The two articles on canopies in the last issue of arq (6/3, pp214–229 and 230–245) make interesting reading. The briefs must have been quite similar – but what a difference in approach to design! Both canopies had to provide temporary cover to a fairly small area, during the summer, at about the level of a normal storey height, and both had to be easy to put up and take down in a fairly short time. The canopy in a courtyard in Amsterdam had to relate to the building and was originally intended to partly surround a tree [1]; the canopy for the Chelsea Flower Show was free-standing in the garden [2]. But the differences in situation do not account for the differences in design approach. The only common points here were that both were designed by a collaborative effort between architect and engineer – surely the only way to design something like this – and for both the starting point seemed to be, by implication, the rejection of anything totally regular, and the need to be innovative.

The Casbah concept was developed by a group of younger European architects in the late 1950s. It flourished over a period of no more than ten years but its influence continues to this day.

Archigram, the British architectural group that became arguably the pre-eminent architectural neoavant-garde of the 1960s and early 1970s, is usually remembered for its visions of a ‘Pop’ and ‘science fiction’ architecture. This article, however, recalls Archigram's relationship to architectural education. If this at first seems surprising, or even mundane, it has to be pointed out that to a great extent Archigram came out of, and was sustained by, the schools of architecture. Moreover, Archigram was nourished by a high ideal of what education, and architectural education in particular, should be about: the cultivation of individuals working in concert, without hierarchy, and free of social, spatial, or ideological institutions. This programme was apparent in many Archigram design projects – the title for this article is for instance borrowed from a piece by Archigram's David Greene [1] – and it is just as palpable in the more proactive role that Archigram took in trying to reform architectural education.

David Lea's Bridge Pottery (arq 6/2, pp130–143), like his other designs, demonstrates his unique gift in handling form and material and light and detail to create serenity and magic from the mundane and ordinary. This pared down modern design incorporates the essential features of the vernacular - human scale, a sense of place and the texture of natural materials - an Arts and Crafts tradition for our time, modest and informal but without the nostalgia and mediaevalism. It appears effortless but, in reality, it is difficult to achieve, requiring a clear vision and an uncompromising approach in its execution.

The 59-story, nearly 1.6 million gross square foot, Citicorp Center tower completed during 1977 in mid-town Manhattan was designed by the much-celebrated architect Hugh Stubbins of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The tower incorporated an array of notable technological features including doubledecker elevator cabs to reduce the number of elevator shafts and thereby increase the usable floor area, alternative energy source and reclamation systems, and low-brightness lighting that helped render the tower some 42% more energy efficient than comparable structures designed to conventional standards (http://www.loringengineers).

arq has been awarded the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers/Charlesworth Award for Learned Journals 2002.

The building that for many incorporates the essence of twentieth-century Modern architecture existed for only six months. Critics have called the Barcelona Pavilion a myth, an icon, an image. In this book, Josep Quetglas claims that it is a stage where the performance can only be described by ‘emptiness and the future’. And although what is true for theatre might not apply to architecture, the dramatic dynamics inherent in modern theatre's concern that the stage set should never repeat the text of the play do help explain the varied and contradictory interpretations of the Barcelona Pavilion.

We were approached in late spring of 2000 by Americans Beth and Charles Miller. Committed to raising awareness of sustainable development and the problems of global water shortages, the Millers were keen to bring their message to one of the largest audiences possible, and they chose the Chelsea Flower Show, the showcase of world gardening, as the place to do it.

Following up both your leader (p99) and Alan Jones' letter (p105) in arq 6/2, the arrival of Jack Pringle as RIBA Vice President for Education and myself as Hon Vice President for Practice does indeed reinforce the moves already in progress to create an RIBA voice in architectural research and to connect it to education and practice. Council has now created the necessary resources, but full approval of the initiative is still in the pipeline.

Most architectural education takes place within a university context. There are very considerable advantages to such an arrangement but, for a discipline as broadly based and practically orientated as architecture, there can also be occasional problems if aspects are inappropriately managed. Anyone who doubts this should read Philip Steadman and Bill Hillier's review of the Built Environment category of the UK Higher Education Funding Council's (HEFCE) 2001 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) (pp. 203–207).

The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) to which every research-active UK university department has to submit every five years has fundamental resourcing implications for teaching and research – and thus, in the case of architecture, for the profession itself. Within the RAE, Architecture has always sat uneasily in a Built Environment ‘unit of assessment’ which appears to be dominated by construction and surveying – an unrepresentative state of affairs which can no longer be ignored. Leaders and letters in recent issues of arq (5/4, 6/1 and 2) have revealed the deep unease with which the results of the latest Exercise have been received. Now that full details of all RAE submissions have been published on the Web (www.hero.ac.uk/rae/ under ‘Submissions’), a fully informed analysis is at last possible. This article has been written in the light of this latest information.

Neutra's now forgotten Venetian lecture of 1949 reveals him as a polemicist with a sense of humour anxious to distance himself from Bruno Zevi's ‘Organic school of architecture of the United States’.

The performance piece Flux in the Sligo Air is a suite for movement artists and electro-acoustic music. It was composed in response to the unique atmosphere of Sligo, a town of 16,000 inhabitants in the northwest of Ireland, and its place within the surrounding landscape. I was inspired by Sligo's architecture and the sky, landscape and sea into which the town is so naturally and uniquely integrated. My study of space perception in architectural terms and its correlation with musical processes led to a contemplation of the relationship of the town's buildings to each other and the spaces (streets) they inhabit in the same manner as tonal phrases might become related to each other, or to a drone. Flux in the Sligo Air is not an analogous translation of architecture into music, however, but an attempt to capture those ever-changing senses which one may experience within a space. The town's natural condition and evolution, the new and the old at many points in time, serve as carriers of ideas of sense and felt knowledge which transcend the purely physical.

Spurred on by the post-'69 generation, theory in architecture reached its high-point in the '80s and '90s. Continental European tracts were welcomed as a ‘wondrous new mode of contemporary thought’. Derrida and Deconstruction dominated. The journals filled their pages with philosophy. Today, the theoreticians find themselves outfaced by the ‘intellectual entrepreneurs and managers of change’ confronting the highly competitive forces of globalization. Michael Speaks writes from a Californian perspective.

Twenty-five years after its publication in 1977, David Watkin's ‘time-bomb’ demolition of Modernist architectural theory has appeared under the cliché-augmented title Morality and Architecture Revisited. Whether the book merits this jubilee re-issue is open to some debate. Of the reasons given on the flyleaf, the suggestion that ‘many of the old fallacies still persist’ seems at once an unnecessary admission of the author's failure or, at any rate, partial success in convincing us of his thesis, and an equally unnecessary concern for the recidivist views of a handful of unreconstructed Functionalists. Can there really be many who are not, after a quarter of a fast-moving century, persuaded that Pevsner was wrong and Popper right? When it comes to architectural theory, historicism in the strict philosophical sense is surely largely discredited.

There is a strange perversity about the way in which Dean Hawkes writes so eloquently about David Lea's work (arq 6/2, pp130–143) without mentioning sustainability or environmental issues. No doubt he will argue that they are implicit in Lea's programme. However this is essentially the problem in that without making them explicit, many people will not understand them. Hawkes is an authority on environmental architecture so why is he so assiduous in avoiding such issues in this piece?

Our profession suffers from a poor research base and what research we do is undervalued. We need to do something about this. We also need to address prejudices that have become established in the construction industry as exemplified by the outrageous references to architecture in the Fairclough Report. The good news with regard to both issues is that, for once, practice and the schools have a coincidence of interest.