This volume looks at the meaning of architecture, including essays by architectural writers and cultural critics. Also included are a wide variety of visual materials that includes historical works and those by contemporary architects. Has 20th-century modernist architecture forever banished the possibility of pursuing art's 'great themes' in architecture? This title uses the theme of the tragic to ask some of the most far-reaching questions about the meaning of contemporary architecture. It explores the possibility of whether a return to explicitly narrative traditions would recuperate the human significance of its subjects. The theme is opened up by a reassessment of tragedy in the history of aesthetics, a critique of the origins of the modernist aesthetic and by relating trauma studies, which have been applied to other cultural criticism, to architecture. How should the great human themes or "tragedies" of our times, such as the Holocaust, be expressed in built form? Is the tragic genre, formulated by the classical world, still applicable in the modern world? Contributors to this issue of Architectural Design include: Joan Branham, Paul Davies, David Hamilton Eddy, Tim Martin, Robert Maxwell, Astrid Schmeing and Ed Winters. Featured architects include: David Chipperfield, CZWG, Peter Eisenman, Norman Foster, James Freed, Daniel Libeskind and John Outram.