Joseph Grima talks about his work as a director at Storefront Gallery and as a curator of the Istanbul Design Biennial. Today, he proposes, the architecture exhibition might best be thought of as a kind of laboratory: a place where conventions are challenged and newly developed ideas are tested.

In a discussion of their recent work, partners of the New-York based practice Common Room comment on their curatorial projects, exhibition designs and publications. Architecture, in their view, is a spatial practice that continually needs to redefine itself in relation to other disciplines and media.

Throughout his oeuvre, Nicholas Hawksmoor employs various strategies for appropriating and processing architecture history. Taking St. George’s, Bloomsbury as a case study, this essay examines how Hawskmoor employs the miniature replica as an architectural motif. It contends that Hawksmoor’s quasi-replicas are not simply to be understood as means of achieving particular formal qualities: they establish a specific and paradoxical relation to history, as attempts of materializing a past that is at once approximated and absent.

With the PLUS project the French architecture firm Lacaton & Vassal investigate improvement proposals for apartments in the notorious French banlieues. Whereas existing plans are consistently based on large-scale demolition and restructuring, Lacaton & Vassal’s outlook is characterized by thinking from the smallest unit in the existing structures. In their view, the quality of life of residents is most improved when their immediate living environment – the apartments themselves – is refurbished. Lacaton & Vassal’s strategy is based on a specific concept of luxury that turns the modernist concept of minimumexistenz on its head and endeavours instead to provide a surplus of living space. In this article, Tom Vandeputte discusses three projects recently designed by the firm: the architecture school in Nantes, the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, developed in early 2007, and their recent design for a library in Angoulême. Vandeputte tests the ideals of the PLUS project in practice and in particular reveals how ‘coincidences’ play a large part in the design and execution process.

The editorial of this issue of OASE opens up a reflection on architecture criticism, following the critical encounters (seminars, debates, lectures, round table discussions), the journal organised to mark its 25th anniversary. The discussions held with a series of stakeholders: architects, writers, academe, publishers, graphic designers, students, etc. have filtered into this issue, which simultaneously evaluates and explores the current state of architecture criticism, ranging from academic reflections on criticism, via the personal views of critics on its current state, to tentative explorations.