Abstract Timber is an ambiguous material, saturated with implicit values of sustainability, and locality, and at the same time globally ubiquitous. This essay examines the curious moment in Norwegian architectural history when timber, long associated with tradition and craft, became an industrial material of mass-production—in particular, through prefabricated structures produced by the Norwegian company

Abstract The work of Atelier Bow-Wow has, over the last 29 years, turned to exploring what they call behaviorology: the full social and cultural effects of constructing architecture. Through collaborations with local craftsmen, wood specialists, timber management companies, house construction companies as well as architectural design studios in Japan and Switzerland they unlock the potentials of local

Abstract This paper explores the role of timber in articulating a modern American project in nineteenth-century Lebanon. It focuses on the architecture of the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut, an educational institution founded by American missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1866. The paper examines the evolving role of timber within this foreign missionary

Abstract This article analyses the history of timber architecture in Valparaíso, viewed through the lens of the city’s flammability. It uses the concept of fire regime to examine how considerations of fire risk have shaped urban development between 1838 and 1906. The research aims to show that Valparaíso’s frequent fires, along with its preference for timber construction in the nineteenth century,

Abstract Gothic Revival architecture projected a sense of unity throughout the British Empire, even though the materials used to construct such architecture varied by available resources, geographic location and climatic conditions. In Canada, this led to the proliferation of wooden churches during the mid-nineteenth century, including William Hay’s Anglican “Garrison Church” for Toronto. The resulting

Abstract A well-known anecdote describes how a young William Le Baron Jenney, traveling the Pacific in 1850, was taken by the construction of bamboo and palm houses in the Philippines. Jenney, and those that historicized him, attributed his experimentation with steel-frame tall buildings in Chicago later in the nineteenth century to these early impressions of bamboo framework with palm-woven panels

(2020). The Architectural Model as Tool, Medium and Agent of Change. Architectural Theory Review: Vol. 24, No. 3, pp. 221-223.

Abstract In 1976–77 the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) in New York organised Idea as Model, an exhibition of architectural models realised by 22 architects and architects’ teams. Many participants can be considered protagonists of postmodern architecture, including Michael Graves, John Hejduk, Robert Stern and Stanley Tigerman, Mario Gandelsonas, Léon Krier, Charles Moore, Massimo

Abstract This article discusses the impact of INA-Casa—the dominant Italian reconstruction plan that operated between 1949 and 1963—on Italian and international architectural debate. It focuses on the role of the so-called manualetti, a series of booklets that guided the designers of the INA-Casa programme. Published by the INA-Casa architecture office in 1949 and 1950 under the supervision of the

Abstract This paper follows the proliferation of the “line-drawing algorithm,” a method for encoding lines into digital media that saw widespread application in early interactive computing. The algorithm reveals a tightly linked complex of graphical technologies which integrated disparate hardware and software into continuous, real-time operation. Generated by this algorithm, the rasterized line offered

Abstract 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 with Rossi’s paintings, kitchenware designs, and architectural projects, the coffee vessel models derived from both imaginary fantasies and manufactured utensils, modeling various conceptual and practical

Abstract This article maps and investigates the practice of 1:1 modeling between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries to demonstrate its critical agency in emphasizing vision over proportional and mathematical tools of composition, in promoting innovative and interdisciplinary approaches, and in encouraging a general circulation of ideas, techniques, and forms between architecture, sculpture, and

Abstract One way to treat the broad range of types and examples of the architectural model is to classify its manifestations in terms of their use in relation to the architectural profession, in which they sit inside, or outside: a model is inside the profession if it contributes towards the realisation of an architectural project. Identifying a model within this framework adds to an understanding

Abstract In the course of the twentieth century the Belgian wood firm De Coene, established in the late-nineteenth century, underwent a thorough modernisation. The company started off as a family business that specialised in art deco interiors and the importation of wood from the Belgian colony of the Congo, but quickly developed into an industrialised producer of cutting-edge modern furniture and

Abstract In the twentieth century, a decades-long debate about timber conservation in America began to shift. As opposed to cutting fewer trees and planting more, conversations about sustaining the nation’s forests increasingly circled around the ideal of higher utilization. Fundamentally, higher utilization meant waste reduction, which entailed turning a greater percentage of the harvested forest

(2021). The Matter of Matter. Architectural Theory Review. Ahead of Print.

Abstract This position paper addresses the ways that we historicise architectural modernism, especially within the context of the unprecedented global movements of people, ideas, materials and labour that characterised the post-war period. It suggests an alternative theoretical framing and corresponding historiography of global modernism, based on the concept of cross-cultural “contact zones.” A notion

Abstract An architectural history that foregrounds materials over the intentions of the architects and other agents of procurement and design places works and the means of their production into fields that do not map neatly on to established geographies. Drawing on a recent body of work concerned with those architectural histories of the Tasman world and the interplay of extractive industries and “grey”

Abstract Through a case study of the professionally made architectural model in Britain between the late 1960s and the early1990s, this article draws from archaeologist Ian Hodder’s concept of entanglement and argues that the relationship between the architect, the architectural model, and the modelmaker exists as an entangled web of shifting distributions of power governed by asymmetric tensions and

Abstract Drawing from Vilém Flusser’s theories on apparatuses and technical images, the paper develops an analysis of BIM (Building Information Modeling) and architectural models as contemporary cultural artifacts. The effectiveness and limitations of BIM technologies in the conception and perception of architecture are contrasted with the haptic experience of physical space, leading to the development

(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). 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.

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

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

The current conjuncture is overwhelmed by three intersecting crises: the Covid-19 pandemic, centuries of racial oppression, and the looming disasters of climate instability. Architecture finds itse...

Our universities are fragile communities and they face serious and growing difficulties. Following the outbreak of Covid-19 in March 2020, I drove to my office, located at the heart of my universit...

East of San Diego, on former Kumeyaay land, the US side of the border with Mexico is a vast industrial zone of warehouses and shipping container yards that roaring trucks crisscross incessantly. Th...

Digital technologies like Zoom have become one of the hallmarks of the Covid-19 pandemic, ensuring that architects and scholars stay connected to each other while reconstructing old and new ways of...

Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio Agamben and Bruno Latour, amongst others, responded as public intellectuals to the political implications of the coronavirus crisis. Žižek and Agamben both took polemical posi...

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

Walter Benjamin suffered from the Spanish Flu, but he never wrote about this global pandemic. There are three possible reasons for this oblivion, and several consequences for architecture’s relatio...

As the invisible killer “Covid-19” marched through continents and caused major disruptions over the past few months, we began rethinking the conditions through which to design cities, to practice a...

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

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

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

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

This 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 Charity O...

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 artwork “placed on display” by my environment was the architectural container, as its own material structure; at the same time it was designed to be a display container for the viewers inside (...

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