Search

No image is more common in surveys of architectural theory than the frontispiece of the second edition of Laugier’s Essai sur l’architecture.1 In lecture courses that race through centuries in the ...

Architectural theory, the British Garden City concept, and the precedent of post-war British cities were central to Zionist planning before the establishment of the State of Israel during the 1948 ...

Writing the architecture survey remains one of the biggest challenges in the field. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western scholars usually followed a synchronic approach (literally ‘with-time’)...

This study is an exploration of Marcel Breuer’s basic design methodology as it appears in his writings, particularly his 1956 monograph Marcel Breuer: Sun and Shadow, the Philosophy of an Architect...

This paper discusses Architectural History and Theory at the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg in 2019. The curriculum is centered on a series of conversations as the means to generate forms of engagement for a plurality of voices, contested views and dialogic encounters, as a way of working toward an alternative institutional imaginary. The focus on conversation and dialogue aims to create a space for slow and shared scholarship, to become a manifestation of spatial resistance to the imperatives of the neoliberal university and global economies of higher education. This paper discusses some of the key conceptual and practical moves undertaken in the development of a new history and theory course through examples of student work. The paper points to inclusive and reflexive pedagogical methods and modes of collaboration as central to resistance, and as the means that enable generative and supportive networks across geographic and institutional boundaries.

This essay investigates Aldo Rossi’s coffee vessel models as exhibited in his “Domestic Theater” project as a mediator between conflicting ideas in his architectural and urban theory. Entangled wit...

The significance of Pierre Bourdieu’s work for architectural theory is partly owing to his account of capital. For Bourdieu, capital is not limited to economic resources, but it also includes speci...

Figure 1 Book cover for Jan Gehl, Life Between Buildings (Washington, DC and London: Island Press, 2011), by Alixandra Hermanso and Macy Miller, architecture students, 2017, displayed in the Klai J...

In outlining their influential architectural theory of space syntax, Hillier and Hanson acknowledge its affinity to Durkheim’s sociological considerations on the spatial-morphological basis of social life. In doing so, space syntax theory promised to address the then woefully under-theorized relationship between society and space, specifically by emphasizing the agency of spatial-morphological arrangements. Given the Durkheimian inspiration, it is surprising that sociology has been so silent on the subject of space syntax. This lack of dialogue may be explained by the gestation of space syntax research within the specialist disciplinary silo of architectural theory, as well as by the default sociological assessment that formal methodologies of spatial analysis – such as those associated with space syntax – sustain a discredited fallacy of physical determinism. Yet, intellectually this situation is unfortunate: while sociology overlooks how space syntax theory has advanced the Durkheimian understanding of spatial morphologies, space syntax theory misses an opportunity to update and broaden its notion of social processes. In response, we revisit Durkheim’s social morphology and review the strengths and deficits of Hillier and Hanson’s consideration of Durkheimian theory. We identify how difficulties arise because of an over-reliance of space syntax theory on the structural-functionalist macro-wing of the Durkheimain tradition. To address this issue, we prepare the ground for a theoretical engagement between space syntax and the micro-sociological branch of Durkheiminan scholarship, and show how this tradition offers a more coherent means for translating the spatio-morphological insights of space syntax theory into contemporary debates in the sociology of space.

Only one retrospective of Yves Klein was presented during the artist’s lifetime, in 1961 at Museum Haus Lange, a gallery in the city of Krefeld, Germany, housed in a little-known brick vill...

There is increasing interest among architectural historians in addressing environmental concerns on both historical and theoretical terms. Simultaneously, other fields have been looking to architectural scholarship to understand the historical relationship between the built and the natural environment. For architectural historians, and others, this has also involved correlating the shifting discourse on environment with a history of architectural transformations and disciplinary expansions. These engagements have made clear that the environmental history of architecture does not simply add more objects to the historical database, but also changes the terms of historical analysis, as new matters of concern and new conceptual frameworks come to the fore. This paper gathers together a dialogic set of projections from scholars responding to the question of how we might newly understand the historical relationship between the built and the natural environment, and the opportunities and challenges this new phase presents to scholars, design researchers, and architects.

Departing from observations collected in an architecture firm, this essay investigates the way in which an architect expressed his concerns for what the material he intended to use “wants to do”. Adopting a speculative and pragmatist perspective, I detect there a possibility of thinking about architects’ responsibility as a moral exchange with beings involved in the design process. The text addresses two interpretations of that situation that could hinder the possibility of a more relational architectural practice. The first reduces the designer’s formulation to a rhetorical means to expose his ability to take constraints into account. The second interprets it as the expression of the architects’ moral obligation to respect the material’s intrinsic nature. Two diverging notions of responsibility are at stake, which are here contrasted with a third one. Built on a materialist view on ethics, the ethological perspective allows the acknowledgement of what the material and the designer become capable of together., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

With this special issue of Architectural Theory Review, we set out to discuss theory (of architecture) as a practice. In order to resist what we perceive to be the persistent division of labour between theoria and praxis, we want to expand and reclaim what can be included under these rubrics.1 And we want to do this in such a way as to draw attention to the specificity of situations. Practices (of space, of architecture) are always entangled with the lives of people, places, and things. They refer to specific, situated problems in response to which we believe it is crucial to resist ready-made answers and to accept the constraints of the milieu in which we find ourselves. We thus call for situated, relational, and embodied perspectives in architectural scholarship rather than distant, autonomous, and authoritarian ones. But we also ask how, in undertaking this work, we can strive to reclaim a capacity for agency in situations that have become oppressive or where power relations have become imbalanced. We feel confronted with the difficult task of resisting how the situations we study are presented to us (through theory) and of speculating instead on how these situations might be envisioned otherwise by reclaiming other (forgotten, inconvenient, odd…) versions of such situations. We draw our inspiration from radical (feminist) thinkers, including Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, and Karen Barad. The relevance of these perspectives for architectural and urban studies—and more specifically, Donna Haraway’s “situated viewpoints” and Isabelle Stengers’ “ecology of practices” and “cosmopolitics”—are becoming increasingly evident.2 With this special issue, we ask explicitly how such approaches can inform new critical engagements with architecture and the city. Through slowing down, hesitation, and “category work”,3 we have invited scholars to resist the taxonomies and conceptual categories with which they have become accustomed, or feel obliged, to think. Our proposal for this special issue also reads as an invitation to reconnect with (hi)stories and (radical) imaginations that tell alternative stories. And through reconnecting with situated stories, we argue that other forms and imaginations of engagement, of resistance, can emerge. Hence our cry: Resist, Reclaim, Speculate! In asking how theory “as a practice” can respond to our cry, we believe three moves are necessary. Firstly, we ask: What are the methodological and ethical consequences of considering theory as a practice? Secondly, we take this challenge as an invitation to expand our understanding of what should be included in the discussion of architecture, which is also to ask what “matters” to the understanding of architecture? Finally, what kinds of stories emerge when we respect the situated nature of the spaces, buildings, plans, and issues we study? And how do these stories make a difference?

This article considers the potential of drawing for studying subaltern architectures. The subaltern architectures under discussion are a series of markets in Cape Town, South Africa, which are occu...

The performance of buildings remains topical, but in many current conversations the definitions of ‘good performance’ are taken for granted. Building performance evaluation tends to be dominated by studies of how buildings behave with reference to technical standards. However, past studies show that the perceptions of good performance are based on broader understandings of what buildings offer, often augmented by interpretations emerging from historical social practices and cultural context. This paper considers different approaches to describing thermal experience as one way to explore what is meant by ‘performance’, arguing that just as the social sciences have enriched earlier approaches to describing relations between people and the thermal environment, there are benefits to embracing humanities-based approaches to describe thermal experience. Architectural theory is replete with examples of a deliberate focus on environmental aspects, but its methods and concepts rarely cross the line from ideation to evaluation. This paper disrupts current notions of building performance evaluation by positing alternative perspectives of how people experience buildings. It discusses how current methods might co-exist with phenomenological insights in ‘thick descriptions’ of how buildings ‘perform’ and considers possible contributions from modes of enquiry in the humanities to describe thermal experience, illustrated by the authors’ research in housing.

This article analyzes the formative role of medieval theology and aesthetics in the development of postwar American architecture by focusing on the architectural theory and practice of Mies van der Rohe and Jean Labatut, both of whom became actively interested in Neo-Thomism from the late 1940s. More specifically, a closer look at their reliance on the work of Jacques Maritain, the preeminent promotor of Neo-Thomism, sheds light on the transmission and circulation of old and new concepts within twentieth-century architectural theory. By revealing how Maritain’s ideas helped to codify the latter and thus exposed the premodern ideas at the heart of modern architecture, I argue that modernist aesthetics should be re-evaluated with regards to its definition of “the new” and its emphasis on the breakdown or mutation of premodern frames of reference.

Gottfried Semper’s concept of Stoffwechsel continues to attract attention from scholars and practitioners, but the detailed context in which it emerged is little examined. Fascination with material culture and reclassification of artefacts as means of producing knowledge in the public domain were major aspects of this context. This paper will examine these with the focus on the elements of domesticity in the early formulation of Semper’s theory of architecture in the manuscript, Practical Art in Metal and Hard Materials (1852).

As natural or technical phenomena, microclimates are thermal zones with site-specific physical characteristics; the modern city was the central object in the genesis of a scientific investigation of microclimates. As man-made artefacts, however, microclimates are far more than pure physical-thermodynamic phenomena; they are fabricated “thermal places” (Lisa Heschong) with varied meanings which require serious architectural, social, and cultural research. Microclimate studies offer valuable insights into everyday culture, social conditions, and the political aspirations of energy-dependent and urbanised societies. This article outlines the notion of the microclimate from the perspective of architectural theory and shows its relevance for contemporary ethnographic research.

This article examines architectural preservation in North Russia after World War II as a movement that treated local vernacular architecture as a key to understanding the authentic national history of Russia. It argues that Soviet architectural preservationists were driven by romantic nationalist ideas that sought to establish northern Russian vernacular architecture as an aesthetic system that fully realized the expressive potential of wood as a construction material. Moreover, Soviet preservationists linked this system to a society free of the social conflicts that allegedly existed in North Russia, thanks to its geographic and political marginality until the tsarist oppression of the nineteenth century. While widely employing the conceptual apparatus of early Soviet-Marxist architects such as Moisei Ginzburg and Aleksei Gan, Soviet architectural preservationists petrified the transformative social agenda of early Soviet architectural theory.

This paper begins with a simple proposition: theory is an image animated by history. By exploring the notion of image in the work of architect and historian Robin Evans, the nature of this animatio...

Publications on architectural theory have predominantly taken on the form of text-based books, monographs, and articles. With the rise of transdisciplinary and practice-based research in architecture, new opportunities are opening up for other forms of architectural theory, such as film-based mediums, which promise to expand and alter the convention of the written practice of theory. Two possible types of filmic theory are presented here. One follows the method of ethnographic documentary filmmaking inspired by Sarah Pinkfilm-based mediums, which promise to expand and alter thellows the line of art house filmmaking inspired by Kathryn Rameyyn Rameyg inspired by Sarah Pinkfilm-based mediums, which promise to expand ae to expand ad mediums, which promise to expand a convention of the written practice of theory. or constructing knowledge, new discourses on filmic theory can be opened up. It is argued here that film as architectural theory is part of this new discourse, broadening the audience’u engag...

This introduction to the ‘This Thing Called Theory’ issue of the journal, written by editors Doreen Bernath and Braden Engel, frames current discourses on architectural theory in three categories: “theory as apparatus,” “theory as transaction,” and “theory as craft.” It also briefly summarizes each of the essays included in the issue.

The theoretical consideration of architecture is a rich vein of cultural theory, but too often with the problem of being disembodied and abstract, and limited by interpretations solely through text. This paper suggests that we reconsider the relationship of the theoretical and the architectural by observing how architecture manipulates intrinsically material ideas. One example can be found in the work of artist Siah Armajani, whose Dictionary for Building (1974-5) explores the arrangement of ordinary things. The work is discussed here with reference to Gaston Bachelard’s study of the spatial imagination in poetry and Susanne Langer’s theory of aesthetics. Armajani allows the made-thing and made-thought to coexist in a state of reverie, revealing the contemplative mode of architectural ideas. While other disciplines and practices undoubtedly contribute to an expanded field of architectural theory, the theoretical-of-the-architectural originates in these tangible thoughts: sensual theories of materi...

The commitment that the architects of emerging Socialist Yugoslavia made towards its revolutionary society in the early 1950s resulted in a pursuit of theory capable of articulating architectural social aspirations. In the case of architect Juraj Neidhardt, this pursuit entailed an interrogation of a lineage of interwar modernist organicism, which he inherited as Le Corbusier’s intern in the 1930s. The theory was premised on the existence of the universal social body, perceived as an organic whole and operating at the scale of the city. In the course of the 1950s, however, Neidhardt developed a conception of organicism that relied on the scale of the region as both the reference of an organic whole and the scope of operation. This paper unravels the relationship between Neidhardt’s new organicism and the Yugoslavian political–economic paradigm and how it was rooted in the discovery of the environment. This frames the political relevance of the pairing between organic theory and the environment.

This paper argues for a pre-theoretical and pro-theatrical understanding of theory. To begin, it considers the Greek tradition of theōria as practiced around the fifth century BCE in the period just before Plato appropriated the cultural practice of theōria as a model for philosophical inquiry. As will be shown, this proto-philosophical practice of theōria was profoundly theatrical, which is to say, spectacular and dramatic in social, situational, and symbolic ways. Such events of theōria involved diverse citizens participating as active witnesses in recurring festivals that had both intimate and far-reaching political, religious, and aesthetic significance. Reflecting on some present-day settings and occasions for practicing theory, this paper concludes with a disciplinary provocation: the re-engagement of theōria’s fundamental theatricality can reanimate the social, situational, and symbolic dimensions of architectural theory, without sacrificing either its relative independence or its capacity ...

Between 1922 and 1950, a growing interest in mechanical principles led to the emergence of a range of non-anatomic dentures that aimed to eliminate the disadvantages of their anatomic counterparts in favour of better mastication efficiency, stability, comfort, and durability. This paper investigates why the development of these non-anatomic prostheses came to a halt. In doing so, it analyses a range of cultural and anthropological factors concerned with dental morphology, and concludes that the concept of who we are and what makes us human—our identity, personality, language, culture, or technology—no longer rests within the bounds of our material body, but in the non-material world we have created. And that the social, cultural, and technological systems we have built outside of us have as much influence over our physical and anatomical attributes as we did in shaping them.

Bernard Tschumi, a world-leading architect, author and theorist is in discussion with Gordana Korolija Fontana-Giusti. The conversation that took place in Tschumi ‘s Manhattan office explores the nature and various aspects of contemporary cities in Europe and America focusing on the reasons why they are still different, despite appearances and global tendencies.The collocutors acknowledge the role of different histories and contexts, and the effects of distinct urban and transient spaces. They highlight the roles of diverse phenomena such as the conceptual art, the writings of radical thinkers, 1960s student protests and other events. They revisit the interplay between architecture and philosophy in the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida among others, focusing on the concepts such as ‘space’, ‘event’, ‘programme’, ‘power’ and ‘deconstruction’. During the course of their dialogue various landscapes of the mind emerge.

Facing increased calls for “practical skills,” the arts and humanities are under immense pressure to demonstrate their value to a public that demands measurable metrics. As a response, graphic design has adopted the language of “research” as a way to engage with tangible benefits. Research, in turn, has emphasized applied learning and the field of engineering has been suggested by some as a possible model for graphic design education. This paper instead proposes architecture as a more aligned disciplinary model for education, practice, and research. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, architecture faced a crisis very similar to the one affecting graphic design today. But rather than relinquish disciplinary control to the positivist scientism of behavioral science, operational research, and design methods as they asserted control over the codes of architectural practice, a number of architects and educators sought architecture’s autonomy, an inward reflection on the methods, techniques, and ques...

The twentieth-century accounts of typology are often both historiographically problematic and conceptually imprecise. They reinforce an understanding of typology as mainly an interchangeable functional and graphic classification, and present Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand as a key figure of the discourse, despite him dealing with buildings according to their genre and not their organisational and structural diagrams of typology. In contrast, one can posit that all theories of type are foremost epistemological and discursive arguments. Although not prescriptive in a formal sense, they are concerned with a rational synthesis of form by thinking through conceptual and diagrammatic organisation. This diagrammatic abstraction had already become instrumental to architectural theory and history in the eighteenth century, long before the modern discourse on the diagram was consolidated in the 1990s.While the architectural diagram is regularly explained as a generic and generative description, it can equally be defined...

This paper explores the notions of ‘blunting’ and ‘jading’, correspondingly posed by Heinrich Wolfflin in the second part of Renaissance and Baroque (1888) and Adolf Goller in the lecture ‘What is the Cause of Perpetual Style Change in Architecture?’ (1887). In both elaborations, the response of the individual to architecture is characterised by a negative reaction that, similar to boredom, becomes more intense as architectural forms lose the power to impress. These early preoccupations of architectural theory with the affective capacity of buildings identify exhaustion as a defining factor in the production and reception of modern architecture. In addition, they indicate a shift in the interest of the discipline, moving from the design and creation of architectural objects to the concern with space as a category of experience.

Gevork Hartoonian’s Architecture and Spectacle: A Critique is a complex book. For those uncommitted or unprepared, this complexity may remain insurmountable. For those who can work through this complexity to uncover the book’s construction and tectonics, there is much to gain.

This article aims to reconceptualize the aggregate ‘Palestinian refugee camps’ in light of the political reality from which the refugees emerged, and take into consideration the new space that took shape, characterized by processes of destruction and dispossession of civil status. The article will focus specifically on the period 1948–1967, and examine these processes by using tools from architectural theory and history. The article contends that the architecture of the refugee camps acts as a type of unwritten rigid law, outlining the boundary between ‘public’ and ‘private’ realms – the sphere of the polis and that of the household and family (Arendt [1958] 1998, The Human Condition, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 28) – through continuous processes of construction and deconstruction.

This book is a genuinely innovative contribution to the burgeoning field of architectural theory anthologies. Whilst most recent theory compendia have retrieved primary texts—from magazines, exhibi...

Fiction, and particularly current science fiction, (1) reflects, gives voice to, and may shape popular images of the city; (b) provides models of ‘world building’ whose methods may complement and critique other methods of informing the design of cities; and (3) plays out poetically rich thought experiments – cities of feeling – that can help designers understand nuances of current urban design and architectural theory. This paper examines the urban landscapes of three 21st-century award-winning science fiction novels. These cities of the fictive imagination can inform the creation of cities of the design imagination.

The aim of this article is to introduce a meta-theoretical discussion in architectural research about materiality and its effect on everyday life and use. Taking a relational perspective, I distinguish between three different perspectives on materialities as described in theories in recent decades. From these perspectives I develop three possible conceptualisations of interobjectivity. The first perspective sees interobjectivity as collaboratively constructed ‘cross-road effects’. The second perspective sees interobjectivity as the process of stitching together material heterogeneities. The third perspective sees interobjectivity as the radiance of a persistent identity through different contexts. These three perspectives each contribute to the ways architectural objects and spaces interact and produce effects. These effects are often discussed within separate paradigms. Putting them together as different modalisations of interobjectivity enables a much richer empirical analysis, where the notion of ‘material effects’ can be differentiated and compared.

When the editors of Architectural Theory Review wrote to suggest a special issue with articles sparked by my first book, Architecture: The Story of Practice, I was deeply honoured and, of course, a...

Weighing in at 1.582 kilograms, this handbook is not just any hand-sized thing like your ordinary little enchiridion or manual – it is a 753-page compendium of contemporary theories of architecture...

The acquisition of the Hypnerotomachia by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries aligned with collection development objectives established in the 1950s by Architecture Dean G. Holmes Perkins. In order to support the university’s training in contemporary design for architecture and urban planning, Perkins built a collection of textual and graphic resources reflecting architectural theory and practice from the Renaissance through the twentieth century. Perkins was a modernist but expected students to acquire expertise in the whole of architectural history. The Perkins Library is made available in dedicated space within the Anne and Jerome Fisher Fine Arts Library, University of Pennsylvania.

This special issue of Architectural Theory Review seeks to explore the implications of reception theory, and the concept of reception, for architecture. The Macquarie English Dictionary defines the...

This paper investigates the implications of reception theory for a possible theory of architecture, not so much to construct such a theory for today, but rather to show how we are already beyond reception theory. Looking at the work of Fish, Iser, Jauss, and de Man, an argument is made that an architectural theory could have been formulated on the basis of reader-response criticism: this architectural theory would be that of an affective architecture, an architecture of affect, where the interplay of subject and object becomes the main focus of concern. This theory is shown to be a sub-species of what Meillassoux calls correlationism, and a link is made with the early written and built work of Le Corbusier. The essay ends by considering a radical afterlife for reception theory in the deconstruction of the notions of subject and object, which, according to the thought of Deleuze, become after-effects of the differential movement of architecture.

The concept of Einfuhlung (empathy), a term coined in 1872 by the German philosopher, Robert Vischer, was highly influential in architectural theory from the last years of the nineteenth century until at least the first two decades of the twentieth. Heinrich Wolfflin and August Schmarsow, two important figures of art history, developed their respective concepts of architectural reception in a strong correlation to the idea of empathy. In their investigations into architectural creation, the idea of the human capacity to empathise with objects and works of art led both art historians to an understanding of art history as a discipline that was dedicated to retracing the dominant ideas of different epochs on a psychological basis.

This paper explores the notion of myth as a specific form of evidence and evidentiality of architecture. This exploration is conducted with specific regard to two key texts: the first, a philosophical text, and the second a text of architectural theory. As such, Barthes’s text: Mythologies firstly published in 1957 and Borden’s text: Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body published in 2001 are explored. This paper suggests that the role served by Barthesian myth in respect to language is similar to the role served by skateboarding in Borden’s exploration of the city. It is suggested that both myth and skateboarding serve as evidence of the instability of objectivity in language, everyday life practices and architecture. We thus argue that the notion of myth will chart a new dimension of contemporary architectural thinking and prompt more possibilities in interlinking design research between architecture, the human body and the sociologic study of mass culture.

In this article, I want to reassess Bachelard's “topoanalysis,” a concept the French philosopher introduced in his La poetique de l'espace (1957). We will look into some of the ideological and theoretical problems that inevitably rise if one wants to use Bachelard's topoanalysis today. I want to argue that these difficulties are far from insuperable and that an alternative approach to Bachelard's legacy is still possible and worthwhile. If we consider Bachelard's exploration of the images of dwelling as a variant of what Jerome McGann coined “deformative criticism,” Bachelard's project can still be used as a relevant methodological instrument for a critical analysis of the imaginary of interior spaces.

When Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Baldacchino first surmounted the altar of Saint Peter's Basilica in 1624, it divided public opinion. Amongst its criticism was the insult that the Baldacchino “was a chimera”, quoted from Vincenzo Berti and added to Fioravente Martinelli's manuscript Roma Ornata dall'Architettura, Pittura e Scultura (Rome Ornamented by Architecture, Painting and Sculpture; 1660–63) by Francesco Borromini. This article analyses the context in which this criticism was made, and the significance of the chimera for Martinelli's audience. The prevalent attributes of the chimera are then aligned with currents of Seicento, and earlier, architectural theory and discourse concerned with value judgments of architecture. This literature, while adamant in its support of architectural merit, is frequently indeterminate with regards to how this may be achieved. Identification of the similarities between the figure of the chimera in Seicento thought and architectural principles allows greater comprehension of...

In 1906 George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) and his wife Charlotte moved to an Arts and Crafts house set in two acres of beautiful gardens in the countryside in Hertfordshire. Despite its potential as ...

There are no Australians included in the several anthologies of architectural theory published in the past decade. Anthologies that survey the recent period of intense theoretical production in architecture include Architecture Theory Since 1968 (1998), edited by K. Michael Hays, with 47 entries, and Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture (1996), edited by Kate Nesbitt and including 51 contributions spanning the period 1965—1995. Contributors to these anthologiesare primarily North American or European, with the exception of one Japanese and a New Zealander now based in New York. Hanno-Walter Kruft's A History of Architectural Theory: From Vitruvius to the Present, 1994, has no discussion of the scene outside Europe and the United States and anthologies that address the modern period such as Joan Ockman's Architecture Culture 1943-1968: A Documentary Anthology (1993) are similarly without Australian content.The selections involved in constructing an anthology in any historical subject are motivated, even where authors profess to objectivity or an even-handed survey. It would be difficult, though, to argue that the absence of Australians in an international setting is a major oversight or a deliberate slight...

This paper explores the force of writing in architectural criticism, theory and history. Writing often plays the silent other to architecture, being continuously assumed rather than examined. Using the conceit of my library as an archive and repository for architectural and personal memory, this essay in part revisits a critical moment in the late 1980s: the literary turn in architectural theory. Interrogating later anthologies describing the transaction between writing, architecture and deconstruction (or post-structuralism), I note that the radical writing practices of the late 1980s have been largely excluded and marginalised in later collections of primary texts from the anthologised period. Curiously, when radical writing practice did appear in later anthologies it was conflated with feminist practice. A double marginalisation reduced the mainstream location of feminist theory and wayward writing to peripheral positions with seemingly little historical force or influence. This essay argues for attent...

Criticized for its artifice and stylization, and loaded with negative connotations as manieroso, the art of the sixteenth century nevertheless became, in the 1920s, a new historical and stylistic periodization and an intensely studied subject. Some aspects of that construction of Mannerism as a distinct category are intimately linked to the contemporary development of modernity, and modernism. Mannerism’s ‘discovery’ was closely related to pioneering developments in art and architecture. Furthermore, while Mannerist art was offering up captivating case studies, research on Mannerism adapted models from psychoanalysis, which was maturing in those same years and was crucial to understanding the structure of the modern self and of modern society. Finally, as we will show, the resulting image of the Mannerist architect was seminal in the styling of the figure of the new, modernist architect.

Gender in architectural theory has been underpinned by the binary of masculine and feminine architectural elements, types, and styles, either disassociated or combined. While discussion of these matters occurred largely within architectural discourse, Ruskin's aim was to use gender to discern architecture from that which it was not. He achieved this by changing the relation between the gender binary and architectural theory, and by privileging the female body. By doing this, Ruskin separated architecture (object, form, and materiality) from its attributes (of quality of production or conception, execution, and finish); distinguished architecture from building; and deemed sculptural decoration as unarchitectural. This undermined the idiosyncratic characterizations of architecture as masculine, feminine, or androgynous, as all architecture was female. It also allowed for the conception of a new kind of ornament which was applied during construction: the ornamental cladding. These were subtle but substantial epistemological shifts which were produced through the recasting of the relation between gender and architecture.