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.

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.

This paper – like those following it in this issue of arq – focuses on the shifting notion of ‘flow’ and the significance of that notion for the practice, critique and theorisation of architecture.

The electric power system has often been compared to a circulatory system, and telecommunication and informational complexes likened to nervous systems. Such characterisations are rigorous only for those aspects that bring the utility system closer to a living system: its mechanisms of control and regulation.

Ideas about movement were fundamental for Modernist architecture of the early twentieth century and are ubiquitous in contemporary theory and practice. The shifting theoretical terrain in which bodily movement is made sense of has continuously produced different understandings of architectural possibilities. For example, where in much early Modernism, and in present conventional practice, movement is often articulated in terms of technical, functional circulation and narrativised aesthetic experience (the architectural promenade), other recent practices adopt more ambivalent approaches. The emphasis in these later practices is on the relationality of programmatic elements, articulated in terms of dynamic coexistence, continual variation and fluid, interconnected space. In this way, they connect to a pervasive concern with mobility in the late twentieth, and early twenty-first century: culture is increasingly seen as dynamic and hybrid, societies are defined through complex webs of interconnection, and social theory is focused on the nomadic. In this context, examining changing conceptions and structuring of bodily movement within architecture provides a means for productively reengaging with modern architectural history.

In 1972 the famous diagram of the ‘Decorated Shed’ was introduced into the architectural discourse; it implied a definition of ‘architecture as shelter with decoration on it’ [1]. The diagram was part of urban research into the commercial environment of Las Vegas that was interpreted by the researchers – Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour – as ‘a new type of urban form’ that they meant ‘to understand’ in order ‘to begin to evolve techniques for its handling’. Yet the critique on this and other research and designs by Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown focused essentially on questions of form and more specifically of the image of architecture.

Japanese culture, through its art, language and religion, is a result of accumulated flows of knowledge from China and Korea. The traditions of garden design and garden construction, similarly, are ‘a space of flows’ from classical Chinese models though, after centuries of development and refinement, have become distinctly reflective of Japanese culture and aesthetics. The first recorded instance of this knowledge flow reaching Japan appears in the eleventh century. The first treatise on Japanese garden design, Sakuteiki (garden making), is attributed to Tachibana no Toshitsuna, a court official and designer of gardens. Though the treatise contains no illustrations, much of the text is precise, and its content reflective of the cultural and aesthetic predilections of the Confucianist Heien court. Other treatises may have been extant during the Heien period (794–1185), though they are now lost.

In 1935 I worked for Mendelsohn and Chermayeff on the Gilbey building for three months in the summer – and Birkin Haward took me under his wing.

By 1937, I'd finished my first three years at the Architectural Association and felt that I wasn't getting anywhere – producing schemes overnight. I wanted to work on real buildings.