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Johannesburg - Graduate School of Architecture 

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Johannesburg - Graduate School of Architecture 

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Academic Court

Lesley Lokko is an architect, academic, and best-selling novelist. She was previously the founder and director of the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg and will be stepping down as dean of The Bernard & Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York in January 2021. She is currently engaged in setting up an independent school of architecture in Accra, Ghana, the African Futures Institute. Born in Scotland, Lesley grew up in Ghana. She received her first architecture degree at London's Bartlett School of Architecture and earned her doctorate in architecture from the University of London in 2007.

Whilst still a student, Lesley began an edited anthology that has come to define her interests across both her academic career and her fiction writing: 'race' and its relationship to the built environment, although that initial interest has expanded considerably to encompass a broader interest in identity politics, culture and urbanism. White Papers, Black Marks: Race, Space & Architecture was published in 2000, some six years after its inception. It remains one of the few anthologies dedicated specifically to the study of 'race' as a meaningful category of enquiry within architectural canon.

For thirteen years, Lesley wrote fiction full-time, publishing eleven best-selling novels but continued to keep a peripheral interest and foot in architectural discourse, returning to academia full-time in 2014. She continues to write fiction: her newest novel, Soul Sisters, will be published by PanMacmillan in summer 2021.

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Lesley Lokko - The London School of Architecture

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Lesley Lokko is an architect, academic, and best-selling novelist. She was previously the founder and director of the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg and will be stepping down as dean of The Bernard & Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York in January 2021.

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Architecture for Humanity rebrands as Open Architecture Collaborative

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Following the bankruptcy and collapse of Architecture for Humanity in 2015, local chapters have banded together to create Open Architecture Collaborative.

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Global information society watch

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Where are we watching? | Global Information Society Watch

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Author: Victor Buchli

Publisher: Routledge

ISBN: 9781000180725

Category: Social Science

Page: 224

View: 175

Ever since anthropology has existed as a discipline, anthropologists have thought about architectural forms. This book provides the first overview of how anthropologists have studied architecture and the extraordinarily rich thought and data this has produced.With a focus on domestic space - that intimate context in which anthropologists traditionally work - the book explains how anthropologists think about public and private boundaries, gender, sex and the body, the materiality of architectural forms and materials, building technologies and architectural representations. Each chapter uses a broad range of case studies from around the world to examine from within anthropology what architecture 'does' - how it makes people and shapes, sustains and unravels social relations.An Anthropology of Architecture is key reading for students of anthropology, material culture, geography, sociology, architectural theory, design and city planning.

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Book Architectural Anthropology [PDF] Download

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Author: Victor Buchli Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 9781000180725 Category: Social Science Page: 224 View: 175 Ever since anthropology has existed as a discipline, anthropologists have thought about architectural forms. This book provides the first overview of how anthropologists have studied architecture and the extraordinarily rich thought and data this has produced.With a focus on domestic space - that intimate context in which anthropologists traditionally work - the book explains how anthropologists think about public and private boundaries, gender, sex and the body, the materiality of architectural forms and materials, building technologies and architectural representations.

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The exhibition celebrated the role of architectural models in shaping the spaces we live in. A collaboration between the V&A and the Building Centre, Shaping Space - Architectural Models Revealed presented the world in miniature; a collection of historical and contemporary models that reveal the evolution of architecture from the first maquette made as a tool for thinking, to a presentation model - a scaled down replica of an architectural intention saying; 'here I am'.

The collection of models on show responded to three questions: Why are models made? How are models made? And who are models made for?

Architectural models are as old as architecture itself. The exhibition explored the history of models, and highlighted the renaissance of craft and the values of making today, alongside the rise of new technologies that mark how the digital age is changing our experience of and access to architectural space.

As children, we encounter scale with wooden blocks and plastic bricks so that we become the master planners of our own tiny cities. From super-sized to miniature, Shaping Space invited the public to experience the spectacle of environments at different scales. The show celebrated the act of thinking through making, presenting the evolution of ideas through models in architectural education and practice. The exhibition examines how models are a testbed for material experimentation and will touch on themes and debates central to current architectural practice, such as sustainability.

The exhibition included models by:

AAU Anastas; Aberrant Architecture; Adjaye Associates, courtesy of American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC); Alison and Peter Smithson; Álvaro Siza; Arch Model Studio; Arckit; ARU (Architectural Research Unit); Assemble; Automated Architecture (AUAR); B.15 Workshop, Manchester University (S. Miller and S. Parker-Backhouse); BDP, modelled by Amalgam; Bompas & Parr; Carmody Groarke; Charles Holland Architects; Dalia Matsuura Frontini; Dieter Cöllen; Dow Jones Architects; L'École Spéciale d'Architecture; Editional Studio; Ellie Sampson; Eugène Viollet-le-Duc; Forensic Architecture; Foster + Partners; GHA Group - Bloomsbury projection; Harvey Wiley Corbett, modelled by Theodore Conrad; Hawkins Brown Architects; J I Wolfson; James Gowan, modelled by Paul Shepheard; Jørn Utzon; Karen Britcliffe; Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret); Louis Kahn; Lina Ghotmeh Architecture; Mary Duggan; OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen; Peter Barber Architects; Peter Davies; Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine; René Herbst, modelled by Nicolaas Warb; Roz Barr Architects; Sam Jacob Studio; ScanLAB Projects; So & So Studio; Stanton Williams; Studio MUTT; Sydney Waterlow, modelled by William Lovett; Théo Zanetti and MAP Laboratory, CNRS; Tony Fretton Architects; WilkinsonEyre; Zaha Hadid Architects.

Curated by the Building Centre exhibitions team in partnership with Simona Valeriani of the V&A's Research Institute (VARI), the collaborative exhibition was designed by award-winning practice Roz Barr Architects, with graphic design by Studio Mathias Clottu.

Shaping Space was accompanied by an events series, workshops, and an education programme led by Rebecca Goozee and Dr Marta Ajmar, from the V&A Research Institute, in collaboration with the Building Centre.

Shaping Space - Architectural Models Revealed builds on research carried out by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded Architectural Models Network (2017-2019), an initiative set up to examine the role of architectural models as part of the creative process in historical and contemporary architectural practice. The core partners in the original network include the V&A, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), the Architectural Association (AA), Sir John Soane's Museum, the Architekturmuseum (Technische Universität Munich), the MAP Laboratory (CNRS) and the Sorbonne.

The free exhibition is generously supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through Follow on Funding for Impact and Engagement (Principal investigator Dr. Simona Valeriani, co-investigator Dr. Marta Ajmar). It is also supported by the Built Environment Trust and the V&A.
The accompanying book, An Alphabet of Architectural Models, is available to order online.
Find out more about the wider project Shaping Space - Architectural Models in Context here.
Follow us on social media for all the latest news and announcements about the exhibition programme!
#ShapingSpace

@ArchModelsNet (Twitter) @archsmodelsnet (Insta)

@BuildingCentre (Twitter) @theBuildingCentre (Insta)
About the V&A Research Institute
The V&A Research Institute (VARI) leads the V&A's research and academic partnership activities, across the breadth of the museum's collections and practices. VARI hosts a varied portfolio of research projects, programmes and affiliations involving academics, makers, designers, conservators, and practitioners of all kinds, creating a unique research environment. VARI seeks to incubate new methods for interdisciplinary collections-led research and research-led teaching, and with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is taking the V&A's long-established culture of research, postgraduate teaching and academic partnerships into a new phase.
About the Arts and Humanities Research Council
The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), part of UK Research and Innovation, funds internationally outstanding independent researchers across the whole range of the arts and humanities: history, archaeology, digital content, philosophy, languages and literature, design, heritage, area studies, the creative and performing arts, and much more. The quality and range of research supported by AHRC works for the good of UK society and culture and contributes both to UK economic success and to the culture and welfare of societies across the globe.

We would like to thank our supporters; 4D Modelshop, Amalgam Modelmaking, B.15 Workshop, Drawing Matter, GHA Group, The University of Manchester, MAP Laboratory (CNRS), and Model Platform.

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Shaping Space - Architectural Models Revealed

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This autumn will see the launch of a major exhibition celebrating the role of the architectural model in shaping the spaces we live in. A collaboration between the V&A and the Building Centre, Shaping Space - Architectural Models Revealed will present the world in miniature

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The After-Life Of The Architectural Model: Where Can History’s Lost Models Go?

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Where does the architectural model go after it serves its purpose? And can it have a meaningful afterlife?

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https://academic.oup.com/ct/article-abstract/29/2/129/5113030?redirectedFrom=fulltext

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Henri Lefebvre's Theory of the Production of Space and the Critical Theory of Communication

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Abstract. This article asks how Henri Lefebvre's humanist Marxism can contribute to the foundations of a critical theory of communication. It does so by reflect

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This article investigates the theoretical legacy of the notion of model in architectural and urban discourse. This concept is characterised by a bundle of meanings, sedimented during a longstanding evolution, and by a never interrupted debate around it. The contribution will retrace the roots of the concept of model and will outlines some highpoints of the discussion, in particular in the 1970s when model became crucial in the epistemological discourse on architecture, till the recent heterogeneous resurgence. In fact, nowadays the notion of model, with its longstanding heritage, may be an effective and still up to date device to study the contemporary conception and production of space in the global stage.

Cet article vise à explorer l'héritage théorique de la notion de modèle dans le discours architectural et urbain. Ce concept est caractérisé par une accumulation de significations, sédimentées pendant une longue évolution, et par un débat qui ne s'est jamais interrompu. Cette contribution retrace les origines du concept de modèle, en soulignant quelques moments de majeure intensité de la discussion, en particulier dans les années 1970 quand le terme modèle était devenu central dans le discours sur l'épistémologie de l'architecture, et jusqu'à sa récente et hétérogène réapparition. A présent, la notion de modèle, forte d'un long héritage, peut être un instrument efficace pour étudier la conception et la production de l'espace au niveau global.
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1 The centrality of the concept of model in architecture and urbanism since the emergence of an auton (...)

2 Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l'architecture. Duchesne. Paris, 1753.

6 Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses. Paris, Gallimard, 1966.

1 The notion of model has played a primary role in the practice and theory of Architecture and Urban Sciences 1 since the very beginning of the development of an autonomous theoretical discourse in both disciplines. This concept has evolved over time, and has come to exist through periodic discussions which have resulted in a longstanding debate with recurring waves and peaks of intensity. This can be seen in publications such as the seminal Laugier's 2 or during what Christian Girard 3 has called " vague scientifisante ", as well as Philippe Boudon's 4 and Françoise Choay 's 5 investigation of the scientifi c basis which underpins the architectural discourse building on the concept of model, following Foucault's 6 work on epistemology.

2 In recent years, this concept shows to have reached a new level of interest in architectural and urban theory. Unlike in the past, the notion of model is no longer questioned as an epistemological concept nowadays, rather used to interpret the design of architecture and city.

9 Colin McFarlane, "Assemblage and critical urbanism", City, n°2, v.15, 2011, pp. 204-224.

10 Anne Coste, Quel sens en architecture pour le polysémique terme de modèle ?, 2008, [on line] https: (...)

3 This attention shows the importance of a notion that combines a longstanding legacy with a flexible definition, resulting from an accumulation of debates and discussions. New forms of urbanisation are currently emerging around the world, and thus require a renewed debate on the epistemological foundations of the term in order for critical urban theory and practice to be updated accordingly 7. Given these circumstances, the questions of what models are and how the concept has evolved should be considered. The current age is characterised by intense exchanges through transnational actors 8, and models could serve as an instrument to question how space is conceived, especially in those cases which appear to be shaped by assemblages of transnational models 9. In fact, transnational models and their successful iconic-related images play a crucial role in the rise of new urban imageries. The notion of model therefore appears to be a device of knowledge that provides interesting and currently under-explored possibilities. In the first part of this article, the intricate meanings of the term, wisely described by Anne Coste 10 as polysemic, will be discussed. Then, the 1970s epistemological debate around the notion of model, indeed the most intense peak of the discussion on it, will be summed up in order to compare and relate this theoretical heritage with the recent resurgence of models in certain contemporary works.

12 About the interconnected relationship between model and type cf. the voice Type in Antoine C. Quatr (...)

13 Charles Jencks, The Iconic Building - The Power of Enigma, London, Frances Lincoln, 2005.

14 The relationship between the imitation of nature and model recurs frequently in a long article whic (...)

4 Unlike other theoretical concepts with a clearly established and shared definition, such as type, model does not have a univocal definition. Anne Coste 11has appropriately discussed the "polysemy" of the notion of model in architecture to describe the multiplicity of its connotations, which may sometimes give rise to confusing ambiguities and ambivalences. Furthermore, model is not only an umbrella term which covers an extensive range of meanings, but a concept which appears strongly interwoven, and sometimes overlapped, with other concepts crucial to architectural theory such as "type" , "icon" 13 or "imitation" .

16 Suzanne Bachelard, "Quelques aspects historiques des notions de modèle et de justification des modè (...)

5 Etymologically, the term "mod el" comes from the late Latin term , an alteration of the classical Latin word , diminutive from 15, which means "measure", or "unity of measure". During the Renaissance age, the expression appeared in Italian, used in sculpture and architecture to indicate a measure to refer to. The term was then spread to French: , English: , and German: Since its origin, the term has been characterised by its ambivalence: designating both its original sense, the material object, as well as its figurative sense, the abstract norm 16.

6 Nevertheless, the concept of model came prior to the appearance of the word itself, dating back to the discussion on artistic production in Greek philosophy. It was marked by the idea of mimesis, namely the imitation, or reproduction of nature in an artistic composition.

17 François Jullien, Traité de l'efficacité, Paris, Grasset, 1996, p. 18.

18 " Nous dressons une forme idéale(eidos), que nous posons comme but (telos), et nous agissons ensui (...)

7 Moreover, model is strongly related to the act of modelling, which is a concept of thinking, a way to conceive and to deal with reality and action. According to François Jullien, the act of modelling is the main distinctive strategy of Western thinking, "one of the most characteristic moves of the modern Western thought 17 ". Modelling is typically a planning activity which consists of imagining an idea, an ideal form - the model - which is assumed as a goal to be achieved . We can note here the relevance of the construction of a representation - the idealised form - which is at the base of representational models in the sciences , as well as in architecture.

20 Michel Armatte, "La notion de modèle dans les sciences sociales : Anciennes et nouvelles significat (...)

8 In fact, the concept of model is not only a specific dis ciplinary concept, and thus has other uses which come from common language or other fields and which create continuous contaminations to the meaning of the word. Hence, in several disciplines, the notion of model is largely adopted with different nuanced meanings, having primary relevance in epistemology and logics, fostered by the mathematisation of sciences 20.

9 Indeed, the term has seen a progressive evolution and shift in meaning since its original connotation in the Beaux Arts, as it gradually spread to a large variety of disciplines. Moreover, as pointed out by Suzanne Bachelard 21, the term has now assumed different related senses which are not always well defined, frequently resulting in "interferences". Serge Diebolt goes even further, highlighting the semantic complexity, the systematic overlapping of different symbolic representations in the term model, which he defines as "a system of symbols [... indifferently and simultaneously graphical, discursive, mathematical, iconic 22 " .

10 Michel Armatte 23 has identified five classes of meanings for the term model: model as a , a prototype to reproduce; model as a of a real dispositive; model as an , detached from a standard; model as an ; and finally, model as a logic-mathematics Apart from the last meaning, referring to mathematics, the four other classes listed above may also be used to classify models in architectural and urban science disciplines, all gathered by the idea of being: "the ephemeral trial that comes before concrete reality (whether in thoughts, theories, intentions)" 24.

11 Anne Coste 25, however, distinguishes three different functions of the term model in architecture: it is adopted to conceive, to represent and to understand. Hence, the model in architecture and urbanism is a device which can provide different instrumental purposes 26, shifting from an imitative to a speculative function.

12 A large variety of things may commonly be assumed as models. This includes physical objects, fictional objects, set-theoretic structures, descriptions or some combination of the few, sharing the purpose "to occupy an indeterminate, tentative, even disposable domain between our hopes and reality" 27. Models are therefore a representation, an image - we would say - with a different degree of abstraction, produced to operatively interpret or modify reality, a device to produce an effect according to our desires, using a strong, indissoluble link with the idea of imagery 28. In this regard, the model is the element that links the project (the image, or ) and the reality; just as it is the device linking an original new object to an imitated one 29 , with the necessary consequence of an impossible coincidence of the different planes, resulting in a constant deviation 30.

13 Above we have seen that the notion of model in architecture and urbanism may be instrumental to "understand"; this function, however, may also be conceived as a way to "know", in relation to the possibilities of establishing knowledge in architecture and urbanism.

31 Marc-Antoine Laugier, op. cit.

32 Wolfgang Herrmann, Laugier and Eighteenth Century French Theory, London, A. Zwemmer Ltd, 1962.

14 It is no coincidence that , since its publication, one of the most influential books on architectural theory, Essai sur l'architecture by Abbé Marc-Antoine Laugier 31, has experienced a long debate surrounding its dissertation on model 32. One of the pillars of the nascent modern discussion on architecture explicitly builds on a particular model: the primitive hut:

The little hut that I have just described, is the model upon which all the magnificences of architecture have been imagined, it is in coming near in the execution of the simplicity of this first model, that we avoid all essential faults, that we seize the true perfections 33.

15 The centrality of a model as one of the starting points in the modern debate on the discipline of architecture is not only evoked by the above-mentioned words, but also by the widely renowned allegorical representation of the hut-model on the book's front cover - which is maybe the most renowned illustration of architecture's origin 34.

36 See also André Corboz, "La posterità del Tempio di Salomone : iconografia e architettura", in Carlo (...)

17 In fact, discussing the role of the Holy Sepulchre 36 in the iconography of medieval architecture in Jerusalem, Richard Krautheimer 37 has pointed out that, at the time, "the model is never imitated in toto. A selective transfer also of the architectural elements takes place". Since "the mediaeval beholder expected to find in a copy only some parts of the prototype but not by any means all of them".

38 For an analysis and a critique of the search for an epistemological foundation for architectural di (...)

39 Michel Foucault, op. cit., 1966.

40 Michel Foucault, op. cit., 1969.

41 Christian Girard, op. cit.

18 Deep changes in the conception of the notion of model are therefore suggestive of new paradigms in architectural thinking. More recently, the concept of model has played a significant and prominent role in some attempts to provide an epistemological foundation for architecture. This was especially the case in France in the 1970s, in the frame of a general call to search for a scientific basis in disciplinary discourses following the debates 38, originat ing from the publication of Michel Foucault's Les Mots et les Choses 39 in 1966 and L'Archéologie du savoir 40 in 1969. This " vague scientifisante" 41 is clearly expressed in the research of two French theorists whose works will be briefly examined: Philippe Boudon and Françoise Choay.

42 Françoise Choay, op. cit.

44 Choay underlines that the foundation of an autonomous theoretical discourse on the built environmen (...)

19 In her seminal book , La règle et le modèle 42, Françoise Choay aimed to discuss the origins of an autonomous theoretical discourse about built environments ( ) 43. In her work , she retraces the two principal formulations through which disciplinary discourse on architecture and the city has been organized: the "rule" and th e "model" respectively vehiculated for the first ti me by two founder texts ( textes instaurateurs ) dating back to the Renaissance period in the Western world 44: De re aedificatoria by Leon Battista Alberti and by Thomas More.

48 It is relevant to observe that also in Philosophy, in regard to the ontology of models in sciences, (...)

22 In her analysis of Choay points out the centrality of space in More's text, "although paradoxical, Utopia, that is nowhere, nonetheless is first of all a space 47". In Utopia , two different overlapping images of utopian spaces are presented. These underpin the entire account of the island, crossing through all scales, from the city to the household. Choay distinguishes the first image, which she calls "portrait 48 ", from the second one, the "model". The portrait is, on the one hand, a description of an individuality, a space with unique spatial connotations and geographical positions. On the other, the model entails the construction of an abstract image, an image deprived of any connotation of localisation. The model is the reduction of space to a prototype devoid of any temporal or geographical dimensions, but reproducible to a "universalizable device".

23 The space model is strongly interlinked with the society model, serving as its support, "in integral and necessary part 49" . The space model/model of space in Utopia is a way to move "through a mirror" 50, a critique of More's contemporary English society, a "modelling critique" ( critique modélisante ). According to Choay, the great merit and innovation of More is the discovery that a society can turn into something different from what tradition has shaped, a society which has a fundamental support in the spatial organisation and in the model of space: "the concept of the model space is connected with a conception of history and work underpinned by a value system 51 ".

24 Vittorio Gregotti 52 has also discussed the relationship between utopia and model, although differently to Choay as he opposed the two terms. In fact, the Italian architect distinguishes the utopic project ( progetto utopico ) from the model, the former being intentionally unrealizable: "it has remained on paper not by accident, but by design decision 53". It is a projection of an a-temporal, a-localised, a-historical condition, and is inseparable from a political social dimension. On the opposite side, the model operates in a defined phenomenal contest as a design device, "pure design instrument 54", able to establish relationships with materiality. The power of the model, according to Gregotti, consists of providing an aesthetic meaning to an operation of re-foundation, towards a transformation to new authenticity. This is an idea of model which has recently been recalled by Bose, Cisar, and Brennan 55 in their editorial, We Live in Models, where they state, "the potential of models is not representational, but rather to collapse notions that the existing is in any sense the natural order of things".

56 Among the different texts where Philippe Boudon has discussed for more than 40 years his theoretica (...)

57 Philippe Boudon, op. cit., 1971.

58 Philippe Boudon, op. cit., 1975.

60 The notion of system in Boudon's work comes from linguistics, in particular from de Saussure.

61 The scale is indeed one of the most important concepts in the architecturological system, the first (...)

62 In Les Mots et les Choses Foucault (op. cit., 1966) introduces the notion of episteme, the historic (...)

63 Philippe Boudon, op. cit., 1975, v. II, p. 8.

64 Philippe Boudon, op. cit., 1975.

65 Christian Girard, op. cit.

25 While Choay's research took strictly the written production into consideration, Philippe Boudon 56 also looks to the architectural physical production in his longstanding struggle to define a scientific system of Architecture since the 1970s - following the publication of Sur l'espace architectural 57 and in particular Architecture et Architecturologie 58. His efforts are based on Structuralist thought, with references firstly to the works of de Saussure and Foucault, with the aim of establishing an architectural epistemology which he named architecturology. Architecturoly is, in Boudon's intentions, a meta-theory which aims to establish the knowledge of architecture as a scientific object. It is a meta-theory because Boudon's purpose is to provide a conceptual basis for architects' theories 59. The scientific object of architecturology in the epistemological field of architecture is the architectural project. This is the product of the architect's work, namely the architectural conception, which is underpinned by modelling operations. The architectural conception is thus conceived as a system 60 which can be scientifically analysed, made intelligible by an activity of modelling . We can see that the concept of model plays a crucial role in Boudon's work. The architectural conception is a process which implies different operations that can be schematised with a mathematical analogy: by the interaction between an "operand", the model, and an "operator", the scale 61. In Boudon's work, the model, as an epistemological concept, is read according to three different 62 analysed by Foucault, "toward the model, three epistemological attitudes seem possible. They correspond to the systems of positivity that, according to Foucault, characterise the pre-Classical, Classical and Modern Ages 63" . The three different attitudes give rise to three different reading grids of model: in the first age, models are connected to the notion of resemblance and similitude (analogy); in the classical age, "representation" establishes rules for proportion in architecture; in the final, and current age, the model becomes part of a system and is no longer "realist", maintaining only a theoretical reality 64. The model, therefore, appears as the central problematic of architecturology , Boudon making the point of defining its meta-theory as "the theory of the model as a theory 65 ".

26 Every operation of copy in architecture, according to Boudon, is a combination of the actions of repetition and of the copied object. The two actions represent two extremes: repetition , which is the closest to the copied object and has a metaphorical character, conveys an aspect of the object which is entirely represented; and , which is the most distant from the copied object and has a metonymic character, conveys only a part of the object which undergoes a "crop operation".

27 During those same years, Jacques Lucan 66 also participated in the debate from the review . Similarly to Boudon, Lucan also questioned to the possibility of investigating the project, building on contemporary philosophical positions (such as Derrida, Levinas and Deleuze) with some common basis - the similarity language-project and concepts such as model, form, imitation and repetition - but with a conflicting conclusion. The French critic, in particular, distinguishes between two different activities, separating the "imitation of model" from the "repetition of a process 67". The repetition of a process to generate a form makes possible the production of innovations, resulting in necessary differences that orient the design process. These processes are mainly influenced not by a recognition of so called "exemplary models" (those derived from a heritage), nor by "theoretic models" (types), but rather by a balance of power. Hence, according to Lucan, design activity is not produced by models. On the contrary, the project, conceived as a tool of knowledge, "allows to qualify the typical differently from the figure of a fixe and independent form; the project allows to qualify the typical as form of a balance of forces, and not as archetype (invariant) 68". As a consequence, "the project has to be thought not so much in typological terms (models, types), but in topological terms (forces, balance of forces, force differences, relations of production ". Philippe Panerai, Jean Castex and Jean-Charles Depaule 70, on the basis of similar premises, have used urban form, a result of the circulation of models, to investigate the evolution of cities, stating that models are the schemes at the base of the architect's thinking and that they are suggestive of the general conditions of a certain historical period. Their position is indicative of an idea of model, slightly moving toward the concept of type - recalling the ambiguity already retraceable in the writings of Quatremère de Quincy. This stance has shifted the concept of model toward a limited vision and toward a morphological approach to the city that goes on to have much success in the international debate on architectural theory during the 1970s and the 1980s 71.

28 During the same period, while in the French context - and to a lesser extent in Italy - the debate around models developed from an epistemological question - also deviating toward the concern for the morphology - , in the Anglo-Saxon context, the discussion on design methodology proposed a modelisation of architectural conception. John C. Jones 72, for instance, investigated the process of models, namely the procedures for designing. Around the same time, Christopher Alexander 73 aimed to find a rationality to explain how forms are shaped, and therefore tried to schematise the procedures that give rise to them in order to find the logical structures behind them. Also building on the linguistic analogy, Alexander proposed two hundred and fifty-three patterns, whereby "each pattern represents our current best guess as to what arrangement of the physical environment will work to solve the problem presented 74 ". Together, the two hundred and fifty-three patterns form a language, with the structure of a network. According to Alexander, they describe a problem and then offer a reproducible solution. Therefore, the reproducibility seems to lead back to patterns of the concept of models. Nevertheless, their extremised archetypical connotation limits them as a peculiar group of models: archetypes.

29 In short, the debate that arose in France in the 1970s, albeit built on common philosophical foundations rooted in Structuralism and Linguistics, reached different conclusions on the role and nature of models. Reproducibility is indeed a common point, as well as, in Choay and Boudon, the idea that there exists a sort of Model, "something above" which encompasses all the models, a sort of . While for Choay, it is the model as a paradigm for utopia, Boudon believes it is the model which coincides with the system of architecturology. Nevertheless, the theoretical construction of both, even if rigorous, seems to be too rigid, giving rise to subsequent criticism 75. This is also perceivable in Lucan, who completely reverses the question, laying the project, as an instrument of knowledge, at the base of models.

30 In the Anglo-Saxon context, models were discussed in parallel by scholars such as Jones and Alexander in terms of methodology of design, instead of epistemology. In these cases, the issue lead them to a more practical question: "how to design?", instead of, "how is it possible to scientifically talk about design?"

32 Nevertheless, in recent years, the concept of model is resurging in the disciplinary debate. This resurgence, witnessed by a flourishing of monographic journal issues 77, conferences and seminars 78, single articles, as well as books and exhibitions 79, still maintains its ce ntre in France, keeping the 1970s-1980s debate as a background, but rarely as a basis to build on a new notion of model. That is to say, there is no explicit effort to re-theorise the concept, its definition remaining generally quite open, undefined and uncertain. This aspect is quite surprising in the context of a call for renewed debate on the epistemological foundations for an updated critical urban theory and practice in the age of globalisation 80. The questions around the nature of the concept of model deserve a deeper investigation in order to understand how cities nowadays are produced by reproducing, assembling and manipulating models.

33 In the 2010s, we c ould identify two macro categories re-flourishing in the use of the notion of model. The first category is connected to studies on contemporary urbanisation processes and the urban phenomena related to globalisation; the second, instead, is linked to an "history of model(s)" or "model(s) in history", including both the history of the notion itself, as well as the history of a specific model. Indeed, there may also be found some contaminations between the two categories.

82 Eugene McCann and Kevin Ward, op. cit., p. xviii.

83 Ola Söderström, "Des modèles urbains 'mobiles'", Urbanism, n°383, 2012, pp. 43-44.

34 In the first case , mod els are investigated as an object of international circulation, mobile references navigating in the contemporary globalised and barrier-less world. In this regard, research on transfer and reception of models frequently adopts the work by McCann and Ward 81 as an interpretative basis, despite the fact that, in their book, the term model is seldom employed. The book rather constitutes a benchmark for its "effort to conceptualise global-urban connections 82", investigating the mobility of urban policies. As a matter of fact, several recent works using the term model to investigate contemporary urbanisation often contain a fundamental ambiguity, equivocation: frequently arguing from the notion of model in architecture, they then operate an unsolved shift in meaning toward an often-vague concept of "urban model". Söderström , for instance, questions "what is an urban model? 83", building on de Quincy and Choay's definitions of model, then moving the discussion towards a notion of urban model strictly related to the issue of policy transfer. He does this, however, without providing a clear definition, rather stating the fluidity of the notion. This vagueness is also confirmed in Söderström 's identification of three different categories of urban models 84 (1) "cities in their entirety" , in respect to their successful policies, on a global plan such as the so-called Barcelona model, or in relation to a specific aspect of urban governance (transportation, cultural promotion as examples); (2) "specific aspects of an urban policy " not directly related to a precise city or space; (3) a "mix of policies and formal solutions " which are defined as " types urbains " , urban types, such as waterfronts or pedestrian streets.

85 Elisabeth Peyroux and Thierry Sanjuan, "Stratégies de villes et 'modèles'" urbains : approche écono (...)

35 Furthermore, the use of the term model as a "container of meanings" goes also unsolved in another contribution to the discussion on the international circulation of urban models edited by Peyroux and Sanjuan 85. They state in the dossier in question that the notion of model "refers to an ensemble of objects, policies, urban doctrines, good practices or labels that share a common element: they are employed as references for the imitation and reproduction in a context different from that of initial production 86 ". Therefore, we can again see the use of the term model to describe a large spectrum of different elements: from physical objects to policies and good practices. A variety is subsequently reaffirmed when the authors interestingly recognise a double operability of models in urban production, acting both on the ideal plan and on the physical dimension. The condition which reassembles a similar diversity of situations is, therefore, the condition of reproducibility: models are a heterogeneous category of elements which can be reproduced and imitated elsewhere. On this point, the position of Peiroux and Sanjuan is slightly divergent from that of Söderström, who seems to point out the process of free de-construction and re-assemblage suggested by urban models, instead of a reproduction process.

36 In short , a first category of research building on the issues of urban policy circulation, adopt s the notion of urban models to investigate processes of the international transfer of a large variety of references. U rban models become all those eleme nts that shape contemporary urban space: from architectural objects to good practices adopted by municipalities, often cities themselves, regarding their materiality, their image or their policies. Fluidity seems to be a keyword here: that is, the circulation of refe re nces and generic urban models appear ing as the magmatic heterogeneous fluid circulating worldwide. Hence, a new theorisation of the notion of model appears arduous, and maybe not a primary concern, preferring to practically question: "urban models, to do what? 87 " , for instance .

37 In these analyses , the gaze often seems to implicitly tack from the model to the act of modelling, in other words to shift from a concept - model - to a process or procedure - modelling . Recent works on urban models, in fact, clearly privilege an emphasis on processes instead of structure: in this case, namely actions or urban policies are investigated rather than things, the object-model. Furthermore , an inappropriate and confusing swing from model to the simplifying act of modelling was already advocated as a risk by Choay 88 in the conclusion of her book, when she stated that contemporary urban discipline and project were often degenerating in an abuse of modelling operations, losing sight of the model nature, depriving it of its value and power.

38 In this first group of works centred on the term model , the reference to previous notions of model in architectural and urban theory is almost neglected and generically reduced to "spatial projections and images of the future city ", and the shift from the already established definitions and their use is often roughly discussed. Thus, another category of recent research has discussed the notion of model in an historic perspective, with an explicit gaze on precedent debate s . This second group collects a larger heterogeneity of aims . Unlike the first one, whose purpose was essentially to investigate the circulation and transfer of references on a planetary scale, here the rediscover y of the concept of model does not have a unique objective.

39 Anne Coste 90, for instance, debating on " Quel sens en architecture pour le polysémique terme de modèle " has investigated "what history of architecture teach us" and "what architectural theorists tell us". Focusing now on only the title and the two subtitles of Coste's work, it is easily possible to outline how the question of model is addressed. Firstly, a variety of different meanings, the polysemy of the term, which need to be traced back in search of sense, out of a necessity to provide categorisation and, consequently, an order around a word often employed in an ambiguous and confused way. Ambiguity, which, according to the author, is paradoxically a carrier of meaning. Secondly, the two subtitles underline the historicity of the notion of model: to reflect on it, to investigate the "idea of model", is somehow a way to develop a history of the history and theory of architecture. Nevertheless, Coste's purpose is by no means solely to build a history of the notion of model, instead she aims to investigate and propose the use of the concept of model as an operative tool to investigate and to learn from architecture " entre rétrospective et prospective 92 ".

93 Thierry Paquot, "Ce que la mondialisation fait aux lieux", Urbanism, n°383, 2012, pp. 70-72.

40 Thierry Paquot's 93article builds on a historical perspective , and could be placed at the intersection of the two categories of work on model that we traced. Through an excursus where he retraces " les trois temps de la mondialisation du monde 94 " , he criticise d the evolution of models' imitation, which in the last "time" has produced an overwhelming standardisation and uniformi s ation of urban space at the global scale.

97 Among them: flexibility, walkability, standardisation, modularity, reversibility, high density.

41 Another interesting and pe culiar case to report is represented by the exhibition, and its catalogue, Paris Haussmann. Modèle de ville , was held at the Pavillon de l'Arsenal, Paris, January 31 -June 4 , 2017, and was curated by Benoit Jallon, Umberto Napolitano, architect founders of the French agency LAN, and Franck Boutté. The aim of the exhibition was not simply a celebration of the Baron Haussmann diligence, nor a glorification of its product - the renovated, modernised city of Paris. Instead, the exhibition was built on contemporary urban design, as clearly stated in the catalogue, on the production of urban space nowadays: notwithstanding the great amount of debates, competitions and projects, alongside new methodologies and concepts, with unsuccessful results, failing to "make the city" and "make any sense 95". This raised the question, "where is it possible to find a model able to "make the city" to provide it with meaning?" To which the curators responded: the centre of Paris, referred to as a " modèle de ville ", provided by "a [...] relevance" . Through a very interesting recourse to drawing as a tool of investigation, the curators showed how a summation of very different factors 97, that are apparently in contradiction, shall ensure that the city renovated in the XIX century remains today a model that is able to deliver a reference for its surprising capacity to establish a meaning to the city, a " sens de la ville " . The drawings displayed in the exhibition as well as the catalogue outlined how "the" model, the Haussmannian Paris, is actually a thought, a design and a collection of several elements - facades and their ornamental parts, urban furniture - which are themselves models or sub-models. Hence, the " modèle de ville " is composed by the assemblage of various models that, through a general coherence, produce an aesthetic and functional unity, shaping the city and its model.

42 In short, the second category of works use s the notion of model that recurs in the lens of history, operating as a "history of model", as in the case of Coste 98, or to obse rve "model(s) in history", as in the contrasting approaches and aims of Paquot 99 and Jallon, Napolitano and Bou tté 100. Even so, these bodies of research do not call into question the concept itself, as they do not re-theorise the concept of model. Nevertheless, the term model seems to be used in a more conscious, less fluid or ambiguous way, otherwise ambiguity itself becomes the object of investigation, such as in Coste's work. The gathering these works adopts a historical lens of observation surrounding the question of sense - the sense of the term model itself 101, the sense of cities' uniformis ation 102, "the sense of the ci ty 103" - and a gaze " entre rétrospective et prospective 104". Namely, the concept of model is exploited to interpret 105, to criticise the contemporary production 106and to propose new paradigms in the design of the city 107. Indeed, in this last case, the vision of model is different from the conception expressed by Gregotti 108 and Choay 109 in the 1960s-1970s, as it is not a projection of a future which breaks with the present, even if it is an aspiration for a re-foundation. Instead, it builds on a modelised past and thus is possible to perceive some traits common to the model in Laugier. More than 250 years ago, the Abbé also discussed his proposal to re-think architecture from a model of the past. In this case, the archetype for antonomasia also marks a difference, however, the primitive hut does not have a precise localisation - someway in mythical Arcadia? - nor a temporal dimension, rather, it is out of the time, it is the origin. In fact, the model of Laugier refers to a myth, while the Haussmannian Paris is obviously something very clear in terms of time and location.

43 To sum up, this last category of works shows how the debate on model in architecture is still vivid and varied . Furthermore, it makes clear how the concept of model can be adopted as an operative tool: it may provide new frontiers in historical interpretations, in the critique of design production and, beyond the theoretical field, may be a starting point for new ideas, new paradigms and new in design practice.

44 In conclusion, this review shows how the notion of model may still be crucial in discussing architectural and urban theory and production. Moreover, recent issues, such as the relevance of globalisation and its transnational networks, are resulting in a new focus on models. In fact, their study may provide an efficient instrument to reveal geographies of circulation of references, as well as to deconstruct and unveil successful imageries that are globally reproduced.

110 Colin McFarlane, "Assemblage and critical urbanism", City, n°2, v. 15, 2011, pp. 204-224.

111 Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, op. cit.

45 Certainly, the contemporary urban space is produced by adopting, manipulating and assembling models characterised by a transnational circulation 110. Nevertheless, what models are and how they can be used to study the urban dimension is rarely investigated, despite the necessity of a renewed debate on the epistemological foundations in order for there to be an updated critical urban theory 111. Undoubtedly, by investigating their representation and conception functions , the understanding function of models may offer a powerful device to investigate the architectural and urban production, thanks to the intrinsic nature of models being in between the conception, the design and the physical results.
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Bibliographie

Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form , Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1964.

Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, New York, Oxford University Press, 1977.

Michel Armatte, "La notion de modèle dans les sciences sociales : Anciennes et nouvelles significations", Mathématiques et Sciences humaines, n°172, 2005, pp. 91-123.

Suzanne Bachelard, "Quelques aspects historiques des notions de modèle et de justification des modèles", in Pierre Delattre and M. Thellier (Eds.), Élaboration et justification des modèles, Paris, Maloine, 1979, pp. 3-19.

Shumi Bose, Sasha Cisar and Nicholas Lobo Brennan, "Editorial", in Models Ruins Power . Issue 1 We Live in Models, 2014, pp. 6-9.

Philippe Boudon, Sur l'espace architectural : essai d'épistémologie de l'architecture, Paris, Dunod, 1971.

Philippe Boudon, Architecture et architecturologie,4 vol., Paris, AREA, 1975.

Philippe Boudon, Introduction à l'architecturologie. Paris, Dunod, 1992.

Philippe Boudon, Conception, Paris, Éditions de La Villette, 2005.

Philippe Boudon, De l'architecture à l'épistémologie : la question de l'échelle. Paris, PUF, 1991.

Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, "Towards a new epistemology of the urban?", City, 19, n°2-3, 2015, pp. 151-182.

Peter Carl, "Death and the Model", Models Ruins Power . Issue 1 We Live in Models, 2014, pp. 104-114.

Françoise Choay, La règle et le modèle. Sur la théorie de l'architecture et de l'urbanisme, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1980.

Damien Claeys, Architecture et complexité : Un modèle systémique du processus de (co)conception qui vise l'architecture,Louvain, Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2013.

André Corboz, "La posterità del Tempio di Salomone : iconografia e architettura", in Carlo Cresti, Massoneria e architettura, Convegno di Firenze, Foggia, Bastogi,1988, pp. 267-269.

Anne Coste, "Le modèle en architecture. Entre rétrospective e prospective", Les Cahiers de la recherche architecturale, 40, 1997, pp. 19-28.

Anne Coste, Quel sens en architecture pour le polysémique terme de modèle ?, 2008, [on line] https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00923363, retrieved on 25/05/2018.

Laurent Devisme and Marc Dumont, "Des modèles urbains, pour quoi faire ?", Lieux communs. Les cahiers du LAUA, 14, 2011, pp. 10-21.

Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses. Paris, Gallimard, 1966.

Michel Foucault, L'Archéologie du savoir. Paris, Gallimard, 1969.

Roman Frigg and Stephen Hartmann, "Models in Science", in Edward N. Zalta, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2018, [on line] https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/models-science/, retrieved on 18/06/2018.

Christian Girard, Architecture et concepts nomades. Traité d'indiscipline, Bruxelles, Mardaga, 1986.

Peter G.W. Glare (Ed.), "Modulus", in Oxford Latin Dictionary, London, Oxford University Press, 1968, p. 1124.

Peter G.W. Glare (Ed.), "Modus", in Oxford Latin Dictionary, London, Oxford University Press, 1968, pp. 1124-1125.

Vittorio Gregotti, Il territorio dell'architettura, Milano, Feltrinelli, 1966.

Wolfgang Herrmann, Laugier and Eighteenth Century French Theory, London, A. Zwemmer Ltd, 1962.

Benoit Jallon, Umberto Napolitano and Frank Boutté, Paris Haussmann : Modèle De Ville/A Model's Relevance. Paris/Zürich, Éditions du Pavillon de l'Arsenal/Park Books, 2017.

Charles Jencks, The Iconic Building - The Power of Enigma, London, Frances Lincoln, 2005.

John Christopher Jones, Design Methods: seeds of human futures, London, John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 1970.

François Jullien, Traité de l'efficacité, Paris, Grasset, 1996.

Richard Krautheimer, "Introduction", in Iconography of Mediaeval Architecture, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, v. 5, 1942, pp. 1-33.

Karl Kropf, Handbook of urban morphology, London, Wiley, 2017.

Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l'architecture. Duchesne. Paris, 1753.

Jacques Lucan, "La forme et la répétition", AMC Architecture Mouvement Continuité, n°47, 1978, pp. 49-52.

Eugene McCann and Kevin Ward (eds.), Mobile Urbanism: Cities and Policymaking in the Global Age, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Colin McFarlane, "Assemblage and critical urbanism", City, n°2, v.15, 2011, pp. 204-224.

Philippe Panerai, Jean Castex and Jean-Charles Depaule, Formes urbaines : de l'îlot à la barre, Paris, Dunod, 1977.

Thierry Paquot, "Ce que la mondialisation fait aux lieux", Urbanism, n°383, 2012, pp. 70-72.

Elisabeth Peyroux and Thierry Sanjuan, "Stratégies de villes et 'modèles'" urbains : approche économique et géopolitique des relations entre villes", EchoGéo, n°36, 2016.

Antoine C. Quatremère de Quincy, "Type", in Dictionnaire historique d'architecture, contenant dans son plan les notions historiques, descriptives, archéologiques, biographiques, théoriques, didactiques et pratiques de cet art, vol 2, Paris, Librairie d'Adrien Le Clere et Cie, 1832, pp. 629-630.

Fabio Restrepo Hernández, Ceci est mon testament : Marc-Antoine Laugier, doctoral dissertation, Barcelona, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, 2011.

Leslie Sklair, The Icon Project. Architecture, Cities and Capitalist Globalization, New York, Oxford University Press, 2017.

Ola Söderström, "Des modèles urbains 'mobiles'", Urbanism, n°383, 2012, pp. 43-46.

Ola Söderström and Thierry Paquot, "Modèles urbains", Urbanism, n°383, 2012, pp.41-42.
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1 The centrality of the concept of model in architecture and urbanism since the emergence of an autonomous theoretical discourse will be discussed below, in regard to Choay's work.

2 Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l'architecture. Duchesne. Paris, 1753.

3 Christian Girard, Architecture et concepts nomades. Traité d'indiscipline, Bruxelles, éditions Mardaga, 1986.

4 Philippe Boudon, Sur l'espace architectural : essai d'épistémologie de l'architecture, Paris, Dunod, 1971.

Philippe Boudon, Architecture et architecturologie,4 vol.. Paris, AREA, 1975.

5 Françoise Choay, La règle et le modèle. Sur la théorie de l'architecture et de l'urbanisme, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1980.

6 Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses. Paris, Gallimard, 1966.

Michel Foucault, L'Archéologie du savoir. Paris, Gallimard, 1969.

7 Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, "Towards a new epistemology of the urban?", City, n°2-3, v.19, 2015, pp. 151-182.

8 Eugene McCann and Kevin Ward (eds.), Mobile Urbanism: Cities and Policymaking in the Global Age, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

9 Colin McFarlane, "Assemblage and critical urbanism", City, n°2, v.15, 2011, pp. 204-224.

10 Anne Coste, Quel sens en architecture pour le polysémique terme de modèle ?, 2008, [on line] https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00923363, retrieved on 25/05/2018.

13 Charles Jencks, The Iconic Building - The Power of Enigma, London, Frances Lincoln, 2005.

Leslie Sklair, The Icon Project. Architecture, Cities and Capitalist Globalization, New York, Oxford University Press, 2017.

14 The relationship between the imitation of nature and model recurs frequently in a long article which Quatremère de Quincy dedicates to the word imitation in its Dictionnaire d'architecture (Op. cit.): " Chaque art trouve à imiter dans la nature un modèle général ou commun à tous, et un modèle qui lui est particulier. "

16 Suzanne Bachelard, "Quelques aspects historiques des notions de modèle et de justification des modèles", in Pierre Delattre and M. Thellier (Eds.), Élaboration et justification des modèles, Paris, Maloine, 1979, pp. 3-19.

17 François Jullien, Traité de l'efficacité, Paris, Grasset, 1996, p. 18.

18 " Nous dressons une forme idéale(eidos), que nous posons comme but (telos), et nous agissons ensuite pour le faire passer dans les faits. Tout cela irait de soi -but, idéal et volonté : les yeux fixés sur le modèle que nous avons conçu, que nous projetons sur le monde et dont nous faisons un plan à exécuter, nous choisissons d'intervenir dans le monde et de donner forme à la réalité "( Id., p. 15)

19 Roman Frigg and Stephen Hartmann, "Models in Science", in Edward N. Zalta, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2018, [on line] https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/models-science/, retrieved on 18/06/2018.

20 Michel Armatte, "La notion de modèle dans les sciences sociales : Anciennes et nouvelles significations"", Mathématiques et Sciences Humaines, n°172, 2005, pp. 91-123.

21 Suzanne Bachelard, op. cit.

23 Michel Armatte, op. cit.

25 Anne Coste, op. cit., 2008.

28 Anne Coste, o Op. cit., 2008.

29 Philippe Boudon, op. cit., 1971.

Philippe Boudon, op. cit., 1975.

30 François Jullien, op. cit.

31 Marc-Antoine Laugier, op. cit.

32 Wolfgang Herrmann, Laugier and Eighteenth Century French Theory, London, A. Zwemmer Ltd, 1962.

Fabio Restrepo Hernández, Ceci est mon testament : Marc-Antoine Laugier, doctoral dissertation, Barcelona, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, 2011.

33 Marc-Antoine Laugier, op. cit., pp. 12-13.

35 Wolfgang Herrmann, Laugier and Eighteenth Century French Theory, London, A. Zwemmer Ltd, 1962.

36 See also André Corboz, "La posterità del Tempio di Salomone : iconografia e architettura", in Carlo Cresti, Massoneria e architettura, Convegno di Firenze, Foggia, Bastogi,1988, pp. 267-269.

37 Richard Krautheimer, "Introduction", in Iconography of Mediaeval Architecture, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, v. 5, 1942, pp. 13.

39 Michel Foucault, op. cit., 1966.

40 Michel Foucault, op. cit., 1969.

41 Christian Girard, op. cit.

42 Françoise Choay, op. cit.

44 Choay underlines that the foundation of an autonomous theoretical discourse on the built environment, its instauration through the two founder texts, is rooted in the history of Western thinking - the Renaissance intellectual revolution, in particular. It would be interesting to deepen a parallelism between the birth of an autonomous discipline on the built environment rooted in the Western culture explored by Choay and the different strategies of thinking in Western world, with the centrality of modelling, and in China examined by Jullien, o

45 Ola Söderström, "Des modèles urbains 'mobiles'", Urbanism, n°383, 2012, pp. 43-46.

46 Françoise Choay, op. cit., p. 22.

48 It is relevant to observe that also in Philosophy, in regard to the ontology of models in sciences, the distinction model-description is debated. The voice "Models in Science" of The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy includes "descriptions" among models' types, although the authors themselves express criticality, since: "we can describe the same thing in different ways. But if we identify a model with its description, then each new description yields a new model, which seems to be counterintuitive" Roman Frigg and Stephen Hartmann, o.

49 Françoise Choay, op. cit., p. 46.

52 Vittorio Gregotti, Il territorio dell'architettura, Milano, Feltrinelli, 1966.

56 Among the different texts where Philippe Boudon has discussed for more than 40 years his theoretical view on space, architecture, architectural conception and its epistemology we list:

Philippe Boudon, Sur l'espace architectural : essai d'épistémologie de l'architecture, Paris, Dunod, 1971.

Philippe Boudon, Architecture et architecturologie,4 vol., Paris, AREA, 1975.

Philippe Boudon, Introduction à l'architecturologie. Paris, Dunod, 1992.

Philippe Boudon, Conception. Paris, Les Éditions de La Villette, 2005.

Philippe Boudon, De l'architecture à l'épistémologie : la question de l'échelle. Paris, PUF, 1991.

57 Philippe Boudon, op. cit., 1971.

58 Philippe Boudon, op. cit., 1975.

60 The notion of system in Boudon's work comes from linguistics, in particular from de Saussure.

61 The scale is indeed one of the most important concepts in the architecturological system, the first scientific concept of architecture. Its function is to rule the shift from the space of conception, espace de conception, to the space of construction, espace d'édification. While the proportion operates only an operation of dimensioning, a purely geometrical operation, the scale operates a dimensioning referring to external factors (the context for instance). In this aspect, geometry and architecture differ: the first has as its proper instrument, the proportion, the second, the scale. In addition to Boudon's bibliography, cf. Damien Claeys, Architecture et complexité : Un modèle systémique du processus de (co)conception qui vise l'architecture,Louvain, Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2013.

63 Philippe Boudon, op. cit., 1975, v. II, p. 8.

64 Philippe Boudon, op. cit., 1975.

Christian Girard, op. cit.

65 Christian Girard, op. cit.

66 Jacques Lucan, "La forme et la répétition", AMC Architecture Mouvement Continuité, n°47, 1978, pp. 49-52.

70 Philippe Panerai, Jean Castex and Jean-Charles Depaule, Formes urbaines : de l'îlot à la barre, Paris, Dunod, 1977.

71 Karl Kropf, Handbook of urban morphology, London, Wiley, 2017.

72 John Christopher Jones, Design Methods: seeds of human futures, London, John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 1970.

73 Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1964.

74 Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, New York, Oxford University Press, 1977, p. XV.

75 Christian Girard, op. cit.

78 For instance: Modèles, références et analogies dans les conduites à projet, ENSAG,Grenoble, February 2008, organised by Anne Coste et Marie-Astrid Creps; La notion de modèle en architecture : du Moyen-Âge à nos jours, INHA, Paris, October 13th 2016, organised by Charlotte Duvette, Justine François, Alison Gorel le Pennec et Léa D'Hommée-Kchouk.

79 A particular and interesting case is represented by the exhibition, and its catalogue, Paris Haussmann. Modèle de ville, held at the Pavillon de l'Arsenal, Paris, January 31st- June 4th 2017, curated by Benoit Jallon, Umberto Napolitano and Franck Boutté.

80 Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, op. cit.

82 Eugene McCann and Kevin Ward, op. cit., p. xviii.

83 Ola Söderström, "Des modèles urbains 'mobiles'", Urbanism, n°383, 2012, pp. 43-44.

85 Elisabeth Peyroux and Thierry Sanjuan, "Stratégies de villes et 'modèles'" urbains : approche économique et géopolitique des relations entre villes", EchoGéo, n°36, 2016.

88 Françoise Choay, op. cit.

89 Elisabeth Peyroux and Thierry Sanjuan, op. cit.

90 Anne Coste, op. cit., 2008.

92 Anne Coste, "Le modèle en architecture. Entre rétrospective e prospective", Les Cahiers de la recherche architecturale, n°40, 1997, p. 19.

93 Thierry Paquot, "Ce que la mondialisation fait aux lieux", Urbanism, n°383, 2012, pp. 70-72.

94 Id. p. 70. The "three times of globalisation" identified by Paquot are: first, starting in the XV century crossing the Renaissance Age till the Scientific Revolution; second, corresponding to the Industrial Revolution, between the end of XVIII century to the beginning of XX; and third, our age, characterised by the Digital Revolution.

95 Benoit Jallon, Umberto Napolitano and Frank Boutté, Paris Haussmann : Modèle De Ville/A Model's Relevance. Paris/Zürich, Éditions du Pavillon de l'Arsenal/Park Books, 2017, p. 10.

96 It is relevant to observe that the subtitle of the catalogue Paris Haussmann in French is " Modèle de Ville", while in English is " A Model Relevance". Hence, there is not a perfect coincidence in the two, but the first adds something to the second: a model of a city still with relevance.

97 Among them: flexibility, walkability, standardisation, modularity, reversibility, high density.

98 Anne Coste, op. cit., 1997 and 2008.

99 Thierry Paquot, op. cit.

101 Anne Coste, op. cit., 2008.

102 Thierry Paquot, op. cit.

104 Anne Coste, op. cit., 1997.

105 Anne Coste, op. cit., 1997 and 2008.

108 Vittorio Gregotti, op. cit.

109 Françoise Choay, o Op. cit.

110 Colin McFarlane, "Assemblage and critical urbanism", City, n°2, v. 15, 2011, pp. 204-224.

111 Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, op. cit.
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Filippo Fiandanese , " Architectural models: legacy and critical perspectives ", Les Cahiers de la recherche architecturale urbaine et paysagère [En ligne], 4 | 2019, mis en ligne le 28 juin 2019, consulté le 07 octobre 2021. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/craup/1885 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/craup.1885
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Filippo Fiandanese is a PhD candidate in the Architecture, History and Project programme at the Polytechnic University of Turin. He is junior fellow at the China Room Research Centre, his research investigating the adoption of transnational models in the construction of a new town in the outskirts of Beijing. He is currently taking part in the international research program, CeNTO, on Chinese New Towns, and has published articles in international journals such as Casabella and Territorio.
filippo.fiandanese@polito.it
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Architectural models: legacy and critical perspectives

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Cet article vise à explorer l'héritage théorique de la notion de modèle dans le discours architectural et urbain. Ce concept est caractérisé par une accumulation de significations, sédimentées pendant une longue évolution, et par un débat qui ne s'est jamais interrompu.

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This article appeared in the Dynamics of Global Feminism issue in Spring/Summer 2019.

A Review of Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field By Janet Halley, Prabha Kotiswaran, Rachel Rebouché and Hila Shamir, Editors (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 599 pages.

The essays in this edited volume, together with a companion volume, Governance Feminism: An Introduction, provide critical reflections on the politics, ethics and consequences of feminist engagements with international, national and local power structures. 1 The editors and other contributors include distinguished academics in law, anthropology, sociology, and women's, gender and sexuality studies. Most of the chapters draw on case studies from the United States, but several also interrogate feminist engagements in law and policy change in Canada, Colombia, France, India, Israel and Palestine, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, as well as at the international level.

As outlined in their Preface, the editors define "governance feminism" (GF) broadly, to include "every form in which feminists and feminist ideas exert a governing will within human affairs" and in "human-inflected processes like knowledge formation, technology and even the weather." 2 Building on Michel Foucault's expansive concept of governmentality, the editors and other contributors consider feminist efforts to engage with both state and non-state power structures. Motivated by the recognition that "feminists now walk the halls of power," they explore several questions through the collected case studies, including: "Exactly what forms of feminism 'make sense' to power elites as they gradually let women in or are forced to make way for them? ... Once feminists gain a foothold in governance, what do they do there, and which particular legal forms are they most heavily invested in? What are the distributional consequences of the partial inclusion of some feminist projects? Who benefits and who loses? Can feminism foster a critique of its own successes?" 3

The concern about distributional consequences reflects a recognition that "some GF projects [have been] terrible mistakes; others have unintended consequences that are or should be contested within feminist political life." 4 Drawing on Max Weber's discussion of the importance of an "ethics of responsibility" as well as an "ethics of conviction" in politics, the editors argue for critically assessing whether a particular GF project is truly emancipatory, and if so, for whom? 5 This critical gaze is especially important in cases involving any of "the five C's: collaboration, compromise, collusion, complicity, and co-optation" in governance projects. 6

The editors trace their interest in GF to their own discomfort with the rise of "crime-and-punishment solutions" to a variety of issues, including domestic violence, prostitution/sex work and human trafficking, and sexual violence in armed conflict, which have generally been promoted by "dominance feminists" and are increasingly aligned with neoliberal and socially conservative forces. 7 This critical perspective on "carceral feminism" is reflected in several of the essays, including Karen Engle's tracing of the emergence of an international women's rights agenda focusing on violence against women and sexual violence in conflict; Elizabeth Bernstein's exploration of the curious alliance between US feminists and evangelical Christians in advocating against sex trafficking in the US and internationally; Leigh Goodmark's documenting of the unintended negative consequences of criminalizing domestic violence in the United States, especially for immigrant women and for women and men of color; and Libby Adler and Janet Halley's reflections on the distributional consequences of stringent child support enforcement measures in the United States, especially for low-income fathers. 8

Other essays included in the volume illustrate the diversity of GF projects implemented globally and locally; the intra-feminist conflicts and odd alliances they can foster; the non-feminist agendas they can serve; and the unintended consequences that can follow. At the international level, Dianne Otto complements Karen Engle's discussion of the international women's rights agenda in tracing the advocacy of feminist peace activists to persuade the UN Security Council to adopt a "women, peace and security" (WPS) agenda, culminating in the adoption of Resolution 1325 in 2000 and a series of subsequent resolutions and implementing measures. 9 Despite these achievements, Otto finds that the WPS agenda has only "selectively engaged" with "feminist logics of social justice and peace." 10 In particular, she notes that the emphasis on sexual violence in several of the WPS resolutions reinforces "protective stereotypes of women that underpin and justify military ways of thinking." 11 However, she finds that Resolution 1325 itself, as well as three subsequent resolutions endorsing women's participation, rights and empowerment in post-conflict state-building, create openings for feminists and their allies to promote more transformative visions of social justice and peace through both grassroots activism and institutional change. 12

Also focusing internationally, Aziza Ahmed traces the successful efforts of feminist activists at the height of the global HIV/AIDS crisis to persuade US and international public health organizations to see women as an "at risk group" in need of priority attention. Ahmed finds that this was achieved by framing a "'heterosexual risk narrative' in which men are the main source of HIV infection for women and violence against women a key means of women's vulnerability." 13 Ahmed notes the unintended consequences of this narrative, including a simplistic depiction of women as passive sexual beings and victims, and the demonizing of men as "easy targets of blame and criminalization." 14 However, the narrative succeeded in part because it fit neatly into a larger dominance/carceral feminist world view, as well as a neoliberal development framework stressing "individual behavior change over structural responses." 15

The country-focused case studies in the volume illustrate a range of local variations in GF projects and outcomes, as well as their links to global forces and trends. The case studies from Colombia and Sri Lanka, in particular, reflect GF interventions in transitional and post-conflict settings. Isabel Cristina Jaramillo Sierra, for example, explores the role of local feminists in Colombia's "Transition" following the peace accord of 2005. 16 She documents the active role of feminist NGOs, coalitions and researchers in engaging with various transitional institutions, through research and reports documenting the impact of the conflict on women, training of staff in the gender teams set up in national and subnational government offices, litigation to demand special measures to protect and support female victims of the conflict, and direct provision of services to these women. Echoing the concerns expressed by Karen Engle and Dianne Otto in their essays, she also questions the premise underlying many of these GF initiatives - that women have been the worst victims of the conflict and therefore in need of special assistance - which was reinforced by influential reports by both the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Amnesty International. This framing of women as victims of conflict has yielded some immediate humanitarian benefits for displaced women, but Jaramillo Sierra worries that it has also trapped them in a humanitarian/welfare system, and that they may be ill-equipped to participate in the post-conflict reconstruction process ahead.

While GF initiatives in transitional Colombia framed women largely as victims of the conflict, Vasuki Nesiah finds that feminists and their allies in Sri Lanka have drawn on both the sexual violence/victimization and agency/empowerment narratives in the WPS agenda (discussed by Dianne Otto in her essay) to address women's needs in post-conflict reconstruction: "Rather than focus on victimhood and harm alone, the emphasis has also been on agency and resilience - on women as economic actors...; indeed, the backdrop of victimization gives added moral impetus to policy initiatives advancing empowerment." 17 However, the focus is mainly on economic empowerment through improved access to property, credit and entrepreneurship - drawing on the "women's economic empowerment" discourse increasingly favored by development banks and agencies, governments and private sector actors in international development. Nesiah focuses specifically on an Owner Driven Housing Assistance (ODHA) program supported by multiple donors as well as the World Bank, UN-Habitat and the Sri Lankan government. This program aimed to provide individual home-building grants and micro-loans to residents in conflict-affected areas. The program, responding to government, UN and NGO calls to address the needs of "war widows," prioritized femaleheaded households for assistance. However, because the grants were insufficient, most households needed to take out loans to cover the balance of the construction costs, and most female borrowers were unable to repay the high rates of interest on the loans. The government belatedly provided debt forgiveness and introduced interest rate caps on loans to war-affected women, but the sad irony remains that the ODHA initiative actually increased rather than decreased women's housing and financial vulnerability. Nesiah cautions that post-conflict development projects such as ODHA, which attempt to advance GF goals of women's empowerment through unregulated market mechanisms, risk exacerbating women's economic vulnerability and disempowering them further. Nesiah's essay echoes a wider feminist critique of "women's economic empowerment" initiatives in international development, and longstanding feminist critiques of microcredit schemes. 18, 19

Other case studies explore the benefits and costs of GF initiatives for different stakeholder groups. In two essays, Darren Rosenblum and Maleiha Malik explore how the concepts of universalism and parity have been used both to increase French women's representation in elected assemblies and to ban the wearing of headscarves by French Muslim women. Prabha Kotiswaran documents the competing interests and strategies of Indian women's movement members, anti-prostitution/anti-trafficking NGOs (both feminist and non-feminist), and sex workers' groups in shaping changes in Indian laws against rape and trafficking. In Pakistan, Vanja Hamzić laments the passing of politically active feminist collectives and the rise of a homogenous and elite class of "feminist experts" who work in consonance with government, donors and civil society actors to pursue neoliberal agendas, to the exclusion of other feminist perspectives. Aeyal Gross documents various manifestations of "gay governance," including the United Kingdom's and United States' promotion of LGBT rights through their foreign policies and foreign assistance, and Israel's advancement of LGBT rights to burnish its credentials as a liberal democracy, and to draw a contrast to its less "liberal" neighbors. Rema Hammami also explores how the publication of survey data on domestic violence in Palestine- based on a methodology that has been subject to criticism-led to various government, donor and NGO initiatives to address domestic violence, but also reinforced "meta-narratives of Arab/Muslim patriarchal violence as represented in the violent pathologies of Palestinian manhood," with wider geopolitical implications. 20

The varied essays included in Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field resonate with the overall theme of this journal issue, and with several of the contributed articles. This edited volume and its companion, Governance Feminism: An Introduction, also are valuable additions to the broader literature on gender and governance. The editors acknowledge some feminist resistance to the project of "describing and assessing the consequences of feminist engagement with [power]"- for example, from those who view any "involvement in governance [as] intrinsically bad," or who view the feminist gains from this engagement as too small and fragile to subject to scrutiny. 21 The essays included in both volumes-completed soon after the US election of 2016-also do not grapple with the recent rise of nationalist politics and the related backlash against feminist achievements in many countries, and the implications for GF projects going forward. Even so, the editors and other contributors make a compelling case for clear-eyed assessments of the positive and negative consequences of GF initiatives. This is part of the "ethics of responsibility" for feminists engaged in politics at any level, and essential to learn from past mistakes and missteps. Feminists may draw different conclusions from these assessments, based on their own assumptions and priorities. But there is still merit in systematically considering "distributional consequences, not in terms of theoretical absolutes, when considering the value of any particular feminist success and the danger of any particular feminist defeat." 22 In terms of methodology, any distributional analysis should be framed broadly to consider a wide range of potential stakeholders, indirect as well as direct impacts, and unintended as well as intended consequences. Including perspectives from diverse stakeholders and observers will also help to mitigate bias in assessing a particular GF initiative.
Eugenia McGill is a Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of International and Public Affairs and the Interim Director of the Economic and Political Development Concentration at Columbia SIPA. Her research interests include the social impacts of globalization, development interventions, and development finance, particularly gender-related impacts, as well as innovative and inclusive approaches to development planning. NOTES
Despite the breadth of case studies included in Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field, the editors acknowledge gaps in coverage, especially related to GF projects addressing paid and unpaid work, as well as other economic issues. Except for the essays on French gender quotas, there is also little attention to global and national projects to increase women's representation in elected assemblies and other formal governance structures, perhaps because the topic has been explored extensively by other researchers. 23 There is also a regional gap in terms of documenting African GF experiences. Looking ahead, there will be numerous opportunities to critically assess GF engagements in other areas, including the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the related Sustainable Development Goals, the recent articulation of "feminist" approaches to foreign policy and foreign aid, and the increasing engagement of private sector actors in "gender equality and women's empowerment" projects.

1 Janet Halley, Prabha Kotiswaran, Rachel Rebouché and Hila Shamir, Governance Feminism: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).

2 Janet Halley, Prabha Kotiswaran, Rachel Rebouché and Hila Shamir, eds., Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), xii.

3 Ibid. In the companion volume, the authors also define "feminism" broadly, as "a sustained disagreement about sex, sexuality, gender, and the family among people who share a central, sometimes pivotal or indispensable commitment to the emancipation of things F - women, femininity, female or feminine genders, mothers, daughters, girls." Governance Feminism: An Introduction, 24.

4 Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field, xiii.

5 Ibid, xvi-xviii.

6 Ibid, xvii.

7 Ibid, x-xi. In the companion volume, the authors trace the emergence of "dominance feminism" from its radical US feminist roots in the late 1960s, and with its singular focus on countering male domination through transformative shifts in power dynamics and norms/values. They also trace the "uneasy but effective alliance" of dominance feminism with liberal feminism, especially in law reform projects, and the sidelining of socialist feminism in the US and elsewhere. Governance Feminism: An Introduction, 31-47.

8 The term "carceral feminism" was introduced by contributor Elizabeth Bernstein. See Elizabeth Bernstein, "The Politics of Sex, Rights, and Freedom in Contemporary Anti-trafficking Campaigns," in Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field, 32, 37-41.

9 Karen Engle, "Feminist Governance and International Law: From Liberal to Carceral Feminism," in Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field, 3-30.

10 Dianne Otto, "Contesting Feminism's Institutional Doubles: Troubling the Security Council's Women, Peace and Security Agenda," in Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field, 200-201.

11 Ibid, 203. Otto singles out Resolutions 1820 (2008), 1888 (2009), 1960 (2010) and 2106 (2013) for their almost exclusive focus on sexual violence in conflict. In 2019, the Security Council adopted a ninth WPS resolution, Resolution 2467, which also focuses almost exclusively on sexual violence in conflict, bringing the total to five out of nine resolutions.

12 The four Security Council resolutions advancing a positive role of women in post-conflict statebuilding include Resolutions 1325 (2000), 1889 (2009), 2122 (2013) and 2242 (2015).

13 Aziza Ahmed, "Feminism, Law, and Epidemiology in the AIDS Response," in Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field, 181.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 Isabel Cristina Jaramillo Sierra, "Finding and Losing Feminism in Transition: The Costs of the Continuum Hypothesis for Women in Colombia," in Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field, 434-478.

17 Vasuki Nesiah, "Indebted: The Cruel Optimism of Leaning in to Empowerment," in Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field, 518.

18 For feminist critiques of "women's economic empowerment" initiatives, see, e.g., Sylvia Chant and Caroline Sweetman, "Fixing women or fixing the world? 'Smart economics', efficiency approaches and gender equality in development," Gender & Development, Vol. 20, No. 3 (2012); Rosalind Eyben and Rebecca Napier-Moore, "Choosing Words with Care? Shifting meanings of women's empowerment in international development," Third World Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 2 (2009).

19 For feminist critiques of microcredit schemes, see, e.g., Robin Isserles, "Microcredit: The Rhetoric of Empowerment, the Reality of 'Development as Usual'," Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 3/4 (2003); Christine Keating et al., "The Rationality of Empowerment: Microcredit, Accumulation by Dispossession, and the Gendered Economy," Signs, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2010); Kate Maclean, "Capitalizing on Women's Social Capital? Women-Targeted Microfinance in Bolivia," Development and Change, Vol. 41, No. 3 (2010); Megan Moodie, "Microfinance and the Gender of Risk: The Case of Kiva.org," Signs, Vol. 38, No. 1 (2013).

20 Rema Hammami, "Follow the Numbers: Global Governmentality and the Violence against Women Agenda in Occupied Palestine," in Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field, 497. Hammami draws on Sally Engle Merry's critique of internationally agreed indicators of gender-based violence. Sally Engle Merry, The Seductions of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). This also resonates with a broader critique of the politics underlying development goals, targets and indicators. See, e.g., Sakiko Fukuda-Parr and Desmond McNeill, eds., "Special Issue - Knowledge and Politics in Setting and Measuring the SDGs," Global Policy Journal (January 2019).

21 Global Feminism: Notes from the Field, xiv-xv.

22 Ibid, xi.

23 See, e.g., Susan Franceschet et al., eds., The Impact of Gender Quotas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Mona Leena Krook, "Electoral Gender Quotas: A Conceptual Analysis," Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 47, No. 9 (2014).

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Critical Perspectives on "Governance Feminism"

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This article appeared in the Dynamics of Global Feminism issue in Spring/Summer 2019.A Review of Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field By Janet Halley, Prabha Kotiswaran, Rachel Rebouché and Hila Shamir, Editors (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 599 pages.

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In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the "orientation" aspect of "sexual orientation" and the "orient" in "orientalism," Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being "orientated" means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry.

Ahmed proposes that a queer phenomenology might investigate not only how the concept of orientation is informed by phenomenology but also the orientation of phenomenology itself. Thus she reflects on the significance of the objects that appear-and those that do not-as signs of orientation in classic phenomenological texts such as Husserl's Ideas. In developing a queer model of orientations, she combines readings of phenomenological texts-by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon-with insights drawn from queer studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Queer Phenomenology points queer theory in bold new directions.

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In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the "orientation" aspect of "sexual orientation" and the "orient" in "orientalism," Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time.

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https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/16123/1/FULLTEXT01.pdf

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About the Project

Shaping Space is a free exhibition at the Building Centre opening in September 2021 and a programme of events for the general public, specialists, and schools. It spotlights the essential yet under-explored role that models play in shaping the spaces we live in.

Context

Supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through Follow-on Funding for Impact and Engagement, it builds on research carried out by the AHRC-funded Architectural Models Network (2017 - 19), set up to examine the role of architectural models as part of the creative process in historical and contemporary practice. The original Network was led by the V&A and core partners included the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), the Architectural Association (AA), Sir John Soane's Museum, the Architekturmuseum (TU Munich), the MAP Laboratory (CNRS) and the Sorbonne.

Aim

The exhibition, events and schools programme together provide unique opportunities to engage with modelmaking and use, positioning models centre stage, telling their stories and exploring their role in enabling the understanding of architecture and its context. Shaping Space invites specialists, the general public and schools to examine the role of modelmaking in contemporary practice, between the physical and the digital, while exploring the historical dimension. The modelmaking practice is taken as a springboard for the use of design and making as a cross-curricular activity.

Outcomes

The free exhibition 'Shaping Space - Architectural Models Revealed', highlights the renaissance of making in the digital age, whilst exploring the rise of new technologies and themes central to current architectural practice, such as sustainability. The events programme explores current and future model making practices, including the use of models in film and in teaching. The schools programme (KS2-5) aims to develop students' knowledge in several areas including representation and materiality in modelling, understanding city space, and problem solving through model making.

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V&A · Shaping Space - Architectural Models in Context

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About the Project Shaping Space is a free exhibition at the Building Centre opening in September 2021 and a programme of events for the general public, specialists, and schools. It spotlights the essential yet under-explored role that models play in shaping the spaces we live in.

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What is the role of critical theory today and who is it for? What kind of maps can theory provide in the context of entrenched capitalist crisis? These are some of the questions posed by the Theory in Crisis Seminar Series.

In the aftermath of various mutations of twentieth-century 'critical theory' (Frankfurt School, 'French Theory', etc.), proponents of 'postcritique' have argued that critical theory has 'run out of steam'. Instead, this seminar series starts from the premise that 21st-century crisis has also generated dynamic new ways of reconsidering these questions. A critical theory of the present is necessarily a crisis theory.

In this seminar Achille Mbembe will discuss his new book Brutalisme (La Découverte, 2020). An insightful and wide-ranging analysis of global capitalist destruction, Brutalisme offers a major theorization of our contemporary political moment and argues for a new politics based on reparation and planetary awareness.

Speaker

Achille Mbembe is Research Professor in History and Politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (University of the Witwatersrand), Johannesburg, South Africa. He is the author of many books including On the Postcolony (2001), Critique of Black Reason (2016), Necropolitics (2019), Out of the Dark Night. Essays on Decolonization (2020) and Brutalisme (2020). His books are translated in fifteen languages. He is the recipient of the Ernst Bloch Award (2018) and the Gerda Henkel Award (2018).

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Theory in Crisis Seminar - Achille Mbembe, 'Notes on Brutalism'

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The University of London sites uses cookies. By continuing to use this site you accept this policy. Cookie policy What is the role of critical theory today and who is it for? What kind of maps can theory provide in the context of entrenched capitalist crisis?

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Lesley Lokko: Decolonising Architecture | Assemble Papers

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Just over 2000 years ago, Pliny the Elder uttered: “Ex Africa semper aliquid novi” (“Out of Africa there is always something new”). No-one is perhaps better equipped to discuss this idea than Professor Lesley Lokko. Currently Head of the Graduate School of Architecture (GSA) at the University of Joh…

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2012, Book Section, Three-dimensional Models as 'in-between-objects' - the creation of in-between knowledge in early modern architectural practice In: Inkster, Ian , (ed.) History of Technology: Conceptualising the Production and Diffusion of Useful and Reliable Knowledge in Early Modern Europe. Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781441152794

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Three-dimensional Models as 'in-between-objects' - the creation of in-between knowledge in early modern architectural practice

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2012, Book Section, Three-dimensional Models as 'in-between-objects' - the creation of in-between knowledge in early modern architectural practice In: Inkster, Ian , (ed.) History of Technology: Conceptualising the Production and Diffusion of Useful and Reliable Knowledge in Early Modern Europe. Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781441152794 Edit Item (login required)

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An International Research Network, funded by the AHRC, led by Dr Simona Valeriani, Head of Early Modern Studies on the V&A/RCA History of Design programme, as Principal Investigator, and Dr Olivia Horsfall Turner, Senior Curator of Designs, as Co-Investigator.

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Architectural Models Network Archives * V&A Blog

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An International Research Network, funded by the AHRC, led by Dr Simona Valeriani, Head of Early Modern Studies on the V&A/RCA History of Design programme, as Principal Investigator, and Dr Olivia Horsfall Turner, Senior Curator of Designs, as Co-Investigator.

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White Papers, Black Marks: Architecture, Race, Culture

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Buy An Alphabet of Architectural Models by Olivia Horsfall Turner, Simona Valeriani, Matthew Wells, Teresa Fankhänel (ISBN: 9781858946979) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.

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This Research Network examines the varied ways in which archaeology, heritage and art converge across a broad range of concepts and practices, from artistic interventions in the museum space to archaeological interpretations which deploy and take inspiration from contemporary art. Whilst the network remains open to diverse topics and research strands, key themes reflect the strengths of the Institute of Archaeology and the Heritage Studies Section in particular.

These include: the use of art to critique archaeology (and vice-versa); the emergence of the photo-essay as a critical tool in archaeology and heritage; the role of art in public archaeology; artists, archaeologists and heritage practitioners as social activists; intersections of conservation and creativity; and the importance of art and heritage to wellbeing.

Archaeology and heritage have a long shared history with art, as well as crucial points of tension which help animate their convergence and divergence. Artists have routinely looked to archaeology for inspiration, from painters referencing the spectacular discoveries of Pompeii to the adoption of an 'archaeological lens' by contemporary artists keen to approach landscapes or objects in new ways. At the same time, archaeologists and other heritage professionals have made significant use of artistic practice to better understand their field of interest, whether in the form of photography, creative writing, performance, sculpture or simply sketching unearthed material. In recent years the critical examination of these cross-fertilisations has become a vibrant area of practice and research in its own right.

Building on this, the long-term aims of the network include:

Providing intellectual space for the critical analysis of the interrelationship between archaeology, heritage and art

Encouraging transdisciplinary research into this area

Increasing public engagement with ongoing archaeological and heritage research at the Institute through diverse artistic practices (exhibitions, workshops, public lectures, participatory events)

Building a network beyond the Institute of scholars, heritage practitioners, curators, writers, artists and archaeologists already engaged in this field

With a specific orientation towards heritage, this network thus contributes to a burgeoning sub-field which is inherently interdisciplinary and provides numerous opportunities for outward-facing projects under the auspices of the Institute of Archaeology. A key ambition here is to 'open up' new and innovative ways of thinking about and researching the past in the present through greater engagement with artistic practices.

Events

The network held its inaugural event at the Institute of Archaeology on 23 May 2014. A display of artwork was exhibited in an informal setting, aiming to re-imagine the 19th Century 'Conversazione' - a relaxed forum for discussion of the arts and sciences.

The network held its 'Conversazione II' at the Institute on 12 December 2014.

The network also co-organised the Institute Research Seminar series on 'Future Pasts | Present Futures: Critical Conversations on the 'Contemporary' across disciplines' (Term II, Spring 2015).

The network organised a group visit to The Museum of Innocence exhibition at Somerset House (March 2016).

The network held its 'Conversazione III: Fragments - Archaeologies in and of the architectural library' at the RIBA on 21 July 2016.

The network organised a lecture by acclaimed artist Marguerite Humeau at UCL on 19 October 2016.

Related outputs

Sterling, C.P. 2013. Ruins in Reverse. An Exhibition at Tate Modern (March 1st - June 24th 2013). Papers from the Institute of Archaeology 23(1):1, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/pia.423

Acheson Roberts, L 2013. The Role of Sculpture in Communicating Archaeology in Museums. Papers from the Institute of Archaeology 23(1):6, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/pia.425

Sharing the Field: Art in the Landscape and Landscape Archaeology

CHAT 2013: Experience

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This Research Network examines the varied ways in which archaeology, heritage and art converge across a broad range of concepts and practices, from artistic interventions in the museum space to archaeological interpretations which deploy and take inspiration from contemporary art.

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By Manuel Orazi

'Proteinic structures', 'proteinic chains', 'space chains' and 'iconostase' are different names for similar structures, proposed and varied over the years by Yona Friedman. [1] They originally have in common a single material, metal, and a principle: the possibility of an infinite architecture. Such an unrealistic but visionary use of giant chain structures connecting the earth and moon had already been imagined by Buckminster Fuller in 1938 in Nine Chains to the Moon: An Adventure Story of Thought; yet it was the German architect Konrad Wachsmann who influenced Friedman while he was a visiting professor at the Technion Institute of Technology in Haifa (1953-54). A pioneer of prefabrication in Germany - at first in wood and then in metal - Wachsmann moved to America in 1941 to collaborate with Walter Gropius and the US Air Force on the design of hangars during and after the Second World War. Wachsmann already knew Gropius, however, and together they were indirectly involved on projects related to prefabrication in Palestine before the war. [2] In any case, Friedman contacted Wachsmann and saw his 'Mobilar Structur', shown during Friedman's time at the Technion and later published in 1959 Wendelunkt im Bauen, subsequently translated into English as The Turning Point of Building: Structure and Design, in 1961.

Yona Friedman (1923-2020), hoop wire structural study, Ville Spatiale, 1958-1959. Wire, 180 × 600 × 600 mm. DMC 1500.

Before moving to Paris in 1957, Friedman was already studying the possibility of a mobile architecture. His main aim was the involvement of inhabitants in the process of building, especially refugees, who at that time were arriving daily in the port of Haifa. Friedman himself had been a refugee from Budapest via Bucharest when he arrived in Haifa in 1946, and similarly had to confront the scarcity of materials. He looked to recycle abandoned pipelines, cut and mounted together in different ways. The meeting with Wachsmann, however, provoked a change of scale in Friedman's first ideas. The modular structures conceived by the German architect revealed a new prospect to imagine: big buildings like hangars, which could be constructed by multiplying a singular metal element through joints. They could also be reversible: 'mobile' in the sense that they could be placed elsewhere.

In 1956, Friedman presented to CIAM X in Dubrovnik a tetrahedral structure for an already existing high-rise building in the city. 'A tetrahedron can be drawn on a cube,' he said. 'Translating that fact into building elements led to the space-frame structure used for the "Ville spatiale", and to all of my "span-over" conceptions.' [3]

Thus, step by step, Friedman experimented with variations on this structure, as shown in the 'Ville spatiale' concept model, inserting circles inside the gridded structures, changing the dimensions and designing for a country with fewer problems of scarcity than France. Just after moving to Paris, for example, in 1958-59, he participated with Roger Aujame in the competition for the renewal of the Medina of Tunis. [4] Tunisia had become an independent republic in 1956-57 - forbidding the hijab and giving the vote to women as its first political acts - in a general climate of renewal. It was in this Corbusian project (referring to the 'Plan Obus') that Friedman officially presented the first large-scale, space-chain structure overlying the Medina, and a project such as this, to which the structure of the concept model refers. The structure allowed for the Medina's preservation while simultaneously promoting an intensification of the city through its modernisation. As Friedman said: 'In 1958 I started with rings, what I was calling "space chains," because of the disadvantage of the space-frame structure's nodes. The space chain, the circle, has no nodes. The points where elements meet are parallel. There were several engineers who were interested in Serge Kétoff, who recalculated it'. [5]

Yona Friedman (1923-2020), wooden structural study, Ville Spatiale, 1928. Wood, 200 × 510 × 260 mm. DMC 1471.

After the so-called age of the megastructure [6] - an epistemological break around 1966 due to a profound change in climate and a parallel faith in technology, coupled with the birth of the radical groups in Florence - Friedman became less and less interested in advanced technology. His 1975 book Utopies réalisables represents a sort of auto-critique in this sense. His collaboration with Unesco and Onu in several programs of auto-construction and do-it-yourself design for the third world culminated in the publication of the 'manuals', illustrated guides for unskilled people , eloquently subtitled: Local materials, simple technology, sophisticated ideas. [7]

Friedman was able to experiment in countless university workshops once the rings came out from the now abandoned overhead steel structure of the Ville spatiale. As demonstrated in the hoop-wire structural study model, the rings could be united easily at their tangential points, so allowing a new informal framework. It was in this way that the space-chain structure passed from metal into wood (though here, ironically, the hoop model is in metal, and the conceptual Ville spatiale structural frame in wood), to allow for improvisation:

To introduce 'trial and error' and instantaneous improvisation into architecture, a new technical approach was necessary. Techniques, like the 'Ville spatiale', like 'Space-chains' or 'Meuble + plus' effectively make such an approach possible. Improvisation for architecture is not done on paper. Models serve only as a visualisation of the procedure of how it can be done. Improvisation can be done only on site, at real scale. This becomes possible through constituting parts that are easy to assemble, easy to handle, without special equipment and without specialist's expertise. It means parts can be pushed around, stacked on top of each other, and similar commonplace procedures, all rather inexpensive. [8]

In Friedman's mature works, such as the Museum of Simple Technology in Madras, built in the 1980s, the space-chains are in wood (mostly bamboo), in accordance with his research on poor techniques. Still more recently they have undergone a further material transformation. In workshops, mainly in museums of contemporary arts in Rome or Shanghai and directed by Friedman and his assistant Jean-Baptiste Decavèle, they use mostly plastic hula hoops due to their low cost. The result is a sort of 'complicated order' in full colour, every time more irregular. The forms and image of the space-chains have evolved, yet the concept remains quite the same. It seems Sir Nikolaus Pevsner was right when he wrote that 'materials can become architecturally effective only when the architect instils into them an aesthetic meaning. Architecture is not the product of materials and purposes - nor by the way of social conditions - but of the changing spirits of changing ages'. [9]
Notes

1. Yona Friedman, Manuel Orazi, Yona Friedman. The Dilution of Architecture, edited by Nader Seraj, Park Books, Zurich 2015, pp. 216-231, 242, 248-252.

2. Gilbert Herbert, The Dream of the Factory-made House: Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press 1984.

3. Yona Friedman, Trihedral System, in Id., Drawings & Models 1945 - 2010, Paris, Presses du Réel, 2010, p. 18.

4. Yona Friedman, Manuel Orazi, Yona Friedman. The Dilution of Architecture, cit., p. 64.

5. Ibid., p. 554.

6. Manuel Orazi, The Chronotope of 1966, "Domus", 1010, February 2017, pp. 36-39.

7. Yona Friedman with Eda Schaur, Roofs part 1 and Roofs part 2. Local materials, simple technology, sophisticated ideas, Manuals for self-help building, Collections "Établissements humains et environnement socio-culturel", UNESCO, Paris 1991.

8. Yona Friedman, Manuel Orazi, Yona Friedman. The Dilution of Architecture, cit., p. 29.

9. Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture, London, Penguin 1943; new and enlarged edition, London, J. Murray 1948, p. XXI.

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'Proteinic structures', 'proteinic chains', 'space chains' and 'iconostase' are different names for similar structures, proposed and varied over the years by Yona Friedman. [1] They originally have in common a single material, metal, and a principle: the possibility of an infinite architecture. Such an unrealistic but visionary use of giant...

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* Title: Social condenser infrastructure: obstacle city vs. floating city

* Year: 2015

* Function : Masterplan (culture + economy + politics)

* Site location: Roosevelt Island, New York

* Nationality: Spanish

* City and date of birth: Madrid (Spain), 18 October 1990

* University / Institution: University of Alcalá, Spain / Architecture School

* Tutors: José Juan Barba

* Contacts: cargocollective.com/alexduroportfolio, https://es.linkedin.com/pub/alex-duro/46/2b4/596, alejandrodlmg@gmail.com

1.- Obstacle city.

Manhattan was born in 1881 with the Commissioners Plan which established a conceptual infinite grid over the 8,750 ha of Manhattan island and created 11 avenues and 155 streets. The only limitation was the island itself, when Manhattan got in contact with both Hudson River and East River.

The city proposed by Commissioners Plan defined the contemporary city up to the present day. A more or less strong division between public and private space which gives room to an horizontal ground division. Plots were built to infinite trying to maximize the built area, looking for profitability, looking for the biggest profit. This system also consolidated the 'skyscrapers' model which born in Chicago. Examples like Flatiron Building illustrate how less mattered the resulting kind of building in the pursuit of earning money, building to the infinite.

Yona Friedman defined that city as the 'obstacle city':

Yona Friedman; INTELLIGENCE STARTS WITH IMPROVISATION.

2.- Floating city.

On the other hand Rem Koolhaas when speaks about city in "What ever happened to urbanism?", expresses his worry about the abandonment of the 'city project':

Rem Koolhaas; WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO URBANISM?

In contrast with Yona Friedman's 'obstacle city' model, we propose the 'floating city' which we will imagine over the ground, within a dialogue with it, but without creating scars or wounds as highways, railroads tracks or barriers and obstacles, as enormous impassable blocks.

With that model we propose a new culture of landscape on which city, landscape and architecture open new dialogue ways which give room to new and different relations that the ones we have been seeing during last years. We would like to postulate a future city more respectful and tolerant with natural elements.

MANIFIESTO

The floating city only touches the ground for resting. Whenever possible, it moves away of the ground. 2. The floating city can be explored under itself. A new spatial journey for the inhabitants of the conventional city. 3. In the floating city there are no cars. People walks. They go by bike or underground. We do not like roads. 4. In the floating city there are no obstacles. Paths are direct to reach each site. Or deliberately tortuous to get lost and enjoy. 5. In the floating city the space is public. No plots are extruded to infinity for the benefit of greedy developers and builders.

(1) Annie Ratti. YONA FRIEDMAN, Intelligence starts with improvisation, Charta/Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Milan, 2009, p. 22-27.

(2) OMA, Rem Koolhaas, Bruce Mau. S, M, L, XL, What Ever Happened to Urbanism?, The Monacelli Press, New York, 1995, p. 958-971.
* Author: Alex Duro

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SOCIAL CONDENSER INFRASTRUCTURE: obstacle city vs. floating city

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Title: Social condenser infrastructure: obstacle city vs. floating city * Year: 2015 * Function : Masterplan (culture + economy + politics) * Site location: Roosevelt Island, New York * Nationality: Spanish * City and date of birth: Madrid (Spain), 18 October 1990 * University / Institution: University of Alcalá, Spain / Architecture School * Tutors: José Juan Barba * Contacts: cargocollective.com/alexduroportfolio, https://es.linkedin.com/pub/alex-duro/46/2b4/596, alejandrodlmg@gmail.com 1.- Obstacle city.

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Yona Friedman is a Hungarian-French architect and theorist whose utopian projects deal with issues of urban planning, infrastructure and the empowerment of the user. In 1958 Friedman published his manifesto, Architecture Mobile, for a new type of citizen free from the strictures of work through the growing automation of production. Friedman envisioned that the increase in leisure time would fundamentally change society and would demand a new architecture. This architecture was developed in his project Ville Spatiale (1958-1962), consisting of temporary, lightweight structures raised above the ground which could span across existing cities, countryside, bodies of water, creating a continuous landscape that could be appropriated and inhabited by the user.

Friedman's Ville Spatiale has similarities withConstant's situationist take on the utopian city, New Babylon (1956-1969). Both are designed for the anticipated abolition of work, formally both schemes are raised above the ground on stilts, creating a network capable of spanning the globe. They also employ a similar aesthetic, one very different from the pop sensibility ofArchigram; their use of collage, subdued colours and models create an atmosphere that is less exuberantly optimistic but perhaps more real. But it was Friedman's emphasis on participation that set him apart from his contemporaries, including Constant whose New Babylon had a slightly authoritarian character. In Friedman's work spatial agency occurs in the valorisation of the user above the architect and the master builder, seen in his later work (from the mid 1970s to the late 1980s) where he developed a series of self-building manuals for unskilled labourers in India, and various countries in Africa and South America. Working with UNESCO and the UN, Friedman developed a language of pictograms that could communicate a system of building using local materials and convey information on dealing with issues ranging from water management and infrastructure to food policy.

Friedman's ideas frequently went beyond architecture and planning encompassing contemporary art, sociology, economics and information systems, but his work is tied together with the principle of individual freedom that he first put forward in his 1958 manifesto and with his emphasis on unpredictability, play, and the empowerment of the non-specialist and the user.

Tim Abrahams and Yona Friedman, 'Interview: Yona Friedman', Blueprint Magazine, 2009, http://www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk/index.php/everything-else/interview-yona-friedman/ [accessed 8 February 2010].

Yona Friedman, 'The Future: Mobile Architecture', Architectural Design, 30 (1960), 356.

---, Toward a Scientific Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1975).

---, Utopies Réalisables (Paris: Union Générale d'éditions, 1976).

Yona Friedman and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Yona Friedman (Köln: König, 2007).

---, 'Interview with Yona Friedman', Atlántica de Las Artes, 2001, http://www.caam.net/caamiaaa/cgi-bin/articulo.asp?idArticulo=582&idioma=EN [accessed 8 February 2010].

References About

Anthony Hill, 'Yona Friedman: An Appreciation', RIBA Journal, 83 (1976), 105.

Sabine Lebesque and Helene Fentener van Vlissingen, Yona Friedman (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1999).

Pier Vittorio Aureli and Manuel Orazi, 'The Solitude of the Project', Log, 2006, 21-32.

'Yona Friedman', Megastructures Reloaded, http://www.megastructure-reloaded.org/en/yona-friedman/ [accessed 8 February 2010].

"My career in architecture (which was the result of my attitude towards science, that is, to accept the primordial importance of individual acts) and was the result of unforesecable individuality directed towards the field of sociology. The acts of the individual are totally unpredictable even for himself. But frequently these unpredictable acts are decisive (they define complicated processes). As far as the field of architecture is concerned, plans are no more than statistical fiction (fictions which do not exist in reality) The important decision is what makes the individual, it is totally unpredictable. No individual, whether in physics of particles or in Sociology, behaves according to abstract laws."
- Yona Friedman, interview at http://www.caam.net/caamiaaa/cgi-bin/articulo.asp?idArticulo=582&idioma=EN

Connections

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Yona Friedman is a Hungarian-French architect and theorist whose utopian projects deal with issues of urban planning, infrastructure and the empowerment of the user. In 1958 Friedman published his manifesto, Architecture Mobile, for a new type of citizen free from the strictures of work through the growing automation of production.

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An International Research Network, funded by the AHRC, led by Dr Simona Valeriani, Head of Early Modern Studies on the V&A/RCA History of Design programme, as Principal Investigator, and Dr Olivia Horsfall Turner, Senior Curator of Designs, as Co-Investigator.

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Architectural Models Network Archives * V&A Blog

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An International Research Network, funded by the AHRC, led by Dr Simona Valeriani, Head of Early Modern Studies on the V&A/RCA History of Design programme, as Principal Investigator, and Dr Olivia Horsfall Turner, Senior Curator of Designs, as Co-Investigator.

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This academic seminar series features researchers sharing their findings, discussing their ideas and showing work in progress from The Bartlett's internationally renowned Space Syntax Laboratory.

Event Information

About

The Space Syntax Lab Seminar series brings together researchers and students to share their work at the intersection of architecture, urban space and society. Organised by the Bartlett's internationally renowned Space Syntax Laboratory the series features a mixture of international invited speakers, UCL researchers and PhD students providing diverse viewpoints on how we understand, analyse and design both buildings and cities.

Schedule

28 October | 16:00 | Lars Marcus

Spatial Capital - How the Spatial Form of the Cities Creates Value in Urband Land and Processes

The concrete outcome of urban planning and design is built form and spatial structure, which offer long-term support and direction to social, economic and ecological urban processes. Hence, the urban form of our cities is a prime element for building sustainability and resilience into our future cities.

Based on space syntax theory and methodology, as well as original additions to that, new knowledge has over the last decades been contributed by Swedish research groups at KTH and Chalmers to the understanding of the link between spatial form and urban processes. Not least has this come to inform both public and private practices in urban planning and design so that these methods today are extensively used by both municipalities and consultancies in Sweden.

More recently, there has been a growing focus on how this also generates extensive value, both in the form of use value and exchange value. In the first sense by enhancing the performance of most urban processes, in the second primarily by substantially increasing land values, which forms a major part of the collateral in the global credit system. In both senses one may speak of a spatial capital essential for both everyday life and the performance of urban processes, but also for the global economy.

The lecture will give examples of both methodological developments of space syntax and empirical applications on both social and ecological processes in cities, but will also present new tools aiming at more informed urban planning and design practice, currently tested in Swedish municipalities, where the aim is to also integrate calculations of the economic value of such interventions, thereby, so to speak, capturing the value of the spatial capital created in these practices.

Biography

Lars Marcus is Professor in Urban Design at Chalmers University of Technology and has led the development of internationally high-ranked research groups in Spatial Morphology at both KTH in Stockholm and at Chalmers in Gothenburg. He has also been responsible for the development of master programs and master courses both at KTH and Chalmers based on this research.

In 2018 he finished a large international collaboration with UCL and TU Delft, creating a unique research infrastructure for comparative studies of spatial urban form. In recent years he has been deeply involved as expert advisor in Scandinavia's largest urban development project, the RiverCity in Gothenburg. Currently he is as vice Director for Research at the department of Architecture and Civil Engineering deeply involved in the reorganization of the department, aiming at greater integration of the knowledge cultures in architecture and engineering.

He is founder and partner of the consultancy Spacescape, that has broken new ground in Sweden for architectural services by offering analytical support on the spatial form of cities to municipalities, real estate developers and architectural firms. Over the last ten years Lars has also extensively participated in Swedish public debate in public and professional press.
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18 November | 16:00 | Francesca Froy

'A Marvellous Order': The Spatial and Economic Structures That Make Agglomeration Economies Work in Greater Manchester

In this seminar Francesca Froy will explore the value of combining space syntax analysis with economic network analysis to better understand the functioning of urban economies. She will focus on Greater Manchester in the UK, and its clothing and textile industries. While urban economies are celebrated for their economic diversity, this diversity is not random, with certain industry sectors being more likely to interrelate with each other in cities and share skills, knowledge, and products. These preferential relationships have been mapped by economic network analysts to build models of 'industry relatedness'. Francesca draws on these models while also exploring how the spatial configuration of Greater Manchester's street network has supported the realisation of economic synergies between industries both in the past and present.

Biography

Francesca Froy has just completed a PhD at UCL's Space Syntax Lab. She is a Visiting Lecturer on urban economies at the Bartlett School of Planning and an Honorary Policy Fellow at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. Her research centres on the use of network theory to better understand economic diversity and complexity. Before returning to academia, Francesca worked for over 20 years in the field of policy research and advice, and until 2015 she was a senior policy analyst at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Her articles can be found in a number of peer-reviewed academic journals including the Oxford Review of Economic Policy and the European Planning Journal.
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2 December | 16:00 | Ha Minh Hai Thai

The Economic Significances of Informal Alleyways

Dr Ha Thai explains his investigations into spatial settings of informal neighbourhoods and their influences on inhabitants' economic wellbeing. He focuses on Hanoi, the capital city of Vietnam, characterised by spontaneous urban developments and a mix of various urban morphologies.

The study employs a mixed methodology adapted from space syntax, urban morphology, observation and interviews, to map and analyse an overlooked element of built form, that is a dense network of informal alleyways connecting homes to local main streets. Such system of pathways and its spatial conditions are shaped by inhabitants' everyday activities, and can significantly facilitate or constrain their opportunities to establish and conduct income-generating activities within their homes. The study suggests the needs for improving space syntax axial map and analysis at neighbourhood scale, demonstrates the utility of the mixed methodology in examining the fine-grain urban settings, and highlights the various impacts of urban physical form on city's and citizens' economic wellbeing.

Biography

Dr Ha Thai is a sessional postdoctoral researcher at RMIT's School of Architecture and Urban Design (Australia). He received his PhD in architecture and urban design from RMIT, Master's in urban design from Newcastle University (UK) and Master's in architecture from Hanoi Architectural University (Vietnam). His current research interests include space syntax, urban morphology, building typology, Asian urbanism, temporary and tactical urbanism, and smart city.
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16 December | 16:00 | Victoria Susan Barker

A Spatial Analysis of Domestic Architecture in Spitalfields, London from c.1720

This talk details an end-to-end study of a house in Spitalfields, London, covering three hundred years (1720 to present), analysing domestic space through various communities, revealing how space was altered to suit the socio-economic needs of its inhabitants. The case study locates the spatial complexities of domestic architecture, the built environment, and communities, and forms the basis for understanding immigration and settlement patterns of those arriving in Spitalfields.

Understanding spatial dimensions within domestic architecture is part of an ongoing process in identifying social patterns as individuals navigated and attributed meaning to place and space. In part, it clarifies the function and designation of space, how people moved from one room to another, and to a degree, assesses spatial control. It also looks at the adaptability of buildings according to the socio-economic changes of individuals and the wider community. This is an interdisciplinary approach that draws heavily on space syntax theories and methods, textual sources, statistics and GIS. Domestic space is analysed using Justified Plan Graphs to understand the hierarchy of space with relation to gender, room function, the concept of privacy and how this changed over time.

Biography

Victoria Susan Barker is an Historian with varied interests: architecture, domestic and urban space, material culture, British and European history, mapping and spatial data. As a mature student she took a degree in History at King's College London, followed by an MRes in Spatial Data Science and Visualisation at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA, UCL). She is now in her second year reading for a PhD in Architectural Space and Computation at The Bartlett, UCL.
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More information

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This academic seminar series features researchers sharing their findings, discussing their ideas and showing work in progress from The Bartlett's internationally renowned Space Syntax Laboratory. The Space Syntax Lab Seminar series brings together researchers and students to share their work at the intersection of architecture, urban space and society.

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1998-2008
Collection includes Chernobyl, Hands of Victory, Oklahoma City Federal Building, New Orleans Superdome, The Dakota, Lorraine Motel, The Pentagon and Watergate. This work will ship from Wright in Chicago, Illinois.

Medium

Signature

Signed with applied label and number to underside or incised signature, title and date to each example.

Moscow-born artist Constantin Boym emigrated to the United States in 1981 though a loophole in Soviet policy-since then, his furniture and product design has been distinguished by a fascination with the once-forbidden American culture. Boym studied architecture at the Moscow Architectural Institute and later received his Master's in design from Domus Academy in Milan. In 1986, he established a design studio in New York City, where he collaborates with his wife, Laurene Leon Boym, on designs for tableware, watches, furniture, lighting, and exhibition installations. Both Boym and his wife are of Russian-Jewish heritage; from their cultural perspective, they make social commentaries on America-often humorous ones-through the reappropriation and redesign of everyday objects and concepts (like their design for McDonald's restaurants, which is intended to make the adult's experience on par with that of children.)

Collected by a major museum

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

2015

2014

NYC Makers: The MAD Biennial, Museum of Arts and Design

1998-2008
Collection includes Chernobyl, Hands of Victory, Oklahoma City Federal Building, New ...

Medium

Signature

Signed with applied label and number to underside or incised signature, title and date to each example.

Moscow-born artist Constantin Boym emigrated to the United States in 1981 though a loophole in Soviet policy-since then, his furniture and product design has been distinguished by a fascination with the once-forbidden American culture. Boym studied architecture at the Moscow Architectural Institute and later received his Master's in design from Domus Academy in Milan. In 1986, he established a design studio in New York City, where he collaborates with his wife, Laurene Leon Boym, on designs for tableware, watches, furniture, lighting, and exhibition installations. Both Boym and his wife are of Russian-Jewish heritage; from their cultural perspective, they make social commentaries on America-often humorous ones-through the reappropriation and redesign of everyday objects and concepts (like their design for McDonald's restaurants, which is intended to make the adult's experience on par with that of children.)

Collected by a major museum

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

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Constantin Boym, Laurene Leon Boym | Buildings of Disaster, collection of eight | Artsy

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1998-2008Collection includes Chernobyl, Hands of Victory, Oklahoma City Federal Building, New Orleans Superdome, The Dakota, Lorraine Motel, The Pentagon and Watergate. This work will ship from Wright in Chicago, Illinois. Medium Signature Signed with applied label and number to underside or incised signature, title and date to each example.

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OurOwnsKIN is a consultancy re-thinking design for the body.
By collaborating with communities of medical and material specialists, we translate anatomical characteristics and emotional perspectives of the body into design for items we wear. We develop and communicate ideas through knowledge sharing events and prototyping to propose material constructions for future manufacturing.

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OurOwnsKIN - Material Anatomies in Design (@ Digits2Widgets) 'Can understanding our body's material make up inspire product design for the future?'

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OurOwnsKIN is a consultancy re-thinking design for the body. By collaborating with communities of medical and material specialists, we translate anatomical characteristics and emotional perspectives of the body into design for items we wear. We develop and communicate ideas through knowledge sharing events and prototyping to propose material constructions for future manufacturing.

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Aravena's surprise Pritzker win in 2016 epitomised the resurgence of the 'social architect' figure both in school and studio conversation. The concept of the architect as an influential change-maker, despite its idealism, has now also filtered into the public imaginary with shows such as Al Jazeera's Rebel Architecture (2016) being widely followed and discussed by many unfamiliar to the profession. The climate is ripe for architects who wish to exhibit a social agenda through their design process and built work. This is not to overlook offices which have pushed for social change since the 1960s (Spatial Agency has documented an extensive list here), yet the number of architects working explicitly with a political agenda appears to be increasing and, it can be argued, have now gained enough visibility to begin to influence the mainstream profession.

Whether their site is the frontline of the migration crisis or the inequity of the real estate market, young collectives such as InBetween Economies, New South and La Rivoluzione Delle Seppie, to name but a few, are adopting alternative and entrepreneurial working methods that set them apart from established practice. These studios are responsive to and innovate with developments in digital technology and connectivity to offer themselves a degree of freedom from conventional work structures. This also enables them to initiate nomadic or spontaneous projects, sometimes only loosely connected to the built environment and often without prior commission. While the motivations of these studios may vary substantially, they remain connected by their focus upon a distinct social or political cause. This motivation defines and drives their method of work, the projects they undertake and, interestingly, it may shift their output into domains traditionally beyond the remit of architecture or design.Our generation doesn't have the luxury to be naive about (economics and politics). They matter and we have to understand and use them, as much as we use space, colour and light in our buildings.

It should not be overlooked that the majority of these young studios were initiated in an age of austerity in Europe, with many new graduates struggling to secure stable employment as experienced practitioners were first in line for re-employment after the 2008 financial crisis. However, the upsurge of offices pursuing a social agenda form a marked ideological shift from a recent fashion to compete to supply global icons for the twenty-first century city only a decade ago. Overall, the sensitivity of these new collectives to the socio-political context in which they work-rather than novelty or media attention-differentiates their approaches from the onset.

InBetween Economies, a research and debate platform based in Copenhagen, cite the current political climate as the main driver of their research and production. "[We] have grown up with a sense of openness and optimism," they suggest. "One of the problems with architecture at the moment is that it tells itself it's socially agnostic in order to justify the economic principles it has come to represent. Our generation doesn't have the luxury to be naive about [economics and politics]. They matter and we have to understand and use them, as much as we use space, colour and light in our buildings."

The issues these collectives select to address are often global in scale, complex and interconnected. While at first the obstacles in the way of intervening into concerns such as climate change, structural racism or economic inequality may seem insurmountable, designers are electing to act at a local level. Members of La Rivoluzione Delle Seppie adopt this approach in the Calabria region of Southern Italy, as the specific geographical location enables them to highlight and bridge the clash between African and European culture exacerbated by a recent increase in migration to the area. Their goal is simply to locate methods that instigate conversation, which have up to this point included puppet cinema and communal cooking. Echoing other spatial activists, Seppie see the architect as a mediating figure in this process, a facilitator of strategies, convening with other actors and, perhaps most importantly, linking marginalised communities to those in positions of power.You'd be amazed by who is willing to listen if you use technology to reach out - a lot of borders are broken down almost immediately.

A focus on the architect's duty to 'facilitate conversation' is also shared by InBetween Economies. They collaborate with respected names in design research, such as Keller Easterling, to instigate productive debate on the built environment and reach as broad an audience as possible-ideally those outside the profession. This visibility has become a catalyst for their events, and they express the ease at which such action can be initiated online. "You'd be amazed by who is willing to listen if you use technology to reach out," they suggest, "a lot of borders are broken down almost immediately. [...] Our ideal result is one where people from all backgrounds collectively discuss the future of their cities with the same fervour as a recent episode of Game of Thrones or Eurovision."

Internet connectivity appears to be pivotal to both how these architecture collectives are conceived and how they engage with their cause. They utilise social media platforms to promote themselves online, gathering huge volumes of followers and therefore the capability to rally people around events. Collectives brand themselves online and navigate the emerging open-source culture to appropriate free programs and tools. "Outwardly, we use graphic design, social media, and something resembling a marketing campaign to build interest in our events," say InBetween Economies. Recent developments in personal computing have also increased the speed at which data can be transferred, enabling their members to 'co-work' on projects that span multiple geographical locations. New South, a design office formed to instigate the The New South exhibition in Paris, which aimed to address neo- and post-colonial issues in architecture, commend the internet as the best means to share information and connect with project collaborators across continents.

Indy Johar, of the UK-based practice Architecture00, highlights the importance of internet-enabled collaborations and connections as a key driving factor for a new generation of architects. "Internet tools have enabled online citizens to map, mobilise and co-produce," he writes. Seppie agrees, "without this mentioned connectivity, we would not be able to create all the links with professionals, academics, locals and refugees." The ease of online publishing is also changing the visibility of the design process, as working sketches and discussions are now being published in real-time online. InBetween Economies suggest that the use of these technologies is second nature to recently graduated architects. "You can think in public, recognise your humility, and work on a problem as a group," they offer. This approach is notably different from the more recognised method of building up experience and knowledge to the point where you are credible enough to be presented to the public-a cornerstone of the profession to date-which, perhaps, has in the past generated a distinct, object-based approach to the built environment.Internet tools have enabled online citizens to map, mobilise and co-produce.

But are these collectives generating architecture? Or would they have a greater impact if they were to be producing buildings in a more recognised sense? Perhaps. However, one of the most interesting aspects of this shift in professional practice is that there is often no commissioning client, or limited economic resources to instigate the project in its initial phase. Therefore, that which is challenged is instead signature ways of doing: methods of mapping, of designing and of building. The research agency Forensic Architecture, operating from Goldsmiths in London, are an example of a studio challenging recognised methods of architectural representation. They suggest the temporal dimension itself holds political power. Therefore, they act to democratise cities under conflict through providing understandable information as events unfold. This work is not at first glance propositional in an architectural sense, yet they argue could possess the potential to stimulate change.

While some young practices see their work as remaining within the realms of architecture theory or discussion ("our representation techniques are not typically architectural, yet they still form a project, we are more focused on public organisation and dialogue than drawings, models or spatial interventions," say InBetween Economies), others are realising their ideas in the form of workshops or built prototypes. The design workshop, once conducted within the architecture studio, appears to increasingly be used as an active on-site process to spontaneously generate 'ground projects' or, as a tool to forge contacts with local actors, industries and institutions to enact a 'participatory design process'. An unexpected consequence is that some collectives are beginning to bypass the traditional procurement process, essentially 'feeling' where they should intervene-the concept behind the arms of the Seppie squid. Stories are collected with tactility, and experimentation might generate impromptu interventions that can bypass conventional planning systems.What do we believe we deserve? When mediocre to poor is the status quo, the search for quality becomes a political endeavour.

New South exemplify a studio that has bridged thinking into doing in order to address their aims by means of physical construction. They stress the need for attention to detail and quality of architectural intervention, perhaps in reaction to the signature aesthetic developing from this wave of 'social architecture'. These include-perhaps inevitably due to volatile financing mechanisms-low-budget, minimal resource and, at worst, exhibit poor-quality craftsmanship, or a DIY aesthetic. "What do we believe we deserve?" they ask, "when mediocre to poor is the status quo, the search for quality becomes a political endeavour." New South are aware of the challenges building in geographically distant contexts may bring. For their experimental pavilion in Adis Addaba, they had to adapt their work method to account for illiteracy and a crossover in languages, developing a vocabulary of non-verbal techniques, including comic books, kits of parts and model patterns. Everything was "designed on site, with hand drawn sketches and on site experimentation serving as guidelines."

The unspoken question so far might be: why does the process of social change need to be adopted by architects? Can we not just get back to what we do best-that is, designing buildings-and leave social activism for policy-makers or academics? Justin McGurk puts forward a sceptical case when he suggests that architects are stepping in where "the state has abdicated its responsibility and the market sees too little profit". That is to say, the current condition is necessitated by a political climate that pushes architects to "operate [on] the extremes of the social spectrum", to either serve capital or aid those disenfranchised by it. A number of critics also query the idealism and questionable criticality of many of the young collectives, suggesting their output is not designed enough to be effective architecture and not radical enough to be effective activism-and is therefore damned to exert negligible impact on the status quo. Perhaps, suggest InBetween Economies, this is the exact post-political atmosphere that requires "new ways of representing, publicising, and talking about architecture." More optimistically, perhaps what such spatial activists might hope to attain could become a sort of 'micropolitics', where small, local interventions are enacted with a hope to result in a kind of meta-intervention, which in turn might then hold potential to generate a cultural shift.

This movement of engaged collectives most likely presents only a partial picture of a current state of affairs. Architecture, as with other professions, is diversifying as the age of connectivity blurs its former institutional and professional boundaries. Perhaps, then, spatial activism is a confluence of 'architectural design' and 'the political project', with many further potential instances of interdisciplinary overlap. Yet, if this activism is understood as the mobilisation of that which is thought into a process of doing, it could be argued that the work of the architect is in itself inherently political, however disengaged their initial aims may have been. Acting upon an identifiable yet fluid set of cultural ideologies, the designer collaboratively develops projects that appropriate their values and solidify their decision-making within material space. The impact is therefore twofold: such interventions generate a built environment of objects that, in themselves, modify a former state of affairs, so can likewise be understood to possess political agency. Perhaps the architectural process is then invariably an act of activism in a broad sense, whether or not a practice adopts a political cause as its primary objective. When asked what skill the collectives saw as essential for an architecture studio to possess in the near future, New South replied "we consider that it will be key to have a point of view".
Interested in other young European collectives who foreground involvement with social change? Check out the work of the following: 51N4E (BE) amid.cero.9 (ES) Anna Heringer (DE) APractice (FR) Architecture00 (UK) Architects for Social Housing (UK) ASA (SE) Atelier D'Architecture Autogeree (FR) AWP (FR) Dogma (BE) Funkia (SE) Ecosistema Urbano (ES) EEEstudio (ES) Emergency Architecture & Human Rights (DK) Forensic Architecture (UK) Freiraum Kollektive (DK) Guerrilla Architects (DE) HATprojects (UK) Hollmen Reuter Sandman (FI) InBetween Economies (DK) Kere Architecture (DE) La Rivoluzione Delle Seppie (IT) Made in Earth (IT) MUF (UK) New South (FR) NLE (NL) Raumlabor (DE) Recetas Urbanas (ES) Studio Weave (UK) Territorial Agency (UK) Tomorrows Thoughts Today (UK) Urban Think Tank (CH) URBIO (SE) ZUS (NL) Collective Disaster (Transnational) Exyzt (FR) Something's Fantastic (DE)

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Spatial Activism: Profiling a New Wave of European Architecture Collectives and Their Spatial Manifestos

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While there exists an extensive volume of politically engaged architecture projects and countless architects who, particularly in their youth, practiced with explicit agendas, architecture offices have in the main been formed around a signature typology or aesthetic. Consider Zaha Hadid's...

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Race, Space & Architecture is a project a long time in the making. Manufactured in the magic, elastic now-now time of Southern Africa (from where its creators all hail), this is a site which has been pressed into being with care. Care for the contributions of text, image, film, drawing and all of the labour - physical and intellectual - which this entails. This is a project of many voices and, as the visual language of the platform speaks to, of many hands, minds, bodies and imaginaries too.

Race, Space & Architecture is an open access curriculum shared as a work in progress. Here, we engage with three questions:

permitting, and freely offered open access to print at home meanwhile.

What are the spatial contours of capitalism that produce racial hierarchy
and injustice?

What are the inventive repertoires of refusal, resistance and re-making that are neither reduced to nor exhausted by racial capitalism, and how are they spatialised?

How is 'race' configured differently across space, and how can a more expansive understanding of entangled world space broaden our imagination for teaching
​and learning?

Race, Space & Architecture is a poster series: to be printed, packaged and posted, pandemic

Race, Space & Architecture is a gathering of soundings: gifted by contributors to the curriculum and students who are already engaging with its themes.

Race, Space & Architecture is a platform of constellations: projects, ideas, writings and provocations that have and continue to inspire this work. These bright lights have been navigational stars, providing realms of thought which we have sought to signal boost, bring into dialogue with one another and reflect on in this work. We see this platform huddling in amongst these works, adding to the chorus such that all our voices might be amplified.
Race, Space & Architecture is a hostess of engagements. We are interested in lively thought, the fuzzy edges of ideas-in-formation and the crafting of weird ruptures which bring to the fore that which ordinarily lies beyond. Here, we hand over to a series of invited contributions and originally commissioned pieces which engage with the work of this project and offer something new in return.

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Race, Space & Architecture is a project a long time in the making. Manufactured in the magic, elastic now-now time of Southern Africa (from where its creators all hail), this is a site which has been pressed into being with care.

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Architectural NGOs operate in two major areas, disaster relief and community development, with many combining the two. They operate from two main perspectives, those from the developed world working in the global South and those working within their own locality. Whilst there are many problems with the global NGO culture, not least the prevalent sidelining of local expertise and talent, they have also made a difference to the lives of many, especially in global responses to humanitarian disaster, to which architecture as a profession has been slow to respond. It was a non-architect, Fred Cuny, who first made a connection between disaster relief and development work in the 1970s. At the time there was no single organisation responsible for the coordination of relief efforts and the standard response to the need for shelter was the provision of lightweight temporary tents. A lack of organisation and understanding of the cultural context meant that it was common for food to rot whilst people went hungry, or for the isolated relief operations of independent charities to send unsuitable goods, such as woollen jackets to tropical countries. This situation prompted Cuny to set up his own consulting company, Fred Cuny & Associates later named Intertect.

Although Cuny and Intertect's ideas were not new, through managing to implement them they changed the way disaster management is handled, advocating better camp organisation with single family tents clustered around a communal space for cooking, laundry etc. and adjoining lavatories. This reduced outbreaks of disease, encouraged ownership and increased security, whilst also creating an atmosphere of self-help where small-scale cottage industries and other self-organised initiatives could thrive. Other innovations included training families to build their own shelters, an approach that has influenced architects such as Shigeru Ban, who has designed emergency shelters made out of recycled paper cardboard tubes, a low-cost and low-tech solution that could be built by families displaced by disaster. Cuny also advocated paying local people to help in the clean-up operation so that materials could be salvaged for rebuilding efforts following a disaster.

Cuny vanished at the age of 50 on a mission to Chechnya in 1995 and the mystery of his disappearance was never solved. Yet his influence has been great, he changed the working practices of organisations such as Oxfam, whilst also being a key starting point for disaster relief and humanitarian approaches in architecture, for example, Architecture for Humanity (AFH) acknowledge Cuny's influence.

Whilst there are a large number of architectural NGOs operating globally, AFH can be credited for popularising disaster relief, and to some extent development architecture, in the US and European countries, especially amongst architectural students and young professionals. The volunteer non-profit organisation was founded in 1999 by architect, Cameron Sinclair, and freelance journalist and documentary producer, Kate Stohr. Formed in response to the Kosovo conflict, the pair realised that there was no organisation that coordinated the response of architects to international humanitarian crises. As AFH point out, the equivalent organisation for engineers, RedR, had at that point been in existence for twenty years. Following a meeting with UNHCR and the realisation of the scope of work involved in addressing the needs in Kosovo, AFH launched an open design competition, which has since become their preferred method of working. Rather than responding to emergencies on their own, AFH organise open calls for ideas, put architects in touch with aid organisations and NGOs that need their design services, and raise money to implement projects. The strength of response from architects to their first competition tapped into a latent desire within the profession to use their services to improve living conditions for those in need.

In 2003, this interest was consolidated in the establishment of local chapters of AFH that operate independently from the main organisation but are affiliated to it. This has led to projects being implemented not only in disaster situations but also locally based community projects, carrying out similar work to Community Design Centers. Since 2006 AFH have organised the Open Architecture Network, an online platform that allows designers to share their ideas and resources and collaborate with each other in order to help people and communities in crisis. The network operates under a creative commons license which means that rather than each new project starting from scratch, people can build on their own experience and that of others.

The list of other architectural NGOs is long and includes Architectes Sans Frontières, Habitat for Humanity International and Architecture & Développement, which are all well established NGOs, often working with the United Nations agency UN Habitat. Those that operate as locally based, grass-roots organisations tend to focus on community development, housing provision and other longer term solutions.Shack and Slum Dwellers International, is one of the largest such organisations, active in Africa, Asia and South America. Others includeAbahlali baseMjondolo, a well established movement of housing relatedNGOs in Latin America, the Aga Khan Development Network, Habitat International Coalition and many others.

'Aga Khan Development Network', http://www.akdn.org/ [accessed 30 June 2010].

'Architects Sans Frontières International', http://www.asfint.org/ [accessed 30 June 2010].

'Architecture & Développement', http://www.archidev.org/index.php [accessed 30 June 2010].

Architecture for Humanity, Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006).

Frederick C. Cuny, Disasters and Development, ed. by Susan Abrams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).

'Habitat for Humanity International', http://www.habitat.org/eca/ [accessed 30 June 2010].

'HIC Habitat International Coalition - Global network for the right to habitat and social justice', http://www.hic-net.org/ [accessed 30 June 2010].

'Open Architecture Network', http://openarchitecturenetwork.org/about [accessed 27 May 2010].

Practical Action - Technology challenging poverty', http://practicalaction.org/ [accessed 30 June 2010].

Ian Davis, Shelter After Disaster (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1978).

"Architecture Sans Frontières-International (ASF-Int) is a politically independent not-for-profit organisation concerned with the social, cultural and environmental commitment to a sustainable built environment. Architecture Sans Frontières-UK (ASFUK) is a UK registered charity, concerned with education and training in the development sector. ASF-UK trains built-environment professionals to be more relevant to the agenda of development, and by supporting networks with local partners, helps to build organisational capacity. Through workshops, grassroots activities and lecture programmes, the organisation promotes ethical practice, particularly in poverty habitats."

Connections

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Architectural NGOs operate in two major areas, disaster relief and community development, with many combining the two. They operate from two main perspectives, those from the developed world working in the global South and those working within their own locality.

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https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/disobedient-objects/designing-for-the-common-goals-of-people-an-interview-with-common-practice

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Like many of the people occupying Zuccotti Park in 2011, the collective Common Practice contributed to their protest camp by drawing on the skills and training they knew best - architecture & design. The result was the 123Occupy project, whose model of an Inflatable General Assembly can be seen in 'Disobedient Objects'. In this post we interview Common Practice member Greta Hansen about the collective, its origins with 123 Occupy, and designing for the 99% now. The end of this interview includes a DIY guide for making your own Inflatable General Assembly. 1. Who/What is 123Occupy? Why did you form, or what do you do now ?
123Occupy is project that has two sides. On one hand it is a very specific project responding to the weather conditions at Zuccotti Park in 2011 when hundreds of protesters were camping outside and winter was approaching. On the other hand it was a sharing strategy. In a group that is now loosely known as Common Practice, we were a handful of architects who came together to approach the winter problem, and the fast distribution of ideas was critical. We wanted to reach more protesters in a short period of time in order to produce more warm spaces than we could have made on our own. We thought our designs could be quickly passed to other hands, produced, manipulated, transformed, and replicated through a set of instructions.

We began to understand our own practice of architecture as basically the production of instructions. We were seeing architecture not as the built product but as the coding of information that would inform it. The code or set of instructions-which became a series of brochures and posters primarily designed by Kyung Jae Kim -could be almost infinitely small. We pared the code to an 11×17 fold-up brochure with eight instructional grids on a side as an easy way to share ideas through the non-hierarchical circumstance of the park. But in theory the code could be as heavy as a full-sized set of construction documents or as lightweight as a string of type.
2. Tell me more about the Inflatable General Assembly. What is it? Why did you create it? What problems (design, public, ect) does it solve? What do you feel is the ideal situation to deploy it?
The bubble is an "other" space separated by the inflated plane from all the other space we normally spend our time in. Originally we imagined that enclosing the general assembly that gathered each night on the steps of Zuccotti Park would be a way of protecting the otherness of the Occupy Wall Street protest. But our project was never realized-we knew it would probably never be built-so the design was in solidarity with the otherness of that protest.

At one point last fall we used the Inflatable General Assembly as a bottleneck instead of a gathering space. There was a lecture at Columbia University School of Architecture's offsite space called Studio X. The subject matter was the relationship between Occupy Wall Street (New York) and Occupy Gezi (Istanbul). Originally we had planned to do a reverse shrink wrap of the entire lecture space in order to create a sort of zone-apart-from-reality: once you stepped through the plastic envelope you would be there. Instead we an entire bubble as the transition. We installed a 40'-0" bottle in the corridor leading to the hall, forcing participants to enter the inflated space in order to access the event.

If there is any ideal space to insert a bubble, however, it is anywhere with a lot of children. They seem to intuitively recognize the magic of an inflated zone of otherness. It is immediately a place for acting, playing, and pretending in a different way and we see this every time we blow up in a public park. The childlike attitude is probably the reaction we are hoping to induce in ourselves and other grown-ups.
3. Are there any other projects your working on, or anything else we should know about?
Common Practice started designing for the common goals of people (i.e. in the spirit of the 99%) but was also conceived as a basket of common design practices and a way for us as architects to branch into multiple design fields that are normally seen as distinct from one another. We have experimented with furniture and are currently hatching ideas and experiments in materials testing and an interview series. And we are passing from bubbles to other design objects but have created a human-powered fan to inflate them (we call it the bicycle blower) in case we ever get the urge.
Common Practice's members include Greta Hansen, Adam Koogler, Kyung-Jae Kim & Andy Rauchut. Savable images of their DIY Manual for creating your own Inflatable General Assembly can be found below:

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'Designing for the Common Goals of People': An Interview with Common Practice * V&A Blog

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Like many of the people occupying Zuccotti Park in 2011, the collective Common Practice contributed to their protest camp by drawing on the skills and training they knew best - architecture & design. The result...

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Archigram

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[Image: From an "ongoing speculative proposal exploring the implications of cones of vision and their interaction with an existing neoclassical 'temple' on the River Thames in Henley, Berkshire," by Archigram/Michael Webb].
As of roughly 16 hours ago, the Archigram Archival Project is finally online and ready to for browsing, courtesy of the University of Westminster: the archive "makes the work of the seminal architectural group Archigram available free online for public viewing and academic study."
[Image: "Proposal for a series of inflatable dwellings as part of an exhibition for the Commonwealth Festival, located in the lodge of Cardiff Castle," by Archigram/Ron Herron].
The newly launched site includes more than 200 projects; "this comprises projects done by members before they met, the Archigram magazines (grouped together at no. 100), the projects done by Archigram as a group between 1961 and 1974, and some later projects." There are also brief biographies of each participating member of the collaborative group: Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron, and Michael Webb.

Even at their most surreal, it feels as if Archigram did, in fact, accurately foresee what the architectural world was coming to. After all, if Chalk & Co. had built the things around us, there would be electricity supplies in the middle of nowhere and drive-in housing amidst the sprawl; for good or for bad, we'd all be playing with gadgets like the Electronic Tomato, that perhaps would not have given the iPhone a run for its money but was a "mobile sensory stimulation device," nonetheless. We might even live together on the outer fringes of " extreme suburbs," constructed like concentric halos around minor airports, such as Peter Cook's "Crater City," an "earth sheltered hotel-type city around central park," or "Hedgerow Village," tiny clusters of houses like North Face tents "hidden in hedgerow strips."
[Image: "Speculative proposal showing use of the 'Popular Pak', a kit of architectural parts for 'tuning-up' existing buildings, applied to an invented suburb," by Archigram/Ron Herron].
There would be temporary, inflatable additions to whole towns and cities; pyramidal diagrid megastructures squatting over dead neighborhoods like malls; dream cities like Rorschach blots stretched across the sky, toothed and angular Montreal Towers looming in the distance; plug-in universities and capsule homes in a computer-controlled city of automatic switches and micro-pneumatic infrastructure.

At its more bizarre, there would have been things like the Fabergram castle, as if the Teutonic Knights became an over-chimneyed race of factory-builders in an era of cheap LSD, reading Gormenghast in Disneyworld, or this proposal "for technology enabling underwater farming by scuba divers, including chambers, floats and tubes for walking and farm control." After all, Archigram asked, why live in a house at all when you can live in a submarine? Why use airplanes when you can ride a magic carpet constructed from shining looms in a "'reverse hovercraft' facility where a body can be held at an adjustable point in space through the use of jets of air"?
[Image: Proposal "fusing alternative and changing Archigram structures, amenities and facilities with traditional and nostalgic structures," by Archigram/Peter Cook].
It might not be architects who have realized much of this fever dream of the world to come, but that doesn't mean that these ideas have not, in many cases, been constructed. Archigram spoke of instant cities and easily deployed, reconfigurable megastructures-but the people more likely to own and operate such spaces today are Big Box retailers, with their clip-on ornaments, infinitely exchangeable modular shelving, and fleeting themes-of-the-week. Archigram's flexible, just-in-time, climate-controlled interiors are not a sign of impending utopia, in other words, but of the reach of your neighborhood shopping mall-and the people airdropping instant cities into the middle of nowhere today are less likely to be algorithmically trained Rhino enthusiasts from architecture school, but the logistics support teams behind Bechtel and the U.S. military.

Another way of saying this is that Archigram's ideas seem unbuilt-even unbuildable-but those ideas actually lend themselves surprisingly well to the environment in which we now live, full of "extreme suburbs," drive-in everything, KFC-supplied army bases in the middle of foreign deserts, robot bank tellers, and huge, HVAC-dependent wonderlands on the exurban fringe.

The irony, for me, is that Archigram's ideas have, in many ways, actually been constructed -but in most cases it was for the wrong reasons, in the wrong ways, and by the wrong people.
(Note: Part of the latter half of this post includes some re-edited bits from a comment I posted several months ago).
In any case, what was it about Archigram that promised on-demand self-transformation in an urban strobe of flashing lights but then got so easily realized as a kind of down-market Times Square? How did Archigram simply become the plug-in units of discount retail-or the Fun Palaces of forty years ago downgraded to Barnes & Noble outlets in the suburbs? How did the Walking City become Bremer Walls and Forward Operating Bases, where the Instant City meets Camp Bondsteel?

Archigram predicted a modular future propelled by cheap fuel, petrodollars, and a billion easy tons of unrecycled plastic-but, beneath that seamless gleam of artificial surfacing and extraterrestrial color combinations was a fizzy-lifting drink of human ideas-as many ideas as you could think of, sometimes imperfectly illustrated but illustrated nonetheless, and, thus, now canonical-all of it wrapped up in a dossier of new forms of planetary civilization. Archigram wasn't just out on the prowl for better escalators or to make our buildings look like giant orchids and Venus Flytraps, where today's avant-bust software formalism has unfortunately so far been mired; it wasn't just bigger bank towers and the Burj Dubai.

Instead, Archigram suggested, we could all act differently if we had the right spaces in which to meet, love, and live, and what matters to me less here is whether or not they were right, or even if they were the only people saying such things (they weren't)-what matters to me is the idea that architecture can reframe and inspire whole new anthropologies, new ways of being human on earth, new chances to do something more fun tomorrow (and later today). Architecture can reshape how we inhabit continents, the planet, and the solar system at large. Whether or not you even want inflatable attics, flying carpets, and underwater eel farms, the overwhelming impulse here is that if you don't like the world you've been dropped into, then you should build the one you want.

In any case, the entire Archigram Archival Project is worth a look; even treated simply as an historical resource, its presence corrects what had been a sorely missing feature of online architecture culture: we can now finally link to, and see, Archigram's work.

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Image: From an "ongoing speculative proposal exploring the implications of cones of vision and their interaction with an existing neoclassical 'temple' on the River Thames in Henley, Berkshire," by Archigram/Michael Webb].

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Architects are asked to engage with an increasingly vast inventory of social and political problems. But where does engagement happen, and what does it involve? One need not leave the studio to understand that architecture is already embroiled in any number of worldly problems. The sense that architecture turns on small things is met with a growing consensus that even the smallest, most quotidian aspects of architectural design turn on large-scale systems and pressing ethical dilemmas. The line between system and architecture is itself increasingly blurry, and with it the role and responsibility of the architect. While the architect's role in engaging large-scale problems is under debate, their political consciousness is remarkably consistent. In the face of climate change, the global debt crisis and myriad other dilemmas, architects seek to make invisible problems sensible. Research is an expression of their political ethos.

A growing number of architects dedicate themselves to research, listening for new idioms about space and design that are normally overlooked or refused in the planning and management of large-scale infrastructural systems. Consider the range of infrastructures that architects now bear witness to: waste, militarization, surveillance, energy, informatics and logistics, to name a few. Not only are these infrastructures large and geographically distributed, but they are also steadfast in their secrecy and resistance to public scrutiny. Architects and their collaborators enter into the fray in order to interpret the inner workings of a system for a wider audience. In the process, they also experiment with their role as observers, trading hats as writers, activists and teachers.

Waste is exemplary of the conditions within which their research now operates. It is a world whose mechanisms are intentionally shrouded from view, and is popularly associated with histories of pollution and subsequent political struggles over landfills, incinerators and toxic dumps. Its work and workers remain undervalued and invisible to the majority of society. At the same time, waste is under fresh scrutiny in design. Research about its spaces and systems seeks to make legible those things that society refuses to see. New architectural works follow suit, integrating visible aesthetics, visitors centers and other forms of public engagement into an architecture that until recently resisted engagement of any kind. The design of research and the design of new facilities coalesce around a shared ideology of bringing the consequences of waste-making into greater visibility.

Drawing on the example of waste and its spaces, I imagine the architect in the recycling facility and other infrastructural spaces as a provisional figure trying to make sense of his or her role in large scale, politically charged problems. When an architect sets foot in a recycling facility or landfill, he or she enters into conversation with protagonists of various stripes-not only clients, but also workers, management professionals, community groups, engineers and activists. Much of the insight and critical awareness of their counterparts in other fields remains strikingly absent from a great deal of design research about waste and other large-scale systems. All too often, architectural research creates a division of labor between the insights of the observer and those of the observed. The design problems that ensue are familiar: earnest efforts to make the invisible visible overemphasize the transgressive character of an outsider looking in, at the cost of understanding how insiders already look inward and around their environment. With the help of anthropological theory and writing, I explore other ways for research to be involved in its sites. What roles might the architect assume alongside those that they research and design for?

GETTING INSIDE INFRASTRUCTURE
The architecture of waste management is reliably opaque to its urban surroundings, shrouded behind hastily constructed corrugated walls and barbed wire. In North America, its off-the-shelf skin and bones of Butler Building parts and rusty enclosure systems are cobbled together in order to keep the machines and the people who sort waste hidden from the public. In spite of this, a wave of recently minted facilities shed new light on trash. Projects such as Annabelle Selldorf's Sims Municipal Recycling Facility in Brooklyn bring garbage into view for an architectural audience -not to mention, introduce architecture to the manifold audiences that come together around garbage: community groups, environmentalists, design review boards and the ever-influential if politically expedient "tax-paying public." Architectural design is front and center in wider efforts to make waste disposal more visible to society, but its ability to question the terms and consequences of waste's invisibility remains circumscribed in a number of important ways.

Architectural authorship of waste management facilities is a relatively new phenomenon. In the United States, for instance, amendments to the Resource and Recovery Act in the early 1980s and subsequent state-level legislation laid the groundwork for greater investment in facilities such as landfills and recycling centers. In time, increased investment and civic consciousness about waste prompted the industry to clean up its image, mobilizing architects as service providers in the design and construction of facilities. Though high profile projects by Selldorf, Ennead and Steven Holl herald the entry of elite architectural firms into the waste industry, regional practices such as J.R. Miller and Associates in the Southwest United States have been working in the industry since the early 1990s. In spite of promises of greater visibility and civic engagement, architects in the United States remain compromised in their ability to radically reinvent the contact between waste infrastructure and the public. Requests For Proposals, design competitions and other modes of solicitation demand that architecture be vested in maintaining the relative invisibility of waste management facilities in American cities. Most new facilities continue to be sited on the periphery of cities, occupying urban blind spots such as industrial landscapes and hinterlands.

When involved, architects seek to leverage "better design": a modest effort to draw attention to the industry and its responsibilities to workers and customers. Better design is a concept that I draw from multiple interviews with the architects of these facilities, such as materials recovery and water treatment facilities. Unlike historical, moralistic notions of "good design," better design is expressive of an architecture of partial, specialized authorship. In its most prosaic sense, better design is typically limited to those things that the public sees from the outside: landscaping, cladding and coloration of buildings or signage. It also incorporates public access to facilities. Visitor's centers are a common feature of many new MRFs (materials recovery facility) and water treatment facilities, featuring vantage points for the public to bear witness to their inner workings. Facilities such as JR Miller and Associates' MRF for the LA County Sanitation District run an elevated walkway through the heart of the recycling facility, lining the passageway with canted windows on either side. Other facilities communicate to a more wide-reaching external public. Bjarke Ingels Group's Amager Bakke Waste To Energy Plant in Copenhagen, Denmark, envisages the architecture of a waste facility less as a decorated shed than as a broadcast system, producing smoke rings that communicate the plant's carbon emissions to an unspecified regional public.

Still, projects of this order are exceptions, not the rule. The ordinarily understated architecture of better design is enlisted to assure that companies and regional sanitation boards appear as good neighbors to surrounding communities-an effort to produce a public, branded image for an industry that is subject to increasing scrutiny by community groups and municipalities. With the exception of visitor's centers and other educational spaces, most of the inner workings of a facility are off-limits to architectural design. Systems for sorting recyclables, for instance, are sold by engineering firms as a proprietary kit of parts. Transportation specialists design connections between the interior of a facility and external forms of infrastructure such as roads and rail lines. The architecture of flow is thus the provenance of an increasingly fragmented cadre of specialists, relegating architectural expertise to their interstices.

But the architect's role as a service provider does not preclude his or her ability to be critical of a system like waste management. Rather than debate the quantity or quality of architecture as a design corps for the industry, why not question the nature of its commitments altogether? Undoubtedly, architectural practice and education are committed to fulfilling a responsibility to the public through the provision of professional services. Research is an important, if often unacknowledged, aspect of its service. But the architectural discipline's commitment to research positions it to undertake a more independent role in accounting for political, social and environmental problems. As a matter of fact, architects already position themselves as potent observers of dilemmas that resist social accountability. In doing so, they undertake the politically charged task of making the invisible visible, a mantle whose ideology has received little critical reflection.

To make the invisible visible assumes an inner world into which an outsider, such as an architect, enters into and makes visible. But waste is not easily confined to an interior. Contemporary design research encounters phenomena, such as waste, that resist clean demarcations between inside and outside worlds. Ubiquitous, dispersed and categorically leaky phenomena challenge the ideology and role of an outsider/researcher who bears witness to foreign and hidden worlds. By assuming the role of an observer, the architect today encounters a series of epistemological concerns that share considerable precedent-and shared histories-with the social sciences. In particular, insights in contemporary anthropology about multi-sited research and collaboration provide a language for reimagining how design research is implicated in the dynamics of large-scale systems. Drawing on the theoretical writings of anthropologist George Marcus and others, I propose that the ideology of "getting inside infrastructure" be joined by other ways of being involved with one's research site and subjects.

Of its many tools of social engagement, the analysis and management of information is tantamount. The management and translation of data about social groups and quantifiable phenomena into diagrams, animations and other forms of visualization is arguably as fundamental to contemporary architectural education as basic drawing, and is part and parcel of how the profession communicates itself to its clients and the public at large. Though forms of information gathering and analysis are everywhere in the profession, the interpretation of data in contemporary design education is better documented. The pedagogical format of the "research studio" is emblematic. In his short but insightful genealogy of the research studio, Kazys Varnelis suggests that contemporary research studios such as Rem Koolhaas' Harvard Project on the City draw "on the processes of information gathering, analysis, and synthesis that an architect undertakes in the early phases of design, utilizing the architect's skills in structuring visual and verbal information into a coherent whole." Privileging analysis over architectural design, the research studio uses uniquely architectural sensibilities to translate data into a rhetoric of interpretation.

Information is also mobilized as a political "front" for architectural practice, an ethics of "being informed." Architect Alejandro Aravena's recently penned manifesto for the 2016 Architecture Biennale is illustrative of this ideology. He implores architects to engage more and better information about society, arguing that "architects have a responsibility to engage in broad conversations that ensure we are properly informed about all the parameters of a given project." Aravena stops short of calling for more immediate forms of engagement, such as direct observation or collaboration, preferring that architecture itself operate as an "open system" for the inclusion, transmission and analysis of information. More inputs into what informs design will, he hopes, generate greater inclusivity for underrepresented populations and problems.

Aravena's call glosses over the significant degree to which architects already utilize the language and methods of other disciplines such as geography, sociology or anthropology. Drawing on the long history of engagement between architecture and the social sciences, university and professional design studios utilize social-scientific sensibilities and data to establish the needs of a client, community or user group. Common examples in contemporary architectural education include spatial mapping projects (ranging from experiential, sensorial mapping to GIS data), rudimentary statistical analysis and behavioral user studies, as well as proto-ethnographic description and interviews. Social-scientific methods and imagery also transcend the grind of everyday practice, propelling deeper forms of introspection about the architectural discipline's boundaries. David Gissen argues that architecture's recent turn towards geographical methods and images, for example, unveils a longer history of shared concepts about territory in both fields-opening architecture up to urgent "geographic" conversations about difference, rights and citizenship.

Wittingly or not, architects and design students who engage in such research practices inherit the problems of social science when they adopt its methods. Geography is one such example. Anthropological concepts are less acknowledged, but equally salient. Notions of complicity in ethnographic fieldwork, for instance, are especially helpful in refocusing ideas about research in architecture away from information gathering to the complicated work of site-based observation. Complicity is essential to any research project, architectural, anthropological or otherwise. Consider the example of waste management. At minimum, researchers must make concessions to the concerns of a company or municipal agency in order to gain access to a recycling facility or landfill. They might further participate in its forms of work or representation in order to learn more about its workings and workers. They are also responsible to the community or advocacy groups that they solicit for perspectives on the same facilities. The researcher might further align themselves with the priorities of advocacy and activist groups. Whether inside or outside the walls of a facility, research about infrastructural systems demands that the researcher be complicitous in the codes and procedures that mark the system.

In recognizing its epistemological affinities with social scientific practices such as anthropology, architecture might also inherit its critical perspectives about the ways in which research becomes involved in its sites and subjects. It can learn from how anthropology writes its involvement with people and institutions into its forms of narration. In her ethnography of sanitation work, for instance, anthropologist Robin Nagle reveals a world of institutional regulations and social codes that are hidden from public scrutiny. Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City (2013) tells the stories of workers in an effort to counter what Nagle calls "the invisibility syndrome" associated with sanitation work, and delicately exposes the inner world of waste to a public that does not understand or respect it. Recounting the many compromises and authorizations entailed in observing and participating in sanitation work, Nagle remarks that her field became one of permissions. Her frustrated requests for permission to conduct fieldwork and participant observation rehearse an ethnographic dramaturgy, involving indifference, resistance and rapport building with her research subjects. Getting inside facilities and into uniform involved tense meetings with unsympathetic bureaucrats, physical tests to measure competency for sanitation work, and negotiations within a predominantly male world of "sanmen."

While many of these critiques are by now second nature to anthropology and cultural studies, introspection about complicity endures in the face of new conditions for site-based research. Marcus argues that "being there" encodes a deeper spatial and cultural metaphor. Even critiques of complicity in anthropological practice, he writes, "sustain the sense that the symbolic and literal domain of fieldwork exists inside another form of life-entailing crossing a boundary into it and exploring a cultural logic of enclosed difference." Marcus contends that this model of boundary-crossing and subsequent translation of cultural difference was out of sync with the objects that anthropologists were observing in the 1990s: financial networks, scientific research, transnational advocacy and so on. In its place, he argues that the fieldworker and his or her informants simultaneously sense that what is happening is tied to what is happening elsewhere, the uncertain causality of which is felt by both figures: a shared sense of being outside. The anthropologist and the informant share a mutual curiosity and desire to make sense of the forces that impinge on them-an equivalence that stands in marked contrast to the inequitable power relationship between a researcher and their informants that is endemic to histories of social science.

Like anthropological fieldwork, design research about porous, large-scale issues such as waste complicate the assumption of a conceptually and physically bounded space within which research is conducted. Certainly, facilities are difficult for "outsiders" to access. But the people that work inside these facilities are also outsiders. Changes in their environment and conditions of work are not experienced uniformly-they are felt by different actors across different places simultaneously. In this context, architects, managers, workers and engineers may experience a shared sense of being outside, of not knowing the sources and causes of large-scale shifts in the value or toxicity of trash and other forms of waste. Who is an insider in a company like Waste Management, a company that is large enough and geographically distributed to approximate the workings of a state bureaucracy? Furthermore, the notion that there is an inside of waste infrastructure is difficult to uphold given that toxic chemicals, smells, unwanted trash and myriad other forms of glut bleed outward into transport networks, aquifers and other vectors. It is everywhere, even when you don't see it.

BEING INVOLVED: COLLABORATION AND ADJACENCY
In assuming the role of an observer, architects witness and document phenomena alongside others who scrutinize their circumstances. Representing and reflecting on their insights introduces voices that are otherwise written out of design problems about new facilities, urban landscapes and infrastructural design. It attends to the concepts that informants use to describe the spaces that they work in and their problems. It listens for alternatives that workers, managers and activists already speculate on, and their spatial idioms. Recognizing their insight demands that architects listen more to voices outside of the field, not less.

I suspect that my call for architects to listen more to others will raise concerns about the identity of architects and their work. They are questions redolent of a discipline trying to figure out its place alongside problems that are foreign to it. I will rehearse a few here: does listening more mean architects will be faced with too many voices, most of which are distant from their expertise? By observing problems that are not immediately architectural, do architects stray too far from their disciplinary commitments and into the terrain of disciplinary ventriloquism or amateur social science: the "architect as anthropologist?" Does the architect engage with experiences of alterity outside of her institutional and disciplinary boundaries at the expense of engaging critically within them, in the here and now, recalling Hal Foster's well known caricature of "the artist as ethnographer?"

What these concerns share is a fear that involvement with extra-disciplinary actors and problems compromises the integrity of architectural knowledge, co-opting its ability to be critical and objective. On the contrary, while many of the waste industry's most potent observers establish positions that are proximate to its workings and spaces, they preserve their independence from the industry's forms of knowledge-making and representation. Artists, authors and scholars such as Nagle, Elizabeth Royte, William Rathje, Mel Chin and Mierle Ukeles work hard to maintain independence for their work, even as they collaborate and give voice to the expertise of actors within the industry. We might imagine their presence in spaces of waste disposal as adjacent to the waste industry: the artist, author or architect may be in contact with industry protagonists, but are by definition "absent of anything of the same kind in between."

I borrow the concept of adjacency from anthropologist Paul Rabinow, who envisages it as a virtual space wherein an observer observes observers. Think, for example of an anthropologist like Rabinow, who studies a scientist conducting research. Rabinow asserts that occupying a position of adjacency allows questions to emerge that would otherwise be unimaginable if the researcher were to constrain herself to the obligations and representational genres of those she observes. The observer, in this case an anthropologist, tells a different kind of story, he writes: one parallel to but entirely different from the plot line of journalism or the representational strictures of scientific papers. One's adjacency to others upholds the differences between their institutional, intellectual and personal commitments and his or her own. According to Rabinow, the researcher asserts objectivity by remaining disinterested in the research subject's obligations and career paths, even where and when he or she observes them.

If the researcher is not beholden to the goals of its subjects, what role do their insights play? Rabinow suggests that this independence lends a freshness of voice, curiosity and critical insight that the researcher's subjects might not have time for, or simply overlook. As an architect, my role in spaces of waste disposal is similar. In ongoing research about the architecture and urbanism of waste disposal, I interview advocates, architects and others about their perspectives on the design and spaces of facilities. The questions that I raise draw out problems about space and design that are already at play in the industry, but which are impermissible or marginal to the day-to-day imperatives of the industry and its critics. Labor activists in the waste industry are, for example, diligent in their attention to issues of worker safety and welfare. Space and design are not prominent concerns. But advocates and workers are deeply versed in spatial problems. As a researcher who is independent from their advocacy, my role is not to speak on their behalf, but instead to approach their questions, concepts and insights in a different way. I leave room for my own curiosity about their work, and their curiosity about my research questions and motivations

Consider further the spatial idioms of advocacy. In an interview in 2014, a number of labor activists in Los Angeles associated with the Don't Waste LA coalition relayed a number of troubling observations to me about labor conditions in the Southern California waste industry. They described how companies rely on temporary and undocumented workers, and how bodies are treated like cogs in a machine-an old but sadly urgent dilemma. Laboring bodies, many of them female, are accorded minimal space in sorting lines. Workers often feel trapped and overwhelmed by the bins of waste they are asked to fill and push. They are denied any space to congregate and rest: bodies in motion, without space. Our conversation underscored the imbrication of space with problems of dignity, inequality and safety. My questions about the architecture of facilities were met with curiosity and interest. Together, we imagined the possibility of advocacy about space and design in the industry, a yet unexplored zone of experimentation.

Our conversation was convivial and creative. But counterparts in other fields do not always welcome independent research about architecture and design. Conducting observation alongside informants is inherently open ended, engendering a play of curiosity that also risks misappropriation of research and conflict over the incongruity of an architect's research with an informant's priorities. Such risks might constrain research, but can also raise unanticipated questions and possibilities, an unresolved tension that I wrestled with during a research project with architecture students at the University at Buffalo during 2011-12, titled "Infrastructural Research." The yearlong seminar examined how small, individual acts of waste making and disposal, such as backyard composting and outdoor trash cans, were tied to bigger ideas about public space in Buffalo. Research prioritized interviews and first hand engagement with waste systems and byproducts over data-heavy evidence gleaned from secondary sources. We learned from embodied forms of recording, measuring and witnessing waste, including Francis Alÿs' walks in Mexico City (The Collector, 1991-2006), Stanley Milgram's studies of dispossession (Lost Letter Technique, 1965) and Mel Chin's collaborative experiments with phytoremediation (Revival Field, 1991-ongoing). Research culminated in the exhibition and publication of a series of broadsheet "Assembly Manuals" ( http://assemblyoftrash.net/), which described a number of new rituals about waste disposal and the social and spatial problems that motivated them.

In part, our research made use of conventional techniques of spatial analysis. We learned from interviews and site visits with urban gardeners, farmers, civil engineers, a regional waste management company, lawyers and advocacy organizations. Our informants painted a different picture of waste than official explanations of its containment and disappearance. Instead, they described a porous landscape: matter, smells and toxins escaped many of the legal, social and physical thresholds that were designed to contain them. Our drawings indexed this porosity. We analyzed, for instance, how dangerous particulate matter escaped from landfills, arguing that, when seen through the lens of particulate matter, the aerial boundaries of the landfill were much bigger than the soil, plastic and fences that contain it. Students also mapped the circulation of organic waste in Buffalo, representing a network of reciprocal exchange between organic waste producers and composters in the city that was independent of municipally-sanctioned forms of waste management.

Our informants' stories and concerns informed our maps and diagrams. But they also made their own maps of urban space. A great deal of our informants' work involved the identification of otherwise invisible boundaries associated with trash, ranging from toxicity and smell to value and conflicting definitions of land use. Much like the architect's sketchbook, measuring tape and camera, or the planner's survey, instruments play an important role in observing the byproducts and consequences of trash. Instruments such as the air quality monitoring bucket are critical to advocates mapping air pollution in the absence of adequate regulation by the state. The bucket, which is an adapted plastic restaurant storage bucket manufactured by an advocacy group in California and distributed to partner groups such as the Clean Air Coalition in Buffalo, uses negative pressure to inhale outside air. Affected communities are trained by advocacy groups to monitor their own air-opening up the act of monitoring to individuals and assuring basic expertise in the production of evidence. Once collected, air quality sample bags are sent to an independent laboratory for evaluation. The lab results are used to lobby the EPA to more accurately identify levels of pollution for use as evidence in legal proceedings.

While our research documented observers of air quality, compost and other phenomena related to waste, we also sought to speculate on the margins of their work. In empirical studies, drawings and the design of a prototype, we experimented with how air quality might involve other publics and spaces. Inspired by the aesthetics of vapor monitoring badges worn by toxic clean up crews, scientists and workers, one student imagined colorful membranes that would register otherwise imperceptible changes in particulate matter, VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds) and other airborne byproducts of landfills. Other studies were empirical, staging sticky surfaces in different urban settings in order to analyze the prevalence of particulate matter in the air. Following these studies, the seminar constructed a prototype for a "Window Lung:" inserting the mechanics of the air quality monitoring bucket into a domestic window. Imagined as a typology for houses that are sited near landfills, the project was unabashedly experimental and open to failure. Connecting the space of advocacy with the space of domesticity raised more problems than it solved. How would expertise be assured? Would a fixed expression of monitoring undermine the spatial and temporal agility of the activist's bucket?

Though some of our informants were enthusiastic about our work, and in some cases eager to appropriate it, others were cautious and outwardly critical. Our research resisted immediate functionality for industry or advocacy efforts, a fact that was troubling to some of our counterparts. We sought to learn about air quality monitoring in Buffalo, but our work was not oriented towards advocacy-based imperatives of training and mobilizing community members to monitor air quality. One of our primary informants, a local air quality monitoring activist, was unconcerned by our autonomy from their work, expressing interest in our architectural studies of air quality as a potential advocacy tool. On the other hand, another national level activist was disturbed by our relative distance from the air quality monitoring movement-communicating his disdain for the project as a waste of time for advocates like himself. In hindsight, given our de facto alliance with air quality advocates and other self-proclaimed "grass roots" work in the city, should we have been more involved in their priorities?

Elsewhere, Ukeles writes that she wanted to avoid the sound-byte mentality of journalism and social-scientific research. Her work resists the performance of objectivity, even as it asserts her role as an artist. I take her work as analogous, not equivalent, to research. In displacing and redistributing roles, Ukeles dons many of the codes and procedures of sanitation workers. Her participation in sanitary practices is joined by an invitation to her counterparts to participate in the structure and play of artistic labor. Collaboration extends the responsibilities of maintenance and art to actors who are by definition independent of the activity that they are participating in, as when the tugboat captain lines his barges up in the service of aesthetic play. Indeed, Ukeles leaves the tugboat performance open to appropriation by her counterpart boat captains, which can be understood as a radical relinquishment or deferral of artistic authority.

Much as Ukeles questions the division of labor between work and art, might architects and designers also question the division of labor in their research? The division of intellectual labor between architect and informant is also a division of spaces, a distinction made between the studio and the research site. In contrast, the involvement of architects in complicated political and environmental problems render such distinctions porous and untenable, even though they never fully go away. The distanced, bleary-eyed labor of studio-based research is joined by the messy, surprising world of first-hand experience, opening design problems up to the insight and imagination of others. In the process, novel inquiries about space and design are introduced to systems and actors who are unfamiliar with architectural concerns, but also to an architectural profession and discipline that has until now largely ignored them.

Curt Gambetta is an architectural designer and PhD student in the School of Architecture at Princeton University. He was formerly the Peter Reyner Banham Fellow at the Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning in New York and a teaching fellow at the Woodbury University School of Architecture in Los Angeles.

The author would like to thank Michael Powell, Hanna Garth, George Marcus, Neeraj Bhatia, Carson Chan, Keith Murphy and the editors of ARPA Journal for their gracious reading of earlier drafts of this paper. Research for the paper was supported by the Peter Reyner Banham Fellowship at the University at Buffalo and the Woodbury University School of Architecture.

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columbia university graduate school of architecture

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Architects are asked to engage with an increasingly vast inventory of social and political problems. But where does engagement happen, and what does it involve?

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Denmark-based architect Dorte Mandrup has won her third UNESCO World Heritage Center project, with her design of the Trilateral Wadden Sea World Heritage Partnership Centre. The project was the winner in a contest to design a new headquarters for the Centre, an organization that aims to protect the Wadden Sea and is jointly run by Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands.

The Wadden Sea area was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2009 and is the world's largest unbroken system of intertidal sand and mud flats.

"We are excited to have completed the circle of the Wadden Sea projects located in this unique UNESCO-protected landscape. By informing visitors about the important surrounding ecosystem and in creating an engaging architectural space, the aim is to make it an even more unique experience to visit the Wadden Sea," said Mandrup.

Drawing upon a motif of harbor piers that rest in the water, the building is lifted away from the ground and extends upwards with the structure highlighting the horizon lines. The sloping plinth connects to the promenade level of the building and extends down to the waterfront. The open floor plates transition seamlessly between the exterior and the interior space. The building will feature several exhibition spaces, research facilities, offices, a seal center, a restaurant, a café, and a hotel. Visitors will be able to experience 360-degree views of the Wadden Sea, and the landscape in the distance.

The project is expected to be completed in 2020.

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Dorte Mandrup to Design Her Third UNESCO World Heritage Wadden Sea Project

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Denmark-based architect Dorte Mandrup has won her third UNESCO World Heritage Center project, with her design of the Trilateral Wadden Sea World Heritage Partnership Centre. The project was the winner in a contest to design a new headquarters for the Centre, an organization that aims to protect the Wadden Sea and is jointly run by Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands.

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Stateless Heritage sets out to challenge mainstream narratives of refugee experience, of humanitarian crises, victim-hood and suffering. In this exhibition, artist and architectural collective (Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti) propose exile as a radical perspective which can take us beyond the limitations of the nation state. Stateless Heritage also interrogates Western definitions of heritage.

The works in the exhibition focus on Dheisheh refugee camp in Palestine. The camp traces its history back to 1949, at the time of the start of the Nakba, when Palestinians were displaced by the founding of the state of Israel. A large light box installation will show photographs of the camp by Luca Capuano. Capuano had previously photographed Italy's world heritage sites for UNESCO. In 2016 DAAR commissioned him to take the same care to document Dheisheh, as a living monument of 'permanent temporariness'. A series of photo-books show the 44 villages the refugees of Dheishah originally came from.

The exhibition presents DAAR's nomination to register the camp as a World Heritage Site (which premiered at this year's Venice Architecture Biennale). The nomination is intended as a provocation, to expose how the definition of heritage is not universal as claimed, but subject to nation state control and has colonial foundations. The exhibition ends in a social gathering space, in the spirit of Dheisheh refugee camp's culture, where people will be able to socialise, read, relax and hopefully, organise. Events in the gallery and online will explore themes including refugee heritage, subjugated heritage, statelessness and resistance to colonialism, through workshops, discussions, music, performance and film.

These works are part of a wider movement to use heritage to resist colonialism and occupation which continues in Palestine, and to expose colonial and imperial legacies more widely. Stateless Heritage will raise issues of migrant justice at a time when the right to claim asylum is under threat in the UK and internationally.

DAAR (Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti) is an architectural collective that combines conceptual speculations and pragmatic spatial interventions, discourse and collective learning. The artistic research of Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti are situated between politics, architecture, art and pedagogy. In their practice art exhibitions are both sites of display and sites of action that spill over into other contexts: built architectural structures, the shaping of critical learning environments, interventions that challenge dominant collective narratives, the production of new political imaginations, the formation of civic spaces and the re-definition of concepts. Read more about DAAR.

Image: DAAR (Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti), Permanent Temporariness, New York Abu Dhabi Gallery 2018. Photo: Luca Capuano.
Stateless Heritage - exhibition press release

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DAAR (Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti) - Stateless Heritage - The Mosaic Rooms

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Stateless Heritage sets out to challenge mainstream narratives of refugee experience, of humanitarian crises, victim-hood and suffering. In this exhibition, artist and architectural collective (Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti) propose exile as a radical perspective which can take us beyond the limitations of the nation state. Stateless Heritage also interrogates Western definitions of heritage.

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Rebel Architecture | Programs Site Menu Title | Al Jazeera

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A six-part documentary series profiling architects who are using design as a form of activism and resistance to tackle the world's urban, environmental and social crises. The series follows architects from Vietnam, Nigeria, Spain, Pakistan, Israel/Occupied West Bank and Brazil who believe architecture can do more than iconic towers and luxury flats - turning away from elite "starchitecture" to design for the majority.

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architette italiane Italian women architects biennale architettura venezia 2021

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Jane Rendell
Audre Lorde:
For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

Audre Lorde wrote these words in 1984, as a response to a Humanities conference at New York University Institute where she and one other black woman had been asked to participate at the 'last hour'.
Bale:
The interior and the domestic have been perhaps the most thoroughly explored of feminist architecture's 'other spaces' as they have both been directly associated with the private sphere, and as such subordinated to the public city, in both patriarchal and capitalist cultures within the discourse of modernity. Research on the interior has had a special resonance for women, coming out of interior design or interior architecture, professional and academic disciplines, which have long been marginalized as women's work in relation to architecture. Mark Taylor and Julieanna Preston's book Intimus celebrates the difference of interiors from architecture, and Preston's own work as an architect-artist often involves transforming standard modularised building materials to reveal their unique and often sensual interiors, as well as creating installations from unruly, tactile materials, such as Bale (2011).
Critical Spatial Practice (Feminist):
The past decade has seen a flourishing of activity in feminism and architecture, driven by interdisciplinary concerns, which have re-located architecture in the expanded field of spatial practices. The rise in practice-led research as well as the influence of the writings of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau on spatial practice has produced an understanding of practice as a process which occurs not only through the design of buildings but also through activities of use, occupation and experience as well as writing and imaging. It is possible to draw connections between de Certeau's 'strategies' and Lefebvre's 'representations of space', on the one hand, and de Certeau's 'tactics' and Lefebvre's 'spaces of representation', on the other, and suggest a distinction between those practices or strategies that operate to maintain and reinforce existing social and spatial orders, and those practices or tactics that seek to critique and question them. I favour such a distinction and have introduced 'critical spatial practice' as a term that emphasises the 'critical' as a reflective and emancipatory activity emanating from the approach to critical theory taken by the Frankfurt School. This has also involved rethinking the role of theory, not to prove a hypothesis nor prescribe a particular methodology or solution to a problem, but rather as a mode of practice in its own right. If 'critical spatial practice' refers to self-reflective artistic and architectural practices which seek to question and transform the social conditions of the sites into which they intervene, as well as their own disciplinary procedures, what are the particular aspects that a feminist approach to critical spatial practice highlights?
Decolonisation:
On the 10th of March 2015, a student threw excrement at the statute of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Just one month later, the Rhodes Must Fall movement succeeded, and the statue came down. This action was an important symbolic rejection of the British imperialist and avowed white supremacist who some have called the 'architect of apartheid.' The action galvanised a dialogue in South Africa concerning race and oppression and it was watched around the world and reminded us in the UK that we are still behaving as a colonising power, at least if our architectural history curricula in universities are taken as evidence. We might be addressing our history of colonisation through 'postcolonial' seminars, but we need to take a decolonising approach. Decolonisation pushes for the undoing of colonialism and the colonial empires established prior to World War I throughout the world. However, decolonisation is not only the removal of dominating non-indigenous forces from the spaces and institutions of the colonised, it is also a process mental process which seeks to 'decolonise the mind' from the coloniser's ideas that made the colonised seem inferior.
ECOBox:
An important and timely volume, Altering Practices, edited by Doina Petrescu and published in 2007, focused the debate in feminism and architecture around the 'poetics and politics of the feminine'. In taking account of the feminine, as well as the feminist, the book acknowledges the role of aesthetics as well as ethics, form as well as function, in architecture. The volume originates in a conference that was held between L'École d'Architecture Paris Villemin and L'École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 1999 in Paris, under the title of Alterities. The book focuses on the other, and on an understanding of practices which aim to change, transform or alter. The notion of practicing 'otherwise' or 'otherhow' relates to the political and poetic perspective informed by feminism put forward by Doina Petrescu and manifest in the work of her practice with Constanin Petcou and others, as Atelier architecture d'autogérée (aaa) or studio for self-managed architecture. This participatory collaborative platform has been groundbreaking in engaging with ecological issues through projects such as ECObox and R-URBAN. And in my view, 'what it takes to make a relationship to make a thing', a phrase articulated by muf (see below), becomes in the work of aaa 'what it takes to make a thing to make a relationship', that the making of architecture could be a subterfuge for the re-making of subjects.
Feminist Killjoy:
Sara Ahmed's resignation from Goldsmith's College London in 2016, due to alleged issues of sexual harassment at the university she had not had the support to adequately tackle, drew the attention of feminists around the world. Her book Living a Feminist Life, a development of her influential blog, feministkilljoys, has been a rigorous reminder that all is not well in the establishment, and that the work of feminists in opposing across sexual, racial and class discrimination is very far from over. Through the figure of the feminist killjoy her book blends theory with her own story, and offers tools and a manifesto for other feminists seeking to challenge forms of oppression.
Greenpeace:
Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything from 2015 is a documentary film directed by Avi Lewis, and a companion piece to her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Klein charts a whole series of activist environmental projects from across the globe, many of which involve women leading the fight against extractivism. Crystal is a young indigenous Beaver Lake Cree Nation leader in Athabasca oil sands country who is fighting in Alberta, Canada for access to a restricted military base. Melachrini is a housewife opposed to mining and drilling projects by Canadian corporation Eldorado Gold, set against the backdrop of Greece in crisis. And Jyothi is a matriarch fighting a proposed coal-fired power plant that will destroy a wetland in Andhra Pradesh, India. On the 11th July 2013, a team of young women from Greenpeace climbed to the top of London's Shard to protest Shell's drilling of the arctic. What could be more of a feminist symbol then these brave female climbers scaling the glass skin of this neoliberal city's tallest tower?
Home:
Some of the key people resisting the demolition of social housing in London are also young women: the E15 Mums who occupied boarded up flats on the Carpenters Estate in protest at the planned destruction of their homes, or the women at New Era who fought off the rent hikes introduced by their private landlord, and most recently the courageous women leaseholders from the Aylesbury Estate who have led the resistance to the compulsory purchase order of the flats they worked hard to buy as council tenants.
Intersectionality:
In 1974 The Combahee River Collective produced a feminist theory of racial difference, which involved developing thematics common to the work of many black women writers, such as a focus on the strength of black women as opposed to their more commonly perceived status as victims, the relation of everyday experience to theoretical concepts, and the positive aspects of relationships between women. Fifteen years later, legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw of critical race theory introduced the term 'intersectionality theory', which argues that the experience of being a black woman must include the interactions, which frequently reinforce each other, of being black and of being a woman. Her work studies how intersecting social identities, particularly minority identities, relate to systems and structures of oppression, domination, or discrimination.
(Big) Jugs:
In the 1990s, the drawn and written projects of American architect and critic Jennifer Bloomer aimed to reveal the insufficiency of logical and rational structures such as spoken language to explain the world, and instead brought into operation the irrational and subversive elements in written texts - as the workings of the feminine. Drawing parallels between the creation of a building, assumed to be a clean act of control and precision, and the mess of childbirth, Bloomer questioned the gender of creativity. Through her dirty drawings and her incorporation of parts of the female anatomy - breasts, milk, fluids, blood, hatching, udders - into architecture, Bloomer generated a critique of the sterility of the architectural drawing process. The feminine in her work was to be found in the so-called slippage of words, for example, the term 'big jugs' placed within an architectural context suggested many things, including large breasts, but also the role of the feminine and female body as a container or empty signifier used to represent patriarchal ideologies. Bloomer's work demonstrated that the feminine can be a radical element in architectural practice.

The work of feminist architects at KTH in Stockholm, such as Katarina Bonnevier, Brady Burroughs, Catharina Gabrielsson, Katja Grillner, Rolf Hughes, Helena Mattsson, Karin Reisinger, Helen Runting, Meike Schalk, and Malin Zimm, has been especially important in developing feminist architecture practices through their solo work but also the collaborative pedagogical endeavor, FATALE, a project located in the architecture school that involved some of them. Their work has focused on activism and pedagogy - operating through different writing modes and forms of performative and participatory practice in art, architecture and public space. On international women's day this year, feminists at the Bartlett will celebrate with them the publication of a whole range of new books that document the work that this inspiring group of feminists have produced, curated and supported. The feminist critiques of the academy offered by FATALE have been accompanied by publications, edited by Harriet Harris, Ruth Morrow, James Soane and James Benedict Brown in the UK, and Katia Frey, Eliana Perotti and Torsten Lange in Zurich, whose tone is activist as well as academic, and that seek to challenge head-on discrimination in the profession and in education.
Liz Diller:
While the first feminist architectural history publication is possibly Doris Cole's From Tipi to Skyscraper: A History of Women in Architecture, in 1973, followed by important work by Dolores Hayden, Gwendolyn Wright and others, the 1990s saw discussions concerning the relationship between gender and space gain theoretical strength in the academy along with the publication of a whole range of books on architecture and its relation to sex, sexuality, gender and feminism, most famously Beatriz Colomina's Sexuality and Space, but also the UK publications Gender, Space, Architecture (which brought together a range of historical and interdisciplinary texts, edited by myself, Barbara Penner and Iain Borden) and Francesa Hughes' The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice. In working across the boundary between theory and practice, and between architecture and other disciplines, the 1990s also saw theoretically informed significant and influential feminist projects by conceptual practitioners such as Bloomer and Liz Diller. Works like Diller's Bad Press (1993) offered a critique of the disciplinary boundaries constructed between domestic life and professional architectural practice.
muf:
In Hanley, in 1998, muf won an open competition set up by Stoke City Council with the Public Art Commissioning Agency. muf's brief was to make a lifting barrier to prevent illegal traffic entering Hanley town centre as part of a larger urban regeneration project. But in dialogue with the council planner at an initial stage of the project, the brief was opened out to reveal how 'art can contribute to a safer, more social environment'. This was an important early project which challenged the scope of the brief and definitions of architecture and planning. As an architectural practice, muf has gone on to make influential and inspirational contributions to feminist architecture over the past twenty years. In the early years muf was frequently criticised in mainstream architectural media for not producing any 'architecture', but this was because the discourse was unable to recognize architecture as the production of anything other than stand-alone-object-buildings. muf's very mode of operation continues to evolve and invent new critiques of architectural design methodologies that emphasise form and object-making. Their working method highlights the importance of exchange across art and architecture, the participation of users in the design process and the importance of collaborating with other producers. For muf, the architectural design process is not an activity that leads to the making of a product, but rather the location of the work itself, and each project should raise the question they've articulated: 'what does it take to make a relationship to make a thing?' In architecture, to position a building as a 'methodology' rather than as an end result is still a radical proposition.
Nomadic Subjects:
The 1990s saw a rise in the relevance and pertinence of identity politics focusing on class, gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Emerging through, and at times diverging from, this discourse, has been the work of post-structuralist feminists, which has been particularly important for architecture in offering ways of thinking about position, situation and location. In this work new ways of knowing and being have been discussed in spatial terms, developing conceptual and critical tools such as 'situated knowledge' and 'standpoint theory' to examine the inter-relations between location, identity and knowledge. The poetic work of African American and Chicana writers, such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks, has been groundbreaking in bringing together politics and lived experience, as has the philosophical thinking of Rosi Braidotti, whose figure of the 'nomadic subject' describes not only a spatial state of movement, but also an epistemological condition, a kind of knowingness (or unknowingness) that refuses fixity.
OOO:
Feminist understandings of 'materiality' or matter show how material is not only the social and economic context for architecture but also an active ingredient in the processes of making architecture. The important work of feminist material philosophers, like Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers and Karen Barad, has provided a foundation for challenging the rise of OOO - or object-orientated ontology - for its gender blindness. An important new generation of thinkers like Claudia Dutson, Helene Frichot, Stephen Loo, Peg Rawes, Undine Sellbach and Katie Lloyd Thomas consider matter from an ecological perspective where humans are interconnected with animals, insects and things, and rethink the treatment of material processes in such architectural traditions as the specification. Feminist architects have also invented new kinds of details that maximise the environmental potential of architectural materials, most famously, Sarah Wigglesworth Architecture in the Straw Bale House (2001) at 9 Stock Orchard Street, and Ruth Morrow in her use of textiles in making concrete.
Parlour:
In the 1970s and 1980s there were many design build collectives which operated as critical alternatives to the capitalist system of building production, and the London-based feminist architectural cooperative Matrix was part of this tradition at its outset. The early 1990s saw the rise of various practices, such as muf, but also FAT and Fluid, which highlighted their collaborative intent by choosing non-proper nouns as names to challenge the usual single architectural signature of authorship. Currently there is a flowering of feminist collective practices in architecture and urbanism, some focused on building and planning, such as Atelier d'architecture autogérée; some more artistic, performative and activist, such as Taking Place and Mycket; and others focused on changing sexist forms of pedagogy and professional practice, like FATALE, Architexx and Parlour. Parlour's work on gender equity in the profession is theoretically informed, but most importantly is a practical initiative for supporting women in the profession, providing a whole range of innovative helpful tools, from the Parlour Guides to Equitable Practices to Marion's List.
LGBTQQIP2SAAA:
stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, pansexual, two spirit, androgynous, asexual and allies. This movement recognises the full spectrum of diversities of gendered and sexed identities and has been the most transformative change to feminism in recent years, challenging binary thinking and practice at all levels.
Race:
Lesley Lokko addressed issues of black identity decades ago in her edited book White Papers, Black Marks: Architecture, Race, Culture, which held fast to a strong sense of desire for political change while also recognizing the often contingent and situated conditions of race and identity . This book is cleverly subdivided into sections by scale: '1: 125,000 - Urban Angles', '1: 1250- Displacement/Diaspora', '1:1 - One on One', showing how racial discriminations and resistances to oppression take place from the macro to the micro, from strategic planning and policy making to architectural details and small-scale art projects. Scale can also describe a differential mapping of subjectivity, from the huge distances covered by movements of migration created through colonialisation and subsequent diasporic displacements, to the close-up proximity of more intimate relationships. Today Lokko is an important architectural educator at the forefront of debates on decolonising the curriculum.
Subjectivity:
In visual and spatial culture, feminists have drawn extensively on psychoanalytic theory to further understand relationships between the spatial politics of internal psychical figures and external cultural geographies. The field of psychoanalysis explores these various thresholds and boundaries between private and public, inner and outer, subject and object, personal and social in terms of a complex understanding of the relationship between 'internal' and 'external' space. The work of Elizabeth Grosz and Steve Pile has been particularly influential in this area, as have the writings of key Australian feminist philosophers, such as Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, whose thinking has revealed, from a feminist perspective, the spatial qualities of mainstream philosophy. The significance of current interest in the psyche might be understood then in terms of the position it occupies as the site of convergence between space and subjectivity, place and psyche, and the importance of feminist architecture in remaking subject positions.
Trouble:
Understandings of positioned knowledge from a range of post-structuralist feminists, such as Seyla Benhabib, Rosalyn Diprose, Jane Flax, Moira Gatens, Sandra Harding, Elspeth Probyn, Linda Nicholson and Andrea Nye, have made it clear that subjectivities are contingent and situated, and constructed in response to particular times and places. Donna Haraway's influential essay from the 1980s, 'Situated Knowledge', has really come into its own in recent years. Her argument - that objectivity is partial and constructed - has helped feminism avoid being seen to reject objectivity in favour of subjectivity, and instead facilitated powerful critiques of status quo positions. Her most recent book, Staying with the Trouble, reconceptualises the Anthropocene as the Chthulucene, as an epoch in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices. For Haraway, the Chthulucene requires what she calls sym-poiesis or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis or self-making.
Undecideability:
The philosophy of deconstruction developed by Jacques Derrida provided a critique of binary thinking, which was put to work by feminists in the 1990s, to showing how the hierarchical relationship often assigned to two terms in a pair is not natural or pre-given but a social construction. Feminist theorist Diane Elam observed that Derrida's understanding of 'undecideability' offered feminism more than an analytic tool, but also a political potential. And through the 1990s, feminist critique was particularly effective in mobilising the possibilities of Derridean deconstruction in architecture, to produce a thorough and ongoing critique of a number of binary oppositions, most specifically the 'separate spheres'. Feminist work has drawn attention to the spaces both marginalized within gendered binaries in mainstream architectural discourse such as the domestic and the interior, as well as those which exceed binary distinctions - margins, the between, the everyday, the heterotopic and the abject.
Visibility:
Conditions of visibility have been very much part of feminist debate over the past decades, in particular the ways in which the vital contribution of feminist forbears have often been obscured. Feminist architectural historian Karen Burns has noted very recently that despite the large number of feminist publications in the 1990s, this was also the decade that saw the absence of feminist texts in major architectural theory anthologies and that the 'feminine' was often included in such anthologies through invited contributions authored by men. Most provocatively Burns makes the excellent point that feminist architectural discourse and practice has, in various instances, in particular the discussions between Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman, been conducted by men through the bodies of women - through choric space. For quite some time in the mid-2000s the topic of feminism in architecture was less than visible, and many of the ideas advanced through feminism were taken up by other discourses. The danger is that, unless the references to feminism are made clear, we might 'unwrite' architecture's feminist genealogy. This then poses questions about acknowledgement, and raises the dangers of invisibility and of appropriation, to quote the Guerilla Girls, of 'seeing your ideas live on in others'. This is why it has been good to see a rise in studies by feminists of citational practice, and the work of Ramia Mazé and others examine exactly how practices of citation in the academy have worked to exclude women's contribution to the field.
Womanhouse:
While first wave feminism was focused on achieving equality, second wave feminism was characterised in many ways by a politics of difference. The slogan 'the personal is political' highlighted the need for public politics to engage with issues of private life - for the spaces between subjects in the setting of home and family to be understood as cultural formations - formed by and forming culture - and thus to be taken seriously by built environment professionals. This was work that was developed by radical feminists in the 1970s either by considering the important links between women and home - such as Womanhouse, 1971-2, feminist art programme at CalArts, with artists Judy Chicago, Miriam Shapiro and others; or by engaging with the difficulties women encountered in the public realm, such as mothers with young children traversing badly designed cityscapes. The feminist architectural cooperative MATRIX and the Women's Design Service addressed their work in the 1990s towards improving the conditions of women in the construction industry and also as users and clients. And in 2016, WAMT (Women in the Manual Trades) who had been supporting tradeswomen for over 40 years relaunched as Women on the Tools.
ArchiteXX:
Sexism back on the agenda - successive Architects' Journal studies in the UK have revealed that unacceptable levels of harassment exist in the architectural profession and the construction industry. And the results of the US Equity in Architecture Surveys from 2016 showed that 'underrepresented groups tended to face greater challenges relative to 'job-person fit'. And it is surely only time until the #metoo finds its way into architecture and the building industry. The AJ's initiatives to promote women in architecture, such as woman and emerging woman architect of the year, are certainly helping to promote women's work in architecture, but the fact that this is still needed in the 21st century is deeply troubling. Lori Brown's key interventions into media sites with ArchiteXX's wikibomb have reignited the feminist project of the 1970s - herstory - to write women back into architectural history. And this initiative is not alone. There are sister projects around the world, and those that I have heard from recently include: Berlin, Frankfurt, Lisbon, Moscow, Seville, Sheffield, Valencia, and Zurich, where challenges are being made to the lack of female representation in university curriculum and professional judging panels, and where research is being conducted that writes women back into history. See for example, Mary Pepchinski and Mariann Simon's Ideological Equals: Women Architects in Socialist Europe. 1945-1989 (2016); Mary Pepchinski, Christina Budde, Wolfgang Voigt, and Peter Cachola Schmal's Frau Architekt: Over 100 years of Women in Architecture (2017) and Lynne Walker and Elizabeth Darling's AA Women in Architecture 1917-2017 (2017). While important initiatives have been set up to award women architects recognition for their work, such as the arcVision Women and Architecture Prize, which has been won by South American architects like Tatiana Bilbao and Carla Juaçaba, and whose all-woman jury includes influential figures from across the globe.
Yearning:
Common to the development of all architectural practices attentive to gender difference is a commitment to diversity and the production of work which bridges theory, history and design. While societies continue to expect that women bear children, and while women still bear the responsibility of being the primary child-carers, female architects will face problems of negotiating the twin demands of home and work and of facing continuing discrimination in the architectural profession and education. But as bell hooks points out so eloquently, 'it is our capacity to imagine that lets us move beyond boundaries'. hooks' writing looks at the role of space, both real and metaphorical, in shaping us as human beings in terms of lived experience and aspiration. When hooks explores the margin/centre binary in describing the politics and spaces of location in her book Yearning, she thinks of how these two positions might be occupied simultaneously. For hooks, theory is emancipatory, it allows the margin to be considered in a different way, as a positive space, not only of domination but also resistance, of oppression and radical possibility.
Zaha:
The death of the influential Iraqi woman architect, Zaha Hadid, in 2016, prompted many of the great and good in the architectural profession to acknowledge her creativity and achievements, when in life, she had struggled especially in her early career to achieve recognition. The manner of the acknowledgements served a culture in architecture which celebrates the one-off genius. The impetus was to bolster the canon, inviting those who had been kept out in, rather than prompting conversations about the lack of media coverage of women architects in general, or more importantly the fact that many women architects do not seek stardom, but recognition and equity.

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Feminist Architecture: From A to Z - R / D

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Jane Rendell Audre Lorde: For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time.

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TRANSNATIONAL HISTORIES OF WOMEN IN ARCHITECTURE

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TRANSNATIONAL HISTORIES OF WOMEN IN ARCHITECTURE

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Telling Transnational Histories of Women in Architecture, 1960–2015

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Posted: 15 May 2017

Date Written: May 2017

Abstract

Feminist theory is not only about women; it is about the world, engaged through critical intersectional perspectives. Despite many significant differences, most feminist theory is reliably suspicious of dualistic thinking, generally oriented toward fluid processes of emergence rather than static entities in one-way relationships, and committed to being a political as well as an intellectual enterprise. It is rooted in and responsible to movements for equality, freedom, and justice. Three important contemporary questions within feminist theory concern (a) subjectivity, narrative, and materiality; (b) global neoliberal geopolitics; and (c) global ecologies. Feminist theorists employ the tools of intersectionality, interdisciplinarity, and the intertwinings of scholarship and activism to address these questions. While we labor to contribute to our academic fields, our primary responsibility is to contribute to positive social change.

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Posted: 15 May 2017 Date Written: May 2017 Feminist theory is not only about women; it is about the world, engaged through critical intersectional perspectives. Despite many significant differences, most feminist theory is reliably suspicious of dualistic thinking, generally oriented toward fluid processes of emergence rather than static entities in one-way relationships, and committed to being a political as well as an intellectual enterprise.

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https://aadr.info/research-and-practice/

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AADR publishes innovative artistic, creative and historical research in art, architecture, design and related fields.

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Experience in Action. DesignBuild in Architecture

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Constructive aspects and social exchange are also important. The book provides a critical overview of the most exciting DesignBuild projects worldwide. More information: https://bit.ly/2V0JR1r

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Indigenous Perspectives on the Notions of Architecture - THE SITE MAGAZINE

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Tiffany Shaw-Collinge Interviews Harriet Burdett-Moulton, Wanda Dalla costa, Kelly Edzerza-Bapty, and Ouri Scott

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https://www.dezeen.com/author/mimi-zeiger/

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Newspapers' largely white, male architecture critics are a reflection of the structural inequalities of the built environment and are not equipped to deal with our current time of crisis, says Mimi Zeiger. More

With the demolition of Los Angeles County Museum of Art underway for Peter Zumthor's redesign, Mimi Zeiger is concerned about what will be left for the city and its residents following coronavirus lockdown. More

Following protests about working conditions at well-known museums - like the Marciano Art Foundation and MoMA - Mimi Zeiger says it's time to address architecture's relationship to unfair labour practices. More

The third Chicago Architecture Biennial draws attention to the biggest issues facing today's society, but is short on architects wrangling with them, says Mimi Zeiger. More

Despite changing needs and tastes, Venturi Scott Brown's threatened extension to the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego warrants preservation simply because their names are attached to it, says Mimi Zeiger. More

Opinion: meaningful architectural reactions to crises may take time, but quick temporary structures can be just as effective, and both are far preferable to not responding at all says Mimi Zeiger. More

Opinion: KPF's attempt to recreate the allure of a red Porsche on the facade of Los Angeles automotive museum has left us with an eyesore, says Mimi Zeiger. But can it teach us anything about our architectural now? More

Opinion: architects' proposals for pre-empting and adapting to the natural crises brought about by climate change aren't necessarily as superficial and politically correct as they may seem, says Mimi Zeiger. More

the architecture and film industries have quite a few things in common - including expensive projects and the lionising of a certain kind of success. But architects can still learn a lot from the approach of independent film makers, says Mimi Zeiger. More

Opinion: Diller, Scofidio + Renfro's The Broad museum in Los Angeles is an elegant exercise in mundanity, says Mimi Zeiger. More

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Newspapers' largely white, male architecture critics are a reflection of the structural inequalities of the built environment and are not equipped to deal with our current time of crisis, says Mimi Zeiger. More With the demolition of Los Angeles County Museum of Art underway for Peter Zumthor's redesign, Mimi Zeiger is concerned about what will be left for the city and its residents following coronavirus lockdown.

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Jane Hall's Breaking Ground (Women Architects) 

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Jane Hall's Breaking Ground (Women Architects) 

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The volume reinforces ongoing labours to repopulate the canon

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Gender mainstreaming

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Book Review: Feminist City: Claiming Space in the Man-Made World by Leslie Kern

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In Feminist City: Claiming Space in the Man-Made World, Leslie Kern delves into the interlocking inequalities and systems of oppression that take concrete shape in cities, using an intersectional f…

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Book Review: Feminist City: Claiming Space in the Man-Made World by Leslie Kern

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A list of terms associated with six referential fields, as proposed by a number of narrators in the course of several seminars, to negotiate various positions, contexts and local narratives about contemporary art referential fields. The aim of proposing six referential fields (historicization, subjectivization, geopolitics, constituencies, commons, and other-institutionality) is to meet the need for discussions that can address various localities and temporalities. Contemporary art contains a variety of social, historical, cultural and political references that exist as referential fields outside the focal ideas, concepts, and artworks themselves. These references also condition the form and practice of artistic production.

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L’Internationale - Glossary of Common Knowledge

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L’Internationale Online, the publishing platform for the museum confederation, offers perspectives at the intersection of art, politics and institutional practice.

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THE ALTERNATIVE LIST OF WOMEN ARCHITECTS - (PART W)

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THE ALTERNATIVE LIST OF WOMEN ARCHITECTS - (PART W)

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To VISIT

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The project considers who our buildings and shared spaces are designed for, who is excluded from our designed environment, and what effect this has on the communities who live there?

A jumping off point for these questions is an unseen archive of work by the radical 1980s feminist architecture co-operative Matrix. The installation will feature rare films, drawings, photos and architectural models from the Matrix archive, presenting their use of radical methods across a range of projects, past and present.

We also introduce archival and contemporary approaches to design that aim to empower groups often excluded in the design of buildings, including Black and Asian women's organisations, community and childcare groups and lesbian and gay housing co-operatives, to explore more inclusive ways of designing, building and occupying spaces.

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How We Live Now: Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative | Barbican

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A multi-layered project comprising an installation, publication and events programme exploring a series of important questions about our public spaces and designed environments.

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models of Built and unbuilt buildings

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Shortlisted in the civic and cultural interior of the year of Dezeen Awards 2020, Models in Model is China's first museum showcasing architectural models.

The chief designer decided to make this museum a mega-model of future cities. The white exhibition area has two main areas, Tijuana and Ironia, as well as a communication area, the Pod Bay. Besides these are three special exhibition areas and a VR zone.

Dezeen Awards Public Vote 2020

Voting closes on 12 October.

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Models in Model by Wutopia Lab | Dezeen Awards

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Shortlisted in the civic and cultural interior of the year of Dezeen Awards 2020, Models in Model is China's first museum showcasing architectural models. The chief designer decided to make this museum a mega-model of future cities. The white exhibition area has two main areas, Tijuana and Ironia, as well as a communication area, the Pod Bay.

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INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVE OF WOMEN IN ARCHITECTURE

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Research Guides: International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA): Find Materials

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The IAWA was established in 1985 as a joint program of the College of Architecture and Urban Studies and the University Libraries at Virginia Tech. The purpose of the Archive is to document the history of women’s contributions to the built environment. What kinds of materials we have in the IAWA and…

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Sanchez de Madariaga, I. and Neuman, M. 2016. Mainstreaming Gender in the City. Town Planning Review. 87 (5), pp. 493-504. https://doi.org/10.3828/tpr.2016.33

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Building a learning city is a collective and continuing journey. It requires a concrete action plan with strong political leadership and steadfast commitment; participation and involvement of all stakeholders; diverse celebratory events charged with enthusiasm and inspirations; easy accessibility and enjoyable experiences for all citizens; a proper monitoring and evaluation of progress; and sustainable and secure funding. You can find detailed instructions on these action tips in our Guidelines for Building Learning Cities.

Learn more from the video tutorials

Complementing the Guidelines for Building Learning Cities, the video tutorials on 'How to build a learning city' illustrate and elaborate on the actions to take. They further encourage the creation of thriving learning communities and provide cities with hands-on approaches to better implement miscellaneous policies and guiding documents.

The video tutorials are made to support policy-makers, stakeholders, urban planners and lifelong learning practitioners in building learning cities. They comprise one introductory video and six interesting and succinct animation clips based on the following themes:

Each module begins with an animated conceptual video, which is further enriched by clips based on the experience of members of the UNESCO Global Network of Learning Cities. Sharing ideas between and among cities is one of the objectives of the network, which has informed this initiative.

What is in store for your city?

The video tutorials aim to steer cities in the right direction in their efforts to build dynamic and sustainable learning cities and advance education and lifelong learning opportunities for all. By watching these tutorials, you could find out, in a nutshell, what a learning city is all about, and thus gain insight into why building a learning city is an important step towards sustainable development. In addition, you will also learn of the important elements in implementing the concept, and gain a grasp of the starting points and next steps, as well as benefitting from successful and practical real experiences from cities across the world.
This project is kindly supported by Think Visual and the Cork Learning City Lead Partners (Cork City Council, Cork Education and Training Board, Cork Institute of Technology and University College Cork).
Special issues
Gender equality Education for sustainable development

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Building a learning city is a collective and continuing journey. It requires a concrete action plan with strong political leadership and steadfast commitment; participation and involvement of all stakeholders; diverse celebratory events charged with enthusiasm and inspirations; easy accessibility and enjoyable experiences for all citizens; a proper monitoring and evaluation of progress; and sustainable and secure funding.

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By Kerstin Martens University of Nottingham This article was published inTransnational Associations , Issue 2/1999, 68-82. All rights reserved. Article publié dansAssociations Transnationales , Issue 2/1999, 68-82. Tous droits réservés. Introduction 1 Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) (2) play an increasingly important role in world politics.

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https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/what-if-the-unbuilt-legacy_o

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https://www.acsa-arch.org/proceedings/Annual%20Meeting%20Proceedings/ACSA.AM.93/ACSA.AM.93.43.pdf

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demolish each kilobyte or megabite it records

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Architecture remains the most tangible way of constructing the social. Yet, the system we call "architecture" is not reducible to the physical, the tactile, the obvious. In the history of avant-garde architecture, immateriality and intangibility carried a promise of liberation, of escape from the heaviness of building, from completion, from gravity or reality. A new contemporary architecture would be built out of pure knowledge-drafted on paper as an idea to be shared, never bogged down by the technicalities of constructing in dimensional space, or even any spatial paradigm altogether. The history of the avant-garde can't-as Beatriz Colomina has pointed out-be separated from its engagement with media and communication. Building would move at the speed of thought and spirit, superseding calculation, regulation, codes, and existing infrastructure.

Architects today do not conceptualize their work in such radical terms. Is it because they are too busy stalking clients in China and the Gulf? Maybe. But at the same time, architects today also have to contend with the fact that other immaterial, intangible forces have subordinated much of the spatial thinking that historically situated architecture in relation to the building and planning of spaces and cities. As Keller Easterling has written in a previous essay, "it is as if architecture, as customarily defined, cannot access some of the most important levers of explicit, measurable spatial change, leaving control of them largely to the financial industries."

But what are these levers? Or for that matter, how has architecture always given form to the immaterial or intangible spatial effects in communication pathways, or war, rubble, memory, tourism, and cultural capital? Hasn't architecture always provided a way of reading ethical transgressions in reverse, of giving them form, for better or for worse? How has physical architecture always been a symptom of ideology? How has it always been a communications infrastructure?

How, then, can we contextualize more recent advances in registering and distributing space, in order to place them back into the history of architecture? Just look at how something like Airbnb abstracts and dissolves, even fiscalizes, core notions such as what constitutes a home. And it presents this as data before an economy of sharing and selling that takes place above and beyond architectural intervention. In the cities where Airbnb is being used most heavily, it is planning urban space, but without urban planners. Except maybe someone like Molly Turner, Airbnb's new director of public policy, who is an urban planner, and describes Airbnb as part of a "third wave of tech ... taking all of the connectivity and transactions that are occurring online and bringing them back offline into the real world."

Airbnb can be part of a new integrated meta-architecture that involves the pooling and marketing of space in a way where, in a broad sense, architectural interventions on the level of building tend to serve as decorative afterthoughts to the capture and recording of not only space, but also of practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, and skills. This is the aim of UNESCO's initiative over the past decade to update the concept of cultural heritage to include immaterial and intangible cultural products. UNESCO's Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) becomes a device for making another layer of global culture visible and searchable across long distances, and an amplifying mechanism for heritage that can allow it to be converted from culture into a knowledge database, and back into culture again. Is this something we can compare to what Lebanese architect Bernard Khoury imagined as a building that would record memories of a place as data, but also demolish its physical matter with each kilobyte or megabyte it records?

Edited together with Nikolaus Hirsch, this first part of a special double issue of e-flux journal focusing on architecture invites a number of the field's most audacious and adventurous thinkers to consider how these invisible and intangible forces are rebuilding cities and reformatting space over and above the role that architecture once served. They are not only reducible to data streams and technocratic information pathways, but also convert ethical questions of whose hands do the actual work of building into material expressions of labor markets, economic flows, and colonial memory. They include the passage from the formal domain of building to an informal domain of knowledge in research-based university departments as well as in slums, black markets, shadow networks, and courtrooms alike. How are practicing architects already working to adapt the radical propositions of architecture to build and think in a way that takes this often contradictory information into consideration?

The second issue of "Architecture as Intangible Infrastructure" will be released in September 2015 with essays and contributions from Beatriz Colomina, Bernard Khoury, Hu Fang, Ingo Niermann and Rem Koolhaas, Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Hans Hollein, and others.

© 2015 e-flux and the author

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Editorial-"Architecture as Intangible Infrastructure," Issue One - Journal #64 April 2015 - e-flux

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Architecture remains the most tangible way of constructing the social. Yet, the system we call "architecture" is not reducible to the physical, the tactile, the obvious. In the history of avant-garde architecture, immateriality and intangibility carried a promise of liberation, of escape from the heaviness of building, from completion, from gravity or reality.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Architecture remains the most tangible way of constructing the social. Yet, the system we call "architecture" is not reducible to the physical, the tactile, the obvious. In the history of avant-garde architecture, immateriality and intangibility carried a promise of liberation, of escape from the heaviness of building, from completion, from gravity or reality. A new contemporary architecture would be built out of pure knowledge-drafted on paper as an idea to be shared, never bogged down by the technicalities of constructing in dimensional space, or even any spatial paradigm altogether. The history of the avant-garde can't-as Beatriz Colomina has pointed out-be separated from its engagement with media and communication. Building would move at the speed of thought and spirit, superseding calculation, regulation, codes, and existing infrastructure.

Architects today do not conceptualize their work in such radical terms. Is it because they are too busy stalking clients in China and the Gulf? Maybe. But at the same time, architects today also have to contend with the fact that other immaterial, intangible forces have subordinated much of the spatial thinking that historically situated architecture in relation to the building and planning of spaces and cities. As Keller Easterling has written in a previous essay, "it is as if architecture, as customarily defined, cannot access some of the most important levers of explicit, measurable spatial change, leaving control of them largely to the financial industries."

But what are these levers? Or for that matter, how has architecture always given form to the immaterial or intangible spatial effects in communication pathways, or war, rubble, memory, tourism, and cultural capital? Hasn't architecture always provided a way of reading ethical transgressions in reverse, of giving them form, for better or for worse? How has physical architecture always been a symptom of ideology? How has it always been a communications infrastructure?

How, then, can we contextualize more recent advances in registering and distributing space, in order to place them back into the history of architecture? Just look at how something like Airbnb abstracts and dissolves, even fiscalizes, core notions such as what constitutes a home. And it presents this as data before an economy of sharing and selling that takes place above and beyond architectural intervention. In the cities where Airbnb is being used most heavily, it is planning urban space, but without urban planners. Except maybe someone like Molly Turner, Airbnb's new director of public policy, who is an urban planner, and describes Airbnb as part of a "third wave of tech ... taking all of the connectivity and transactions that are occurring online and bringing them back offline into the real world."

Airbnb can be part of a new integrated meta-architecture that involves the pooling and marketing of space in a way where, in a broad sense, architectural interventions on the level of building tend to serve as decorative afterthoughts to the capture and recording of not only space, but also of practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, and skills. This is the aim of UNESCO's initiative over the past decade to update the concept of cultural heritage to include immaterial and intangible cultural products. UNESCO's Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) becomes a device for making another layer of global culture visible and searchable across long distances, and an amplifying mechanism for heritage that can allow it to be converted from culture into a knowledge database, and back into culture again. Is this something we can compare to what Lebanese architect Bernard Khoury imagined as a building that would record memories of a place as data, but also demolish its physical matter with each kilobyte or megabyte it records?

Edited together with Nikolaus Hirsch, this first part of a special double issue of e-flux journal focusing on architecture invites a number of the field's most audacious and adventurous thinkers to consider how these invisible and intangible forces are rebuilding cities and reformatting space over and above the role that architecture once served. They are not only reducible to data streams and technocratic information pathways, but also convert ethical questions of whose hands do the actual work of building into material expressions of labor markets, economic flows, and colonial memory. They include the passage from the formal domain of building to an informal domain of knowledge in research-based university departments as well as in slums, black markets, shadow networks, and courtrooms alike. How are practicing architects already working to adapt the radical propositions of architecture to build and think in a way that takes this often contradictory information into consideration?

The second issue of "Architecture as Intangible Infrastructure" will be released in September 2015 with essays and contributions from Beatriz Colomina, Bernard Khoury, Hu Fang, Ingo Niermann and Rem Koolhaas, Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Hans Hollein, and others.

© 2015 e-flux and the author

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Editorial-"Architecture as Intangible Infrastructure," Issue One - Journal #64 April 2015 - e-flux

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Architecture remains the most tangible way of constructing the social. Yet, the system we call "architecture" is not reducible to the physical, the tactile, the obvious. In the history of avant-garde architecture, immateriality and intangibility carried a promise of liberation, of escape from the heaviness of building, from completion, from gravity or reality.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.bernardkhoury.com/uploads/1443441928-3A.jpg

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
e-flux journal issue 64: "Architecture as Intangible Infrastructure," Issue One
guest-edited by Nikolaus Hirsch

with Keller Easterling, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Justin McGuirk, Ravi Sundaram, Eyal Weizman, Philip Ursprung, and Felicity D. Scott

www.e-flux.com/issues/64-april-2015

e-flux journal iPad edition is now available.
Free download here.

Architecture remains the most tangible way of constructing the social. Yet, the system we call "architecture" is not reducible to the physical, the tactile, the obvious. In the history of avant-garde architecture, immateriality and intangibility carried a promise of liberation, of escape from the heaviness of building, from completion, from gravity or reality. A new contemporary architecture would be built out of pure knowledge-drafted on paper as an idea to be shared, never bogged down by the technicalities of constructing in dimensional space, or even any spatial paradigm altogether. The history of the avant-garde can't-as Beatriz Colomina has pointed out-be separated from its engagement with media and communication. Building would move at the speed of thought and spirit, superseding calculation, regulation, codes, and existing infrastructure.

Architects today do not conceptualize their work in such radical terms. Is it because they are too busy stalking clients in China and the Gulf? Maybe. But at the same time, architects today also have to contend with the fact that other immaterial, intangible forces have subordinated much of the spatial thinking that historically situated architecture in relation to the building and planning of spaces and cities. As Keller Easterling has written in a previous essay, "it is as if architecture, as customarily defined, cannot access some of the most important levers of explicit, measurable spatial change, leaving control of them largely to the financial industries."

But what are these levers? Or for that matter, how has architecture always given form to the immaterial or intangible spatial effects in communication pathways, or war, rubble, memory, tourism, and cultural capital? Hasn't architecture always provided a way of reading ethical transgressions in reverse, of giving them form, for better or for worse? How has physical architecture always been a symptom of ideology? How has it always been a communications infrastructure?

How, then, can we contextualize more recent advances in registering and distributing space, in order to place them back into the history of architecture? Just look at how something like Airbnb abstracts and dissolves, even fiscalizes, core notions such as what constitutes a home. And it presents this as data before an economy of sharing and selling that takes place above and beyond architectural intervention. In the cities where Airbnb is being used most heavily, it is planning urban space, but without urban planners. Except maybe someone like Molly Turner, Airbnb's new director of public policy, who is an urban planner, and describes Airbnb as part of a "third wave of tech ... taking all of the connectivity and transactions that are occurring online and bringing them back offline into the real world."

Airbnb can be part of a new integrated meta-architecture that involves the pooling and marketing of space in a way where, in a broad sense, architectural interventions on the level of building tend to serve as decorative afterthoughts to the capture and recording of not only space, but also of practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, and skills. This is the aim of UNESCO's initiative over the past decade to update the concept of cultural heritage to include immaterial and intangible cultural products. UNESCO's Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) becomes a device for making another layer of global culture visible and searchable across long distances, and an amplifying mechanism for heritage that can allow it to be converted from culture into a knowledge database, and back into culture again. Is this something we can compare to what Lebanese architect Bernard Khoury imagined as a building that would record memories of a place as data, but also demolish its physical matter with each kilobyte or megabyte it records?

Edited together with Nikolaus Hirsch, this first part of a special double issue of e-flux journal focusing on architecture invites a number of the field's most audacious and adventurous thinkers to consider how these invisible and intangible forces are rebuilding cities and reformatting space over and above the role that architecture once served. They are not only reducible to data streams and technocratic information pathways, but also convert ethical questions of whose hands do the actual work of building into material expressions of labor markets, economic flows, and colonial memory. They include the passage from the formal domain of building to an informal domain of knowledge in research-based university departments as well as in slums, black markets, shadow networks, and courtrooms alike. How are practicing architects already working to adapt the radical propositions of architecture to build and think in a way that takes this often contradictory information into consideration?

The second issue of "Architecture as Intangible Infrastructure" will be released in September 2015 with essays and contributions from Beatriz Colomina, Bernard Khoury, Hu Fang, Ingo Niermann and Rem Koolhaas, Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Hans Hollein, and others.

-Nikolaus Hirsch, Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

In this issue:

Keller Easterling-IIRS
There are architects who "know how." They have mental faculties that allow them to walk over a field and subsequently draw its topographic map or predict the size of an upstairs bedroom in relation to an interest rate. Hyperaware of multiple levers and faders in urban space, they might think of changing a street by increasing the number of times a train stops there. They can mentally model the way a tax structure will eviscerate a city or the way a toxic building will topple all the buildings around it. Rather than a master plan for a city, they can design a growth protocol with a counterbalancing calculus of public and private space. They imagine collapsing the morphology of airports by reconceptualizing the departure lounge. They adjust the capacities of an entire highway network by altering the repertoire of one switch within it. They initiate a long-term process for organizing the forests and vantage points of a mountain range.

Pier Vittorio Aureli-Intangible and Concrete: Notes on Architecture and Abstraction
In contemporary urbanization, a plethora of symbols and meanings has become the generic curtain behind which the abstraction of capital operates. It is for this reason that the task of the coming architecture is not simply to unmask the undeniable abstraction of architecture as a process, but to make legible a form of architecture in which the awareness of the conditions in which we dwell can become the precondition for new forms of life within and against the power of abstraction.

Justin McGuirk-Honeywell, I'm Home! The Internet of Things and the New Domestic Landscape
For the first time since the mid-twentieth century-with its labor-saving household appliances and rising quality of life-the domestic is once again the site of radical change. And though domestic space appears to fall within the realm of architecture, architects themselves have been almost mute on the implications of such change. Architecture, it seems, has given up its dreams of imagining how we might live, and in that void technology is rushing in. That tired old trope "the house of the future" has been replaced by what is now called the "smart home."

Ravi Sundaram-Post-Postcolonial Sensory Infrastructure
The management of public affect through authorized circulation has broken down all over the postcolonial world, if not elsewhere, disrupting older transactions between sovereign power and a population seen as susceptible to sensorial powers. Media has become the infrastructural condition of living, rather than existing as distinct, regulated sites like the cinema theater, or as celluloid. The always emergent potential (or "becoming virtual") of mediation is now a generalized condition of affect-driven postcolonial media modernity in India, if not most parts of the world today.

Eyal Weizman-Violence at the Threshold of Detectability
By posing matter against memory, they demanded a history without subject and beyond language. In Irving's legal strategy, the fact that the holes could not be found became "negative evidence" against the process of extermination. Negative evidence is an oxymoronic term that legal scholars use in order to refer to an absence of material evidence that they want to be considered as evidence in itself. It is what defense teams mobilize to disrupt prosecution cases: no body, no gun, no holes. In legal terms, it is a kind of antibody that comes to disrupt and dismantle complex epistemological assemblages of networked evidence. Furthermore, given that a hole is not matter, but a gap within material continuity, the issue at stake was not a simple absence but a certain "absence of an absence."

Philip Ursprung-Out of Bologna: Lacaton & Vassal's Nantes School of Architecture
I would argue that the role of architecture as intangible infrastructure in the realm of higher education is both crucial and repressed. Perhaps the utilitarian nature of the spaces of higher education stands in the way of perceiving them as elements that are of interest to architects. The spaces of lecture halls and libraries, admission offices and photocopying booths, gym halls and bicycle stands, cafeterias and computer rooms, inform the daily life of students and teachers. Yet the constant transformation necessary for their functioning, the adaptation to changing numbers of students, the reshuffling of institutes and chairs, the permanent reorganization of staff hierarchies-these factors make the spaces of higher education unattractive to Architecture with a capital "A."

Felicity D. Scott-"Vanguards"
While frequently situated as a radical or avant-garde departure from traditional formal and aesthetic concerns in architecture, the late-sixties engagement with information technologies and computerization as well as the rise of the "user" as an object of social scientific knowledge-all under the rubric of "responsiveness"-can also be read as symptomatic of the discipline's functionalist response to a period of rapid technological transformation and of tumultuous social change, for which it was indeed seeking new tools.

The print edition of e-flux journal can now be found at:
Amsterdam: De Appel arts centre / Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten Andratx: CCA Andratx Antwerp: M HKA Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Århus: Kunsthal Aarhus Athens: OMMU Auckland: split/fountain Austin: Arthouse at the Jones Center Baden-Baden: Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden Banff: Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre Barcelona: Arts Santa Mònica / MACBA Basel: Kunsthalle Basel / Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel Beijing and Guangzhou: Vitamin Creative Space Beirut: 98weeks Belgrade: Cultural Center of Belgrade Bergen: Bergen Kunsthall / Rakett Berlin: b_books / Berliner Künstlerprogramm - DAAD / Bücherbogen am Savignyplatz GmbH / do you read me? / Haus der Kulturen der Welt / Motto / Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) / Pro qm Bern: Kunsthalle Bern / Lehrerzimmer Bialystok: Arsenal Gallery Bielefeld: Bielefelder Kunstverein Birmingham: Eastside Projects / Ikon Gallery Bologna: MAMbo - Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna Bregenz: Kunsthaus Bregenz Bristol: Arnolfini Brussels: WIELS Contemporary Art Centre Bucharest: National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest (MNAC) / Pavilion Unicredit Cairo: Beirut / Contemporary Image Collective (CIC) / Townhouse Gallery Calgary: The New Gallery Cambridge: Wysing Arts Center Castello: Espai d´art contemporani de Castelló (EACC) Chicago: Graham Foundation / Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts / The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago Cologne: Kölnischer Kunstverein Copenhagen: Overgaden Derry: CCA Derry~Londonderry Dijon: Les Ateliers Vortex Dublin: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane / Project Arts Centre Dusseldorf: Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum Frankfurt: Städelschule / Portikus Gdansk: Łaźnia Centre For Contemporary Art Geneva: Centre de la photographie Ghent: S.M.A.K. Glasgow: CCA Centre for Contemporary Arts / Glasgow Sculpture Studios Graz: Grazer Kunstverein / Kunsthaus Graz / Künstlerhaus KM- / para_SITE Gallery Grijon: LABoral Centre for Art and Creative Industries Groningen: University of Groningen Hamburg: Kunstverein in Hamburg Helsinki: Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma Hobart: CAST Gallery / INFLIGHT Hong Kong: Asia Art Archive Iași: theartstudent at the University of Fine Arts, Iași Innsbruck: Galerie im Taxispalais Istanbul: BAS / Cda-Projects / DEPO / SALT Johannesburg: Center for Historical Reenactments Kansas City: La Cucaracha Press Klagenfurt: Kunstraum Lakeside Kristiansand: SKMU Sørlandets Kunstmuseum Kyiv: Visual Culture Research Center Leeds: Pavilion Lisbon: Maumaus, Escola de Artes Visuais / Oporto / Kunsthalle Lissabon Ljubljana: Moderna galerija Llandudno: MOSTYN London: Architectural Association-Bedford Press / Calvert 22 / Chisenhale Gallery / Gasworks / ICA / Serpentine Gallery / The Showroom / Visiting Arts Los Angeles: REDCAT Loughborough: Radar, Loughborough University Luxembourg: Casino Luxembourg Madrid: Brumaria / CA2M / PENSART Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie Marfa: Ballroom Marfa Melbourne: Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) / World Food Books Mexico City: Librería Casa Bosques / Proyectos Monclova Milan: Fondazione Nicola Trussardi / HangarBicocca Milton Keynes: MK Gallery Minneapolis: Walker Art Center Monaco: Nouveau Musée National de Monaco Moncton: Fixed Cog Hero (a bicycle courier company) Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) Moscow: Garage Center for Contemporary Culture Munich: Haus der Kunst / Museum Villa Stuck / Walther Koenig Bookshop New Delhi: Sarai CSDS New York: e-flux / Independent Curators International (ICI) / Printed Matter, Inc Nottingham: Nottingham Contemporary Omaha: Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Oslo: Kunstnernes hus Oxford: Modern Art Oxford Padona: Fondazione March Per L'Arte Contemporanea Paris: castillo/corrales - Section 7 Books / Centre Pompidou / Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers Philadelphia: Bodega Pori: Pori Art Museum Portland: Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) / Publication Studio Porto: Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves Prague: DOX Centre for Contemporary Art Prishtina: Stacion - Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina Providence: AS220 Reykjavik: Reykjavik Art Museum Riga: kim? Rio de Janeiro: Capacete / A Gentil Carioca Rome: MACRO Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Roma / Opera Rebis Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute / Witte de With | Center for Contemporary Art Saint-Nazaire: Le Grand Cafe, centre d'art contemporain Salzburg: Salzburger Kunstverein San Antonio: Artpace São Paulo: KUNSTHALLE São Paulo / Master in Visual Arts, Faculdade Santa Marcelina Sarajevo: Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA) Seoul: The Books / The Book Society Sherbrooke: Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop's University Singapore: The Ngee Ann Kongsi Library Skopje: Press to Exit Project Space Sofia: ICA-Sofia / Sofia Art Gallery / SWIMMING POOL St Erme Outre et Ramecourt: Performing Arts Forum St Louis: White Flag Projects Stockholm: Bonniers Konsthall / Iaspis / Index - The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation / Konstfack, University College of Art, Craft and Design / Konsthall C / Tensta konsthall Stuttgart: Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart Sydney: Artspace Tallinn: Kumu Art Museum of Estonia The Hague: Stroom Den Haag Toronto: Art Metropole / Mercer Union / The Power Plant Torun: Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu in Torun (CoCA) Toowoomba: Raygun Contemporary Art Projects Trieste: Trieste Contemporanea Trondheim: NTNU University Library Umeå: Bildmuseet, Umeå University Utrecht: BAK, basis voor actuele kunst / Casco - Office for Art, Design and Theory Vaduz: Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein Valencia: IVAM-Biblioteca Valletta: Malta Contemporary Art Foundation Vancouver: Artspeak / Fillip-Motto / Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia / READ Books, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Emily Carr University of Art and Design Vienna: Kunsthalle Wien / Salon für Kunstbuch-21er Haus Vigo: MARCO, Museo de Arte Contemporanea de Vigo Vilnius: Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) Vitoria-Gasteiz: Centro Cultural Montehermoso Kulturunea Visby: BAC - Baltic Art Center Warsaw: Zachęta National Gallery of Art Wiesbaden: Nassauischer Kunstverein (NKV) Yerevan: Armenian Center For Contemporary Experimental Art (NPAK) Zagreb: Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic / Gallery Nova / DeLVe | Institute for Duration, Location and Variables Zurich: Postgraduate Program in Curating, Zürich University of the Arts / Shedhalle / White Space.

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e-flux journal issue 64: "Architecture as Intangible Infrastructure," Issue One guest-edited by Nikolaus Hirsch with Keller Easterling, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Justin McGuirk, Ravi Sundaram, Eyal Weizman, Philip Ursprung, and Felicity D. Scott www.e-flux.com/issues/64-april-2015 e-flux journal iPad edition is now available. Free download here. Architecture remains the most tangible way of constructing the social.

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https://www.area-arch.it/en/beyond-war-fetishism-the-lyrism-of-performative-architecture-a-dialogue-with-bernard-khoury/

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Beyond war fetishism The lyrism of performative architecture a dialogue with Bernard Khoury | Area

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Beirut and Memory Nicola Santini: What do you think is the role of architecture in the recovery or mystification of memory in Beirut and what role your

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https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/design-justice

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An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological surv...

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https://www.vam.ac.uk/research/projects/architectural-models-in-context#gndn

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An AHRC-funded research network hosted at the V&A. Instagram & Tweet @ArchModelsNet

About the Project

This research network sets out to bring together all those interested in the history, current practice and future of architectural model-making. Its intention is to share knowledge, to take stock of the current state of the field, and to identify productive areas for future practice and research.

Context

Architectural models are used throughout the design process. Although they have much in common with other 3D representations, the complexity of representing a building, specific questions of scale and their public impact set them apart. Like architectural drawings, they are tools for thought and communication; they help to make invisible design processes visible and they document moments of communication that are otherwise ephemeral. Models, however, uniquely convey the embodied 3D qualities of a building and have been long seen as the most comprehensible form of architectural representation.

Aim

The Architectural Models in Context project will help develop a deeper understanding of the role of the architectural model in the design process, both historically and in contemporary practice. It will create an inter-disciplinary knowledge hub for those researching, working with, or interested in models. The project sets out to promote appreciation of the value of models and to promote their documentation, preservation and public display and on-line resources will be developed on architectural models for public and professional audiences.

Outcomes

Whilst the relevance of architectural models is acknowledged by a number of different research and practice-based constituencies: students, architects and designers who use them; model-makers who construct them; curators who look after, display and interpret them; conservators who maintain them; and academics who research them, to date, no forum for knowledge exchange exists; nor is there a comprehensive, searchable resource that lists the institutions in which such collections are housed. The network aims to provide this forum for dialogue and a searchable web-based resource.

Project Outputs

The Team

Dr Simona Valeriani

Senior Tutor, V&A/RCA History of Design

Partner Institutions

Events

Architectural Avatars: Uncover the Link! Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Test your skills in this memory card game. Can you find all the works that can be traced back to Palladio's symmetry or Le Corbusier's modernism?

This event, presented by the network, will explore the role of architectural models in contemporary practice focusing on the scale, materiality and purpose of model making. Leading practices will share projects and perspectives on model making.

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Architectural models in context: creativity, skill and spectacle · V&A

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Architectural Models in context is an AHRC-funded research network hosted at the V&A - #ArchModels

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https://collection.maas.museum/object/9414

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Architectural model 'National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Developement Association Dance Studio'

Object No. 2000/71/2

Merrima in association with the museum are the designers of the Bayagul exhibition. Merrima is staffed by two architects and an interior designer who work soley on Indigenous projects. In 1999 they received an award from the Institute of Architects for their work on the Girrawaa Creative Work Centre at Bathurst jail. The consultation process undertaken with the Indigenous communities that these buildings were built for is extremely important so that it reflects their cultural needs. These models also reflect the importance of Indigenous architects designing culturally appropriate buildings for Indigenous communities. Alison Page states: 'The thing about Indigenous people doing that consultation and being the designers as well is that you can pick up on things that aren't said. You don't have to go through the whole protocol issue, because it is something that is inherent in our culture so we know what to do and what not to do.' Source: Architecture Bulletin March 2000.

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Summary

Object Statement

Architectural model with cover, 'National Aboriginal and Islander Skill Development Association Dance Studio', balsa wood / plastic, Merrima Aboriginal Design Unit, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 1999

Physical Description

Architectural model with cover, 'National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Association Dance Studio', balsa wood / plastic, Merrima Aboriginal Design Unit, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 1999. The model is in the shape of a rectangle with the exposed timber ribs forming a curved roof and walls. Down one side of the model is a set of stairs from the top level down to the lower level. The cover is made up of a clear acrylic rectangular base and a larger rectangular sheet of clear acrylic that curves over to fit between two ridges attached to the base.

PRODUCTION

Notes

The NAISDA dance studio was designed by Indigenous architect Kevin O'Brien of Merrima Aboriginal Design Unit, part of the Department of Public Works and Services of New South Wales. It is a memorial to the Eora warriors that were killed resisting the colonial invasion. The design of the NAISDA building represents a carcass. 'Expressed as timber ribs that form the curved roof and walls, the body of the building exists in a state of decomposition. The carcass is a symbol of death but the dancers who occupy the space breath life into it and enable the spirit of culture to live on'. This model was made by the Merrima Aboriginal Design Unit, part of the Department of Public Works and Services in Sydney. This model was made in 1999.

HISTORY

Notes

To provide the client, National Aboriginal and Islander Skill Development Assosication, with a scaled model of what the building will look like when finished. The National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Association (NAISDA) grew out of the Aboriginal Islander Skills Developement Association (NAISDA) which was established in 1972. It became and incorporated body as NAISDA in May 1988. Since then it has continued to develop its dance and teaching programs, culminating in a full Diploma course in 1995.

SOURCE

Credit Line

Purchased 2000

Acquisition Date

19 June 2000

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Powerhouse Collection - Architectural model 'National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Developement Association Dance Studio'

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Architectural model with cover, 'National Aboriginal and Islander Skill Development Association Dance Studio', balsa wood / plastic, Merrima Aboriginal Design Unit, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 1999

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https://thefunambulist.net/

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https://futurearchitecturelibrary.org/book/archifutures-volume-6-agency/

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http://www.matrixfeministarchitecturearchive.co.uk/explore/how-is-space-gendered/

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A central question for feminists involved in the built environment in the 1970s and '80s was trying to unravel how we could analyse the gendering of space, across a multitude of complexities and intangibles. The word sexism had not yet been invented, and the commonsense assumption within architecture was that built space was neutral and objective, with the professional's job merely to apply their unbiased expertise.

What Betty Friedan in the US called 'the problem that has no name'; and Sheila Rowbotham in the UK described as 'lumber(ing) around ungainly-like in borrowed concepts which did not fit the shape we feel ourselves to be ' was already being opened up for exploration by second wave feminism. Geographers and historians seemed much further ahead than architecture - in the Matrix book group we avidly read work from the States by Dolores Hayden, Gwendolyn Wright, Doris Cole, Gerda R. Wekerle and Susana Torre, and from the UK by Leonora Davidoff and Catherine Hall; then later Doreen Massey, Linda McDowell and Gill Valentine. Later again, Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner and Iain Borden edited some of these seminal texts together in Gender, Space Architecture: an interdisciplinary introduction (Routledge 2000).

I still hold to the framing that the Matrix book group put forward in our 1984 introduction (pp 9-10):

Buildings do not control our lives. They reflect the dominant values in our society, political and architectural views, people's demands and the constraints of finance, but we can live in them in different ways from those originally intended. Buildings only affect us insomuch as they contain ideas about women, about our 'proper place', about what is private and what is public activity, about which things should be kept separate and which put together. But this does not determine how we live. [...]

As feminist architects and designers we want to avoid the architectural determinism that sees building-users as puppets, capable of being manipulated according to the architect's idea of desired behaviour. The arrangement of space in and between buildings is a reflection of accepted views which may have a greater or lesser effect on the occupants -or which may have unintended effects on social life in general. We have tried to avoid assuming that our experiences and views are universal. Even though we hope to speak of all women's experience, we are directly limited by our own history. All of us have come through higher education, mostly with a training in architecture, and thus fit into the conventional definition of the white, middle class [...] we believe that our experience is a common one for women.

Now, though, I speak about 'social, spatial and material practices' rather than 'buildings' so as to better draw out the dynamic, nuanced and deeply relational intersections between built space and its differential occupation. I still explore our everyday norms and routines, unpicking how these value particular kinds of bodies and minds rather than others; and to better understand how built environment education and practice can work to both perpetuate and to challenge such norms. I notice that the focus of our references in the 1980s was the plight of the middle class white suburban housewife, challenging our own normative role models, but also often excluding or making marginal working class, and black and ethnic minority women's experiences and concerns.

Part of this shift is because of the way both social relations, and architectural approaches to the design of space have changed. When I began working with Matrix on research projects at the end of the 1970s, it was still possible to literally see gender roles mapped onto physical space as patterns of separation (women at home in the suburbs/men at work in the city). It was even easier to look back to 19th century Victorian England and see how these attempts to articulate gender difference through the design and control of material space had begun, as a deliberate design philosophy.

Of course, by the 1980s, this was already an oversimplified picture; not only emphasizing the location of the white, middle-class suburban housewife and often leaving other groups invisible; but also not taking into account the changing nature of households away from the nuclear family, as well as the large scale movement of young middle class women into higher education, that was already changing opportunities for that group.

At the beginning of the 21st century things are even more amorphous. I suggest that gender divisions are much more lightly etched into material space, social roles more layered, multiple. Conceptually, the older binary oppositions, where women were consistently 'signed' inferior to men (and where the 'commonsense' design and ordering of physical space was sometimes central to expressing the different 'locations' of men and women) have much less purchase; and are increasing crucially challenged by transgender and non-binary movements. Social roles can more fluid and interchangeable, particularly before children are born. Many women are more financially independent, many more people live in different household arrangements. Architects and designers still have normative biases, but architectural or urban design 'gendering' is no longer so explicit as it was in design guidance like 'Spaces in the Home' (1972) and 'Housing the Family' (1974) - eloquently critiqued by Sue Francis in the Making Space book.

But the stereotypes of what constitutes 'Man' or Woman' (that is, not the realities of any particular man or woman but an idealized and artificial social construct) continue to have impacts, intersected with stereotypical assumptions about class, race, age, sexuality, disability etc. Political struggles around cis and transgender identities, #blacklivesmatter and #metoo as well as media debates about wearing a veil, career women, late babies and same sex marriage, all show just how central attempts to name gender and other relationships through a language of proper 'commonsense' still are; both in the 'ordinary' patterning of everyday social, spatial and material practices, and through aspects of how building and spatial design prioritises (values) particular traits and activities over others. Just as importantly, core economic and social inequalities remain and, are even deepening. In the current moment, it feels vitally important not only to really understand how built space makes concrete normative social relations through being gendered, racialised and made disabling; but also how it can be re-though towards social, material and spatial justice.

References

Betty Friedan (1963) The Feminine Mystique W. W. Norton

Doris Cole (1973) From Tipi to Skyscraper: A History of Women in Architecture i Press Inc.

Sheila Rowbotham (1973) Woman's Consciousness, Man's World Pelican p35

Susana Torre (1977) Women in American Architecture Whitney Library of Design

Dolores Hayden (1981) The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities, MIT Press.

Gerda R. Wekerle (1981) New Space for Women Westview Press

Gwendolyn Wright (1981) Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America. Pantheon

Leonora Davidoff and Catherine Hall (1987) Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 University of Chicago Press

Linda MacDowell (1999) Gender, Identity and Place. Cambridge: Polity.

Doreen Massey (1994), Space, place, and gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Gill Valentine (1995) Mapping desire: Geographies of sexualities Psychology Press (with David Bell)

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A central question for feminists involved in the built environment in the 1970s and '80s was trying to unravel how we could analyse the gendering of space, across a multitude of complexities and intangibles.

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https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2455929620967812

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https://www.hesge.ch/head/en/event/2019/architectural-models-theory-and-practice-scale

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Architectural Models: Theory and Practice in Scale | HEAD

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Campus HEAD, Design RoomAv de Châtelaine 7

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https://academic.oup.com/past/article/239/1/e23/2957256

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Just as, in Nigel Thrift's words, space is the 'fundamental stuff of human geography', time, one might add, is the 'stuff' of history. While this separation seems neat, historians tend to study time and place as parallel concepts; when they merge, spatial history (and historical geography) follows. Important within spatial history are the concepts of 'place' (that is, physical spaces that people naturalize through patterns, behaviour and communications) and 'scale' (the representation of any area, as produced and defined by social process, from the smallest unit, the body, to the largest, the universe). This article presents how authors within have studied space, place and scale. It emphasizes that spatial history can serve as methodology, approach and object. It contributes to a small but growing pool of articles outlining the historiography of spatial history. By examining spatial history in (a journal with an explicitly social character) I show that, while the study of human geography turned away from social concerns from the 1940s to the 1960s, it was concern with social history that made the space of Past and Present a place for spatial studies. Further, the linguistic turn and postmodernism opened the door to innovative articles that examine or employ space, place and scale.

In looking through the pages of Past and Present, we see that it is not just time that is the 'stuff' of history: frequently historical inquiry is also concerned with space and place. The purpose of this argument is not to propose a hierarchy between human geography and history, nor to suggest that one discipline gives origin to the other, is more relevant or even is more concerned with space. Indeed, while several Past and Present articles deal with historical geographies prior to the linguistic turn, the number of innovative, exciting articles with a spatial focus produced after 1980 multiplies to the point of overshadowing previous study. Instead, this article suggests that including social history in the historiographical narrative of interdisciplinary approaches to space and place emphasizes the relationship between history and human geography as an intertwined narrative with ebbs and flows, rather than a linear story of borrowing and gradual approximation.

After a brief historiographical presentation of human geography, space and place, this article outlines ten Past and Present articles that, in some way, approach space, place and scale in their study. The articles were published from 1954 to 2014, though all but two appeared after 1980, reflecting the linguistic and spatial turns. The articles are not introduced in strict chronological order but are, rather, grouped according to approach or method. In my analysis of these articles, I emphasize the authors' contributions to the study of space and place. I do not dwell much on definitions beyond those the authors offer, focusing instead on approach, method and object of historical inquiry. As Phil Hubbard states in his article 'Space/Place', 'the key question about space and place is not what they are, but what they do'.

I

HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, SPACE AND PLACE

Historiographical studies of human geography outline a disjointed narrative: geography emerged in the early nineteenth century, characterized by environmental determinism and historicism. It became an arm of European imperialism, and fell into a crisis of disciplinary definition until the publication of Richard Hartshorne's 'Nature of Geography' in 1939. Hartshorne urged geographers to focus on spatial distributions rather than time. Though some had turned to social interests, the Second World War, the Cold War and McCarthyism in the United States presented significant obstacles. In the 1960s, geography was overcome by technical, statistical and quantitative study and did not return to qualitative methods and a humanistic focus until the 1970s.

In the 1970s, what Phil Hubbard has described as two 'very different strands of geographical inquiry' emerged: humanistic accounts that emphasize that different settings have a different sense of place, and Marxist and other materialist accounts that look at domination and resistance across varied spaces, tending to focus on the importance of space as 'both socially produced and consumed'. The philosopher Henri Lefebvre was perhaps the most influential of the materialist writers. Lefebvre published The Production of Space in 1974, introducing the terms 'spatial practice' (or how we move within and around space), 'representations of space' (the architectural plans, city plans and other such cartographies of our everyday existence) and 'representational space' (or the symbolic associations that overlay geographic spaces). Lefebvre emphasized that spaces change over time, as do our use of them, representations of them and symbolic associations with them. In the words of Hubbard, in the materialist accounts, 'place emerges as a particular form of space, one that is created through acts of naming as well as through the distinctive activities and imaginings associated with particular social spaces'. Building on Lefebvre's work, a number of studies reference what has been termed 'thirdspace', that is, geographical imaginaries, or space that is both real and imagined. Another important Marxist interpreter of space and place is David Harvey, who points out a paradox: globalization depends on a sense of place, because history, culture and landscape are 'crucial in perpetuating special processes of capital accumulation'.

Meanwhile, writers of humanistic accounts, according to Hubbard, 'shifted the analytical focus of human geography from social space to lived-in space'. The influential geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, in Space and Place, adds that space does not have inherent scale but instead is created by emotional attachment through 'fields of care'. Place, on the other hand, is imbued with meaning and, according to Tuan, how we create a 'sense of place' deserves focused study. Another humanist, Edward Relph, urges scholars to seek a more human-centred and empathetic understanding of 'the lived experience of place'. Relph stresses that there can only be a 'sense of place' when the bond between people and place is 'deep-rooted'. Hubbard summarizes the distinction between materialist and humanist accounts in this way:

Suggesting that (bounded) places are fundamental in providing a sense of belonging for those who live in them, humanistic perspectives propose a definite but complex relationship between the character of specific places and the cultural identities of those who inhabit them. Against this, materialist perspectives propose that cultural battles create explicit inequalities in the way that space is occupied and used by members of different groups.

Human geography took a postmodern turn in the 1990s, producing a form of inquiry that tied the study of geography with social justice and focused on pluralities, binaries, positionalities and deconstruction. Space, in the 1990s, appeared as a social construct in constant transformation. Postmodern scholars emphasized the 'slipperiness and instability of language' and the impossibility of universal definitions for space and place.

Within the pages of Past and Present, postmodernism caused debate, but also yielded fascinating studies in spatial history. In 1991 Lawrence Stone opened a discussion on postmodernism and history in a closing note. His concise proposition spurred a four-part response. Stone outlines 'the crisis of self-confidence' into which history was thrown by the postmodern 'threat' posed by what he identifies as 'linguistics' (Saussure and Derrida), 'symbolic anthropology' (Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner and Mary Douglas) and 'New Historicism'. He feels that the discipline of history - which, his note informs, is rooted in truths that lie outside the text - is at stake, and recommends an article by Gabrielle M. Speigel offering a 'way out of the ever-narrowing trap in which we historians find ourselves'. Stone's appraisal received immediate response from Patrick Joyce and Catriona Kelly. In his response, Joyce recognizes the postmodern conundrum for historical inquiry: if the 'real' only exists as transmitted to us discursively, then historians have no access to the 'true' past, but only have access to discursive representations of it. Joyce proposes breaking 'out of this circularity and banality' by taking the linguistic turn 'seriously', that is by 'questioning received categories of the "social" '. Kelly introduces to the debate the perspective of women's history, stating that 'reading historical material for information about women automatically means reading against the grain'; otherwise, women would be left out of most historical discussion. Kelly offers another option: to read texts for their language and lexicon, but also to look into their context and intertextuality. In doing so, we recognize texts as 'an over-flavoured broth of dubious provenance, whose precise quantities of ingredients must be established, and process of culinary preparation determined'. In this way, the meaning of historical texts exists both discursively (within the text) and contextually (from without). Both Stone and Speigel offer lengthy, sophisticated rejoinders that accept the contributions of the linguistic turn, in that it has provided historians with more sophisticated ways to read texts, but insist that there must be a middle ground in which reality is not defined only as language. As is revealed throughout the course of this article, the linguistic turn and postmodernism within the pages of Past and Present provoked innovative articles that examine space, place and scale. Spatial social history, in this sense, owes its existence to this kind of debate.

What scholars now refer to as 'the spatial turn' is 'the perception that social change can no longer be satisfactorily explained without a reconceptualization of categories referring to the spatial component of social life'. While many scholars have limited their discussions of the spatial turn to methodological questions inspired by the use of geographic information system technologies for the study of human geography and history, the turn towards spatial study also focuses on how spatial meaning is constructed and how space is represented.

Now, according to the dominant historiographical narrative, human geography exports the concept and study of space to other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. Indeed, human geography and history have long enjoyed each other's influence. Yet, when studies of human geography veered into a decidedly technical, statistical realm, history did not follow; in fact, as can be seen through the very founding of Past and Present in the 1950s, social history emerged at precisely the time when human geography moved away from social issues. In the introduction to Past and Present's first issue, the editors eschew the statistical and technical form of scholarship that overcame fields like geography, stating that, while 'some are no doubt stimulating', these methods 'are unable to deal with any but the simplest forms of historical change' and instead mislead by way of 'technical sophistication'. Importantly, history in Past and Present was to be relevant:

We should perhaps to-day rely, not on discovering past parallels, but on understanding how change took place in the past; but we share the belief of Polybius in the value of history for the present, and in particular his conception of historical discipline as an instrument enabling us 'to face coming events with confidence'. In a generation which, as Friedrich Mienecke demonstrated, has history in its marrow, and for which an historical mode of thought is second nature, we believe that it is to history that the great majority of thinking men and women look for strength and understanding.

History had (needed to have) value for the present. Further, history had to encompass not just Europe or the English-speaking world. Historical inquiry in Past and Present refused the narrowing of scale that human geography underwent in the 1950s. Within issues that followed, space and place (though not necessarily referred to in those terms) imbued urban, micro-, regional, national, global, social and cultural histories.

II

SPACE, PLACE AND SCALE IN PAST AND PRESENT

Underpinning many articles in Past and Present 's earliest issues is an unspoken agreement with the nation-state as container of historical process. These articles often expose this tendency within their title, including the name of the nation along with an indication of the period studied. While this tendency reflects practical intra-disciplinary divisions (as in divisions of departments and research areas into broad geographic regions within which figure our national specializations), it also reveals a tacit agreement that national borders delimit bounded spaces within which social and economic practices unravel.

Nonetheless, in these early issues of Past and Present, there are deviations from this pattern. The most obvious divergences occur in articles focused on the pre-national period in Europe, which refer, instead, to regional designations of space. In these articles, the focus is on the process studied, often interpreted through the lens of social class. These studies do not emphasize local meaning, but instead treat the space within which processes occur as absolute. Eric J. Hobsbawm's work in this early period deserves special mention, as his work focused on social processes that crossed national borders, giving more importance to the role of class than to the national space within which it existed.

Barraclough dedicates most of the article to a presentation of Walter Prescott Webb's book The Great Frontier, recognizing it as a 'bold attempt' to examine modern history through the frontier created by the arrival of Europeans in the Americas in 1492 and the centuries of interaction generated by this encounter. For Webb, it was Christopher Columbus' voyage to the New World that made the Renaissance and the Reformation possible, and it was the 'windfalls', or commodities, produced by the European exploitation of this frontier that created the foundation for the Industrial Revolution, making the frontier 'the matrix of the modern world'. Barraclough does not fully agree with Webb's conclusions, and spends the bulk of the article offering detailed criticism; yet, he does agree with Webb on one main point: that the conquest of the frontier brought the world together as one, binding the history of modern Europe to that of the Americas. Barraclough argues that, as the European age came to a close, the world became 'frontierless', creating an environment within which fascism and dictators, specifically Hitler, arose. Writing during the cold war, Barraclough warns that there are only two options for the modern world: communism ('a plausible solution for the countless millions of "under-privileged" in Asia and Africa as well as in Europe') or the path of conquest of 'living-space' at the expense of others ('a solution which entails famine, bloodshed, want, destruction, and its result can only be the survival of the least fit, the crudest, earthiest and least civilized'). Barraclough's desire to slide the scale of historical inquiry from the national and European to an integrated, world history was not just academic; it was a moral imperative which he saw as having drastic consequences.

In these early years of Past and Present, writers of the Annales school, particularly Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel, with their focus on change over a vast period, social history and geography, were highly influential. Albert Soboul's 'The French Rural Community in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries', for example, relied heavily on Marc Bloch's Les Caractères originaux de l'histoire rurale française in its examination of the decline of the French rural community. Soboul recognizes work on the rural community in other disciplines, particularly geographical and ethnographical studies, and urges historians to draw from related social sciences. Importantly, he offers defining characteristics of the rural community, following Bloch in accepting it as based on collective property ownership and communal regulation of agricultural and forestry practices. For Soboul, the parish and the community 'were the same, their boundaries and their interests being for the most part identical'. He defines the community economy as a 'natural' agricultural economy that, though hierarchical, is pre-capitalist. He argues that, while the French Revolution accelerated the community's decline, the seeds of the French rural community's downfall were planted much earlier with the intrusion of a capitalist mode of production. In sum, it was not the fall of the old regime that brought the French rural community to an end; it was modern capitalism. Soboul's article, then, is an example of the materialist conception of space. The community was defined not by sentiment or psychological bond, but by its hierarchies, land use and mode of production. Change in any of these would shake the community at its very definition.

In this sense, Soboul's article stands in opposition to an article on the French rural community that appeared in Past and Present twenty-five years later. In 'Parish, Seigneurie and the Community of Inhabitants in Southern Central France during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries', P. M. Jones also focuses on the notion of the French rural 'community'. Jones attributes the weakness of prior studies of the community to 'economic and geographical determinism' and interpretations of France based only on studies of the north or north-east. Like Soboul, Jones points to geographers and ethnographers, especially those who offer 'important insights into the mental domain'. With this in mind, he turns to the southern Massif Central in south central France, describing it in terms of its physical geography, economy, patterns of human settlement and demographics. Considering the region's varied geography and sparse settlement, and offering convincing evidence from letters and travel diaries, Jones finds that the contours of the community in the southern Massif Central did not necessarily follow 'ecclesiastical, nor seigneurial, nor natural boundaries'. Jones rejects the notion that the rural community was defined by commonly owned property, showing that in the 'provinces of the centre', while sometimes lands were communally managed, they were rarely communally owned. Further, naturally occurring barriers of terrain often made communal management impossible. Instead, Jones finds the 'heart-beat' of rural society in the parish. The community in the southern Massif Central, Jones argues, 'was a spiritual or rather psychological condition' that 'implied a communion of the living and a communion of the living with the dead', with the church, the cemetery and the bell tower figuring centrally as reference points. The rural community, according to Jones, gathered in the cemetery 'around the tombs of their ancestors in order to consult them, commune with them and pray for them'. The community, then, is a sentiment 'emancipated from the constraints of physical space' that cannot be defined by the borders of a village, but instead existed as 'a complex of values and beliefs which can best be analysed at the level of mentalités '. While, for Soboul, the community was a space determined by geography and mode of production, for Jones it was a place bound to its inhabitants by sentiment, psychology and history. Both see the parish as defining this space: for Soboul, as boundary; for Jones, as soul.

Clearly influenced by the linguistic and postmodern turn, beginning in the early 1990s the method of studying space and place, whether materialist or humanist, shifts towards a historical examination of naming and mapping. An article by Robin Okey entitled 'Central Europe/Eastern Europe: Behind the Definitions' examines the idea of 'central Europe', or Mitteleuropa, highlighting its borders as arbitrary. The centrality of central Europe, he shows, has nothing to do with its location to the east or west of other regions. Where central Europe begins and ends depends on whether the scholar employs religious, social or political criteria. Nonetheless, while the term 'central Europe' presents a 'definitional bog' in which 'geographers speak with uncertain voice', it has entered into popular use. Some geographers, Okey states, suggest that the murkiness of regional definition points to 'arbitrary' bonds, and others suggest that the region is a 'concept of political will'. Okey sees in the study of geography a way out of the definitional confusion, arguing that central Europe should be understood as a 'historical region'.

Okey offers an exhaustive survey of European debates on Mitteleuropa throughout the twentieth century. Importantly, he recognizes that borders are arbitrary, but he still accepts and asserts that the category of Mitteleuropa is valid. The question is not whether it exists, but what factor unites and defines it. He discards culture, religion, politics and economics as categories that could define the region. Instead, he finds that geographical studies reveal 'a transitional zone of mountains, basins and counter-flowing river systems, shaping a pattern of ethnic splintering implausible in the vast plains of the continental east or extensive peninsulas of the Atlantic west'. These geographic formations funnelled migrations, exposed groups in open spaces and led to 'attempts of a clutch of small and medium-sized peoples to assert their identities against more powerful neighbours on their flanks'. These groups have consistently had to deal with pressure from either side, pushing them into the east or the west. Importantly, a common characteristic is that of dominant German influence over this region. The historical region of central Europe, then, is 'characterized by its fragmentation'. In terms of self-perception, Okey finds that this historical region was born of 'a sense of grievance, of European destiny denied and merit unperceived'. In sum, absolute space provides the context within which social processes unfolded, leading to a region defined not by culture, politics or economics, but by geography, fragmentation and a sense of grievance. Okey's acceptance of the arbitrariness of borders and his method of studying spatial discourse show the clear influence of postmodern debates, while his argument for a historical region based on physical geography and sentiment fit within a humanist narrative of place.

In contrast, in 'The Power of Naming, or The Construction of Ethnic and National Identities in Peru: Myth, History and the Iquichanos', Cecilia Méndez-Gastelumendi demonstrates that a term used at times to describe a place and at others a people has no stable meaning. Initially, Méndez-Gastelumendi had set out to study the 'Iquichano Rebellion', which took place from 1826 to 1828 in the south central Andes, waged by a multi-class group opposed to the newly formed republic of Peru. She, like other scholars, government groups, anthropologists and novelists, had accepted the 'Iquichanos' as 'a hereditary "ethnic group" of the "Chanka Confederation" ', a pre-Hispanic people who had resisted Inca expansion. However, exhaustive archival research in government documents, reports, maps, missionary diaries, lawsuits, land disputes and tributary records of the province of Huanta returned no mention of 'Iquicha' or its resident 'Iquichanos'. Instead, Méndez-Gastelumendi found the first written use of the term 'Iquichano' during the 1826-8 uprising. Further, she found that 'Iquicha' did not appear as an official (or unofficial) town, community or region in these documents. Instead, within the documents, 'Iquichanos' were all peasants who opposed the republic.

The peasants initially resisted this definition, associated as it was 'with the quality of being a rebel, a "traitor to the patria " ', but this situation would change, as did the relationship between the peasants of Huanta and the republican state. Méndez-Gastelumendi explains that, beginning in 1831, nine communities in Huanta requested exemption from paying tribute, presenting themselves as victims of the deception of the 'Iquichano party', which had fooled them into rising up against the republicans. As a result of this alleged deception, they had participated in the rebellion; the government's consequent repression had left them devastated and unable to pay the tribute. In subsequent national battles during the 1830s, the 'Iquichano' military achieved national glory, changing their designation from the traitorous 'Iquichanos' to 'brave Iquichanos', and the 'Iquichano' peasants finally received exemption from paying tribute. Examining the history of one village, Méndez-Gastelumendi shows that Indians migrated out of their communities to join the 'Iquicha', who were exempt from tribute. In doing so, they created an 'inconspicuous area' referred to as 'Iquicha', which 'had come to signify something greater and more visible than anything it could thus far have been: a core settlement around which groups of peoples, hitherto unrelated to this name or place, would establish and seek to identify themselves'. Subsequently, Iquicha appears in documents as a geographical location with political boundaries; today only a village remains.

The Iquichano identity 'remained variable', with peasants of the province of Huanta at times referring to themselves as 'Iquichano' and at others using adjectives referring to more specific place names. Reminiscent of Jones's study of the French rural community in the southern Massif Central, Méndez-Gastelumendi states that 'in the Andes, the concept of community has not necessarily been tied to the idea of a contiguous territory, but rather has coexisted with notions of non-contiguous territoriality and ever-flexible boundaries'. According to her,

the insistence, particularly by anthropologists and the state, that the Iquichano are an ethnic identity, instead of a historical identity, has modern consequences. Referring to it as an ethnic identity inadvertently associates the group with the Inca or even the pre-Inca, that is, with a rustic and distant past.

As such,

it is not just a 'chronology' or an understanding of the past which is at stake here, but rather the way it shapes (and is shaped by) the language with which we perceive and define society and humanity in the present. For it is precisely the fixation on the European conquest as the ultimate source of historical explanations of the present that lies at the base of the binary construct which has denied historicity to Andean peoples, while conceiving of them as 'remnants', vestiges, unevolved and, ultimately, 'ethnic'.

In sum, Méndez-Gastelumendi is not denying that the peasants of Huanta have an ancient past; rather, she is emphasizing that it is commonly forgotten that they also have a very modern history. Further, like Barraclough, Méndez-Gastelumendi sees her interventions as having moral consequences for the present community.

Méndez-Gastelumendi's article shows the power of naming to produce a sense of place, even when the physical space to which the place name refers is ambiguous. Christine R. Johnson's 'Renaissance German Cosmographers and the Naming of America' also takes up the subject of place naming, but does so to show how Europeans created knowledge about what came to be called 'America', arguing that 'the reality of a New World' was founded within the context of cartographic, mathematical and scientific data, theories and conventions circulating throughout Europe in the sixteenth century. Johnson studies the naming of America through maps created in the sixteenth century, beginning with the map drawn in 1507 by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller that first gave America its name. Waldseemüller worked in collaboration with Matthias Ringmann and Walther Ludd, who 'all placed their explications in the well-established system of cosmography, that is, the mathematical description of the universe'. While cartographers relied for 'empirical information' on Amerigo Vespucci's travel narrative Four Voyages and his Mundus novus letter (both of which have since been accepted as forgeries), such data was subordinated to mathematical models set forth in Ptolemy's Cosmography, which Waldseemüller and Ringmann revised in 1513. The figure of Vespucci was prominent in the map drawn in 1507, but his 'accomplishments were seen as simply part of the whole enterprise of discovery' and 'did not in any way strain the mathematical framework of Ptolemaic cosmography'. The choice of Vespucci's name for the map, then, was due not to his intellectual, innovative insights (as some scholars have claimed), but to the voyager type he represented and the accessibility of his texts at a time when 'information was a resource both highly prized and difficult to acquire'.

While Johnson studies maps and the context of their creation, in 'The Geography of Revolution in Ireland, 1917-1923' Peter Hart creates them. Hart focuses on the 'uneven geography' of the revolution of 1917-23 in Ireland, showing that the violence of the revolution (which he measures in terms of 'those killed or wounded by bullets or bombs' on a county-to-county basis) was regional, not national. To carry out his study, Hart harvested data from a vast array of sources, including constabulary reports, Royal Irish Constabulary tabulations, military reports, casualty lists and several newspapers. In doing so, he is able to apply new data to older hypotheses, including those offered by David Fitzpatrick in a Past and Present article published in 1978.

Hart maps out the violence of the revolution in several ways. He provides a table displaying data and a map showing the overall frequency of violent acts per county. He also offers maps that display the numbers of violent acts per county over shorter periods. Through his analysis, he is able to show that 'the Cork IRA emerges as the strongest overall, chiefly in virtue of its consistency', while the rate of violence in other cities and counties shifts over time. Meanwhile, 'Munster and Dublin bore the brunt of the revolution at every stage'. After presenting this quantitative data, Hart contributes qualitative analysis, examining the reasons that different groups gave for the uneven distribution of violence. According to the experts of the General Headquarters of the Irish Republican Army, the unevenness was due to the 'slackers' who did not contribute but still claimed glory. Nonetheless, for the men in the field, it was a lack of access to rifles and other arms, physical terrain and the presence of the Protestants and Unionists that determined the frequency of violent acts. Historians, in turn, have focused on rurality, with Fitzpatrick claiming that the more rural the area, the more violent, but, Hart rebukes, nearly half of the British victims of the revolution were produced in Dublin, Cork and Belfast. Further, he does not find a correlation between poverty, prosperity, voting patterns and violence. Instead, agreeing with Fitzpatrick, he finds that 'as an organization, the IRA tended to be more violent where the police and courts were least effective, which in turn may have been related to a tradition of resistance inherited from the agrarian rebels of Victorian Ireland'.

Hart's study relies on quantitative data, statistical know-how and technical map-making skill, all generally related to what scholars have come to call the 'spatial turn'. Yet, while Hart's article (along with Gregory P. Downs and Scott Nesbit's Mapping Occupation project, the maps provided by the University of Delaware's Colored Conventions project and the Spatial History project at Stanford University, among many others) demonstrates that historical inquiry can benefit from the inclusion of datasets and mapping technologies, spatial history and the study of maps need not intimidate the technophobe. In the twenty-first century, many studies in spatial history analyse maps as texts, rather than creating them.

For example, following a method similar to that of Johnson, in 'A Plague on Bohemia? Mapping the Black Death' David C. Mengel studies maps that have represented the progression and geographic reach of the Black Death alongside the texts that accompanied them. Mengel traces how the scholarly consensus that Bohemia was left unscathed by the Black Death developed through 'the most influential account of plague in Bohemia': a map. In 1962 Élisabeth Carpentier published an article on the plague in Annales. She provided a map that 'has shaped all subsequent discussion of the Black Death in Bohemia'. The map shows the march of the plague across the Continent in six-month increments and identifies cities that were 'partly or entirely spared by the plague', including Milan, Nuremberg and Liège, parts of the Pyrenees, sections of the Netherlands and large portions of east central Europe. Carpentier presented the map tentatively, warning that it was incomplete and would require further study. Despite the creation of other maps by other scholars, her map has been widely reproduced (without her caveat) in popular magazines, scholarly studies and western civilization textbooks. The only scholar who took issue with Carpentier's map was František Graus, who in 1963 objected to the 'exceptional regions' of southern Poland and Bohemia. Graus 'crammed the footnotes of his dense, five-page article with fourteenth-century evidence of plague in the Bohemian kingdom', arguing that, while the first appearance of the plague in Bohemia was light, there was a second, much more destructive phase. Graus situated the plague within a variety of other pestilences, emphasizing the feudal crisis as 'a category into which a devastating epidemic fitted badly'. Despite Graus's documentary diligence, anglophone scholars ignored his work, and the only argument that gained attention was one that he never actually made, 'that Bohemia escaped from plague because of its geographical isolation'. Meanwhile, Philip Ziegler included Carpentier's map in his popular history book The Black Death in 1969, repeating that the plague left Bohemia untouched and assuring the fame of Carpentier's map. Though Zeigler's account drew responses, Graus was the only scholar who effectively showed that the plague reached Bohemia, though in lesser extremes than in Italy and coastal Europe. Nonetheless, he did not provide a map and his conclusion 'defies the clear cartographic representation which, we have seen, effectively disseminated the belief that Bohemia's experience with the Black Death was exceptional', and so Graus's criticism went unnoticed.

Each of the articles outlined thus far focuses on geographical spaces, their associated place names, the communities that relate (or do not relate) with them and the maps created to represent them. However, one historical study of space in Past and Present focuses on the spaces that lie behind closed doors. Amanda Vickery, in 'An Englishman's Home Is His Castle? Thresholds, Boundaries and Privacies in the Eighteenth-Century London House', studies privacy by examining the domestic space of everyday Londoners. Vickery's study 'opens the door of the London house to consider how internal space was conceptualized, demarcated and policed'. She relies on criminal records from London's main criminal court, the Old Bailey, and examines the 'claim and defence of private property' and 'the capacity and mechanisms to achieve seclusion and withdrawal, refuge, security and secrecy'.

Vickery first examines the external perimeter of the household, with the doorway as the 'archetypal liminal boundary'. Legally, an open door, open window or poorly secured latch was an invitation to intruders, leaving the 'classic responsibility of the head of household to patrol the boundaries and lock up fast at night'. Vickery then turns to the interior of the home, emphasizing that, regardless of social class, most of London's inhabitants lived in rented accommodation and thus shared space with other individuals, sometimes even the same room, leading to theft, not just from intruders, but from within. Furthermore, nosy landlords often found clever ways to enter legally, or at least view, the rooms they let. Homes had their own hierarchical geographies, as 'Certain rooms became synonymous with small incomes and struggle'. Among the household residents, servants had the least personal space, often sleeping on temporary, movable bedding and guarding locked boxes carrying all of their worldly belongings. At the boundary of the household, once over the threshold and at one's locked box, the key was fundamental to securing each person a minimal amount of private space.

Finally, Edward D. Melillo's article 'Global Entomologies: Insects, Empires, and the "Synthetic Age" in World History', published in 2014, serves as a bookend to Barraclough's piece from 1954, with which this examination of Past and Present articles began. Melillo studies the histories of shellac, silk and cochineal, documenting 'a series of long-standing productive relationships between humans and insects'. These histories were studied through 'fragmented and episodic accounts', but Melillo urges historians 'to transcend approaches based solely on local or national comparisons and move towards models that emphasize transnational connections'. Studying the histories of three products produced by domesticated insects shifts our perception of colonial spatial geographies by placing Europeans on the ' knowledge periphery ... incredulous that indigenous know-how beyond the boundaries of the Occident could be so central to global commerce'. Melillo presents the transnational histories of each product, the rise of synthetics, the parallel rise of toxicity and the limits of synthetic substitution.

In the words of the historian Richard White, spatial history (here he is referring specifically to geographic information systems) is not just about representing what we have learned on a map; rather, 'it is a means of doing research'. Herein lies one important contribution of the study of place, space and scale in Past and Present: while at times what is acquired from its historical study is a deeper understanding of geographical concepts and their associated processes, often it is other knowledge that is gained. Through spatial history, we learn about the routes of commodities and the structure of geographical knowledge. We learn about the values and shape of a community. We learn about privacy, plague, empire, insects, cosmography, violence and peasants. In other words, space within the pages of Past and Present has presented itself as an approach to history, an object of study and a methodology (employed to learn more about a distinct object of study). Like the field of human geography, spatial history in Past and Present responded to the influence of the postmodern and linguistic turns, though, unlike human geography, it never turned away from social issues and only recently became a more technical venture. Yet, there is no overwhelming drive towards quantitative approaches or even mapping software that requires specific technical knowledge. Instead, the articles on space, place and scale in Past and Present have continually provoked their readers to consider how we relate to the space around us, how we make of it our own place, what hierarchies we create within it, how we imagine and relate it to other places, and how we represent it to others.

Author notes

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Space, Place and Scale: Human Geography and Spatial History in Past and Present*

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Just as, in Nigel Thrift's words, space is the 'fundamental stuff of human geography', time, one might add, is the 'stuff' of history.1 While this separation se

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Recommended by Ben White - (Natural History Museum / Design Museum & British Museum 

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Recommended by Ben White - (Natural History Museum / Design Museum & British Museum 

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https://www.base-models.co.uk/

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Base Models - London Architectural Model Makers

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Base Models are a London based architectural modelmakers also working on art projects, props, lasercutting and fabrication in various media.

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01cxyrm

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BBC Four - Dreaming the Impossible: Unbuilt Britain

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The fascinating and dramatic stories behind some of the grandest designs never built.

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https://eahn.org/2020/06/cfp-the-architectural-model-as-tool-medium-and-agent-of-change-architectural-theory-review/

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CfP: The Architectural Model as Tool, Medium and Agent of Change. Architectural Theory Review

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Special issue of Architectural Theory Review, edited by Matthew Mindrup and Matthew Wells The architectural model has long held an important role in the edification of buildings, not least as a descriptive tool, a source of inspiration and a medium for studying new designs.

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https://www.readingdesign.org/feminist-architecture-a-z

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Jane Rendell
Audre Lorde:
For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

Audre Lorde wrote these words in 1984, as a response to a Humanities conference at New York University Institute where she and one other black woman had been asked to participate at the 'last hour'.
Bale:
The interior and the domestic have been perhaps the most thoroughly explored of feminist architecture's 'other spaces' as they have both been directly associated with the private sphere, and as such subordinated to the public city, in both patriarchal and capitalist cultures within the discourse of modernity. Research on the interior has had a special resonance for women, coming out of interior design or interior architecture, professional and academic disciplines, which have long been marginalized as women's work in relation to architecture. Mark Taylor and Julieanna Preston's book Intimus celebrates the difference of interiors from architecture, and Preston's own work as an architect-artist often involves transforming standard modularised building materials to reveal their unique and often sensual interiors, as well as creating installations from unruly, tactile materials, such as Bale (2011).
Critical Spatial Practice (Feminist):
The past decade has seen a flourishing of activity in feminism and architecture, driven by interdisciplinary concerns, which have re-located architecture in the expanded field of spatial practices. The rise in practice-led research as well as the influence of the writings of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau on spatial practice has produced an understanding of practice as a process which occurs not only through the design of buildings but also through activities of use, occupation and experience as well as writing and imaging. It is possible to draw connections between de Certeau's 'strategies' and Lefebvre's 'representations of space', on the one hand, and de Certeau's 'tactics' and Lefebvre's 'spaces of representation', on the other, and suggest a distinction between those practices or strategies that operate to maintain and reinforce existing social and spatial orders, and those practices or tactics that seek to critique and question them. I favour such a distinction and have introduced 'critical spatial practice' as a term that emphasises the 'critical' as a reflective and emancipatory activity emanating from the approach to critical theory taken by the Frankfurt School. This has also involved rethinking the role of theory, not to prove a hypothesis nor prescribe a particular methodology or solution to a problem, but rather as a mode of practice in its own right. If 'critical spatial practice' refers to self-reflective artistic and architectural practices which seek to question and transform the social conditions of the sites into which they intervene, as well as their own disciplinary procedures, what are the particular aspects that a feminist approach to critical spatial practice highlights?
Decolonisation:
On the 10th of March 2015, a student threw excrement at the statute of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Just one month later, the Rhodes Must Fall movement succeeded, and the statue came down. This action was an important symbolic rejection of the British imperialist and avowed white supremacist who some have called the 'architect of apartheid.' The action galvanised a dialogue in South Africa concerning race and oppression and it was watched around the world and reminded us in the UK that we are still behaving as a colonising power, at least if our architectural history curricula in universities are taken as evidence. We might be addressing our history of colonisation through 'postcolonial' seminars, but we need to take a decolonising approach. Decolonisation pushes for the undoing of colonialism and the colonial empires established prior to World War I throughout the world. However, decolonisation is not only the removal of dominating non-indigenous forces from the spaces and institutions of the colonised, it is also a process mental process which seeks to 'decolonise the mind' from the coloniser's ideas that made the colonised seem inferior.
ECOBox:
An important and timely volume, Altering Practices, edited by Doina Petrescu and published in 2007, focused the debate in feminism and architecture around the 'poetics and politics of the feminine'. In taking account of the feminine, as well as the feminist, the book acknowledges the role of aesthetics as well as ethics, form as well as function, in architecture. The volume originates in a conference that was held between L'École d'Architecture Paris Villemin and L'École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 1999 in Paris, under the title of Alterities. The book focuses on the other, and on an understanding of practices which aim to change, transform or alter. The notion of practicing 'otherwise' or 'otherhow' relates to the political and poetic perspective informed by feminism put forward by Doina Petrescu and manifest in the work of her practice with Constanin Petcou and others, as Atelier architecture d'autogérée (aaa) or studio for self-managed architecture. This participatory collaborative platform has been groundbreaking in engaging with ecological issues through projects such as ECObox and R-URBAN. And in my view, 'what it takes to make a relationship to make a thing', a phrase articulated by muf (see below), becomes in the work of aaa 'what it takes to make a thing to make a relationship', that the making of architecture could be a subterfuge for the re-making of subjects.
Feminist Killjoy:
Sara Ahmed's resignation from Goldsmith's College London in 2016, due to alleged issues of sexual harassment at the university she had not had the support to adequately tackle, drew the attention of feminists around the world. Her book Living a Feminist Life, a development of her influential blog, feministkilljoys, has been a rigorous reminder that all is not well in the establishment, and that the work of feminists in opposing across sexual, racial and class discrimination is very far from over. Through the figure of the feminist killjoy her book blends theory with her own story, and offers tools and a manifesto for other feminists seeking to challenge forms of oppression.
Greenpeace:
Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything from 2015 is a documentary film directed by Avi Lewis, and a companion piece to her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Klein charts a whole series of activist environmental projects from across the globe, many of which involve women leading the fight against extractivism. Crystal is a young indigenous Beaver Lake Cree Nation leader in Athabasca oil sands country who is fighting in Alberta, Canada for access to a restricted military base. Melachrini is a housewife opposed to mining and drilling projects by Canadian corporation Eldorado Gold, set against the backdrop of Greece in crisis. And Jyothi is a matriarch fighting a proposed coal-fired power plant that will destroy a wetland in Andhra Pradesh, India. On the 11th July 2013, a team of young women from Greenpeace climbed to the top of London's Shard to protest Shell's drilling of the arctic. What could be more of a feminist symbol then these brave female climbers scaling the glass skin of this neoliberal city's tallest tower?
Home:
Some of the key people resisting the demolition of social housing in London are also young women: the E15 Mums who occupied boarded up flats on the Carpenters Estate in protest at the planned destruction of their homes, or the women at New Era who fought off the rent hikes introduced by their private landlord, and most recently the courageous women leaseholders from the Aylesbury Estate who have led the resistance to the compulsory purchase order of the flats they worked hard to buy as council tenants.
Intersectionality:
In 1974 The Combahee River Collective produced a feminist theory of racial difference, which involved developing thematics common to the work of many black women writers, such as a focus on the strength of black women as opposed to their more commonly perceived status as victims, the relation of everyday experience to theoretical concepts, and the positive aspects of relationships between women. Fifteen years later, legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw of critical race theory introduced the term 'intersectionality theory', which argues that the experience of being a black woman must include the interactions, which frequently reinforce each other, of being black and of being a woman. Her work studies how intersecting social identities, particularly minority identities, relate to systems and structures of oppression, domination, or discrimination.
(Big) Jugs:
In the 1990s, the drawn and written projects of American architect and critic Jennifer Bloomer aimed to reveal the insufficiency of logical and rational structures such as spoken language to explain the world, and instead brought into operation the irrational and subversive elements in written texts - as the workings of the feminine. Drawing parallels between the creation of a building, assumed to be a clean act of control and precision, and the mess of childbirth, Bloomer questioned the gender of creativity. Through her dirty drawings and her incorporation of parts of the female anatomy - breasts, milk, fluids, blood, hatching, udders - into architecture, Bloomer generated a critique of the sterility of the architectural drawing process. The feminine in her work was to be found in the so-called slippage of words, for example, the term 'big jugs' placed within an architectural context suggested many things, including large breasts, but also the role of the feminine and female body as a container or empty signifier used to represent patriarchal ideologies. Bloomer's work demonstrated that the feminine can be a radical element in architectural practice.

The work of feminist architects at KTH in Stockholm, such as Katarina Bonnevier, Brady Burroughs, Catharina Gabrielsson, Katja Grillner, Rolf Hughes, Helena Mattsson, Karin Reisinger, Helen Runting, Meike Schalk, and Malin Zimm, has been especially important in developing feminist architecture practices through their solo work but also the collaborative pedagogical endeavor, FATALE, a project located in the architecture school that involved some of them. Their work has focused on activism and pedagogy - operating through different writing modes and forms of performative and participatory practice in art, architecture and public space. On international women's day this year, feminists at the Bartlett will celebrate with them the publication of a whole range of new books that document the work that this inspiring group of feminists have produced, curated and supported. The feminist critiques of the academy offered by FATALE have been accompanied by publications, edited by Harriet Harris, Ruth Morrow, James Soane and James Benedict Brown in the UK, and Katia Frey, Eliana Perotti and Torsten Lange in Zurich, whose tone is activist as well as academic, and that seek to challenge head-on discrimination in the profession and in education.
Liz Diller:
While the first feminist architectural history publication is possibly Doris Cole's From Tipi to Skyscraper: A History of Women in Architecture, in 1973, followed by important work by Dolores Hayden, Gwendolyn Wright and others, the 1990s saw discussions concerning the relationship between gender and space gain theoretical strength in the academy along with the publication of a whole range of books on architecture and its relation to sex, sexuality, gender and feminism, most famously Beatriz Colomina's Sexuality and Space, but also the UK publications Gender, Space, Architecture (which brought together a range of historical and interdisciplinary texts, edited by myself, Barbara Penner and Iain Borden) and Francesa Hughes' The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice. In working across the boundary between theory and practice, and between architecture and other disciplines, the 1990s also saw theoretically informed significant and influential feminist projects by conceptual practitioners such as Bloomer and Liz Diller. Works like Diller's Bad Press (1993) offered a critique of the disciplinary boundaries constructed between domestic life and professional architectural practice.
muf:
In Hanley, in 1998, muf won an open competition set up by Stoke City Council with the Public Art Commissioning Agency. muf's brief was to make a lifting barrier to prevent illegal traffic entering Hanley town centre as part of a larger urban regeneration project. But in dialogue with the council planner at an initial stage of the project, the brief was opened out to reveal how 'art can contribute to a safer, more social environment'. This was an important early project which challenged the scope of the brief and definitions of architecture and planning. As an architectural practice, muf has gone on to make influential and inspirational contributions to feminist architecture over the past twenty years. In the early years muf was frequently criticised in mainstream architectural media for not producing any 'architecture', but this was because the discourse was unable to recognize architecture as the production of anything other than stand-alone-object-buildings. muf's very mode of operation continues to evolve and invent new critiques of architectural design methodologies that emphasise form and object-making. Their working method highlights the importance of exchange across art and architecture, the participation of users in the design process and the importance of collaborating with other producers. For muf, the architectural design process is not an activity that leads to the making of a product, but rather the location of the work itself, and each project should raise the question they've articulated: 'what does it take to make a relationship to make a thing?' In architecture, to position a building as a 'methodology' rather than as an end result is still a radical proposition.
Nomadic Subjects:
The 1990s saw a rise in the relevance and pertinence of identity politics focusing on class, gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Emerging through, and at times diverging from, this discourse, has been the work of post-structuralist feminists, which has been particularly important for architecture in offering ways of thinking about position, situation and location. In this work new ways of knowing and being have been discussed in spatial terms, developing conceptual and critical tools such as 'situated knowledge' and 'standpoint theory' to examine the inter-relations between location, identity and knowledge. The poetic work of African American and Chicana writers, such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks, has been groundbreaking in bringing together politics and lived experience, as has the philosophical thinking of Rosi Braidotti, whose figure of the 'nomadic subject' describes not only a spatial state of movement, but also an epistemological condition, a kind of knowingness (or unknowingness) that refuses fixity.
OOO:
Feminist understandings of 'materiality' or matter show how material is not only the social and economic context for architecture but also an active ingredient in the processes of making architecture. The important work of feminist material philosophers, like Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers and Karen Barad, has provided a foundation for challenging the rise of OOO - or object-orientated ontology - for its gender blindness. An important new generation of thinkers like Claudia Dutson, Helene Frichot, Stephen Loo, Peg Rawes, Undine Sellbach and Katie Lloyd Thomas consider matter from an ecological perspective where humans are interconnected with animals, insects and things, and rethink the treatment of material processes in such architectural traditions as the specification. Feminist architects have also invented new kinds of details that maximise the environmental potential of architectural materials, most famously, Sarah Wigglesworth Architecture in the Straw Bale House (2001) at 9 Stock Orchard Street, and Ruth Morrow in her use of textiles in making concrete.
Parlour:
In the 1970s and 1980s there were many design build collectives which operated as critical alternatives to the capitalist system of building production, and the London-based feminist architectural cooperative Matrix was part of this tradition at its outset. The early 1990s saw the rise of various practices, such as muf, but also FAT and Fluid, which highlighted their collaborative intent by choosing non-proper nouns as names to challenge the usual single architectural signature of authorship. Currently there is a flowering of feminist collective practices in architecture and urbanism, some focused on building and planning, such as Atelier d'architecture autogérée; some more artistic, performative and activist, such as Taking Place and Mycket; and others focused on changing sexist forms of pedagogy and professional practice, like FATALE, Architexx and Parlour. Parlour's work on gender equity in the profession is theoretically informed, but most importantly is a practical initiative for supporting women in the profession, providing a whole range of innovative helpful tools, from the Parlour Guides to Equitable Practices to Marion's List.
LGBTQQIP2SAAA:
stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, pansexual, two spirit, androgynous, asexual and allies. This movement recognises the full spectrum of diversities of gendered and sexed identities and has been the most transformative change to feminism in recent years, challenging binary thinking and practice at all levels.
Race:
Lesley Lokko addressed issues of black identity decades ago in her edited book White Papers, Black Marks: Architecture, Race, Culture, which held fast to a strong sense of desire for political change while also recognizing the often contingent and situated conditions of race and identity . This book is cleverly subdivided into sections by scale: '1: 125,000 - Urban Angles', '1: 1250- Displacement/Diaspora', '1:1 - One on One', showing how racial discriminations and resistances to oppression take place from the macro to the micro, from strategic planning and policy making to architectural details and small-scale art projects. Scale can also describe a differential mapping of subjectivity, from the huge distances covered by movements of migration created through colonialisation and subsequent diasporic displacements, to the close-up proximity of more intimate relationships. Today Lokko is an important architectural educator at the forefront of debates on decolonising the curriculum.
Subjectivity:
In visual and spatial culture, feminists have drawn extensively on psychoanalytic theory to further understand relationships between the spatial politics of internal psychical figures and external cultural geographies. The field of psychoanalysis explores these various thresholds and boundaries between private and public, inner and outer, subject and object, personal and social in terms of a complex understanding of the relationship between 'internal' and 'external' space. The work of Elizabeth Grosz and Steve Pile has been particularly influential in this area, as have the writings of key Australian feminist philosophers, such as Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, whose thinking has revealed, from a feminist perspective, the spatial qualities of mainstream philosophy. The significance of current interest in the psyche might be understood then in terms of the position it occupies as the site of convergence between space and subjectivity, place and psyche, and the importance of feminist architecture in remaking subject positions.
Trouble:
Understandings of positioned knowledge from a range of post-structuralist feminists, such as Seyla Benhabib, Rosalyn Diprose, Jane Flax, Moira Gatens, Sandra Harding, Elspeth Probyn, Linda Nicholson and Andrea Nye, have made it clear that subjectivities are contingent and situated, and constructed in response to particular times and places. Donna Haraway's influential essay from the 1980s, 'Situated Knowledge', has really come into its own in recent years. Her argument - that objectivity is partial and constructed - has helped feminism avoid being seen to reject objectivity in favour of subjectivity, and instead facilitated powerful critiques of status quo positions. Her most recent book, Staying with the Trouble, reconceptualises the Anthropocene as the Chthulucene, as an epoch in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices. For Haraway, the Chthulucene requires what she calls sym-poiesis or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis or self-making.
Undecideability:
The philosophy of deconstruction developed by Jacques Derrida provided a critique of binary thinking, which was put to work by feminists in the 1990s, to showing how the hierarchical relationship often assigned to two terms in a pair is not natural or pre-given but a social construction. Feminist theorist Diane Elam observed that Derrida's understanding of 'undecideability' offered feminism more than an analytic tool, but also a political potential. And through the 1990s, feminist critique was particularly effective in mobilising the possibilities of Derridean deconstruction in architecture, to produce a thorough and ongoing critique of a number of binary oppositions, most specifically the 'separate spheres'. Feminist work has drawn attention to the spaces both marginalized within gendered binaries in mainstream architectural discourse such as the domestic and the interior, as well as those which exceed binary distinctions - margins, the between, the everyday, the heterotopic and the abject.
Visibility:
Conditions of visibility have been very much part of feminist debate over the past decades, in particular the ways in which the vital contribution of feminist forbears have often been obscured. Feminist architectural historian Karen Burns has noted very recently that despite the large number of feminist publications in the 1990s, this was also the decade that saw the absence of feminist texts in major architectural theory anthologies and that the 'feminine' was often included in such anthologies through invited contributions authored by men. Most provocatively Burns makes the excellent point that feminist architectural discourse and practice has, in various instances, in particular the discussions between Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman, been conducted by men through the bodies of women - through choric space. For quite some time in the mid-2000s the topic of feminism in architecture was less than visible, and many of the ideas advanced through feminism were taken up by other discourses. The danger is that, unless the references to feminism are made clear, we might 'unwrite' architecture's feminist genealogy. This then poses questions about acknowledgement, and raises the dangers of invisibility and of appropriation, to quote the Guerilla Girls, of 'seeing your ideas live on in others'. This is why it has been good to see a rise in studies by feminists of citational practice, and the work of Ramia Mazé and others examine exactly how practices of citation in the academy have worked to exclude women's contribution to the field.
Womanhouse:
While first wave feminism was focused on achieving equality, second wave feminism was characterised in many ways by a politics of difference. The slogan 'the personal is political' highlighted the need for public politics to engage with issues of private life - for the spaces between subjects in the setting of home and family to be understood as cultural formations - formed by and forming culture - and thus to be taken seriously by built environment professionals. This was work that was developed by radical feminists in the 1970s either by considering the important links between women and home - such as Womanhouse, 1971-2, feminist art programme at CalArts, with artists Judy Chicago, Miriam Shapiro and others; or by engaging with the difficulties women encountered in the public realm, such as mothers with young children traversing badly designed cityscapes. The feminist architectural cooperative MATRIX and the Women's Design Service addressed their work in the 1990s towards improving the conditions of women in the construction industry and also as users and clients. And in 2016, WAMT (Women in the Manual Trades) who had been supporting tradeswomen for over 40 years relaunched as Women on the Tools.
ArchiteXX:
Sexism back on the agenda - successive Architects' Journal studies in the UK have revealed that unacceptable levels of harassment exist in the architectural profession and the construction industry. And the results of the US Equity in Architecture Surveys from 2016 showed that 'underrepresented groups tended to face greater challenges relative to 'job-person fit'. And it is surely only time until the #metoo finds its way into architecture and the building industry. The AJ's initiatives to promote women in architecture, such as woman and emerging woman architect of the year, are certainly helping to promote women's work in architecture, but the fact that this is still needed in the 21st century is deeply troubling. Lori Brown's key interventions into media sites with ArchiteXX's wikibomb have reignited the feminist project of the 1970s - herstory - to write women back into architectural history. And this initiative is not alone. There are sister projects around the world, and those that I have heard from recently include: Berlin, Frankfurt, Lisbon, Moscow, Seville, Sheffield, Valencia, and Zurich, where challenges are being made to the lack of female representation in university curriculum and professional judging panels, and where research is being conducted that writes women back into history. See for example, Mary Pepchinski and Mariann Simon's Ideological Equals: Women Architects in Socialist Europe. 1945-1989 (2016); Mary Pepchinski, Christina Budde, Wolfgang Voigt, and Peter Cachola Schmal's Frau Architekt: Over 100 years of Women in Architecture (2017) and Lynne Walker and Elizabeth Darling's AA Women in Architecture 1917-2017 (2017). While important initiatives have been set up to award women architects recognition for their work, such as the arcVision Women and Architecture Prize, which has been won by South American architects like Tatiana Bilbao and Carla Juaçaba, and whose all-woman jury includes influential figures from across the globe.
Yearning:
Common to the development of all architectural practices attentive to gender difference is a commitment to diversity and the production of work which bridges theory, history and design. While societies continue to expect that women bear children, and while women still bear the responsibility of being the primary child-carers, female architects will face problems of negotiating the twin demands of home and work and of facing continuing discrimination in the architectural profession and education. But as bell hooks points out so eloquently, 'it is our capacity to imagine that lets us move beyond boundaries'. hooks' writing looks at the role of space, both real and metaphorical, in shaping us as human beings in terms of lived experience and aspiration. When hooks explores the margin/centre binary in describing the politics and spaces of location in her book Yearning, she thinks of how these two positions might be occupied simultaneously. For hooks, theory is emancipatory, it allows the margin to be considered in a different way, as a positive space, not only of domination but also resistance, of oppression and radical possibility.
Zaha:
The death of the influential Iraqi woman architect, Zaha Hadid, in 2016, prompted many of the great and good in the architectural profession to acknowledge her creativity and achievements, when in life, she had struggled especially in her early career to achieve recognition. The manner of the acknowledgements served a culture in architecture which celebrates the one-off genius. The impetus was to bolster the canon, inviting those who had been kept out in, rather than prompting conversations about the lack of media coverage of women architects in general, or more importantly the fact that many women architects do not seek stardom, but recognition and equity.

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Feminist Architecture: From A to Z - R / D

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Jane Rendell Audre Lorde: For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time.

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https://www.tandfonline.com/action/doSearch?AllField=Architectural+models&SeriesKey=ratr20

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https://www.dezeen.com/2019/10/31/last-redoubt-architectural-model-museum-wutopia-lab-china/amp/

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Wutopia Lab has used over 5,000 white steel pipes to form the structure of The Last Redoubt, China's first museum for architectural models.

Steel walkways connect rooms lined with thin white columns, where the models are displayed on floating white shelves at different levels.

Designed by for exhibition company Fengyuzhu, the museum is divided into zones with names taken from science fiction films such as the Pod Bay and the Thunder Dome, from 2001: A Space Odyssey and Mad Max respectively.

Fengyuzhu' founder Li Hui found inspiration for the project in the Archi-Depot Museum in Tokyo, the first museum of its kind in Japan, which is located in a former warehouse.

"When I looked through photos of Archi-Depot, an idea popped into my head," said Yu Ting, chief architect of Wutopia Lab.

"Since the museum focuses on models of various built or unbuilt projects, if we look at these vastly different projects from a macro perspective, and ignore the difference in region and time period, they can form a world together."

The collection was chosen to present architectural visions of the future.

Originally the intention was to use curtains to define the spaces, but once the steel rods were in place Yu was "deeply touched" by the effect they had on light entering the museum.

The diaphanous effect of vertical dividers is designed to give the sense that The Last Redoubt is one giant architectural model housing scores of models, like a dollhouse.

The central space - accessed via a corridor called Stargate - is lined with glass at its edges and a ceiling of distorted mirrors.

Around this wraps a ring of exhibition spaces separated by partitions of steel rods that create a complex series of sight-lines and a dynamic play of light through the interiors.

The Last Redoubt's exhibition spaces operate at two scales: model and human. At the scale of the models, the structure has ten storeys of cantilevering shelves protruding from the steel pipework walls.

At the human scale there are two levels, with the main exhibition areas at ground level and a mezzanine walkway allowing visitors to see the higher shelves

In one corner of the museum is the circular Thunder Dome. Lined with white panels and lit by an illuminated ceiling, it is a media hub with virtual reality technology.

"Although I named it the Thunder Dome, it is a peaceful place filled with divine light," said Yu.

Wutopia Lab's previous projects include a pair of pink and blue houses exploring ideas of masculinity and femininity, and a visitor centre in Qinhuangdo with a striped facade inspired by a nautical T-shirts.

Photography is by CreatAR Images.
Project credits:
Architects: Wutopia Lab
Lead architect: Yu Ting
Project architect: Wutian SUN
Design team: Haixu ZHANG, Ben ZHANG
Construction: Shanghai Maichang Construction Ltd.
Client: Fengyuzhu

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White steel spaces form sci-fi themed architectural model museum in China

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Wutopia Lab has used over 5,000 white steel pipes to form the structure of The Last Redoubt, China's first museum for architectural models.

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Nasra Abdullahi is a designer, writer and editor based in London. She is the 2021 guest editor of The Avery Review and a member of the second cohort of New Architecture Writers. A student at the Bartlett School of Architecture, she is interested in ways we can seek equitable futures through material cultures away from projected architectural and urban desires.

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Nasra Abdullahi is a designer, writer and editor based in London. She is the 2021 guest editor of The Avery Review and a member of the second cohort of New Architecture Writers. A student at the Bartlett School of Architecture, she is interested in ways we can seek equitable futures through material cultures away from projected architectural and urban desires.

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https://thefunambulist.net/network/rasheedah-phillips

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Rasheedah Phillips is a queer Philadelphia-based housing attorney, parent, and interdisciplinary artist. Phillips is the founder of The AfroFuturist Affair, a founding member of Metropolarity Queer Speculative Fiction Collective, co-founder of Black Quantum Futurism, and co-creator of Community Futures Lab. As part of BQF and as a solo artist, Phillips is currently a CERN Artist Resident, Vera List Center Fellow, Knight Art + Tech Fellow, a former Pew and A Blade of Grass fellow.

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Rasheedah Phillips is a queer Philadelphia-based housing attorney, parent, and interdisciplinary artist.

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https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.7228/manchester/9780719082719.001.0001/upso-9780719082719

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The Colonisation of Time: Ritual, Routine and Resistance in the British Empire

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Abstract. The Colonisation of Time is a highly original and long overdue examination of the ways that western-European and specifically British concepts and rit

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https://www.routledge.com/The-Feminist-Architecture-of-Postmodern-Anti-Tales-Space-Time-and-Bodies/Reynolds/p/book/9781032240077

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This monograph aims to counter the assumption that the anti-tale is a 'subversive twin' or dark side of the fairy tale coin, instead it argues that the anti-tale is a genre rich in complexity and radical potential that fundamentally challenges the damaging ideologies and socializing influence of fairy tales.

The Feminist Architecture of Postmodern Anti-Tales: Space, Time and Bodies highlights how anti-tales take up timely debates about revising old structures, opening our minds up to a broader spectrum of experience or ways of viewing the world and its inhabitants. They show us alternative architectures for the future by deconstructing established spatio-temporal laws and structures, as well as limited ideas surrounding the body, and ultimately liberate us from the shackles of a single-minded and simplistic masculine reality currently upheld by dominant social forces and patriarchal fairy tales themselves. It is only when these masculine fairy tales and social architectures are deconstructed that new, more inclusive feminine realities and futures can be brought into being.

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The Feminist Architecture of Postmodern Anti-Tales: Space, Time, and Bodies

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This monograph aims to counter the assumption that the anti-tale is a 'subversive twin' or dark side of the fairy tale coin, instead it argues that the anti-tale is a genre rich in complexity and radical potential that fundamentally challenges the damaging ideologies and socializing influence of fairy tales.The Feminist Architecture of Postmodern Anti-Tales: Space, Time and Bodies highlights how anti-tales take up timely debates about revising old structures, opening our minds up to a broade

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In this podcast, Renisa Mawani introduces her current work that uses the migrant ship Komagata Maru to address migration within its legal and temporal dimensions. We then continue this conversation by examining the arguments she made in the 2012 article "Law's Archive," which examines the available means to archive law within the collective narrative that the archive constitute. This means are politically and physically determined in such a way that the indigenous contribution - not always textual for instance - to this collective narrative cannot fully take part in it. This conversation has therefore for goal to challenge the way we commonly understand the notion of archive in the Western world, in order for a larger plurality of narratives to enter the common history.

Renisa Mawani is Associate Professor of Sociology and the first Chair of the Law and Society Minor Program at the University of British Columbia (2009-2010). She works in the fields of critical theory and legal history and has published widely on law, coloniality, and legal geography. Her articles have appeared in journals including, Law and Society Review, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Environment and Planning D, Theory, Culture, and Society, and Cultural Geographies. Her first book, Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Contacts and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871-1921 (2009) details the dynamic legal encounters between indigenous peoples, Chinese migrants, mixed-race populations, and Europeans in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-centuries. Her second book, Across Oceans of Law (in progress), is a global legal history of the Komagata Maru, a Japanese steamship that carried 376 Punjabi migrants from Hong Kong to Canada, and to India in 1914. The book draws on oceans to explore questions of empire, law, and time. She is also co-editor of "The Travels of Law: Indian Ocean Itineraries" (with Iza Hussin, University of Chicago) which is to be published by Law and History Review in Fall 2014.
WEBSITE:
- http://soci.ubc.ca/persons/renisa-mawani/
REFERENCE ARTICLES:
- Renisa Mawani, "Law's Archive", Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 8, 337-365, 2012.
- Jacques Derrida, "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority,'" in Acts of Religion, ed., G. Anidjar, pp. 228-298. New York: Routledge, 2001.
- Jacques Derrida, "Archive Fever in South Africa," in Refiguring the Archive, eds., C. Hamilton, V. Harris, J. Taylor, M. Pickover, G. Reid, R. Saleh, pp. 38-80. London: Kulwer Academic Publishing, 2002.
- Nora Akawi, " Mapping Intervals: Toward an Emancipated Cartography" (September 2012), for The Funambulist Papers: Volume 1 (Punctum Books, 2013)
REFERENCE BOOKS:
- Renisa Mawani, Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871-1921, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010.
- Renisa Mawani, Accross Oceans of Law, forthcomingJacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by E. Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
- Cornelia Vismann, Files: Law and Media Technology. Translated by G. Winthrop-Young. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008a.
ASSOCIATED PODCASTS ON ARCHIPELAGO:
- "The Architect's Expertise in a Judicial Context" with Nina Kolowratnik (March 2014)
- "The Politics of Ruin: What's Hidden under Rubble?" with Gastón Gordillo (May 2014)
- "Law, Space and Bodies" with Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (October 2013)

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RENISA MAWANI /// The Archive: Fragments and Forces of Indigeneity

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In this podcast, Renisa Mawani introduces her current work that uses the migrant ship Komagata Maru to address migration within its legal and temporal dimensions. We then continue this conversation by examining the arguments she made in the 2012 article "Law's Archive," which examines the available means to archive law within the collective narrative that the archive constitute.

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An Indigenous Feminist's Take On The Ontological Turn: 'Ontology' Is Just Another Word For Colonialism

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In this article, I ask how anthropology can adopt a decolonial approach that incorporates and acknowledges the critical scholarship of Indigenous thinkers whose work and labour informs many current t...

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https://waithinktank.com/Narrative-Architecture-Manifesto

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Narrative Architecture

Manifesto
There is a form of architecture that aims at not getting built. An architecture on paper that should not be confused with paper architecture. An architecture based on pure statements in which real brick, mortar, and poured concrete are substituted by cut-and- pasted paper and narrative prose. An architecture about the failed and accomplished ambitions of buildings and master plans. An architecture that although focused on the critique of this ambition, is not concerned with just any form of critique. An architecture not preoccupied with the expert's view in newspapers, nor the common man's comments on populist design blogs, nor the propaganda centrefolds of glossy magazines. An architecture that talks directly to architecture about architecture. An architecture of disciplinary struggle. This form of architecture focuses on the critique of ideology, after recognizing that ideology - in its multiple incarnations - has infiltrated all spheres of architectural production, including the sphere of criticism itself. An architecture that through narrative texts and a vast repertoire of images (collages, photomontages, drawings, storyboards, comic strips, animations) - creates allegorical stories that aim to expose the impasse and misfires of architecture in theory and practice. This form of architecture is simultaneously both theory and practice. It is theory as practice; critique as architectural project. This form of architecture is called Narrative Architecture and this is its manifesto.

Coup
In order to be an effective tool against the seriousness of architectural discourse, Narrative Architecture relies on the subversive power of humor. It paints cheeky portraits that parody through irony and sarcasm the shortcomings of ideology. Narrative Architecture turns disillusion into mockery, disappointment into subversive critique, pessimism into kynical reason.(1) It drills the sharpness of critique into the ossified shell of hegemonic architectural discourse. Narrative Architecture is made out of blown-up impostures. Its components are exaggerated characteristics innate to architecture. Architectural ambition freed from the pragmatic distortions of selective inhibition.

Although ostensibly heroic, Narrative Architecture is not utopian. Its colossal monuments, impossible landscapes, and allegoric texts are real depictions mirroring the absurd scenarios imagined by architectural discourse. Narrative Architecture implies the sublime autonomy of theory. Narrative Architecture is pure theory under a magnifying glass. It is architecture as ' endless supermarket',' continuous monument' and 'voluntary imprisonment'. Narrative Architecture is the product of failed struggles and lost wars. It recognizes its inability to 'win' the fight. It feeds from past, present, and future failures. Because it learned that Team 10, Yona Friedman, and even artist-turned-urbanist Constant failed to break from the modernist discourse and the tools of its ideology, Narrative Architecture turns the tools of ideology against themselves.

If Modernism used every medium available - publications, architecture, urban plans, even CIAM as a platform to project its ideology - to shoot down the opposition, Narrative Architecture points the ideological guns back at Modernism. When an architectural position tries to consolidate itself as a hegemonic discourse and avoids "coming voluntarily to the table of negotiation" with its opponents, Narrative Architecture provokes "the polemical continuation of the miscarried dialogue through other means".(2) Narrative Architecture summons the dialectic properties of narrative in order to reestablish the conversation and expose the lies. If architecture promises a city made of glittering white concrete, Narrative Architecture casts the whole world in cement. If architecture renders buildings behind curtains of dense green foliages, Narrative Architecture depicts a universe contained in a forest of skyscraping trees. If architecture decides to surf the waves of economic and social indifference, Narrative Architecture projects a world washed away by a neoliberal tsunami.

Narrative Architecture tackles every form of 'enlightened false consciousness' and reveals what lies behind the disguising masks of social impromptu and urban reconstruction; of the intoxicating greenery of certified sustainability and neoliberalist social philanthropy, of the aesthetic fantasies-turned urban oversimplifications of parametricism and other momentary aesthetic trends; of the perverse reductionism of cartoonish diagrams and immaculate renders.(3) Narrative Architecture doesn't shoot down the banners and slogans of architectural discourse, it reads them aloud against the ideological wind so as to reveal their absurdity.

Post Mortem
Because ideology presents concepts as their opposite - lies as truth, opportunism as responsibility, self-consciousness as social consciousness - it has condemned Narrative Architecture to the sterile indifference of the museum wall, to the anesthetizing beauty of the art book. However, Narrative Architecture belongs on the drawing board, on the computer screen, in the architectural discussion. Narrative Architecture belongs to the present, to the schools, to the practices. Narrative Architecture reveals the condition of the zeitgeist, now. If Ideology is doublethink, Narrative Architecture screams "down with Big Brother". While ideology is watching you, Narrative Architecture watches it back. In a world driven by nonsensical statements, the most absurd of positions then becomes the clearest path. When everything seems to stagnate, Narrative Architecture keeps moving.

1
The concept of ideology critique applied here is borrowed from Peter Sloterdijk Critique of Cynical Reason (1983). According to Sloterdijk Kynicism, as opposed to modern cynicism (enlightened false consciousness), could be used as a strategy to destabilize the hegemomic powers of the establishment. Kynicism consists often of humor (through satire or irony) that attempts to highlight the impasse of absurd intellectual postures in order to carry out an ideology critique. For more see Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

2
"Enlightenment is reminded how easily speaking openly can lead to camps and prisoners. Hegemonic powers cannot be addressed so easily; they do not come voluntarily to the negotiating table with their opponents, whom they would prefer to have behind bars." (...) "Ideology critique means the polemical continuation of the miscarried dialogue through other means. It declares a war on consciousness, even when it pretends to be so serious and 'nonpolemical'". Ibid

3
Thus, we come to our first definition: "Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness." Ibid.

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Narrative Architecture Manifesto - WAI Think Tank

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Narrative Architecture Manifesto There is a form of architecture that aims at not getting built. An architecture on paper that should not be confused with paper architecture. An architecture based on pure statements in which real brick, mortar,...

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https://www.academia.edu/37031391/Archives_Museums_and_Collecting_Practices_in_the_Modem_Arab_World

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Archives, Museums and Collecting Practices in the Modem Arab World

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Introduction co-authored with John Pedro Schwartz