As love affairs go, it is not the most obvious of unions: architects, with their polo-neck jumpers and overt aestheticism, being matched to developers - people with dogged cost-cutting and practicality in the forefront of their minds, plus a rather dowdy dress sense. Yet fall in love they must, for what is a building project if the developer - who has found the land and organised most of the scheme - does not get along with the architect, who must design the edifice of wonderment that will sit on it? Rubble, that’s what.

So no wonder the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment and the Royal Institute of British Architects felt the need for a speed-dating night in central London recently that aimed to have architects and developers snuggling up to one another.

At first sight, it seemed as if the architects would hold all the cards. They were far better turned out: the women wore weird bits of entwined silver jewellery and elegant black dresses; the men had tie-less black shirts, fabulous specs and complex arrangements of facial hair. They exuded the kind of confidence normally shown by contestants on reality-television shows. The developers, in shiny ties and sober suits, looked much less interesting. It’s also clearly a rather macho business: there wasn’t a woman among them.

For those readers unfamiliar with speed-dating events, the structure is simple: one group sits at tables, and the other moves around. So every five minutes, a bell rang and the architects had to move on and chat up another developer. They were meant to discuss things such as “Is our relationship lost in translation?” and “How better can we bridge the divide?”

What happened, however, was a fascinating revelation of power play, during which the architects tarted themselves around ruthlessly to get work - or the vague promise of it - from the money men.

“We have solved the UK housing problem,” declared one of the creatives, Bill Dunster, a masculine type who looked like he was unused to being turned down by a date. He produced a variety of books, cards and pictures of work by his eponymous practice, and fanned them out in front of Nick Davies, the planning and design director at Crest Nicholson. “Is this a level6 house?” asked Davies, inexplicably impervious to Dunster’s fashionable suit and manly charm. “Yep. Three bed,” cried Dunster, the man behind BedZed, a famous eco-community in Beddington, Surrey. “Everything is in place. Yours for £150,000.” I think he then suggested the level6 house could be made available in flat-pack for just £115,000.

Level 6 means a house is zero-carbon, with solar-power this and low-energy that. Dunster showed Davies a picture of 50 of his level6 houses sitting on a hectare of land. The bell rang. “If you don’t use us, your competitors will,” was his parting shot.

Over on the Berkeley Homes table, architects Georgina Hock and Gareth Wilkins, an associate and associate director, respectively, of Proctor and Matthews (designs include the second phase of the Greenwich Millennium Village), were bewailing the state of affairs in British housing over a glass of dry white and some spring rolls. Hock appeared happy to let Wilkins do the talking, while she batted her eyelashes at Charles Calverley, the chairman of Berkeley Homes Northeast London.

“Nobody takes on board the monumental housing requirements we have to work with,” said Wilkins. “The problem we all have is planning. Do you know how many committees you would have to approach in order to get a building done on a brownfield site in east London?” I confessed I didn’t. “About 20. It’s no wonder we have a housing crisis.” Calverley looked vaguely sympathetic, but overall seemed more interested in a bowl of jellybeans than in Wilkins and Hock’s overtures. But that’s the speed-dating scene for you. “The thing is, we have to keep an eye on the commercial aspect,” he murmured.

This appeared to be the fundamental flaw in any putative romance between the two professions. No sooner did architects start waxing lyrical about levels and aesthetics than developers started shifting nervously in their chairs.

Neither party is a charity, but both use remarkably different routes in order to make their money. And profit is, of course, one of the important goals of any development. As Niel Pratt, an architect from Architecture plb, put it: “There always has to be value. But while we call it ‘value engineering’, developers might call it ‘cost-cutting’.” It seemed a hopeless impasse. Could a meaningful liaison be found?

People began to fill in “interfacing ideas” on red paper hearts. One came from Geoff Winter, from Miller Homes. “We can work fine with you guys,” he said, looking at two architects whose sartorial style was so high-end that they almost seemed to have bounced out of the pages of Elle. “It’s the local authority that is the problem.”

At last, people started relaxing a bit, and suggesting other reasons why house-building seems so bogged down in Britain. “It’s the media,” some said, particularly when they saw my Sunday Times badge. “It’s the general public,” said Chris Roche, principal design architect with 11.04 Architects, one of several award-winning London-based practices represented. “How they are with us now is just how they were with contemporary art way back before Damien Hirst made it all sexy. We need to have that kind of effect on the public.”

So forget about the love affair between architects and developers. What both professions seem to need – badly – is love and understanding from the rest of us. We need to understand how all these regulations and committees are grinding them down, and we need to appreciate that something terrifyingly new is just a Georgian house with cladding. Probably.

Explore Property

• Buying & Selling

• New Homes

• Overseas

• Interiors

• Investment

• Gardens

• Cool In Your Code

• Specials

• First-time buyer

Times recommends

• Second homes: credit crunch casualty or money-spinner?
• How I built my own sliding house
• Top 10 incentives for house buyers