‘Which way up?’ and ‘What size?’ are recurring questions when viewing the artworks of Tom Ellis. Devices of reflection and re-scaling are extracted from an architectural context and employed with quirky irreverence in this exhibition of models, drawings and ready-mades. Even before his collaboration with architects for this latest show, Tom Ellis' work has shown a fascination with imagined places and structures. Earlier pieces construct, in cheap, clumsy materials, the inaccessible landscapes viewed from a plane window or the envisaged destination of a journey. His explorations of the perceptual effects of scale are sometimes jokey, sometimes profound, but always refreshing and unpretentious.

‘We're going to start by researching research’ says RIBA Vice-President Jack Pringle (pp. 104–106 of this issue). It's a statement that will send shivers down the spine of all those who recall the boring and generally useless lists of university research published by a well-intentioned Architects' Journal in the 1970s. But read on – for Pringle emphasises that ‘the complicated thing is bringing everything together’ into the quite ordinary buildings and places designed not by ‘star’ architects but by the vast majority of the profession.

The repercussions of the results of the UK Government's highly controversial 2000 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) for architecture (arq 6/3, pp 203–207) continue to resonate. But this time the university architecture schools are not alone. For the first time ever, the RIBA, recognizing the seriousness of the situation for the profession, is giving architectural research the attention it deserves. Jack Pringle is masterminding the Institute's response. In late September, arq reminded him of his initial response to the RAE debacle (arq 6/3, pp 197–198), and asked him about current developments.

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.

Peter Blundell Jones' and Jian Kang's article ‘Acoustic form in the Modern Movement’ (arq 7/1, pp 75–85) eloquently describes how functional form may sometimes have been driven by acoustical requirements – the clearest example is perhaps the fruitful collaboration between Scharoun, the architect, and Cremer, the acoustician, in the design of the Berlin Philharmonie.

Architect, author and teacher, Michael Brawne was also an arq contributor and referee. His article ‘Research, design and Popper’ published in our second issue (1/2, pp 10–15) was an analysis of the similarity between architectural design and scientific research based on Karl Popper's hypothetico-deductive theory. It cut straight to the heart of the declared subject of this journal. Reading it again, one can almost hear Michael – with his characteristically precise enunciation (and often exquisitely drawly voice) – elucidating his argument.

The following celebration of Michael and his contribution to architecture speaks eloquently about the man and his teaching but surprisingly little about his completed buildings – especially those of the '60s and '70s. There was something very rigorous about these. Indeed, Charles Correa asserts that the houses in Hampstead are ‘among the half-dozen most important pieces of architecture’ constructed in the UK over the last 50 years.

It was in the first Hampstead house that, in 1962, there emerged the surface mounted vertical mullions that were to appear again – always subtly related to the internal spatial arrangement – in later projects. And there was his use on the upper levels of his buildings of steeply sloping Cor-Ten sheet (something that today's generation, who seem to have rediscovered this problematic material, could well learn from). In plan, his buildings often made a powerful use of the diagonal (the Cambridge influence perhaps?) and occasionally revealed his admiration for Alvar Aalto's work. This thoughtful, highly distinctive body of work extended from country cottage conversions and extensions to competition designs such as his ‘groundscraper’ high-density housing entry for the Portsdown competition.

And what of Michael's exhibition designs? Following the 1965 publication of his book, The New Museum, it was a field in London which he seemed to dominate for much of the late '60s and the '70s – with shows such as the stunning Art in Revolution at the Hayward Gallery in 1971 and the exquisite Age of Neo-Classicism at the Royal Academy in the following year. In the mid '90s, his work for ecclesiastical museums in Germany was equally elegant and well-judged. And, over the last six years, recalling his artist father, he turned to making sculpture at Bath College.

Michael Brawne is remembered here by some of his contemporaries, fellow teachers and students. The first contribution, by Bob Allies, is reproduced by permission from The Independent newspaper in which it appeared on 16 August 2003.

Jonathan Woolf studied architecture at Kingston, and worked with Munkenbeck and Marshall before setting up in practice in 1990. He taught at the AA with Philippe Barthelemy, from 1995 to 2000, where their Intermediate Unit 5 made a number of proposals related to Hampstead Heath in north London and explored them using solid wood models. We met at his new office – a converted pub – and, over a beer from the fridge, discussed his latest completed building, Brick Leaf House. It is a 10,000 square foot double villa built for two brothers and their families on the edge of Hampstead Heath. We began by looking at the sort of model his AA unit would have produced.

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.

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.

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.

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.

By coincidence I lived for a couple of years in a small flat in Matti Välikangas' Olympic Village in Helsinki (1939–40) to which Hildi Hawkins referred in Insight: ‘Home, sweet home’ (arq 7/1, pp 94–96). I too reflected my time in such environments onto my home here: the hyper-efficient planning, daylighting, wet-floor bathrooms, double-rebated doors with lift-off hinges etc. Along with a quality that I also sense in some design of the same period here; seemingly quite ordinary buildings imbued with the hopes of an embryonic welfare state and the care of the architects and builders who built them.

As a child, on visits to Finland in the 1960s and '70s, I was constantly amazed by the way people lived. At home, in the Yorkshire army officer's quarter where we lived, I barely encountered the modern, let alone the really comfortable. Designed before the First World War for a large family plus servants and animals – the accommodation included a scullery, butler's pantry, paddock and orchard – our house was huge, rambling and uncomfortable not to mention freezing cold in the rainswept, windswept northern winters.

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.

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.

Sarah Wigglesworth and Jane Wernick's article, ‘Clear Water Garden; A Study In Design Research and Collaboration’ (arq 6/2, pp214–229) contained (p216) the following passage:

‘There was a very productive equality in our working relationship. Partly because the power structure between different genders and knowledgeswas almost entirely absent.’

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].

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.

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.

Geoffrey Bawa died in May, so it is fitting as well as poignant that Thames and Hudson have published this new and lavish edition on his life's work, written by the indefatigable David Robson. It will undoubtedly prove to be the definitive publication. Interest in Bawa's work is clearly very high; the previous monograph by Brian Brace Taylor published in 1986, was revised and republished in 1995 by the same publisher. Robson's new work is more comprehensive and includes the very latest projects. It also sets the scene both in terms of Bawa's unusual career and life story and of the awesome legacy of his home, the fascinating island of Sri Lanka.