Forces shaping urban morphology in Southern Africa Today: unequal interplay among people,practice and policy

ABSTRACT

This article explores public participation and its impact on urban structures in Southern Africa. Often, public participation stands in opposition to existing legislation and prevailing urban policies. Using textual analysis and case studies of Harare, Zimbabwe, Johannesburg, South Africa and Luanda, Angola, this study concludes that the urban fabric and structure of Southern African cities are in a state of instability. The rise of public participation–“right to the city”–has given way to “cities of rebels” in which citizens react or rebel against urban policies and legislation. These forces threaten sustainable urban morphology and service delivery, complicating the roles of urban planners and managers.     

Rhizomorphics of Race and Space

This article discusses the slave-holding forts and castles erected on the coast of West Africa between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, and argues for their centrality in conceptualizing race as a maker and marker of modern, transnational American identity. It reconfigures Paul Gilroy's notion of "fractal" and "rhizomorphic" structure of the Black Atlantic to cast the castles as a collective architectural monument to centuries-long cultural exchanges between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. By linking these sites to recent "roots" tourism, it also demonstrates their continued vitality to mapping the history and theory of African diasporic spaces in the United States.     

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.     

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.”     

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.     

Seeing syncretism as visual blasphemy: critical eyes on caodai religious architecture

ABSTRACT

The exuberant, eclectic architecture of the Caodai Holy See in French Indochina was described as a “grotesque combination” of European and Asian elements by several famous writers and this sense of horror served to construct a notion of “visual blasphemy” which merged aesthetic and ethical elements. Architecture is always read and misread though a cultural lens. It has been argued that the colonial “world as staged” (Mitchell 1999) produced its own “reality-effects,” so I argue that an anti-colonial counter project of large public works tied to an innovative Asian synthesis of world religions served not only to bolster the morale of a once downtrodden people but also to convince them of the historical inevitability of their triumph. Caodaism was a new religious movement followed by 3 million people in French Indochina and its daring and “presumptuous” architecture was a visual act of insurrection, an iconographic revolution designed to precede and prepare the way for the political revolution to follow.     

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     

Humanism and the Teaching of Architecture

Abstract

“Urban Threads” was an architectural installation that explored the ways in which those without land, money, and power shape the urban fabric, in particular the private territories that are staked out in the public realm and the spatial practices that connect them. All creative works in the installation were produced by women who were homeless in the context of a support group, TimeOut @ The Place, run by a collaboration of welfare agencies in Melbourne. Nine sites, located in minor lanes and alcoves in Melbourne's Central Activities District, each housed “bedrooms” and “WAR(d)robes,” a “dining room,” and a “Living Room.” The “Path of Most Resistance (and Least Distance)” was marked out between them. The installation was conceived of and curated by the author as part of a PhD by Creative Works. The question “to what extent can architecture be 'tactical' (de Certeau's definition)” is at the basis of the project.     

Jackson hlungwani's altars: an african christian theology in wood and stone

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the architecture and sculpture of Jackson Hlungwani's New Jerusalem site at Mbhokota in the Limpopo Province in South Africa, against the background of the theology, architecture, and art of the African independent churches in South Africa. The paper examines Hlungwani's idiosyncratic approach to Christianity and its manifestation in a reworking of ancient stone ruins and the production of an entirely individual body of sculpture. It demonstrates how Hlungwani marries aspects of his Tsonga tradition with biblical imagery, and suggests that it was this marriage that enabled Hlungwani to reconcile the sale of his sculpture with his religious beliefs. The paper also establishes that Hlungwani's iconography is completely independent of orthodox Christian dogmas and is created in the context of an awareness of “art.”     

Intending the Spirits: Experiencing Vodu Through the “Fetish” in Togo

Abstract

Early encounters with Africa initiated a European fascination with the “fetish.” Though this term has been extensively problematized, anthropologists have kept the term, reading fetishes as cultural texts and searching to untangle the material assemblages and deep symbols that comprise them. This article contributes to our knowledge of fetishes by applying a practitioner-centric approach to their use and meaning in the matrices of Vodu. First, I elucidate meanings of these spiritual embodiments using ethnography of prayer and sacrifice in Gorovodu as practiced by ethnic Ewe and Mina communities in southern Togo. I then deploy the language of phenomenological anthropology to argue that fetishes bring intentionality into being and focus. Their filled presence directs consciousness towards the spirits and allows practitioners to sensuously experience spirituality and spiritual being. Rituals surrounding material fetishes are a means of intending reciprocal relationships with the divine into perceptual consciousness, and it is through these relationships that life and success are made possible.     

Museological Framings of Islam in Europe

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the evocation of the sacred in the realm of material heritage practice, drawing on the creation of Freedom Park, a monumental, state-driven post-apartheid heritage project, as a case of heritage formation. Heritage formation refers to the casting of material cultural forms as heritage through sacralizing practices that set these objects apart at the center of social relations and their maintenance as powerful registers of the past for the “hailing” of collective identities. Specifically, it shows how southern African indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) and religious concepts were appropriated, translated, and employed in the formation of three material elements at Freedom Park: the//hapo, or museum, as recounting a cosmogony of nation, the Wall of Names as generating a transcendent ancestry, and the Isivivane as focalizing a national sacred center. Overall, it serves to expand our understanding of the dynamics of heritage production in a transforming South Africa, the dynamic power and appeal of heritage as sacralized material culture, and the significance of a critical religious studies approach for interpreting the dynamism of contemporary heritage practice.     

Embodying transcendence: on the literal,the material,and the cinematic sublime

ABSTRACT

This essay looks at the phenomenological relation between immanence and transcendence, the material and the immaterial, in films focused on “spiritual” or “religious” subject matter and themes. These films employ a variety of cinematic strategies meant not only to represent but also to present and solicit transcendent or “spiritual” states of being from the viewer. Each of these strategies is also an act of belief about the relationship between immanence and transcendence and about the relationship between the viewer's lived and sensual body and the visions and sounds expressed on the screen. Thus, certain strategies sublimate the experience of ek-stasis in literal dramatizations that emphasize the transcendent as “other” than material immanence, others emphasize the transcendent as located in immanence and thus sublimate the experience of ek-stasis in the materiality of existence—and still others emphasize the transcendent as immaterial and ungraspable except as an apprehended gap and/or opening in immanence. Considering such films as The Diary of a Country Priest, Thérèse, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Passion of the Christ, and Bee Season, the essay describes how certain ek-static moments are presented not only to but also on the viewer's lived-body, where both immanence and transcendence emerge and phenomenologically constitute both the sense and meaning of religious or spiritual experience.     

Whole Community Resilience: An Asset-Based Approach to Enhancing Adaptive Capacity Before a Disruption

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Conventional hazard mitigation and pre-disaster recovery planning processes typically begin with hazard scenarios that illustrate probable events and analyze their impacts on the built environment. The processes conclude with responses to the hypothetical disruption that focus on “hardening” buildings or structures or removing them from threatened areas. These approaches understate the importance of natural and social sources of adaptive capacity. Three “proof-of-principle” exercises designed to strengthen the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)'s Risk MAP (Risk Mapping, Assessment, and Planning) process in Washington State suggest how better to conduct hazard mitigation and recovery planning. Each begins with workshops where stakeholders identify built, natural, and social assets that contribute to human wellbeing (HWB) before introducing earthquake scenarios that affect HWB. Participants then identify assets that could facilitate adaptation to changed circumstances (a “new normal”). Participants discuss how these assets would achieve the goals of comprehensive community planning as well as hazard mitigation and recovery from disaster. Neighborhood-scale social organization emerges as an important priority.

Takeaway for practice: Asset-based approaches enable communities to better recover from disaster and adapt to a post-disaster “new normal.” By premising planning discussions on a more holistic set of assets, communities can balance physical recovery goals with qualities that help them to adapt to future change. Furthermore, thinking about recovering before an event actually occurs can enlarge the menu of mitigation strategies. Planning for adaptation can also help communities achieve many non-risk-related objectives.     

Meaning of Functionalism

Abstract

This study explores the recent spatial politics of John F. Kennedy Plaza, “Love Park”—a piece of Philadelphia's mid-1960s Penn Center redevelopments. By the turn of the century, Love Park had become a center of a growing international skateboard culture, appearing widely in magazines and videos and on ESPN. In 2002, the city redesigned the park in order to deter the skateboarders, to the vocal protests of a broad-based coalition that included Edmund Bacon and over half the city council members. Through a review of city planning documents, local newspaper reportage, and personal interviews, I argue that the Love Park debates illustrate the extent to which “bohemian” or “countercultural” lifestyles are becoming institutionalized as instruments of urban development.     

Conference Reviews

Abstract

The desire to teach in a way that acknowledges our position in the world as global citizens faces several challenges, many of which are global in nature. We identify three of these. First, there is the split between “modern” and “traditional” that can be found in a wide range of institutional and historical practices the world over. Second, there is the problem of language which has embedded within it certain historical presumptions. Third, there is the hesitancy in studio teaching to address issues that allow students to see themselves as actors in global history. What we advocate is a global critique of anti-global practices.     

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.     

Interstitial Space and Everyday Housing Practices

Abstract

This paper explores the role of interstitial space and everyday housing practices at the domestic scale. Interstitial space is often framed as “empty” or “in-between” space located in the shadows of conventional built form and everyday practices. In this paper, we focus on interstitial space as a site of often undervalued or taken-for-granted housing possibility. We begin the paper by outlining the contours of interstitial space as a theoretical concept before highlighting two cross-cultural examples of domestic housing storage practices within the Australian context: (1) “under the house” in the Queensland vernacular and (2) “close to the wind-break” in a remote Aboriginal community in the centre of Australia. We conclude by drawing attention to the importance of interstitial spatial practices for housing theory and practice and offer suggestions for further research.     

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.