Over the past year, one subject has dominated the Leader and Letters pages of each and every issue of this journal – the UK Government's last Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). This final number in our sixth volume is no exception. Sparked off by Philip Steadman and Bill Hillier's RAE review in arq 6/3 (pp. 203–207), three remarkable letters appear in this issue (pp. 292–293).

The two articles on canopies in the last issue of arq (6/3, pp214–229 and 230–245) make interesting reading. The briefs must have been quite similar – but what a difference in approach to design! Both canopies had to provide temporary cover to a fairly small area, during the summer, at about the level of a normal storey height, and both had to be easy to put up and take down in a fairly short time. The canopy in a courtyard in Amsterdam had to relate to the building and was originally intended to partly surround a tree [1]; the canopy for the Chelsea Flower Show was free-standing in the garden [2]. But the differences in situation do not account for the differences in design approach. The only common points here were that both were designed by a collaborative effort between architect and engineer – surely the only way to design something like this – and for both the starting point seemed to be, by implication, the rejection of anything totally regular, and the need to be innovative.

While I enthusiastically welcome Michael Speaks' article ‘No hope no fear’, which draws attention to a significant shift in the culture of the architecture studio (arq 6/3, pp209–212), I question the advisability of announcing ‘the death of theory’, as it is going to be misunderstood, with unhelpful consequences. We have had theory of a sort for as long as we have had architecture, but this is not the sort of theory whose death is announced. The theory whose death is announced is much more closely defined, and while it has flourished in some places, in others it has hardly taken root. There are some ‘traditionalists’ to use Speaks' term, who have well-developed theoretical ideas, and others (whom I would prefer to call philistines) who think that we can get along perfectly well without anything more analytical than common sense and intuition. ‘The death of theory’ belongs to a recognizable tradition of such rhetorical deaths as that of the author, and – most pertinently here – Foucault's ‘death of man’. As in those cases, ‘we’ might get excited about a world-changing cataclysm, but most people will continue as if nothing had happened, and there is no doubt that theory will continue to flourish, in just the way that authors flourish and ‘man’ flourishes, despite being long dead.

I read with interest the detailed arguments presented by our colleagues at the Bartlett, complaining of the treatment of architecture by Unit of Assessment (UoA) panel 33 (arq 6/3, pp203–207). We and our colleagues from other disciplines at the University of Edinburgh were shocked at Architecture's Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) result. We had been confident of at least a 4, but were awarded a 3a. We spent a disappointing day with the architectural historian on the panel to ascertain how we could have been so wrong in the internal estimation of our rating. I also had private discussions with another architectural panel member. Those on the panel we spoke to seemed to know little about our work. Our portfolios of refereed designs were not called for. It seems that our groundbreaking books linking the history of engineering and architecture were too far removed from what engineers usually do, and were not rated. Our books and articles on theories of design and information technology seem to have been of no interest.

In his article, ‘No hope, no fear’ (arq 6/3, pp209–212), Michael Speaks presents what appears to be an ‘anti-theory theory’, a piece of eloquent theoretical writing in which he maintains that theory in architecture has come to an end.

My student years, 1961–67, exactly coincide with Archigram's first and best flourishing and, just as Jon Harris, in my Cambridge Architecture year, was the Cambridge salesman for the first issue of Private Eye, I was the Cambridge salesman for the first issue of Archigram. From this contemporary though partial viewpoint, Simon Sadler's article arq 6/3, pp247–255) seems historically convincing. I might, though, nuance the emphasis on Archigram ‘cultivating the anti-establishment reputation of 1960s youth’ and ‘an ill-tempered generation gap in early 1960s British architecture’. Most people, especially when young, proclaim themselves as outside the establishment tent, pissing in. So it's surely not noticeably ‘ironic’ that pre-War AA students did too. But there seems to me a world of difference between the soft ‘youthquake’ of early 1960s Britain (Quant, Bailey, the other Peter Cook, etc) and the leftist atmosphere of post-1965, the delayed echo in Britain of America's Vietnam and Civil Rights struggles. The first ethos – aesthetic, chirpy, self-mocking, and largely apolitical – nurtured the surrealist technophilia of Archigram's most interesting projects. The second, which really was ill-tempered and anti-establishment, made Archigram seem irrelevant or worse, as the article points out.

Architectural education is under pressure: economic pressure to enrol more students, political pressure to award more degrees and more recently pressure from the Architects Registration Board (ARB) and RIBA to maintain and, in some cases, to improve standards. If this was not in itself enough, the schools must also undertake increasing amounts of research to obtain essential, additional HEFCE funding.

I am grateful to Tom Woolley (arq 6/3, pp198–199) for taking the trouble to point out that David Lea's pottery buildings at Cheriton can be used to demonstrate a thesis on sustainability. In doing so he adds further weight to my general argument that small-scale, tightly budgeted projects may lead to architecture of substance. But the central point of my article (arq 6/2, pp130–143) was, as is clear from its title, to explore the relationship between ‘Necessity and Poetry’. In pursuing this I took Lea's proposition, quoted in the article, that, ‘Light, Surface, Material and Space are the four basic elements of architecture’, as my reference and worked with these in elaborating my theme. It was my judgement that the point was well enough made. To have raised, explicitly, the question of sustainability would have confused the issue.

I am deeply concerned by the issues raised by Bill Hillier and Philip Steadman's article in arq 6/3 (pp203–207).

The current debates on teaching standards, on research assessment and on the condition of the profession tend to be carried on in isolation from each other. In this article Gordon Murray, a practitioner and teacher, draws a connection between all three topics and underlines the importance and potential of research for both teaching and the profession. His brief review of teaching and professional formation in Japan provides a thought-provoking comparison with architectural education in the UK and the US.

‘A beacon of excellence in healthcare design’… ‘a symbol of civic pride in our community’ … ‘a “state of the art” building’ … ‘a building which could be magnificently innovative and visionary in its time, location and conception’. These phrases, taken from the ‘Aspirational Statement’ that introduces the competition brief, should have left no one in any doubt that the clients for the proposed new integrated care centre in Kentish Town were looking for something new and different. With hindsight, it is easy to see why Allford Hall Monaghan Morris's (AHMM) unusual design [1a–c] won the competition.

The Casbah concept was developed by a group of younger European architects in the late 1950s. It flourished over a period of no more than ten years but its influence continues to this day.

Models are increasingly used in exhibitions on historical themes. However, far from being merely an aid to representation, architectural modelling invariably acts as a highly effective aid to research.

The expression of time is pervasive in Japanese culture and architecture. At the Chapel on Mount Rokko, Tadao Ando draws on native traditions to articulate a range of temporal phenomena.

Computers are now used routinely to create high-quality images of proposed buildings but the extent to which these images are contributing to the quality of the final product remains questionable.

John Pawson was brought up in Yorkshire, the son of a mill-owner, and was sent to school at Eton, where he insisted on sleeping in a white canvas hammock. It was an early sign of his interest in the ascetic. After seven years in the family textile business, he travelled to Japan and then studied briefly at the Architectural Association before setting up his own design practice in London. He is celebrated as a Minimalist but, as Deyan Sudjic points out in one of the essays in Themes and Projects, the latest book on Pawson's work, it ‘has a robustness that allows it to transcend the trivialization of the label’. His buildings have a considerable physical and sensory presence, an abundance of experiential things. In another essay, one of the neighbours of Pawson's London house, Katherine Bucknall, describes the effect as ‘maximal, supercharged, eerie, occasionally mystical’. And it is easy to empathize with her observation that even a pink rubber glove lying on the kitchen floor takes on a surreal quality, ‘like a piece of contemporary art … a human clue in a plain, geometric ground’. These sorts of realities are not easily reducible to words or images and so, when I met John Pawson in his London office (and after he'd helped me fix my tape-recorder), that's where we began.