Introducing the first issue of arq, its founding editor, Peter Carolin, wrote that ‘much that is described as research is nothing of the kind, many academics are becoming specialists in research remote from teaching, and design is discounted as a form of research. The link between research and practice is, once more, endangered’.

The discussion of the state of research and practice in architecture in recent issues of arq has been triggered by the results of the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise and the prospect of the next RAE in 2008. For the architectural profession I would argue (in Panglossian fashion) that the RAE 2001 may turn out to be for the best in the long run. There is nothing like a poor result, especially if felt to be ill deserved, to concentrate the mind.

Recent correspondence in arq raises important questions about the relationship between the wide range of research being undertaken in the schools, and architectural practice. John Worthington (arq 7/3+4, pp197–199) makes a particularly important point when he says that architectural schools and the profession ‘cannot afford to stand aloof from the other (construction related) disciplines’. In many Universities (my own included), the discipline of architecture lies within a larger ‘School of the Built Environment’. I see this as entirely positive. The schools must reflect, and respond to, the contemporary realities of practice, if their relevance is to be maintained. As with practice, both teaching and research is increasingly based on interdisciplinary collaboration. While taking place within institutions, such collaboration between institutions and the wider construction industry (manufacturers, contractors and so on) is now often regarded as a prerequisite for successful research bids to both UK and European research funding agencies. Our school has found that many businesses within the construction industry (large and small) now recognize the value of research to the development of their products or processes. Professional practices are also benefiting in a similar way, in recognizing the expertise (and facilities) that reside within the Universities.

Although the Department for Education and Skills' ‘Classrooms of the Future’ and ‘Design Exemplar Initiative’ are to be welcomed (arq 7/3+4, pp244–279), they should not be allowed to obscure the far-reaching issues involved in the Public Finance Initiative (PFI). As a procurement process, PFI represents a massive investment in social programmes and public building projects: the estimated £34 billion in contract or commissioned gives an indication of this. PFI transfers the responsibilities and risks associated with the procurement, delivery and management of public buildings and estates over a period of 25 years to the private sector, and almost none of the expenditure involved is reflected in the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement. This makes it highly attractive to government, but the question remains as to how much it mortgages the nation's future because it merely defers and extends borrowing. If schemes mature at a time of recession or serious budget deficit, the implications could be highly damaging.

This conference set out to address the rise, fall and possible futures of the problematic and controversial term ‘primitive’. Taking place over two days in September 2004 at the Welsh School of Architecture in Cardiff (hosted by the Architectural History and Theory Group), it aimed to attract an interdisciplinary audience and included a range of keynote speakers drawn from both academia and practice. Selected papers from the proceedings will be published in book form by Routledge in 2005.

Located in Northumberland, 35km north of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and 3km from the North Sea, the mid-nineteenth-century East Lodge to Togston Hall was originally a simple, linear, rectangular single-storey cottage of whinstone with a dual pitch roof. It had acquired an accumulation of ugly, pebble-dashed, flat-roofed extensions to the south and was in poor condition.

Architects should learn to communicate more through their architecture. The commercial vernacular architecture of the American ‘strip’ – motels, gas stations, fast food outlets – communicates loud and clear. In comparison, high architecture, particularly the high architecture of Modernism, is sullen and silent. This, roughly, is the thesis of Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Stephen Izenour (1972 and 1977), one of the key texts of the Post-Modernist movement in architectural theory of the early 1970s. Venturi et al thought architects could learn a lot about symbolism and communication from the sort of non-judgmental study of roadside architecture that their students had undertaken at Yale. In the second half of the book the idea was developed into a theory and encapsulated into a universal building concept, ‘the decorated shed’, which has since become a cliché of architectural criticism. The decorated shed was designed to overthrow the most cherished beliefs and rituals of Modernism. Expression through form was to be replaced by the ‘persuasive heraldry’ of the totem and the billboard; articulation of detail was to be replaced by old-fashioned applied ornament; and the ‘heroic and original’ was to be replaced by the ‘ugly and ordinary’. But the emphasis was on the decoration rather than the shed. Learning from Las Vegas did not have much to say about the way that the sheds of the commercial strip were constructed, other than describing them vaguely as ‘system built’, or about the implications that the technology of their construction might have for architectural practice.

In relating stories about origins that recall an idealized ‘Primitive’ condition, Vitruvius seeks legitimacy for judgement about architecture. At issue is the problem of authority, and Vitruvius is anxious about authority, and about order. Vitruvius' audience for his story of the Primitive dwelling, as for the rest of his treatise, the Ten Books on Architecture, is the emperor Octavian, introduced in the dedicatory preface as ‘imperator Caesar.’ His book to Caesar asserts a commonplace among rhetoricians, that authority is sought in a distant past, and in exemplars, useful precedents that promise a perfect work. ‘Décor,’ writes Vitruvius, ‘demands the faultless ensemble of a work composed, in accordance with precedent, of approved details. It obeys convention, which in Greek is called thematismos, or custom or nature’ (trans Granger, 1983, I.2.5). The task of the orator was to ‘demonstrate’ (demonstratio) that authority, and so for architecture, in his mythmaking and concern to demonstrate the truth of his opinions, Vitruvius establishes that the task of architecture is the representation of order.

Questions concerning the significance and meaning of sacrifice in our secular age, whether in the form of a ritualized or purely contemplative construct, lay bare much that is problematic and troubling about modern consciousness. This paper examines the mortuary significance of baptism and its influence on architecture, drawing comparison between Early Christian and modern views of sacrifice. By referring to key theological writings, the study considers the baptistery as a site of human conversion where the search for redemption unfolds as both a cosmological and mytho-historical drama. The investigation distinguishes between the literal meaning of sacrifice and its more complex Platonic-Christian symbolism, the latter defining the nature of human piety and ultimate spiritual immortality. The study concludes with an examination of the baptismal font at St Peter's in Klippan. It asks whether this seminal work attests to a continuity of symbolic meanings or whether it is the product of hermetic thought.

The essence of the art of architecture is the medium of the enclosure of space at a scale that embraces the body as well as the eye. The medium has its greatest potential when it is revealed in daylight because it is the strongest, purest and most subtle of lights. This medium is the product of the synthesis of skills that are often held to be discrete, the ability to manipulate surface and the ability to manipulate volume. Across civilization the conjunction of these skills has been rare; moreover because architecture is a complicated applied art, it is only in the church and temple where the medium can be unfettered and attain great spirituality.

I have a first English edition of Rasmussen's Experiencing Architecture and impressed in the flyleaf is ‘Library of Alan Reiach’.

Ahh! It was a great disappointment to me that Alan's library was split up and didn't come back to the practice.