(2021). Violent Foundations. Architectural Theory Review. Ahead of Print.

Abstract With the inclusion of the digital in the suite of on-site interpretation experiences now available at many war memorials, long-standing tensions between education, commemoration and tourism are amplified. At the same time, new regimes of bodily experience shaped by the interaction of architectural and digital technologies, evolving expectations of behaviour and engagement, and challenges to

(2020). In This Issue. Architectural Theory Review: Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 125-126.

(2020). Doors and Portals, Revisited. Architectural Theory Review: Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 192-197.

(2020). Latour’s Activist Scepticism. Architectural Theory Review: Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 217-220.

Abstract In 1964 Bruno Zevi and Paolo Portoghesi launched an ambitious retrospective of Michelangelo’s oeuvre to commemorate the fourth centenary of his death. Held at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, the exhibition, titled Mostra Critica delle Opere Michelangiolesche, offered a comprehensive experience of Michelangelo’s work entirely through replicas and reproductions. A controversial aspect of

(2020). The University is Dead, Long Live the University! Architectural Theory Review: Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 198-202.

Abstract The proto-sociologist Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl is best known in architectural history for the popularity that his organicist-functionalist dictum of “building from the inside out” received in early twentieth-century German architectural culture. However, less is known about Riehl’s own writing on architecture in the context of his sociological theories. This paper discusses the importance of

(2020). Regarding Immigrant Detention. Architectural Theory Review: Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 214-216.

(2020). Post-Zoom: Screen Environments and the Human/Machine Interface. Architectural Theory Review: Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 207-210.

(2020). Benjamin’s Flu. Architectural Theory Review: Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 184-187.

(2020). Choreographies for the Laboratorized City. Architectural Theory Review: Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 188-191.

Abstract The history of American architecture includes many examples of activists and reformers who sought to make the profession more inclusive, just, and socially engaged. This article provides a review of the academic literature discussing the efforts of such architects in order to identify historic trends in the study of activist architects in the United States—this paper’s focus. After an initial

(2020). Can We Still Choose Architectural History? Architectural Theory Review: Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 203-206.

(2020). Mock Tudor. Architectural Theory Review: Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 211-213.

Abstract After the Second World War, neorealism was fundamental as a spatial register of the time while simultaneously contributing to the creation of a visual culture at a key moment in Italian history. Although the term has been adopted ad hoc in architecture, transfers between neorealism and architecture are still not fully understood and significant grey areas remain. Against this backdrop, recent

(2020). Covid—Quid Tum? Architectural Theory Review: Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 182-183.

Abstract This article examines Heinrich Wölfflin’s discussion of sixteenth-century Italian landscape design in Renaissance and Baroque (1888). It argues that Wölfflin’s interpretation influenced twentieth-century accounts of the mannerist garden, from Luigi Dami’s Il giardino italiano (1924) and the Fascist-era Mostra del giardino italiano (1931), to later Anglo-American scholarship. Close attention

Abstract Once celebrated as a tourist destination, and now filled with derelict hotels, Varosha is a contested landscape at once embodying contradicting political and economic aspirations and featuring vividly in negotiations for political reconciliation in Cyprus. This paper provides a history of the antagonisms that surround this area by interrogating the creation of hotels and landscapes of leisure

Abstract This article offers an analysis of the ideas of the French architect Jean Labatut, who was the director of graduate studies at Princeton’s Department of Architecture in the post-Second World War years (1949–67). Throughout his career at Princeton (1928–67) he developed a pedagogical system centred on a visual engagement with the built environment. As a progressive Catholic, Labatut integrated

AbstractThis paper explores the role of architecture as a catalyst for housing policy through analysis of the Tenement House Exhibition held in New York City in 1900. Organized by the progressive C...

This article examines how the architecture of international exhibitions stimulated sensations of moving through space and time. It conducts a detailed study of the principal structures of the Glasg...

The following paper takes as its starting point a posed photograph of the members’ room space within the Architectural Association’s AA125 exhibition. The image is one of the only published traces ...

What do we mean when we say that a building is an assemblage? To answer this question, we must first decide what we mean by ‘the assemblage’ and which areas of Deleuze and Guattari’s corpus we will...

Abstract In 1936, Le Corbusier proposed his first stadium, which he entitled a Centre national de réjouissances populaires de 100,000 participants. It was a spectacular cultural, sporting, and political vision for Paris as it was to hold 100,000 spectators. This was his first project to deal with architecture’s relationship with the crowd, and through Elias Canetti’s definition of the closed vs. open

Abstract Pierre Patte’s view of an idealised Parisian street, a sectional illustration in his treatise Mémoires sur les objects le plus importans de l’architecture of 1769, occupies a pivotal position in the historiography and visual representation of crowds and crowded spaces, though not a single person inhabits Patte’s imagined space. Pared down and evacuated of human presence, Patte’s section provides

ABSTRACTS Drawing on fieldwork at travelling fairs in England, this article uses a number of concepts—crowd crystals, involvement contours, cacophony, intercalary elements—to read the heterogeneous interrelationships between fair-going crowd dynamics and fairground architecture. The article notes an apparent lack of interest in both these entities (from crowd theory and architectural theory, respectively);

On May 29, 1985, there was a slow moving but devastating and destructive collision between architecture and the crowd at the Heysel football stadium in Brussels (Belgium). About one hour before the kick-off of the 1985 European Football Cup final, Liverpool fans breached the fence and overpowered the police line that separated their section from that of the supporters of the rival team, Juventus. What

Abstract This paper examines the representation of the crowd as the consuming mob in the American department store in the early twentieth century. In store promotions and popular accounts, urban retail spaces provide the setting for the materialization of the crowd as the driving engine and mutated body of mass consumption. Store owners and their backers employed the image of shopping hordes on their

AbstractMany times in the history of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), Rem Koolhaas has self- or co-curated exhibitions of recent work—in 1978 at the Guggenheim in New York; between 1...

Abstract In 1970, the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York City hosted the exhibition Haus-Rucker-Co LIVE!, a mid-career retrospective of the Viennese architectural collective. Most historians have studied the range of design works created by the trio—and featured in the exhibition—alongside contemporaneous architects’ concerns with sci-fi fantasy; temporary, inflatable structures; and countercultural

AbstractOnly 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...

The eponymous “audiences” generated by Dan Graham’s 1976 installation, “Public Space/Two Audiences,” were both contained within a white box featuring one mirrored wall and separated by a piece of insulated glass that cut through the middle of the space. Part of Ambiente/Arte dal futurism al body art, Germano Celant’s exhibition within the central pavilion of the 34th International Art Exhibition of

Abstract “Form and Use in Architecture” was constructed and mounted at MIT’s Hayden Gallery in 1969. Designed and assembled by students with guidance from Stanford Anderson, then professor at MIT, it was a means to test Anderson’s theories of design. The exhibition opposed modernist faith in the predictability of forms’ effects. It instead investigated notions of environments, which accounted for interplay

Abstract In 2015 Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam programmed the exhibition 1:1 Period Rooms by Andreas Angelidakis, an environment featuring six evocations of historical period rooms, gradually evicted from the Stedelijk Museum as it adopted the white cube convention. This article interprets the exhibition, its six period room-white cube permutations, and Andreas Angelidakis’s multiple authorial

Abstract The article reflects on the conceptualization of the exhibition MAN transFORMS, the opening show of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Design Cooper-Hewitt Museum in October 1976. Discussion of the exhibition’s curatorial direction considers how conceptions of the environment are applied as content as well as form via reflection on the curatorial tools employed in the genesis

Abstract Architect, painter, and designer Herbert Bayer was a progenitor of modern exhibition design that emphasized the visual perception of its audiences; his associate and occasional collaborator, Alexander Dorner, also approached the conception of exhibitions by focusing on viewer experiences. Their similar emphasis on the centrality of subject-viewers and differing philosophies of perception and

This paper interprets the context and implications of a little-known but consequential ideological feud that emerged between rival “regionalist” and “modernist” camps of architectural practitioners in the south Indian state of Kerala in the 1970s. Beginning with a comparative analysis of the private residences of the key protagonists—the expatriate British Gandhian, Laurie Baker, and J. C. Alexander

Even though knowledge of geographically and culturally distant architectures is more often circulated and translated through the dissemination of images than gained by visceral first-hand experiences of actual buildings, places and spaces, there have been limited historiographic analyses of the critical role that architectural photography plays in shaping such understandings. Broadening perspectives

Colonial-period military estates in Singapore are being gentrified for adaptive reuse producing high-end hospitality and retail venues for expatriate and tourist consumption. These include the feted “Black and White” residential enclaves synonymous with Singapore’s tropical aesthetic. But underlying this reinvention is a disturbing history of wartime repurposing under the Japanese Imperial Army, which

This paper presents scaffolds and dissections for the comparative representation and analysis of Indic temple geometry found in temples across South and Southeast Asia. Scaffolds are representational schema that capture classes of constructive geometry such as grids, geometric profiles and procedures from canonical descriptions. Dissections represent horizontal and vertical profiles that capture attribute

How big is architectural history, now? This was the question recently posed by Timothy Hyde in the “coming of age” issue of ARQ, Architectural Research Quarterly. A small discipline com-pared with the history of art or literature—at least as one might measure it in the size of its major annual conferences, the value of the grants it secures, or the linear meterage of its library holdings—architectural

According to Stephen Kite, a “shadow-maker” knows that shadows cast by sunlight, moonlight, and candlelight are different; that “some illuminance is needed to see even the deepest blacks” (255); that “a lightening background ‘blackens’ a dark grey square” (255); that you can carve a block of shadow with light; and that a shadow cast by coloured light is perceived as having a complementary coloured

This article proposes a new perspective on the contemporary standing of architectural history by examining the transition from architectural histories grounded in and upon textuality to an architectural historical approach formulated though the theoretical understanding of cultural techniques. Taking as a case study the cabin built by the philosopher Henry David Thoreau—and posing the wilfully deceptive

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

This essay investigates the pictorial practices used by Edmund Sharpe (1809–77) to visualize the evolution of English Gothic architecture. Examining his 1849 Treatise on the Rise and Progress of the Decorated Window Tracery in England, this essay emphasizes Sharpe’s singular approach to classifying architecture within the framework of debates about evolutionary descent in studies of natural and architectural

This essay unravels the history of Chicago as an urban laboratory and the way crisis was utilised and even staged in order to project alternative scenarios. It centres on a single photograph of an intersection from 1909, which shows the location saturated with a shocking amount of traffic brought to a standstill. To make visible what commonly remained hidden (the flows and intensities of urban movement)

Founded in 2010 by Sydney-based artist and academic Sarah Breen Lovett, Expanded Architecture is a multidisciplinary curatorial project that has, across a number of iterations, incorporated film, performance, exhibitions, and symposia. Its most recent version, Temporal Formal at Seidler City (November 7, 2014), was structured as a single-evening exhibition held across three buildings designed by Harry

Accounting for historical formation as intensive formations of a material milieu amounts to nothing less than an ethical project. This paper proposes an ethological approach to architectural arrangements to overcome an impasse in the understanding of the built environment. In its central parts, it respectively revisits two favourite clichés of architectural theory: the Foucauldian dispositif (apparatus)

This article looks at the contemporary situation of the Hotels Alimentation du Bas-Congo in Kinshasa and Mbanza Ngungu (Democratic Republic of the Congo). The distinctive iron frameworks of these colonial buildings were manufactured in Belgium between circa 1904 and 1911 and sent to the Congo to serve as hotels. I analyse the corporeal state of these remainders of early Belgian colonialism according

Following material and theoretical encounters the author has with “dark matter” in her daily life in the Otway Ranges in south-east Australia, this article explores architecture’s complicity with climate change and possible paths for its redemption. Dark matter is simultaneously the building materials produced from crude oil, the production of which is a significant contributor to global warming, and

Drawing on fieldwork in Cape Town, this essay moves transversally across different settings—situated assemblages made up of enunciations, actions, and codes—in order to explore “that which holds a society together”, which is the institution in the broadest sense. Confronted with the violence of inequality produced and maintained by enduring spatial structures, complexity, hybridity, and ambiguity come

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

In 2012, I was involved in the experimental study program, Campus in Camps, which is located in the West Bank and which brought together 15 third-generation refugees to study the contemporary condition of Palestinian refugee camps and to speculate about their potential futures. In this article, I draw on my experience at Campus in Camps in order to reflect on how design and speculation can be activated

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

This essay investigates the “political aesthetics” of electric lighting in Manhattan during 1913–1922, particularly the conflicting styles of public and private lighting, both urban and domestic, portrayed within F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 The Beautiful and Damned. Using the method of “topographic literary analysis”, it traces the novel’s two main protagonists, of different gender and class, as they

Dear Editors:I appreciate Peggy Deamer’s close reading of my article on the impact of anti-monopoly laws upon architectural ethics and practice. I’d like to clarify certain points that I made, and ...

Hyungmin Pai, author of The Portfolio and the Diagram, suggests World War I and the Great Depression revealed “to many architects that the traditional strategy of autonomy had become ineffectual amidst a social agenda maximising efficiency and production”. Pai links the major reformation of the discipline that subsequently took place to this questioning of the profession’s relevance. Eighty years later

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

This essay proposes a new semio-pragmatic framework to grasp the different assemblages of power in which architecture participates. It does so by deploying Félix Guattari’s pragmatic conceptualisation of enunciation, developed in Schizoanalytic Cartographies, as the basis for a renewed analysis of the Red House by Philip Webb and William Morris. In distinguishing between polyphonic and ethico-aesthetic