August. (View).

One of the most difficult problems of contemporary architecture is size. Architects are asked to design bigger and bigger buildings, and many who have made brilliant small works are unable to cope. The problems are not to do with marshalling resources: these days we can ensure that (with luck) even the largest structures can be completed on time and to budget. Difficulties lie in scale and relationship to human beings. Our next issue looks at bigness, and how architects have dealt with the problems of scale demanded by contemporary programmes. We shall show the monumental General Bank of Granada by Alberto Campo Baeza and contrast it with the huge but comparatively workaday port terminal by Foreign Office Architects. Hiroshi Hara's Superdome at Sapporo has been on television screens round the world as one of the venues for World Cup soccer: we show how it works. Christoph Ingenhoven has designed a vast headquarters for Lufthansa in Frankfurt -- an example of how to deal with a very large organization in three dimensions while retaining human and urban scale: we preview the project. Also in Frankfurt there is the new Frankfurt Messehalle by Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners with a brilliantly inventive metal and glass roof. Glass is one of the most important materials used in creation of big buildings, and we shall have a supplement on new uses of glass, which will cover Arthur Erickson's Glass Museum in Tacaoma. Will Alsop inventively uses coloured glass in Dusseldorf and Denton Corker Marshall uses glass to contribute to the Georgian grid of downtown Sydney. Get this and 11 other sparkling and exploratory international issues delivered to your door at a discount by using the subscription form or from www.arplus.com