When discussing ‘How Should One Read a Book?’, Virginia Woolf describes the work of an author as ‘an attempt to make something as formed and controlled as a building‘, using architecture as an analogy for the structure of a literary work. The ‘formed and controlled‘ structures of Woolf‘s books are here explored through her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, which she was writing around the same time as her essay on ‘How Should One Read a Book?‘ and for which she drew a diagram of its tripartite structure. While Woolf repeatedly uses imagery that juxtaposes transitory life with fixed buildings, her writing also suggests another more complex, fleeting architecture. This is revealed through an examination of the temporal structures of her novels and the momentary architecture that forms around its inhabitants. The decay and renewal of the house in the middle section of To the Lighthouse extends this further, revealing a precariousness that undermines the qualities of control, constancy, and permanence she had assumed for a building and, by analogy, her ‘formed and controlled‘ structures. Architecture, instead, becomes momentary and precarious. An assembly of architectural short stories reflect on this reversal as they are ‘read‘ by To the Lighthouse – developing the dialogue between the writing of architecture and building of literature, between architectural possibility and the world-making of words within a book. New College Library by Níall McLaughlin, Ursula Meier‘s film Home, the Marshall House by Dow Jones and the Snellman House by Erik Gunnar Asplund are discussed. The study combines a close reading of the text with a drawn analysis that maps To the Lighthouse and Woolf‘s novels while also reconstructing places she inhabited.

In modern architectural debate, buildings are made by their description in the literature as much as they are defined by the reality of their construction. On this point, a relatively small glitch in the celebratory narrative of the roof of the Sydney Opera House – four columns that do not appear in the descriptions of the building – offers the opportunity to reflect on the generation of architecture’s canons and perhaps the perceived need to elevate the subject matter by abstracting the engineering of its construction. While questioning the reasons for the absence of the columns from the biographies of the building, the article articulates the value of embracing even the smaller details in projects' histories.

Building materials both derive from nature and human culture. Although this categorisation often assumes a binary opposition; it should be reminded that natural materials have always been utilised for architectural design through human faculty embedded in cultural knowledge. On the other hand, modern materials produced via destructive industrial means, credited to human culture, do reveal their inherent ‘nature’ in their various applications and in different climatic conditions. Acknowledging the inherent intertwining of nature and culture in building materials, this article discusses the reasoning and moral language embedded in architectural theories regarding material use in design, through the angle of perversion. Based on its various definitions, interpreted as unnatural, abnormal and contingent, the article approaches this multifaceted topic, through examining aluminium; an industrially produced modern material that is conceptually malleable. The transformation of aluminium’s use in architecture and its perception throughout its short history presents a fruitful case for understanding many-sided arguments regarding material applications to formal design approaches and thinking with/through material in order to design.

The changing concepts of the body have had a significant impact on architectural and structural design thinking. This article examines the influence of historical analogies with the body on structural design, highlighting the analogies’ bias against functionalist aesthetics and their scope limitations. By contrast, recent advances in cognitive neuroscience research on the body and perception enable us to gain a new perspective on the analogy between body and structure. While exposing the traditional analogy's static and one-sided limitations, the article proposes the perspective of incorporating bodily experience dimensions into structural design considerations based on neuroscience. The article also emphasises the importance of collaboration with all disciplines in the structural design process from a biological standpoint, with the goal of refining and enriching the analogy between structure and body, thus complementing and refining the artistic and human dimensions of structural design from a body perspective.