The private house has perhaps always been a prototype for more elaborate architecture, but never more so than in the heyday of the Modern Movement, when it provided both the opportunity for experiment and the chance to explore creatively the changing essence of dwelling. This article, based on a keynote lecture given to the Alvar Aalto Foundation in February 2015, compares the generating principles of Alvar and Aino Aalto's own house of 1936 with those of built and unbuilt houses by Hugo Häring, underlining the importance of specific planning and spatial relationships as the essential generators, to which the making of façades remained subordinate or at least secondary. Häring's Woythaler House of 1927 also appears here for the first time in a properly comprehensible form, thanks to information recovered from drawings now available in the public realm.

The article seeks to generate a more nuanced version of environmental ethics than the current positivistic approach taken towards the ecological crisis by referring to the sense of ecology as evident in the practice and writings of Richard Neutra. Despite the whiteness of his architecture, Neutra's architecture was ecological in a profound way in which the ethics of the inter-personal and related dwelling activities of inhabitants are as important as measuring energy performance. For him, more fundamental than man's relationship with nature or natural resources was the inter-personal sharing of ‘we’, in which scarcity itself is the medium of a proportionate joining. Put differently, the reciprocity between the natural and the inter-personal, in which the former reinforces the latter, was the key to an ecological setting.

In the process of underpinning Neutra's sense of the reciprocity between the natural and the inter-personal, as well as the shared inter-personal communication in an atmosphere, this article draws ideas from Japanese intellectual tradition such as Tetsuro Watsuji&s notion of fudo, or climate, and its correlate inter-personal ethics, and Kitaro Nishida's account of a trans-subjective mode of communication of the ‘we’. Referring to this Japanese tradition in which Neutra was deeply interested, the article interprets Neutra's architecture based not upon the ego-oriented mode of the ‘I’ but upon the ego-less mode of ‘ek-sistere’ that reinstates the condition of the human being as a pre-reflective corporeal being, or what I would like to call a ‘common subjectivity’ to be articulated into different, yet conjoined, ‘I’s to form a joint measure. In this fashion, the article demonstrates how one's relationship with the natural necessarily involves the dimension of the inter-personal, while illuminating the goal of Neutra's practice: securing a place for the inter-personal through the coordination of natural forces.

Sustainability is the most significant force to change architecture since the breakthrough of modernism a century ago. So far the contributions of architects to this mandate have largely amounted to technological interventions. Yet the urgent call for sustainability demands going beyond merely technological solutions to modify behavioral patterns, cultural habits and even our deeply ingrained ideas about ourselves. The very notion that architecture could modify behavioral patterns, or the sedimentation of habits seems far-fetched in an epistemological framework that has drawn strict lines between outside and inside, subject and object, body and mind — all the dualities that the cognitive and neurosciences have been gradually working to undermine. Our practice as architects has been unconsciously shaped by centuries of formalist thinking that have turned buildings into inanimate objects; a habit of thinking that has weakened our role and contributed to the sense that architecture is a luxury item, one among many consumable commodities — though we can no longer deny that it is the very fabric of our survival and flourishing.

Further, the once healthy plurality of our architectural theory has left us without a coherent philosophical framework with which to confront the climate crisis. For John Dewey, theory and practice were not ontologically separate domains, but two distinct yet inseparable and necessary aspects of engaging in the world. This essay explores how Dewey's pragmatic philosophy could help to build a theoretical framework that would allow us to apply and integrate the findings of the cognitive and neurosciences into our architectural practice and education, so that we might respond not only to the constraints and opportunities of the given context — site, program and energy resources—but also to the limits and affordances of our perceptual systems and the whole of our body and mind.

This study explores a formative period in the development of Gangnam, an exclusive district south of the Han River that was conceived of and shaped in the context of South Korea's militaristic and capitalist urban culture of the late 1960s. Created in imitation of what was at the time considered to be a highly modern urbanism that had been transplanted not only from the West but also from neighboring countries such as Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore, Gangnam was meant to provide an urban zone that would be secure from the threat of North Korean aggression while simultaneously proclaiming South Korea's ambitions to become a modern nation. This drive to create a new identity for Korea as a capitalist and developed nation, combined with the strong authoritarian nature of the South Korean state, meant that the implementation of modernist architecture and urbanism in Gangnam was primarily made to serve the nation-building and entrepreneurial ambitions of the state. Gangnam thus provides an example of the implementation of modernist structures and planning concepts that were originally envisioned as ways of providing meaningful public space by countering unchecked private speculation (i.e. massive apartment complexes, neighborhood units, superblocks, and automobile-oriented roadways) in the service of materialism at its most flamboyant. This perplexing condition could be said to be the result of what happens when architectural or urban forms are emptied of their publically-oriented ethical impulse, particularly in state-led large-scale urbanisation. While Gangnam can in some respects be considered to be a successful implementation of a modernist cityscape in the sense that it continues to be developed and thrive, it has become the centre of a segregated and unequal urbanity characterized by a highly materialist and extremely competitive culture that is diametrically opposed to the original intentions of those earlier modernist avant-gardes.

Both before and after his forced resignation from the charge of the Sydney Opera House (1956–66)in 1966, Danish Architect Jørn Utzon (1918–2008) has cited Chinese architecture as one of the most important inspirational sources of his unfinished masterpiece. However, the significance of Chinese building culture has largely been overlooked in historical accounts of Utzon's Opera House design. This is despite ample evidences suggesting several direct analogies of Chinese architecture in Utzon's design proposals. The evidence also indicates that one of the key Chinese sources for Utzon comes from the written works of Finland-born and Sweden-based art historian Osvald Sirén 喜龍仁 (1879–1966). Accordingly, this paper aims to identify Utzon's perception of Chinese architecture from Sirén's interpretation of this subject, and Utzon's eventual reinterpretation of this notion in his design of the Sydney Opera House.

The article poses four questions. First, what were the socio-political contexts both of Sirén and Utzon's approach to Chinese architecture? Second, how did Sirén interpret Chinese architecture in his scholarly work? Third, what was the interrelationship between Sirén and Utzon? And fourth, how did Utzon reinterpret Sirén's concept in his design for the Sydney Opera House? To respond to these questions, the authors surveyed the literature associated with Sirén and Utzon, reviewed their private collections, and undertook interviews with their friends, colleagues and followers. On this basis, the authors constructed a series of ideological analogies between Sirén and Utzon's work, with particular emphasis on Utzon's design for the Sydney Opera House.

Design can be viewed as a complex and on-going social accomplishment, a product of everyday trajectories between a milieu of human and material registers. Seen in this way the design practice serves as an arena for these quotidian activities. We seek to construct a more dynamic picture of architecture by connecting process and product, supplementing a project narrative with one of practice, highlighting the context in which the outcome was created. We address the research question: how does practice culture become intertwined within the designed product?

A research model emerged from the review of the literature and evolved as a loose framework to discuss the practices and projects at hand. The research focused on the particular design consideration of adaptability in an effort to direct and ground the study. The research was conducted in two stages –at first a set of interviews were conducted to gain broader insights into the everyday accounts of the practices and secondly, project case studies were selected to further investigate the topic.

The narratives reveal the culture of each practice to stress a particular meaning in each context: for Make it is about a beautiful object; for ABA a piece of social infrastructure and; for CGL a business asset. Adaptability finds itself subdued, promoted, compromised and sold as part of the design process and the resultant architecture. Our contribution extends the argument that design is entangled within its socio-cultural surroundings and grounds the culture of practice in the designed artefacts - the way in which a practice handles decision-making contingencies, both endogenous and exogenous forces, will together shape a practice disposition towards design (adaptability). Design that is driven by a strong culture that embeds exogenous influences in the approach tends to provide more adaptable solutions as part of a quest to satisfy long-term, societal concerns.