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.

Banishment was probably the most frequent punishment in early modern Spanish criminal courts. It was impossible to enforce and antithetical to the interests of the state, yet it survived. This article, based on archival sources, proposes that the study of early modern law, probably in general but definitely in Spain, must account for its symbolic and rhetorical meaning beyond the language of a given statute. Looking at the practice of banishment, the long history of legal compilation in Spain, and the particularities and contradictions of legal practice there, this article calls for a deeper and more interdisciplinary approach.

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.