The Architectural Association Photo Library has a very long history and its earliest photographs date from the late 19th century. Just launched is its new website which provides a fantastic collection of pictures of buildings of all kinds as well as landscapes, cities and places. It also includes archives of numerous photographers whose work is in the collection, so these can be searched by name as well as by place. F R Yerbury's photographs of early modernism can be seen, as well as unique collections given to the Library with pictures by renowned architects and historians including Erno Goldfinger, Reyner Banham and Robin Evans. It's easy to browse, and the high standard of photography makes it rather different from Google image search.

What is totally unique, though, is its coverage of the AA itself. Often described as the most famous architectural school in the world, there is evidence here of the avant garde design work of its students, with thousands of images of student projects. And the life of the school is also abundantly present- pictures of lectures, workshops, exhibitions, crits, as well as the events and parties for which the AA is also renowned.

photolibrary.aaschool.ac.uk

A conversation in London a few days ago when Birmingham was referred to as a 'northern city', led me to pose and attempt to answer this question. It's as near to Bristol as it is to Manchester, and driving up from Oxford on the M40 takes an hour. Birmingham has six hourly trains to and from London on weekdays with three different train companies, while trains to those cities in the north are slower and far fewer. 

The bucolic Warwickshire countryside is on its southern edge, the delightful towns of Warwick and Stratford are very close- and the magical country houses at Baddesley Clinton and Packwood even have Birmingham postcodes. Not so grim (as) up north !

The Praca das Artes project in downtown Sao Paulo is now completely open, and the subject of a book just published by Azouge Editorial. The most ambitious intervention in the old centre for several decades, it is the work of Brasil Arquitetura Studio, led by Francisco Fanucci and Marcelo Ferraz, effectively the successor office of Lina Bo Bardi, along with Marcos Cartum of the Municipal Department of Culture.

A large urban block 'in poor health' according to Raul Juste Lores, its public open spaces are encompassed by a three dimensional composition incorporating schools of music and dance, rehearsal rooms, archives and concert auditoria. Most are housed in blocks of shuttered concrete, coloured by oxide pigments in shades of brown and red. Others are housed in revived buildings of the mid century, the project's narrative placed firmly in a reading of the historical significance of a location significant a hundred years ago, and intended as a gift to revive a needy part of the urban fabric with the pleasures of dance, music and art.

Bill Brandt, Edwin Smith and Eric de Mare were among the extensively published photographers in Britain in the 1940s and beyond. A name new to me is that of John Gay: an extensive archive of his work is held by English Heritage and published by them in the 2009 book England Observed. 

Born Hans Goehler in Germany, he adopted the name of the English playwright in 1939 and published several books, developing a career mainly with journal and advertising photography. Now there is an evident nostalgia of looking back at a lost Britain through his work, but the photographs that most appeal are imbued with a modernist sensibility- a concern with light conditions and a reflection of ideas of form. His German art education, shaped by the Bauhaus, shows through and maybe the photographs they most resemble are the commissioned work of the great Laszlo Moholy-Nagy during his brief sojourn in Britain in the 1930s.

An exhibition of the work of Giorgio Casali, the most interesting post war Italian architectural photographer opens at the London Estorick collection tomorrow and runs until 8 September.

Working for the journal Domus for over thirty years, he created an amazing collection of images of what may now be seen as an heroic period in Italian architecture- images which, in the time-honoured fashion of the commissioned architectural photographer reflect and flatter the formal concerns of such architects as Ponti, Albini and Monsani.

I'm doing a gallery talk on 15 June at 3pm.

                                                                                                                  www.estorickcollection.com/exhibitions

Architectural guidebooks tend to be a constant companion when travelling round a city- who designed that, when was it built, finding out about the back story, questions that need instant answers. The recently launched App for iPhone and iPad Edifice London maybe makes the guide book redundant as it's so immediate. Walking down the street, you can, with luck, immediately pinpoint the building you're looking at, or one in the next street. Beautifully produced, good pictures, well written and well informed texts largely by the App's originator Sandy McCreery. It's a work in process so not everything is on yet, but well worth anyone buying for an amazingly modest fee.

The West Bromwich building, intended as a digital media interactive experience, actually opened in 2009 after a series of  financial and administrative disasters. It has even sometimes appeared to flourish in a rather different guise, with some good art shows as well as events ranging from comedy nights to popular tea dances for the older generation. And it is the only cultural establishment serving a wide area on the north western edge of Birmingham.

But all may go as the current proposal is to convert it to a Sixth Form College- though how an open volume dominated by a ramp snaking through it can be turned into a school is a puzzle. Invite Will Alsop (its architect) back maybe ?

To quote from Mediating Modernism: ...'maybe the true site of 'modern architecture' as it has been developed is not the suburban location of a series of inconveniently located villas, but the pages of the far more accessible publications that document and present this work.'(p11) 

Visiting Mies van der Rohe's Villa Tugendhat in suburban Brno, a Czech city not otherwise on the map for very much and two or three hours from either Prague or Vienna, is not easily undertaken. It reopened for public visits less than a year ago after an extremely thorough and well-funded restoration: the absence of the patina of age and use is a little disconcerting, and reminiscent of the 1986 facsimile of the Barcelona Pavilion the original of which Mies was building at the same time. So what do you get from a visit that all those published images and accompanying discourse don't tell you ? Plenty: the sense of the relationship between the set pieces that photographs and plans don't fully disclose. The effects of its rich and quite startling materiality, the chrome columns, milky opalescent glass, figured ebony and onyx slab. The technology that supports the innovations such as air filtration and heating and the wonderful windows that retract into the floor. And the exquisite way the building frames its setting and the view of the city across the valley.

New Street, the main Birmingham rail station, is the busiest outside London and, until now, probably the ugliest. Its rebuilding completed in 1970 may have erased the grimy Victorian station, but unlike the contemporary Public Library, also being replaced, has had no defenders. A building quite without rhetoric, though not in the sense the Smithsons would have intended, it was surmounted by a second-rate shopping centre, an early example of British Rail Estate's selling air rights. 

Architects FOA, (now succeeded by AZPA) known most of all for their Yokohama Port Terminal, have undertaken a radical rebuilding of the station to be completed by 2015, part of which has recently opened. It already gives the sense of a building that will lift the spirits as well as creating new routes into the station and through the city centre, vital since the station lies at its heart.