Introducing the first issue of arq, its founding editor, Peter Carolin, wrote that ‘much that is described as research is nothing of the kind, many academics are becoming specialists in research remote from teaching, and design is discounted as a form of research. The link between research and practice is, once more, endangered’.

With the UK's 2008 Research Assessment Exercise looming, we make no apologies for publishing a further exploration of the nature of architectural research. In her paper (pp141–147), Jane Rendell makes a lucid and persuasive case that design is a complex interdisciplinary activity that sits uneasily within current definitions of research. For Rendell, architectural design, just as much as writing, can be practised as a form of criticism, a proposition that was explored at ‘Critical Architecture’, the recent conference at the Bartlett School in London (pp105–108).

I was pleasantly surprised by the interest generated by my article on the making of the Australian Parliament House in Canberra (7/2, pp140–154), and intrigued by the parallels drawn between its saga and that of the new Scottish Parliament; but I feel the need to respond to some of the comments by Charles McKean, published in the following issue of arq (7/3+4, pp199–200).

The discussion of the state of research and practice in architecture in recent issues of arq has been triggered by the results of the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise and the prospect of the next RAE in 2008. For the architectural profession I would argue (in Panglossian fashion) that the RAE 2001 may turn out to be for the best in the long run. There is nothing like a poor result, especially if felt to be ill deserved, to concentrate the mind.

Experiments with an innovative in situ casting technique question assumptions about the nature of concrete, the workmanship of risk, and the familiar relationship between design and making.

In ‘A Primitive exchange: on rhetoric and architectural symbol’ (arq 8/1, pp39–45), Stephen Frith mounts three distinct arguments. The Vitruvian story of the ‘agonistic’ origins of building, drawn from Book II, is initially used to claim that de Architectura proposes a primitive origin for the essential elements of architecture. This, through a somewhat curious imputation of Aristotelian thoughts on causality and limit, is then claimed as evidence (along with a supplemental argument regarding the importance of eloquence) of Vitruvius's use of rhetoric as a model framework for architecture (‘The way Vitruvius teaches us to design a work of architecture is similar to that for putting a speech together’). And the importance of the use of rhetoric is that ‘Rhetoric and architecture share the same symbolic heritage. Both rely on “figurative” language, the analogous relations between things … [from which it follows that] Proportion becomes a symbol, a metaphor of order … of substituting this for that’.

Recent correspondence in arq raises important questions about the relationship between the wide range of research being undertaken in the schools, and architectural practice. John Worthington (arq 7/3+4, pp197–199) makes a particularly important point when he says that architectural schools and the profession ‘cannot afford to stand aloof from the other (construction related) disciplines’. In many Universities (my own included), the discipline of architecture lies within a larger ‘School of the Built Environment’. I see this as entirely positive. The schools must reflect, and respond to, the contemporary realities of practice, if their relevance is to be maintained. As with practice, both teaching and research is increasingly based on interdisciplinary collaboration. While taking place within institutions, such collaboration between institutions and the wider construction industry (manufacturers, contractors and so on) is now often regarded as a prerequisite for successful research bids to both UK and European research funding agencies. Our school has found that many businesses within the construction industry (large and small) now recognize the value of research to the development of their products or processes. Professional practices are also benefiting in a similar way, in recognizing the expertise (and facilities) that reside within the Universities.

In this previously untranslated text, Gustave Eiffel explains the technical rationale of his then controversial tower and argues persuasively for its practical uses and cultural value to Paris.

This letter was invited as a response to Brian Hatton's review in this issue (pp105–108), and the editors would welcome further correspondence on this theme.

Although the Department for Education and Skills' ‘Classrooms of the Future’ and ‘Design Exemplar Initiative’ are to be welcomed (arq 7/3+4, pp244–279), they should not be allowed to obscure the far-reaching issues involved in the Public Finance Initiative (PFI). As a procurement process, PFI represents a massive investment in social programmes and public building projects: the estimated £34 billion in contract or commissioned gives an indication of this. PFI transfers the responsibilities and risks associated with the procurement, delivery and management of public buildings and estates over a period of 25 years to the private sector, and almost none of the expenditure involved is reflected in the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement. This makes it highly attractive to government, but the question remains as to how much it mortgages the nation's future because it merely defers and extends borrowing. If schemes mature at a time of recession or serious budget deficit, the implications could be highly damaging.

This conference set out to address the rise, fall and possible futures of the problematic and controversial term ‘primitive’. Taking place over two days in September 2004 at the Welsh School of Architecture in Cardiff (hosted by the Architectural History and Theory Group), it aimed to attract an interdisciplinary audience and included a range of keynote speakers drawn from both academia and practice. Selected papers from the proceedings will be published in book form by Routledge in 2005.

This conference, which took place 25–27 November 2004, was held by the Bartlett School of Architecture in association with the Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA). Its stated aim was to examine the relationship between critical practice in architecture and architectural criticism, intending to place architecture in an interdisciplinary context with reference to modes of criticism in other disciplines, specifically art criticism, and to explore modes of critical practice in architecture: buildings, drawings and texts. Brian Hatton attended the second day of the conference; his comments on the first day are based on discussions with colleagues and reading of transcripts.

Are the sinuous forms of the Disney Hall by Frank O. Gehry concrete testimonies of architectural ideology, or are they demonstrations of sound engineering and construction?

This interview celebrating the 82nd birthday of the ‘Grand old man of German Architecture’ (Die Zeit) sheds some interesting light on questions of tyranny and freedom, of the necessity of imperfection, of struggles to maintain a humane architectural practice in an increasingly pressured and commercial world. It also reveals the underlying reasons why Behnisch could be claimed for Deconstruction while his office's work in many ways predated this so-called movement, and while it pursued an idealistic and optimistic political agenda rather than a cynical or despairing one.

Located in Northumberland, 35km north of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and 3km from the North Sea, the mid-nineteenth-century East Lodge to Togston Hall was originally a simple, linear, rectangular single-storey cottage of whinstone with a dual pitch roof. It had acquired an accumulation of ugly, pebble-dashed, flat-roofed extensions to the south and was in poor condition.

Imaginative developments in stone masonry in ontemporary architecture stimulate reflections on the continued meaning and use of this most ancient of materials.

The language of the architectural specification raises questions for philosophical accounts of matter and highlights the cultural construction of building materials.

Architects should learn to communicate more through their architecture. The commercial vernacular architecture of the American ‘strip’ – motels, gas stations, fast food outlets – communicates loud and clear. In comparison, high architecture, particularly the high architecture of Modernism, is sullen and silent. This, roughly, is the thesis of Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Stephen Izenour (1972 and 1977), one of the key texts of the Post-Modernist movement in architectural theory of the early 1970s. Venturi et al thought architects could learn a lot about symbolism and communication from the sort of non-judgmental study of roadside architecture that their students had undertaken at Yale. In the second half of the book the idea was developed into a theory and encapsulated into a universal building concept, ‘the decorated shed’, which has since become a cliché of architectural criticism. The decorated shed was designed to overthrow the most cherished beliefs and rituals of Modernism. Expression through form was to be replaced by the ‘persuasive heraldry’ of the totem and the billboard; articulation of detail was to be replaced by old-fashioned applied ornament; and the ‘heroic and original’ was to be replaced by the ‘ugly and ordinary’. But the emphasis was on the decoration rather than the shed. Learning from Las Vegas did not have much to say about the way that the sheds of the commercial strip were constructed, other than describing them vaguely as ‘system built’, or about the implications that the technology of their construction might have for architectural practice.