This book contains the two formal lectures delivered by the authors at the University of Melbourne as part of the 2010 Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellowship Program, and an anthology of essays written during the last ten years. These writings formed the basis for the academic activities undertaken in Australia during the residency at the Melbourne School of Design. CLAUDIO D'AMATO GUERRIERI is full Professor of Architectural Design and the current Dean of the Faculty of Architecture at the Polytechnic of Bari, which he founded and first headed in 1990. Between 2003 and 2009, he was the Director of the Program in Architecture and Industrial Design within the same Faculty. He was previously Chair of Architecture at the University of Reggio Calabria, and taught at the University of Rome. Since the 1980s, he has been part of many government commissions on the transformation of architectural teaching in universities. Professor d'Amato Guerrieri received his Laurea in Architettura in 1971 from La Sapienza University of Rome, where he subsequently obtained a Master degree in Study and Restoration of Monuments in 1974. Since 1978 he is part of the Architects' Professional Register for the jurisdiction of Rome. ATTILIO PETRUCCIOLI holds the Chair in Landscape Architecture at the Polytechnic of Bari, where he is also the Director of the Architecture Department. Between 2003 and 2009, he was the Dean of the Faculty of Architecture. Before his appointment in Italy, Professor Petruccioli was the Aga Khan Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and the Director of the Aga Khan Program of Islamic Architecture at Harvard and MIT. He is currently a member of the Italian Inter- University Research Centre on Developing Countries (CIRPS), and sits on the Board of Directors of the American Centre for Maghrib Studies, the Board of the International Seminar on Urban Form, the Committee of Honour of the International Network of Traditional Building Architecture and Urbanism (INTBAU) of the Prince of Wales Foundation in London, and the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE). He is also a research associate at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University.