Sustainable urbanism and identity: A holistic perspective for future cities
September 2024
In most contexts, sustainable urbanism is characterized by a focus on the natural environment and ecological sustainability. However, contemporary development practices not only consume extensive land...
The materiality of architecture, between the rise of the Digital Age and the advent of the Anthropocene
September 2024
This paper explores questions of materiality in contemporary architecture in light of emerging developments in the discipline, building on the author’s previous work on the subject. After presenting...
Architectural history today: Where do we stand? Where do we go?
June 2024
Originating from a keynote lecture for the EAHN 2022 Conference, this review aims at mapping the field of architectural history as it presents itself today, tracing recent evolutions and new directions....
Taming the Rhinoceros: A brief history of a ubiquitous tool
September 2024
At the turn of the millennium, architects and educators, propelled by the demise of critical theory, found a space to speculate about technology’s role in the future of architecture. As Michael Speaks...
“Contemporary” and “Chinese” beyond Regionalism: Wang Shu, Li Chengde, and the Pritzker’s interpretation of China
March 2025
The awarding of the 2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize to Wang Shu, though more than a decade past, remains a significant moment for critical reflection. While recent scholarship has examined Wang’s work...
Sites of resistance in Puerto Rico: A feminist perspective
June 2025
This article explores how feminist agents in Puerto Rico are redefining public space through acts of resistance, care, and co-creation. It addresses the marginalization of women under patriarchal and...
Stacking risk: The growing seismic vulnerability of self-built housing in Mexican colonias
June 2025
Despite decades of scholarship on informality and housing precarity in Latin America, seismic risk in self-built urban settlements remains underexplored in architectural and urban discourse. This paper...
From Rosalind Krauss to Arata Isozaki: Drawing as the expression of architectural concepts
September 2024
The article examines the drawings, prints, and installations of Arata Isozaki as critical expressions of architectural concepts. Building on Rosalind Krauss’s reading of Peter Eisenman’s work, it explores...
From archive to canon: Qi Biaojia’s Yu Garden as a place of emotional attachment in the construction of individual and national memory
March 2025
This study draws on texts and images of Yu Garden to demonstrate how the textualization of Chinese gardens conveys the continuity of cultural memory. Built by Qi Biaojia during the late period of the...
The Climatron’s air: Buckminster Fuller’s domes of metaphysical control
December 2024
In 1959, the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis celebrated the opening of a state-of-the-art greenhouse geodesic dome—named the Climatron—to showcase the effects of controlled climatic conditions...
Scattered archives and neglected histories: Álvaro Ortega
June 2025
Colombian architect Álvaro Ortega had a remarkable professional trajectory. Trained at McGill and later at Harvard under Walter Gropius, Ortega taught at the National University of Colombia and worked...
Stoffwechsel in the Anthropocene
December 2024
The German term Stoffwechsel—literally meaning “change of matter” and translated into English as “metabolism”—describes the exchange process between a living organism and its environment. The term became...
Archives: In Process. Atelier Deshaus, Long Museum, Shanghai
September 2024
Doors of modernity
March 2025
At the turn of the 20th century, a range of new objects, appliances, machines, and infrastructures began to be incorporated into buildings: ticket offices, elevators, heating systems, and revolving...
Lin Huiyin, House Beautiful, and women’s place in architectural culture in the United States in the 1920s
June 2024
Scholarly discussions of the experiences that Lin Huiyin would have had as a student in the United States between 1924 and 1928 have yet to include the experiences she might have had outside the classroom...
Material Neoplatonism: Michelangelo’s architectural folios after the Codex Coner, 1515-1518
September 2025
The study challenges the claim that Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) conceptually isolated Ancient Roman architectural forms, reinventing them in the intangible realm of abstract ideation. I maintain...
Perspectives in computational design: A brief assessment of today's socio-technical context, promises, and challenges
June 2024
Overwhelming factual evidence proves that digital technologies are much better suited to fixing at least some of today's socio-technical problems than the obsolete mechanical technologies we inherited...
Layering confinement: Polar architectures among the 1950s infrastructural programs
Available online 19 December 2025
The history of Arctic and Antarctic explorations is by no means confined to the modern era, yet sustained habitation in these challenging environments did not occur until the postwar years. This paper...
Developing collective knowledge as territorial practice: Transdisciplinary citizen science in the CARPINO project
September 2025
This paper reflects on a transdisciplinary citizen science project carried out in Carpaneda, Vicenza (Italy): CARPINO (CARPaneda for INclusion and Observation of biodiversity changes). CARPINO investigated...
Mega (超大)
June 2024
Mega is a fitting scale to address the most urgent, interconnected issues of our time: rapid urbanization, climate change and energy use, and the loss of biodiversity. The coordination across and among...
Cities as central stakeholders for a fundamentally sustainable built environment
March 2025
By 2050, urban areas are expected to accommodate 80 % of the global population, necessitating a shift from conventional sustainability approaches to regenerative and positive building practices. This...
HOK wins the protocol wars: Corporate architecture, network infrastructure, and the global city
December 2024
This paper examines the role of computer networking in the development of corporate architecture in the 1980s, focusing on the firm of Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum (HOK). In 1981, HOK installed one of...
From sign to inscription
June 2024
This paper extends the author's work on inscriptions as a new theory of contemporary architecture. Using the concept of unary trait from Lacanian theory, the paper analyses two works of architecture....
Climate controlled: Navigating perceptions of weatherlessness in modern American office buildings
September 2025
Over the past 150 years, technological advancements, evolving cultural notions of health, and shifting societal priorities have profoundly transformed the human relationship with climate and the built...