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.

I have had the honour to write and lecture on a number of occasions about Leslie Martin's work and buildings but the excellent reviews and commentaries you published in your previous issue (arq 4/4) moved me to wish to relate an incident from his teaching which sheds much light.

Decorum refers to the suitability of a building's design and was a commonplace principle of architectural theory from the Renaissance to the beginnings of modernism. It was relevant to ornament, shaping the way a building articulated its status within civic and social order. This essay examines decorum as part of the history of ideas, with phases of growth, codification, and decline. Its fading was not unresisted, being part of a critical debate that emerged in the wake of the Industrial Revolution – namely, the role architecture might play in creating a cohesive environment for the modern world.

I owe Leslie Martin a great personal debt: in 1964 he asked me to come and teach at Cambridge and at the same time arranged for me to design a laboratory building at Royal Holloway College. I went on to teach at Cambridge for 12 years and to design, among others, two further buildings at Royal Holloway, part of London University. It was the ideal combination of practice and academic activity of which Martin was a prime exponent.

Compared with the land, everything else is an illusion. The cities are the startled thoughts of sleep.

Alfred Caldwell

My first encounter with Alfred Caldwell was in 1986, in the third year studio of Crown Hall, the school of architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). He sat next to me and asked me, ‘What did you come here to do?’ He meant here and now in this school of architecture, but his tone was deeply challenging in such a way that the question resonated much further.

Caldwell was a self-made man, practised in engineering, botany, construction, planning and landscape architecture; he had been responsible for planning a number of large parks in and around Chicago and had served Mies van der Rohe as his landscape architect. In addition he was a builder, an educator, a father and husband, a writer, poet and visionary — an unusual range of work, well summarized in Dennis Domer's Alfred Caldwell: The Life and Work of a Prairie School Landscape Architect. In our world, where the trend is for specialization and distinction in a narrow field, it seemed to me that an integrated mind capable of such breadth was really something special. Caldwell inspired me; at 83 he epitomized the closest thing to wisdom in a man.

How refreshing to re-read Leslie Martin's classic ‘The Grid as Generator’ (arq 4/4). Where did it hide during the last 28 years? How useful it would have been as a measure for the proliferation of approaches to the city that have followed in a period that includes Krier's journey from the Royal Mint Square perimeter block to Poundbury, and Koolhaas' from Manhattan to the new dense megacities of the Far East.

Martin's essay is in many ways exemplary. Coming from a cultured architectural position, but open to the possibility that certain parameters of design can usefully be quantified, he opens the possibility of a middle way for architectural research between the established numerically-based model of the physical sciences and the emerging discursive models of cultural studies.