You are right to claim in your Leader (arq 4/3) that ‘most unsustainable behaviour gets written into the initial problem statements in projects’ and you are right also to claim that [architects] ‘need to get out in front of the building process and begin to rewrite the rules and redesign the processes that now generate so much unsustainable development … [often] talking clients out of what they think they need …’

The utilization of solar energy involves an interplay between heating demand and the use of building materials. It is therefore important to use environmental analysis methodologies which take into account the effects of building materials. Two typical construction types, lightweight timber-based and heavyweight concrete-based, are therefore compared using specific housing forms. These forms represent differing passive solar strategies that can be seen in contemporary Danish housing. The results highlight the diversity of effective environmental design strategies available to architects.

A close inspection was made of the vault of Henry VII Chapel, Westminster Abbey, when it was scaffolded for repair and maintenance in 1994–95. Defects were seen which appear to be peculiar to fan vaults, and this paper attempts to explain these defects. The discussion involves an understanding of the behaviour of masonry, from the simplest arch form to barrel vaults, rib vaults and the complex fan structure, with an examination of the ‘pathology’ of these forms.

Oficinas saliteras (nitrate works) were company towns developed to extract and process nitrates in the Antofagasta region of Chile's Atacama desert, one of the world's harshest environments. The two last of these oficinas were María Elena (founded in 1925) and Pedro de Valdivia (1931), whose development marked the introduction of the Guggenheim industrial system. Their urban design was closely related to the industrial cities of Europe and the United States, as well as the Spanish urban tradition. María Elena used an octagonal street plan, while Pedro de Valdivia is based on a crossing pattern.

In architecture the link between life and art can be so strong that one can see them as fused, as Heidegger did. We encounter buildings in connection with the life that inhabits them, but the relationship between building and life is not that of cause and effect. The building is a tool, for which a variety of uses might be found. Gilles Deleuze saw ideas as tools, and valued ‘nomadism’ – moving between sets of ideas. He deployed a rhetoric of mobility and invention that encourages the free play of ideas, while effectively resisting the lure of Heideggerís ‘blood and soil’ nostalgia.

The key to Figure 7 was incomplete. The complete key (which may be photocopied) is reproduced here

Three small mews houses in a Dublin suburb are reviewed here in terms of their typological ambitions, formal preoccupations and vision of domesticity. Their nature and form is compared with an earlier project by Cleary and Hall in order to extrapolate a more general picture of the changing criteria and concerns guiding Dublin's architectural development. The project demonstrates how a repeating order can accommodate difference. The feeling of exposure in their unusually open upper floor living areas is tempered by the exhilarating sense of contact with the city.

One of the sad oddities of academic life is that great and original contributions get cursorily noticed at the time of their appearance, and are then ignored. Leslie Martin's ‘The Grid as Generator’ is one such case. Published in the book he co-authored with Lionel March in 1972, this opening essay – and indeed the entire book – represented an extraordinary breakthrough in urban research. Yet neither has been properly recognized.