On studying the latest monograph dedicated to recent work by the Office of Zaha Hadid (OZH) – El Croquis No.103: ‘Zaha Hadid 1996–2001’ – one enjoys two distinct sensations: awe and pleasure. Truly remarkable in both number and quality, this collection of sophisticated, poised and delicate projects – some recently realized, others imminent – demonstrates syntheses more sizable and more programmatically challenging than those of the previous 15-year period. Indeed, in conversation with Architectural Association Chairman Mohsen Mostafavi, Hadid offers that ‘a new degree of complexity has been entered’.

As Mostafavi notes, the conceptual theme evident in recent work is that of geology. The genealogy of this theme can be read in early seminal works like the Hong Kong Peak Project of 1983, where planarity and spatial compression combined with sculptural tactics, like the carving of existing landscape, to produce public spaces within a newly animated topography. But Hadid comments that more recent projects have tended to another strain of the geological thematic: the volumetric.

About five years ago I decided that I wanted to write a textbook on building construction. At that time it seemed like a straightforward, if lengthy, task of setting out the essential issues in the construction of buildings to a readership of architecture students and young practitioners. It would consist of information that I had regularly discussed and sketched with colleagues I had worked with over the years.

In talking to possible publishers, I put across to them a case explaining how I thought the book would fill a gap in the market, and who would read it. I felt at the time of starting the project that it would be of benefit to students to show some of the possible developments for future construction, as well as construction techniques from other industries from which architects like to draw inspiration. I wanted to include aircraft, yachts, oil production platforms and ski lifts as well as environmental issues such as the recycling of building materials and embodied energy. However, as the text developed I felt it would be more valuable for a reader to have a more focused book, without too much crusading for environmental issues or dreaming about other structures. I thought that it would do the book a disservice in the long run by appearing too quirky, and instead aimed for a balance of hard fact and inspiring images.

Last time I was in Glasgow, I met the architect Isi Metzstein in the street and his first words to me were: ‘It's you! I don't know how you can show your face here!’ My book on Mackintosh had just been published, and local papers were carrying headlines like ‘MACKINTOSH AUTISTIC!’

Compared with the land, everything else is an illusion. The cities are the startled thoughts of sleep.

Alfred Caldwell

My first encounter with Alfred Caldwell was in 1986, in the third year studio of Crown Hall, the school of architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). He sat next to me and asked me, ‘What did you come here to do?’ He meant here and now in this school of architecture, but his tone was deeply challenging in such a way that the question resonated much further.

Caldwell was a self-made man, practised in engineering, botany, construction, planning and landscape architecture; he had been responsible for planning a number of large parks in and around Chicago and had served Mies van der Rohe as his landscape architect. In addition he was a builder, an educator, a father and husband, a writer, poet and visionary — an unusual range of work, well summarized in Dennis Domer's Alfred Caldwell: The Life and Work of a Prairie School Landscape Architect. In our world, where the trend is for specialization and distinction in a narrow field, it seemed to me that an integrated mind capable of such breadth was really something special. Caldwell inspired me; at 83 he epitomized the closest thing to wisdom in a man.