Independent research consulting firms may not get much attention in the architectural culture, but they play an inordinately important role in bringing research findings to the profession and in meeting the research needs of the building industry. Here is a profile of two North American consulting firms that shows their diversity, and their commonality. Tom Fisher reports.

A surprising amount of good and original architecture has been built in Switzerland and Austria in recent years, combining the power of international ideas and techniques with the special characteristics of a local setting. This paper considers a school by Rodolphe Luscher, who practises in French-speaking Lausanne but was born in the more Germanic Zurich. Analyzing it in detail, the author comments on how it can be accommodated into the developing story of Modernism.

Waterside is one of a handful of recent British commercial buildings that will be remembered long after this decade is over. Its greatest significance is as a marker of the changing relationship between organizations and their office accommodation. The story of its development contains many generic lessons to be derived from the use of architecture as a catalyst in change management. It is hoped that a future paper will report on one of the most intractable problems in architectural research–whether office design (and Waterside in particular) can affect productivity.

Kenneth Frampton, architectural critic and Columbia University professor, responds to the criticism that has been levelled at his notion of the ‘tectonic’ in this interview with Paulo Martins Barata. Frampton views the tectonic as a way of resisting both the ‘speculator’ economy of mass-produced construction and the ‘atectonic’ architecture of Post-Modernism and Post-Structuralism. At the same time, he acknowledges the quixotic nature of an idea that is ‘a kind of rearguard response to the commodification of architecture’. The interview is set in context by Martins Barata.

Convinced that his father's work was arranged around an underlying structure, Robert Lutyens, in 1944, posed the challenge that ‘…someone will someday discover my father's system of applied geometry’. Drawing on an analysis of the ground floor plans of 40 English country houses designed by Edwin Lutyens between 1889 and 1913, this paper considers Robert Lutyens's ‘Armature of Planes’, a theory which he closely associated with the development of his father's work. The analysis reveals Edwin Lutyens's consistent use of ratios to structure his work.

The resignation of the Sydney Opera House architect, Jørn Utzon, marked the culmination of an increasingly frustrating phase of the project. Utzon had intended a partnership between designer, consultant, contractor and subcontractor to develop technical design solutions which would not have been possible under normal competitive tendering. The government rejected this. Here are examined the issues which underpinned the relationship between the architect seeking technical perfection and the manufacturing engineer seeking the fullest artistic expression of his product.

The relationship between architecture, the body and the computer is considered in this paper. Whereas the body has been related traditionally to architecture through concepts of geometry and proportion, the computer also brings to light the valorization of craft, McLuhan's philosophy of the changing sensorium, the projection of digital utopias, Freud's construction of the relationships between repetition, obsession and the uncanny, and the residence of the body in concepts of mind. The examination of these issues is productive in the context of the design studio.