Space, Time and Architecture is intended for those who are alarmed by the present state of our culture and anxious to find a way out of the apparent chaos of its contradictory tendencies.

So wrote the Swiss Modernist Sigfried Giedion (1941, p.vi) introducing the first edition of his pioneering and influential history to the background and cultural context in which modern architecture and urban planning grew and flourished. He stated there that:

History is not a compilation of facts, but an insight into a moving process of life.

In the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures Giedion gave at Harvard University in 1938–1939 he endeavoured to bring some order and understanding to the development of Modernism in the context of the great buildings and cities of the world, even as many were being blown to pieces in Europe during the Second World War.

Eighty years later, as the destruction of great monuments of civilization continues in very different parts of the world, we are using this special issue of the Architectural Science Review, as a modest homage to the significance of his great work. We are also exploring ways out of the apparent chaos of the contradictory tendencies of our own age. The following papers focus on how architectural solutions relate to the people they serve and the places they are built in now and how they will perform in the different future we are so much better able to predict today.