The idea of hospitals as machines for treatment still affects the way they are procured and designed, to the detriment of qualitative considerations that had been intrinsic to the evolution of hospitals since antiquity when they were first cast as cities of health. A return to the urban model is the inspiration behind a number of contemporary hospitals, where it not only creates a sense of place but provides a structure for meaningful user participation; our best hope of designing people rather than machine-centric buildings that are an appropriate, enduring response to function and context.

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.

The contemporary role of libraries has evolved from mere information storage to facilitating engaging access to knowledge resources. Despite this shift, book reading and library usage statistics in Iran remain low. This study aims to explore the relationship between physical and spatial library features, user behaviour, and perceived meanings. The goal of this investigation is to consider the impact of spatial features within libraries on the behaviours of users and the meaning that they receive. Employing an environmental psychology approach, exploratory analyses were conducted through field research, incorporating observational techniques (behavioural attributes mapping and lists) and questionnaire-based methods (semantic differential). Three Shiraz public libraries were selected for observation, and user behaviours were documented. Questionnaire data were analysed using SPSS23 software. Findings indicate that superior physical and spatial attributes foster user attachment to libraries. The meanings of ‘ordered’, ‘pleasant’, ‘interesting’, ‘legible’, ‘open’, and ‘quiet’, along with the physical factors of ‘interior appearance’, ‘type of windows’, ‘outside view’, ‘special decorating’, ‘type of materials’, ‘inviting entrance’, ‘ceiling height’, and ‘furniture’, are influential determinants of user attachment to public libraries.

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.

The Knoxville International Energy Exposition, held in 1982, was the first world’s fair in which the People’s Republic of China (PRC) participated. Shortly after the rapprochement between the PRC and the United States, the erection of the Chinese Pavilion in Knoxville overlapped a ‘honeymoon’ period of the two nations, marked by growing political and architectural exchange after decades of isolation. This article argues that the Chinese Pavilion at the Knoxville fair materialises China’s enthusiastic yet discreet interaction with the US during moments of diplomatic sensitivity, economic uncertainty, and shifting ideological positions in the 1970s and 1980s. Constructed at the height of the Cold War, the pavilion symbolised the PRC’s diplomatic success in rebuilding its relations with the Western Bloc, while the realisation of the pavilion was challenged by sensitive political issues, China’s limited budget, and a lack of exhibits. Under China’s new Reform and Opening-Up policy, the building also marked a turning point in pavilion design for the country in international events, with a significant shift of focus from overt ideological promotion to a self-orientalised cultural display through the pavilion’s design process. It illuminates a key moment in the architectural history of modern China when the nation’s growing self-awareness of its global image prompted its officials, exhibition planners, and architects to reconsider the relationship between pavilion design and the architectural profession.

Paul Auster’s novel The Book of Illusions provides a meditation on to whom our deeds in a short life are known. In architecture, How to Play the Environment Game (HTPTEG) and its creator – Theo Crosby – are condensations of many of the same meditations. Fifty years after HTPTEG it is worth reflecting on what the exhibition, the book and the person tell us about architecture, its materialization, individual architects and even the value of canonical interpretations of architecture and its personalities. HTPTEG represented the impossibility of architectural intentionality in the production of the built environment and prompts the question of whether Crosby was content to disappear as an individual recognized in his own right and with his own distinct effects on the canon?

Paul Klee’s famous conception of drawing - as a ‘line [that] goes out for a walk’ - points to a significant question regarding agency and intentionality in design. In short, does the line ‘go out’ for a walk, or is it ‘taken’ for one? This paper questions whether the point, the line, and other potentially unconsidered actors, could have agency in the process of drawing, or whether this is something reserved for the intentional artist or architect alone. This paper engages the metaphysical framework of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) to explore this tension, suggesting that if the line were to sincerely ‘go out’ for a walk, then it is possible to imagine an expanded concept of agency beyond such intentional limitations. OOO is a philosophy founded on a realist structure of objects existing independently of their relations. In the object-oriented cosmos, everything is equally an object, including humans, nonhumans, non-living beings, and even non-physical and fictional entities. The radical levelling ambition of this ‘flat ontology’ highlights a curious and unresolved balancing of intentional humans alongside the many behavioural or inanimate ‘things’ of the cosmos. This paper thus engages the flat ontology of OOO alongside creative drawing practices, to reconsider agency as something not possessed by distinct beings engaged within any interaction, but rather in the interaction itself. This position critiques notions of control and certainty, offering a potential practice of kinship and collaboration in design, beyond the human sphere.

‘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.

This paper is about the neighbourhoods known and remembered by a particular pattern of social relations and specific, recurrent rituals. It delves into the nuanced dynamics of place-making within the historic pu-jing neighbourhoods of Quanzhou, utilizing an approach that combines architectural ethnography and ‘research by drawing’. After an exploration of the daily practices and festive rituals intertwined within these neighbourhoods, the paper reflects on the enduring cultural significance and deep-rooted identity shaping these spaces over generations. It underscores the critical role of collective agency in preserving these intimate, historically rich spaces amidst the contemporary challenges posed by global homogeneity, offering valuable insights into the resilience of community identity and the perpetual contestation between local authenticity and global homogeneity in contemporary urban contexts.

Following the October Revolution of 1917, VKhUTEMAS – the state art and technical school active in Moscow from 1920 to 1927 – implemented a pioneering educational model conceived to serve the needs of Soviet society. From its inception, the school was organised into eight art and production departments: Architecture, Painting, Sculpture, Graphics, Textiles, Ceramics, Wood, and Metalworking. Their collaboration was further strengthened in 1923 with the introduction of a two-year Basic division, which comprised four courses: Graphics, Colour, Volume, and Space – the last being the most experimental. For the past forty years, the Soviet scholar Selim O. Khan-Magomedov has served as the principal source of historical knowledge about VKhUTEMAS. More recently, researchers such as Natalia Adaskina, Anna Bokov, Anatole Senkevitch, Luka Skansi, and Alla Vronskaya have expanded our understanding of the school’s operations. However, the broader implications of the Space course as a whole and its relationship with contemporary pedagogy remain relatively unexplored. Drawing on extensive research in public and private archives worldwide, this paper investigates the methods and sequence of avant-garde teaching employed for the Space course between 1923 and 1927. More than a century after its founding, VKhUTEMAS is exceptionally relevant to contemporary architectural education.

This article explores the colonial history of Hong Kong, also known as the Fragrant Harbour, through an inclusive drawing process that uses urban artefacts, place, and time as subjects for excavation, documentation, and projection. This process draws upon the city’s thick and thin of sensory experiences - a phrase this paper understands to mean the physicality of urban arteries (roads and alleys) as well as sedimented layers of time and memory. This concept frames the drawing process as both an archaeological and speculative act: one that excavates the past while imagining futures yet to come. Shaped by 156 years (1841–1997) of British colonial influence, Fragrant Harbour has become a site of unique hybridity where cultures, identities, and everyday practices converge. In response to these conditions, we ask our students to investigate the city through a drawing process of giving and taking, movement and stillness, presence, and erasure. Co-created through graphite lines, their collective work emerged as they gathered to extract, discover, and redraw the Fragrant Harbour capriccio they inhabited.

While organisations in various domains increasingly seek cognitive talents associated with being autistic, several barriers prevent autistic people from joining the workforce. One such barrier concerns higher education: compared to their peers, autistic students are more likely to encounter difficulties during college years. Besides challenges with concentration, socialising, or independent living, their specific way of interpreting the world can make their environment appear disorientating and frightening. Yet in inclusive education practices, the role of the built environment – the design of the campus, buildings, and spaces – hardly receives attention. Our study therefore aims to understand college life on the autism spectrum, viewed through the built environment lens. We used participatory methods to explore five autistic students’ experiences at our university and how spaces affect these. The goal was to identify where – in which spaces – they feel most (un)comfortable. We invited a student organisation to use the insights gained to make their main event more autism-friendly and asked participants to assess the interventions. Central in participants’ college life are study, sociality, and retreat. While their experiences are diverse, for all five the role of space relates to clarity (e.g. clear circulation), distractions (e.g. background noise), and possibilities to escape in socially acceptable ways. Predictability and having control are crucial to ease stress and increase comfort. Rather than explicitly suggesting improvements for spaces experienced as uncomfortable, participants demonstrate creative use and appropriation of spaces. We conclude that small interventions can already make a difference. For future research, we encourage addressing autistic students’ real-life challenges and putting insights into practice while respecting the diversity on the autism spectrum. Given this diversity, we also propose different ways to involve autistic people in studies about and with them.