Adolescents in palliative care have complex emotional and developmental needs that make privacy within the built environment a crucial aspect of their comfort, dignity, and sense of control. However, in many paediatric hospice settings, privacy is often compromised by the continuous need for observation and accessibility in care delivery. This study explores how privacy in the built environment is understood and addressed in palliative care for children and adolescents, drawing on both medical and architectural perspectives. It combines a review of existing literature with qualitative analysis of interviews conducted with fourteen medical professionals and eight architects, together with a comparative examination of seven contemporary hospices. The analysis investigates spatial design features, such as bedroom layout, visibility, and zoning, shape the experience of privacy in care environments. While single bedrooms are now widely adopted, the findings of this study emphasise that these features alone may not adequately address the psychosocial and emotional dimensions of privacy. Continuous observation, glazed doors, and the placement of beds directly in line with doorways were identified as elements that can contribute to feelings of exposure and reduced autonomy. The study highlights a persistent gap between clinical functionality and environmental support for psychological well-being. It argues for more age-responsive design strategies, such as thoughtful spatial zoning, adaptable room configurations, and sensitive transitions between public and private areas, to better accommodate the needs of adolescents. Reconsidering how built environments mediate care and control can help create hospice settings that more effectively support privacy, autonomy, and dignity for young people nearing the end of life.

James I’s oldest son, Henry Frederick, died in 1612, at the age of eighteen. Dozens of poets, including several prominent ones, published elegies to the prince in the months after his death. This essay considers these printed laments as representative of a pessimistic turn in seventeenth-century printed poetry. Arguing that this streak of skepticism about the effectiveness of poetic publication is more than just an immediate reaction to a national catastrophe, the essay compares the elegies to a dedication to the prince from during his lifetime and examines their role in the development of the printed verse miscellany.

This article examines the cosmology of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” in the context of the shift from a bright to a dark universe in the European cosmological imagination. While other comparable transformations—from geocentrism to heliocentrism, or a bounded to an unbounded universe—have been extensively studied, the turn from bright to dark space remains almost entirely neglected. Drawing on textual and visual evidence from antiquity to the present day, this article provides the first sustained exploration of the subject as well as a novel reading of Milton’s cosmology and the challenges it presents to the contemporary reader.

Brasília, the iconic modernist capital of Brazil, has sparked diverse interpretations and reactions over the past six decades. While celebrated as a prime example of Brazilian modernism and international functionalist urbanism, it has also faced criticism for its perceived rupture with traditional cultural patterns. This article delves into the relationship between modernity, tradition, and coloniality in Brasília, exploring the city through the lens of decolonial theory. By examining the discourse surrounding Brasília and its urban architecture, particularly the Alvorada Palace, the article aims to uncover how coloniality manifests within the city’s modernity. It argues that modernism in architecture indeed embodies coloniality as a system of domination. The spatial characteristics, spatial organisation, sectorisation, hierarchies, and symbolism embedded within Alvorada Palace serve as a starting point for analysing Brasília’s symbolic and spatial dimensions. Ultimately, this research sheds light on the intricate connections between modernity and coloniality, inviting a critical re-evaluation of Brasília’s architectural and cultural identity.

‘Literalism,’ which seeks to use descriptive language in a technically regimented and exacting manner without figuration, is shown as an incoherent linguistic ideal in architectural history writing. By attending to its four primary presumptions, which prop up a larger issue, literalism is exposed as not only flawed but troublesome in a global discipline. In contrast, the essay advocates for non-literal language as a living, disclosive, sometimes epiphanic vocabulary, over and against literalism’s dead and instrumental one. The former, it is argued, can manifest potent but hard to grasp matters operating in the tension between the symbolic and communicative dimensions of architecture. Thus, non-literal language is able to deepen not obscures historical understanding via architectural descriptions.