In 1951, Le Corbusier designed a funerary chapel in Caracas to honour the memory of Colonel Carlos Delgado-Chalbaud, the recently assassinated president of the Venezuelan military junta. This enigmatic project – unknown until now – provides an interesting insight into Le Corbusier's use of architectural references and their layers of symbolic meaning. Most documents have mysteriously disappeared, but the few remaining have allowed the project to be reconstructed rather accurately.

Wishing to write about his work, I approached Peter Zumthor in February 1996. We agreed to do something substantial but still accessible, and eventually settled on the format of a long interview. We then chose three of his buildings that would raise different issues – the now famous Thermal Baths in Vals, the Wohnsiedlung Spittelhof and Topography of Terror in Berlin.Readers unfamiliar with these three buildings will find them comprehensively described and illustrated in the superb Peter Zumthor Works: buildings and projects 1979–97 with text by Peter Zumthor and photographs by Hélène Binet, published by Lars Müller Publishers, Baden, 1998, ISBN 3-907044-58-4. This and the related Thinking Architecture by Peter Zumthor were the subject of an extended review in arq 3/1.

The interviews were held in English on 22 July 1997 over the course of the day in his studio in Haldenstein. They are published in the order in which they were held. We edited them together in August 2000, resisting the desire to amend them.

I first learnt of his work in 1988 when he was a visiting professor at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Santa Monica where he first delivered the lecture later published as ‘A Way of Looking at Things’. I would like to thank him for agreeing to share his thoughts on architecture, and for the often difficult and unfashionable reminder that to do things well takes time.

This analysis shows how the increasing availability of computers in architectural practice and the steady development of electronic networks around the world could encourage the relocation of professional structures into countries with lower production costs. Starting from the existence of sharp professional wage differentials between developed and developing regions, it formulates the hypothesis that, in a few years, most architectural work could be documented in places such as South-East Asia and transferred digitally over to America, Australia or Europe.

As the tenth anniversary of the death of Sir James Stirling approaches, Michael Spens considers the relative significance of aspects of his work, both in terms of a sequence of key designs and in the light of contemporaneous critiques. What emerges is a confirmation of the architect's underlying extension of a progressive, enriching modernity. The best work is seen as a rare consummation of the Sublime, as opposed to the Picturesque, within the general continuity of Modernism.

Computers have come to play an important role in architectural practice. Nonetheless, the promise of computation as a creative partner in practice, and a means to better understand and support the design process has yet to be realized. This article considers aspects of computation, and alternative ways that these have been approached in order to make computation useful in architecture and other areas of spatial design.

Air conditioning is now recognized as a significant factor in global warming and climate change. In the search for alternatives, passive downdraught evaporative cooling (PDEC) is proving to be both technically and economically viable in different parts of the world. Brian Ford describes the principles and current practice of this innovative approach to cooling in the hot dry regions of the world.

Brian MacKay-Lyons has evolved an architecture out of the vernacular of his native Nova Scotia that combines simplicity of form and construction with a subtlety of placing a house on its site. In three recent houses, the expansiveness of the structures has increased and the landscape has become more integrated with the interiors, physically and visually. Both extremely rational and highly idiosyncratic, MacKay-Lyons' work shows how rootedness in a place, however geographically isolated, can result in architecture as rigorous as that produced anywhere.

Martin Heidegger's ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ is well known to many architects. But comparatively little is known about the building in southern Germany's Black Forest where this influential work was almost certainly written. This essay describes how Heidegger's Hut came to be built and how it was configured and occupied. No plan of this little building has ever before been published. In the intellectual alignments that the hut displays, particularly at a small scale, it records physically many of the priorities that Heidegger wrote about.

Decorum refers to the suitability of a building's design and was a commonplace principle of architectural theory from the Renaissance to the beginnings of modernism. It was relevant to ornament, shaping the way a building articulated its status within civic and social order. This essay examines decorum as part of the history of ideas, with phases of growth, codification, and decline. Its fading was not unresisted, being part of a critical debate that emerged in the wake of the Industrial Revolution – namely, the role architecture might play in creating a cohesive environment for the modern world.

The utilization of solar energy involves an interplay between heating demand and the use of building materials. It is therefore important to use environmental analysis methodologies which take into account the effects of building materials. Two typical construction types, lightweight timber-based and heavyweight concrete-based, are therefore compared using specific housing forms. These forms represent differing passive solar strategies that can be seen in contemporary Danish housing. The results highlight the diversity of effective environmental design strategies available to architects.