The nature of architectural design in the early twenty-first century is considered through a comparison between the author's recent design for a university hostel and earlier examples of the genre.

This project was designed by a Lecturer in Architecture at Cambridge for one of its Colleges. It is occupied by undergraduates, some of them architecture students, and during its construction it was used as a teaching case study. The design is somewhat ‘didactic’ in nature, attempting to be quite explicit in its thematic and formal procedures; stylistically, it can be seen as an examination of the possibilities inherent in a late modernist tradition. For this reason, and because of its privileged site and budget, it offers an opportunity for some reflections on architectural composition at the beginning of the twenty-first century, in relation to earlier traditions of formal manipulation.