Like the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) that preceded it, the UK government's proposed Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a means of allocating funding in higher education to support research. As with any method for the competitive allocation of funds it creates winners and losers and inevitably generates a lot of emotion among those rewarded or penalised. More specifically, the ‘winners’ tend to approve of the method of allocation and the ‘losers’ denigrate it as biased against their activities and generally unfair. An extraordinary press campaign has been consistently waged against research assessment and its methods by those involved in architectural education, which I will track over a decade and a half. What follows will question whether this campaign demonstrates the sophistication and superior judgment of those who have gone into print, or conversely whether its mixture of misinformation and disinformation reveals not just disenchantment and prejudice, but a naivety and a depth of ignorance about the fundamentals of research that is deeply damaging to the credibility of architecture as a research-based discipline. With the recent consultation process towards a new cycle of research assessment, the REF, getting under way, I aim to draw attention to the risk of repeating past mistakes.

Some artists have a sense of architecture, using it in or around their work. I am thinking of Antony Gormley whose casts of his own body are almost always located in relation to a setting – whether a beach, the courtyard of a gallery or the precipitous edges of high buildings. I am thinking too of James Turrell whose light spaces are works of architecture, places in which to contemplate the sky, to watch the sunlight pan slowly around the space. I would cite too Martin Creed whose fugitive sprinters ran approximately along the axis of the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain in London, framed by them, avoiding visitors as they rushed from one end to the other; and Anish Kapoor for his bulbous walls or his vast ‘trumpet’ – Marsyas – in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern.

Casa Rustici was a building I admired when I lived in Milan in the mid 1980s, so the opportunity to stay there for a week when it registered on a list of apartments for rent was appealing [1]. Before I undertook the visit I was well aware of the prestige of the building as an important Rationalist project, and after some initial research became intrigued by the divergent accounts of it given by different commentators. The best known critique of Terragni's work is Eisenman's investigation of its abstract composition. Patetta exposes the constraints on the design process imposed by the building codes, while others emphasise the historical precedents that underpinned the Rationalist project. Vitale and Bell provide an insight into the ambiguous character of the central court or lightwell of the building. What I hope to add to these is an account which addresses not just the abstract quality of the building, but also its phenomenal qualities, and its social and historical origins. My intention is that this material will present the building in a way which is relevant for current practice.

At a recent appointment, I asked a question that my doctor could not answer, so he swivelled around to the computer in the examination room, typed in a few words, and almost instantly brought up all the literature that he needed to respond to my query. The ease with which my doctor accessed that information raised a question in my own mind about why our discipline has not organised our knowledge as effectively as medicine has done. Why can't we do key word searches and bring up the current research, the most relevant information, and the best ideas and applications in our field for us to assess and build upon? The answer, I think, has to do with our discipline lacking an effective knowledge loop.