In 2005 the Arts and Humanities Research Council initiated a review of practice-led research in art, design and architecture. The purpose of the review was to develop a ‘comprehensive map of recent and current research activity in the area’. What quickly became obvious to the team that won the bid to run the review (led by the three authors) was that to map activity one first had to attempt to define it. The term ‘practice-led research’ means many different things to different people and so immediately raises debate. The positions range from those who believe that the act of making or designing alone constitutes research, to those who believe that research (as analytical activity) is incommensurable with design (as synthetic activity). For the former, the knowledge contained within the artefact is self-evident and beyond the need for additional explication; for the latter, knowledge resides outside the artefact and in the realm of its dissemination and interpretation. The importance of the AHRC review is not that it will settle these arguments, but that it will provide a much firmer context in which to place them.

This double issue of arq includes a number of papers first presented at a conference held in Nottingham in November 2005 which was hosted jointly by AHRA (the Architectural Humanities Research Association) and the School of the Built Environment at the University of Nottingham, in conjunction with the Nottingham-based Image Studies Network.

The theme for the event was set by Professor Marco Frascari, Director of the School of Architecture at Carleton University, Ottawa, and also a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Nottingham in 2005–06. Both ‘models’ and ‘drawings’ have been interpreted in a particular way by Frascari, who wrote in the event’s Call for Papers:

‘Nowadays, we know what kinds of drawings architects make. They have been codified by tradition, by profession and by legislation. Although this canonisation is a relatively recent event nevertheless it has reached a condition where innovation is almost impossible. The architect’s drawings have become “models” and generate “models” to be preserved in museums, magazines and archives. To challenge this idle condition it is necessary to question the imagination of construction and the construction of imagination and how these processes affect and effect the envisioning of architecture in absentia’.

The conference thus addressed relationships between drawings and buildings around four key themes: the tendency of architectural representations to become ‘models’ for imitation, following Frascari’s interpretation of that word; the claim of new imaging technologies to make visible what could be described as the previously unseen; the cognitive spatial implications of traditional imaging practices relative to CAD; and the critical potential of the architectural image.

What is architectural research? That was the title of a University of Cambridge Department of Architecture symposium held at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London in September 2005. The idea of the symposium emerged during a battle to save Cambridge's Department of Architecture from closure in 2004. The University authorities had recommended closure because the Department's research rating in the UK's Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) of 2001 had dropped from 5 to 4 with a corresponding fall in research funding from the government. For a research-based university like Cambridge (where only three departments out of over 50 in the whole University scored below 5) research funding subsidises teaching so, for the University authorities, closure would have saved money and reduced its financial deficit. An outcry from within and outside the University saved the Cambridge Department, but important questions remain.

Sponsored by Vectorworks and SketchUp and convened by the new Director of the Architectural Association, Brett Steele, the RIBA's first annual Research Symposium, held on 3 October 2005, aimed to promote and disseminate architectural research work, and to encourage relationships between practice and research. At a time of growing concern over the future of research in architecture, and a sense of increasing marginalisation by the encroachment of other disciplines, both the variety of papers and the evident popularity of the event spoke of its continued vitality and relevance across the profession.

Three projects by Lynch Architects illustrate the author's argument that the villa type enables contemplation to become an ethos, and the reconciliation of action and poetry.

Rethinking the teaching of materials and construction to reunite the intellect with the senses provided a stimulus for the design of a private house in Adelaide.

Developments in computer-aided design and manufacturing are breaking down divisions between designing and making, opening up radical new opportunities for the practice of architecture.

A series of residential extensions demonstrate the relationship between idea, detail and experience and enable reflections on how working drawings can choreograph inhabitation.

Analysis of the detailed design of a primary school classroom suggests that intelligent sustainable design can be both environmentally beneficial and cost effective.

Since the Renaissance, descriptive geometry has become a generative architectural idea and a systematic representation of production. CAD’s precision is the apotheosis of this trajectory.

Following the lead of Buckminster Fuller’s experiments with the prefabricated, mechanical core, Archigram like the Smithsons, extended the service model to the domestic programme.

The development of architectural knowledge and research in Britain offers a context in which to interpret a recent study of research across UK architectural schools.

Mediating between forest and garden, tradition and modernity, a small wooden gate at Alvar Aalto's Villa Mairea is shown to be deeply rooted in Finnish cultural memories.

Bergson's concept of duration encapsulates a philosophy of the experience of time – which could also explain how spaces acquire temporal richness through construction and use.