Valery’s cry for clarity stiffens my resolve to write from the position of a working life in architectural practice. Sometimes we need to raise our heads above the heat of daily battle with budgets and restrictive regulations, to remind ourselves of what it was that made architecture such a compelling field of study in the first place. Personal experience of works of architecture persuades us that architectural design provides useful evidence of human intelligence. And there is a case to be made for connecting the widely accepted value of historic architecture to the less well-established position of contemporary architecture in the culture, to pay attention to what Robin Evans once called ‘the small poetic voice of modern architecture’.3

One of the most conventional architectural elements is the plinth. Neither a specifically modern nor Western element, it is a familiar feature of religious buildings, and associated in premodern societies with the altar. The plinth is commonly understood as an expression of the elevation of the structure towards the sacred and its separation from profane daily life. A number of fairly recent publications have discussed the function of the architectural plinth in the twentieth century. The architectural historian Fritz Neumeyer, architectural historian and theorist K. Michael Hays, and architect and theorist Pier Vittorio Aureli have all argued that the role of the plinth in the work of Mies van der Rohe is mediation.1 In this, they modify a common modern conception of the plinth as an element that isolates and separates a building from its environment.

In February 1944 a thirty-nine-year-old itinerant architect named Heinrich ‘Henry’ Klumb [1] (1905–1984), moved to the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico for what was supposed to be a short-term, public works job with the island’s provincial government, that is, a territorial government that had been established and was largely supervised by the American federal government. At the time of his arrival on the island, Klumb was a one-time German immigrant, a former protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn’s occasional design and business partner during the mid-to-late 1930s, and a moderately successful designer of a variety of projects and building types. These early projects and building types included residences, prototype prefabricated buildings and houses, museum exhibits, furniture pieces, and a number of housing and urban master plans. Over the next forty years he would emerge as Puerto Rico’s most locally well-known and prolific modern architect. His major successes on the island consisted of his public works, university buildings, churches, residences, and office buildings. Outside of Puerto Rico, his association with Frank Lloyd Wright has also generated a measure of interest.

This article examines the emergence of a new materiality in Israeli architecture in the 1950s. I refer here to two distinct but interrelated senses of the word materiality. The first is predicated on the socioeconomic and geopolitical conditions in which architecture, like all fields of artistic production, takes shape; the second reflects the use, handling, and finishing of materials in construction. I show how several key figures in architectural circles in the recently founded State of Israel expressed this new materiality by developing a new style, characterised by restrained formal gestures, abstention from material extravagance, the use and exposure of local materials, an emphasis on the legibility of structure, and an appeal to rational building procedures. This style was a product of both pressing objective material constraints, which were acute in the postwar welfare state and its austerity regime, and ideological frameworks from the interwar period, the foundations of which were cultural as well as disciplinary.

Australia’s laid-back, sun-drenched beach lifestyle has been a celebrated and prominent part of its official popular culture for nigh on a century, and the images and motifs associated with this culture have become hallmarks of the country’s collective identity. Though these representations tend towards stereotype, for many Australians the idea of a summer holiday at the beach is one that is intensely personal and romanticised – its image is not at all urbanised. As Douglas Booth observed, for Australians the beach has become a ‘sanctuary at which to abandon cares – a place to let down one’s hair, remove one’s clothes […] a paradise where one could laze in peace, free from guilt, drifting between the hot sand and the warm sea, and seek romance’.1 Beach holidays became popular in the interwar years of the twentieth century, but the most intense burst of activity – both in touristic promotion and in the development of tourism infrastructure – accompanied the postwar economic boom, when family incomes were able to meet the cost of a car and, increasingly, a cheap block of land by the beach upon which a holiday home could be erected with thrift and haste. In subtropical southeast Queensland, the postwar beach holiday became the hallmark of the state’s burgeoning tourism industry; the state’s southeast coastline in particular benefiting from its warm climate and proximity to the capital, Brisbane. It was here – along the evocatively named Gold Coast (to Brisbane’s south) and Sunshine Coast (to its north) [1] – that many families experienced their first taste of what is now widely celebrated as the beach lifestyle [2]. As one reflection has it:

Almost every architecture school in China has its own university-run design institute, which functions as a platform for academics and students to engage with architectural practice.1 Design institutes play an active role in advancing, producing, and sharing architectural knowledge.2 Academic-architects, in the context of design institutes, tend to embed themselves within a complex academic-professional network, simultaneously engaging with scholarly inquiry, training young professionals and transforming cultural assets into capital in the market.3 It is the unique position of such educator-practitioners that has distinguished the work of university-run design institutes from that of numerous other state-backed design institutes.

Construction is by far the largest material-consuming activity in the UK. In 2016, the territory produced more than 800 kg of construction and demolition (C&D) waste per person.1 Most of these building materials are energy intensive to produce and environmentally costly to transport. Their premature replacement therefore contributes significantly to the increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.