Despite the growing body of literature on Chinese architecture, contemporary Chinese architects’ critical approaches to drawing have received little scrutiny. To address this research gap, this essay examines the 2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate Wang Shu’s creative uses of modern parallel projection methods. The essay focuses on Wang’s specific drawing strategies that have allowed him to reconcile the disengaged mode of seeing that is engrained in parallel projection with the immersive spectatorship that traditional Chinese landscape painting epitomises.

First, through a literature review, this paper highlights Wang’s observations regarding the a-perspectival nature of Chinese landscape painting. Rather than being a perspectival window for the disengaged gaze, the landscape painting invites viewers to inhabit the pictorial space. Second, through comparative studies of selected cases, this essay investigates how Wang’s acknowledgement of the landscape painting’s a-perspectival traits has influenced his specific strategies when using parallel projection methods. The examined cases include Wang’s drawings for the Chen Mo Art Studio (Haiyan, 1998), the Tengtou Pavilion (Shanghai, 2009-10), and the Xiangshan Campus of the China Academy of Art Phases I and II (Hangzhou, 2002-08).

The essay concludes by highlighting significant changes in Wang’s later parallel projection drawings. Wang’s work has increasingly delineated architectural terrains as sensory topographies to foster viewers’ time-bound immersive spectatorships. Moreover, when serving his architectural ideas, Wang’s drawings have transcended the geometric representation of depth by implying spaces that exceed the limits of projection drawings. By examining his drawings, this essay sheds light on a salient yet underexamined aspect of Wang’s architectural undertakings. By investigating in-depth case studies of contemporary Chinese architectural drawings, this essay takes a crucial step towards a better understanding of this hitherto understudied domain.

When discussing ‘How Should One Read a Book?’, Virginia Woolf describes the work of an author as ‘an attempt to make something as formed and controlled as a building‘, using architecture as an analogy for the structure of a literary work. The ‘formed and controlled‘ structures of Woolf‘s books are here explored through her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, which she was writing around the same time as her essay on ‘How Should One Read a Book?‘ and for which she drew a diagram of its tripartite structure. While Woolf repeatedly uses imagery that juxtaposes transitory life with fixed buildings, her writing also suggests another more complex, fleeting architecture. This is revealed through an examination of the temporal structures of her novels and the momentary architecture that forms around its inhabitants. The decay and renewal of the house in the middle section of To the Lighthouse extends this further, revealing a precariousness that undermines the qualities of control, constancy, and permanence she had assumed for a building and, by analogy, her ‘formed and controlled‘ structures. Architecture, instead, becomes momentary and precarious. An assembly of architectural short stories reflect on this reversal as they are ‘read‘ by To the Lighthouse – developing the dialogue between the writing of architecture and building of literature, between architectural possibility and the world-making of words within a book. New College Library by Níall McLaughlin, Ursula Meier‘s film Home, the Marshall House by Dow Jones and the Snellman House by Erik Gunnar Asplund are discussed. The study combines a close reading of the text with a drawn analysis that maps To the Lighthouse and Woolf‘s novels while also reconstructing places she inhabited.

In the summer of 2021, UNESCO approved Germany’s first Jewish World Heritage Site, Schum. It contains the synagogues and Jewish cemeteries of the medieval rabbinic strongholds of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz, or, rather, that which is left of them. All Jewish heritage in Schum was damaged during the Holocaust and the synagogues of all three cities were reduced to rubble in the 1938 Kristallnacht Pogrom. And yet, in the present-day Nibelungen-city of Worms, there it is, the old synagogue, fully reconstructed in historic guise, though without a congregation to call it home. How can this be? And how are we to read this difficult reconstruction in the context of the five times this synagogue has been destroyed and rebuilt in its nearly millennium-long history? To investigate these questions, this article uses a regional, decentralised, and colloquial understanding of memory-work as a methodological framework for focusing on the mundane materialities of site and its cultural productions as evidence and storyteller of conflicting, contradictory, and often semi-fictitious struggles for agency and identity. Traditional Jewish ritual and liturgical conceptions of memory, among others, will be employed to expand and complicate the many possible readings of this site and to challenge prominent assumptions in discourses of memory and space concerning fundamental shifts that events of modernity, such as the Holocaust, supposedly necessitate in material cultures of memory.

Building materials both derive from nature and human culture. Although this categorisation often assumes a binary opposition; it should be reminded that natural materials have always been utilised for architectural design through human faculty embedded in cultural knowledge. On the other hand, modern materials produced via destructive industrial means, credited to human culture, do reveal their inherent ‘nature’ in their various applications and in different climatic conditions. Acknowledging the inherent intertwining of nature and culture in building materials, this article discusses the reasoning and moral language embedded in architectural theories regarding material use in design, through the angle of perversion. Based on its various definitions, interpreted as unnatural, abnormal and contingent, the article approaches this multifaceted topic, through examining aluminium; an industrially produced modern material that is conceptually malleable. The transformation of aluminium’s use in architecture and its perception throughout its short history presents a fruitful case for understanding many-sided arguments regarding material applications to formal design approaches and thinking with/through material in order to design.

We will equip in the museum a bathroom with its enamelled bath, its porcelain bidet, its wash-basin, and its glittering taps of copper or nickel. […] Clearly, this museum does not yet exist. Such a museum would be truly dependable and honest; its value would lie in the choice that it offered, whether to approve or reject; it would allow one to understand the reasons why things were as they were and would be a stimulant to improve on them.

The Hill House by Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1902-04) is widely considered a seminal work of early modern architecture. Today, after more than a century of saturating Scottish weather, the house is crumbling from water damage and needing renovation. In 2019, the first stage of works to stabilise the house and rectify its damp walls began in radical fashion with the ’Hill House Box’ by London-based architects Carmody Groarke. Like an oversized architectural raincoat, this roof and chainmesh-walled structure completely encases the house, allowing it to dry out before conservation works can begin. The design also incorporates a series of walkways through the interstitial volume, enabling visitors to observe the old building from new vantage points during its renovation. As such, the enclosure not only forms a protective case, but effectively turns the building - and its conservation - into a museological exhibit.

The architectural interest of the Hill House Box, however, lies in its encounter with Mackintosh’s temporally and stylistically distinct design, and the perverse strategy of placing one building inside another. For this essay, the Hill House and its new box highlight the underexamined architecture of buildings-in-buildings and, in particular, the creation of spaces that are neither interior nor exterior, but both, simultaneously. Drawing upon a diverse array of buildings and texts, this paper will attempt to outline a theoretical framework through which such composite constructions might be better understood. In particular, it will argue that, while there are countless ways that buildings have historically become encased within other buildings, it is within museums and sites of preservation, like the Hill House Box, that these fantastic architectural encounters find their most exciting and emphatic expressions.

Erik Gunnar Asplund’s Stockholm Public Library is considered an important building in the history of twentieth-century architecture, yet relatively few archival plans have been saved from the library’s extended design process from 1919–25 and its subsequent construction until opening in 1928. This work presents the first systematic review of the available, digitised archival plans from Sweden’s National Centre for Architecture and Design (ArkDes), and explains Asplund’s gradual design and development of the project. Subsequent alterations in the library are briefly summarised, followed by the results from an extensive 3D laser scanning process throughout and around the building as it undergoes a significant period of renovation and maintenance. The results from 3D laser scanning create the first comprehensive and detailed record of the building for supporting future research, teaching, and renovation work. This study emphasises the mutual benefits of combining historical and technological approaches, and conducting academic research in parallel with contemporary renovation projects of historical architecture.

After experiencing a floor-heated ‘Korean room’ in Tokyo in the 1910s (possibly in 1920), Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) applied its operating principle to his Usonian houses, starting with the Jacobs House I (1936–7). Successively, Wright’s heating method, along with other Usonian features, was applied to many postwar mass-produced houses, particularly those by Levitt & Sons in New York and Eichler Homes in California, two representative housing development companies in mid-century America. In their tract housing projects undertaken for about two decades from the late 1940s, floor heating (what is generally called ‘radiant heating’) was attractive not only owing to its thermal comfort but also because its slab system without a basement made construction inexpensive and expeditious. Although research on Levitt and Eichler homes has often mentioned the new heating method in relation to Wright’s influence, they could hardly identify the inspiration that Wright drew from Korea. Bridging the gap, this study argues that the Korean floor-heating idea disseminated to postwar mass-produced houses in America through Wright. Considering that their affordable houses were targeted at ordinary families seeking the American dream in a renewed social context, it can be said that Korean heat warmed the American dream, albeit indirectly. Ultimately, this radiated Korean heat would illustrate how one culture influences another, resulting in cultural cross-fertilisation.

The changing concepts of the body have had a significant impact on architectural and structural design thinking. This article examines the influence of historical analogies with the body on structural design, highlighting the analogies’ bias against functionalist aesthetics and their scope limitations. By contrast, recent advances in cognitive neuroscience research on the body and perception enable us to gain a new perspective on the analogy between body and structure. While exposing the traditional analogy's static and one-sided limitations, the article proposes the perspective of incorporating bodily experience dimensions into structural design considerations based on neuroscience. The article also emphasises the importance of collaboration with all disciplines in the structural design process from a biological standpoint, with the goal of refining and enriching the analogy between structure and body, thus complementing and refining the artistic and human dimensions of structural design from a body perspective.

Despite the growing body of literature on Chinese architecture, contemporary Chinese architects’ critical approaches to drawing have received little scrutiny. To address this research gap, this essay examines the 2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate Wang Shu’s creative uses of modern parallel projection methods. The essay focuses on Wang’s specific drawing strategies that have allowed him to reconcile the disengaged mode of seeing that is engrained in parallel projection with the immersive spectatorship that traditional Chinese landscape painting epitomises.

First, through a literature review, this paper highlights Wang’s observations regarding the a-perspectival nature of Chinese landscape painting. Rather than being a perspectival window for the disengaged gaze, the landscape painting invites viewers to inhabit the pictorial space. Second, through comparative studies of selected cases, this essay investigates how Wang’s acknowledgement of the landscape painting’s a-perspectival traits has influenced his specific strategies when using parallel projection methods. The examined cases include Wang’s drawings for the Chen Mo Art Studio (Haiyan, 1998), the Tengtou Pavilion (Shanghai, 2009-2010), and the Xiangshan Campus of the China Academy of Art Phases I and II (Hangzhou, 2002-2008).

The essay concludes by highlighting significant changes in Wang’s later parallel projection drawings. Wang’s work has increasingly delineated architectural terrains as sensory topographies to foster viewers’ time-bound immersive spectatorships. Moreover, when serving his architectural ideas, Wang’s drawings have transcended the geometric representation of depth by implying spaces that exceed the limits of projection drawings. By examining his drawings, this essay sheds light on a salient yet underexamined aspect of Wang’s architectural undertakings. By investigating in-depth case studies of contemporary Chinese architectural drawings, this essay takes a crucial step towards a better understanding of this hitherto understudied domain.

This article follows the fascinating mythology of grace and gift exchange to construct an argument about appearances as transcending the boundaries of things through a form of radiance or shining. The latter is based on the primary figure of the Graces, Aglaea, whose name literally signifies shining. The question arises how the obligatory rules of gift exchange - giving, receiving, and returning - apply to appearances, which leads to a cyclical ’alternating current’ of shining and working. It now becomes clear why the ancient Greeks married the ethereal figure of Aglaea to the sweaty, club footed smithgod Hephaestus: shining things are necessarily linked to the making of shining things. In the magic realm of Hephaestus shining and automation are fully merged: automata are without exception made of gold or silver, while the abundantly embellished objects he creates always evoke movement. At this point in the essay the term ’phenotechnology’ is coined: the work of making things lies in their overworking, which is sharply contrasted to the classic notion of ornament as parergon, as by-work, or in the words of Aby Warburg, as bewegtes Beiwerk. Instead of viewing movement as added on (Alberti) to structure we find that the figural movement of pliant motifs in fact creates structure, a structure that according to Gottfried Semper undergoes ’the mystery of transfiguration’, which reverses the relationship between surface and space: space is the very depth of radiating surfaces.

This article investigates the ideas of New Phenomenology, as developed by Hermann Schmitz. Schmitz distinguishes between the physical body that can be seen and touched, and the felt body that is the place of affective involvement. By locating the felt body as the basis of all human experience, Schmitz radically transcends the division between subject and object in favour of understanding human relations with the world as a question of embodied communication and meaningful situations. Basic principles of philosophical phenomenology, as described by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, are outlined, and New Phenomenology as conceived by Schmitz is presented. The aim is to investigate the relation of human being to the built environment. The Church of St Peter in Klippan designed by Sigurd Lewerentz, the Salk Institute in San Diego designed by Louis Kahn, and the Nordic Pavilion in Venice designed by Sverre Fehn are described, analysed, and discussed through the lens of New Phenomenology. The findings are located in relation to various scholarly writings on phenomenology in architecture, and it is argued that the content of the work of architecture may be emotionally gripped as meaningful presencing in specific situations. It is concluded that – in a world where we desperately need to rethink human relation to the environment in general, and the architect’s relation to building in particular – New Phenomenology can draw attention to human and environment as intrinsically connected. As such, understanding architecture in terms of embodied communication and meaningful situations may be one way to activate environmental awareness.

In modern architectural debate, buildings are made by their description in the literature as much as they are defined by the reality of their construction. On this point, a relatively small glitch in the celebratory narrative of the roof of the Sydney Opera House – four columns that do not appear in the descriptions of the building – offers the opportunity to reflect on the generation of architecture’s canons and perhaps the perceived need to elevate the subject matter by abstracting the engineering of its construction. While questioning the reasons for the absence of the columns from the biographies of the building, the article articulates the value of embracing even the smaller details in projects' histories.

The architect Hans Döllgast (1891–1974) has steadily gained in international recognition. His works of postwar reconstruction in Munich have been heralded as original contributions to modern architecture that resist historiographic classifications, such as modernist vs regionalist, avant garde vs traditionalist, or internationalist vs nationalist. Döllgast was also a revered pedagogue and prolific author, and his varied writings have yet to receive much scholarly attention. Döllgast’s books and essays present a significant body of sources that shed light on the complexity of architectural discourse in the formative years of modern architecture in Germany. This article considers Döllgast’s study of farmhouse ‘parlours’, entitled Alte und neue Bauernstuben (‘Old and New Farmhouse Parlours’) was first published in 1937. It was both his most popular book and the one that critics and historians have paid least attention to. Though it may appear antiquarian at first glance, it is in fact both critical and contemporary in spirit. Döllgast’s study sheds light upon his mature thinking about the relevance of the vernacular for the modern house. It also serves to question a general assumption in the existing literature that Döllgast only engaged with tenets of modern architecture after the war, having been a regionalist aloof from the discourse of the modern movement prior to the war. Scholars have shown that the loaded motif of the vernacular was never the sole preserve of anti-modernist conservatives and played a significant, if ambivalent, role within modernist discourse, from the late Wilhelmine period to postwar West Germany. While it reflects these wider trends, Alte und neue Bauernstuben also eschews alignment with the dominant strands of architectural discourse of its time by charting an independent-minded path in the context of imposed totalitarian uniformity. Döllgast’s text thus stands out in modern architectural discourse less for adducing the farmhouse as such, than for developing such a close, multifaceted reading of a particular vernacular interior, while alluding to more than elaborating its relevance for contemporary architecture. Ultimately, Döllgast’s study served him to develop a practical phenomenology of dwelling.