We must build for this nation a big passion for innovation. We must make the development of the creative mind a national agenda. Unless we get really serious about cultivating creativity and promoting innovation, the transformation to an innovation economy will not really happen.

This paper reflects on the contemporary design practice of Scottish rural housing, through a comparative and analytical approach, examining how three architects, including the author, devise architectural languages embedded in the countryside and locality as inspiration in addressing modern architectural design within a conservative planning tradition. While promoting innovative architectural and settlement design at national level, planning systems at local government level in Scotland often tend to promote versions of bastardised Georgian villas complete with dormer and astragal windows. The author's award-winning practice has challenged the approach, and this paper represents a practitioner's self-reflection in analysing key elements of the implicitly grounded concepts of his design ethos, while comparing this with other contemporary designers with similar but different approaches. The paper provides a brief overview of the planning context and the development of both rural built form and moral philosophies related to the religious traditions of differing localities, prior to a review of the work of the three practices and a reflection on the way in which these practices ‘ground’ their work within context. This, it is argued, has relevance not only for the planning system, but also for other practices, and wider relevance for embedding research within practice.

This paper reflects on experience gained through MARS (Making Architecture Research Studio) at the University of Nottingham. It argues for a densification of design teaching and learning through a direct, practical and tactile engagement with materials and making. It sets out the pedagogical benefits of exploring and theorising the practical, combined with the value and relevance of material practices. As a methodology of design teaching it suggests a multi-level, synergistic approach to pedagogy and practice that can build key knowledge and skills while avoiding a narrowly instrumental view of architectural education and practice. A key aim of the pedagogy of the studio is the development of an empathetic imagination, as clearly articulated by William Hazlitt (1805) in An Essay on the Principles of Human Action:

In the summer of 2009, while on vacation in Italy, I lay on a deck chair on a beach under the scorching sun reading Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. I had taken Mike Davis's book as holiday reading after becoming interested in attitudes to sustainability as represented in films through supervising the unpublished dissertation ‘The Science and Fiction of Sustainable Living’. The dissertation analysed approaches to the green movement of the 1970s versus those held today. It did this through the study of ecological science fiction movies made during the two periods. As someone grounded in humanities research, using film studies research methods rather than conventional building science methods seemed to me an engaging, original approach to sustainability. The dissertation compared the 1972 American environmental science fiction film Silent Running to the 2007 British science fiction film Sunshine. During this supervision, the student gave me a copy of the films. Because Silent Running resonated with me, I took it on that same Italian holiday and watched it again. I recall thinking that Silent Running offered a departure point for an alternative kind of sustainable design studio. Then and there, I selected a film clip that I screened – in the background and without volume – at studio presentations to students held in September 2009.

It was neither with music or an acoustic, but with a sense of origin that we wanted to build the work. A work that seeks, is still in the seeking, in search of establishing a road.

It is a commonplace to describe twentieth-century Modernist architecture as utopian, but doing so arguably has less to do with putative social agendas than with explaining the failure of such work to deliver on extravagant promises. By interrogating utopian declarations for twentieth-century architecture and visionary urban representations, the aim of this article is to sharpen the loose pairing of Modernist architecture and Utopia. Consideration is also given to how undue emphasis on representation supports post-rationalisations of failure as the inevitable teleology of Utopia, which serves only to empty architecture of its ethical function. To conclude, some preliminary thoughts on the prospects of a more convincingly utopian modern architecture are advanced.

The aim of this study is to chart the manifestation of the Chapel at Ronchamp as a plastic organism and to identify its complex intrinsic visual qualities. To use Gordon Cullen's words, the work involves ‘charting the structure of the subjective world’. Although it has graphic and figurative aspects, the Chapel at Ronchamp achieves existential meaning primarily through plasticity, in other words the visual medium of form, space, polychromy (colour as a relative phenomenon) and texture, revealed in light. As in the case of all spatially rich unicellular works of architecture, the charting of the chapel has involved about ten three-day field studies over a three-year period, recording diurnal and seasonal variations and human activity; because this is uncharted territory it has first been necessary to ‘learn’ the building. The working method has involved recording observations, accompanied by photographic sketches at fifteen minute intervals; the observations have then been correlated with a heliodon model and indicative plans and sections, including sun-paths; the character of the light admitting apertures being of particular significance. Spatial and colour relationships have then been simulated in the studio.

Aldo van Eyck, in an interview twenty-five years after John Voelcker died [1], remembered him as follows:

It is not often that a generation of people are offered the opportunity to decide the future course of a nation. In a little over a year around four million people living across Scotland will be afforded the monumental chance to decide whether the place they call home should be an independent country. As both ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ campaigns debate with claim and counterclaim over a wide range of emotive issues neither side can definitively answer, the grassroots campaigns of the pro-independence side are offering imaginative visions of a different Scotland building upon the cultural gains of devolution.