The concept of labyrinth as a design idea is prevalent throughout the history of Western architecture. In the late-eighteenth century when the Western Jesuits built a labyrinth as a part of a "Western-like" garden within the Chinese imperial garden Yuanming Yuan, the labyrinth appeared exotic and enjoyable for the Chinese. This essay…

Across most of Oklahoma's gently rolling prairie countryside these artistically uninformed structures often provide the only vertical punctuation to a landscape otherwise made of mostly horizontal lines. One of the pleasures of teaching architecture is to participate in the intellectual progress of students--many of whom hail from rural areas and…

This paper argues for the educational relevance of the apparently unbelievable project of the architects Arakawa and Gins to design houses that would grant their inhabitants immortality. First, the author demonstrates that, broadly conceived, this is a familiar philosophical project, perhaps "the" philosophical project. He then produces a reading…

The Rural Studio, an outreach program of Auburn University, designs innovative houses for poor people living in Alabama's Hale County by using "junk" such as car windshields, carpet tiles, baled cardboard, and old license plates. The article theorizes this particular architecture in terms of Critical Regionalism, developed by…

Museums have become a crucible for questions of the role that traditional art and art history should play in contemporary art. Friedrich Nietzsche argued in the nineteenth century that museums can be no more than mausoleums for effete (fine) art. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, curators dispelled such blanket pessimism by…

In what is in retrospect easily recognized as one of the three or four truly groundbreaking essays in environmental aesthetics, Francis Sparshott distinguishes a number of different ways of conceptualizing our relationships to our environments. Such different conceptualizations, he argues, deeply influence the ways in which we aesthetically…

In architectural design education, students develop drawing, conceptual, and critical skills which are informed by their ability to reflect upon the production of ideas in design processes and in the urban, environmental, social, historical, and cultural context that define architecture and the built environment. Reflective actions and thinking…

Author compared different book reviews on building and architecture as well as the relation between architecture and general building practice. (Author/RK)

Advances in glass technologies are being applied in contemporary interior architecture. Glass forms and surfaces are appearing in settings and applications that offer vivid aesthetic experiences for users, but create ambiguous messages concerning community and privacy. Where a modernist application of glass may have been directed toward creating a…

This essay analyzes the bi-directional relationship between Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy and his architectural experiment of designing the Wittgenstein House. Putting the Wittgenstein House into the chronological context of Wittgenstein's philosophical writings, this research attempts to explore how his architectural design brought about a…

Discussed the meaning of the word, lyricism, as it applied to painting, sculpture, and architecture. (Author/RK)

Various arguments are adduced to develop the notion that the mestizaje of Mexico have developed a cultural style, that the style manifests itself architecturally, and that it is not a mistake to label the style "postmodern." The work of Goldblatt is cited, and material descriptive of the Church of Santa Maria Tonantzinla are alluded to.…