In 1983, the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture mounted an exhibition of Zaha Hadid's work titled Planetary Architecture II. An image from this event shows Hadid as she points to one of the drawings on the wall surrounded by a group of listeners. The interior is saturated with drawings. As they unfold before the viewer, the drawings blur the boundaries between walls, floors and ceiling. An interior space wrapped in drawing, orchestrated by the exhibitor, the image of this show is nevertheless also an expression of the pedagogical ideas of Alvin Boyarsky, the chairman of the AA school between 1971 and 1990.

Studio remains the physical and intellectual space at the heart of every good architectural school. It is a forum for the sharing of ideas and a place in which to work together in order to explore architecture and its role in shaping our environment, society and culture. It should reveal interesting contrasts and synergies between the particular and the universal, the individual and the collective.

This paper presents the comparative analysis of the National Museum of Modern Art, in the Pompidou Centre, Paris, designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano (1972–77), and the Tate Modern art gallery, London, the conversion of an industrial building by Swiss practice Herzog & de Meuron (1995–2000). The two museums share a set of conspicuous similarities so that their parallel investigation seems self-evident. Both are large-scale national museums of modern art, extending over two floors, in buildings that constitute urban landmarks and are often seen as examples of the museum as a box [1a–b]. Their ground floors are conceived as a space you walk through, as a ‘piazza’; their spatial organisation is modular and flexible; their visual construction, punctuated by powerful views to the city. Moreover, they are guided by similar spatial ideas and share common fundamental morphological properties. Interestingly, their affinities extend to their collections – both begin with the turn of the twentieth century and extend to the twenty-first century; and their curatorial practices – as, for instance, the practice of reprogramming the galleries on a regular basis. But the experience of visiting the two museums is entirely different and each appears to have its own idiosyncratic spatial character, quite distinct from the other (described metaphorically by the museum designers as the museum as a city in the case of the Pompidou and as a machine for showing art in the case of Tate Modern). So, could these obvious similarities hide critical differences between the two museums?

The popularity of the concept of evidence-based design (EBD) has exploded over the past five years, picking up speed as a topic of attention in environmental design conferences, papers and articles, and books. Rooted in the healthcare environment, the EBD concept has now bridged out to design of long-term care settings, housing and workplaces, as well as facilities management. While evidence-based design is indeed a seductive term for those of us interested in advancing research-informed design – portending linkages between research-derived evidence and environmental design – we cautiously note that, as of this writing, in its current conceptualisation, its clout is stronger than its clarity. This paper is a clarion invitation to the environmental design research community to consider the concept of evidence-based design as emergent, warranting careful, critical examination regarding its meaning and underlying assumptions.

As the existing housing stock ages throughout Europe, retrofitting offers many opportunities for the substantial improvement of the energy performance of residential buildings and the provision of sustainable alternatives to conventional heating and cooling. The effect of global warming is leading to a widespread use of air conditioning in existing and new residential buildings. This potentially implies an increase in cooling energy and adverse environmental effects on an unprecedented scale. In the hot and dry climate of many south European cities, this could be avoided with the use of an innovative wall integrated passive evaporative cooling system, which harnesses air, water and porous ceramic to provide comfortable indoor conditions. Dr Rosa Schiano-Phan discusses the applicability of such a system to the urban context of Seville in the light of the current Spanish regulatory framework and recent developments of European energy performance standards.

Some artists have a sense of architecture, using it in or around their work. I am thinking of Antony Gormley whose casts of his own body are almost always located in relation to a setting – whether a beach, the courtyard of a gallery or the precipitous edges of high buildings. I am thinking too of James Turrell whose light spaces are works of architecture, places in which to contemplate the sky, to watch the sunlight pan slowly around the space. I would cite too Martin Creed whose fugitive sprinters ran approximately along the axis of the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain in London, framed by them, avoiding visitors as they rushed from one end to the other; and Anish Kapoor for his bulbous walls or his vast ‘trumpet’ – Marsyas – in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern.

This paper – like those following it in this issue of arq – focuses on the shifting notion of ‘flow’ and the significance of that notion for the practice, critique and theorisation of architecture.

Like the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) that preceded it, the UK government's proposed Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a means of allocating funding in higher education to support research. As with any method for the competitive allocation of funds it creates winners and losers and inevitably generates a lot of emotion among those rewarded or penalised. More specifically, the ‘winners’ tend to approve of the method of allocation and the ‘losers’ denigrate it as biased against their activities and generally unfair. An extraordinary press campaign has been consistently waged against research assessment and its methods by those involved in architectural education, which I will track over a decade and a half. What follows will question whether this campaign demonstrates the sophistication and superior judgment of those who have gone into print, or conversely whether its mixture of misinformation and disinformation reveals not just disenchantment and prejudice, but a naivety and a depth of ignorance about the fundamentals of research that is deeply damaging to the credibility of architecture as a research-based discipline. With the recent consultation process towards a new cycle of research assessment, the REF, getting under way, I aim to draw attention to the risk of repeating past mistakes.

The electric power system has often been compared to a circulatory system, and telecommunication and informational complexes likened to nervous systems. Such characterisations are rigorous only for those aspects that bring the utility system closer to a living system: its mechanisms of control and regulation.