Despite the growing body of literature on Chinese architecture, contemporary Chinese architects’ critical approaches to drawing have received little scrutiny. To address this research gap, this essay examines the 2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate Wang Shu’s creative uses of modern parallel projection methods. The essay focuses on Wang’s specific drawing strategies that have allowed him to reconcile the disengaged mode of seeing that is engrained in parallel projection with the immersive spectatorship that traditional Chinese landscape painting epitomises.

First, through a literature review, this paper highlights Wang’s observations regarding the a-perspectival nature of Chinese landscape painting. Rather than being a perspectival window for the disengaged gaze, the landscape painting invites viewers to inhabit the pictorial space. Second, through comparative studies of selected cases, this essay investigates how Wang’s acknowledgement of the landscape painting’s a-perspectival traits has influenced his specific strategies when using parallel projection methods. The examined cases include Wang’s drawings for the Chen Mo Art Studio (Haiyan, 1998), the Tengtou Pavilion (Shanghai, 2009-10), and the Xiangshan Campus of the China Academy of Art Phases I and II (Hangzhou, 2002-08).

The essay concludes by highlighting significant changes in Wang’s later parallel projection drawings. Wang’s work has increasingly delineated architectural terrains as sensory topographies to foster viewers’ time-bound immersive spectatorships. Moreover, when serving his architectural ideas, Wang’s drawings have transcended the geometric representation of depth by implying spaces that exceed the limits of projection drawings. By examining his drawings, this essay sheds light on a salient yet underexamined aspect of Wang’s architectural undertakings. By investigating in-depth case studies of contemporary Chinese architectural drawings, this essay takes a crucial step towards a better understanding of this hitherto understudied domain.

In the summer of 2021, UNESCO approved Germany’s first Jewish World Heritage Site, Schum. It contains the synagogues and Jewish cemeteries of the medieval rabbinic strongholds of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz, or, rather, that which is left of them. All Jewish heritage in Schum was damaged during the Holocaust and the synagogues of all three cities were reduced to rubble in the 1938 Kristallnacht Pogrom. And yet, in the present-day Nibelungen-city of Worms, there it is, the old synagogue, fully reconstructed in historic guise, though without a congregation to call it home. How can this be? And how are we to read this difficult reconstruction in the context of the five times this synagogue has been destroyed and rebuilt in its nearly millennium-long history? To investigate these questions, this article uses a regional, decentralised, and colloquial understanding of memory-work as a methodological framework for focusing on the mundane materialities of site and its cultural productions as evidence and storyteller of conflicting, contradictory, and often semi-fictitious struggles for agency and identity. Traditional Jewish ritual and liturgical conceptions of memory, among others, will be employed to expand and complicate the many possible readings of this site and to challenge prominent assumptions in discourses of memory and space concerning fundamental shifts that events of modernity, such as the Holocaust, supposedly necessitate in material cultures of memory.

Despite the growing body of literature on Chinese architecture, contemporary Chinese architects’ critical approaches to drawing have received little scrutiny. To address this research gap, this essay examines the 2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate Wang Shu’s creative uses of modern parallel projection methods. The essay focuses on Wang’s specific drawing strategies that have allowed him to reconcile the disengaged mode of seeing that is engrained in parallel projection with the immersive spectatorship that traditional Chinese landscape painting epitomises.

First, through a literature review, this paper highlights Wang’s observations regarding the a-perspectival nature of Chinese landscape painting. Rather than being a perspectival window for the disengaged gaze, the landscape painting invites viewers to inhabit the pictorial space. Second, through comparative studies of selected cases, this essay investigates how Wang’s acknowledgement of the landscape painting’s a-perspectival traits has influenced his specific strategies when using parallel projection methods. The examined cases include Wang’s drawings for the Chen Mo Art Studio (Haiyan, 1998), the Tengtou Pavilion (Shanghai, 2009-2010), and the Xiangshan Campus of the China Academy of Art Phases I and II (Hangzhou, 2002-2008).

The essay concludes by highlighting significant changes in Wang’s later parallel projection drawings. Wang’s work has increasingly delineated architectural terrains as sensory topographies to foster viewers’ time-bound immersive spectatorships. Moreover, when serving his architectural ideas, Wang’s drawings have transcended the geometric representation of depth by implying spaces that exceed the limits of projection drawings. By examining his drawings, this essay sheds light on a salient yet underexamined aspect of Wang’s architectural undertakings. By investigating in-depth case studies of contemporary Chinese architectural drawings, this essay takes a crucial step towards a better understanding of this hitherto understudied domain.

This article investigates the ideas of New Phenomenology, as developed by Hermann Schmitz. Schmitz distinguishes between the physical body that can be seen and touched, and the felt body that is the place of affective involvement. By locating the felt body as the basis of all human experience, Schmitz radically transcends the division between subject and object in favour of understanding human relations with the world as a question of embodied communication and meaningful situations. Basic principles of philosophical phenomenology, as described by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, are outlined, and New Phenomenology as conceived by Schmitz is presented. The aim is to investigate the relation of human being to the built environment. The Church of St Peter in Klippan designed by Sigurd Lewerentz, the Salk Institute in San Diego designed by Louis Kahn, and the Nordic Pavilion in Venice designed by Sverre Fehn are described, analysed, and discussed through the lens of New Phenomenology. The findings are located in relation to various scholarly writings on phenomenology in architecture, and it is argued that the content of the work of architecture may be emotionally gripped as meaningful presencing in specific situations. It is concluded that – in a world where we desperately need to rethink human relation to the environment in general, and the architect’s relation to building in particular – New Phenomenology can draw attention to human and environment as intrinsically connected. As such, understanding architecture in terms of embodied communication and meaningful situations may be one way to activate environmental awareness.

There is a tension within social architecture between aims and actions. Emerging in response to the increasingly anti-social nature of the urban, some claim the aim of social architecture is to challenge and build beyond various contemporary urban crises. This aim, however, is at odds with the primarily small scale and contextually grounded nature social architecture operates on. Some proponents avoid this tension by arguing that their aim is to materially improve the communities they are engaged with, however this has been critiqued as limiting social architecture’s potential. Within this paper, I advance previous critiques that have been made of social architecture through an examination of literature fields both inside and outside of architecture, and through a yearlong fieldwork study. Firstly, I explore the definition of the phrase in its use both by proponents and detractors of the movement. Secondly, I situate social architecture's emergence within architecture and use this to further the critiques of the tension between its aims and actions through the lens of reification. Thirdly the fieldwork serves as a contextual basis to manifest these critiques. Finally, with the aims of social architecture brought into question, the paper speculates upon what social architecture’s aim could be. This paper furthers the critiques of social architecture while suggesting that, through reframing its aim, social architecture could be used to demonstrate that alternatives to the present moment are possible.

Climate breakdown demands new ways of thinking, new ways of relating to other human and non-human beings, and therefore new ways of approaching the future. Approaches to the future that adequately account for the climate need to be sufficiently far-reaching to avoid quick-fix solutionism, and sufficiently grounded to avoid unbounded flights of visionary fancy. The climate crisis is a gritty, contested situation that cannot be approached through one means alone. If architecture and spatial practice realise their inherent interdisciplinary potential, they could contribute to forming new modes of spatial relation that have profoundly social and climatic implications. The reverse is equally true: the social, economic, and environmental shifts required will bring new spatial formations which require new spatial practices. This essay explores how futures may be thought of in terms more appropriate to climate. Architects and spatial practitioners are capable of effecting social and ecological change despite their historical implication in the structures and practices of the extractive capitalist system within which they operate. The different projects and practices studied here, from the 1960s to the present, offer ways of thinking about the future that have spatial consequences in the built environment but reach into wider socio-political and ecological realms. What we can take from these practices and projects are lessons in how systemic change must guide design for the future, and how new spatial relations can support this change rather than circumscribe its parameters. As the various practitioners described in this essay prove, subverting systems from within is possible. And from that subversive first step, critical, imaginative, and projective steps can follow.