This essay examines Kenzō Tange's visionary urban scheme, A Plan for Tokyo, 1960: Toward a Structural Reorganization (1961), in terms of its mobility rather than its much-discussed monumentality. The existing studies of this plan was too im-mersed in its unprecedented megalomaniac scale to pay sufficient attention to the fact that it was a complex design for urban mobility. While the issues of scale and speed might seem to be separate, in fact they are inextricably interconnected since the increasing speed and mobility brought about by new technology would make the existing human scale ob-solete and required the new scale of the machine. In this essay, I would like to revisit Tange's plan for Tokyo Bay as a highly nuanced plan for urban mobility. First, this essay defines A Plan for Tokyo, 1960 as a model city for an automobile society against the backdrop of Japan's rapid motorisation. Tange's unrealised urban scheme was driven by the architect's firm belief in mobility as a fundamental factor influencing the development of postwar Japanese economy and his strong ambition to provide a proper urban infrastructure for the efficient circulation of traffic. The essay then traces how Tange's interest in the visible network of transportation evolved into his preoccupation with the invisible networks of information flow by focusing on his Tokaido Megalopolis (1964), a colossal city that was organically connected by the linkup of physi-cal, social, and information networks. Although Tange's ambitious design was left only on paper and had little impact on the actual development of Tokyo, its historical im-plications lie in its radical configuration of a new concept of architecture and city not as hardware but as software in preparation for the nascent information society.

In recent years, there has been a spate of posthumously built works by Frank Lloyd Wright. Using the architect's archive as a kind of repository of designs that can be adapted for new clients, programmes and sites, these buildings stake out an ambiguous claim upon Wright's name and legacy. The growing body of posthumous architecture presents a range of often unacknowledged and unexamined challenges to Wright's celebrated canon of built works, and to the architectural discipline more generally, troubling conservationists, historians, tourists and foundations alike. These problematic buildings are the subject of this essay, which examines the contemporary appeal of Wright's archive and “brand,” to open up serious questions about the authenticity, authorship and authorisation of an architect's works realised long after their death.

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.

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.

Wang Shu (b. 1963) is a locally trained Chinese architect who has received widespread media coverage in the last decade, especially after receiving the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2012, often considered the Nobel Prize of architecture. Numerous articles and interviews have been published concerning Wang Shu and his design practice, however, there is a lack of analysis of his work from what might be called the perspective of his ecological phenomenology. Wang acknowledges his interest in phenomenological thinking and expresses an ongoing concern about human relationships with place and nature, the continuity of craftsmanship in the face of technological development, as well as the materiality and tactility of bodily perception. Before analysing Wang's work, relevant ideas of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) and their influence on architectural discourse are firstly examined. Both of them were seminal philosophers who offered inspiring insights to ecological discourse.

Most of an architect's life is concerned with that which has not yet taken place, both foreseeing the near future and expressing an intention of how this future world should be remade. However small the intervention, all design proposals are utopian works. With this in mind, this article is a celebration of the utopian potential of reading science fiction (SF); to make the familiar strange, to reveal fears about the future, to confront us with ourselves, and to shape the world we inhabit. It is an unabashed call from an architect and avid SF reader, for architects to raid the bookshelves for the most lurid cover and glaring font and lose themselves in the exuberant worlds of science fiction.

This article offers a step by step analysis of an undiscussed note written by Christian Nor-berg-Schulz 18 April 1979, titled Translation, as I ask what role the notion of transla-tion played in his theory of genius loci. Scholars have recently shown interest in the way the field of translation and architecture intersect and can inform each other. Norberg-Schulz is widely read and researched, but the role of translation in his authorship has to date been undiscussed. Springing from my discovery of the note in the archive, I revisit Norberg-Schulz's phenomenological approach to architecture with a specific focus upon the notion of translation.

I uncover his references from this note and see these in light of his published work, particularly his landmark treatise Genius Loci: towards a phenomenology of architecture (1980). Building upon a long tradition of architectural theory, involving ideas from Vitruvius and Gottfried Semper, I argue that the theme of translation is recurrent throughout Norberg-Schulz's theoretical authorship, appearing in his theory of genius loci, his understanding of continuity and change, accounts of Norwegian architectural culture, and writings about the architecture of Louis Kahn.

Here, translation is seen as a tool for gathering, in the Heideggerian sense, which gives birth to an architecture in which the architectural outcome is not inferior to its pre-cursor, but simply different and from which something constructive might emerge. Seen in relation to the notion of architecture as language, it could even be argued to be a vital core to Norgerg-Schulz's longstanding interest in the meaning of architecture and place and how design must negotiate continuity and change. Understanding the genius loci as vital in architectural appropriation, as design, thus, implies a process of transla-tion, arguably a vital contribution to the ongoing interest in the intersection of architecture and translation.

This article brings together two distinct aspects of Aldo Rossi's urban theory and reads them against recent urban peripheral development in Madrid. By exploring the scientific method used in Rossi's work The Architecture of the City against the contemporary conditions of this metropolis, the authors examine whether and to what extent either ‘memory’ or ‘permanence’ are reflected in this new city. Additionally, the analogous city of fragments that Rossi explored in the second phase of his career is also brought into play, and considered in relation to Rossi's scientific method. Developing from Rossi's later approach, we carried out a photographic survey of these areas to understand the contemporary urban landscape. We utilise these two theoretical positions in his work as a form of critique on today's periphery, focusing on two of the Urban Action Plans (PAUs) — Las Tablas and San Chinarro — in the city of Madrid, and bridging the ideas of theory and project that were so important for La Tendenza, the group of architects to which Rossi belonged in the 1960s. These specific study areas allow a broader understanding of the patterns of urban development around Madrid, and the consequences of these projects as experienced by citizens of the city. More broadly, this analysis aims to further our understanding of the European urban peripheral condition, and points to the continuing relevance offered by the theoretical approaches of Rossi's work in today's context, a critical discourse that is felt to be necessary by the authors.

Infrastructure has become a relatively established field of inquiry in architectural academia over the last two decades, insofar as it builds on the rational and generative overtones of the term. However, the contrasting possibility that infrastructure might represent an obstacle for the city and its architecture has often been overlooked. Simultaneously, the idea that the city might be considered as a piece of architecture that can be comprehended, controlled, and eventually designed as a whole (whether from scratch or incrementally), has recently resurfaced, echoing Aldo Rossi's concept of ‘primary elements’. In his seminal book The Architecture of the City, Rossi described the way these elements ‘participate in the evolution of the city over time in a permanent way, often becoming identified with the major artefacts constituting the city’. But, he noted: