Columbia University's recent interdisciplinary conference on transparency aimed, according to the convenors, to ‘bring an ordinarily extraordinary material back before our eyes’.

This paper investigates the history and programme of the Chinese architectural journal Time + Architecture (Shidai Jianzhu). As one of the newly established architectural periodicals in post-Mao China, the journal was launched in 1984 by academics Luo Xiaowei, Wang Shaozhou and their colleagues at the Department of Architecture in Tongji University, Shanghai. The journal's close association with academic institutions and commercial design firms shaped its dual nature; that is, both scholarly and professional. At the turn of the millennium, the journal's substantial reform of editorial policy redefined its character from a ‘presenter’ of received materials to a ‘producer’ of selected collaborative work, and enabled it to maintain editorial distinctiveness in the Chinese architectural publishing scene.

This paper argues that Time + Architecture constructed a significant place for critical practice in contemporary China through the presentation of critical architecture and architectural criticism. Over the past few decades, the journal, under the editorship of Zhi Wenjun, published a number of special issues on the work of emerging independent architects such as Yung Ho Chang, Wang Shu, Liu Jiakun and others. The thematic topics, projects and criticisms presented by the journal exemplified an editorial agenda to publish innovative and exploratory work and demonstrated the editors' and contributors' collective endeavours to develop a critical discourse that confronted the dominant ideology of architecture.

The kind of investigation that the Department of Education and Skills (DfES) has brought about through its exemplar design initiative should be commonplace in architectural culture. For an exemplar design is, or should be, an embodiment of theory in a particularly clear and intense way. The DfES has given 11 architects the opportunity to theorize school environments and contribute realizable ideal designs in the context of the biggest investment in primary and secondary education for over a generation.

‘Where the pastoral meets the post-industrial’. London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) Chief of Design, Kathryn Firth's words to describe the area that the Corporation inherited as part of its remit following the Summer Olympic Games in 2012. Seeming to exemplify this, the former industrial warehouses of Hackney Wick, such as the Counter Café [2], allow shrubbery growth and sprawling ivy; their brick exerior walls emblazoned with art work reminiscent of William Morris. What we have here is recognition of the area's pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial episodes; a narrative that serves to provide some temporal coherence to what is a complex and fragmented landscape.

The first chapter of Nikolaus Pevsner's The Englishness of English Art is entitled ‘The Geography of Art’. In this he presents a reflection on the validity of geography as a means of interpreting art and architecture and in it he proposes that, ‘there is a whole string of facts from art and literature [that are] tentatively derived from climate’. The instrumental connection of architecture and climate is widely accepted in the literature of socalled ‘architectural science’. But the influence of geography and the specific conditions of climate may be shown to have a more fundamental influence on architecture than simple pragmatism.

There is nothing, no ‘naked life’, no external standpoint, that can be posed outside this field permeated by money, nothing escapes money.

In 2009, an international masterclass at the Berlage Institute studied a street market in a deprived Rotterdam neighbourhood, the Afrikaanderplein. Headed by Teddy Cruz and supported by Jeanne van Heeswijk and Miguel Robles-Duran – three socially and politically committed architects and artists – the group produced a critique of the tight control and regulation of the market by authorities. The group's proposals were, basically, to liberalise and deregulate the market.

Whether the Afrikaanderplein market is a case which merits deregulation depends, of course, on the specific conditions the group detected in the area. More important here, however, is that the proposals appear, at least superficially, to contrast the anti-neoliberal and radical positions of the three individuals directing the group.

Analysis of the detailed design of a primary school classroom suggests that intelligent sustainable design can be both environmentally beneficial and cost effective.

In this paper architectural Modernism is used to describe the unadorned flat-roofed houses constructed using modern materials such as concrete, reinforced concrete and steel, and built mainly in the period following the First World War. This is a sparse definition that fails to do justice to the much broader interpretation of Modernism, which affected not only architecture, but all the arts in the first quarter of the twentieth century, a movement that reached maturity around 1930. However, even though the definition fails to reflect the richness of the Modernist idiom, the houses have long been recognised as representing Britain's first inroads into Modernist architecture as acknowledged by, for example, Gould, Bentley, Collins and Bettley.

Le Corbusier – The Art of Architecture is the vague and loaded title given to a marvellous but somewhat random collection of Le Corbusier material that has been touring Europe, until recently housed in Lutyens' crypt in Liverpool Cathedral before landing in London this spring at the Barbican, where it feels at home in Brutalist surroundings. The exhibition has provided the inspiration for a festival of Le Corbusier events and talks, competitions and workshops across the country. The question, however, is why?

Martin Heidegger begins his lecture ‘… Poetically Man Dwells …’ by denying poetry is a marginal practice whose imaginings are ‘mere fancies and illusions’. ‘[T]he poetic’, he states, is not ‘merely an ornament and bonus added on to dwelling’. On the contrary, Heidegger boldly claims that poetry is the source of all human dwelling on earth: ‘[…] poetry first causes dwelling to be dwelling. Poetry is what really lets us dwell.’

The connective tissue of Heidegger's argument in ‘… Poetically Man Dwells …’ is the concept of ‘measure’. In the English translation of the lecture, permutations of the term ‘measure’ (Maß/messen) appear a remarkable ninety-four times, not including dozens more uses of its synonyms: ‘dimension’, ‘span’, ‘meter’ and ‘gauge’. What seems surprising, given that the set-up of the lecture revolves around poetry and measure, is that the commonest understanding of measure related to poetry – poetic measure itself – is not discussed thematically by Heidegger. Rather, Heidegger's incessant word play produces meanings that include ‘measuring against’ in the sense of comparing to a standard, ‘measuring up’ a space by ‘stepping-out’ (durchmessen), ‘measuring out’ in the sense of dividing-up or apportioning (das Zu-Gemessene), ‘being measured’ in the sense of having propriety, ‘taking measures’ (die Maß-Nahme) in response to a situation, and ‘measuring between’ as a distance or span. These meanings are of course related to common poetic measure, and might even be claimed to be its ground.

The common lawyer's understanding of land still hovers between a purely material conception of the physical stuff of land and a more cerebral image of land as comprising a co-ordinated set of abstract entitlements. This underlying tension between the physical and the conceptual has imparted a multi-dimensional complexity to the term […]. Kevin Gray and Susan Gray

What is a building? To begin to extrapolate our reasons for posing this question, consider the context of ‘Further Reading’, and the supplementary documents this supposes. To those whose profession is dedicated to the design of buildings, and whose professional life is, all too often, beleaguered by impediments threatening the actualisation, the construction, of their design, supplementary documents are not simply footnotes to design but evidence of struggles over design control. Within this trajectory, law is, most frequently, figured as yet another problematic. But consider a rather different trope – one which uses aspects of legal thinking, or rather thinking through law, to re-engage with the idea of ‘a building’ and of ‘design’. Supplementary documents, in this sense, become a ‘supplement’ which we could characterise as an ‘excess’. Documents which before might have been marginalised now become reconstituted as artefacts, evidencing other accounts of the processes of architecture. Legal artefacts related to design and building, which evidence a series of techniques and strategies for diagramming rights and responsibilities, may be deployed to open new perspectives on the question of ‘What is a building?’

Alvar Aalto's Vuoksenniska Church (1958) has been widely discussed in architectural literature, often in general terms of plasticity or ambiguity. Yet previous studies have given relatively little consideration to the approximately 800 archived sketches and drawings for the project. When a limited number of Aalto's sketches for the church have appeared previously, an isolated sketch has often been used to illustrate a single aspect or element of the church, such as a notable lighting or acoustic detail. The church's complexity and spatial qualities make it well suited for more detailed study, using sketches and drawings to clarify the design process of the church and provide new insights. The most important sketches and drawings from the church's design process are presented and discussed in this paper. They illustrate how the design process began with simple sketches, in plan and section, for folding and moveable partitions, highlighting Aalto's priority for balancing religious and social activities in the church through divisible meeting spaces. Acoustical considerations were also combined in these earlier plans, while section sketches show how the church's skylight and unique clerestory windows were gradually developed through several iterations. The threefold repetition of elements in both plan and section was consistent throughout the design process. The structure of the church was designed with simple organic motifs like frogs and fish, but was also intentionally combined with other key elements. While previous studies have emphasised one aspect of the church or another, Aalto's sketches taken together offer a more holistic understanding. They show the interrelated nature of different elements in the church and the relative relationships between different sketches and ideas in the design process. As a work of architecture, the church's definitive qualities of architectural harmony and coherence are far more compelling than any one particular feature or notable detail.

The late seventeenth century saw massive shifts in construction techniques and practice. This was particularly true in structural carpentry and owed much to the innovations of a single architect.

Sir Christopher Wren occupies a central place in English architectural history. Yet he was also a mathematician and it is reasonable to assume that he took more than a passing interest in the structural aspects of his buildings. Starting from the work of David Yeomans (1992 et al), this article considers his involvement in one particular craft, carpentry. By returning to the original documents and from careful measurement and recording of the surviving works and other buildings of the time, it reveals that his office had a far greater influence than hitherto supposed.

A founding member of the Computer-Aided Design Group at the University of Cambridge, UK, and a student and collaborator of CAD pioneer Steven A. Coons at MIT, Robin Forrest occupies an important place in the history of computational design. Along with important contributions to the mathematics of shape representation, his coining of the term ‘computational geometry’ in 1971 offered a handle on design techniques that started to emerge – somewhat uncomfortably at first – in the interstices of engineering, mathematics, and the fledgling field of computer science. Initially fostered by governmentsponsored research into Computer-Aided Design for aircraft and car manufacturing, the methods he helped develop have since been encoded in countless commercial software systems for 3D modelling and simulation, helping structure the intellectual work – and the professional identity – of architects, engineers, and other practitioners of design.

The expression of time is pervasive in Japanese culture and architecture. At the Chapel on Mount Rokko, Tadao Ando draws on native traditions to articulate a range of temporal phenomena.

In his essay of 1983, ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism’, Kenneth Frampton referred to the Bagsværd Church as a primary exemplar, briefly citing the architect's representation of ‘the Chinese pagoda roof’ in this project, to emphasise the importance of crosscultural inspiration in the creation of ‘critical regionalism’. Peter Myers followed Frampton in his 1993 ‘Une histoire inachevée’, arguing for the significant role that Chinese architecture played as a source for Utzon's Bagsværd Church design and further variations on the theme of Chinese and Japanese exemplars on Utzon's work follows. Françoise Fromonot established the importance of the 1925 edition of the Yingzao-fashi (State Building Standard, first published in 1103 ad) and Johannes Prip-Møller's 1937 Chinese Buddhist Monasteries for Utzon; Philip Drew pointed out the significance of the work of Chinese writer Lin Yutang (1895–1976) and historian Osvald Sirén (1879–1966) as important channels through which Utzon perceived East Asian art and architecture; while in 2002, Richard Weston suggested Das Japanische Wohnhaus (1935), written by Japanese architect Tetsuro Yoshida (1894–1956), as a formational influence in Utzon's early perception of Japanese building culture. However, none of these works attempt to clarify the precise role that Chinese and Japanese precedents play in Utzon's architectural career. Two more recent studies, by Philip Goad and Michael Asgaard Andersen, have confirmed the role of Chinese architecture in Utzon's church design and have introduced new evidence and details, but there are still unanswered questions about the exact nature of these influences. This article attempts to address the detailed process of Utzon's cross-cultural practices for his design of the Bagsværd Church in order to reveal how Utzon interpreted specific ideas, ideals, and artefacts from East Asian building culture.

‘The fire is burning. Is it burning for me or against me? Will it give tangible shape to my dreams, or will it eat them up? I know pottery traditions going back thousands of years; all the potters’ tricks I know, I have used them all. But we have not yet reached the end. The spirit of the material has not yet been overcome.’

(Adolf Loos, ‘Pottery’)

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.