Search

Climate change presents multiple challenges to cities -not only in terms of the resilience and sustainability of the urban fabric, but also in relation to how urban inhabitants imagine they might adapt to a future transformed environment. This article explores imaginative modes of thinking in relation to future cities and climate change, focusing on representations of urban drowning or submergence. It considers, in turn, climate-change fictions -from J.G. Ballard's 1962 novel The Drowned World to Paulo Bacigalupi's The Drowned Cities, published in 2012; visual representations from Gustave Dore's The New Zealander in 1872 to Alexis Rockman's 2004 Manifest Destiny; and architectural conjecture, from Wolf Hilbertz's Autopia Ampere project from 1970 onwards to CRAB Studio's Soak City in 2009. The article draws out how these imaginaries intersect with theoretical understandings of science fiction and ecology, contending that an emphasis on multiple imaginaries of climate change is critical to expanding the narrow range of possibilities that currently characterize the literature on cities and climate change. Imaginative texts, images and designs mutually inform each other to encourage holistic ways of approaching how we think about the prospect of urban submergence and to incubate radical responses to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Such is the power of Charles Dickens’s legacy that popular ideas about the Victorian city tend to be synonymous with the London depicted in his novels. The adjective “Dickensian” is regularly used ...

This paper explores the relationship between the imagination of urban destruction and a personal experience of a particular urban ruin: the former resort town of Varosha in Cyprus, abandoned since 1974. I draw out the connections between my experience of Varosha's ruined spaces and three imaginative tropes that emerged out of and influenced that experience: first, the fantasy of urban annihilation (or urbicide), an enduring trope of apocalyptic cinema and actualized in modern aerial warfare; second, the fantasy of being the first/last witness in a post-apocalyptic ruined world; and, third, the fantasy of disanthropy, or the imagination of the world as post-human. The result is to open up a space of dialogue between the experience of being in urban ruins, the contested histories of those ruins and the imagination of urban destruction in order to address the wider questions of how large-scale ruins might be remembered and reconstituted in ways that promote inclusivity, hold together contradictions and maint...

This article focuses on the relationship between ornamental iron and the civic in British market halls, a subject which has been overlooked in the existing literature on their architectural development. Like many other forms of nineteenth-century retail architecture — shops, bazaars, arcades and department stores — market halls embraced the new architectural possibilities suggested by iron: increased floor-spans were made possible by wrought-iron joists, which could span greater distances than timber ones; the strength of cast-iron columns allowed larger openings in the external walls; and the increased availability and lower cost of glass meant that these openings could be glazed, allowing greater visibility of commodities. Yet, unlike much Victorian retail architecture, which was usually privately financed, market halls were explicitly articulated as public spaces. As such, there were problems in assimilating iron-and-glass structures into established notions of public architecture. In 1878, The Building News, in a discussion of London’s market buildings, argued that they should be ‘different from huge railway sheds and Crystal Palaces’ because their status as public buildings required some form of ‘artistic’ treatment. For many architects of market halls — in common with other new building types in the Victorian period, such as pumping stations, railway stations, exhibition halls and warehouses — the solution lay in a dual architectural identity: an exterior structure built in conventional building materials such as stone and brick, harmonizing with existing urban architecture; and an interior space supported by an independent iron-and-glass structure.

This paper offers a reading of urban ruin through a personal experience: a visit I made to the Chernobyl site in October 2007—first to the destroyed reactor and then to the ruined buildings of Pripyat, using my own photographs as documents. The paper situates this experience in the context of wider representations of technological ruin and the city. Pripyat may not be a city, let alone a metropolis, but its scale as a ruin is unique in the post‐war period. In the West, the ruined city usually only presents itself in fictive representations: that is, in literature and film and not in the flesh, so to speak. Experiencing the ruins of Pripyat may invite thoughts about the value, or otherwise, of industrial ruin; its unprecedented scale invites an altogether different meditation on the ruin of the city as a whole and perhaps, too, of civilisation itself.

This article examines, for the first time, the central importance of forms in an historical context by focusing on the development of the British census in the nineteenth century. Census historians have explored its impact in detail, including the production and dissemination of household schedules, by which the state gathered the information it desired. Yet, only cursory references have been made to the process that made the inquiry successful or not: the willingness or otherwise of the public to divulge the data requested and their ability to do this through the medium of the printed form. The article outlines changes in the production of household schedules from 1801 to 1901, their typographic characteristics, and the ways in which they were promoted by the census organisers. It considers responses to these documents through local schedules and nationwide newspaper and journal articles, shedding light on the means by which a vast and multifarious populace dealt with reading and filling out for...

This article considers the role of technical representations in the building of one of the most significant civil engineering projects of the mid-nineteenth century, London’s main drainage system, designed and overseen by the engineer Joseph Bazalgette. It explores the ways in which the contract—composed of engineering drawings and an accompanying specification—mediated the relationship between Bazalgette and his most important ally, the contractor. The article also pays close attention to the variety of audiences beyond the contractor to which these documents were directed: including those who authorized and funded the project, those parties directly affected by construction, and the wider public. The result is a fuller picture of the social context in which the main drainage project was constructed and of the crucial role played by the contract in mediating social relations of many kinds, a perspective that is absent in the existing literature on the subject.

Considered in an historical context, the design of information for everyday use can tell us much about the experience of reading for action. This article focuses on the extraordinary range of information designed for London's cab passengers in the nineteenth century, focusing on fare books, lists, posters and maps. The article assesses how the largely anonymous designers of these documents—publishers, mapmakers and printers—sought to address the perceived needs and abilities of their intended readers, and explores how actual readers responded, focusing, in turn, on two groups: regular cab users (invariably assumed to be upper- or upper-middle-class men) and strangers to London, whether foreigners or otherwise. The paper demonstrates how accounts of reading experience link design and use and bring into focus the effectiveness, or otherwise, of the former. Even in the context of this very specific case study, the article's analysis of readers' responses to information design suggests varieties of historical everyday experience that have yet to be considered by historians, but, like other forms of reading, warrant our close attention.

In ‘Ornament and Crime’ (1908), one of the most powerful early ‘manifestos’ of architectural modernism, Adolf Loos directly equates ornament with all manner of filth. With insistent repetition, his...

This issue of The Journal of Architecture features new historical and theoretical work around the theme of ‘Architecture and Dirt’. The papers represent a selection of those presented in 2007 at a ...

Victorian architects and architectural theorists made a clear distinction between ‘building’ and ‘architecture’; for them, a building became architecture when historical references were invoked. The development of new constructive materials, in particular cast iron, directly challenged this perceived distinction. A new material possessed no history; how, therefore, could it be architectural? This paper will address this question by focusing on the treatment of cast iron in a particular building – the Abbey Mills pumping station, of 1865–68 (Fig. 3) – assessing, for the first time, the contribution of its architect Charles Driver (1832-1900). By also referring to Driver’s published writings, this paper will assess how he sought, in this building, to invest cast iron with architectural, and therefore historical, meaning.