Zürich architects Annette Gigon and Mike Guyer display an enjoyment of the realities – both physical and intellectual – of architectural production and, to this extent, can be seen as part of a prevailing pattern in northern Switzerland. This paper comments on their work and shows it also to be creatively critical, subverting a number of modern orthodoxies and supplanting them with an affective internal logic.

In the first issue of arq, the author argued that the adoption of a model, or perhaps models, borrowed from the procedures of, respectively, the humanities and the sciences does not constitute a sufficient basis from which to define the nature and content of the discipline of Architecture. The present paper returns to this theme and develops further the proposition that design practice, both its processes and its products, constitutes the core, the centre, of the discipline and goes on to examine the implications of this for the form, content and delivery of architectural education.

The relationship between the creation and experience of architecture is a little discussed topic. If architectural ideas are only fully understood with the illumination of construction, what are the implications of teaching architectural design in the academic studio? Linked to this is the issue of time: how do materials weather and age and how in this youth-obsessed era (in both architectural society as well as society generally) can we rediscover the importance (and beauty) of building buildings which are enhanced as they grow old. Three small (in one case tiny) built projects are examined to consider these relationships.

Architects are, with few exceptions, ‘school trained’. This paper traces the history of the relationship between architectural education and practice. It describes the approaches developed at Cambridge and the Bartlett in the 1960s - and the theories that each embodied: one based on architecture as a cultural manifestation and the other governing the science of building. The paper concludes with the view that we need to be more realistic in our attitude to artistic aspiration as a component of studying architecture while strengthening the ways by which building performance can be tested.

Architecture in South Africa is at a crossroads. After years of repression and isolation during which contemporary architecture lost its way, there is now a desperate need for architects to respond to the social and cultural challenges of a society riven by massive material contrasts. Within architecture schools, a student body more representative of society than hitherto is engaged in projects which reflect the very diverse needs of the community. Central to the effectiveness of such teaching programmes is the presence of teachers fully engaged in practice, creating a responsible architecture for a renewed nation.

In Book 3 of his Four Books on Architecture (1579), Palladio gives alternative designs for a wooden trussed bridge to span a river 100ft wide. The designs are ingenious, and analysis of Palladio's proposals shows that the bridges would have been effective. Some of the details, however, seem to be at variance with the expected structural action of the bridges, and there remain problems (not fully answered here) of practical construction.

The controversial book Design by Competition by Jack L. Nasar (1999) is a challenge to designers (it must qualify as controversial after the stinking review in arq 3/4). It's a tacky production - banal cover, messy text layout, photos taken without a perspective control lens - and it also claims to speak for the people in a crusade against ‘high architecture’. Clearly, neither form nor content is calculated to stimulate enthusiasm in the architectural community.