The history of the relationship of studio teaching to research since the Oxford Conference has been one of babies thrown out with bathwater. Nearly 40 years on the need for research to underpin and invigorate the acts of designing is ever more keenly felt. This paper starts from a belief that the fruitful linkage of the two requires new approaches to both – that the past 40 years shows that it does not happen automatically. Designing is considered as a series of tangible acts where the nature of each operation affects not just the outcome of the project but also the intention of the designer. This puts a renewed emphasis on the means and tools of designing, on the need for operative theories which avoid reductivism and to explore the difficulty of transforming an intention into an architectural hypothesis.

For many years, architects in the United Kingdom have looked enviously at the competition system in the German speaking countries and Scandinavia. Now, with the introduction of a major public buildings programme partially funded by the new National Lottery, competitions are becoming more common in Britain. This paper opens with some reflections on the advantages and disadvantages of competitions. It then describes the conduct and outcome of a single Lottery-funded competition for the design of a building for which there were no precedents and in which issues of content and image were major preoccupations for both designers and assessors.

This statement came to be written as an introduction to our proposal to ‘repair’ the urban design and city plan of Salerno, Italy. It was based on three sources: first, the inadequacy of town planning as an instrument to give form to the city, a proposal and experience already applied by Oriol Bohigas as city architect for Barcelona and later carried out by ourselves with the Olympic Village and Port; second, our vocation as architects to see a close relationship between the architecture of buildings and the architecture of the city so much so that many of our earlier buildings were conceived and assembled manipulating metaphors of urban reference and vice versa; third, as a result of working on urban designs in Cardiff and Breda, the text has been further modified to accommodate the different cultural problems involved in Northern European cities.

Wright's approach to design comprised a polarity of modes, ranging from axial symmetry, employed in public buildings, to free and spontaneous expression of use, route and place, in the private house. Together these showed a deep awareness of the Classical tradition, and personal study, unusual for his time, of oriental place-making. An idiosyncratic attitude to nature and existence lay behind this, often embodied in a ‘high place’.

A series of changes is identified in the iconography of the English courtroom, which seems to indicate a gradual liberalisation in the architecture of justice. However, it is suggested that this masks a deeper continuity in the layout and space configuration of the law court building, which relates to the fundamental social programme which it has to fulfil. Configurationallyspeaking, the space of the courtroom, which appears so powerfully to integrate the actors in the courtroom drama, turns out to be ‘virtual’. Although the actors can see and hear each other perfectly well, they actually inhabit separate and mutually-exclusive physical domains. The locus of spatial integration is to be found in the backstage corridors of the law court which, it is argued, is the place where legal negotiations take place. Thus, though it would be theoretically possible to reproduce the social programme of the law court in a virtual reality courtroom, this would be at the expense of a vital generative function served by the building, which is to ensure that specific legal conflicts are resolved in the interests of a wider social justice.

This paper describes the results of measurements taken in a number of step wells, well houses, and bath houses in northern India, between March and April 1995. There is a discussion of the combination of thermally massive structures and evaporative cooling effects which characterise the buildings (some of which are over 500 years old). All of the structures examined continue to provide comfortably cool interiors in the heat of summer.

Parametric design is a paradigm for the more effective use of computers in architectural design and practice. Rather than focus on design as a holistic process of formal synthesis, the more localised issue of design development will be discussed, especially with regard to the resolution of complex geometry. The triforium of Gaudí's Sagrada Familia is taken as a case study. Parametric variation is used to define surface geometry consistent with the surviving fragments of plaster models, and what we know of Gaudí's technique.

At a time when the architectural profession in the United Kingdom and elsewhere is undergoing considerable change, a clear understanding of the relationship between the services that architects can, and want to, provide and those desired and valued by our clients is vital. The architect's unique skill has been described as that of design. What does that mean today? We may all believe in the value of design but we must be sure that we can afford to offer such services at a realistic cost if we are to stay in business. This paper seeks to discover the linkages between the cost of design and its value.