its clarity. This paper is a clarion invitation to the environmental design research community to consider the concept of evidence-based design as emergent, warranting careful, critical examination regarding its meaning and underlying assumptions.

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.

The electric power system has often been compared to a circulatory system, and telecommunication and informational complexes likened to nervous systems. Such characterisations are rigorous only for those aspects that bring the utility system closer to a living system: its mechanisms of control and regulation.

Squeezed into the narrow confines of a parasitic Mumbai dwelling; gathered around a ceramic tea-set in an elevated tea-house; trapped in the transparent void of a tree; and nestled in a vertical tower of fur, books and timber the 1:1 – Architects Build Small Spaces exhibition offered a tactile and intimate encounter with the intense experiences and emotions evoked by a series of small architectural spaces. Installed throughout the Victoria and Albert Museum, the exhibition ran from 15 June – 30 August 2010.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the growing recognition of the plurality of history and the constructive nature of monuments, in conjunction with a more general realisation of the intellectual problems of war, resulted in a widespread interrogation – both intellectually and aesthetically – of concepts of memorialisation and commemoration. This interrogation is credited as the catalyst for a series of new approaches to monument-making, famously exemplified by Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington (1982) in addition to a series of holocaust-related memorials, such as those theorised in the seminal writings of James E. Young. These memorials, in conjunction with post-modern discussions of the politics of memory and issues of counter-memory, complicated the culture of commemoration, seeing the emergence of new commemorative types known as counter-monuments, which Young defines as ‘memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premise of the monument’. These are often also identified by terms such anti-memorials or progressive memorials. Among these, new sub-genres also emerged in response to particular methods of commemoration such as living and spontaneous memorials, in addition to more gestural methods of commemoration involving, for example, services or performances that transcend the categories of sculpture and architecture.

Mole Architects was set up by Meredith Bowles in 1997, and has become known for well-crafted, contextually responsive and ecologically sensitive projects. One of the claims that Mole make in their practice brochure is that their work is identified by a consistency of attitude rather than a ‘house style’. This claim emphasises thinking, analysis and process but this is balanced by the evidence presented in their realised work, which demonstrates an undeniable interest and delight in the materiality and making of buildings. Reflecting on the enduring influence of his architectural education, Bowles acknowledges this balance: ‘What I think these formative experiences refer to is a belief in the importance of things rather than ideas, or rather that ideas reside in the thing itself’.

This paper presents the comparative analysis of the National Museum of Modern Art, in the Pompidou Centre, Paris, designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano (1972–77), and the Tate Modern art gallery, London, the conversion of an industrial building by Swiss practice Herzog & de Meuron (1995–2000). The two museums share a set of conspicuous similarities so that their parallel investigation seems self-evident. Both are large-scale national museums of modern art, extending over two floors, in buildings that constitute urban landmarks and are often seen as examples of the museum as a box [1a–b]. Their ground floors are conceived as a space you walk through, as a ‘piazza’; their spatial organisation is modular and flexible; their visual construction, punctuated by powerful views to the city. Moreover, they are guided by similar spatial ideas and share common fundamental morphological properties. Interestingly, their affinities extend to their collections – both begin with the turn of the twentieth century and extend to the twenty-first century; and their curatorial practices – as, for instance, the practice of reprogramming the galleries on a regular basis. But the experience of visiting the two museums is entirely different and each appears to have its own idiosyncratic spatial character, quite distinct from the other (described metaphorically by the museum designers as the museum as a city in the case of the Pompidou and as a machine for showing art in the case of Tate Modern). So, could these obvious similarities hide critical differences between the two museums?

Ideas about movement were fundamental for Modernist architecture of the early twentieth century and are ubiquitous in contemporary theory and practice. The shifting theoretical terrain in which bodily movement is made sense of has continuously produced different understandings of architectural possibilities. For example, where in much early Modernism, and in present conventional practice, movement is often articulated in terms of technical, functional circulation and narrativised aesthetic experience (the architectural promenade), other recent practices adopt more ambivalent approaches. The emphasis in these later practices is on the relationality of programmatic elements, articulated in terms of dynamic coexistence, continual variation and fluid, interconnected space. In this way, they connect to a pervasive concern with mobility in the late twentieth, and early twenty-first century: culture is increasingly seen as dynamic and hybrid, societies are defined through complex webs of interconnection, and social theory is focused on the nomadic. In this context, examining changing conceptions and structuring of bodily movement within architecture provides a means for productively reengaging with modern architectural history.

If we ask ourselves the question, ‘why does Jim Stirling loom so large in the landscape of British and continental architecture?’, the answer does not come easily. We will begin by saying that Leicester alone – its clarity, its curious fragility, its wit and inventiveness – earned him a singular place in modern architectural history. It seemed to have arrived just at the moment when modern architecture had reached its expiry date. Next we will probably remember the straightforward intelligence of his essays on Le Corbusier's post-war work. But we will just as quickly disown one or another of the later buildings: the Tate, the Fogg, or most often, the elephantine competition entry for the Bibliothèque Nationale. We will ignore the fine restraint of the architecture building at Rice University and instead bemoan the cartoonish (but astonishing) facades of the Berlin Wissenschaftszentrum. We will uneasily ponder his lifelong love of quotation and self-quotation, recognising the wit but wondering about the line where quotation becomes laziness or theft.

On 15 August 1965, The Beatles performed before more than 55,600 fans at Shea Stadium, New York, USA. In what was by far the biggest event to date of its type, that evening a dramatic revelation of the commercial possibilities of popular music took place, and changed the nature of the music business for ever. Simultaneously, despite using more powerful amplification than had been used before, the virtually non-existent connection between the musicians and their audience revealed the enormous technical and architectural challenges of large-scale concerts. Though this concert took place in a permanent building structure, the equipment it was hoped would temporarily alter its use for performance purposes was portable. That it was clearly inadequate for this task reinforced the need for new mobile facilities that would do the job better [1, 2].

In 1972 the famous diagram of the ‘Decorated Shed’ was introduced into the architectural discourse; it implied a definition of ‘architecture as shelter with decoration on it’ [1]. The diagram was part of urban research into the commercial environment of Las Vegas that was interpreted by the researchers – Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour – as ‘a new type of urban form’ that they meant ‘to understand’ in order ‘to begin to evolve techniques for its handling’. Yet the critique on this and other research and designs by Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown focused essentially on questions of form and more specifically of the image of architecture.

In the context of the maturation of traditional concepts of identity into ‘new forms of plurality and spatiality’, this paper aims to explore the role of genius loci, memory, and ultimately identity in a particular gallery: the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, Orkney.

Initially, it considers ways in which regional and vernacular identities have informed and enriched the architectural project, instilling it with tangible and intangible traces of place, and the past and present people of that place. Formal and material influences from the abstract but poetic idea of north, the local topography and town, and the existent buildings on site, are revealed.

As the existing housing stock ages throughout Europe, retrofitting offers many opportunities for the substantial improvement of the energy performance of residential buildings and the provision of sustainable alternatives to conventional heating and cooling. The effect of global warming is leading to a widespread use of air conditioning in existing and new residential buildings. This potentially implies an increase in cooling energy and adverse environmental effects on an unprecedented scale. In the hot and dry climate of many south European cities, this could be avoided with the use of an innovative wall integrated passive evaporative cooling system, which harnesses air, water and porous ceramic to provide comfortable indoor conditions. Dr Rosa Schiano-Phan discusses the applicability of such a system to the urban context of Seville in the light of the current Spanish regulatory framework and recent developments of European energy performance standards.

Japanese culture, through its art, language and religion, is a result of accumulated flows of knowledge from China and Korea. The traditions of garden design and garden construction, similarly, are ‘a space of flows’ from classical Chinese models though, after centuries of development and refinement, have become distinctly reflective of Japanese culture and aesthetics. The first recorded instance of this knowledge flow reaching Japan appears in the eleventh century. The first treatise on Japanese garden design, Sakuteiki (garden making), is attributed to Tachibana no Toshitsuna, a court official and designer of gardens. Though the treatise contains no illustrations, much of the text is precise, and its content reflective of the cultural and aesthetic predilections of the Confucianist Heien court. Other treatises may have been extant during the Heien period (794–1185), though they are now lost.

In 1984 Colin Rowe was finally persuaded to write an introduction for a book on the work of James Stirling. In his text, Rowe claimed that he had previously resisted a similar invitation in 1973, due in part to an inability at that time to account for Stirling's lack of interest in facades. He wrote: ‘According to my reading, these [Le Corbusier's Villa Schwob and Garches] were all masters of the vertical surface; and clearly, it must have been the relative absence of this concern in Stirling which arrested my writing in 1973 and which remains my reservation about Stuttgart’. For Rowe, the missing facade of Stirling's museum extension to the Staatsgalerie stood metonymically for the absence of Stirling's visible engagement with the articulation of an ideal world, because the facade was ‘the existential interface between eye and idea’. Without a facade Rowe could not be sure that Stirling adhered to the sort of idealism that satisfied his own architectural and philosophical concerns.

Among the legacy of Modernist architecture, the Danteum project is an extraordinary attempt to inscribe a literary expedition into architectural organism. Beyond its absolute form, the project makes use of the plastic effects of architectonics to create immersive ‘atmospheres’ that elicit states of mind and transform the continuous movement through the scheme into a dramatised journey. The coexistence of immersion and progression provides competing challenges to visitors' narrative sensemaking. This paper will analyse the Danteum as a hybrid system of episodic and situational narrations that turns this geometrical space int o a narrative labyrinth.

While Le Corbusier's spiral plan projects have long been debated for their symbolic and rhetorical meaning - dealing with initiation, procession, ritual, generative nature, unlimited growth and so on - little attention is paid to their actual production as designs. If we look for the emergence of the spiral plan as a production of Le Corbusier's studio then we might begin with a sketch design for the Villa La Roche made in 1923 and not with the project for the Mundaneum (1928) generally credited as the point at which the architect 'invents' the spiral type [1]. Taking the Villa La Roche spiral experiment as a tentative beginning marks a much longer history of the spiral plan type in Le Corbusier's work that links the architect's early domestic projects to later major public building proposals such as the Venice Hospital (1964).