The Dong carpentry rule is reflective of the Dong's culture, traditions and construction methods related to human measurement. It is dimensioned by a comparable set of lucky and unlucky units instead of abstract geometries, indicating the favorable and unfavorable units that can be applied in construction. As a measurement system derived from the human body, the units celebrate more critical sections such as the head, feet or joints, relating to the proportions of the ‘master craftsman's body. Thus, on a construction site, the representation of the human body acts to convey scale and measurement, and particularly, this ruler holds the human proportion for sacred and public buildings, specifically Drum Towers and ‘Wind and Rain’ bridges. In this paper, the measuring system will be explored to show how it is made and assists the carpenters in dimensioning their buildings. This measurement system establishes a relationship between the construction and their beliefs.

Transparency, translucency and surface reflectance are material qualities that underpin modernist aesthetics. The lightness and transparency of buildings remain manifestly contemporary and the walls of our cities continue to open up, as the default material of choice is glass. From London to Los Angeles, from the Shard to the Crystal Mall, the potency and immateriality of the crystal image is a liberation of the modern imagination. This paper concerns the crystal imagination as represented in the architectural interiors and poetry of Belgian symbolism. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, aesthetic theory and output in Brussels was, remarkably, more developed than that of other European capitals. For the Symbolist artists, coloured and patterned glass, mirrors and rare stones were deeply fascinating as they were at once transparent (see-through) and also contained an interior mysteriously closed to the world outside. As a reflection on the dominance of the visible in contemporary architecture, this paper explores the dual aspects of the crystal image – as both open and closed - and the notion of interior as it matures in the work of the architect Victor Horta. Here, a highly subjective taste for the artificial is combined with themes that surround the crystal and which continue into the materialism of modernist movement through German expressionism. Bruno Taut's Cologne Werkbund Exhibition Glashaus (1914) embodied Scheerbart's crystal visions, and went on to inspire the activist movement that was to deliver such dreams into political action. The paper comments on the development of Taut's ideas in modernism, and the correlation of glass and crystal to the singular experience of vision. It suggests that the crystal imagination of the late nineteenth century, and the potential for those crystal metaphors to disclose worlds not available to sight, still may provide rich inspiration for tomorrow's architectural visions.

Architecture in Northern Ireland in the twentieth century followed much the same pattern as elsewhere in the British Isles moving, broadly, from historic styles around the turn of the century, through a phase of Arts and Crafts activity for a decade or so, until settling down to a concentrated period of interest in Neo-Georgian styling in the 1920s and '30s. This inter-war era included, however, some examples of Modernism, primarily of an ornamented Art Deco type but occasionally of a more plain variety which ranged between Functionalism and the International Style. Examples of this type of modern architecture – characterised by flat roofs, white walls, large horizontal windows and a general avoidance of ornamentation – formed only a comparatively small part of the overall output of the period in Northern Ireland, and, for most architects who were involved, their contribution amounted to little more than a building or two; such was the prevailing tradition-bound architectural mood of the time.

One architect in Northern Ireland, however, demonstrated a commitment to the Modern Movement that appears to have been greater than most. That was Philip Bell, whose name has been mentioned from time to time by various commentators, whether as a designer of Modernist houses or as the architect of one other particularly well-known building of the 1930s in Northern Ireland, the Strangford Lough Yacht Club House, which was an accomplished and stylish enough building to have been featured in the English architectural press at the time.

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 article focuses on a critique of three different approaches to undergraduate architecture design studio teaching around the scenario of post-conflict reconstruction in Lebanon following the Hezbollah-Israeli war in 2006. Broadly, the author argues for the value of their own politically-engaged/critical teaching method over politically ‘neutral’ humanitarian, or radical but politically pre-disposed approaches. In addition to the relevance of how the topic of post-conflict reconstruction in architectural teaching relates to questions of political ‘positionality’, the article also offers an insight into the challenging political environment faced by academics in Lebanon and how this highlights the ethical limits of ‘apoliticality’.

The article examines the post-WW2 expanded understanding of the concept of Mediterraneità or Mediterranean-ness in the South Adriatic coastal region of Montenegro in the former Yugoslavia, primarily as a modernist recourse against the demand for productivity and tenets of socialist realism and socialist aestheticism. The discussion of Mediterraneità refers to recent research of Italian architecture by Michelangelo Sabatino (2010), arguing that over the period of thirty years in its wider resonance across the Adriatic littoral, the original notion was adapted to different regional, cultural and socio-political contexts. This article specifically analyses the theory of modular coordination of the architect Milan Zloković (Trieste, 1898 – Belgrade, 1965), professor of architectural composition and design at the University of Belgrade, and its application in the tourist colony Hotel Mediterranean in the city of Ulcinj in Montenegro, which he realised in co-authorship with his son, architect and engineer Đorđe Zloković (1927, Trieste) and daughter, architect Milica Mojović (1932, Belgrade), in the early 1960s. In order to achieve meaningful if economically highly restrained design and efficient construction for developing mass tourism of the Montenegro littoral, the architects argued for the usefulness of modular coordination not only from the rational but also from the compositional point of view. The article explores a specific understanding of modern Mediterraneità in the Ulcinj colony which combines scientific means of modular coordination and the spirit of vernacular building in stone. The methodology combines historical and theoretical interpretation with geometric and proportional analysis of typology and modular coordination. The original graphic geometric methods are derived from the theory of the architect Milan Zloković through comparative analysis of Le Corbusier's Modulor, Alexander Klein's method of successive increments and Richard Padovan's interpretation of proportional systems correspondences. The article brings previously unpublished photographic documentation from the period.

As to the isothermicity of the translucent walls, experimental laboratories will be able in the near future to give us a new translucent material whose isothermal properties will be equal to that of the thickest wall. From then on, we will witness the inauguration of a new era: buildings will be altogether hermetically closed. Windows will no longer be needed on the façade; consequently neither dust nor flies nor mosquitoes will enter the houses; nor will noise.

Le Corbusier's fascination with light and glass formed a continuing thread throughout his career. After his maxim ‘architecture is lighted floors’ came the passionate discourses to defend the building's openness, first with his fenêtre en longueur, the ribbon window, and ultimately with his emblematic pan de verre, the glass wall that would not only provide sunlight-flooded interiors but would also most significantly contribute to shape the Modernist imagery. Despite the profuse explorations invested in this concept, Le Corbusier would always lament his failure to execute his ‘pan de verre 100%’ in the way he would have desired: ‘as a mur neutralisant constituted by a double glass-wall with an internal cavity through which conditioned air would circulate, hot in winter, cold in summer’.

The idea of the mur neutralisant was born as part of a challenging environmental theory for buildings, termed either respiration exacte or air exact [1], proposed by Le Corbusier in collaboration with his cousin and practice partner Pierre Jeanneret in 1928. Le Corbusier would describe this theory in two of his most dogmatic publications: first, as one of his lectures (5 October 1929) collected in Précisions (1930) and, second, as part of La Ville Radieuse (1935), his manifesto on modern habitation.

Ian Fleming's recently-opened Floridiana Hotel, in Miami Beach, where James Bond's client, Mr Junius du Pont, ‘promise[s] to make [him] comfortable’, was correctly matched in the film adaptation of Goldfinger with Morris Lapidus's Modernist Fontainebleau Hotel (1952–54) rather than with Miami's Mediterranean-style Hotel Floridian. Fleming was not enthusiastic about the architecture of the most expensive hotel in the world (at the time of its opening), nor about its ‘rich and dull’ gardens. He obviously chose it as a representation of the ‘easy, soft, high’ life of 1959 in Miami, and as the perfect setting for a gathering of American millionaires and secret agents, gamblers, gangsters, hitmen and prostitutes.

Directly below Bond['s Aloha Suite], the elegant curve of the Cabana Club swept down to the beach – two storeys of changing-rooms below a flat roof dotted with chairs and tables and an occasional red and white striped umbrella. Within the curve was the brilliant green oblong Olympic-length swimming-pool fringed on all sides by row upon row of mattressed steamer chairs on which the customers would soon be getting their fiftydollar-a-day sunburn.

The evening before, Bond had ‘the most delicious meal […] in his life’, at the most expensive restaurant of Miami. But the thought of ‘eating like a pig […] the easy life, the rich life revolted him. He felt momentarily ashamed of his disgust […] It was the puritan in him that couldn't take it'. It was also Fleming's nod to his readers, barely out of the grim austerity of postwar Britain, where food was rationed until 1954, bombsites abounded, housing was severely substandard or temporary, smog was thick and yellow, and wartime shortages lingered to the end of the decade. Despite Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's optimistic 1957 assurance to his fellow Conservatives that most of them had ‘never had it so good’, outside lavatories and no central heating were still common. His calls for ‘restraint and common sense’ were hardly answered by Bond's life of oyster-and-champagne dining and air-conditioned vacationing.

In Alvar Aalto's architecture wood had an important role, symbolically and as a material. Aalto brought out the biological characteristics of wood and its relationship with human beings and with nature in his architecture. Aalto was a master at combining Finnish vernacular building with the European tradition and metamorphosing into some other material as he went along. Concrete, glass, wood and brick were all equally worthy materials.

In Aalto's architecture, the role of wood is based above all on the ease with which it can be worked, its heat insulation properties and the fact that it is pleasant to the touch. Trees themselves as symbols of growth and sources of form of different kinds, and forests as spatial outlines, however, gave wood a mythical character. To Aalto, wood was adapted as an argument for human warmth and humanism when, to his mind, Modernism, the International Style, began to become too stereotyped and estranged from the idealism Aalto associated with it. With time, wood became for Aalto more and more a material that was used for cladding buildings and worked as a space divider, a material that was employed to soften acoustics and was used in details for places that people were going to touch.

It could be said that, on the one hand, wood acted as decoration in Aalto's buildings, but on the other, the variations of form in the wooden detailing show a synthesis of Aalto's architecture.

‘Conventions of a competition system: jury reports and competition briefs published in Wettbewerbe Aktuell’ is part of a broader enquiry into the relationship between architectural competitions in Germany in the 1970's, 1980's and 1990's and the dissemination of competition results in the form of drawings, model photographs, abbreviated contents of competition briefs and jury reports, in the journal Wettbewerbe Aktuell. The paper briefly introduces the German competition system and its regulations relevant at the time, before charting Wettbewerbe Aktuell's beginnings and publishing format. A close reading of primary school and museum competitions published in the journal then provides the platform for an analysis of the content and format of the briefs and jury reports published with the prize-winning schemes. The objective of the paper is to identify principles, similarities and regularities and their possible effects on competition architecture, in the texts – briefs and jury reports – which describe and analyse architectural competitions in Wettbewerbe Aktuell.

This article re-examines the swimming pool as a potent building type embodying the salient characteristics of Modernity. Not only did the building of modern public swimming pools celebrate new materials, engineered solutions and technologies but they also reflected rapidly changing attitudes to the body, leisure and fitness in line with Modernist aspirations. Public pools thus created new communal places where relationships between social, natural and built environments could be explored and embraced.

In understanding these social and design aspirations to create the Modern ‘good life’, a set of English and Australian waterside open-air swimming pools and lidos of the 1930s – Scarborough (1915–1934), Tinside (1935), the Eastern Beach Reserve Geelong (1939) and the North Sydney pool (1936) – are described and compared in their past and present state. These seaside pools offered places for people to seek refuge within a setting which remains at once natural but also controlled and shaped, while also promoting the psychological and physiological benefits of open-air activities.

In re-appraising the fate of the public swimming pool today, the article concludes by highlighting two successful contemporary examples, the Badeschiff in Berlin (2009) and the Copenhagen Harbour Bath (2003). We argue that these new pools have grown out of precedents found in the early twentieth century but have reinvigorated the type by offering new interpretations of designing with nature, and providing facilities more relevant to current leisure and environmental trends. Their success lends support to the need for careful documentation and conservation of earlier surviving exemplars.

This paper investigates the radical approach to architectural representation of Bernard Tschumi in the late 1970s and its relationship to the literary and visual practices of Dada and Surrealism. Focussing on Tschumi's Advertisements for Architecture and Manhattan Transcripts, the paper demonstrates how the critique of avant-garde tactics in Peter Bürger and Walter Benjamin applies to a broader understanding of politics in architecture and its efficacy.

The ground as the solid surface of the earth, as the land that lies under our feet and as the foundation on which anything built rests, has always served as a condition of a possibility of place. Heaviness and gravity on the one hand, and the attempts to overcome them through high-rise constructions on the other, define physical space and create different sorts of spatial relationships. Now that mobility and connectivity have introduced a new dynamism and flexibility, and the attention increasingly shifts from the one and only ‘native’ ground to multiple material and immaterial conditions that shape our existence, the question is whether the attachment to the ground refers to the materiality of the ground itself or to some sort of phantasmatic background context. In a world that is less about place and more about places, less about origins and more about connections between the different sites of our lives, the notion of ‘groundedness’ mediates between materiality and symbolism. Similarly to physical space, cyberspace is also capable of creating a ‘there’ and a place, establishing new geographies and different sorts of attachment. Are we then moving from a conscious attachment to a native ground and a single home, to a multiplicity of places, grounds, and, if possible, ‘homes’? This attachment to the ground is the focus of this essay. It mediates between groundedness and groundlessness: from the Heideggerian ‘being in the world’ as ‘being on the earth’ and the understanding of the ‘native ground’ as a repository of meanings and memories, to flying in the physical world and studying an avatar's weightless existence in virtual worlds. By using examples taken from the virtual world of Second Life, it aims to question the symbolisation of the ground, and through this, to explore the forms that placeness takes within digitisation.