He left few buildings, three books and a great army of admirers. Cedric Price was, in the very best and most creative sense of the word, a researcher and a visionary well ahead of his time. His London Zoo aviary, Fun Palace and Potteries Thinkbelt projects were hugely influential. Here, STEPHEN MULLIN, his chief assistant from 1964 to 1969, remembers both their gestation and (in his extensive notes on p. 118) their extra ordinary and greatly loved progenitor.

One of the most neglected and urgent issues facing architecture – the substantial fracture between thinking about architecture and engaging in professional practice – was addressed at a two day conference in Cambridge this March (2004). Organized by RIBA East/University of Cambridge CPD for Architects, in association with the University's Department of Architecture and Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, it attracted a sizeable audience of practising architects, senior academics and students. This mix reflected the organizers' ambition to bring together professional and academic perspectives in this interdisciplinary area. The proceedings will be published by Spon during 2005.

Framing the question of a research and innovation (R&I) strategy for the UK construction industry requires careful consideration of several key issues: pluralism, vision and recognition of the significance of product (place and its constituent components) as well as process. Much of the groundwork for specific research topics has been undertaken and identified elsewhere (Macmillan, 2002), so this paper does not reinvent the wheel or list all the relevant research issues. Any discussion informing an R&I strategy should provide continuity and not jettison previous work in order to provide continuity. Too much structural change in past funding mechanisms has led to uncertainty for researchers and has adversely affected medium- and long-term projects.

Jeffrey Cook was best known for his pioneering work on bio-climatic design. But what made his particular contribution to architecture distinctive was the breadth of his interests and his concern to make connections between them. Two examples of this were the wonderful studies of the Natural History Museum (‘Designing the well-tempered institution of 1873’ in arq 1/2, pp70–78 and ‘Delivering the well-tempered institution of 1873’ in arq 2/1, pp66–75) which he wrote together with Tanis Hinchcliffe.

Jeff was one of the members of the first arq Editorial Board. Both then and later, he was a generous and perceptive referee. And it was he who made the most helpful suggestions when a new board was formed after Cambridge University Press took over as publishers. Sadly, he was not a member of that Board but he continued to help us – and to gently castigate us for changing the layout: ‘The old design was distinctive and couldn't be bettered’ he wrote, ‘– all those wonderful large letters across the opening spreads!’

Jeff is remembered here by Dennis Sharp, Steve Szokolay, Dean Hawkes and Simos Yannas.

The UK's Education Secretary, Charles Clarke, was recently quoted as describing medieval historians as ‘ornaments’ and suggested that the state should no longer pay for their activities. As attacks on liberal education go, his particular utilitarian and anti-cultural point was not unusual. But was it justified? Here, Michael Asselmeyer, a medieval historian himself, takes issue and argues the case for teaching humanities to architects.

This is a house about decisions that were not made, not because I am indecisive, which I am, but because many of those choices that architects consider to be critical in design are to me either unnecessary or impossible: the choice between the detail of traditional architecture and the non-detail of minimalism, between a frame building and a wall building, between a free plan and a cellular plan, between a tight fit and a loose fit with function. These were all decisions in which I chose not one alternative but both. I did not believe the conventional wisdom that to be modern was to be minimal, scaleless, generalized and reductive or that to be representational, to make references to history, or to be responsive to scale was to be traditional.

The first point to make about the competition for the new British Embassy in Warsaw relates not to the architecture of the six submissions but to the selection process that produced them. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) has long been committed to appointing new, and often young, architects to carry out its major projects and to the architectural competition as the means of selecting a design. Anticipating the procedures now legally required under OJEC rules, the FCO openly advertises for architects to apply to be selected to participate in their various competitions. Following detailed briefings and extended site visits, designs are then produced, and presented, and winners chosen.

Lined against one wall in the reception area of Feilden Clegg Bradley Architects' (FCBA) London office is a row of folding bicycles [2]. All are provided by the firm for the use of staff and partners. A sign of clear commitment to green and humanist causes, credentials which are surely needed by modern architects of large housing schemes. Luckily for the Brooklands Avenue project for 378 dwellings in Cambridge, the architects are supported in this commitment by their client, Countryside Properties. Also luckily, the site contains many magnificent trees. These are mostly around the perimeter, but there is one line forming a strong central spine running north-south. Better still, the west boundary is flanked by Hobson's Brook and a strip of common land.

Until the launch of Federation Square in Melbourne, in 1997, Australia's contribution to the history of international architectural competitions consisted essentially of two buildings: the Sydney Opera House, won by Jørn Utzon in 1957, and the Federal Parliament House in Canberra, won by Mitchell/Giurgola and Thorp (MGT) in 1980. While Utzon's building is widely acknowledged as a daring piece of innovative design and one of the architectural icons of this century, MGT's winning scheme for Parliament House drew heavy criticism from the moment the proposal was unveiled: neo-Classicist lines, a Beaux-Arts parti, and the building's occupation of Capital Hill – at the top of the Griffins' 1912 scheme for Canberra – were seen by many as displaying a lack of sensibility towards Australian landscape, culture, and ingenuity, and as the result of a conservative approach to contemporary urban design.

Many important design concepts have an unfixed format in current housing design. The fragmentation and seemingly uncontrolled expansion of cities question the definition of the current city. On a smaller scale there is nowadays no common idea of what a dwelling should be, in terms of image, spatial properties, construction or function. Flexibility is a key word in housing design. ‘The architectural view is increasingly shifting from its métier propre, that of ordering, towards change, towards an intellectual grasp of the unstable’ (Wohlhage, 1999). At the intermediary scale where the flexible dwelling and the cityscape meet, descriptions like ‘enclave’, ‘ensemble’ and ‘estate’ are in vogue. Such terminology has insufficient architectural precision to be credible as an answer to current urban problems. The instability of our cities is not that new – and cannot be an excuse for a professional attitude where anything goes.

When asked ‘what is your most exciting/important job’ my answer would always be ‘the next one’. The struggle necessary to finish any serious building project is so overwhelming that once the certificate of completion is signed, the last thing one wants to do is reflect on or pontificate about it. I was 34 when given Southfield [2] to design and am now more than twice that age. I was flattered when Fiona McLachlan told me she wanted to do research on my practice and initially to study Southfield and I was later a little scared when the Editor asked me to write an introduction to this study. But I have found it fascinating to read Fiona's paper and to ponder those heady days in the mid 1960s when Southfield dominated my life. It seems to me the most useful contribution I can make is to relate how I came to be doing this job and where the ideas came from which I can now appreciate were and are very important.

In 2000, the UK Government Department for Education and Skills (DfES) piloted 27 new primary school projects around the country in an initiative called ‘Classrooms of the Future’. Starting with a polemical question: what is ‘a Classroom of the Future’?, it encouraged both a design-led approach and an exploration of where the theory of the classroom design meets teaching practice. David Miliband, the government minister involved, described the challenge as ‘designing inspiring buildings that can adapt to educational and technological change’ (DfES, 2002a). Chris Bissell from the DfES, the initiator of ‘Classrooms of the Future’ summed up his expectations: ‘to deliver the best and most effective education exploiting all the possibilities of the information age, school buildings need to reflect advances in technology. They need to provide a pleasant and comfortable environment for learning and to use architectural and design features to stimulate children's imaginations. And they need to be open to wider use, binding schools to their local communities.’ (DfES, 2002a)

In recent years there has been mounting curiosity about how architects and engineers work with one another to make buildings. Studies of such collaborations have their present use for furthering technique and efficiency in construction. As a historical exercise, one might view the tendency as part of a broader, revisionist trend – an overdue project for setting the record straight, and releasing architecture from the velvet manacles of art history. Acquaintance with the making of any sizeable building soon teaches that the Vasarian concept of disegno – of a creative process anterior to and set apart from construction – suits only a minority of architecture's modes and moments. As an explanation even of the more imaginative paths that lead from the blank sheet to the occupied building, it is intellectually reductive, humanly ungenerous, and actually untruthful.

Rudolph Michael Schindler (1887–1953) designed a beach house for Henry Braxton and Viola Brothers Shore in 1930. The house was to have been sited on Ocean Front Walk, Venice, Los Angeles [1]. It was never built, but remains a paper project. In the architectural drawings archives at University of California, Santa Barbara, there are both sketch plans and detailed plans for four levels: the ground floor, the main floor, the balcony floor and the roof level. There are drawings for each of the four elevations as well as sections. Constructional details are provided on five sheets. All told there are 13 extant drawings. In his signature upper case, Schindler typed a brief written description of the house [Table 1].

Buildings are constructed, expanded, refurbished, demolished, deconstructed and relocated in response to the essential needs of contemporary societies. Inevitably, these needs evolve with time. Modern design and construction have always operated in a constantly shifting context of requirements and resources. It is well known that unanticipated forces and emerging circumstances have compelled change in architecture through the ages and yet, most buildings are constructed to serve for countless decades (Kronenburg, 2000, Brand, 1994). During that time, buildings are exposed to an enormous range of fluctuating pressures. In this age of furious technological innovation, growing global ecological awareness and changing economic and societal priorities, the pace of change is increasingly frenetic. Out of this state of affairs arise both significant challenges and intriguing opportunities.

The kind of investigation that the Department of Education and Skills (DfES) has brought about through its exemplar design initiative should be commonplace in architectural culture. For an exemplar design is, or should be, an embodiment of theory in a particularly clear and intense way. The DfES has given 11 architects the opportunity to theorize school environments and contribute realizable ideal designs in the context of the biggest investment in primary and secondary education for over a generation.

Several strategies are used at the Rotterdam Kunsthal to create a direct relation between the city and the interior of the building. Our hypothesis is that the frictions and difficulties that arise from this openness to the outside world are integrated into the design of the building. In fact, despite being exposed to the forces of the city, the project maintains its functionality and identity. Many existing texts have touched upon the relationship that exists between the Kunsthal and the city (for example, van Dijk [1993], Kipnis [1996], MacNair [1994]), but none clearly articulates the different paradoxes that result from this complex intertwining. The importance of systematically and critically exploring these paradoxes lies in the fact that the Rotterdam Kunsthal is one of the very first of a series of contemporary buildings that have tried to connect themselves in direct ways to their urban surroundings.

It has taken a long time to be able to assess Jørn Utzon's importance. Until the end of the twentieth century, the architect described by Sigfried Giedion as the most important of the ‘third generation’ hardly appeared in its literature. By contrast we had no such problem with Le Corbusier: there were the Oeuvres Complètes. It was easy to consult any building, indeed sketch, and along the way to be thoroughly coerced into his theoretical position. His massive and megalomaniac contribution to the last century could be studied first through L'Esprit Nouveau, the avant-garde magazine which promulgated him – ‘17.23, 2me février, 1926, Grande Pensée de L-C …’ and so forth – and later through the archives and sketchbooks. Wright suffered from too many publications. After the Wasmuth Portfolio of 1910 there was no single, accessible reference to his huge output: his theory tended to the verbose, and he was devious in concealing his own sources, most especially his debt to Japan. Mies van der Rohe wrote little and was famously gnomic; his buildings supplied his ‘text’. The so-called second generation, Aalto and Kahn, were well served in terms of publication of their work. The former's theoretical position took much posthumous teasing-out by critics to become widely understood. He could overcome people's ignorance of Finnish – for example, by his 1961 definition ‘acoustic separation is kilograms’ and by his stupefied reaction to the question of what module he used: ‘a millimetre, more or less!’ – but he wrote little.

During the past decades, many computer tools have been developed to assist in the environmental design of individual buildings. Heat, light, sound and especially energy consumption can be analyzed in many different packages. This is not generally true for urban design, especially at the medium scale. Although it is widely assumed that urban texture – the pattern of streets, building heights, open spaces and so on – will determine environmental quality both in the buildings and outside, tools for investigating the connections are sparse. The need for medium-scale understanding is confirmed by Givoni (1989):

‘The outdoor temperature, wind speed and solar radiation to which an individual building is exposed is not the regional “synoptic” climate, but the local microclimate as modified by the “structure” of the city, mainly of the neighbourhood where the building is located.’

This paper describes how novel image-processing algorithms could be applied in urban areas to calculate a wide number of parameters. These parameters allow the construction of what we could call ‘urban infoscapes’: a layered collection of information on cities, that can be successfully used to inform urban design and planning.

In 1934 Le Corbusier wrote to Tage William-Olsson: ‘You have created, in Stockholm, the first great work of the modern time, the traffic junction of Slussen [1]. It seems as if everything should go on in the same scale. Don't despair. Go on, make proposals, fight…’ These encouraging words from the vigorous master certainly suited an architect whose father had told him that, ‘There are two things in front of which you shouldn't despair, those which you can't change and those which you can’. He hung Le Corbusier's letter on the wall of his office.