Housing dominates this issue of arq. In his description of four recent projects designed for United Kingdom sites by his Netherlands practice, Hans van der Heiden considers housing as an element at the city scale (pp. 12–31). While in arq's first ‘revisit’ article, Fiona McLachlan reviews the performance in use of a large 1960s Edinburgh housing scheme (pp. 33–50). Common to the schemes in both articles is the use of the perimeter block or enclave as a housing form.

Generative design techniques (‘Digital canopy: high-end computation/low-tech construction’ arq 6/3, pp230–245) tend to intrigue and slightly scare (arq 6/4, pp293–294 – letter from Sam Price) at the same time. It is reassuring to know that computers will only be as smart as we can program them. We can even control if they learn and how they learn. Design capabilities using generative methods agreeably are a product of both how smart we make the generative algorithms and how intelligently designers can make use of them. A human designer alone probably would not have come up with the canopy design built and a computer alone could not have.

In their article, ‘Casbah: a brief history of a design concept’, (arq 6/4, pp. 321–336) Robert Oxman and his co-authors state that the matchbox models are ‘unsigned’, (caption to Figure 3b). They are not. Elsewhere, they are always credited to Herman Hertzberger. for instance in Wim van Heuvel, Structuralism in Dutch Architecture, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 1992, p. 13 and also in monographs on Hertzberger.

Sarah Wigglesworth and Jane Wernick's article, ‘Clear Water Garden; A Study In Design Research and Collaboration’ (arq 6/2, pp214–229) contained (p216) the following passage:

‘There was a very productive equality in our working relationship. Partly because the power structure between different genders and knowledges was almost entirely absent.’

Is the subject of ‘gender difference’ an appropriate subject for a research journal? Perhaps it is only in the realm if architecture that this question could possibly arise at all. Elsewhere, in the real world, we know gender difference is accorded the seriousness and consequent academic research status it deserves as it is understood as a fundamental component within our culture.

I don't necessarily think that gender comments are out of place in a research publication, but it is slightly unsatisfactory to bump into them in passing.

Sarah Wigglesworth and Jane Wernick's article explores how a close collaboration in design can become research when ideas are passed freely between the designers, leading to unexpected and original solutions.

Jeffrey Cook was best known for his pioneering work on bio-climatic design. But what made his particular contribution to architecture distinctive was the breadth of his interests and his concern to make connections between them. Two examples of this were the wonderful studies of the Natural History Museum (‘Designing the well-tempered institution of 1873’ in arq 1/2, pp70–78 and ‘Delivering the well-tempered institution of 1873’ in arq 2/1, pp66–75) which he wrote together with Tanis Hinchcliffe.

Jeff was one of the members of the first arq Editorial Board. Both then and later, he was a generous and perceptive referee. And it was he who made the most helpful suggestions when a new board was formed after Cambridge University Press took over as publishers. Sadly, he was not a member of that Board but he continued to help us – and to gently castigate us for changing the layout: ‘The old design was distinctive and couldn't be bettered’ he wrote, ‘– all those wonderful large letters across the opening spreads!’

Jeff is remembered here by Dennis Sharp, Steve Szokolay, Dean Hawkes and Simos Yannas.

The UK's Education Secretary, Charles Clarke, was recently quoted as describing medieval historians as ‘ornaments’ and suggested that the state should no longer pay for their activities. As attacks on liberal education go, his particular utilitarian and anti-cultural point was not unusual. But was it justified? Here, Michael Asselmeyer, a medieval historian himself, takes issue and argues the case for teaching humanities to architects.

Many important design concepts have an unfixed format in current housing design. The fragmentation and seemingly uncontrolled expansion of cities question the definition of the current city. On a smaller scale there is nowadays no common idea of what a dwelling should be, in terms of image, spatial properties, construction or function. Flexibility is a key word in housing design. ‘The architectural view is increasingly shifting from its métier propre, that of ordering, towards change, towards an intellectual grasp of the unstable’ (Wohlhage, 1999). At the intermediary scale where the flexible dwelling and the cityscape meet, descriptions like ‘enclave’, ‘ensemble’ and ‘estate’ are in vogue. Such terminology has insufficient architectural precision to be credible as an answer to current urban problems. The instability of our cities is not that new – and cannot be an excuse for a professional attitude where anything goes.

When asked ‘what is your most exciting/important job’ my answer would always be ‘the next one’. The struggle necessary to finish any serious building project is so overwhelming that once the certificate of completion is signed, the last thing one wants to do is reflect on or pontificate about it. I was 34 when given Southfield [2] to design and am now more than twice that age. I was flattered when Fiona McLachlan told me she wanted to do research on my practice and initially to study Southfield and I was later a little scared when the Editor asked me to write an introduction to this study. But I have found it fascinating to read Fiona's paper and to ponder those heady days in the mid 1960s when Southfield dominated my life. It seems to me the most useful contribution I can make is to relate how I came to be doing this job and where the ideas came from which I can now appreciate were and are very important.

Rudolph Michael Schindler (1887–1953) designed a beach house for Henry Braxton and Viola Brothers Shore in 1930. The house was to have been sited on Ocean Front Walk, Venice, Los Angeles [1]. It was never built, but remains a paper project. In the architectural drawings archives at University of California, Santa Barbara, there are both sketch plans and detailed plans for four levels: the ground floor, the main floor, the balcony floor and the roof level. There are drawings for each of the four elevations as well as sections. Constructional details are provided on five sheets. All told there are 13 extant drawings. In his signature upper case, Schindler typed a brief written description of the house [Table 1].

During the past decades, many computer tools have been developed to assist in the environmental design of individual buildings. Heat, light, sound and especially energy consumption can be analyzed in many different packages. This is not generally true for urban design, especially at the medium scale. Although it is widely assumed that urban texture – the pattern of streets, building heights, open spaces and so on – will determine environmental quality both in the buildings and outside, tools for investigating the connections are sparse. The need for medium-scale understanding is confirmed by Givoni (1989):

‘The outdoor temperature, wind speed and solar radiation to which an individual building is exposed is not the regional “synoptic” climate, but the local microclimate as modified by the “structure” of the city, mainly of the neighbourhood where the building is located.’

This paper describes how novel image-processing algorithms could be applied in urban areas to calculate a wide number of parameters. These parameters allow the construction of what we could call ‘urban infoscapes’: a layered collection of information on cities, that can be successfully used to inform urban design and planning.

The architects of the Modern Movement in the late 1920s found new sources of form through the pursuit of technical and functional issues in design. They sought shaping agents in functional organization, in the admission of light, in efficiency of structure and construction, and many other physical issues of this kind. At the same time, they felt the need to escape from traditional rules of architectural composition involving Classical orders of columns, symmetry and axes. They were ready to discover a new and surprising identity for buildings precisely to defy the historicist conventions that until then dominated architecture as a cultural tradition. Acoustics is an area in which many interesting claims were made, and some famous Modernist designs were supposedly formed, or at very least inspired, by acoustic forces. These historical instances beg the question whether acoustics is really a legitimate and helpful formal determinant of buildings. Perhaps instead, the acoustic arguments put forward by architects to justify their formal choices were just convenient alibis. This is a far more complex issue than at first it seems.

Geoffrey Bawa died in May, so it is fitting as well as poignant that Thames and Hudson have published this new and lavish edition on his life's work, written by the indefatigable David Robson. It will undoubtedly prove to be the definitive publication. Interest in Bawa's work is clearly very high; the previous monograph by Brian Brace Taylor published in 1986, was revised and republished in 1995 by the same publisher. Robson's new work is more comprehensive and includes the very latest projects. It also sets the scene both in terms of Bawa's unusual career and life story and of the awesome legacy of his home, the fascinating island of Sri Lanka.

Notwithstanding contributions such as those articulated in Kenneth Frampton's Studies in Tectonic Culture (MIT Press, 1995), few authors have furthered a clear discourse concerning the relationships between construction techniques and formal ideas in architecture subsequent to the late twentieth-century critiques of Western Modernity. Moreover, such writing as there has been has tended to draw from the supposedly redemptive, recuperative and largely Heideggerian tenor of concerns regarding the relationship of humankind to technology and its desired capacity for architecture to mitigate, if not completely resist, the assumed imminent threat of technology to life itself.

William Braham writes that this book has been conceived as a genealogy of modern architectural colour, explaining that he uses the term ‘genealogy’ in the (Deleuzean) sense of it automatically bringing one to an understanding of the distance travelled since the particular origins under research. Such an analysis is useful to Braham who wants to bring to the practising architect an informed view of the use of colour in architecture by investigating the discussions that have surrounded it since the 1830s.

As a child, on visits to Finland in the 1960s and '70s, I was constantly amazed by the way people lived. At home, in the Yorkshire army officer's quarter where we lived, I barely encountered the modern, let alone the really comfortable. Designed before the First World War for a large family plus servants and animals – the accommodation included a scullery, butler's pantry, paddock and orchard – our house was huge, rambling and uncomfortable not to mention freezing cold in the rainswept, windswept northern winters.