Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2023.2205436
María Novas-Ferradás
In the 1950s, married women in the Netherlands were assimilated into the fixed ideal of heteronormative family and traditional family housing standards which were the norm; single women were not. Single women represented not only a separate category in post-Second World War society but also a stigmatised one. What was a woman without a man? Women were simply not expected to live alone. In the mid-twentieth century, however, high-rise residential projects were designed to enable women to live independently. Over a period of more than thirty years, Dutch women’s organisations and pioneering women architects made a key contribution to collaboratively develop emancipatory and innovative residential projects in the country’s biggest cities. In 1948, the Elisabeth Brugsma Foundation commissioned the architectural office Pot & Pot-Keegstra to build the Elisabeth Brugsmaflat in The Hague. The process was difficult, and took a long time, before the Elisabeth Brugsmaflat finally opened its doors in 1958. It was an important step to the progressive normalisation of women living independently, and also contributed to the improvement of housing standards for all.
{"title":"A flat of one’s own: the Elisabeth Brugsmaflat in The Hague (1945–1958)","authors":"María Novas-Ferradás","doi":"10.1080/13602365.2023.2205436","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2023.2205436","url":null,"abstract":"In the 1950s, married women in the Netherlands were assimilated into the fixed ideal of heteronormative family and traditional family housing standards which were the norm; single women were not. Single women represented not only a separate category in post-Second World War society but also a stigmatised one. What was a woman without a man? Women were simply not expected to live alone. In the mid-twentieth century, however, high-rise residential projects were designed to enable women to live independently. Over a period of more than thirty years, Dutch women’s organisations and pioneering women architects made a key contribution to collaboratively develop emancipatory and innovative residential projects in the country’s biggest cities. In 1948, the Elisabeth Brugsma Foundation commissioned the architectural office Pot & Pot-Keegstra to build the Elisabeth Brugsmaflat in The Hague. The process was difficult, and took a long time, before the Elisabeth Brugsmaflat finally opened its doors in 1958. It was an important step to the progressive normalisation of women living independently, and also contributed to the improvement of housing standards for all.","PeriodicalId":44236,"journal":{"name":"METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture","volume":"45 1","pages":"402 - 433"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73505866","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 : 2023-02-24DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2023.2167851
Alejandro Campos-Uribe, Paula Lacomba-Montes
Grounded in an experiential understanding of architecture, this research explores ways in which architectural history can help bring works or ideas more vividly to the present. We propose here an embodied visit to Aldo and Hannie van Eyck’s house in Loenen aan de Vecht. In the house, layers of temporality, materiality, everyday living, and lived experience mingle with design solutions and worldviews affecting them. By immersing into the materiality of the Van Eycks’ home, the paper offers a lively, intensive, and qualitative understanding of the design and its connections with the architect’s contributions to post-war architectural discourses. The experiential account uses a mix of archival, ethnographic, and performative techniques, a proposed method that adds a necessary degree of complexity to architectural history. The method enacts a new form of knowledge where our bodies inform the findings, from materiality to meaning, and connects to new architectural history approaches, namely Architectural Anthropology and Performative Design Research. With all these elements, we are proposing a rich, empirical account of the project by means of three re-enactments of the Van Eycks’ homelife: a visit to the attic, table talk under the skylight, and a lively lunch in the garden. The account offers deep insights into how architectural ideas take material form, showing that specific ways of understanding history, time, or space, are indeed embodied within our built environment and that they can only be disentangled, with the help of our bodies, by performing actions within, in and around buildings.
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Pub Date : 2023-02-17DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2023.2213561
Léa‐Catherine Szacka
In an age of climate emergency and amid the current global historicisation of the postmodern period, the concept of ‘critical regionalism’ is being reassessed, more than 40 years after it was first theorised by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre in 1981. With Resisting Postmodern Architecture: Critical Regionalism Before Globalisation, Stylianos Giamarelos insightfully scrutinised the critical regionalism project as a whole and from all possible directions: in its genealogy; its media construct; its application; and even as far as its misinterpretations and misopportunities. Looking at the positive worldwide dissemination and reception of the discourse of critical regionalism, Giamarelos poses the concept developed by Tzonis and Lefaivre, and later popularised by Anglo-American scholar Kenneth Frampton, as one possible response to the enduring crisis of modern architecture. The result is an important new resource in the currently growing literature on postmodernism and a study that outlines critical regionalism as an unfinished project for the twenty-first century. Yet, ultimately, this in-depth scholarly enquiry is not merely a history of postmodernism, but also an alternative history of modern Greek architecture, a commentary on architecture’s media production, and a study of operative criticism. Taking a step back, Giamarelos starts his book in the year 1980, as he returns to the well-known history of the First International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, ‘The Presence of the Past’. Announcing his ambition of telling that history from a very different perspective, the author approaches the event from the periphery and through the eyes of Greek architects Suzana and Dimitris Antonakakis. Amongst other things, the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale became famous for marking the decisive moment in which Frampton, by resigning from the show’s organisation committee, detached himself from other voices associated with postmodern architecture. As I have argued before, the Biennale also ‘enabled Frampton to develop ideas on critical regionalism that, though in reaction to the International Style, would open a path distinct to postmodernism’. Despite Frampton’s retreat, the 1980 Biennale turned into a theatre of many important encounters, mainly between Europeans and their American counterparts — following the lines already traced by Vittorio Gregotti’s 1976 ‘Europa/America’ exhibition at the Biennale. Yet, these encounters were ideologically charged; one of Giamarelos’ claim in this first chapter is that it might have been the American Review by Léa-Catherine Szacka Manchester Architecture Research Group, University of Manchester, UK lea-catherine.szacka@manchester.ac. uk
{"title":"Resisting Postmodern Architecture: Critical Regionalism Before Globalisation","authors":"Léa‐Catherine Szacka","doi":"10.1080/13602365.2023.2213561","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2023.2213561","url":null,"abstract":"In an age of climate emergency and amid the current global historicisation of the postmodern period, the concept of ‘critical regionalism’ is being reassessed, more than 40 years after it was first theorised by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre in 1981. With Resisting Postmodern Architecture: Critical Regionalism Before Globalisation, Stylianos Giamarelos insightfully scrutinised the critical regionalism project as a whole and from all possible directions: in its genealogy; its media construct; its application; and even as far as its misinterpretations and misopportunities. Looking at the positive worldwide dissemination and reception of the discourse of critical regionalism, Giamarelos poses the concept developed by Tzonis and Lefaivre, and later popularised by Anglo-American scholar Kenneth Frampton, as one possible response to the enduring crisis of modern architecture. The result is an important new resource in the currently growing literature on postmodernism and a study that outlines critical regionalism as an unfinished project for the twenty-first century. Yet, ultimately, this in-depth scholarly enquiry is not merely a history of postmodernism, but also an alternative history of modern Greek architecture, a commentary on architecture’s media production, and a study of operative criticism. Taking a step back, Giamarelos starts his book in the year 1980, as he returns to the well-known history of the First International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, ‘The Presence of the Past’. Announcing his ambition of telling that history from a very different perspective, the author approaches the event from the periphery and through the eyes of Greek architects Suzana and Dimitris Antonakakis. Amongst other things, the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale became famous for marking the decisive moment in which Frampton, by resigning from the show’s organisation committee, detached himself from other voices associated with postmodern architecture. As I have argued before, the Biennale also ‘enabled Frampton to develop ideas on critical regionalism that, though in reaction to the International Style, would open a path distinct to postmodernism’. Despite Frampton’s retreat, the 1980 Biennale turned into a theatre of many important encounters, mainly between Europeans and their American counterparts — following the lines already traced by Vittorio Gregotti’s 1976 ‘Europa/America’ exhibition at the Biennale. Yet, these encounters were ideologically charged; one of Giamarelos’ claim in this first chapter is that it might have been the American Review by Léa-Catherine Szacka Manchester Architecture Research Group, University of Manchester, UK lea-catherine.szacka@manchester.ac. uk","PeriodicalId":44236,"journal":{"name":"METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture","volume":"108 1","pages":"319 - 322"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75020532","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 : 2023-02-17DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2023.2193610
A. León
In 1869, the Osage burial monument known as Big Mound, located in the middle of downtown St. Louis, was destroyed. But the desecration of the site did not end there. The multiple destructions and memorialisations that this sacred site subsequently endured reveal the markers of settler colonialism, a form of occupation that replaces Indigenous populations with invasive societies. We can see this pattern take shape in the narratives constructed around the site, in the manner in which its destruction was enacted and recorded, and in the commemoration efforts made in 1929 under the sponsorship of the Colonial Dames of America. This association is dedicated to honouring the memory of settlers, the agents involved in the destruction and dispossession of Indigenous populations. The plaque installed by the group prioritises them over the Indigenous builders it is supposed to commemorate. Aggressions to the site have not stopped. In 2014, the Missouri Department of Transportation moved the marker to make way for the construction of the Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge. A few efforts have been made to palliate these actions and commemorate the monument. However, these efforts have elided and erased the claims of its builders — the Osage Nation — and constructed an image of these sites as empty, abandoned ruins built by supposedly distant, disappeared groups. By disconnecting the original builders from contemporary Indigenous groups, they have followed settler colonial frameworks resulting in acts of both physical and conceptual un-making that extend to the present. Undoing these frameworks is the first step towards reconsidering the broader site, which extends beyond the monument.
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Pub Date : 2023-02-17DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2023.2186467
M. Mullane
As Japan’s colonial empire pushed westward in the early twentieth century, insects pushed back. Colonists in Taiwan were besieged by the Formosan termite, a voracious but then relatively mysterious species that ate everything from government buildings to Shinto shrines. The Japanese government dispatched termite specialists to the island in response to document the damage and develop a solution. The problem was not only that termites could eat away at architecture in Taiwan; more dire was the possibility that they could travel throughout the empire and back to the mainland. Such an existential threat prompted entomologists to collaborate with architects and engineers and develop novel methods of study. Looking at entomological reports, architectural histories, and buildings that were both destroyed by termites and dedicated to displaying them, I show how termite-pocked buildings were mediated to map the Japanese colonial empire and physicalise its potentially dangerous interdependence. By approaching the special issue’s theme of ‘unmaking’ as an act of insect-led destruction, I argue that vulnerable wooden architecture served as a medium of connection between human and insect actors as both came to terms with empire.
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Pub Date : 2023-02-17DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2023.2197376
Michael Robinson Cohen
In the essay, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America’, Rosalind Kraus highlights the impossibility of identifying a singular throughline or aesthetic style that connected the contemporary art of her day. Seventies American art, she concluded, cannot be organised into a coherent list; in fact, it ‘is proud of its own dispersal’ and seems to intentionally negate ‘that need for a list’. The ‘index’ of Kraus’s essay title is not the alphabetical organisation of terms in a list, but rather denotes a mark or trace left by an action or object. Despite this alternate definition, and the nonconforming nature of seventies art, Kraus cannot fully discard the desire to instil a linear organisation and, thus, the list prevails in the structure of her essay. Each paragraph begins with a numeric marker providing some semblance of order to the reader and fulfilling the longing for a ‘synthetic’ device that lingers in the introductory paragraph of the essay. Kraus’s inability to avoid the impulse to list suggests not only the rhetorical power of the list, but perhaps speaks to her inability to embrace the entropy of the art of her day. A will to list is of course nothing new. Amongst architects, perhaps no one has committed to the practice of making lists more than Michael Meredith and Hillary Sample, the pair that heads the architecture firmMOS. In exhibitions and books, Meredith and Sample have previously made ‘visual lists’, to borrow a term from Umberto Eco, of scale figures, houses for sale, lo-fi architecture, and, most recently, vacant spaces. The image-based indexes made by MOS present items with a cool rationality that seems to eschew politics or really Review by Michael Robinson Cohen Founding member, Citygroup Architecture, Bard College Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, USA mcohen@bard.edu 310 Book Reviews
在这篇题为“索引注释:美国70年代艺术”的文章中,罗莎琳德·克劳斯强调了不可能确定一个单一的贯穿线或美学风格,将她那个时代的当代艺术联系起来。她总结道,70年代的美国艺术不能被组织成一个连贯的列表;事实上,它“对自己的分散感到自豪”,似乎有意否定“对名单的需求”。克劳斯文章标题的“索引”不是按字母顺序排列的术语,而是指一个动作或物体留下的标记或痕迹。尽管有这种不同的定义,以及70年代艺术的不一致性,克劳斯不能完全放弃灌输线性组织的愿望,因此,这个列表在她的文章结构中盛行。每一段都以一个数字标记开始,为读者提供了某种秩序,并满足了对文章引言段中“综合”手段的渴望。克劳斯无法避免列出清单的冲动,这不仅表明了清单的修辞力量,也可能说明了她无法接受她那个时代艺术的熵。想要上市当然不是什么新鲜事。在建筑师中,也许没有人比Michael Meredith和Hillary Sample更致力于制作清单的实践,这对夫妇领导着建筑公司mos。在展览和书籍中,Meredith和Sample曾制作过“视觉清单”(借用Umberto Eco的术语),包括规模人物、待售房屋、低保真建筑,以及最近的空置空间。由MOS制作的基于图像的索引以一种冷静的理性呈现物品,似乎避开了政治或真正的Review by Michael Robinson Cohen创始成员,Citygroup Architecture, Bard College annandale on hudson, NY, USA mcohen@bard.edu 310 Book Reviews
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Pub Date : 2023-02-17DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2023.2192756
D. Wendel
In 2010, the Rwandan government rolled out a mandatory roof modernisation programme to replace grass thatch on every house and outbuilding in Rwanda. The initiative was ostensibly one of shelter modernisation, but rather more embedded in post-genocide nation and peace building. The paper considers Louis Althusser’s concept of ‘interpellation’ as a useful framework for understanding how the Rwandan government established relationships between architectural aesthetics, sovereignty, and peace. Ethnographic research with state ministries and interviews with rural residents reveal the ideological basis for those connections — how aesthetics regulated values and the reception of the programme by ordinary Rwandans. Historical research substantiates the persistent use of architecture aesthetics as a medium of interpellation mobilised previously in the name of morality, health, and modernity, and most recently, peace.
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Pub Date : 2023-02-17DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2023.2195419
Victoria Addona
This paper focuses on the concept of infrastructural precariousness in early seventeenth-century administrative drawings that document urban and natural environments by the architect-engineer Gherardo Mechini. Each drawing responds to a report produced for the granducal administration on broken property: walls, streets, and banks crumbling due to floods, fires, storms, vandalism, or, more often, cumulative destruction over time. In addition to illustrating the textual descriptions of ruined architecture in lucid coloured washes, Mechini often pasted sheets picturing his proposed restoration directly above each image. A user could make, unmake, and remake virtually the built environment by flipping the paper up and down. He further collaborated on a series of topographic maps to picture Tuscan roads and land holdings. In what follows, I examine the innovative graphic solutions adopted by Mechini to visualise the legislative management of Tuscany’s precarious infrastructure and policies informed by nascent theories connecting architectural preservation to ethical rule. Drawing emerged as an expressive administrative instrument to probe how to maintain and improve the built environment and promote the perceived stability and unity of the centralised governing state.
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Pub Date : 2023-02-17DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2023.2213559
Jason E. Nguyen, Elizabeth J. Petcu
This special issue of The Journal of Architecture surveys the concept of ‘unmaking’ as an overarching facet of architectural thinking and production that has yet to be considered at a synoptic scale. When we refer to ‘un-making’, we mean the actions that result in the dismantling of architectural forms, modes of thought, and means of production. A historical study of these operations, we hope, might generate necessary theoretical frameworks to conceptualise transformations in architecture amid today’s unprecedented sociopolitical and environmental challenges. The aim of this special issue is twofold: first, it brings into dialogue topics from across different periods and geographies that explore varied yet related notions of un-making; second, it introduces a range of theoretical approaches to analyse architectural disassembly that might further conversations and actions to reimagine the discourses, institutions, and practices in the field today. How might past and ongoing instances of architectural destruction paradoxically help us develop more critical and comprehensive methods to undertake the study, reform, and design of the built environment? Through the lens of this issue’s collected historical studies, we argue that mechanisms of architectural un-making in design, environments and technologies, and politics are interdependent and must be considered in tandem to address the extraordinary architectural challenges of the twenty-first century. The forces that un-make architecture, and by which architecture un-makes, shape the physical and conceptual landscapes of the built environment as well as the world in which architecture operates. Instances of architectural unmaking can evidence human agency, such as the dismantling of the original Pennsylvania Station in New York City beginning in 1963 to make way for its now widely reviled replacement. In this case, destruction unfolded both physically, in the razing of the building by McKim, Mead and White, as well as metaphorically, in the suppression of monumental symbols of civic life in the urban field. Un-making in architecture can additionally arise from natural and environmental disasters. The destruction wrought by the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Hurricane Maria in 2017 in Puerto Rico, and the 2022 Pakistan floods highlights the urban and regional scales of natural catastrophes. Such natural and environmental forms of architectural un-making can be difficult to disentangle from human actions. For instance, the vulnerability of certain buildings, communities, and infrastructure in the Global South are linked to the lasting impacts of imperialism, including the design Jason E. Nguyen
这期《建筑杂志》的特刊调查了“解构”的概念,将其作为建筑思维和生产的一个总体方面,尚未在概括性的尺度上加以考虑。当我们提到“解构”时,我们指的是导致建筑形式、思维模式和生产方式解体的行为。我们希望,对这些操作的历史研究可以产生必要的理论框架,以便在当今前所未有的社会政治和环境挑战中概念化建筑的转变。本期特刊的目的是双重的:首先,它带来了来自不同时期和地域的对话话题,探讨了不同但相关的“制造”概念;其次,它引入了一系列理论方法来分析建筑拆卸,这可能会进一步推动对话和行动,以重新想象当今该领域的话语、制度和实践。过去和正在进行的建筑破坏的实例如何帮助我们发展更重要和全面的方法来进行建筑环境的研究、改革和设计?通过本期收集的历史研究,我们认为在设计、环境和技术以及政治方面的建筑破坏机制是相互依存的,必须同时考虑,以应对21世纪的非凡建筑挑战。破坏建筑的力量,以及建筑破坏建筑的力量,塑造了建筑环境的物理和概念景观,以及建筑运作的世界。建筑拆除的例子可以证明人类的力量,比如1963年开始拆除纽约市原有的宾夕法尼亚车站,为现在广受诟病的新车站让路。在这种情况下,破坏既表现在物理上,在McKim, Mead和White的建筑中被夷为平地,也表现在隐喻上,在城市领域中对公民生活的纪念性符号的压制。自然灾害和环境灾害也可能导致建筑的破坏。2010年海地地震、2017年波多黎各飓风玛丽亚和2022年巴基斯坦洪水造成的破坏凸显了自然灾害的城市和区域规模。这种自然和环境形式的建筑解构很难与人类行为分开。例如,全球南方某些建筑、社区和基础设施的脆弱性与帝国主义的持久影响有关,包括Jason E. Nguyen的设计
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Pub Date : 2023-02-17DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2023.2181373
Eliyahu Keller
Beginning in 1957, the United States Government pursued an unimaginable enterprise. For eighteen years, and as part of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s ‘Atoms for Peace’ initiative, the controversial Project Plowshare employed hundreds of scientists, engineers, and policymakers, and facilitated 27 tests and 31 nuclear detonations for an outrageous goal: the use of nuclear weapons for constructive means. The experiments were designed to explore a range of energy-related and infrastructural projects such as gas and isotope extraction or excavations for the purposes of constructing new harbours, canals, and transportation ways. This article examines a speculative architectural project inspired directly by Project Plowshare: a proposal for an underground city to be built beneath Manhattan in a spherical cavity created by a nuclear bomb, suggested by the Canadian architect and planner Oscar Newman (1935–2004), and published in Esquire magazine in 1969. Rather than examining this project for its architectural qualities or plausibility, this article explores Newman’s underground city as a document that testifies to the conditions of its making and situates it as a concise, literal, and radical representation of the conditions under which architecture was imagined in the Cold War decades in the United States. In Newman’s underground city, architecture is embedded within a constellation of geopolitics, warfare, and propaganda, and makes visible the inherent dependability between technological progress, construction and development, and environmental destruction.
从1957年开始,美国政府进行了一项难以想象的事业。18年来,作为德怀特·d·艾森豪威尔(Dwight D. Eisenhower)总统“原子促和平”倡议的一部分,备受争议的“犁头计划”(Project Plowshare)雇佣了数百名科学家、工程师和政策制定者,促成了27次试验和31次核爆炸,实现了一个令人难以置信的目标:将核武器用于建设性手段。这些实验旨在探索一系列与能源相关的基础设施项目,如天然气和同位素的开采或挖掘,以建设新的港口、运河和运输方式。本文研究了一个直接受到Plowshare项目启发的投机建筑项目:一个由加拿大建筑师和规划师Oscar Newman(1935-2004)提出的在曼哈顿地下建造一个由核弹形成的球形空洞的地下城市的建议,并于1969年发表在《Esquire》杂志上。本文不是考察这个项目的建筑质量或合理性,而是将纽曼的地下城市作为一个证明其制作条件的文件,并将其定位为一个简洁,文字和激进的代表,在冷战时期的美国,建筑是在这样的条件下想象的。在纽曼的地下城市中,建筑被嵌入地缘政治、战争和宣传的星群中,并使技术进步、建设和发展以及环境破坏之间的内在可靠性可见。
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