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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 ...

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.

We can find the sprouts of the architectural approach of space in ancient Greek Philosophy. The process lasts from the Pythagorean notion (kenon) – which is the emptiness between the numbers – to the definition of space by St Augustine, where he determines the forming of space as the main role of architecture. The enquiry regarding architectural approach of space intensified after the Second World War – Hajnóczi joined into this discourse with his works on the field of spatial theory in the 1960’s. He intended to create a unified framework for the different approaches of space from different fields of science. This common range of interpretation is deriving from the analytic understanding of space – that is Spatiology. Overviewing Hajnóczi’s theoretical works we will try to show the evolution of his thoughts and will try to identify the antecedents of his theoretical structures in the works of contemporary thinkers. In his academic doctorate dissertation in 1977 with the analytic approach he subdivided the architectural space into its elemental spatial relations generated by the constructional objects and then he has attempted to give the quantitative and also the qualitative understanding of them. In his Genesis – as the last accord of his oeuvre – he tried to understand the particular elements of this system and also build an intelligent whole of them again.A tér építészeti értelmezésének megalapozását az európai kultúrában már a görög bölcseletben megleljük. A püthegóreusok számok közötti ürességétől (kenon) az építészeti tér Szt. Ágoston általi meghatározásáig tart a folyamat, melyben végül az építészet legfőbb feladataként a tér alakítását határozták meg. Ezen értelmezések körüli érdeklődés felizzott a második világháborút követő időben – ebbe a diskurzusba kapcsolódott be Hajnóczi Gyula térelméleti munkássága az 1960-as években. Azzal a szándékkal lépett fel, hogy egységes keretet adjon a sok tudományág felől érkező építészeti tér-értelmezéseknek. Ez a közös értelmezési tartomány a tér analitikus értelmezéséből sarjad – ezt a tértudományt nevezte el spaciológiának. Végigtekintve Hajnóczi Gyula térelméleti műveit igyekszünk bemutatni a gondolatok kifejlődésének folyamatát, valamint kísérletet teszünk arra, hogy felmutassuk a kortárs kutatók munkásságában Hajnóczi Gyula gondolati rendszerének előzményeit. Az 1977-ben megjelent akadémiai doktori értekezésében az építészeti tér analitikus értelmezésével szétbontotta az építészeti teret az azt meghatározó konstruktív közegek elemi térviszonylataira, és ezek mennyiségi és minőségi értelmezését kísérelte meg. Az életmű végső akkordjaként írt, Az építészeti tér genezise c. műve az analitikusan szétbontott és egyenként értelmezett térelemek rendszerének megértésére, az elemek újbóli összeépítésére tett kísérletet.

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...

This article explores transformations in Peter Wilson’s work by reading his Japanese projects of the late 1980s in relation to Roland Barthes’s Empire of Signs. The specific account it develops is constructed around the entries Wilson produced for the 1978 and 1988 Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competitions. What makes this a comparison of particular interest is that the competitions, a decade apart, were run under nearly – but not quite – the same brief. The first was set by Peter Cook, who called for projects for a ‘Comfortable House in the Metropolis’. This idea was then taken up for the second by Toyo Ito, although he inflected it with an emphasis on the ephemerality of the physical under the effects of new electronic communication technologies. Drawing on Barthes’s observations, the article argues that – across these years – Wilson’s work moves from an approach grounded in metaphor to a mode that is increasingly ideogrammic, and that this is supported by, and reflected in, the way that his drawings change. Here, I claim, the submarine – allusions to which become prominent in Wilson’s work in the period – comes into focus as the key transitional device. Importantly, Wilson’s submarine is not a tool for plumbing depth conditions; rather, it is quite the opposite, insofar as it acts as a figurative cipher, an ideogram in its own right, for the act of screening out relations and drying up metaphoric fluidity. In its conclusion, the article brings the 1988 project into contact with earlier ideogrammic experiments within modernity, including the drawings of Henri Michaux and the reflections of Sergei Eisenstein on cinematic montage and compound ideograms.

This is an edited transcript of a conversation held in Thurloe Sq, London, on 25 July 2020. Peter Wilson’s exhibition ‘Indian Summer and Thereafter’ had opened at Betts Project the previous evening...

The Cistercian abbey church plan with a flat east end, the “Bernardine plan,” is one of the most distinctive, and most discussed, plans of medieval architecture. It has traditionally been seen as a direct result of views on monastic architecture held by Bernard of Clairvaux, our most important source for understanding medieval art and architecture. However, as Conrad Rudolph argues in Medieval Architectural Theory, the Sacred Economy, and the Public Presentation of Monastic Architecture: The Classic Cistercian Plan, this ignores the architecture of Bernard's own monastery and the architectural theory of his circle. By reading this plan in conjunction with the Cluniac apse-echelon plan and the well-known pilgrimage plan and considering it alongside the monastic sacred economy and issues of materials, craftsmanship, and public access, Rudolph shows that the “Bernardine plan” does not represent Bernard's conception at all. It is better thought of as the “classic Cistercian plan,” a compromise of lower spiritual standards aimed at broader institutional acceptance.

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...

This article considers Alvar Aalto's two church and parish centre projects in Wolfsburg in light of the architectural, political and sociocultural contexts that framed their design and construction in post-war Germany. The study interrogates how architect and parish came together to build the ecclesiastical complexes of Heilig-Geist (1960–62) and Stephanus (1963–68), and how the parties interacted and engaged with widely debated issues in church architecture and urban planning. Close analysis of the buildings and their design processes, based on site visits as well as the study of architectural drawings and models, shows that Heilig-Geist and Stephanus acquire sacred character primarily through the connections they establish between interior and exterior space. The dynamic between inside and outside relates the buildings to key ideas in contemporaneous church architectural theory concerning inward- and outward-looking church-building, part of the broader discourse on the relationship between the sacred and the profane.

The use of the golden section to regulate the proportions of forms and spaces is one of the most debated and controversial issues in architectural theory. In this article, I show that the work of t...

[EN] This article discusses the need to reflect on the inner and outer of art and architecture as opposing principles for the construction of a contemporary analytical theory of artistic and architectural creation. Twentieth-century theoretical production has often seemed to sway between a perceptual paradigm and a creative paradigm, sometimes blurring the boundaries between the two. In fact, only the second one adheres to the principles underpinning the great contemporary artistic and architectural revolution. This article is divided into four sections, each of which aims to provide a brief synthesis of the various positions adopted towards the two paradigms during the twentieth century., [ES] Este artículo plantea la necesidad de reflexionar sobre el interior y el exterior del arte y la arquitectura como principios opuestos para la construcción de una teoría analítica de la creación artística y arquitectónica contemporánea. La producción teórica del siglo XX parece haber dudado con frecuencia entre un paradigma perceptivo y un paradigma creativo, con una delimitación a veces imprecisa entre ambos. Sólo el segundo respondería a los principios que dieron sentido a la gran revolución artística y arquitectónica contemporánea. El contenido propuesto se estructura en cuatro apartados con los que se intenta transmitir una breve síntesis de las distintas posiciones que, en torno a estos dos paradigmas, se han dado a lo largo del siglo XX.

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.

This article offers a step by step analysis of an undiscussed note written by Christian Nor-berg-Schulz 18 April 1979, titled Translation, as I ask what role the notion of transla-tion played in his theory of genius loci. Scholars have recently shown interest in the way the field of translation and architecture intersect and can inform each other. Norberg-Schulz is widely read and researched, but the role of translation in his authorship has to date been undiscussed. Springing from my discovery of the note in the archive, I revisit Norberg-Schulz's phenomenological approach to architecture with a specific focus upon the notion of translation.I uncover his references from this note and see these in light of his published work, particularly his landmark treatise Genius Loci: towards a phenomenology of architecture (1980). Building upon a long tradition of architectural theory, involving ideas from Vitruvius and Gottfried Semper, I argue that the theme of translation is recurrent throughout Norberg-Schulz's theoretical authorship, appearing in his theory of genius loci, his understanding of continuity and change, accounts of Norwegian architectural culture, and writings about the architecture of Louis Kahn.Here, translation is seen as a tool for gathering, in the Heideggerian sense, which gives birth to an architecture in which the architectural outcome is not inferior to its pre-cursor, but simply different and from which something constructive might emerge. Seen in relation to the notion of architecture as language, it could even be argued to be a vital core to Norgerg-Schulz's longstanding interest in the meaning of architecture and place and how design must negotiate continuity and change. Understanding the genius loci as vital in architectural appropriation, as design, thus, implies a process of transla-tion, arguably a vital contribution to the ongoing interest in the intersection of architecture and translation.

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 research is focused on the post-modern Nu Art Museum in Bandung of I. Nyoman Nuarta, who is known as a sculptor-creator. Nuarta has shifted his approach to sculpture from the mainstream paradigm of classical museum design to architectonics, museum design, and land art. According to the master plan, the Nu Art Museum and Sculpture Park is a space composed for Nuarta’s artistic community, which includes an outdoor sculpture park; gallery, studio and workshop; visitors’ spaces; and living facilities for the creation, production and display of his masterpieces such as the New Garuda Wisnu Kencana project. To understand the aims, objectives, and issues surrounding the NuArt Museum requires a multi-faceted method, which is achieved in various ways; first, by elaborating on the typology of famous museums in the world; second, by exploring architectural theory; and third, by in-depth communications with the artist himself to reveal his artistic passion, desire, and intervention. By referring to grounded theory research within a qualitative research method for the analysis of the Nu Art Museum in Bandung, the design process was revealed as architectonics, museum design, and as a land art project that adopted an architecture-sculpture approach. The architectonics are purely interpreted as the artists’ collective desire to show off their post-modern artistic spirit (zeitgeist) by performing anti-deterministic, self-sustaining, and/or multivalent actions towards a new architecture, thus provoking new interpretations of Nuarta’s creativity in architecture in an emotive and cognitive way.

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.

The article discusses the emergence of morphology within the field of architectural theory and practice during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The shared goal with all those evoking the term was to make architecture regain a depth of meanings and associations lost to economic and functionalist imperative. The essay focuses on issues of one of the most famous “little” magazines, Le carre bleu, devoted to the topic “morphology-urbanism” edited by the Finnish Team Ten member Reima Pietila (1923–93) around 1960. Particular attention is paid to series of urban studies which read in multiple registers and scales; a single drawing could be, for example, simultaneously be read as an abstract composition as well as a urban plan, by recalling both a suprematist painting and a topographical maps.

In a series of essays published in 1966 as 'L’arceau qui chante' ['The Arch That Sings'], the architect Abderrahman Bouchama outlined a new path for a post-revolutionary Algerian architecture. Bouchama’s text responded to ambitious efforts to construct a revolutionary socialist state immediately following Algeria’s independence in 1962. Significantly, President Ahmed Ben Bella’s policies of 'autogestion', or self-management, aimed to fuel the reallocation of property, the redistribution of resources, the restructuring of labor, and the redefinition of national culture, efforts that encouraged a radical rethinking of architecture and the construction industry. While Bouchama was certainly the most prolific architectural theorist at the time, his writings and built projects might be productively set in dialogue with contemporaneous efforts by Anatole Kopp, Pierre Chazanoff, and Georgette Cottin-Euziol to articulate what I argue was a provocative architecture of 'autogestion'. Algeria’s brief experiment with 'autogestion' imagined a path towards socialism rooted in the new nation’s revolutionary origins, even as it repositioned the Maghrib as a defining center for Afro-Asian and pan-Islamic solidarity, an impulse that was articulated powerfully in Bouchama’s writings. Attending to this episode suggests the critical importance of provincializing Marxist architectural theory and practice, a project that requires paying closer attention to important strands of anti-imperialist struggle within Marxist theory and praxis that operated outside of its familiar centers.

Architectural theory as we know it today is informed by Western, neo-Marxist theories. But throughout history Marxism has influenced architectural thinking in many more ways than just through this well-known intellectual trajectory. Distinct forms of Marxist architectural theory have been articulated in countries where orthodox Marxism was the foundation of political theory or where Marxism inspired revolutionary or postcolonial struggles. This Special Collection of Architectural Histories examines architectural theory and its Marxist imprint in the Second and Third World from the 1950s to the 1980s, the interconnections between these different countries and traditions and the entanglements with postcolonial or anti-imperialist theories. It offers a preliminary inventory of what was going on where, and who were some of the key figures. It provides the groundwork for a more precise mapping of the worldwide impact of Marxist thinking on architectural discourse. ispartof: Architectural Histories vol:7 issue:Special Collection: Marxism and Architectural Theory across the East-West Divide pages:1-7 status: Published online

This interview engages with Łukasz Stanek in a conversation that contextualizes the Special Collection in Architectural Histories on Marxism and architectural theory across the East-West divide. It follows Stanek’s keynote lecture for the conference Theory’s History 196X–199X: Challenges in the Historiography of Architectural Knowledge (Brussels, February 8–10, 2017) and his recent book, Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War (2019). ispartof: Architectural Histories vol:7 issue:Special Collection: Marxism and Architectural Theory across the East-West Divide pages:1-10 status: Published online

Gottfried Semper is often credited with originating the concept of the building as skin in architectural theory, but an alternative trajectory of this idea can be found in the mid-nineteenth-century science of hygiene. In Skin, Clothing, and Dwelling: Max von Pettenkofer, the Science of Hygiene, and Breathing Walls, Didem Ekici explores the affinity of skin, clothing, and dwelling in nineteenth-century German thinking, focusing on a marginal figure in architectural history, physician Max von Pettenkofer (1818–1901), the “father of experimental hygiene.” Pettenkofer's concept of clothing and dwelling as skins influenced theories of architecture that emphasized the environmental performance of the architectural envelope. This article examines Pettenkofer's writings and contemporary works on hygiene, ethnology, Kulturgeschichte (cultural history), and linguistics that linked skin, clothing, and dwelling. From nineteenth-century “breathing walls” to today's high-performance envelopes, theories of the building as a regulating membrane are a testament to the unsung legacy of Pettenkofer and the science of hygiene.

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.

The use of scripted parameters that define objects in architecture is generally regarded as a recent phenomenon, associated with digital design. Mario Carpo, Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural Theory and History at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL), describes how parametric notations are part of an enduring architectural lineage that has its roots in the theses of classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, previous to printing, when the only means of disseminating the proportions and combining of elements was to describe them, writing them out by hand without the aid of illustration.

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...

© 2016, Istanbul Teknik Universitesi, Faculty of Architecture. All rights reserved.For over a century, the controversial issue of ornament has oscillated between the two extreme conditions of being condemned and praised. Although current architecture receives ornament enthusiastically due to its design potentials, it still remains as a problematic and critical topic, as it maintains its blurry and slippery character. The aim of this study is to construct the theoretical framework of or­nament in the twenty-first century architectural domain. The paper intends to in­vestigate the reemergence of this-yet-ambiguous issue to evaluate its new aspects, and redefine its limits in contemporary architectural theory and practice. Being much more than an intricate architectural element, an in-depth study of orna­ment overlaps its reemergence with social, cultural, and economical status quo. Through the examination of specific contemporary case studies, this study makes a layered reading of architectural ornament as an instrument of image-driven contemporary culture within spectacle-laden public sphere. In contemporary architecture, the digital, structural, sensual, representational, and symbolic fac­ets stratify ornament metaphorically and literally, making it an intense medium of impression and expression. Ornamental buildings emerge as embodiments of consumption, exhibition, and public attention, by contributing to image-making, commercial success, and marketing strategy, in addition to the performance of ornament as a challenging designerly instrument.

The author explores the problem of Jean Bullant’s treatises and his theoretical heritage in the evolution of European architectural thought. Being one of the leading architects of the 16th century France, Jean Bullant still remains unknown in contrast to his splendid contemporaries such as Philibert Delorme and Pierre Lescot. Bullant’s bright talent and imaginative creativity enabled him to go much further than any of his fellows and to express his style in a more complex and ingenious Mannerist manner. During the period of disgrace, after the death of the king Henry II in the early 1560s, he publishes his three treatises in Paris: Recueil d’horlogiographie, contenant la description, fabrication et usage des horloges solaires (1561), Petit traicte de geometrie et d’horologiographie pratique (1562), and Reigle generalle d’architecture des cinq manieres de colonnes (1564). The research has been dedicated to each of the works and examines their connection to European humanists, such as Oronce Fine and Sebastian Munster, Italian influence by Alberti and Serlio, and French contemporaries’ pursuits.

Drawing on the reflections contained in Roland Barthes' lectures on the "Neutral", this paper reconsiders John Hejduk's Silent Witnesses installation (1976), often thought a peripheral work despite the architect's assertion that it is his most important statement. While discussions of silence normally presume the presence of a listener, I argue that this work concerns the silence – if we can continue to use the word – that endures beyond any possibility of audition. This is the condition emblematized by the final blank grey volume of Hejduk's installation, whose radical erasure of all traces gestures toward the absolute archival destruction – characterized by Jacques Derrida as an "apocalypse without revelation" – presaged by the nuclear age. Developing through a series of close readings of Hejduk's own commentaries on his work, as well as its relations with other texts and practices, the paper explores the linkages between Silent Witnesses and the nuclear epoch.

Les dernières décennies ont vu croître le nombre de publications consacrées aux croisements entre genre et architecture. Cet article passe en revue une partie importante de ces contributions à l’histoire et la théorie architecturale. Il classe ces publications selon une typologie se fondant sur différents paradigmes qui ont marqué les gender et women studies. Il opère également une distinction entre les points de vue qui se concentrent sur la construction du genre et son inscription dans l’environnement du bâti, et ceux qui se focalisent sur la discrimination sexuelle repérée au sein des institutions d’architecture. The last decades have seen an increasing number of publications devoted to the interconnections between gender and architecture. This article reviews a large amount of such contributions to architectural history and theory. It categorizes these publications according to a typology based upon consecutive paradigms within women and gender studies. It also differentiates between arguments focusing on gender constructions that are inscribed in the built environment and those focusing on gender discriminations within architectural institutions. Die letzten Jahrzehnte haben eine wachsende Zahl an Veröffentlichungen zur Verbindung zwischen Gender und Architektur hervorgebracht. Dieser Artikel rekapituliert einen wichtigen Teil dieser Beiträge zur Architekturgeschichte und –theorie. Er unterscheidet die Publikationen nach Typen, die sich aus den verschiedenen Paradigmen der Gender und Women Studies ergeben. Der Artikel nimmt ebenfalls eine Unterscheidung innerhalb der Standpunkte vor, indem er die Geschlechterkonstruktion und ihre Prägung innerhalb eines Baus von den in Architekturinstitutionen festgestellten Fällen sexueller Diskriminierung abgrenzt. Negli ultimi dieci anni è cresciuto il numero di pubblicazioni dedicate alle relazioni fra gender e architettura. Questo articolo passa in rassegna una parte importante dei contributi dedicati alla storia e alla teoria architettonica. Esso classifica le pubblicazioni secondo una tipologia fondata sui diversi paradigmi che hanno caratterizzato i gender e i women studies. Esso opera inoltre una distinzione fra i punti di vista che si concentrano sulla costruzione del genere e sulla sua iscrizione nell’ambiente costruito, e quelli che mettono a fuoco la discriminazione sessuale individuata in seno alle istituzioni d’architettura. Las últimas décadas vieron crecer el número de publicaciones dedicadas a los cruces entre gender y arquitectura. Este artículo examina una parte importante de estas contribuciones a la historia y la teoría arquitectónica. Clasifica estas publicaciones según una tipología basada en distintos paradigmas que han marcado los gender y women studies. También opera una distinción entre las opiniones que se concentran en la construcción del género y su inscripción en el medio ambiente del armazón, y los que se concentran sobre la discriminación sexual situada en las instituciones de arquitectura.

Learning to account for material formation as 'embodied and embedded, relational and affective' figurations amounts to nothing less than an ethical project. This paper speculates on the agentic status of material arrangements to address a certain impasse yet to be overcome in the productive understanding of the built environment. In its central parts, it respectively revisits two favorite clichés of architectural theory—the Foucauldian dispositif (apparatus) and the Deleuzo-Guattarian agencement (assemblage). Therein I will reclaim their different conceptions of arrangements with the aim to outline where architectural theory could advance a radically more productive understanding of the built environment. The paper here proposes a tactical alliance with the flat, monist, and process-ontological angles of new materialist perspectives. Proposing that there is a clear project waiting for post-critical theory, the paper concludes with some consideration on how architectural theory could affirm this new theoretical agenda.

This paper reveals a missing thread in the global historiography of architectural theory by scrutinizing the relationship between political ideology and architectural discourse in Mao’s China (1949–76). Several critical moments in this era, during which new theories or concepts emerged, deserve close study: 1) the National Style in 1954; 2) the official design principle, ‘appropriateness, economy, and if possible, beauty’ in 1955; 3) the Socialist New Style in 1959; 4) the Design Revolution in 1964; and 5) the ‘new architecture’ in 1973. The political context and the role of state ideology are discussed with regard to the relevant texts, buildings, architects and design institutes. Discussion focuses on the mode of theoretical production in the Mao era, which is summarized as a relation between ‘container’ and ‘content’. The broad and abstract theories of the time are conceptual containers that failed to define specific contents. Architectural autonomy continued to exist in the form of knowledge accumulation, especially the absorption of modernism, even though state ideology and political movements dominated architectural discourse.

Sustainability is the most significant force to change architecture since the breakthrough of modernism a century ago. So far the contributions of architects to this mandate have largely amounted to technological interventions. Yet the urgent call for sustainability demands going beyond merely technological solutions to modify behavioral patterns, cultural habits and even our deeply ingrained ideas about ourselves. The very notion that architecture could modify behavioral patterns, or the sedimentation of habits seems far-fetched in an epistemological framework that has drawn strict lines between outside and inside, subject and object, body and mind — all the dualities that the cognitive and neurosciences have been gradually working to undermine. Our practice as architects has been unconsciously shaped by centuries of formalist thinking that have turned buildings into inanimate objects; a habit of thinking that has weakened our role and contributed to the sense that architecture is a luxury item, one among many consumable commodities — though we can no longer deny that it is the very fabric of our survival and flourishing.Further, the once healthy plurality of our architectural theory has left us without a coherent philosophical framework with which to confront the climate crisis. For John Dewey, theory and practice were not ontologically separate domains, but two distinct yet inseparable and necessary aspects of engaging in the world. This essay explores how Dewey's pragmatic philosophy could help to build a theoretical framework that would allow us to apply and integrate the findings of the cognitive and neurosciences into our architectural practice and education, so that we might respond not only to the constraints and opportunities of the given context — site, program and energy resources—but also to the limits and affordances of our perceptual systems and the whole of our body and mind.

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.