architecture Archives

Resisting Postmodern Architecture

Since its first appearance in 1981, critical regionalism has enjoyed a celebrated worldwide reception. The 1990s increased its pertinence as an architectural theory that defends the cultural identity of a place resisting the homogenising onslaught of globalisation. Today, its main principles (such as acknowledging the climate, history, materials, culture and topography of a specific place) are integrated in architects’ education across the globe. But at the same time, the richer cross-cultural history of critical regionalism has been reduced to schematic juxtapositions of ‘the global’ with ‘the local’.

Retrieving both the globalising branches and the overlooked cross-cultural roots of critical regionalism, Resisting Postmodern Architecture resituates critical regionalism within the wider framework of debates around postmodern architecture, the diverse contexts from which it emerged, and the cultural media complex that conditioned its reception. In so doing, it explores the intersection of three areas of growing historical and theoretical interest: postmodernism, critical regionalism and globalisation.

Based on more than 50 interviews and previously unpublished archival material from six countries, the book transgresses existing barriers to integrate sources in other languages into anglophone architectural scholarship. In so doing, it shows how the ‘periphery’ was not just a passive recipient, but also an active generator of architectural theory and practice. Stylianos Giamarelos challenges long-held ‘central’ notions of supposedly ‘international’ discourses of the recent past, and outlines critical regionalism as an unfinished project apposite for the 21st century on the fronts of architectural theory, history and historiography.

Marble in the Making

Ireland’s geological bedrock, though often overlooked, contains an exceptional range of varicoloured marbles comparable to continental varieties and in some cases superior. Marble in the Making focuses on Victorian Ireland, an architectural landscape characterised by neo-Gothic design and the high point of indigenous marble production. It demonstrates that the architecture of this period is distinguished by native polychromy, a feature that was shaped by the resurgence of Gothic architecture and driven by post-Famine entrepreneurship and industrialisation.

This is the first major study of Irish marble. It uncovers the largely unheard-of marble industry by tracing stone from quarry source to marble works to building. The book’s interdisciplinary approach identifies key marble deposits and their distinctive characteristics, outlines workshop and quarry practices, reconstructs trade paths and reveals connections between communities. It enables a holistic and contextual attribution of architectural marble and broadens the understanding of nineteenth-century Irish Gothic Revival architecture. Moreover, this research repositions Irish marble within an international framework, highlighting its contribution to transnational material culture and geological heritage.

Experiments with Body Agent Architecture

Experiments with Body Agent Architecture puts forward the notion of body agents: non-ideal, animate and highly specific figures integrated with design to enact particular notions of embodied subjectivity in architecture. Body agents present opportunities for architects to increase imaginative and empathic qualities in their designs, particularly amidst a posthuman condition.

Beginning with narrative writing from the viewpoint of a body agent, an estranged ‘quattrocento spiritello’ who finds himself uncomfortably inhabiting a digital milieu (or, as the spiritello calls it, ‘Il Regno Digitale’), the book combines speculative historical fiction and original design experiments. It focuses on the process of creating the multi-media design experiments, moving from the design of the body itself as an original prosthetic to architectural proposals emanating from the body.

A fragmented history of the figure in architecture is charted and woven into the designs, with chapters examining Michelangelo’s enigmatic figures in his drawings for the New Sacristy in the early sixteenth century, Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s physically ephemeral ‘putti’ adorning chapels and churches in the seventeenth century, and Austrian artist-architect Walter Pichler’s personal and prescient figures of the twentieth century.

Dwelling on the Future

Dwelling on the Future focuses on the design of dwellings and their varied environments, and questions how an architect responds to the challenge of providing humane places in which to live for a growing, multifarious population in an increasingly divided world. The issue is never just housing. People – individuals, groups and societies – can and do have different goals and aspirations. Is it possible to imagine and implement a world in which a level of comfort and stability is available for even the poorest members of societies?

Pierre d’Avoine covers a wide range of examples, including proposals for luxury housing and designs for low-cost dwellings, which all address the needs and desires of their potential inhabitants. He explores an inclusive approach to the design of settlements – and not just in cities – that recognises difference, an approach that demands a fresh political vision to resolve humanity’s increasing inequality, for the benefit of all. D’Avoine asks if we can respond with optimism to the Kabakovs’ mordantly titled installation ‘Not Everyone Will Be Taken Into the Future (2001)’. While this was perhaps a statement of fact in Russia and elsewhere in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, it is implicit, and ever more so, in the West today.

Architecture as a Way of Seeing and Learning

At the beginning of 2020, 66 long-term refugee camps existed along the East African Rift. Millions of young children have been born at the camps and have grown up there, yet it is unknown how their surrounding built environments affect their learning and development.

Architecture as a Way of Seeing and Learning presents an architect’s take on questions many academics and humanitarians ask. Is it relevant to look at camps through an urban lens and focus on their built environment? Which analytical benefits can architectural and design tools provide to refugee assistance and specifically to young children’s learning? And which advantages can assemblage thinking and situated knowledges bring about in analysing, understanding and transforming long-term refugee camps?

Responding to the extreme lack of information about East African camps, Nerea Amorós Elorduy has built contextualised knowledge – nuanced, situated and participatory – to describe, study and transform the East African long-term camps, and uncover hidden agencies in refugee assistance. She uses architecture as a means to create new knowledge collectively, include more local voices and speculate on how to improve the educational landscape for young children.

With this book, Amorós Elorduy brings nuance, contextualisation and empathy to the study and management of long-term refugee camps in East Africa. It is empathy, she argues, that will help change mindsets, decolonise humanitarian refugee assistance and its study. Crossing architecture, humanitarian aid and early career development, this book offers many practical learnings.

Architecture of Memory

Architecture of Memory explores architectural disappearance, urban remembrance and functional change amid social upheaval. Using archival, architectural and artistic methods, Natalia Romik investigates the spectral architecture of former shtetls – predominantly Jewish towns in Central and Eastern Europe before the Second World War. After the war, these towns were repopulated by people of other nationalities, who reused former Jewish properties. Today, traces of the Jewish populations have nearly vanished from urban reality and public discourse. Romik’s work seeks to discover new ways to develop abandoned shtetl architecture, focusing on Jewish heritage sites like synagogue ruins and ritual baths.

Through an interdisciplinary approach that merges architectural design, contemporary art and Jewish studies, Romik’s experimental research addresses the complex social issues of former shtetls by combining theoretical discussions with artistic performances and architectural interventions. The book documents projects ranging from subtle, mirror-clad interventions – such as the Nomadic Shtetl Archive, JAD, and Hurdy-Gurdy – to practical renovations that transform derelict synagogues and Jewish pre-burial houses into historical museums and cultural centres. These efforts confront the ‘present absence’ of these towns by merging theoretical discourse with archival research, artistic performances and architectural interventions, aimed at investigating the lost Jewish communities’ spectral architecture.

Architecture’s Model Environments

Seen through the distilling lens of the architectural model, Architecture’s Model Environments is a novel and far-reaching exploration of the many dialogues buildings have with their environmental surroundings. Expanding on histories of building technology, the book sheds new light on how physical models conventionally understood as engineering experimentation devices enable architectural design speculation.

The book begins with a catalogue of ten original model prototypes – of wind tunnels, water tables and filling boxes – and is the first of its kind to establish an architectural approach to fabricating such environmental models. Subsequent chapters feature three precedent models that have been largely overlooked within the wider oeuvres of their authors: French polymath Étienne-Jules Marey’s 1900-2 wind tunnels, Hungarian-American architects Victor and Aladár Olgyay’s 1955-63 thermoheliodon, and Scottish chemist and building ventilation expert David Boswell ‘The Ventilator’ Reid’s 1844 test tube convection experiments.

Moving between historic moments and the present day, between case studies and original prototypes, the book reveals the potent ability for models, as both physical artefacts and mental ideals, to reflect prevailing cultural views about the world and to even reshape those views. Fundamentally, Architecture’s Model Environments illustrates how environmental models reveal design insights across scales from the seam (that leaks) to the body (that feels) to the building (that mediates) to the world (that immerses).

Architecture in Dialogue with an Activated Ground

Architecture in Dialogue with an Activated Ground sets out to validate the role of the unreasonable in the design process.

Using case study projects, architect Urs Bette gives an insight into the epistemological processes of his creative practice, and unveils the strategies he deploys in order to facilitate the poetic aspects of architecture within a discourse whose evaluation parameters predominantly involve reason. Themes discussed include the emergence of space from the staged opposition between the architectural object and the site, and the relationship between emotive cognition and analytic synthesis in the design act. In both cases, there is a necessary engagement with forms of ‘unreasonable’ thought, action or behaviours.

By arguing for the usefulness and validity of the unreasonable in architecture, and by investigating the performative relationship between object and ground, Bette contributes to the discourse on extensions, growth and urban densification that tap into local histories and voices, including those of the seemingly inanimate – the architecture itself and the ground it sits upon – to inform the site-related production of architectural character and space. In doing so, he raises debates about the values pursued in design approval processes, and the ways in which site-relatedness is both produced and judged.

Re-Centring the City

What is the role of monumentality, verticality and centrality in the twenty-first century? Are palaces, skyscrapers and grand urban ensembles obsolete relics of twentieth-century modernity, inexorably giving way to a more humble and sustainable de-centred urban age? Or do the aesthetics and politics of pomp and grandiosity rather linger and even prosper in the cities of today and tomorrow?

Re-Centring the City zooms in on these questions, taking as its point of departure the experience of Eurasian socialist cities, where twentieth-century high modernity arguably saw its most radical and furthest-reaching realization. It frames the experience of global high modernity (and its unravelling) through the eyes of the socialist city, rather than the other way around: instead of explaining Warsaw or Moscow through the prism of Paris or New York, it refracts London, Mexico City and Chennai through the lens of Kyiv, Simferopol and the former Polish shtetls. This transdisciplinary volume re-centres the experiences of the ‘Global East’, and thereby our understanding of world urbanism, by shedding light on some of the still-extant (and often disavowed) forms of ‘zombie’ centrality, hierarchy and violence that pervade and shape our contemporary urban experience.

Practising Ethics

Grappling with ethics can disorientate and disturb your peace of mind in the small hours of the night. Practising Ethics transforms ethics from an obstacle to an opportunity by offering a poethic infrastructure to guide the development of ethical practice in architectural and urban research.

Practising Ethics bridges the gap between research volume and textbook. The book’s two-part structure creates a dialogue between ethical concepts derived from decolonial, ecological, feminist and queer theory, and lived ethical experiences that are explored through specific situations. A series of opening essays present hotspots, touchstones, keystones, blindspots, moonshots and milestones as different ethical orientations in a six-point methodology. This is followed by six case studies in which practitioners and researchers navigate these orientations through narrative figurations that describe ethical deliberations arising from social science, humanities, practice-led and participatory art and architectural design research in El Salvador, India, Nigeria, Peru and the United Kingdom.

The book acts as a companion to an award-winning online toolkit and is illustrated by Judit Ferencz who offers creative exercises for readers to develop their own poethic infrastructures.