‘Does everything that does not impress us strike us as unimpressive? And does the ordinary always impress us as being ordinary?’ asked Wittgenstein in his Philosophical InvestigationsThe translation given by GEM Anscombe in the English edition reads: ‘Does everything that we do not find conspicuous make an impression of inconspicuousness? Does what is ordinary always make the impression of ordinariness?’. This article explores his questions through four built projects where the architects faced the apparent contradiction of inventing the everyday. The projects reflect an interest in construction with an ornamental quality in the classical sense of the word: a link between the building typology and its material appearance. The structure constitutes ‘an honest diagram’. The author was one of the lead architects for the buildings.

Buckminster Fuller's work has traditionally been divided into the early ‘Dymaxion’ projects, and the later ‘geodesics’. This paper focuses on the 1942 Dymaxion Map as a connection between these careers. The Map was an innovation, substituting local projections for a ‘global’ one. Visualizing the earth's surface as a series of facets, connected by ‘great circles’, he approached the ideal of an interdependent, spherical system of tension and compression. The military development of geodesics suggests interplay between the geometry of the geodesic skin and its potential as a metaphor for global action.

It has been some consolation for the loss of Leslie Martin, a major figure in twentieth-century British architecture, to read the special issue of arq (4/4) dedicated to his memory. He was a great Englishman, a rare combination of theorist and teacher, of politician and generous benefactor. His resuscitated article of 1972, ‘The grid as generator’, is a theoretical demonstration of the qualities of the urban grid, and of how it may form the basis for a latter-day return to the problem of controlling urban development. As such it is masterly in its explicative power and in its prescience. And yet it raises some questions as to the role of design in urban design.

This analysis shows how the increasing availability of computers inarchitectural practice and the steady development of electronicnetworks around the world could encourage the relocation ofprofessional structures into countries with lower production costs.Starting from the existence of sharp professional wage differentialsbetween developed and developing regions, it formulates thehypothesis that, in a few years, most architectural work could bedocumented in places such as South-East Asia and transferreddigitally over to America, Australia or Europe.

I warmly congratulate Jacques Heyman on the absolute clarity of his ‘An observation on the fan vault of Henry VII Chapel, Westminster’ (arq 4/4). But while this was not the subject of the author's study, many of us might well be interested to hear his view as to why the Perpendicular pendant came about since it is unnatural constructionally. Historians no longer with us sometimes supposed the pendants remembered the columns between nave and aisles in a larger church or cathedral, but I have not seen this referred to recently.

This is a translation of the inaugural lecture Asplund gave as Professor of Architecture at Stockholm's Tekniska Högskolan in 1931.E. G. Asplund. ‘Var arkitektoniska rumsuppfattning’, Byggmästeren: Arkitektupplagan 1931, pp.203—210. There is a photograph of Asplund giving this talk, in Christina Engfors' book E. G. Asplund: arkitekt, Arkitektur Forlag, Stockholm, 1990, p.69. Asplund used the opportunity to affirm his support for the ‘new conception of space’ in contemporary architecture. His acknowledgement of the influence of Le Corbusier is expected; but the emphasis on Spengler's The Decline of the West,Oswald Spengler. Der Untergang des Abendlandes, (Vol.1) Gestalt und Wirklichkeit (1918), (Vol.2) Welthistorische Perspektiven (1922), C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Munchen, translated by C. F. Atkinson as The Decline of the West, (Vol.1) Form and Actuality (1926), (Vol.2) Perspectives of World-History (1928), George Allen & Unwin, London.Spengler's ‘theory of historical cycles’ was broadly dismissed as unsound by contemporary academic historians (cf. R. G. Collingwood — ‘Oswald Spengler and the Theory of Historical Cycles’, in Antiquity, 1927), but his use of the generic spatial organizations evident in architectures of the past, as evidence of the ‘culture souls’ of the civilizations that produced them, retains interest from an architect's point of view. and to its identification of ‘infinite space’ as the ‘prime symbol’ of Western culture, suggests that maybe Spengler's work had more influence on architects in Europe during the 1920s than is generally recognized.

Architectural Practice: a critical view,Gutman, R., Architectural Practice: a critical view, Princeton Architectural Press, Princeton, 1988, 160pp., ISBN 0-910413-45-2, price $12.95 £7.95 (pb). Robert Gutman's seminal survey of the architectural profession, was published 13 years ago. In it, he discussed the changes that were occurring within architecture and the building industry. Although based largely on the American experience, it both echoed and foreshadowed changes elsewhere.

In his concluding paragraph, Gutman wrote: ‘To deal with the challenges in coming decades, the adoption of ingenious management techniques by individual offices or the use of clever public relations programs by the architectural community, is unlikely to prove sufficient. Intensive research, thought and policy initiatives focusing on these challenges are needed … Architecture is too important to the quality of American life for us to assume that the knowledge of architects working alone is adequate to address it … [Other interested] groups must be involved … Only if joint programs with this scope and on this scale are undertaken, is the profession likely to formulate persuasive policies that will assure the independence of architectural practice in future years.’

The RIBA Future Studies Group was established in 1999 to stimulate radical thinking on strategic architectural issues. It has close links with a number of other organizations and research institutions. It describes its purpose as ‘to improve the quality of architecture through the initiation, commissioning and dissemination of research studies … intended to inform the climate within which architects work …’ Full details of the group can be found at

www.site.yahoo.net/future-studies/purandin.html

Last year, Future Studies published its first two studies. Robert Gutman reviewed them for arq.

Kieran Timberlake Architects have demonstrated in a series of built projects the constructive logic of architecture and the ability of buildings to alter our perception of a site. Their work exemplifies a respect for materials and assemblies and an interest in the idea of ‘instauration’, which views a place as one of continuous inhabitation. In an era in which architects often try to express non-architectural ideas through their buildings, KTA's return to the expressive power of construction and materials, of sensitive siting and understated form comes as a welcome change.

Although I was generously given the opportunity to make an extended contribution to arq's tribute to Leslie Martin (arq 4/4), I hope I may be allowed to respond to your republication of Martin's important essay, ‘The Grid as Generator’ and to Peter Hall's introduction to it.

Research by Design was the title of an international conference held at the Faculty of Architecture at Delft University of Technology in early November 2000. It set out to explore new ways of thinking in architectural research and its relation to design education and practice. The academic debate was complemented by presentations of high-profile international projects that were discussed from a methodological point of view. Graeme Hutton and Charles Rattray report.

In Peter Hall's introduction to Leslie Martin's ‘The Grid as Generator’ (arq 4/4) he states that ‘the crucial link between research and design has been fatally lost’ and that ‘it is more than high time that architecture schools begin to rediscover it’. I am not so sure Hall is correct in saying that the link has been broken, though the parameters may have changed since Leslie Martin's day. Martin's work was set in the context of post-Oxford Conference architectural education and research, with its alliance to the models of the sciences and objective analysis. The link between research and design could then be identified as an instrumental one, with the former directly guiding the latter along prescriptive tramlines. The intellectual strength of such methodological approaches may be apparent, and to some extent they fulfilled the Oxford Conference's mission of saving architecture within the elite academies. But there are also dangers in the determinist use of research to direct design.

The last issue of arq (4/4) contained a celebration of the life and work of Leslie Martin, who died last July. Jørn Utzon, Richard Rogers, Manuel de Sola Morales, Lionel March and many others each wrote of Martin's singular contributions to architecture – in practice, education and research. To these we now add one further appreciation – by Kenneth Frampton.

Wishing to write about his work, I approached Peter Zumthor in February 1996. We agreed to do something substantial but still accessible, and eventually settled on the format of a long interview. We then chose three of his buildings that would raise different issues – the now famous Thermal Baths in Vals, the Wohnsiedlung Spittelhof and Topography of Terror in Berlin.Readers unfamiliar with these three buildings will find them comprehensively described and illustrated in the superb Peter Zumthor Works: buildings and projects 1979–97 with text by Peter Zumthor and photographs by Hélène Binet, published by Lars Müller Publishers, Baden, 1998, ISBN 3-907044-58-4. This and the related Thinking Architecture by Peter Zumthor were the subject of an extended review in arq 3/1.

The interviews were held in English on 22 July 1997 over the course of the day in his studio in Haldenstein. They are published in the order in which they were held. We edited them together in August 2000, resisting the desire to amend them.

I first learnt of his work in 1988 when he was a visiting professor at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Santa Monica where he first delivered the lecture later published as ‘A Way of Looking at Things’. I would like to thank him for agreeing to share his thoughts on architecture, and for the often difficult and unfashionable reminder that to do things well takes time.

Martin Heidegger's ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ is well known to many architects. But comparatively little is known about the building in southern Germany's Black Forest where this influential work was almost certainly written. This essay describes how Heidegger's Hut came to be built and how it was configured and occupied. No plan of this little building has ever before been published. In the intellectual alignments that the hut displays, particularly at a small scale, it records physically many of the priorities that Heidegger wrote about.

The paradoxes of progress have plagued architecture for most of the last century. We revitalized our cities and ended up concentrating poverty, we used technology to bring us closer to nature and ended up damaging the environment, and we established a progressive design culture and ended up isolating ourselves from the very public whose lives we sought to improve. As we begin the next century, we should ask how we might avoid the unintended consequences of our often well-meaning efforts.

That will demand a rethinking of modernism. As the philosophers Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins have argued, the modern world brought ‘a new emphasis on objectivity…(but) the source of the objectivity, paradoxically enough, was to be found in one's own subjectivity. Thus the modern age was founded on an apparent contradiction: we come to know the world “outside” by looking “inside.“’Solomon, Robert and Higgins, Kathleen. A Short History of Philosophy. Oxford University Press, Oxford. 1996. pp. 177–178. The utopian tradition of modern architecture reflects that contradiction, as architects have asserted highly subjective visions as the basis for a universal transformation of the objective world. Whether it be the technological utopia of LeCorbusier's Plan Voisin or the Arcadian utopia of Wright's Broadacre City or the rational utopia of Burnham's Chicago Plan, architects emerged in the 20th century at the vanguard of efforts around the globe to realize, as a universal objective fact, one person's subjective vision. And we have paid a heavy price for that hubris: not only a physical price — whether in the loss of the historic cores of our cities in realizing LeCorbusier's urban vision or in the destruction of the rural landscape in realizing Wright's suburban one — but a political price as well — in the tremendous human and environmental losses we've taken in realizing the utopias of Marx, Nietzsche, and now in the midst of global laissez-faire capitalism, Adam Smith.

As we look ahead, can we have ‘progress without utopia’ as Edward Rothstein asked recently in the New York Times? Can we improve the lives of all people and respect the existence of all species, without lapsing back into our old utopian ways of imposing singular subjective visions onto others? That will depend upon our finding a new relationship between the objective and subjective realms, in which they are neither totally separate nor as a matter of one dominating the other, but instead interwoven and mutually respectful realities. For architecture, that means shaping environments whose objective reality recognizes the diverse subjective realities of those who inhabit what we create, as well as seeing our own subjective reality, as architects, as just one of many inputs into the objective realities we design.

Your decision to reprint Leslie Martin's 1972 paper ‘The Grid as Generator’ (arq 4/4) was apposite. It provided intellectual reconciliation between two schools of planning theory: the art of civic design and the science of empirical analysis of the use of land. After more than two decades out of favour (during which systems theory and an interest in the process of planning rather than its product were the vogue) both schools of planning are again in the ascendancy.

Brian MacKay-Lyons has evolved an architecture out of the vernacular of his native Nova Scotia that combines simplicity of form and construction with a subtlety of placing a house on its site. In three recent houses, the expansiveness of the structures has increased and the landscape has become more integrated with the interiors, physically and visually. Both extremely rational and highly idiosyncratic, MacKay-Lyons' work shows how rootedness in a place, however geographically isolated, can result in architecture as rigorous as that produced anywhere.