Independent research consulting firms may not get much attention in the architectural culture, but they play an inordinately important role in bringing research findings to the profession and in meeting the research needs of the building industry. Here is a profile of two North American consulting firms that shows their diversity, and their commonality. Tom Fisher reports.

The architectural profession lacks the infrastructure that enables other professions, such as mechanical engineering, to build a knowledge-base and share research results of use to practitioners. To create such an infrastructure, the profession needs to develop learning cycles that involve researchers, educators, and practitioners working in task groups to set research priorities, raise funds, publish findings, and disseminate knowledge through conferences and curricula.

The U.S. home builders and suppliers, funded by the Federal government, have developed new methods and technologies to improve the energy efficiency and reduce the cost of single-family housing. This report by Michael Crosbie, one of the researchers involved in the effort, reviews the work done so far and looks ahead to future collaborative efforts to advance this huge sector of the U.S. economy.

This winning design in the 1998 Lichterfelde Süd International Landscape and Urban Design Competition is for the regeneration of a former military training ground on the southern boundary of Berlin. The brief was for a new urbanism of the periphery, with 3200 dwellings on a 115 hectare site. The design is a continuation of research embracing conditions of uncertainty and change on mainly post-industrial or former military sites. It could be described as a fragment of an infrastructural urbanism in preparation for an unpredictable diversity of architectures.

Steven Hollwon an international competition for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland, based on the concept of intertwining or ‘chiasma’. That idea stems from the museum's site, which stands at the point where the city and Töölö Bay, the commercial core and the Parliament building come together. Intertwining also characterizes the form of the building, in which a gallery wing twists over and around a rectangular block, separated by a tall, curving entry hall dominated by a broad ramp. The museum has a few functional lapses, but is generally successful.

With the coming of computers and the Internet, the relationship of the physical and virtual worlds has shifted. Virtual environments will not replace physical ones, but the nature, location, and function of the latter will change, creating both challenges and opportunities for architects.

This paper defines an architectural position in which the concept of tolerance provides a strategy for making work. It also represents a moment in time within a continuing assessment and re-assessment of the ideas of the practice we established three years ago. Ideas are explored through built and speculative projects and tested through critical discussion with collaborators. The source of these ideas within a historical context is acknowledged and their application in a number of our recent projects and buildings is illustrated.

A surprising amount of good and original architecture has been built in Switzerland and Austria in recent years, combining the power of international ideas and techniques with the special characteristics of a local setting. This paper considers a school by Rodolphe Luscher, who practises in French-speaking Lausanne but was born in the more Germanic Zurich. Analyzing it in detail, the author comments on how it can be accommodated into the developing story of Modernism.

The library at Sunshine Coast University, Queensland was completed three years ago. The library is both the physical heart and the social focus of the new campus. Two firms of architects collaborated on the design: one, Lawrence Nield & Partners, with extensive experience of major projects and the other, John Mainwaring & Associates, familiar with the local climate. The low budget encouraged innovatory construction. The building is of interest for its visual openness, its suitability for the subtropical climate and the extensive use of timber for cladding and screening.

As disciplines, urban design and architecture often seem to be at cross purposes. Urban design tends to concern itself with the collective, architecture with isolated buildings. The Group 91 framework plan for Dublin's Temple Bar is an integrated proposal by architects for the creation of public urban spaces and for the insertion of new buildings into the historic fabric. In particular, the Printworks by Derek Tynan is a didactic model: it suggests how people can beneficially live and work in a quickly evolving city and offers an urbanism of collage and potent reciprocity.

Waterside is one of a handful of recent British commercial buildings that will be remembered long after this decade is over. Its greatest significance is as a marker of the changing relationship between organizations and their office accommodation. The story of its development contains many generic lessons to be derived from the use of architecture as a catalyst in change management. It is hoped that a future paper will report on one of the most intractable problems in architectural research–whether office design (and Waterside in particular) can affect productivity.

In the UK, government policy has encouraged architecture schools to be more research active and there is pressure to make the two final years of the five year course more definitively postgraduate. The University of Sheffield has responded with an experiment that combines studio teaching with real research on the city and its history. Sheffield is Britain's fourth largest city with a population of around half a million. It grew very rapidly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, It now employs a fraction of the former labour force and the city is having to adjust its identity.