Designing is, purely, the thinking before acting: it lies within the response to a request for action. In designing's essence lies questioning and, with it, the understanding that everything has relevance, albeit to varying degrees. The resultant - the design - is then only limited by practical externalities such as the availability of time or other resources. If the thinking were to begin with assumed constraints then the thinking would already be poorer, as then would the design.

Z's approach might be characterised as neo-modernism: an attempt to continue the modernist spirit of questioning without the egocentric endgames of the mid-twentieth century. It is thus in essence non-hierarchical and open: anarchitecture.

Z is averse to, or even incapable of, the po-faced, rectilinear anality that characterizes many current, vernacular-modernist designs. Within such work, there is often timidity and traditionalism: sentiments underpinned by the repression of feeling and by unfounded romantic dependencies. Whilst evoking a modernism, many of these designs are deficient in the the only continued relevance of modernism - that of the act of questioning. Relatedly, their worshipfulness is devoid of play and humour, both of which are essential parts of creative and complex thinking. Their notional purity of form is often just arid reductionism, forgetting that a straight line is also a curve but of extremely large radius and that shit is more life giving than gold.

Z's tools are sought in language and in philosophy as well as in logic and its derivations within mathematics and science. Significant, holistic insights have been endorsed by complexity theory, just as earlier relativity and quantum theories in physics helped to deconstruct platonic beliefs about absolutes. These all demonstrate the possibility of an overview unencumbered by the canonical or by the insistence upon only one allowable frame of reference. One danger with this, however, is that these associations can be glibly used to pander to a lazy vapidity called, amongst other things, post-modernism.

Z's designing lies thus in approach and attitude. Indeed, 'no' can be a valid, or even a preferred, solution (everything is political). Z's designing is not in favoured forms, materials, treatments or colour conceits. But rather, z seeks to interrelate all elements involved in a project whilst, equally, looking to question all these elements. It is a necessary environmentalism, an eco-modernism, an anarchitecture...