With the UK's 2008 Research Assessment Exercise looming, we make no apologies for publishing a further exploration of the nature of architectural research. In her paper (pp141–147), Jane Rendell makes a lucid and persuasive case that design is a complex interdisciplinary activity that sits uneasily within current definitions of research. For Rendell, architectural design, just as much as writing, can be practised as a form of criticism, a proposition that was explored at ‘Critical Architecture’, the recent conference at the Bartlett School in London (pp105–108).

I was pleasantly surprised by the interest generated by my article on the making of the Australian Parliament House in Canberra (7/2, pp140–154), and intrigued by the parallels drawn between its saga and that of the new Scottish Parliament; but I feel the need to respond to some of the comments by Charles McKean, published in the following issue of arq (7/3+4, pp199–200).

In ‘A Primitive exchange: on rhetoric and architectural symbol’ (arq 8/1, pp39–45), Stephen Frith mounts three distinct arguments. The Vitruvian story of the ‘agonistic’ origins of building, drawn from Book II, is initially used to claim that de Architectura proposes a primitive origin for the essential elements of architecture. This, through a somewhat curious imputation of Aristotelian thoughts on causality and limit, is then claimed as evidence (along with a supplemental argument regarding the importance of eloquence) of Vitruvius's use of rhetoric as a model framework for architecture (‘The way Vitruvius teaches us to design a work of architecture is similar to that for putting a speech together’). And the importance of the use of rhetoric is that ‘Rhetoric and architecture share the same symbolic heritage. Both rely on “figurative” language, the analogous relations between things … [from which it follows that] Proportion becomes a symbol, a metaphor of order … of substituting this for that’.

This letter was invited as a response to Brian Hatton's review in this issue (pp105–108), and the editors would welcome further correspondence on this theme.

This conference, which took place 25–27 November 2004, was held by the Bartlett School of Architecture in association with the Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA). Its stated aim was to examine the relationship between critical practice in architecture and architectural criticism, intending to place architecture in an interdisciplinary context with reference to modes of criticism in other disciplines, specifically art criticism, and to explore modes of critical practice in architecture: buildings, drawings and texts. Brian Hatton attended the second day of the conference; his comments on the first day are based on discussions with colleagues and reading of transcripts.

This interview celebrating the 82nd birthday of the ‘Grand old man of German Architecture’ (Die Zeit) sheds some interesting light on questions of tyranny and freedom, of the necessity of imperfection, of struggles to maintain a humane architectural practice in an increasingly pressured and commercial world. It also reveals the underlying reasons why Behnisch could be claimed for Deconstruction while his office's work in many ways predated this so-called movement, and while it pursued an idealistic and optimistic political agenda rather than a cynical or despairing one.

With the exciting period of construction following German reunification now over, German post-war reconstruction has finally come to an end. For a brief period, reunification enlivened the building market with great visions, but now the demand for architecture and employment in the construction industry has sunk dramatically.

It has always been thought that there are two dimensions in museum experience: the experience of space which can be distinguished from that of exhibits, as the former is largely non-discursive while the latter is more in the discursive domain. This paper aims to contribute to the description and understanding of the intricate pattern of interdependencies between the two parameters of the microstructure of the gallery space, the design of space and of the display layout. The paper uses rigorous methods of ‘spatial data’ collection and analysis (analytic representations of spatial relationships, and systematic representations of the movement pattern) and on this objective foundation builds an interpretative and critical argument.

There are at present considerable concerns with how architectural research will be assessed in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) of 2008. In RAE 2001, most architectural research was submitted to one of three Units of Assessment (UoA): 33 Built Environment, 60 History of Art, Architecture and Design, and 64 Art and Design. There were subtle, but important, differences in output definition and assessment criteria between UoA 33 and UoA 64 with respect to practice-led research. Most importantly, in UoA 33 practice-led outputs were accepted by the panel, but only as publications, whereas UoA 64 assessed practice-led research outputs accompanied by a 300-word statement that clarified the contributions of that particular research to the development of original knowledge in the field. The diversity of methods and complexity of output types, combined with the composition of UoA 33, led to results that many feel did not properly reflect the strengths of architectural design, particularly practice-led research. This methodology essentially disenfranchised a significant part of the community from the rae process to the detriment not only of the community, but to the credibility of the process itself.

This paper investigates the sublime as manifested in the architecture of Tadao Ando. The primary object of interpretation is his Azuma House (1976) in Osaka. However, according to Ando, the sublime equally characterises his religious work such as the Church of the Light (1989) near Osaka. One unique characteristic of Ando's architecture is the treatment of residential and religious buildings according to common spatial themes, challenging the conventional dichotomy between the profane and the sacred. The evocation of the sublime can be claimed as one such theme. Both buildings are particularisations of the theme of the sublime: in the case of the Azuma House into the context of the everyday and, in the case of the Church of the Light, into the context of the theological horizon of Christianity. This paper elucidates how the spatial setting of the Azuma residence conditions, in a distinguishing manner, the experience of the sublime. Given that, in the history of Western architecture, Etienne-Louis Boullée's architecture of immense emptiness (as manifested in the Metropolitan Basilica and Newton's Cenotaph) presents itself as one of the most distinctive articulations of the sublime, it is employed here as the dialogic partner for Ando's architecture of the sublime.

Adrian Stokes (1902–72) — aesthete, critic, painter and poet — is linked to John Ruskin and Walter Pater as one of the greatest aesthetic thinkers in this English empirical tradition. This paper explores his insights on the reciprocity of colour and form in relation to architecture.

The crisis in modern architecture in the middle of the twentieth century brought about a reaction to total Utopian solutions and ideas and the realization of the importance of ‘place’ and identity. These notions found expression, among others, in a renewed interest in vernacular construction. Vernacular construction is evolutionary and contains key, a priori, aspects of identity and place. As such it constituted a focus of attention and gained special exposure and popularity after the exhibition ‘Architecture without Architects’, held in MoMA, New York in 1964. As a result of this attention, the patio, that external room constituting the heart of the house in the Middle East, in the Mediterranean basin and in the Far East, gained architectural significance. At the same time it found a place in modern housing in the Western world.

‘Acceptance of the banal conditions of construction enables a good concept to become fit for building,’ say the Dutch architects Claus en Kaan. In The Netherlands, those conditions include a culture of consensus, where the architect has no special authority as creator, tight budgets, strict project management and standardised products. However, their results in these quotidian circumstances are extraordinary: invigorating yet restrained, visceral as well as intellectual. Kees Kaan took me to see one example, their recently completed Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) at Rijswijk — a tour de force of expression, form and experience. But afterwards we began by discussing the product of a quite different building environment: their Royal Netherlands Embassy for Mozambique in Maputo. It was, says Kaan, ‘an adventure’.

There must have been an immediate contrast with the building industry here in Holland, which we might call synthetic, with its absence of craft and its preponderance of off-the-shelf products...