The publication, last December, of the ‘research ratings’ awarded to subject groups in each of the United Kingdom's higher education institutions provoked a shocked response in many Architecture schools. A fierce debate on the nature of architectural research and its implications for the future form of architectural education is now developing. With so many countries following the UK standard of a five-year period for full-time education in Architecture (and RIBA validation), this is a subject of more than local interest. Peter Carolin reports on the background to this debate.

The last issue of arq (no. 7) included an account of the recent Research Assessment Exercise undertaken in United Kingdom university schools of architecture and reported on the latest developments in the long-running debate on whether design can be regarded as research. This same debate has also taken place in Australian universities and Michael Keniger reported on the Refereed Design Scheme which had been evolved to resolve this problem. Here, Simon Pepper, an architectural historian who has been involved in this debate over many years, reflects on the issues and the Australian system.

This paper deals with issues and possibilities of cross-cultural study in architectural education, especially the teaching of architecture history and theory in schools with students of diverse cultural background. The paper argues that responding to cultural diversity involves not only a more comprehensive curriculum, but also a correlated view of curriculum content, skills, course structure and interdisciplinarity, and a sensitivity towards differences that cannot be accounted for in a universalist frame of reference. Instances of the cultural possibilities offered by the Chinese tradition to contemporary architectural education are given as examples and these are related to a geo-cultural landscape of Chinese communities in which Western schools might exercise a significant role.

Australian Architecture schools, like their UK equivalents, have also been grappling with the need to obtain recognition for design as equivalent to research. They have had to tackle the subject not because of pressures imposed by a national funding system, as in the United Kingdom, but because of the need to maintain credibility within their universities. Michael Keniger looks back over a 10 year period of experiment.

‘Urbanism’ has become a familar posture among architects, so familiar that it has recently become a target for ridicule. The actual developments of cities today make the neo-Sitte-esque contextualism of the 1970s look even more Utopian than the International Style. There are many and varied socio-economic and political determinants in many differing situations which might explain the hopes of the past and their distance from the realities of the present. However, much of the problem with urbanism is not to do with actual urban conditions or the success or failure of particular projects, but rather with how the concept of urbanism was framed in the architectural profession and academy. It ought still to be possible to develop a few operative concepts and a way of having a shared discourse on the architectural aspects of city sites. But at the moment we are caught between vast rhetorical claims for such work as ‘theory’; and a new naturalism that sees the city as generic global and beyond architecture. These notes are intended as a provocation both to the institutionalisation of urbanism and to the idea that it has become passé.

A two stage international landscape and urban regeneration design competition was held last year for the site of a former Brikettfabrik at Witznitz near Borna in the south Leipzig region of Germany. The design of the winning entry was based on architectural, urban and landscape design strategies developed over the past five years. This paper opens with an introduction to these ideas and related theoretical precedents. There follows a description of the project's context and of the design itself.

This paper describes a model of Sir John Soane's House and Museum which was executed as an independent study during the authors' Third Year at Yale University School of Architecture. Having visited the building independently of each other and having returned with a similar mystified curiosity, they initiated the project as an attempt to further understand the house by developing an analytical method of representation specific to it. The model was constructed from drawings prepared by the authors which synthesised information from available published documentation and drawings obtained from the Soane Museum Library.

In 1961, a group of young designers practising under the name of Atelier 5 completed Siedlung Halen near Berne. This private housing development was the first built example of the compact, low-rise housing type conceived by Le Corbusier for vacation use in the south of France. It was the forerunner of the newly resurgent carpet or mat planning form. In addition, Halen was a social experiment likened by its designers to the Unité d'Habitation at Marseilles, reinterpreted to fit closely with the local topography. Beyond its undisputed claim to history, its success resides, as in the case of the Unité, in having raised the standards of a particular housing form. Attention to the welfare of users has since become a hallmark of the work of Atelier 5. This paper describes the genesis of the project, its form and social outlook.

The Errant's Lodge forms part of the Open City (Ciudad Abierta) founded by the staff and students of the University of Valparaíso in 1970 (see the review of The Road That is Not a Road and the Open City Ritoque, Chile on p. 92 of this issue). This paper outlines the project's origins; the ‘alternative’ programme to which the design responds; the climatic and environmental considerations; the construction; and its relationship to research and teaching. The project, which is still in progress, is partly funded by a Chilean government research grant.

For the last 40 years, organic values have prevailed in Western architecture. The conflict in the 1950s between the organic and the typical with its ideology of mechanisation is currently being reenacted under the new categories of the generic and the specific. These two orders of value are assumed to be incompatible, even though both history and theory suggest otherwise. In this conflict, the organic has so far survived unscathed in spite of a growing interest in the typical, the status of which remains unclarified: should it be envisaged as a means to an aesthetic, as it is at present, or should it be a means to affluence?

What role does memory play in our concept of home? How important are the sounds that fill a home? What significance do nuances of light and shadow hold? These are critical issues in the search for a residential design strategy after the modern public housing era. This paper discusses these issues in the context of some apartments designed by Kjell Forshed for a housing co-operative on the island of Stumholmen, Karlskrona, Sweden.

The house is not widely known but has been praised by a distinguished circle since its completion, including Aldo Van Eyck and Christian Norberg-Schulz. It represents a fusion of European revision of modernism as a model of the continuity of ‘The Other Tradition’ with avant-garde American design concepts of the late 1960s. Quite distinct from the work of the New York Five, for example, it is, the author claims, nonetheless related to it through the architect's teaching involvement with the Yale and MIT schools from 1960. Today it remains a significant architectural icon, and following the death of its owners is in need of formal listing and statutory protection.