Troppo Architects was established in Darwin, northern Australia, in 1981. The radical ‘Troppo Style’ of their houses designed in the 1980s blur edges between indoors and outdoors, formality and informality, and enclosure and openness. In this paper a corpus of ten of those houses is examined through the lens of philosopher Warwick Fox's concept of responsive cohesion. This is a unique quality of the relations between the internal components of a ‘thing’ and also between the ‘thing’ and its contexts. The houses are exemplary in demonstrating this quality of mutual and subtle response through the interactions between their form and local environmental and cultural contexts, including the idea of responsible hedonism as a design principle.

The research utilises original documents, site visits and interviews with stakeholders, particularly the architects and the residents. The outcomes reveal interlocking links between the dwelling, the place, the values of the architects and their clients, and the global bio-physical world. They show objectives of personal enjoyment of life and environmental responsibility could co-exist in harmony. However, the research also shows how these houses change over time depending on their location and on the attitudes of their owners. They would not work elsewhere, or for clients without a similar attitude to life and the pleasures offered by everyday living close to the variety and stimuli of the outdoors.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Louis I. Kahn was not only an architect of powerful buildings; he was also an unconventional teacher and a radical philosopher whose influence on his students was far-reaching. It is through his many former students, especially those in his Master's Class at the University of Pennsylvania, 1960–74, that Kahn's distinctive philosophy of education and unique pedagogy have continued to influence the teaching and making of architecture in the late modern era.

Focusing on a neglected area of Kahn scholarship, the author argues that Kahn's legacy as a teacher should be remembered as among his greatest accomplishments. The study examines Kahn's philosophy of education, his unique pedagogy, and his motives for teaching. It draws upon the author's experience as a student in the Master's Class and extensive research at the Louis I. Kahn Collection housed in Penn's Architectural Archives, the comprehensive repository of records relating to Kahn's academic and professional career. It is the first study to be based upon interviews with numerous fellow Master's Class alumni, reflecting the views expressed by Kahn's students about their teacher and the lasting impact of his teaching on their professional lives.