‘Quality’ has become ubiquitous in the management vocabulary of Western societies. In consequence, the word's familiar usage has grown slippery. Formerly grounded in ethical values or skilled craftsmanship, ‘quality’ is now commonly associated with the management of administrative or technical processes. Whereas the appreciation of quality was founded in the exercise of individual judgement and taste – of connoisseurship – organisations now seek to ground its assessment in supposedly objective systems of evaluation. Practitioners are under pressure to quantify quality, but it remains questionable whether it is possible or even desirable to do so. Several papers in this issue of arq derive from a conference exploring such themes around the idea of Quality, an event held at the Welsh School of Architecture in July 2007 and reviewed here.

A group organised by the University of Edinburgh, led by Mark Dorrian, and CNRS Paris, led by Frédéric Pousin is exploring the history and the cultural meanings of the aerial view. It aims to investigate how the aerial view can be defined, how images are produced, how ‘elevated’ one has to be in order to produce or experience an aerial view, and how images are used and consumed. Jointly funded by the British Academy and CNRS, a numberof meetings will be held over the next two years. The following account reports on the first meeting held in Edinburgh on 3 February 2007.

This was a big, serious conference in a big, serious city. Architectural historians from North America and around the globe gathered to discuss their work and to look at buildings together. Yet despite the generosity with which the American Institute of Architects handed out CPD points for every paper and tour attended, there were not many architects there; the conference remained substantially a forum for professional architectural historians and their research students to talk shop. It's a pity – this kind of conference represents an excellent opportunity for architects to take their place at the heart of the debate on history and conservation.

The wall, as constructed, is 519.5mm thick, plus or minus the irregularities of reused flagstone. It consists of 12.5mm plasterboard, a vapour barrier, 145mm timber studs, 150mm ‘Rockwool’ insulation, 12mm Far Eastern marine grade plywood, ‘Tyvek’ building membrane, a 50mm cavity, stainless-steel wall ties, an unforeseen leaf of 100mm concrete block, and a heavily debated skin of 200–300mm reused flagstone. It follows the original footprint of an 1840s longhouse, now reduced, perhaps, to a representational role. Built by a team of three – two architects and a marine biologist – this wall is the result of five years of planning, sketching, drawing, specifying, sourcing, shipping, and self-building. It contains adaptations, compromises, guilt and uncertainties. The project draws both from phenomenological beliefs concerning a site embedded with accumulated memories, and rationalised predictions developed from a Modernist architectural education. The constructed result stands as a negotiation between theoretical aims and the pragmatics of a self-build on an exposed island.

Contemporary criticism in architecture frequently ignores the procurement process that a project has undergone and its impact on the design of a building. Critics tend to concentrate on the finished product, the building, paying little or no attention to how the architect secured the job, who the client was, how they were represented, the client / architect relationship and how these had an impact on both design and design process, beyond functional requirements.

At the back of a dimly lit room at the north-east wing of the Philadelphia Museum of Art the visitor may, or may not, discover an old, weathered Spanish door. Approaching this unlikely sight, a concealed view behind the door becomes noticeable as a result of light emanating from two peepholes. The act of looking through them transforms the unsuspected viewer into a voyeur and reveals a brightly lit three-dimensional diorama: a recumbent, faceless, female nude, holding a gas lamp and bathed in light is submerged in twigs in an open landscape where a waterfall silently glitters [1a, 1b]. The explicit pornographic pose of the splayed legs and the exposed pudenda is dazzling. On careful inspection, this startling view is only possible through another intersecting surface; between the viewer and the nude stands a brick wall on which an irregular rupture has been opened – as if by a violent collision – making the scene even more unsettling. Defying traditional definitions of painting or sculpture Marcel Duchamp's enigmatic final work is a carefully constructed assemblage of elements, with an equally enigmatic title: Etant Donnés: 1°la chute d'eau, 2°le gaz d'éclairage… (Given: 1st the Waterfall, 2nd the Illuminating Gas…), 1946–1966.

The recent history of architecture can be characterised as a battle between attention-grabbing, ‘iconic’ buildings and a counteracting tendency towards the aesthetically reduced, even avowedly ‘minimal’. But beneath the surface appearance of these contrasting formal tendencies – restless or serene, as demanded by their aesthetic ideals – the means of building have become relentlessly more complex to meet ever more demanding environmental and other performance requirements. It was against this background that the Design Research Unit at Cardiff University convened a one-day symposium to explore the possibility of ‘Building Simply’: the topic proved, not unexpectedly, elusive. Below we publish some reflections by Gordon Murray on some of the issues raised, and these are followed by three design papers – by Pierre d'Avoine, Roland Raderschall and the organisers – that addressed the topic from differing perspectives.

The act of making links hand and eye, and connects the intellect to physical change. A sculptor carving stone requires precision of thought before deploying manual dexterity. The challenge for an architect until the recent past has been to communicate such thoughtfulness, embodied in a design, to the people who will make the building and its component parts. Making architecture and the pursuit of excellence in the physical delivery of quality in built projects is a challenging and collaborative process [2]. It is not possible to legislate for excellence, however it is possible to create contexts in which high-quality architecture is probable. By comparison, John Ruskin in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) set his aspirations low: ‘We may not be able to command good, or beautiful, or inventive architecture, but we can command an honest architecture’.

There seems to be little question that we live in an age of complexity, perhaps undue complexity. The interrelation of almost all the people all the time – at least those with internet access – the pressures of urbanisation, natural resource depletion, increasing traffic and pollution, and our ability to be anywhere at any time electronically have led to a rather complex living mode. Architects, heeding the call, have produced an architecture of corresponding complexity. Falling to architectural fashion trends, market pressures, and the surge of corporate capitalism, architects now give their clients just what they want, or what they themselves want to give them. There was a time when architectural form expressed some relation to reason, but that dated notion seems to be in little evidence today.

‘When you go into a room and see a box of cigars, a computer and a horse you look for similarities, but if the room contains only one object you look for differences.’ (Luciano Berio, introducing a BBC Symphony Orchestra weekend of his music at The Barbican in 1990)

As we watch a film, we let filmmakers take us by the hand and tell us a story until they lead us into a world visually constructed to captivate us for a specific amount of time. The worst thing a filmmaker can do is not to terrify us, or fool us with special effects, but to rob us of our illusion that what we are seeing is ‘true’ even if just for now. Through the mimetic power of film, we, the viewer, picture the film set as if it is real architecture, and assemble the walls and floors we see into an architectural whole. This paper focuses on what we see ‘behind’ the screen rather than the cinematic experience itself. The premise is that by examining the nature of filmic ‘reality’ we will be helped to understand architectural form and order.

In landscape architecture, building simply was the rule in the past, because building materials and processes were natural, local and common. This all began to change during the 1950s, when concrete became popular, synthetics replaced natural building techniques, and tropical woods became standard for outdoor use. The use of these materials was taken for granted in day-to-day office work for many years. My own attitude changed some time in the 1980s, when Minimal and Conceptual Art became significant and the emerging environmental concerns began to make an impact.

More than three decades ago, the architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri pessimistically concluded that a revolutionary architecture cannot precede a social revolution. In this comment, he summed up the perceived failure of Modernist architecture to realise a social utopia. The comment implied that the architectural discipline, as part of the superstructure, cannot affect society; rather, it is the means and forces of production which determine society, while architecture only reacts, corresponds and represents these changes.