The Danteum, an unbuilt “temple” meant to celebrate Dante Alighieri and the Fascist regime on the occasion of the 1942 Esposizione Universale in Rome, is one of the most widely discussed architectural pieces of its age due to its uncommon intention of being an architectural translation of a literary work: Dante’s Divine Comedy. This paper will analyse how Giuseppe Terragni’s appeal for a symbolic and expressive architecture devoid of rhetoric and decoration led to an atypical design that challenges two key tenets of architectural modernism—abstraction and technical rationality—and how this generated contradictions with his stated goals. The paper will also point out how this uncommon scheme undermined wider and more lasting architectural conventions by putting forward a certain dissolution of architecture.

This article places Hannah Arendt’s theory of politics in the context of architectural making, action, and storytelling. Targeted specifically at the architectural reception of Arendt, it highlights the distinction between the world of work and the realm of free agency, arguing that storytelling—a political act—should be of equal concern to the politically ambitious architect as the making of buildings. Distinct from both fiction and architectural project narratives, Arendt’s storytelling contributes to rethinking the role of the architect in collaborative projects as well as the potential for political agency in architectural works.

This article reframes the “Sydney School” discourse within a transnational context of Australian architectural engagement with Asia from the 1950s to the 1980s. Rather than defining the movement through its familiar stylistic traits, the article argues that these characterisations have obscured a deeper intellectual transformation driven by direct encounters with Asian architectural traditions and philosophy. Drawing on newly accessible archival material from the State Library of New South Wales, the article reconstructs the extended cultural immersions of Adrian Snodgrass and his network. It traces Snodgrass’s engagement with Hindu and Buddhist thought in Ceylon and Japan, Alan Gilbert’s commissions in Hong Kong and China, and Peter Muller’s collaborations in Bali and beyond, to argue that these cases reveal a gradual but profound shift from Western interpretations of Asian architecture toward authentic cultural exchange. By foregrounding these transnational networks, the article calls for a fundamental rethinking of late twentieth-century Australian architectural historiography.

This essay focuses on Adrian Snodgrass’s discussions of Japanese spatial concepts, in particular his consideration of the postmodern architecture of Kishō Kurokawa, Kurokawa’s philosophy of “symbiosis,” and the so-called Japanese New Wave. It considers Snodgrass’s work in the context of David Joselit’s notion of “synchronization,” which describes contemporary global artistic production as the reauthorisation of cultural heritage within recognisable idioms of modernism. Considered in these terms, Snodgrass’s mediation between Western philosophical traditions and Eastern spiritual worldviews is an exemplary form of globalised theory. Yet, in its effort to bridge worldviews, Snodgrass’s work embodied both the possibilities and limits of intercultural synchronisation: it translated Buddhist concepts into an Heideggerian idiom recognisable within postmodern Anglophone discourse, while striving to preserve their irreducibility. Operating between synchronisation and symbiosis, Snodgrass’s scholarship advanced the intercultural appreciation of architecture to reveal the persistent incommensurability between cultural traditions and the universalising logics of globalised exchange.

This paper applies two Western intellectual traditions—the objectivist and the process-relational—to architectural thought and practice. The objectivist tradition, associated with Plato, Aristotle, Galileo, and Descartes, portrays a world of stable, mathematically defined objects, with the architect as an autonomous subject who shapes and controls them. The process-relational tradition, informed by diverse “Continental” and American thinkers including Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, Rorty, Schön, and Deleuze, describes a dynamic, fluid, relational world that embeds the architect as participant. Building upon insights first introduced by my PhD supervisor, Adrian Snodgrass, and drawing from experience from my own practice, I contend that the process-relational framework offers a more challenging yet significantly richer and more robust understanding of contemporary architectural practice.

The British Architectural profession throughout the twentieth century relied on an array of architectural assistants from a variety of backgrounds, working largely unseen across a variety of building projects. Within the architectural studio, ideas were developed in a complex process of transfer and exchange. These assistants would then return to their respective homes, taking their newly developed architectural knowledge with them. This paper looks at John Duncan, who travelled to Britain from Western Australia where he served as Ernö Goldfinger’s chief assistant for 18 months between 1954 and 55. By constructing a biographical narrative of Duncan and his time in the Goldfinger office, this paper traces the exchange of ideas between them, and how this shaped Duncan’s later architectural career. It argues that by acknowledging the experience and contribution of these assistants, it adds to the current understanding of how architectural knowledge was encountered, exchanged and produced in the post-war period.

Adrian Snodgrass’s affinity with the visual expression of Buddhist teaching in its art and architecture was a persistent theme through his writings, his participation in exhibitions, and his own collecting. The subject of this paper is his embrace of Buddhist art, his encyclopaedic analysis of its iconography, evident over the course of his long association with the Gallery and in his curatorial involvement in exhibitions. It focuses most particularly on his outstanding contribution to the 2001 ground-breaking exhibition Buddha: Radiant Awakening (November 10, 2001 to February 24, 2002). The exhibition was conceived at a time of a broad societal pressure for increased “Asia-literacy” and the institutional adoption of government policies advocating multiculturalism, diversity, and the increased inclusion of ethnically diverse communities in museum audiences. Adrian was instrumental in the shaping of the concept of the show, the selection of its objects.

Despite never finishing his architectural qualifications, Adrian Snodgrass worked for various architects throughout the 1950s and independently designed several houses in Sydney in the early 1960s. The architectural drawings for these houses were acquired by the State Library of New South Wales (SLNSW) in 2017. These drawings offer a window into the architectural style of an individual who returned to architecture in various ways throughout his career, often through his connections with close friends and “real” architects Peter Muller, Bert Read and Alan Gilbert. In 2023, SLNSW acquired a collection of letters to Peter Muller from Adrian Snodgrass in Sri Lanka and India in the 1950s, which range in topics from literature, music, philosophy and architecture, illuminating the connection between Muller and Snodgrass in detail. This essay provides preliminary analysis of archival traces of Snodgrass’s work and travels, and discussion of architectural collecting processes of SLNSW.

The previously unpublished text of the address given by Adrian Snodgrass on the occasion of the launch of his and Richard Coyne’s book Interpretation in Architecture: Design as a Way of Thinking (Routledge 2005) at the University of Sydney, School of Architecture. The paper, like the book, shows the fusion of Adrian’s research in Asia with his architectural vision.

This article situates recent developments in artificial intelligence within the intellectual legacy of Adrian Snodgrass, whose scholarship in hermeneutics, structuralism, and poststructuralism provided a critical foundation for rethinking design theory and computational methods. My early collaborations with Adrian challenged the positivist assumptions underpinning symbolic AI. But now, large language models (LLMs) based on neural network theories demonstrate striking technical competence. They also reaffirm the centrality of textuality. The texts on which they are “trained” parallel to some degree the bodies of text acknowledged in the humanities as vital for the perpetuation of human understanding. The discussion positions LLMs as an extension of human linguistic practice, and reflects on their implications for authorship, scholarship, and design pedagogy. In honour of Adrian, the paper argues that the hermeneutic perspective he championed remains vital for understanding both the possibilities and limits of AI in shaping knowledge, creativity, and the built environment.