Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2022.2067203
Evan Schreiner
Abstract The Ottoman Public Debt Administration (OPDA), a multinational financial cooperation with semi-governmental privileges, was founded in 1881 following the Ottoman government’s declaration of bankruptcy. Acting within a complex inter-imperial setting, the OPDA’s headquarters constituted the center of an expansive material network engendered by debt, operationalizing a system of resource extraction across a wide economic geography. Focusing on the concept of trust underlying the financial instrument of debt, this paper considers architecture to be both a medium and a product of the logics of modern finance developed in the late nineteenth century. The building’s methodical ordering of space, modest yet specific ornamentation, and unique façade design did not simply mirror the financial activities it housed, rather it actively mobilized them to regain creditors’ trust following financial collapse. I argue that the OPDA building’s design—in its incorporation of past, “traditional” forms—materialized an ongoing process of borrowing from the future, naturalizing the debt system’s stability and thus enabling its endurance.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2022.2049614
Elliott Sturtevant
Abstract Architecture seems to have lost sight of flexibility’s multiple definitions and historical depth. The concept’s easy presence in contemporary architectural discourse masks flexibility’s intimate connection to the contraction and expansion of industrial production and changing manufacturing processes in the first half of the twentieth century. Flexibility at this historical moment required rendering the manufactory divisible, thereby allowing space, a financial asset, to be redistributed over time. This article follows one such firm, the Austin Company, through a series of commissions to illustrate how it positioned itself as a flexibility supplier. Doing so allows for inquiry into the nature of flexibility in the history of industrial capitalism.
{"title":"Fear the Elephant: Selling Flexibility at the Austin Company in the Aftermath of the Great Depression","authors":"Elliott Sturtevant","doi":"10.1080/13264826.2022.2049614","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2022.2049614","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Architecture seems to have lost sight of flexibility’s multiple definitions and historical depth. The concept’s easy presence in contemporary architectural discourse masks flexibility’s intimate connection to the contraction and expansion of industrial production and changing manufacturing processes in the first half of the twentieth century. Flexibility at this historical moment required rendering the manufactory divisible, thereby allowing space, a financial asset, to be redistributed over time. This article follows one such firm, the Austin Company, through a series of commissions to illustrate how it positioned itself as a flexibility supplier. Doing so allows for inquiry into the nature of flexibility in the history of industrial capitalism.","PeriodicalId":43786,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Theory Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"35 - 55"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43585145","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2021.2023341
Bart Verschaffel
Abstract The perception and aesthetic experience of places concerns the appreciation of what is recognised as a site. It presupposes readability. A place is here, surrounded by other, similar places, that are there. Beyond, elsewhere, there is always a hinterland: beyond my world, is the World. One can only imagine the World, but the World can announce itself here, as an aspect or element of what we effectively perceive, such as a view onto a distance or the horizon. A (meaningful) environment acquires, moreover, an aesthetic quality when the successful structuring of the interplay of Place and World suggests an image to the aesthetic view: when the site is recognised as exemplifying the “topos” of a “lovely place,” or a locus amoenus: an enclosed, secret garden (“paradise”), or a “House before the Distant.”
{"title":"Loci Amoeni: The Meaning and Aesthetics of Sites","authors":"Bart Verschaffel","doi":"10.1080/13264826.2021.2023341","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2021.2023341","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The perception and aesthetic experience of places concerns the appreciation of what is recognised as a site. It presupposes readability. A place is here, surrounded by other, similar places, that are there. Beyond, elsewhere, there is always a hinterland: beyond my world, is the World. One can only imagine the World, but the World can announce itself here, as an aspect or element of what we effectively perceive, such as a view onto a distance or the horizon. A (meaningful) environment acquires, moreover, an aesthetic quality when the successful structuring of the interplay of Place and World suggests an image to the aesthetic view: when the site is recognised as exemplifying the “topos” of a “lovely place,” or a locus amoenus: an enclosed, secret garden (“paradise”), or a “House before the Distant.”","PeriodicalId":43786,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Theory Review","volume":"25 1","pages":"282 - 291"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41933119","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2022.2029923
Shannon Starkey
Abstract In 1966, Konrad Wachsmann began to research and design a city hall for the new speculative development of California City. For six years, the Institute for Building Research at the University of Southern California (USC) worked on a design to signal California City’s transition to public authority while redefining architecture as a media system that actively transmitted, processed, and stored information. Incorporating emerging telecommunications technologies, architecture served as a feedback loop of governance. And while the project failed to secure funding, representation became a substitute for the building. Drawings and models were superseded by machined prototypes and full-scale mock-ups. The project reveals the collapse of fantastical design speculation and the real, all manufactured in the controlled environment of the laboratory. Just as the proposed televisual media system sought to deliver effects of the real—bodies and voices broadcast live—the mock-ups delivered evidence of the real that rendered the building unnecessary.
{"title":"Architecture as Media System: Konrad Wachsmann at California City","authors":"Shannon Starkey","doi":"10.1080/13264826.2022.2029923","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2022.2029923","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In 1966, Konrad Wachsmann began to research and design a city hall for the new speculative development of California City. For six years, the Institute for Building Research at the University of Southern California (USC) worked on a design to signal California City’s transition to public authority while redefining architecture as a media system that actively transmitted, processed, and stored information. Incorporating emerging telecommunications technologies, architecture served as a feedback loop of governance. And while the project failed to secure funding, representation became a substitute for the building. Drawings and models were superseded by machined prototypes and full-scale mock-ups. The project reveals the collapse of fantastical design speculation and the real, all manufactured in the controlled environment of the laboratory. Just as the proposed televisual media system sought to deliver effects of the real—bodies and voices broadcast live—the mock-ups delivered evidence of the real that rendered the building unnecessary.","PeriodicalId":43786,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Theory Review","volume":"25 1","pages":"292 - 307"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46844666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2021.1997137
Michael Faciejew
product of a dominant intellectual class. Since the 1980s, scholars from Science and Technology Studies have paved the way for myriad studies of the embodied practices that shape knowledge in laboratories, government offices and other institutional settings. Such internal critiques are motivated by the conviction that ideas and facts are not immaterial constructs but contingent things realized through the distributed agency of individuals, protocols and objects with conflicting interests. In architecture, this influence has helped to erode heroic myths cemented in midcentury accounts of modern architecture and delusions about architectural “autonomy.” It has also helped to reorient architectural discourse away from static buildings interpreted solely through design intention and public perception. Yet the most memorable studies about architectural knowledge have focused on the pedagogical settings of the studio and the seminar and on the agency of individuals such as Alvin Boyarsky or the duo of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Indulgent attention to the intra-disciplinary legacy of such figureheads reduces architecture to a medium for commentary on the social and diminishes its participatory role in the public realm. For Yaneva—perhaps architectural scholarship’s most prominent defender of Actor-Network Theory, a method adapted from her mentor Bruno Latour—the “crafting” of architectural ARCHITECTURAL THEORY REVIEW 2021, VOL. 25, NO. 3, 394–398 history and architectural knowledge instead has stakes in a larger public discourse on the built environment. Whereas Yaneva’s earlier research isolated “design” as the site where architectural knowledge is shaped—as in The Making of a Building: A Pragmatist Approach to Architecture, her 2009 study of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA)—Crafting History instead centers the “archive.” The material site is the Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal, which since its founding in 1979 has worked to reposition architecture as a public discourse. It was selected by Yaneva for its unique organizational mandate, which has evolved with the shifting currents of scholarship in the four decades of its existence, reflecting the succession of CCA Directors, including Kurt Forster, Nicholas Olsberg, Mirko Zardini, and, since 2020, Giovanna Borasi. With an increasingly interdisciplinary (political, technological, economic) understanding of the built environment, as suggested in a recent exhibition on the spatialization of emotional capitalism (Our Happy Life, 2019), the CCA uses its collections and exhibitions to deliberate architecture’s capacity to reorganize society. It extends these deliberations across a range of institutional programs: publications, online events, produced films, lectures, archives, research projects and visiting scholar programs. Despite its idiosyncratic character, the CCA should nevertheless be understood as a fairly conventional “institution” in the sense that it is
{"title":"How Architecture Makes Friends","authors":"Michael Faciejew","doi":"10.1080/13264826.2021.1997137","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2021.1997137","url":null,"abstract":"product of a dominant intellectual class. Since the 1980s, scholars from Science and Technology Studies have paved the way for myriad studies of the embodied practices that shape knowledge in laboratories, government offices and other institutional settings. Such internal critiques are motivated by the conviction that ideas and facts are not immaterial constructs but contingent things realized through the distributed agency of individuals, protocols and objects with conflicting interests. In architecture, this influence has helped to erode heroic myths cemented in midcentury accounts of modern architecture and delusions about architectural “autonomy.” It has also helped to reorient architectural discourse away from static buildings interpreted solely through design intention and public perception. Yet the most memorable studies about architectural knowledge have focused on the pedagogical settings of the studio and the seminar and on the agency of individuals such as Alvin Boyarsky or the duo of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Indulgent attention to the intra-disciplinary legacy of such figureheads reduces architecture to a medium for commentary on the social and diminishes its participatory role in the public realm. For Yaneva—perhaps architectural scholarship’s most prominent defender of Actor-Network Theory, a method adapted from her mentor Bruno Latour—the “crafting” of architectural ARCHITECTURAL THEORY REVIEW 2021, VOL. 25, NO. 3, 394–398 history and architectural knowledge instead has stakes in a larger public discourse on the built environment. Whereas Yaneva’s earlier research isolated “design” as the site where architectural knowledge is shaped—as in The Making of a Building: A Pragmatist Approach to Architecture, her 2009 study of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA)—Crafting History instead centers the “archive.” The material site is the Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal, which since its founding in 1979 has worked to reposition architecture as a public discourse. It was selected by Yaneva for its unique organizational mandate, which has evolved with the shifting currents of scholarship in the four decades of its existence, reflecting the succession of CCA Directors, including Kurt Forster, Nicholas Olsberg, Mirko Zardini, and, since 2020, Giovanna Borasi. With an increasingly interdisciplinary (political, technological, economic) understanding of the built environment, as suggested in a recent exhibition on the spatialization of emotional capitalism (Our Happy Life, 2019), the CCA uses its collections and exhibitions to deliberate architecture’s capacity to reorganize society. It extends these deliberations across a range of institutional programs: publications, online events, produced films, lectures, archives, research projects and visiting scholar programs. Despite its idiosyncratic character, the CCA should nevertheless be understood as a fairly conventional “institution” in the sense that it is ","PeriodicalId":43786,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Theory Review","volume":"25 1","pages":"394 - 398"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49145063","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2021.1973047
L. Belik
Abstract This paper explores the traditional construction method of building with paxiúba (Socratea exorrhiza) in the Amazon—more specifically in the Brazilian state of Acre. This type of palm tree is native to Central and South America, and is commonly used in the construction of vernacular houses. Originally employed by local indigenous villages, paxiúba was popular not only because of the abundance of raw material, but also due to how easy it is to work. With the arrival of latex farmers to the Amazon in the early twentieth century, paxiúba started to be used in early non-indigenous settlements, becoming a construction material associated with the infrastructure of resource extraction in early stages of territorial occupation. Today few houses built of paxiúba remain in Acre. Despite changes in building material, newly built residences nonetheless retain the floor plans and construction methods inherited from traditional paxiúba houses, notwithstanding different spatial uses and settlement locations in dense, urbanized areas far from the isolated forests or farming settlements of their predecessors.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2021.2020858
Dorit Fershtman
Abstract Ongoing appraisals of generality in architecture have largely referenced theories in natural philosophy as well as generic and normative structures, criticised as formalistic and dull. Expounding on generality’s role beyond its received ideas, this paper describes the creative methodological value of this concept. Drawing on sources in post-war modernism, analytic philosophy, and the prevailing academic quest for new research methods, the paper assesses the methodological role of generality as a creative tool in the search for innovative architectural knowledge and modes of practice. It ties conceptual design’s exploration during the post-war period to cross-disciplinary academic methodological concerns about generality. Scrutinising Mies van der Rohe’s mid-century statements, it illuminates a rigorous, disciplined body of work anchored in the epistemology of the era’s philosophy of science. The terrain highlighted has relevance to current architectural dialectics, which rethink research methods in the quest for new design practices.
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