Establishing a horizontal plane is basic to architecture. Jørn Utzon's use of the platform inspired the authors' entry to the recent international competition for the design of a new theatre in Copenhagen.

The performance piece Flux in the Sligo Air is a suite for movement artists and electro-acoustic music. It was composed in response to the unique atmosphere of Sligo, a town of 16,000 inhabitants in the northwest of Ireland, and its place within the surrounding landscape. I was inspired by Sligo's architecture and the sky, landscape and sea into which the town is so naturally and uniquely integrated. My study of space perception in architectural terms and its correlation with musical processes led to a contemplation of the relationship of the town's buildings to each other and the spaces (streets) they inhabit in the same manner as tonal phrases might become related to each other, or to a drone. Flux in the Sligo Air is not an analogous translation of architecture into music, however, but an attempt to capture those ever-changing senses which one may experience within a space. The town's natural condition and evolution, the new and the old at many points in time, serve as carriers of ideas of sense and felt knowledge which transcend the purely physical.

This modest building questions basic assumptions about processes and finishes, about the nature of brickwork and the detailing of window frames – and provides a powerful space for worship.

Peter Wilson's early interests in figuration, metaphor and narrative in architecture are most clearly illustrated in sites selected for his unit projects and competition entries completed while at the Architectural Association in the 1970s and '80s. Whether outwith or within cities, Wilson's concerns revolved primarily around the orchestration of a collection of expressive objects, on various tableaux themselves embodying, a priori, charged and original poetics. These preoccupations have largely extended to and variously informed the work of Arkitekturbüro Bolles+Wilson, the Münster based practice started in 1987 by Wilson and his partner Julia Bolles.

Launched overnight into Cambodia, the author was responsible for the design and construction of a small residential community. Researching local traditions, she constantly adapted to local culture and conditions.

John Pawson was brought up in Yorkshire, the son of a mill-owner, and was sent to school at Eton, where he insisted on sleeping in a white canvas hammock. It was an early sign of his interest in the ascetic. After seven years in the family textile business, he travelled to Japan and then studied briefly at the Architectural Association before setting up his own design practice in London. He is celebrated as a Minimalist but, as Deyan Sudjic points out in one of the essays in Themes and Projects, the latest book on Pawson's work, it ‘has a robustness that allows it to transcend the trivialization of the label’. His buildings have a considerable physical and sensory presence, an abundance of experiential things. In another essay, one of the neighbours of Pawson's London house, Katherine Bucknall, describes the effect as ‘maximal, supercharged, eerie, occasionally mystical’. And it is easy to empathize with her observation that even a pink rubber glove lying on the kitchen floor takes on a surreal quality, ‘like a piece of contemporary art … a human clue in a plain, geometric ground’. These sorts of realities are not easily reducible to words or images and so, when I met John Pawson in his London office (and after he'd helped me fix my tape-recorder), that's where we began.

Christine Hawley's cri de coeur (p.5 ) on the outcome of the UK Government's latest Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) may be dismissed by some as sour grapes. Others, however, will welcome the robustness of her warning and hope that, at long last, the research dilemma in university architecture schools will be given the airing it deserves. One body in particular should facilitate such a debate – the Royal Institute of British Architects – but it has never shown much interest in the subject (arq 5/4, p. 291).

La Congiunta, Peter Märkli's house for sculptures in the Leventina valley, is an enigmatic concrete structure. It has the appearance of a large rock, its density strengthened by a complete absence of visible openings. No hint is given of its content or its entrance. And so our curiosity impels us to explore the block's exterior. The horizontal divisions of the shuttering create at a glance the impression of large stone slabs. On closer viewing, the individual boards and the grain of the timber are revealed as traces of construction. Our understanding of the volume develops gradually, through contact with its material qualities.