Scholarly analysis of the writings on architecture of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) has largely focused on passages in Twilight of the Idols where he claims that ‘Architecture is a kind of eloquence of power in forms – now persuading, even flattering, now only commanding.’1 Yet, considering Nietzsche’s theory of the will-to-power – that an innate drive towards power, might, and self-overcoming is the dominant force of existence – architecture gets interpreted in this passage as he would likely have interpreted sculpture. Any recognition of the social, political, physical, and psychological accommodations of architecture are absent. However, in a passage in Joyful Wisdom entitled ‘Architecture for the Perceptive’, Nietzsche wrote of architecture as a carefully crafted space to inhabit. This discussion of architecture as a lived space has received considerably less attention.

A green Unimog, the penultimate agricultural utility vehicle, makes its way through a curved, potholed road in the dark woods of Lower Bavaria. What differs from an otherwise everyday scene is the strange, compact structure that rises from its rear body and partly overhangs the driver's cabin. Painted in a warm yellow and oxblood red it contrasts vividly with the muted dark green of the surrounding fir trees.

At the end of the road, the forest opens up and the wide plain of the river Inn leads the way towards the west, towards Munich. Looking southwards through the driver's window one can see the profile of the Bavarian Alps in the evening sunset. Arriving in Munich the vehicle makes a stop at a busy boulevard lined with cafés and bars.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's idea of a modern courtyard house is explored in this article considering three aspects: context stimuli, development, and practical applications. In this manner, this article provides significant contributions to the understanding of Mies's courtyard house idea. In fact, so far the stimuli and motivations behind his studies on this house type have been insufficiently explored. This obscurity has facilitated hypotheses such as that some of the courtyard house projects that Mies attributed to himself were not designed by him, but by his students and assistants. This article offers an alternative view of this issue that supports the architect's original claims by clarifying his teaching approach, creative process, and historical context. This article also clarifies the development of Mies's courtyard house idea through several projects that he designed on this theme, including the Courtyard House with Round Skylight (1934), which has been little explored in previous literature. Ultimately, this article examines the practical applications of Mies's courtyard house idea, both as a motif of student exercise and as an architectural solution for low dwellings, showing that this idea has maintained its relevance throughout the decades.

For the modern architect, the programme for the church was fraught with the dangers of excessive individualism of style or, alternatively, a merely superficial updating of tradition. To escape from both, the architect was, by the early 1960s, being exhorted to study the church's functions. Aware of the difficulties of placing ancient rituals in the same category as the sociology of education or the productivity of offices, architects and like-minded clergy saw the church as a building not only to house certain actions and communications, but also capable of lending these a relevant meaning. The church architect had to discard his preconceptions about the building type, and begin with a new analysis of ritual, and had also, therefore, to find out what the ritual meant by questioning the client and developing a brief. In this research the architect would therefore act as a ritual anthropologist; like the anthropologist, he would encounter some significant methodological problems.

The Mountain Dwellings project, located in the centre of the Ørestad district of southern Copenhagen, was built in 2008 by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). Together with BIG’s other housing projects nearby, namely the VM Houses and the 8 House, the building is a part of the urban development carried out under the ‘Ørestad act’, initiated by the Danish Parliament in the 1990s. This promoted the development of a new contemporary urban quarter of dwelling, studying, and working. With an attempt to reinforce the vibrant urban fabric of the district, various buildings of residential units and public spaces have been built, in addition to the improved green areas and rainwater canals.

The aim of this study is to chart the manifestation of the Chapel at Ronchamp as a plastic organism and to identify its complex intrinsic visual qualities. To use Gordon Cullen's words, the work involves ‘charting the structure of the subjective world’. Although it has graphic and figurative aspects, the Chapel at Ronchamp achieves existential meaning primarily through plasticity, in other words the visual medium of form, space, polychromy (colour as a relative phenomenon) and texture, revealed in light. As in the case of all spatially rich unicellular works of architecture, the charting of the chapel has involved about ten three-day field studies over a three-year period, recording diurnal and seasonal variations and human activity; because this is uncharted territory it has first been necessary to ‘learn’ the building. The working method has involved recording observations, accompanied by photographic sketches at fifteen minute intervals; the observations have then been correlated with a heliodon model and indicative plans and sections, including sun-paths; the character of the light admitting apertures being of particular significance. Spatial and colour relationships have then been simulated in the studio.

This paper investigates the sublime as manifested in the architecture of Tadao Ando. The primary object of interpretation is his Azuma House (1976) in Osaka. However, according to Ando, the sublime equally characterises his religious work such as the Church of the Light (1989) near Osaka. One unique characteristic of Ando's architecture is the treatment of residential and religious buildings according to common spatial themes, challenging the conventional dichotomy between the profane and the sacred. The evocation of the sublime can be claimed as one such theme. Both buildings are particularisations of the theme of the sublime: in the case of the Azuma House into the context of the everyday and, in the case of the Church of the Light, into the context of the theological horizon of Christianity. This paper elucidates how the spatial setting of the Azuma residence conditions, in a distinguishing manner, the experience of the sublime. Given that, in the history of Western architecture, Etienne-Louis Boullée's architecture of immense emptiness (as manifested in the Metropolitan Basilica and Newton's Cenotaph) presents itself as one of the most distinctive articulations of the sublime, it is employed here as the dialogic partner for Ando's architecture of the sublime.

Chinese men of letters pursued the idea of a poetic life in feudal times, and this ideal was often embodied in traditional gardening and landscape paintings. However, it has been argued that the pursuit of this traditional notion of poetic life has been lost with the arrival of modernity. In this view, Chinese cities are seen as losing their identities and becoming Westernised. Wang Shu, the Pritzker Prize-winning Chinese architect, has taken great efforts to rebuild an understanding of Chinese cultural identity: by looking back to the idea of poetic life reflected in traditional gardens and landscape paintings, and attempting to recompose a sense of poetry for contemporary architecture. This article aims to examine Wang’s approaches to this sense of poetry in one of his projects, the design of Xiangshan campus while, at the same time, seeking to offer a Chinese reflection on the architecture of poetry.

However, Wang’s approach to using visual and metaphoric techniques in reviving the city’s poetic system can be questioned. His tactics, considered here in relation to the Xiangshan campus, arguably do not fully understand Chinese aesthetics, and do not pose fully a contemporary definition of the ‘sense of poetry’ in relation to the traditional Chinese mind. A holistic interpretation of architectural poetry should concern life, both as living and pleasure, material and spirit, rather than dealing primarily in visual composition. Nevertheless, his efforts in exploring Chinese-ness and his influence on Chinese architects remain highly significant.

Australia’s laid-back, sun-drenched beach lifestyle has been a celebrated and prominent part of its official popular culture for nigh on a century, and the images and motifs associated with this culture have become hallmarks of the country’s collective identity. Though these representations tend towards stereotype, for many Australians the idea of a summer holiday at the beach is one that is intensely personal and romanticised – its image is not at all urbanised. As Douglas Booth observed, for Australians the beach has become a ‘sanctuary at which to abandon cares – a place to let down one’s hair, remove one’s clothes […] a paradise where one could laze in peace, free from guilt, drifting between the hot sand and the warm sea, and seek romance’.1 Beach holidays became popular in the interwar years of the twentieth century, but the most intense burst of activity – both in touristic promotion and in the development of tourism infrastructure – accompanied the postwar economic boom, when family incomes were able to meet the cost of a car and, increasingly, a cheap block of land by the beach upon which a holiday home could be erected with thrift and haste. In subtropical southeast Queensland, the postwar beach holiday became the hallmark of the state’s burgeoning tourism industry; the state’s southeast coastline in particular benefiting from its warm climate and proximity to the capital, Brisbane. It was here – along the evocatively named Gold Coast (to Brisbane’s south) and Sunshine Coast (to its north) [1] – that many families experienced their first taste of what is now widely celebrated as the beach lifestyle [2]. As one reflection has it:

There is ambiguity and confusion concerning the nomenclature of parallel projection. Today, such representations are often broadly identified as axonometrics. However, the actual history of parallel projection, delineated by oblique and axonometric projections, reveals inherent spatial differences. By clarifying the intrinsic demarcations between these two forms of parallel projection, one may bring into question anew the approaches and applications of parallel projection as an architectural form of representation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

If you want to know what society looks like, look at our cities, look at their distribution of spaces, their scales, their densities. Look at how cities curate events. This article sketches the basis for architectural thinking on individual/collective social formations as read through the texts of Vitruvius and Freud with support from Aristotle, Arendt, and Lacan, in parallel with city projects by the rooms+cities studio, a Master’s-level design research unit at the University of Dundee, which is itself a collective project that begins with the close reading of canonic city plans in search of the collective body of knowledge that comprises the discipline and practice of architecture. Teaching may not be the only way to change built environment thinking but it is one way. Vittorio Gregotti reckoned that the schools were best placed to challenge establishment practices with avantgarde thought. We use architecture to think the relation between the individual and the collective, and thereby to make a space for politics and public life. This article is thus comprised of two arguments, one predominantly textual, the other graphic, of complementary weight and importance, that run side by side and occasionally cross or mingle.

This paper investigates Gottfried Semper's use of comparative science as a basis for a theory of architecture. It traces Semper's reliance on the works of Jean-Nicholas-Louis Durand and the zoologist Georges Cuvier. Following Michel Foucault's argument that the emergence of comparative science entails a decisive transition in modern thought, the paper explores the origins and implications of Semper's comparative theory of architecture. Through this focus, the paper attempts to identify and explore an essential tension inherent in Semper's work between, on the one hand, his sensitive recognition of the symbolic significance of architecture, and on the other, the proto-positivism implied in his ‘science of invention’. This dilemma still conditions our contemporary architectural culture, making the study of Semper's complex and conflicting ideas more relevant than ever.

The Museum of Natural History, London, typified the state of environmental service design in large public buildings when construction started in 1873, as described in an earlier paper in arq, vol. 2. Its exemplary systems included both ventilation with heating and the architect's use of towers, especially the novel multi-sleeved versions which he described as ‘thermosyphonic’, as ventilation exhausts. This paper describes how, both in critical design decisions during construction and in physical adjustments made after its occupation in 1881, the Museum reveals both contemporary practices and the professional skills of its architect and engineer.

This essay attempts to outline the ways in which contemporary videogames produce spatial experiences, and how architects might interrogate their unique media form. Framing videogames as both computational constructions and cultural artefacts, the paper places the study in a lineage of architectural thinkers examining ‘pop-culture’ and technology. This draws from the Smithson's writings on advertisements as technical images, Venturi Scott-Brown's studies on symbolism, through to Reyner Banham's definition of mass produced gizmos. The paper first outlines the importance of videogames on society and their Smithsonian impulses towards architectural design. To support this, I examine the work of game theorists such as Espen Aarseth and Ian Bogost. Aarseth argues that game spaces sever certain ties and ‘deviate’ from reality in order to become playable spaces. Bogost contends that game rules produce ‘procedural rhetoric’ - games may advance arguments through the playing of their rules. Reading from these theories I argue that these rule-based breaks from the real are a potent site for architectural speculation.

The second section comprises design case studies scrutinising existing game worlds and producing new videogames as architectural experiments. I begin by examining the significance of symbolism in videogame worlds, and how this might provide alternative trajectories for digital architectural design. I subsequently explore Atkinson and Willis’ concept of the ludodrome, slippages between virtual and real, and discuss Ubiquity, a game I produced to explore this condition. I return to Banham's Great Gizmo, alongside PW Singer's writings on military robotics, to see the gamepad as a new order of gizmo for colonising space. And I discuss ‘Grand Theft Auto V’'s loading screen as a manifestation of satellite imagery aesthetics that collapse space. The paper concludes that games are powerful media for spatial experimentation and we must prepare for new generations of designers highly influenced by such ‘deviated’ architectures.

Building, furniture design and the decorative arts collaborate to embody Fascist political values and mass identity in an icon of modern architecture.

There seems to be little question that we live in an age of complexity, perhaps undue complexity. The interrelation of almost all the people all the time – at least those with internet access – the pressures of urbanisation, natural resource depletion, increasing traffic and pollution, and our ability to be anywhere at any time electronically have led to a rather complex living mode. Architects, heeding the call, have produced an architecture of corresponding complexity. Falling to architectural fashion trends, market pressures, and the surge of corporate capitalism, architects now give their clients just what they want, or what they themselves want to give them. There was a time when architectural form expressed some relation to reason, but that dated notion seems to be in little evidence today.