A leisurely approach.

This issue looks at a very wide range of buildings for leisure, taking the term in its widest possible sense: from cultural activities, through sport, to simply lazing around on the beach or just escaping from the pressures of urban life. The intention has been to find built work that can demonstrate both variety and quality in an area where results are too often flashy, utilitarian or cheapjack, and sometimes all three.

Frank Gehry's American Center in Paris (p26) is a type, the showplace of the culture of one nation to another, that too often ends up being pompous, or hiding discreetly behind the facades of some grand palace or other. Nobody could ever accuse Gehry of being pompous, and he manages to respond to a new and rather formal area of the city with wit and fizz without going over the top. Spatially and formally, the Center is a showcase for the best, most exciting aspects of US culture.

Enric Miralles' Spanish National Training Centre for Gymnastics at Alicante (p33) is not just a nursery for talent but a place in which gymnastics can be enjoyed as a spectator sport within dramatic performance spaces. The building as a whole, for all the freedom of its planning, helps bring a sense of place to an otherwise dreary area. James Stewart Polsheck's performing arts centre in San Francisco (p56) also helps an inchoate part of the city coalesce by injecting a new spirit of informality and liveliness.

Similarly, Helin & Siitonen's swimming pool in a small town in central Finland (p40) brings a new civic sense to a rather dreary suburb and offers an exciting series of spaces for enjoying water in many different ways. Our other two swimming pools are rather less dramatic, but both Richard Dattner in New York (p45) and Pino Zoppini in an industrial suburb of Genoa (p48) inject their buildings into areas much in need of new spirit to make leisure part of the general texture of local life. So does Massimiliano Fuksas with his sports centre in a relatively poor part of central Paris (p61) where his new facilities form part of a general improvement area that includes housing, shopping and workplaces.

Peter Hubner's youth hostel in a Stuttgart suburb (p50) caters for some of the poorest travellers and, by using a previously unconsidered site on top of a storm-water reservoir, he has made a memorable place that offers civilised haven and will be recalled by thousands of back-packers as they make their way round the Grand Tour. In contrast, MBM's big hotel at Puerto Vallarta in Mexico (p66) caters for a more prosperous group of holidaymakers while evoking the splendour of the Grands Hotels of old; ingenious use of ambient energy helps makes such an atmosphere available to people who formerly would not have been able to afford it.

Most of the buildings in this issue demonstrate that, just as leisure is an essential component of the civilised life, buildings for leisure can again become a vital part of the physical context of civility.