In 1960, Belgian artist Rene Magritte painted La Corde Sensible. In the background is a natural landscape, characterised by mountains and by a river. At the front is a champagne glass topped by a cloud. It prompts questions: does the cloud have its own weight? Is the glass mediating between the liquid state of the river and the gaseous state of the cloud? A few years later in 1972, the Viennese group Haus-Rucker-Co depicted a similar provocative scenario in ‘Big Piano’. In place of a champagne glass, a ladder with many steps – each with a different sound – reaches towards a cloud, which is a site of immersion and the loss of orientation.

These two examples, along with other artistic manifestations from the same period, reveal the rise of an aesthetic sensibility, which for the first time, questioned traditional physical and perceptual boundaries seemingly fixed by tradition, pursuing a sort of material evanescence. They illustrate a process of formal and conceptual dematerialisation. Generally, one may say that, from the second half of the twentieth century, the discipline of aesthetics experienced a radical change: shifting away from semantic or hermeneutic interpretations back to its original meaning: aesthetics as aisthesis, the ancient Greek word for perception. This implied a rediscovery of the body, the rehabilitation of the senses, and a renewed interest in phenomenology.

Luis Barragán (Guadalajara, Mexico, 1902-1988) and José Antonio Coderch (Barcelona, Spain, 1913-1984), despite having different origins, shared a common ground. Their architecture – based on Mediterranean tradition – was adapted to similar mild climate conditions, where shadowed and protected open spaces played a role as transitional spaces between indoors and outdoors. Those spaces were not treated as traditional elements incorporated within the buildings’ repertories, but were spatial proposals with a goal – rooted in their cultural backgrounds – of enriching the relationship between both realms. In this essay, common features arise when comparing two paradigmatic houses built by Barragán (Casa Prieto López, Mexico City, Mexico, 1950) and Coderch (Casa Ugalde, Caldes d’Estrach, Spain, 1951), within subjects such as the role of tradition, the relationship to the place, or the explanation of their architecture as a plastic experience.

Private and public are clearly separated in both architects’ works, generally by a hermetic and neutral facade, behind which indoors and outdoors are interwoven, in such a way that open spaces take part of the interior of their houses and views towards the landscape or the sky break up the limits. Some of the spaces are settled in a kind of ambiguous category: there will be enclosed rooms with no ceiling, or patios and porches with windows in them.

The common Mediterranean heritage appears within plane and plastered abstract walls, where plasticity rises from roughness, colour, light and shadow. The nuances appear in the personal interpretation of the experience of space, as well as in answer to the local conditions, and it is then that a different position in relation to nature emerges; whereas the Mediterranean coast is naturally soft and mild, the Mexican vegetation and geological features introduce a brave contrast between the open and the built.

In England, the establishment of art history as a professional discipline was consolidated by the foundation of the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1932, and the Warburg Library's move from Hamburg to London the following year due to the rise of the Nazi régime; a political situation that caused the emigration of German-speaking scholars such as Fritz Saxl, Ernst Gombrich and Rudolf Wittkower. Colin Rowe, an influential member of the second generation of historians of modern architecture, was educated as part of this cultural milieu in the postwar period, studying at the Warburg Institute in London. In the ‘Addendum 1973’ to his first published article ‘The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa’ (1947), Rowe acknowledged the Wölfflinian origins of his analysis – Saxl and Wittkower had studied under Heinrich Wölfflin – and the validity of his inherited German formal methods. This assumption, in the opinion of one of Rowe's students, the architectural historian and critic Anthony Vidler, indicated the ‘still pervasive force of the late nineteenth century German school of architectural history in England in the years after the Second World War’.

The Fun Palace, a collaborative enterprise initiated by the radical theatre producer Joan Littlewood and architect Cedric Price in early 1960s London articulated a response to the ‘increased leisure’ available to postwar British society. A critical model for cultural production in which civics met pleasure, the Fun Palace project aimed to construct situations for playful exchange conducted through self-directed actions as a way to activate audiences. Pleasure for all – a ‘breakthrough to total enjoyment’, in opposition to what was seen as existing commodified leisure practices – became understood as a critical agenda pitched against the elitist and interventionist Labour government's 1965 White Paper, A Policy for the Arts: The First Steps. Enforcing class-based distinctions between the high arts and popular entertainment, state arts policy failed to address the key role played by the media in the rise of the leisure society. In analysing British communications in the 1960s, the cultural critic Raymond Williams argued that, rather than opposing fine art with popular entertainment, social growth could only be achieved through the circulation of public and independent media, opportunities for which were at the time limited within the corporate structure of British broadcasting and press.

This article approaches three architectural facts, three works of architecture: three embassies designed by the same architect. They are the centre and horizon of the article and its goal is to make explicit the architectural processes, strategies, and decisions of conceiving and designing them. Therefore, this article gives words to things above all, while citing one or two insightful ideas from other authors. Its immanent verbs are to show and to reveal. Through dense descriptions and critical redrawings, this article seeks to prove that the creative design process of Guillermo Jullian de la Fuente is a continuous one, which can be seen through a deep examination of his buildings’ courtyards, the apparently empty residual useless spaces. The idea of courtyard is what gives purpose to Jullian's whole design process. Jullian's game is to decide their formal characteristics through a series of abstract matrices of lines and patches. In his design process, every step and every work is a possibility for evolution, variation, or disruption. There are no intellectual causes behind these foral studies but a set of creative decisions. This article also tries to show when and where those decisions occur. It seeks to contribute to the practice of design research.

From a starting point of Jay Swayze's extraordinary Underground Homes and Gardens project (1980) this paper explores and contextualises the bunker's significance and accelerated production under threat from atomic weapons in the Cold War. The nuclear bunker represents the end-point of a series of buried and semi-buried structures. Bulwarks since the early eighteenth century against increasingly sophisticated forms of ordnance, they emerge in increasing numbers throughout the twentieth century across a series of scales and spheres from the household to the civic and urban. In its proliferation as a building type and precise fitness to purpose, the bunker is arguably as emblematic of modernity as the department store, the great exhibition, the skyscraper or the machine-inspired domestic space advocated by Le Corbusier. It also represents the obverse – or perhaps a parodic iteration – of the preoccupations of early architectural modernism: a vast underground international style, cast in millions of tons of thick, reinforced concrete retaining walls, whose spatial relationship to the landscape above was strictly mediated through the periscope, the loop-hole, the range finder and the strategic necessity to both resist and facilitate the technologies and scopic regimes of weaponry.

This paper critically uncoils Paul Virillo's observation that, once physically eclipsed in its topographical and technical settings, the bunker's efficacy would mutate to other domains, retaining and remaking its meaning in another topology. ‘The essence of the new fortress’, he writes, ‘is elsewhere, underfoot, invisible from here on in’. Shaped by this impulse, this paper attempts to render visible the bunker's relationship to modernity and its architectural, cultural and urban contributions to the twentieth century. In doing so it excavates some of the relationships between the physical artefact, its implications and its enduring metaphorical and perceptual ghosts as domestic realms and whole cities and regions became atomic.

In De Arquitectura, Vitruvius lists three interrelated Latin terms – firmitas (strength or structural stability), utilitas (functionality or appropriate spatial accommodation), and venustas (beauty or attractive appearance), as being the basis of good architecture. Regarding firmitas, he implies that a good architect needs to choose the best and most solid materials, regardless of their cost. Yet, perhaps dismissing Vitruvius's advice, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, most Postmodern architects went on to erect buildings that often looked more like stage sets than anything strong and durable.

Postmodern designers applied colour, pattern, and ornament to buildings, transferring ordinary and everyday popular imagery, forms, and material into high culture. By rejecting modern design and aesthetics, they also dismissed the building techniques and materials used by their predecessors. As explained by experts from the Portland-based architecture firm Peter Meijer Architect, PC (PMA), ‘there is an inherent impermanence of the original materials based on a default decision making process that limited a building's longevity to a twenty-five year life-cycle’ for Postmodern architecture. In other words, Postmodern buildings were often built as ephemeral constructions, for which longevity was not an absolute value.

Like modernism, postmodernism was an international phenomenon with significant regional variants. Britain played an important role in mediating between the very different postmodernisms developing in North America and Continental Europe. It helped that London was at the centre of architectural discourse in the 1970s. The Architectural Association attracted international figures such as Charles Jencks, Léon Krier, and Rem Koolhaas, while publications such as Architectural Design and Andreas Papadakis's Academy Editions imprint combined coverage of new buildings with excursions into theory and history. James Stirling, John Outram, and Edward Jones won important overseas commissions, while the work of Terry Farrell, Jeremy Dixon, and others was exhibited at the seminal 1980 Venice Biennale.