This was a big, serious conference in a big, serious city. Architectural historians from North America and around the globe gathered to discuss their work and to look at buildings together. Yet despite the generosity with which the American Institute of Architects handed out CPD points for every paper and tour attended, there were not many architects there; the conference remained substantially a forum for professional architectural historians and their research students to talk shop. It's a pity – this kind of conference represents an excellent opportunity for architects to take their place at the heart of the debate on history and conservation.

The recent history of architecture can be characterised as a battle between attention-grabbing, ‘iconic’ buildings and a counteracting tendency towards the aesthetically reduced, even avowedly ‘minimal’. But beneath the surface appearance of these contrasting formal tendencies – restless or serene, as demanded by their aesthetic ideals – the means of building have become relentlessly more complex to meet ever more demanding environmental and other performance requirements. It was against this background that the Design Research Unit at Cardiff University convened a one-day symposium to explore the possibility of ‘Building Simply’: the topic proved, not unexpectedly, elusive. Below we publish some reflections by Gordon Murray on some of the issues raised, and these are followed by three design papers – by Pierre d'Avoine, Roland Raderschall and the organisers – that addressed the topic from differing perspectives.

‘When you go into a room and see a box of cigars, a computer and a horse you look for similarities, but if the room contains only one object you look for differences.’ (Luciano Berio, introducing a BBC Symphony Orchestra weekend of his music at The Barbican in 1990)

In landscape architecture, building simply was the rule in the past, because building materials and processes were natural, local and common. This all began to change during the 1950s, when concrete became popular, synthetics replaced natural building techniques, and tropical woods became standard for outdoor use. The use of these materials was taken for granted in day-to-day office work for many years. My own attitude changed some time in the 1980s, when Minimal and Conceptual Art became significant and the emerging environmental concerns began to make an impact.

Driven by our interest in sustainability, the vernacular architecture of Wales and a preference for ‘rational’ over wilfully expressive form, the determination to ‘build simply’ has become an abiding aspiration in the work of the Design Research Unit (dru) at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. Established in 1998, dru aims both to apply the School's wider research to architectural commissions and to develop design as a medium of research in its own right. In this paper, various themes that recur in the Unit's recent work are discussed in the context of two current schemes that exemplify this research-based approach to design.

In 1554 the Renaissance architectural master, Andrea Palladio (born Andrea della Gondola, or ‘di Pietro’), produced two little-known guidebooks to the city of Rome. These were unillustrated texts, one of which described the ancient wonders of the city while the other concentrated on the later medieval churches. Guidebooks of this kind had existed since medieval times but Palladio introduced a new kind of structure to the guide by organising the material into logical routes which the tourist could follow. Since then architectural guidebooks have proliferated and the introduction of photography and high quality graphics has changed their appearance significantly. However, in many respects things have not altered a great deal. Architectural guidebooks still present a view of a city which is that of a single individual (or small group of authors) and the selection of the material determines what is deemed to be of significance. Some guides, such as those by Nikolaus Pevsner, attempt to present the buildings in as neutral a way as possible in order to give the work a degree of objectivity but, nonetheless, the visitor is still being presented with a particular view of the city.

‘It was democracy that commissioned this project. If we had not been serious in deciding that our nation is resolved – as it says in our constitution – to create a new order for itself and establish a social state on the basis of free self-determination, this building would not have been conceived and completed in the way that it has been, a building whose reality […] symbolises what is new about our order, embodying the element of freedom and the desire that man should be at its centre.’

The term ‘sustainability’ is often used as a woolly term for everything that is good and desirable. Besides, ‘sustainability’ is a subjective area, which can be difficult to quantify. Any construction project has a wide range of environmental impacts, each of which may have been measured in a different way. Energy may have been measured in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, whereas wood or mineral extraction is generally measured volumetrically, making comparisons between environmental impacts difficult to determine. Various methodologies seek to standardise impacts for comparative purposes and the guiding principle for any environmental assessment is a comparison to the existing building stock, and a result is invariably in terms of a building's relative sustainability. However, to some it is not a matter of being ‘more’ or ‘less’ sustainable. You either are or you are not, therefore relative sustainability is not a valid concept. The discussion of sustainability in this paper is not a debate on the semantics of the term, but ultimately the purist's view does lead to the question whether there can ever be such a thing as a sustainable building and indeed what the role of architecture in the context of sustainability is.

Venaria Reale was built by the Savoy Duke Carlo Emanuele II on a marshy site about six miles north-east of Turin. It comprised a large palace cum hunting-lodge, gardens, a hunting wood and a small city through which the palace was approached. Designed by the architect Amadeo di Castellamonte, it was built almost entirely ex novo between about 1655 and 1675. The entire project was thematically structured around an elaborate programme of emblems (essentially mottos with illustrative paintings) drawn from contemporary rhetorical practice. This iconographic scheme was devised by the court philosopher and eminent theorist of rhetoric, Emanuele Tesauro. It is also clear that the Duke himself was involved in both the architecture and decoration of the scheme.