An unprecedented number of multilevel pagodas were built in China from the tenth through the thirteenth century. This growing emphasis on verticality, in contrast to the usual horizontal sprawl of China’s building tradition, raises questions about what “height” meant in the history of Chinese architecture. This essay argues that the height of the multilevel pagoda was necessarily performative: not so much because the pagoda served as a means of ascending to that height, but because it drew the attention of the faithful.

Air conditioning relieves us of having to think about the air, so that we can think about other things.

How climate control created and sustains the dualistic thinking underlying climate change and its inequities.

This was the genius of our ancestors, that by cutting off the light from this empty space they imparted to the world of shadows that formed there a quality of mystery and depth superior to that of any wall painting or ornament.

A meditation on what was lost when Japan rapidly modernized and traded in its traditional aesthetics for Western appliances.

… as valuable as the familiar theoretical and conceptual languages of Euro-American landscape geography are, they also risk concealing a range of different aesthetics, social formations, and experiences that unfold in the non-Euro-American landscape. They risk dissimulating the politics of places as they are produced and lived contextually.

In the paper I work this argument through a critical engagement of the landscape architecture of Sri Lanka’s most famous tropical—modernist architect, Geoffrey Bawa; I specifically focus on his favorite, intensely choreographed, view at the estate Lunuganga on Sri Lanka’s south coast. As I show, while tools from the new cultural geography and beyond can help us to read this view as a classically modernist and apolitical landscape, a work of ‘art for art’s sake’, it is only a radically contextual familiarization with Sri Lankan society, politics, and history that can also reveal the landscape’s more subtle instantiation of a spatializing Sinhala-Buddhist hegemony.

… the average sound levels at the four temples over the course of an entire day were between 47.0 and 52.7 dBA, and approximately 70% of those surveyed tended to evaluate the temples’ soundscapes as comfortable and harmonious. When the sound level of a temple was higher than 60 dBA, respondents were more likely to feel uncomfortable

… the history, myth and cult of a Burmese Buddha image standing in the middle of the [Shan] city of Chiang Tung and the ways in which religious visual culture expresses ethnic-religious identity.

Religious art, as a symbol of culture, is inevitably political. And yet, for whatever reasons an icon might be installed, it’s only a matter of time before it becomes adopted by its hosts.

Their design ideas were radically different but the reaction was the same: people hated it.

On the importance of autonomy and power in interior design.

The temples were a signal that the previous people who came to Delphi had gotten the truth.

Like an object circling the sun, the visitor senses she is within the gravitational pull of a powerful entity.

An analysis of the Fo Guang Shan Buddha Museum’s immense Buddha statue and its rich dàochǎng 道場: a bodhimaṇḍala for the (postmodern) human realm.

… but someone was about to arrive in Texas to stick up for these bats

… to create a healthy indoor space, make it more like the outdoors

Born into a Jewish family in Nazi Austria, Hundertwasser came to despise straight lines and the authoritarianism they represented. His story reminds me that we are products of our environment, even—or perhaps especially—when we reject it.