This project began when one of my research colleagues, a civil engineer, pointed to his very thorough study of daylighting in buildings and said: ‘Here is all that architects need to know about light – why don't they use it?’ A discussion followed about what kind of knowledge is relevant, when, and for whom. It ended with the questions: ‘What kind of knowledge do architects really use in their design process?’ and ‘How can we as researchers provide the different kinds of knowledge that are useful for practice?’ These questions became the basis of a research project and this paper reports on its studies and discussions.

The Ulster Museum is destined to remain a building that stands somewhat outside time and remote from its society. The building is in two parts that are merged into one: the first Classical, designed by James Wyness and built only in part by 1929, and the second, a transformative concrete extension designed by Francis Pym for a 1963 competition judged by Leslie Martin and opened in 1972 to the most violent year of the conflict in Northern Ireland. The extension is, as Paul Clarke, of the University of Ulster has written, ‘an icon to a period when architecture addressed at the very centre of its responsibility, the optimism of modern life, culture and public space’. Now, after decades of inept alterations and unimaginative curation, its doors are closed for a refurbishment that will disassemble its central ideas together with all the optimism that Clarke alludes to – and this at a time when Northern Ireland has the chance to build the open civil society that it never had and that the museum competition project symbolised in that brief period of opportunity for change forty-six years ago.

This theoretical paper addresses the persistence of architecture students in undergraduate design learning despite the considerable sacrifices that this frequently entails, and proposes a framework for some of the mechanisms that explain students' diligence in their love-hate relationship with the design studio. Such love-hate association is poorly understood, but is clearly a pervasive dilemma in architecture education. The proposed model includes a number of cognitive mechanisms that students may use to reconcile their idealised and romanticised self-image with the incoherent sacrifices of design studio.

A photograph by Robert Polidori, of a room within the city of Petra, shows a pristine cubic volume hewn out of the rock. The nature of the stone reveals different textural and figural qualities of the material when it becomes a floor, a wall or a ceiling. There is no need to ‘put’ the building together, to assemble it, because it is already exists. This, then, is the fantasy of the architect, to sculpt from a single substance that is both structure and surface, with the only remaining questions pertaining to shape and smoothness.