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.

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.

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.

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 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.