The term ‘sustainability’ is often used as a woolly term for everything that is good and desirable. Besides, ‘sustainability’ is a subjective area, which can be difficult to quantify. Any construction project has a wide range of environmental impacts, each of which may have been measured in a different way. Energy may have been measured in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, whereas wood or mineral extraction is generally measured volumetrically, making comparisons between environmental impacts difficult to determine. Various methodologies seek to standardise impacts for comparative purposes and the guiding principle for any environmental assessment is a comparison to the existing building stock, and a result is invariably in terms of a building's relative sustainability. However, to some it is not a matter of being ‘more’ or ‘less’ sustainable. You either are or you are not, therefore relative sustainability is not a valid concept. The discussion of sustainability in this paper is not a debate on the semantics of the term, but ultimately the purist's view does lead to the question whether there can ever be such a thing as a sustainable building and indeed what the role of architecture in the context of sustainability is.

‘When you go into a room and see a box of cigars, a computer and a horse you look for similarities, but if the room contains only one object you look for differences.’ (Luciano Berio, introducing a BBC Symphony Orchestra weekend of his music at The Barbican in 1990)

This was a big, serious conference in a big, serious city. Architectural historians from North America and around the globe gathered to discuss their work and to look at buildings together. Yet despite the generosity with which the American Institute of Architects handed out CPD points for every paper and tour attended, there were not many architects there; the conference remained substantially a forum for professional architectural historians and their research students to talk shop. It's a pity – this kind of conference represents an excellent opportunity for architects to take their place at the heart of the debate on history and conservation.

Venaria Reale was built by the Savoy Duke Carlo Emanuele II on a marshy site about six miles north-east of Turin. It comprised a large palace cum hunting-lodge, gardens, a hunting wood and a small city through which the palace was approached. Designed by the architect Amadeo di Castellamonte, it was built almost entirely ex novo between about 1655 and 1675. The entire project was thematically structured around an elaborate programme of emblems (essentially mottos with illustrative paintings) drawn from contemporary rhetorical practice. This iconographic scheme was devised by the court philosopher and eminent theorist of rhetoric, Emanuele Tesauro. It is also clear that the Duke himself was involved in both the architecture and decoration of the scheme.

In landscape architecture, building simply was the rule in the past, because building materials and processes were natural, local and common. This all began to change during the 1950s, when concrete became popular, synthetics replaced natural building techniques, and tropical woods became standard for outdoor use. The use of these materials was taken for granted in day-to-day office work for many years. My own attitude changed some time in the 1980s, when Minimal and Conceptual Art became significant and the emerging environmental concerns began to make an impact.

The recent history of architecture can be characterised as a battle between attention-grabbing, ‘iconic’ buildings and a counteracting tendency towards the aesthetically reduced, even avowedly ‘minimal’. But beneath the surface appearance of these contrasting formal tendencies – restless or serene, as demanded by their aesthetic ideals – the means of building have become relentlessly more complex to meet ever more demanding environmental and other performance requirements. It was against this background that the Design Research Unit at Cardiff University convened a one-day symposium to explore the possibility of ‘Building Simply’: the topic proved, not unexpectedly, elusive. Below we publish some reflections by Gordon Murray on some of the issues raised, and these are followed by three design papers – by Pierre d'Avoine, Roland Raderschall and the organisers – that addressed the topic from differing perspectives.

In 1554 the Renaissance architectural master, Andrea Palladio (born Andrea della Gondola, or ‘di Pietro’), produced two little-known guidebooks to the city of Rome. These were unillustrated texts, one of which described the ancient wonders of the city while the other concentrated on the later medieval churches. Guidebooks of this kind had existed since medieval times but Palladio introduced a new kind of structure to the guide by organising the material into logical routes which the tourist could follow. Since then architectural guidebooks have proliferated and the introduction of photography and high quality graphics has changed their appearance significantly. However, in many respects things have not altered a great deal. Architectural guidebooks still present a view of a city which is that of a single individual (or small group of authors) and the selection of the material determines what is deemed to be of significance. Some guides, such as those by Nikolaus Pevsner, attempt to present the buildings in as neutral a way as possible in order to give the work a degree of objectivity but, nonetheless, the visitor is still being presented with a particular view of the city.

‘It was democracy that commissioned this project. If we had not been serious in deciding that our nation is resolved – as it says in our constitution – to create a new order for itself and establish a social state on the basis of free self-determination, this building would not have been conceived and completed in the way that it has been, a building whose reality […] symbolises what is new about our order, embodying the element of freedom and the desire that man should be at its centre.’

Driven by our interest in sustainability, the vernacular architecture of Wales and a preference for ‘rational’ over wilfully expressive form, the determination to ‘build simply’ has become an abiding aspiration in the work of the Design Research Unit (dru) at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. Established in 1998, dru aims both to apply the School's wider research to architectural commissions and to develop design as a medium of research in its own right. In this paper, various themes that recur in the Unit's recent work are discussed in the context of two current schemes that exemplify this research-based approach to design.

At the back of a dimly lit room at the north-east wing of the Philadelphia Museum of Art the visitor may, or may not, discover an old, weathered Spanish door. Approaching this unlikely sight, a concealed view behind the door becomes noticeable as a result of light emanating from two peepholes. The act of looking through them transforms the unsuspected viewer into a voyeur and reveals a brightly lit three-dimensional diorama: a recumbent, faceless, female nude, holding a gas lamp and bathed in light is submerged in twigs in an open landscape where a waterfall silently glitters [1a, 1b]. The explicit pornographic pose of the splayed legs and the exposed pudenda is dazzling. On careful inspection, this startling view is only possible through another intersecting surface; between the viewer and the nude stands a brick wall on which an irregular rupture has been opened – as if by a violent collision – making the scene even more unsettling. Defying traditional definitions of painting or sculpture Marcel Duchamp's enigmatic final work is a carefully constructed assemblage of elements, with an equally enigmatic title: Etant Donnés: 1°la chute d'eau, 2°le gaz d'éclairage… (Given: 1st the Waterfall, 2nd the Illuminating Gas…), 1946–1966.

An unorthodox and influential critique of the modern city was published in 1908 by August Endell, an autodidact in the field of architecture. Influenced by empathy theory, Impressionist ideas, contemporary sociology, and the literary and artistic circles of the time, Endell's small book Die Schönheit der Großen Stadt (The Beauty of the Metropolis) read the metropolis through a new way of ‘seeing’ [1,2]. What he saw was surprising for most readers: the city's centre was discovered in marginal sites, and its lasting identity was grasped in its fleeting moments. Although Endell never drew up encompassing schemes for the city, did not participate in the first city-building competitions of the time, and focused primarily on individual building projects, one of his major publications was entirely devoted to the city. The Beauty of the Metropolis takes the reader on a journey through a city that slowly reveals itself as Berlin. Throughout the book, Endell describes urban scenes such as streets, plazas, stations, and the margins of urbanity, such as the city's blank walls and outskirts.

A group organised by the University of Edinburgh, led by Mark Dorrian, and CNRS Paris, led by Frédéric Pousin is exploring the history and the cultural meanings of the aerial view. It aims to investigate how the aerial view can be defined, how images are produced, how ‘elevated’ one has to be in order to produce or experience an aerial view, and how images are used and consumed. Jointly funded by the British Academy and CNRS, a numberof meetings will be held over the next two years. The following account reports on the first meeting held in Edinburgh on 3 February 2007.

More than three decades ago, the architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri pessimistically concluded that a revolutionary architecture cannot precede a social revolution. In this comment, he summed up the perceived failure of Modernist architecture to realise a social utopia. The comment implied that the architectural discipline, as part of the superstructure, cannot affect society; rather, it is the means and forces of production which determine society, while architecture only reacts, corresponds and represents these changes.

Contemporary criticism in architecture frequently ignores the procurement process that a project has undergone and its impact on the design of a building. Critics tend to concentrate on the finished product, the building, paying little or no attention to how the architect secured the job, who the client was, how they were represented, the client / architect relationship and how these had an impact on both design and design process, beyond functional requirements.

As we watch a film, we let filmmakers take us by the hand and tell us a story until they lead us into a world visually constructed to captivate us for a specific amount of time. The worst thing a filmmaker can do is not to terrify us, or fool us with special effects, but to rob us of our illusion that what we are seeing is ‘true’ even if just for now. Through the mimetic power of film, we, the viewer, picture the film set as if it is real architecture, and assemble the walls and floors we see into an architectural whole. This paper focuses on what we see ‘behind’ the screen rather than the cinematic experience itself. The premise is that by examining the nature of filmic ‘reality’ we will be helped to understand architectural form and order.