Peter Cook: which architects are top of the pops on the lecture circuit? And what makes for a good speaker?

For a long time I have wondered why we all assume that a man or woman who has visual or formal talents can talk about this in front of an audience, somehow transmitting the connections between ideas and gambits, curious leaps of inspiration or the making of deft moves.

It's a task that haunts many good architects who get crotchety, unsociable and downright boring in the run up to a lecture date. Though it is just those who can become the most intriguing communicators over time.

I can remember the afternoon when Peter Smithson (our teacher at the AA), summoned us to hear an afternoon lecture on the subject of his Sugden house and, halfway through, dried up. Perhaps the silence was less than a minute--but the train of thinking had frozen--and Smithson was too serious or too honest to fall back on an emergency package of chatter lines to bridge over to the next headline. We came to realise the privilege of his afternoon series as chunks of these conversations started to emerge in Uppercase--a tiny magazine, then in AD--a 'proper' magazine, then as parts of books such as Without Rhetoric.

We had heard it in the raw. Later versions were cleaned-up and became more coherent, but lost in the process some of the energy and some of the creative perversity. I ponder on this since I give many lectures myself: as you become more adept, you become more ambitious, you become increasingly aware of the mixture of content, energy, picture power and the buzz of the audience, but do you ever get it right?

The first exposure has the angst, the thrust, the eagerness; the second is smoother (and probably the best version). The third flows effortlessly but if you run to a fourth you know which lines get a laugh and you've stopped thinking. So you 'tweak' on the laptop in the plane (or in the days of slides, carry a spare 40 to drop into the argument).

I was reminded of all this as the dark evenings took over in New York, London and Paris: where the densest traffic in architectural chatter can wreck reputations.

In recent years, the most consistently large audiences could be guaranteed for theorists and commentators; clarifying ideas should, after all, be their business. Certainly Mark Wigley in New York and Mark Cousins in London are worth crossing a large town to hear. Wigley is the only person outside cinema or television who has made me laugh so much that it hurt. He's the smartest project critic around with sufficient memory of his days in architecture to know the true reasons why the ethical, political, symbolic or quotational are not the only motives for design. While Cousins, as a lapsed shrink, can talk magic around the process of cause-and-effect.

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Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Jean Nouvel are a good listen as they have the realisation that their work will survive fashion and so they can let themselves go on stage. Frank can be matter-of-fact and disarmingly honest--as befits one who has been featured in The Simpsons and has built malls and condominiums as well as icons. Zaha gets naughtier and chattier as time goes by and is not embarrassed by the quickness of her mind. And Jean just grins and rolls with it.

But watch Thom Mayne, who just oozes architecture. Early lectures were tortured, middle lectures discursive but still teacher-y. Now he feels his power, challenges you and offers hope. The Pritzker has given him a roller blade. Lebbeus Woods is, I think, the most satisfying: his Midwestern morality emerging as a foundation for the thrust and challenge of his drawings.

And of the younger guys? There are few who can intrigue us as much as could Libeskind, before he went 'promotional'. Mark Goulthorpe has weird stuff, umpteen Gaston Bachelard quotes, but gradually gets less edgy. Most of the Dutch come across as arrogant (let's hope it is just the problem of English language forcing them to jump between fluency and pragmatism). Elizabeth Diller has made a theatre out of word structure that is rehearsed and refined to an extraordinary degree: so catch her if you possibly can.

But before I forget, two really great old guys stay in my memory as yardsticks conveying humour, knowingness and craft: Sverre Fehn in Oslo and Clorindo Testa in Buenos Aires. Even if you don't understand their language you instinctively respond to timing, to mystery and, by the way, to stunning architecture.