Built for Change: Neighborhood Architecture in San Francisco

Abstract

In an increasingly globalized world, national governments appropriate vernacular building traditions to support national identity-building political agendas. In England the neo-traditional house has become an established feature of suburban architecture. This is not, however, as is often assumed, indicative of the nostalgia of the consumer. Rather, neo-traditionalism is the result of planning policies introduced by the government to preserve regional architectural identities and maintain a visual “Englishness” in the built environment. These policies have, in turn, been undermined by the nationwide standardization of “traditional” designs by national house-building companies.     

To the Editor

Abstract

This study investigates the gradual evolution of the idea of installation in three experimental exhibition pavilions designed before World War I by the German architect Bruno Taut. In collaboration with the critic Adolf Behne, Taut gradually transferred ideas from Expressionist painting to architecture and helped move his designs, and with it modern architecture more generally, from a focus on visual “objects,” to multisensory “experiences,” an idea that continues to resonate in modern installations today.     

Kitaro Nishida's Philosophy of Emptiness and its Architectural Significance

Abstract

In order to reconcile the breach between the “typologist” and the “populationist” in contemporary architecture, this article discusses Kitaro Nishida's philosophy of emptiness. The article first introduces Asian artistic examples to illustrate the significance of emptiness in art. It then discusses Nishida's emptiness as the ultimate foundation of reality from which being and nonbeing coemerge. The article also summarizes three interrelated lessons from Nishida's emptiness pertaining to architecture: the dialectic of opposites, the bodily subject of immersion, and the dialectic between the ideal and the real. The article finally explicates these concepts by discussing Asian and Western architectural examples.     

An Architecture of the Whole

Abstract

This article offers a history and theory of “whole design” as it emerged through countercultural ecology, by offering a critical reading of the Whole Earth Catalog and its affiliate publications, and correlating it with design projects and related philosophies from the 1960s to the present day. The article proposes that the Catalog was itself a sort of architecture, a colloquium connecting its participants to design and to the world at large. Despite its determinist, systems-based origins, the article suggests that whole design harbored an ideologically and aesthetically vibrant indeterminism of continuing relevance to sustainability.     

Relics,liṅgas,and other auspicious material remains in south asian religions

ABSTRACT

This article reconsiders sites, practices, and ideas about the physical remains of the special dead in South Asian religions. Questioning the common notion of “relics” as a point of distinction between “Buddhism” and “Hinduism,” it explores the constellation of ideas and practices surrounding the remains of gods, demons, people, and animals in South Asian religions. Archaeological and literary evidence for li?gas, stūpas, and related sites and structures are used to explore shared discourses and practices among Buddhists and ?aivas in particular. Through such test cases, it shows how bones and other physical remains of the special dead could become areas of engagement, especially when linked to sacred landscape. Attention to these contact zones reveals sharing, borrowing, and competition among ancient and medieval groups that modern scholarship has studied primarily in terms of assumed differences between “Hinduism” and “Buddhism.”     

Current Information: Literature Surveys

Abstract

In eighteenth-century France, François Cointeraux was as an advocate of pisé, a provincial technique that rammed pure earth into artificial stones. Economical and sturdy, pisé could be used for a variety of rural constructions, ranging from sheds to silos. To share this knowledge, Cointeraux founded the “School of Agritecture,” which combined agriculture (“agri-”) with architecture (“-tecture”), and taught students how to work the land for food and shelter. Despite its practical benefits, the hybrid curriculum was not adopted elsewhere, for its agrarian values ultimately proved incompatible with the interests of industrial capitalism.     

Architectural History in Professional Education: Reflections on Postcolonial Challenges to the Modern Survey

Abstract

Multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) is a controversial condition involving heightened sensitivities to chemicals and allergens. Retreating to “safe” environments is the best available therapy, making the dwellings of those with MCS compelling studies of healthful design.

Safe environments have been offered as exemplars of “green” architecture and have been parodied so as to ridicule environmental concern. In both cases, real lessons are obscured. Reflecting on a study of dwellings built by people with MCS, this essay seeks to clarify the relationship of these unique constructions to ecologically minded architecture as a whole. The dialogue between safe and green points towards their synthesis.     

Placing Resistance: A Critique of Critical Regionalism

Abstract

Critical regionalism emerged as an architectural concept during the early 1980s. For leading theorists such as Kenneth Frampton, critical regionalism was an “architecture of resistance” seeking “to mediate the impact of universal civilization” and “to reflect and serve the limited constituencies” in which it was grounded. This paper examines critical regionalist rhetoric, particularly its emphasis on resistance, as a theoretical construct that inadvertently marginalized and conflated the diverse architectural tendencies it championed. The reception of Mexican architect Luis Barragán as a critical regionalist is highlighted to analyze some of critical regionalism's most problematic assumptions, implications, and effects.     

Haptic Diagrams: From Cinematography to Architectural Performance

Abstract

Contemporary design practices use the diagram as an active agent in the development of form and matter into architectural space. Deleuze and Guattari, following Foucault,¹ defined the diagram as an “abstract machine,” which “does not function to represent even something real, but rather constructed a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality.”² This formulation emphasizes the diagram's configuration and its modes of operation through virtuality and potentiality. In this sense, the diagram is the architects' way of dreaming, the “no-place” encompassing the utopian act. Simultaneously being reality and process, the diagram delays the relation between sign and meaning and promotes a shift from architecture as form or sign to an architecture of forces, performance, and performativity.³     

Broadcasting from the “Mediated Center:” Baltimore’s Candelabra Television Tower,circa 1959

ABSTRACT

The rise of post-WWII television markets around the world required new technical solutions for broadcast media. These solutions became novel examples of urban-scale infrastructure, including the “television tower” as a unique structure. Among early American examples is Baltimore’s three-mast “candelabra” television tower, completed in 1959. Although the project’s feasibility depended upon advances in structural design, its most significant innovation was institutional. As an early example of “infrastructure sharing,” Baltimore’s candelabra tower illustrates how innovative built form can engender a new relationship among technology, urban infrastructure, and the production of cultural capital.     

Reflections on Computational Design Through Interactions With Materiality and Physical Mock-Ups

Abstract

The “Medium is the Message” is an environmental art installation project intended to explore the interrelationship of art and democracy upon the platform of public space. The various attempts at instigating dialogue and public engagement have served to demonstrate Michael Sorkin's premise that “the accommodation of differences is the key project of contemporary democracy.” This active engagement in contemporary social issues provides a framework for deeper understanding of academic knowledge in the design professions and opens up potential for its future application, unveiling public space as the critical stage upon which positions of identity are established and negotiated.     

Transgressing religious boundaries: the power of aesthetics in tamil catholic and hindu worship

ABSTRACT

This article discusses shared material culture and sensorial practices in prayer among Hindu and Catholic Sri Lankan Tamils living in Paris, such as the clockwise circling of incense, the use of flower garlands, and the worship of Mother Mary. Rather than classifying these practices into religious categories, I argue for a need to examine how such practices come to be shared. By employing a material approach to religious aesthetics which recognizes that objects or “things” are active and have agency and affect how we sense and thus experience our world, I suggest that common aesthetic elements are able to produce feelings of religiosity and, particularly for people who share a common aesthetic in everyday life, to bridge the levels between humans and the divine.     

Seeing religion with new eyes at the asian civilisations museum

ABSTRACT

In Asia and even in cosmopolitan Singapore, religion still plays a major role in national affairs as well as in the everyday lives of many ordinary people. Singapore is a secular state with a multifaith and multi-ethnic showcase. The plurality of cultures, religions, races, and origins still has a significant impact on state matters such as the school curriculum, citizenship education, and preservation of traditional cultures. Museum educators need to understand the opportunities and challenges diversity creates so that our collection and programs may be rendered relevant and meaningful to our visitors. Continual experimentation and responsive improvisation raised many questions and offered numerous possibilities for our museum educators to help visitors see religion with new eyes, not as exclusive sets of beliefs but an ecosystem of diverse ideas bound by rich civilizations that are connected by centuries of trade and cultural exchange. The Asian Civilisations Museum is the first museum in the region to present a broad yet integrated perspective of Asian cultures and civilizations. Can this museum really help people in our society, especially students; discover “selves” and “others“? Is it necessary to introduce new ways of looking at religion? Is impactful learning about various religions possible in a secular space?     

Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Works

Abstract

This article introduces the idea of the “convergent mosque,” an online mosque paradigm converging virtual and physical spaces. First, it reviews the formal and typological elements of religious architecture as accumulated over the course of centuries, highlighting the evolutionary nature of mosque design and focusing specifically on the Ottoman/Turkish case. Building upon this historical background, the latter part of the article elaborates a new mosque paradigm suitable for the digital age. The main argument of the study is that a concept as time-honored as the architecture of the mosque may paradoxically be best maintained by a change in design, allowing it, too, to evolve in accordance with advancing technologies.     

Outreach Extensions: OMA/Rem Koolhaas Exhibitions as Self-Critical Environments

Abstract

Many 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 1980 and 1990 in London, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Rotterdam, France, Paris, and Basel; in 1994 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York; and in 2003–04 in Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and in OMA’s Kunsthal in Rotterdam. They are—typical for this medium—a forgotten part of OMA’s production. In this article, OMA’s exhibition policy is reconstructed by highlighting shows that reveal both the “medium-specificity” of an OMA exhibition as well as the obsessions in Koolhaas’s method. Instead of offering the experience of “real” architectonic spaces or environments, these expositions consciously reflect the cultural and historical conditions in which OMA projects were developed, also by challenging disciplinary or institutional limits, and by “reaching out” to the world outside. A typical OMA show is not a space that has to be enjoyed phenomenologically, but rather a meaningful discursive environment, aiming to materialize the “structures” defining late twentieth-century life and work. The exhibition architecture offers guidelines for interpretation of the projects on display, as well as critical observations on the boundaries of architecture.     

Ordering Space: Types in Architecture and Design

Abstract

Embedded in the culture of modern architecture is the directive that a façade ought to fit tightly around its building, like a well-fitting suit. “False façades,”“façadism,” and the “screen façade” have been derisive terms used by architects and critics to describe buildings whose façades appear either too big or too small for their buildings. Postmodernism changed this, so that façades relatively independent of their interiors were encouraged. The neo-modernism of the last two decades has integrated this “disconnected” façade into the practice of what otherwise is a revival of the system of the heroic period of the movement.     

Beautiful and efficacious statues: magic,commodities, agency and the production of sacred objects in popular religion in vietnam

ABSTRACT

In his provocative rethink of the anthropology of art, Alfred Gell offers the radical suggestion that people commonly abduct agency—acts of thought, will or intention—to things and suggests that the relationship between people and things be studied in the manner that anthropologists analyze other kinds of human relationships. In Gell's terms, the relationship between people and temple images, as sacred objects, follows the “the rules laid down for idols as co-present others.” We will explore how one such a relationship fares in the accelerated market economy of Vietnam where workshops have rationalized the production of “idols,” wooden temple statues, making them more like commodities and where a global market in Asian antiquities encourages theft. Tim Ingold critiques studies of “agency” and “materiality” for too often ignoring the tangible materials and methods of production, but we suggest that in the marketplace for sacred objects, attention to both object agency and artisanal process can be mutually enriching. To do this, we first describe how popular religion in Vietnam renders statues as animated, sacred and agentive and how devotees experience and describe statue agency in and through their own relationships with divine images. We then show how production methods are implicated in the creation of agentive images and consider how these understandings and processes have and have not been compromised since the opening and acceleration of the market from the late 1980s. We argue that a sophisticated market permits a hierarchy of value and a range of consumer choice in the production and consumption of sacred objects.     

The Worker’s House

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 Riehl’s thoughts on domestic architecture in giving theoretical elaboration to what, in the mid-nineteenth century, was a growing intellectual concern over the social position of workers. As the “worker” emerged as a distinct social type, and workers’ welfare registered as an increasingly pressing issue, Riehl’s call for a sociologically oriented understanding of architecture (capable of reforming the worker “from within”) significantly altered the terms of the debate over housing policy in Germany. In examining his theoretical elaboration of the task of social policy and the role of architecture within it, this paper reads Riehl’s work as a prelude to a new kind of logic about architecture’s social agency that would come to underpin modern housing reform.