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 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.

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.

‘This is an extraordinary group of buildings’, wrote Philip Johnson (then a Mies van der Rohe follower) when The Architectural Review published Alison and Peter Smithson's School at Hunstanton in September 1954. ‘… Here we have an unknown team … being allowed to win and build. Most surprising they are allowed to build not a conventional school, not even a Hertfordshire plan, but something quite the opposite of the prevailing trend … The plan is not only radical but good Mies van der Rohe, yet the architects have never seen Mies's work …’ In this paper, based upon a talk given at the Architectural Association School and on conversations with the Editor, Peter Smithson recalls the background to the project, its design and construction, his later visits to Chicago and a 1973 revisit to the building.

This paper challenges the predominant reading of Dublin's architectural history whereby the eighteenth century is a golden age of rational urbanism and the nineteenth century represents a collapse into confusion and stasis. It emphasises the different ways in which the city continued to change in the nineteenth century. An examination of James Joyce's changing representation of Dublin - from the ‘scrupulous meanness’ of Dubliners to the exuberance of Ulysses - suggests how an equivalent shift in architectural strategies, from a nostalgia for the formal certainties of Georgian Dublin towards an appreciation of the heterogeneous nineteenth-century city, might produce a new kind of urbanism.

This paper describes the use of timber as a rainscreen cladding on David Chipperfield's River and Rowing Museum at Henley. The extensive use of green oak in this way is the key to a precise and beautifully crafted building and was the result of collaboration between the architects and the Timber Research and Development Association. This use of timber represents a major shift in the work of David Chipperfield from concrete toward a wider palette of materials. Henley is also an important example of a recent trend in the development of timber as an external cladding material. Timber cladding as a rainscreen will be discussed in the context of the Henley project in terms of its performance factors and the design and construction process, and analysed with a view to drawing some conclusions for its future use.

This paper is an account of a study of existing arcade environments in London and Cardiff. Seasonal surveys were undertaken in order to understand both the arcades' thermal performance and their contribution to the environmental diversity of the city. Arcades, which are genuine bioclimatic buildings and urban spaces, appear to generate progressive environmental transients that draw on the ability of users to adapt and thus improve their comfort. The surveys were conducted using a portable sensor array. The results are analysed in terms of environmental transients and seasonal performance.

This paper describes current research activities oriented towards the development of an innovative methodology for survey and documentation activities in buildings that owing to their general characteristics challenge the use of traditional survey and documentation methodologies. In particular, the specific project of the survey and documentation of the Abbey of Valmagne in southern France is presented as an example of the use of telematics for conducting geographically distributed activities within a methodology specially designed for projects in which the location and complexity of historical structures poses a dramatic challenge. The paper ends by addressing a number of conclusions that can be applied to a general framework and their relation with future research and development work in this field.