Sessions

Productive intersections between art history and architectural history and theory may have come to an end in the late twentieth century in Europe and the United States, but not in the Antipodes. Almost since its inception in 1984, the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ) experienced tensions between empiricist historians and those with a commitment to theory, as Julia Gatley pointed out in her historical account of its first twenty years. The name of the Society’s journal, Fabrications, reflected the theoretical interests of its first editors, Desley Luscombe and Stanislaus Fung, who were also responsible for the original editorial policy. Their first editorial caused controversy among members who defended the need of history to be understood, not obfuscated by theory. The Society, through its journal and annual conferences, encouraged exchange and debate between empirical historians and theorists, as evidenced by the 1997 SAHANZ conference’s “theoretical turn.” This attitude was mirrored by the inclusion of a greater emphasis on critical and cultural theory in the teaching of history and theory at Australian and New Zealand architecture schools. In addition, the proliferation of journals published by architectural schools in Australia and New Zealand, for example Interstices: A Journal of Architecture and Related Arts and Architectural Theory Review, also maintained the tension between history and theory.
Through interviews with preeminent architectural historians in Australia and New Zealand, first-hand witnesses of these tensions between theory and history, between a critical or a documentary approach to history, this paper aims to bring forth the richness of the lesser-known scholarly Trans-Tasman context of the late twentieth century. SAHANZ, as an institution, helped to bridge the alleged split between architectural history and theory, if there was ever one, fostering the dialogue and encouraging different approaches that informed both research and education –still does today.

The growing criticism against post-war modernism during the 1960s, of its edifices, its protagonists as much of its reasoning, did not only result in the phenomenon of postmodernism in the decades to follow, but also caused a crisis of architectural education based primarily on modern doctrines. One answer to this crisis – and that is a working hypothesis – was the internalization of critique into institutions of higher education. It is more than a coincidence that the founding of the gta (Institut Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur) at the ETH Zurich by Adolf Max Vogt and Paul Hofer in 1967 runs parallel to the efforts of Jürgen Joedicke and the IGMA (Institut für Grundlagen Moderner Architektur) at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart (today University of Stuttgart) and echoes the HTC program (History Theory Criticism of Art and Architecture) at MIT by Stanford Anderson and “Hank” Millon between 1964–74, while O.M. Ungers failed with a similar attempt at the TU Berlin in 1968. In all these incidents, there is more at stake than just a rapprochement to the history of architecture after the modernist ban against eclectic historicism from architectural design; they speak rather of a fundamental revision of the modern project within architectural education. Indicators are the institutional changes of PhD programs, which were traditionally offered by art history departments, and were now integrated into schools of architecture, paralleled by the change of debate in architectural education and new formats for research and teaching.
The (re)birth of architectural theory as curricular subject introduced at MIT, Stuttgart and ETH stands out amongst these new formats. This is not to say that “theory” has been absent from architectural education, but its institutionalization allowed for steady (often mandatory) classes in the curriculum, for a clarification of the methods and goals, and for a scientific ennoblement of the subject by its own faculty, journals, conferences, publications, exhibitions and the aforementioned doctoral programs. Significantly, ETH and MIT chose to separate theory from design, that is, they produced a new type of academic: the architectural theoretician. Previously, “theory” often meant the poetics of a master architect, or a speculative mode of writing, while the new format operated with various “critical” theories form heterogeneous sources, and aimed for teaching teachers (rather than architects) – an assumption that might be up for critical interrogation today? This position paper argues that the “split” between history and theory of architecture is not only a product of “theory’s success” in the 1980s, and its rapid fall following 2001, but has already been latently present in their institutionalization in the late 1960s. And that the perceived “split” between theory and history today is not the only ‘schiz’, but that their separation from studio (design pedagogy) and from technology (both digital representation as well as environmental performance) runs even deeper. The position paper itself practices an alternative by looking into the sources of these multiple “splits” (historically) and by speculating about a different form of research, teaching, and practice (theoretically).

This roundtable contribution proposes the advent of the architectural museum as a productive interface to approach the split between art history and architectural theory identified in the call. As a latecomer to the institutions of collection and display - most architecture museum were not founded until the late 1970s and 1980s - the architecture museum was established in a period when the traditional museum as a place of collection and display was under negotiation. The institutional critique of the 1960s that aimed to liberate art from the confinement of the museum and open up institutional boundaries finds its counterpart in the emerging interest in placing architecture within the walls of the museum.
This somewhat contradictory situation was met in the young institutions by a combination of the traditional methods of art history and the institutional critique of contemporary theory. The architecture museums started collections that contributed to the historicizing of architecture while at the same time engaging critically with the contemporary built environment, often employing counter-cultural or activist methods. However, the architecture museum also indicates a preoccupation with the representations of architecture as an end in itself. The turn away from architecture as built form firmly associated with the event of architectural postmodernism is inextricably interwoven with the architectural institutions. Evidently, the museums have their share in making architectural theory and criticism harmless to the politics of architecture as it retreated from wider socio-political concerns to an increased degree of discursive autonomy.
A captivating circumstance is that the late blooming of the architectural museum in the 1980s was soon followed by the first signs of decay that threw a considerable number of the young institutions into predominantly disciplinary crises already a few years into the 2000s.
This contribution would bring this ‘rise and fall’ of the museum institutions of architecture to the roundtable. It discusses the agency of the institution and how the putting of architecture in the museum and the resulting expansion of the discourse contributed to the split between art history and architectural theory.

This paper departs from the idea that the gaps that have become established between historical and theoretical research are themselves a way out of the increasingly rigid categorization between the two domains.
While the sharply delineated boundaries of the late 20th century between ‘theory’ and ‘history’ helped establish clear research approaches, they also excluded the implicit insights embedded within design practice, favouring explicit and analytical arguments. The current cultures of research funding and publications solidify these boundary conditions, asking researchers to identify quite specifically their methods, their peers and their research domains.
In The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), Anna Tsing demonstrates how science itself develops more erratically than commonly presented in scientific discourse; that it is determined not only by objective methods and logical argumentation, but equally by coincidence, context and unforeseen connections. “Cosmopolitan science is made in emerging patches of research, which grow into or reject each other in varied encounters.” (Tsing, 223)
These ‘varied encounters’ are both necessary to the vitality of the disciplines, and prevented by the fine-grained delineation of disciplinary boundaries and methodologies. Together, the variety of methodologies within the history, theory and practice of architecture may foster a more explorative mode of thought, including unexpected detours or seeing miscommunications as fruitful insights into other perspectives.
This paper explores these ‘emerging patches’ of research that sit within the gap between history and theory. It seeks to aid in ‘unsplitting’ the two approaches through a verbal, visual and material presentation, demonstrating how the analytic and historical capacities of historians and theorists alike are potentially enriched by the drawing and design skills of practitioners. In so doing, this paper proposes that the field of architecture sits at the heart of what Tsing identifies as ‘cosmopolitan science’: its varied skill set of observation and analysis, drawing and building, projecting and historicizing has the potential to develop a synthesis of visual and material epistemologies that can develop a more diverse ecology of scientific exploration.

In December of the eventful year 1967, O. M. Ungers hosted an international congress for architectural theory at the Technical University of Berlin. The issue at stake was the usefulness of architectural theory at all. After the societal turbulences and rapid changes in the urban environment at the end of the 1960s, what architectural theory was – and what it should refer to – had become quite unclear. Ungers therefore offered social phenomena, technical conditions, historical experience, and immanent laws of form as its possible subjects. Only three years before, the AIA-ACSA Teachers’ Seminar in 1964, which is known as the starting point for Ph.D. programs in History, Theory, and Criticism at American architecture schools, had discussed quite the same issues. At the centre of these debates was the question whether architectural theory should refer to its own history or embrace the emerging social sciences, which tried to explain and manage the present. One outcome was the construction of an architectural theory that understood architecture – and itself – as an autonomous force. However, as John Harwood has shown, at the same time a multifaceted research agenda emerged at American architecture schools, including an architectural history open to all kind of social and human sciences. Following these hints, the paper wants to point out that the same was true in German-speaking countries: The papers of Ungers’ congress as well as, for example, the Bauwelt Fundamente series, reveal a broad spectrum of approaches. The field was open around 1970, and that included a very open conception of architecture. In fact, it was not so much “architecture” which architectural history and theory were interested in, but the perception and use of the “built environment” in general. And it was this openness which made it relevant for the politicized education in architectural design at that time.

Manfredo Tafuri’s call for ‘operative criticism’ as a progressive solution to the lack of political efficacy and of scholarly rigour in the militant architectural history of the mid-twentieth century had, in his time, little following. Architectural historians sought greater professional specialisation not ‘operativeness,’ whereas architectural theorists, by the late 1970s, were beginning to embrace the ‘linguistic turn’ and its nihilistic view of historical knowledge.
In spite of this and of the ever-widening split that has characterised the global scholarship of architecture ever since, Italy gave rise to several methods of typo-morphological studies founded upon both rigorous historiography and a coherent theory underpinning the operative use of this historical knowledge in architectural design. This paper argues that the Italian ‘school’—for want of a better word—is perhaps unique insofar as it defines a clear scope of objects and methods pertaining to the disciplinary field of architecture as a whole, thus providing a unified framework for both historiography and design.
Yet, this Italian ‘school’ of typo-morphological history and theory is diverse, exposing rifts between traditionalists and modernists. The former are tributary of Aldo Rossi’s postmodernist formal relationships derived from a concept of ‘collective memory,’ whereas the latter adopt Saverio Muratori’s ‘procedural typology’ as a tool for generating abstract spatial relationships. This paper will focus on recent historical studies in nineteenth century architecture as well as new projects in the cities of the river Po plains—Alessandria, Parma, Bologna—that clarify these theoretical conflicts, yet show the way forward for an ‘operative’ dialogue between historiography and typological design theory. These recent contributions have displaced, ever so slightly but significantly, the long-standing Italian emphasis on Medieval and Renaissance historiography and on the iconic post-war building campaigns in Rome, Milan, and Venice.

Despite featuring in the reading list of almost every first-year architecture student, Vitruvius is barely readable for a twenty-first-century architect. His message remains bound up with the principles of order, proportion and composition, the qualities of sites and the broad superhuman knowledge an architect must possess, all of which topics are enunciated on the first pages of the first book. Nonetheless, Vitruvius is still the author most quoted in architectural lectures, from Álvaro Siza to Rem Koolhaas, from first-year students to structural engineers. The triad of Vitruvian architectural qualities—firmitas, utilitas, venustas—has conquered the heart and the reason of every architectural discourse. Ironically, the formulation owes much to Alberti, who, in his own treatise, wrestling with Vitruvius’ cumbersome syntax, updated a marginal remark to establish one of architectural history’s most powerful aphorisms. This encapsulation of the unreadable treatise in a few words turned out to be a highly effective ingredient in maintaining Vitruvius’ authoritative status. The treatise’s circulation as a book allowed its owners the illusion of possessing an idea along with the physical object.
By surveying the forms of its various editions from the late 15th century until today, instead of becoming trapped in the subtleties of the text, one can access a complex network of usages, traffics and fluctuations. To analyse multiple print editions of Vitruvius is to unfold a historical panorama of architectural theory that fuses the immaterial realm of ideas with the material forms of books and buildings. The intricate nature of the Latin text inculcated Vitruvian authority with an aura capable of serving every purpose, with each new edition representing an occasion to establish an architectural discourse that did not necessarily follow its source. This contribution seeks to reflect on the condition of architectural theory when confronted with the printed book. Vitruvius seems the most appropriate patron to ignite a discussion on the light-hearted relationship between architectural theory, history and practice.

This paper proposes Palazzo Te in Mantua as a case study in issues of built and cultural heritage before UNESCO. Palazzo Te was built for Federico II Gonzaga between 1525 and 1534 following a design by Giulio Romano. Since its very construction and throughout the nineteenth century—under both Austrian and French empires—campaigns of restoration and design were carried out on the architecture and ornamental apparatus of the palace to ensure its preservation and transmission into the future. Such practices stem from the recognition of the intrinsic value of the palace as an expression of the cohesion of art and architecture in the work of Giulio Romano: a value that shaped Palazzo Te’s cross-cultural recognition as a monument. This identity was built not only through physical interventions, but also through a critical construction. Beginning in the eighteenth century, Palazzo Te was analysed by scholars, described by travellers, and drawn by local and foreign architects and artists, thus disseminating through Europe images of the palace in both literary and graphic representations.
By 1866, after the Unità d’Italia, the Italian Unification, Palazzo Te was transformed into a museum. The palace is open to visitors, and descriptions are provided in each room to present the works of art to the public: an extremely modern practice that, along with ongoing preservation efforts, ushered the palace into its contemporary status within the UNESCO site of Mantua.
This research investigates the process by which Palazzo Te came to be recognized as a monument across geopolitical regimes as well as the practices related to its preservation in the modern era, arguing that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries laid the groundwork for modern definitions of transnational built and cultural heritage, for which architecture and literature were a means of its identification and transmission.

I seek to look anew at the legislation of heritage preservation in the Baltic area from 1880s to 1930s. The Baltic German community, representing the cultural elite at the time, made continuous attempts toward a heritage law. With their Baltic Heimat between the German motherland, Russian fatherland, and awakening communities of Estonians/Latvians, several empires and “cultural contestants” were at play. Nonetheless, the first heritage conservation act only came to be realized in 1923 (Latvia) and 1925 (Estonia), by which time the political circumstances had completely changed. My analysis compares the preparations and drafts for the act by the Baltic Germans around 1900 and the new nation-states in 1920s. How was the international value of local heritage articulated in those documents? Which international (and German) role models and specialists were consulted? How were these debates communicated to a wider audience?
Furthermore, fitting Baltic art into the international narratives is a common feature also in the first survey books, most importantly Wilhelm Neumann’s Grundriss einer Geschichte der bildenden Künste und des Kunstgewerbes in Liv-, Est- und Kurland vom Ende des 12. bis zum Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts (1887) and Voldemar Vaga’s Estonian Art: The History of Arts in Estonia from the Middle Ages to the Present Day (1940, in Estonian) – authors who were at the forefront of both the field of art history and heritage preservation.
The Baltic area is hardly a completely disparate community, but it is curious that the Baltic German culture that did see itself as an integral part of German culture is not commonly recognized as such by either the colleagues at the time or those of today. Therefore, this is a topic discussing peripheries within Europe, colonial narratives, patriotic duty of a Kulturnation, national self-positioning, cultural responsibility to posterity, and the universal value of local heritage – all common notions in the texts published at the time.

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, Japan was forced by the western hegemonies to end its isolationist policy. To avoid colonization, the Japanese government initiated a complex process of modernization: It introduced the western administrative machinery, as well as technological and cultural knowledge from the West, dispatched students to renowned educational institutions abroad, and hired experts from Europe and North America as advisers and teachers. The ensuing shifts in society affected art and architecture as well.
Collectibles such as art objects met a tremendous western interest, usually described and summed up in the keyword Japonism. This was a mixed blessing: It ensured research and discourse on Japanese art but went with a sell-out of Japan’s mobile artefacts. Japanese architecture faced a different but no less difficult situation. Largely perceived as a technologically outdated curiosity, it was marginalized in western discourses. On site, existing structures suffered both from loss of economic systems that had ensured their maintenance over time and cases of targeted destruction in the wake of political changeover. In addition, traditional practices and competences fell out of favour due to the focus on modern building technologies.
The paper addresses these multi-layered processes as well the actors and institutions involved. With a focus on built artefacts, it traces the re-interpretation of Japan’s cultural characteristics against the foil of western norms and standards. It shows Japan’s modern heritage policies as part of the general negotiation of a modern cultural identity, as a phenomenon of cultural transfers and negotiations of meaning. As a result, it shows the emergence of a cultural practice in which “traditional” values and “modern” perceptions of relevance became inextricably interlinked.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a growing number of European travellers, pilgrims, and scholars arrived in Jerusalem, establishing research institutions, initiating archaeological excavations, and creating cartographical and artistic representations of the city. While these were common colonial practices at that time, the iconisation and reconstruction of Jerusalem was, however, a unique case of a heritage site formation. For at the heart of this endeavour stood not the folklorising gaze on the east, adding an iconic monument to the growing “world heritage imaginary”, but rather an inner European motivation of gazing upon the origin of Christian faith at the very moment it was vanishing in the heart of industrializing Europe. Consequently, rather than importing the monument to the centre of the empire, a reversed process occurred in which the long-lasting Christian symbolic image of the heavenly city was brought from the heart of the empire to the orient. The unavoidable gap between the ideal image and the actual provincial ottoman city, resulted in a unique working method: not a preservation of the existing, but a reinvention of the declining religious symbolic image using modern scientific methods. An essential step was the translation of the medieval jewel-like portrayal of an abstract heavenly city into a modern representation based on a “birds eye view”, framing and canonizing the city as a closed geometrical emblem. With the establishment of the British mandate in 1917, it was exactly this reversed action of turning the symbolic image into a demarked geographical zone that enabled British planners to translate the image directly into a set of planning principles: creating an unbuilt green belt around the walls, while restricting development within them. This planning tradition that shaped Jerusalem as a hermetic enclosed monument holds important implications to this day. Looking back at the formation of the city as a monument, while unpacking the convoluted relationship between the city and its image, might help make it more graspable today.

In 1893, nine families from four different regions of Italy migrated to Eritrea as the first non-military settlers to occupy the newly-acquired territory. Provided land and financial support by the Italian government, the families established the first ‘esperimento di colonizzazione,’ the village of Godofelassi. Despite using an Eritrean house typology, the village’s layout was designed as a familiar type meant to reproduce homes for Italians while affirming Italianità in the colony. Yet, in the same way the design of the village was neither Italian nor Eritrean, the experimental cultivation aimed at producing ‘tropical’ commodities as coffee and tobacco was foreigner to the Italian families as to the Eritrean soil.

Aligned with experimentations in Italy to unite, employ and house its divided population, Godofelassi was to offer an alternative to the many families escaping Italy’s poor rural areas who would otherwise be migrants/labourers somewhere else. Eventually, the experiment failed to reproduce the imagined community desired: some of the families bonded with Eritreans, while the soil was domesticated to produce typically-Italian crops.

This paper complicates the figure of the migrant as a monolithic construct, presenting the ambivalence of the multi-regional families migrating to Eritrea as both agents of the state and experimental subjects for the reproduction of a uniform Italian identity. Godofelassi presents an alternative certainty distinguishing home and foreign, challenging consolidated notions of domesticity and the rapport between migration and colonialism, usually framed as a contested system of place appropriation between the customary binomial colonizer/colonized. The case of Godofelassi suggests that domesticity acts through production, and that the period of emergence of the domestic sphere is the very same as that of not only the nation but its specific capitalist economy of products. Finally, it challenges the totality of consolidated terms arguing for the potential of exploring the hard-to-classify episode.

The Anglo- European notion of the home and its power to reform, mould and reshape “native” habits and customs, in the constitution of colonial power, is well known. In Bangalore, the administrative capital of the Princely state of Mysore, the ordered home took the form of the bungalow as part of residential “improvement” schemes in the city between 1890 and 1920. During this critical period, the city became a labour market, attracting new migrants who housed themselves in designated ‘native pockets’ in the city’s civil and military station. Without interference from the princely state and a municipality run by a British Resident, the station allowed sociality beyond the limits of traditional caste and occupation hierarchies. Thereby attracting migrants of marginalised endogamous groups referred to variously in records as Pariahs, Tamils or ‘low caste menials’. Concomitantly, a need for sanitary housing arose with cholera and plague outbreaks, and providing it became part of a larger national project by the colonial government. But as this paper will reveal through one such plague-proof planning scheme, Frazer Town, planning “improvements” were often paradoxical. On the one hand, the bungalow within a compound, became leitmotif for twinned sanitary and moral reform in localities such as Frazer Town. On the other hand, capitalist imperatives and laissez-faire economics constrained improvement measures. Existing migrant communities were displaced to make available the bungalow and the bourgeois comfort of a planned locality, to limited populations. Owing to the paucity of self-representation of marginalised, non-local, migrant communities, this paper draws attention to such understudied social groups by examining spaces such as segregation camps and temporary plague settlements that they were rehoused to. Moving beyond social privilege and aesthetics of improvement projects such as Frazer Town, this paper shows how the notion of home that provided refuge for some, rendered others displaced and dispossessed.

The question “who is my neighbour?” appeared in an 1899 article authored by Danish photographer and housing activist Jacob Riis, published in the American nationalist magazine The Century. Riis discussed the diverse religious performances gathering Italians in New York, first segregated in groups from different Italian regions and then together as a diasporic community with a shared national background. The formation of this community was particularly relevant at the time, for the Italian diaspora—the largest one in modern history to date—coincided with the unification of the country and the rise of Italian nationalism. The formation of the nation as an “imaginary community” took place simultaneously in Italy and in New York and was in direct friction with the rise of American nationalist ideas after the Civil War.

This paper studies the way in which housing design reforms in New York at the turn of the century participated in the consideration of Italian migrants as citizens, defining their inclusion and exclusion in America through processes of assimilation and discrimination. Jacob Riis was not only a chronicler of these processes, but also a protagonist within them. In fact, his evaluation of those individuals whose houses “had ceased to be sufficiently separate […] to afford the influences of home and family,” linked the general concern with ventilation and lack of space in the tenements with the celebration of the nuclear family as a privileged domestic arrangement for the different diasporic communities settling in America. Through a critical reading of fundamental texts of the period, the discussion of performances enabling diverse forms of belonging, and the analysis of transformations in housing, this paper considers how architecture linked the family to the nation and helped shape shifting identities providing access to citizenship for the Italian diasporic community in New York.

In 1893 when the availability of pastoral lands, and of British investments in them, dried up, Adelaide experienced a sharp recession. As a way of alleviating social hardships, city officials pinned their hopes on the dream of, and recent advances in, irrigation. They formed citizen collectives and sent them to tame the Murray River, the mythical inland watercourse in the desert. The dream was a rural hinterland of agriculture and self-sufficiency projected onto a seemingly empty land and born of imported European values: plans were drawn, land divided, machinery imported. Invisible was the fact that the Murray Basin had for centuries been a physical and spiritual centre to the indigenous population. The settlements failed, many within the first two years. But their short life reflected the wider problems associated with the attempt to domesticate the Australian environment. This domestication, often less successful in practice, helped to develop a rural culture based on imported environmental values that inserted itself between the binary of urban (colonial settlements) and wilderness (the Australian ‘outback’). Against a broader topic of irrigation as a common technology imposed by European colonization to tailor crop production to domestic markets, this paper tries to understand colonization, through irrigation, as a cultural effort by an urban community to domesticate its environment in order to produce specific values regarding home and inhabitation.

The planning of the cities of the socialist period was often associated with the planning, construction and operation of industrial infrastructure. The early socialist city planning discourse of the 1920s was centred on the predictable problems of spatial and functional relationships between production and residential zones and their interconnected development. In the following period of actual realisation of the cities’ masterplans such approach could not be practically implemented as the city planners and architects had been restricted in their opportunity to project and control the positioning and spatial development of industrial sites and did not normally produce and own planning documentation related to industrial development. All initiatives in planning, construction and operation of industries were concentrated in the hands of the state industrial agencies, which were administrated centrally by the Ministry of Industrial Development. Such strict division in the sphere of public and industrial planning resulted in the haphazard development of production zones and the emergence of problematic spatial and ecological situations in many socialist industrial cities.
It is less known that the later period of the 1960s–80s was characteristic by the increased concern with the environmental performance of industrial cities and by an attempt of the local planning authorities to consolidate the power over the development and operation of production zones. This paper discusses the example of Yekaterinburg (formerly Sverdlovsk) demonstrating the specifics of the local urban industrial planning strategies embraced during that period, which aimed to systematise and include the previously unrestricted and largely independent development of industries under the general control of the city planning process. The architects and planners were able to survey the enclosed industrial areas within the city and for the first time produce their development plans. The main purpose of such movement was to ensure a more sustainable development of industrial zones and their less negative environmental impact on the city.

Tselinograd was established as the capital of the USSR Tselinniy Krai (Virgin Land Territory) in 1961. The planned city became a showcase of a new conception of town planning and the standardization of buildings under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. The new residential typology, which was proposed in conjunction with the Virgin Land Campaign and which is commonly known as the Khrushchyovka, was widely used across the whole of the USSR, as well as being exported to other socialist countries, such as China. Beginning in the 1950s, this new typology was used to supply dwellings to about 60 million people across the USSR for two decades. Despite these buildings being designed to last for a limited period, a large portion of the current population of the former USSR still reside in units constructed during this era. The Khrushchyovka contributed to the shape of socialist society and formed an important part of USSR history and popular culture, as well as collective memory. This contribution aims to analyse the innovative approach that was tested in Tselinograd by documentary analysis of the original planning documents for Tselinograd and by content analysis of the programmatic speech of Nikita Khrushchev at the National Conference of Builders, Architects, Workers in Construction Materials and Manufacture of Construction and Roads Machinery Industries, and Employees of Design and Research and Development Organizations on 7 December, 1954. Furthermore, it seeks to discuss and interpret the legacy of the original plan for Tselinograd in the current capital city of Kazakhstan, which recently has been renamed Nur-Sultan. The study is based on primary data collected in four periods of field investigation between 2009 and 2011.

The notion of citizen participation in urban planning has rarely been associated with state socialism as a system favouring the centralized, top-down planning approach. However, post-WWII Yugoslavia makes an interesting case, as citizen participation, together with state decentralisation and self-management or ‘industrial democracy’, formed three main pillars of Yugoslav socialism. External factors such as Yugoslav non-aligned position and its openness to Western cultural influences strengthened the Yugoslav society that was considered a relaxed version of socialism as compared to other countries behind the Iron Curtain. However, the social reality of citizen participation in a single-party political system was not flawless. Hence, considering the concept of planning diffusion, we intend to trace the evolution of the participatory planning model in socialist Belgrade. To what extent was it a spontaneous occurrence in the atmosphere of self-management and condition of cultural autonomy? Which features were borrowed, and where did the role models come from? What were the key channels and nodes of international collaboration that enabled such an exchange? Which aspects of the participatory model were customized, re-invented to adjust to the socio-economic and cultural specificities? To address these questions, we use the case study of Belgrade, as an embodiment of the cosmopolitan urbanity, between 1965 and 1980. This period is considered the peak of participatory urban planning, also characterized by intensive professional networking. In doing so, we will elucidate the richness of urban planning culture in socialist Belgrade and its dynamic evolution, further contesting stereotypes regarding ’typical’ socialist planning practice.

Is Colin Ward’s work—perhaps best known through The Child in the City (1978)—a ‘missing thread’ in understanding architectural preoccupations with urban and spatial emancipation? Ward’s notions of play, everyday self-organization, and autonomy offered ways to envision liberating architectural and urban design. This paper reconstructs Ward’s ‘anarchist child’ (likely a trope for ‘the human’) through four correlated approaches, which disclose the multifaceted nature of Ward’s writing, specifically its applications in architecture, historical and contemporary, and how this transformed familial and civic life.

A feminist reading, first, brings to the fore some ambiguities in Ward’s approach to gender and the urban subject, and explicates the feminist references present in his work. Second, Ward’s correlation between the micro and the macro will be shown as a key analysis of the production of urban subjects, children and adults. The adventure playground was one of everyday life’s ‘minor anarchies’: bottom-up response to urban planning, rural enclave in the city, and catalyst for community engagement. Like the playground, the allotment—another subject of Ward’s interest—is presumed to be a social microcosm, here interrogated as a third approach to spatial form and society. Finally, Ward’s presentation of the urban environment as multiple, producing unevenness and inequality, can be shown as anchored by Ward’s humanist trust in autonomy.

We expand Ward’s view by analysing the anarchist child's involvement in architectural and governmental experiment, where its self-organised play entered into what Michel Foucault called the ‘game of liberalism’. If there is a revived interest today in the city as an environment of playful freedom and self-organised activity, it has been largely subjugated to market logic and stripped of anarchist sympathies. Revisiting Ward’s anarchism of the 1970s suggests a fruitful historical enquiry into architectural culture, (radical) architecture’s emancipatory ambitions, and a parallax view on the subsequent hegemony of neoliberal creativity.

Following World War II, German society sought comprehensively to reform and renew itself. As Konrad Jarausch explains, central to the attempt ‘to lead Germany back into civilized society and the European economy’ was the reform of education. Children – through what, where and, how they learned - would be central to this process of renewal.

Led and financed from America, the educational strand of reconstruction emphasised the need ‘to fashion new learning objectives, new curricula, new teaching methods, new teachers, new relationships between the people, the teachers and the school.’ John Dewey’s philosophy of learning through experience was often invoked, although it had by that time fallen out of favour in the US. Through curriculum reform and innovations such as the student parliament – the SMVs – German children were seen, in Brian Puaca’s term, to be ‘Learning Democracy’.

This paper will explore architecture’s role in this reorientation of children’s learning, by focussing on the Geschwister-Scholl School in Lunen, one of two schools designed by Hans Scharoun in the late 1960s. The project’s low-lying arrangement of angular classrooms linked by loose circulation space had its origins in the design for a school presented by Scharoun at the Darmstadt Symposium of 1951. Scharoun talked of giving architectural form to the pedagogical process, attuning light and space to the children’s needs. There was an evident compatibility between Scharoun’s long-evolving design philosophy and aspects of the project of educational reform, particularly in his emphasis on spatial configuration as a determinant of social behaviour. This paper will explore the extent to which what has generally been understood as a sensibility specific to Scharoun is in fact directly prompted and shaped by the political agenda of the time. This will involve looking at other examples from the period in West Germany and also at what was happening contemporaneously in the GDR, where curriculum reform was also being pursued, with radically different means and to radically different ends. In all instances, schools, and the children they housed, shaped the future political culture.

The design objects made at the Hochschule für Gestaltung (1953-1968) shaped the German nation post-WWII for years to come: the Braun equipment, the Lufthansa logo, or the stern, reduced and deeply rational stackable dishware. This was the "Good Design" that the school's architects and designers thought would aid the re- democratization of West Germany. And while the model making was the mode of production of the object, it was photography that rendered the Ulm objects iconic. They were photographed 'from slightly above and mostly frontal'—the point of view of an architect looking at a model. Or rather, the perspective of a playing child?

Down in the city of Ulm, another organization tried to shape a new West German future through design: the 'Committee for Good Toys' ('Verein Spielgut'). It consisted of a group of volunteers who tested and selected toys for children. Organizing a traveling exhibition in 1954, the committee—soon consisting of children psychologists and paediatricians, a toxicologist, "experienced parents and grandparents," but also seven architects and two engineers—met regularly.

This paper contends that both these attempts—related through personal ties and aesthetic kinship—took the design of objects as opportunity to renegotiate the lost Maßstäblichkeit in the post-war (physical and ideological) rubble. Presenting the objects (toys as well as tea cups or building parts) as isolated entities in front of a neutral background with no context or scale, took the point of view of a playing child and turned it into the subject position of the maker and ruler—an attempt to suggest the possibility of reconfiguring the pieces toward a rational, democratic society.

‘We gather here in Hellerau this afternoon to celebrate the laying of the foundation stone for our school building’, announced Wolf Dohrn to the smiling audience gathered together on a warm spring afternoon in 1911. ‘The youngest pupil—a local eight-year old Hellerau lad—will strike the first three hammer blows for this building that is one of the few to be consecrated to the future.’ The Swiss music pedagogue Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865-1950) stood proudly up front—it was after him that the school was named: the Jaques-Dalcroze Institute for Rhythmic Education. The architect of the Institute, Heinrich Tessenow (1876-1950) was also there. Characteristically absent was the reclusive Swiss Scenographer Adolphe Appia (1862-1928), who largely through his austere yet mysteriously atmospheric Espaces rythmiques drawings and then his stagings at Hellerau, played a decisive yet understudied role in the development of twentieth-century architecture and aesthetics; a role that attained its greatest realisation in the Institute’s remarkable luminous Festsaal (festival theatre) that—within a year after those three hammer blows struck by its youngest pupil—would host Eurhythmic performances of choreographed youths in motion before enraptured audiences.

There is much that is remarkable about the Hellerau endeavour, not least of all how very important the bodily-musical education of children through Eurhythmics was to it. Also notable is the effort that was given over to finely tuning the architecture of the Institute to music and movement through a modular play of dimensions. This paper presents an account of the remarkable cultural life that was ushered into being at Hellerau (centring on the time-out-of-time of performance in which music, light, bodily movement and architecture were brought into accord), achieved through the common commitment of the individuals from various countries and backgrounds who gathered there, united by their common belief in the promise of Eurhythmic education.

The paste-up remains one of the most consequential, yet least recognized, transformations affecting architectural drawing in the post-WWII period. The paste up was a cardboard surface for preparing materials for reproduction in print, on which a wide array of things could be fitted, marked, glued, and overlaid: photographs and magazine clippings, ink and graphite drawing, transfer lettering, stamps, correction fluid, zip-a-tone patterns, and more. This composite quality makes the paste-up different from paper, it was neither carried around like a notebook, nor meant to be the permanent vehicle of the architect’s mark-making. Paste-ups more closely resemble collages and photomontages, yet they were not conceived as works of art, nor objects to be seen in themselves. Instead, they were to be delivered to a printer, captured photographically, turned into a printing plate, and eventually into a printed page. Paste-ups were a way-station, a transfer mechanism connecting the drawing board and the clipping file to the emerging technology of photomechanical offset lithography. In this sense, paste-ups were less an autonomous medium than a crucial element in an assemblage for producing technical images, in which the procedures of hand drawing were more intimately linked to protocols of photomechanical reproduction. Looking at paste-ups produced by Arata Isozaki, Hans Hollein, and Archigram, the paper theorizes the agency of this technical assemblage as part of a transition from an era dominated by the reproductive processes of industrial letterpress and rotogravure to a later moment dominated by xerography and desktop publishing. Paste-ups mark a turning point in the relation of drawing to design. Where the assembly of graphic materials had long been seen as a secondary, mechanical activity compared to drawing’s manual and conceptual virtuosity, in the era of the paste-up the collection and arrangement of ready-made graphic parts was reclaimed and valorised as central to the architect’s intellectual work.

The intense practice of drawing characterized the approach of many Italian architects during the post-war and postmodern decades. In this context Carlo Aymonino (1926-2010) was a pivotal figure. He started his career as a painter, winning also prizes at the 1948 Rome Quadriennale d’Arte, and then he decided to move to architecture, maintaining always the instrument of drawing at the centre of his design method. The hundreds of black sketchbooks kept in his archive witness the daily practice of drawing that characterized all the Aymonino’s life, far beyond the needs of his work as an architect. For Aymonino, drawing represented a larger container of memories, researches, suggestions within which grasping design solutions and figurative ideas for specific projects. Scrolling through the pages of those sketchbooks, fragments of beloved painting of Raffaello or Michelangelo overlapped memories of voyages, portraits of his wife and plans and sections of ancient and contemporary buildings. This complex ensemble of personal memories, carvings into the fields of art, archaeology and architecture, reworked through the medium of drawing (black pen, watercolours, collage etc.) is the best way to approach Aymonino’s architecture. My paper will start with a contextualization of Aymonino’s figure within the Italian panorama of the Fifties and Sixties, and then I will analyse some pages of sketches and drawings from his black sketchbooks. Finally, I will approach the exemplary case of the Monte Amiata residential complex at the Gallaratese in Milan (1967-72), in collaboration with Aldo Rossi, which allows us to deepen the Aymonino’s close relationship between the practice of drawing, the design process and the building site. This paper is a part of a broader ongoing research on the figure of Carlo Aymonino, and I will be able to show and discuss unpublished drawings from CSAC archive in Parma, the Accademia di San Luca archive and the AAM Architettura Arte Moderna archive in Rome.

The production of drawings in the North American architectural culture of the late twentieth-century has often been framed within a conception of architecture predominantly concerned with itself, in which the drawing became the primary site of intellectual work and research. As such, these drawings became a form of cultural production in their own right and were mostly circulated within networks of art galleries, museum exhibitions and private collections, suggesting a closer affinity with the art world instead of the one of construction.

One of the more enigmatic figures in this context is the American architect John Hejduk (1929-2000), whose work indeed exists largely in drawings and paintings, texts and books. Most of his work has never been realised, and was perhaps never intended to be realised. Yet, the evolution of his work also seems to demonstrate a tendency to escape such architectural ‘solipsism’ and to open up towards the world. While his earlier work was indeed preoccupied with the ‘first principles’ of architecture and their corresponding drawing techniques, his later ‘masque’ projects explicitly embrace the historical, cultural and spatial contexts of the sites they address.

This paper will examine this apparent difference in the earlier and later work of Hejduk through the classical notion of disegno. Focusing on two exemplary projects—the Diamond Series (1962-1967) and Victims (1984)—it will demonstrate how Hejduk’s work exhibits a shift away from a conception of architecture deeply rooted in the Albertian model of the architect, and towards a more relational process echoing the ‘communitas’ of medieval building practices. While the drawing might remain the primary site of intellectual work for Hejduk, the role of the drawing changes from its operationality ‘within disegno’ to a practice of drawing ‘without disegno’.

Political protests or calls for social changes were hardly to find in Switzerland before the youth protests in Zurich, a protest movement of the post-punk generation around 1980. Its rebellious spirit also affected a young generation of Swiss architects, and in particular, a group of students and young architects at the ETH studio led by Fabio Reinhart, Luca Ortelli and Miroslav Sik. Their teaching approach latterly called Analogue Architecture was represented by the large-scale crayon perspective drawings; with the travelling exhibition of the same name it enjoyed for a short time much resonance within the European architectural discourse.

From today's point of view the "post-punk spirit" of analogue architecture should be considered in a higher context of dirty realism, a concept defined by Bill Buford 1983 in relation to the new American literature being "not heroic or grand" but rather referring to "the belly-side of contemporary life." Few years later the concept was conveyed by Liane Lefaivre to the built examples of renowned architects and to the cinematic art or urban environment by Josep Lluís Mateo. Dirty realism appeared to be a response to the demand for an objective reproduction of reality of the 1980s instead of idealistic architecture concepts of the previous times. Nonetheless it was left behind already in the 1990s.
As well as the literary representation, achieved through the conceptualization of everyday life in the form of artificially constructed everyday language, the analogue images represented a particular concept of contemporary architecture: as a critical engagement with the fragile dirty reality of post-industrial society, also taking into account the unique urban reality of Switzerland. The oppressive photorealistic cityscapes with oddly backward-looking buildings were considered by the analogues as exercices de style (Raymond Queneau), depicting complex configurations as transformations of a wide range of "difficult" analogies such as reform architectures, Biedermeier or Nordic Classicism as well as everyday constructions and mass culture images.

The analogue drawings not only differentiated from ordinary architectural design; by alienation of neither modern nor postmodern types and forms they demonstrated a critical architecture practice: The images of an "estranged" architectural universe as critique of "depthlessness" (Jameson) of postmodern architectural structures.

Amongst the myriad graphic techniques employed by late- and post-modern architects, the incorporation of photographs into architectural image-making offers a unique entry in the period’s imaginary. Used by a wide range of architects and artists such as OMA, John Hejduk, Melvin Charney, Haus Rucker Co., and others, photomontage and -collage both deployed and undermined photography’s then-expiring “truth guarantee” within the realm of the architectural project. Sometimes, photomontage and other related forms were used instrumentally, to visualize and disseminate proposed designs. In other instances, photomontages served as “real” iterations of projects never intended for actualization in any other form. From Hans Hollein’s “Aircraft Carrier City in a Landscape” (1964) to Stanley Tigerman’s “The Titanic” (1978), photomontage offered a ground for critique capable of destroying (or at least undermining) modernist shibboleths, many of which had themselves been photographically instantiated. While considering a broad range of photo-drawing techniques, this presentation will focus upon the dialectical relationships established between a background site photograph and an overdrawn or otherwise inserted architectural project. At first glance, Herzog & de Meuron’s “Berlin Zentrum” project (made with Remy Zaugg for a 1991 exhibition) appears to follow in a paradigm of modernist virtualization, communicating the immense scale of the proposed towers and their geographic anchorage within the city’s western half. While the background photograph may be seen to offer a surrogate site for an unrealized alternative future, it also transforms the project into an index of a rapidly shifting urban situation, one whose inevitable transformations could never satisfy the heady optimism of the early nineties. At this moment when many European architects (particularly from the Benelux nations) have returned to various forms of photomontage and collage, it is à-pro-pos to return to the recent past to trace the genealogies and typologies of these images.

My paper discusses Eliel Saarinen’s Pavillon Finlandaise for the 1900 Paris World's Fair, which together with auxiliary exhibits and publications blended art, architecture, science, and mythology in service of Finland’s quest for independence. The focus will be on how granite was used throughout the pavilion in a manner that blurred the fake and the real, structural and ornamental use, as well as scientific and artistic imagery with the goal of turning the igneous rock into a symbol of national perseverance and raison d’etre of independence from Russia, all while promoting it as an export material. I will pay particular attention to the pavilion’s hybrid imagery, which combined typological references to Finnish medieval and Norwegian stave churches with Richardsonian Romanesque motives, and to the series of exhibits that combined science and art, fact and fiction. The latter included a display of the visually stunning geographic survey of Finland published in Atlas de Finlande (1899) and a display of rock specimens under Axel Gallen-Kalela’s Kalevala frescos, which depicted the protagonists of the national epic in a Stone Age-like setting and garb.

The notion of image-truth alludes to W.J.T. Mitchell’s notion of the "duplicity of image," that is, its "capacity of both truth and illusion," which countered the notion of material truthfulness that dominated the way stone had been theorized in 19th century architectural theory from Gottfried Semper to John Ruskin till that point. This entailed that instead of being conceived as a truthful and permanent material object, the pavilion enticed the visitor to bounce between haptic, visual, and verbal information and absorb various geological, archeological, and geographic narratives, acting as a "relay [point] connecting theories of art, language, and the mind with conceptions of social, cultural, and political value." (Mitchell). This shift of focus from how the building was made to how it was perceived by the onlooker made it possible for the contemporary French audience attuned to reading modernist poetry, which relied similarly on creating a fleeting kaleidoscopic image in the mind of the reader to consider the pavilion as a beacon for modernity despite of its historicist and archaic imagery.

How are monuments made? Insofar as colossal works of engineering were emblematic monuments of the nineteenth century, smaller, ephemeral infrastructural elements depended on new technologies of photographic representation and reproduction to emerge as monuments in their own right. This essay focuses on a novel, temporary bridge type and the photographs that monumentalized them in late-nineteenth-century France. Portable, demountable bridges were comprised of prefabricated steel members, which could be quickly assembled and dissembled to provide temporary passage across damaged railroad bridges. The structures were developed after the Franco-Prussian War, of 1870-1871, when the French military hastily destroyed a number of railroad bridges crossing the Seine River in an unsuccessful attempt to stop German troops from reaching Paris. This event, coupled with the arduous process of rebuilding the bridges after the war, led French military engineers to implement temporary railroad bridges as a military strategy of industrial warfare. Ubiquitous in the world wars, the bridges are firmly entrenched in the history of military architecture. This paper addresses their earlier applications, when French military and civil engineers worked with private industry to develop the bridges, deploying them in France for civilian purposes and exporting them internationally, across Europe, Latin American, and the colonial world. Although photographs of the bridges were used by their builders to document technical expertise, the images relentlessly crept into the mass media and penetrated the popular imagination. A staggering number of photographs circulated in the illustrated press, postcards, and at universal exposition, and they placed the bridges in the ambit of the militarization of everyday life after the Franco-Prussian War, the colonial imagination, and industrial capitalism. By turning to the photographs within the circumstances of their public circulation, this paper shows how the images visualized and monumentalized these ephemeral infrastructural elements as part of the cultural landscape of late-nineteenth-century modernity.

It is well known that the period following the French revolution saw a proliferation of temporary architectural structures that, although by nature fleeting, lent an imprint of ancient virtues to the pageantry of post-revolutionary Paris. Although confined to paper and permanently fixed to the page, the Napoleonic frontispiece to the first volume on ancient Egyptian architecture in the Description de l’Egypte resonated with these monuments while amplifying their encomiastic function, an agency derived from a fusion of different times and spaces that could only be realized in the printed realm.

Constructed from two main components – a triumphal gate that opens up onto a landscape of Egyptian ruins – the frontispiece acted as a receptacle of sculptural spoils, uniting, on paper, constituent elements from antiquity that had been either lost to the British after the French defeat in 1801 or violently relocated from Italy to Paris, subsequently to become the focus of major urbanistic interventions in the French capital.

Thereby hinging on a specific moment in the flux of artefacts between Egypt, Paris and Rome, the gate forms a great mnemonic structure that fuses ideal, classical time with the immediate temporality of contemporary urbanism. It opens up not only onto Egypt but, in its portrayal of the Nile Valley as a barren land of ancient structures to be restored, onto the landscape, plastic and malleable, of the past itself. As such the frontispiece constituted a monument – simultaneously atemporal and precariously fleeting – that signalled a provisional architecture of the future built from the remnants of the past.

This paper considers the Description frontispiece as an ephemeral structure on paper whose particular monumentality lay in its temporal ambiguity, its play on ruined decay and re-pristinated ancient form itself suggesting that its concern was as much with contemporary and future France as with Egyptian antiquity.

"Unsettling Ephemerality and Monumentality" traces the rise and fall of one of the few post-revolutionary monuments that physically came to replace the former fortress-prison on the Place de la Bastille. The elephant fountain which Napoleon Bonaparte ordered in 1808 to be erected in situ however was never finished. A scale model of plaster and wood, it was ousted by the current July Column from 1835 onwards to a remote corner next to the Bassin de l’Arsenal. The ruined Eléphant de la Bastille was eventually torn down in 1846.

Due to the central place the Place de la Bastille occupied in the minds of many nineteenth-century Parisians, the project and subsequent decline of the elephant fountain was a much-discussed topic in contemporary newspapers and specialised periodicals. The Elephant de la Bastille however achieved everlasting glory through the hand of Victor Hugo. In Les Misérables, the Eléphant de la Bastille is characterized as “a prodigious first draft, a grandiose cadaver of an idea by Napoleon that two or three successive blasts of wind had taken away and thrown every single time further from us." Hugo’s words on the model have elaborated on contemporary reactions to the once so promising project for a fountain on the Place de la Bastille. At the same time, Hugo’s view onto this fugitive, ephemeral monument of which he until his death in 1885 kept a wooden fragment invites for new perspectives. A repulsive and grotesque presence, the monument on the Place de la Bastille through the eyes of Victor Hugo sheds fresh light on questions of monumentality and ephemerality in the politically unstable milieu of nineteenth-century France. Conversely, the fugitive Eléphant also questions some apparent dogmas on the nature of architectural monuments Hugo expressed thirty years earlier in the chapter ‘Ceci Tuera Cela’ in Notre-Dame de Paris.

Delos Symposia, the decade-long series of international meetings initiated by Constantinos Doxiadis in 1963, has been presented in the scholarship as an extension of the legacies of CIAM and west-east relations of European and Japanese architectural cultures (Wigley 2000); and as part of the 1960s emerging discourses on planetary development and environmentalism (Pyla 2009). Departing from these narratives, the paper, aims to investigate Delos Symposia as a platform of exchanges between the so-called global ‘North and ‘South’ by exploring the ways they facilitated intense interactions among ‘cosmopolitan’ scientists, transnational experts, and governmental officials that reflected and questioned the North-South divide.

The paper focuses in particular moments where the shifting epistemological/geographical configurations of ‘North’ and ‘South’ rose more prominently, by adopting two interrelated perspectives: Firstly, it highlights the interactions between interdisciplinary debates of Delos Symposia, the research projects of the Athens Centre of Ekistics and the professional activities of Doxiadis Associates in Africa, and beyond. In doing so, the paper examines the shaping of global architectural expertise at the intersection of ‘northern’ agendas for technological advancement, global urbanization patterns, and scientific networks, with ‘southern’ practices of low-cost and local-based solutions developed in the field. Secondly, the paper, examines more explicitly the role of actors from the ‘South’ in these meetings, alongside or in the shadow of actors from the ‘North’. By exploring the frictions between ‘North’ and ‘South’ perspectives on topics such as urbanization patterns, management of resources, and human-environment relations, the paper highlights attempts to reconcile ‘One World’ anxieties with ‘Third World’ development aspirations. Considering the epistemic plurality of these debates, where architects conversed with economists, biologists, mathematicians, and anthropologists, the paper, further explores how Delos Symposia invited both anthropocentric and post-human perspectives aiming, ultimately, to interrogate both ‘northern and ‘southern’ actors’ decolonizing agendas.

The archive of the trans-continental career of the Argentinian architect Jorge Arrigone (1930-) holds traces of south-south transfers and experiments in housing. Trained as a self-help housing expert in Colombia in the mid-1950s at El Centro Interamericano de Vivienda y Planeamiento (CINVA), the Inter-American Housing and Planning Centre, from 1962 Arrigone was contracted as a housing advisor for United Nations missions including Ujamaa village housing in Tanzania (1963-64) and PREVI III in Peru (1970-72). Between missions, Arrigone was a housing advisor in Argentina. In 1974, after a mission in Swaziland he settled with his family in neighbouring South Africa to work for the state funded National Building Research Institute (NBRI) in the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research as an expert in building technology. From there he designed Siyabuswa, a pilot core housing scheme for black South Africans who were forced to resettle under apartheid legislation to the rural “homeland” of KwaNdebele (1976-79).

Within a project funded by the apartheid state, Arrigone rematerialized South American technologies - specifically adobe, roofing and sanitation - as well as the forms of surveys that were utilised in his CINVA training. Their acceptance into the repertoire of South African low-cost housing suggest that, at least for a short period, “appropriate” materiality and projections of “development” were slipped across borders below the screening of political intentionality. At the time of the construction of Siyabuswa, South Africa was facing international sanctions, but Arrigone managed to draw on his personal networks to localise the global typology of the core house and to represent it as primarily an economical and material solution to the state’s costly housing policy.

The paper is specifically interested in the core house typology mobilised at Siyabuswa in its relational formations: both those created in situ, through the linking of South American ayuda mutua to South African conditions, as well as within the NBRI which was arguably empowered by Arrigone’s success in disguising his more progressive housing agendas. Following this project, other researchers revived the agency’s work in incremental self-build from the early 1950’s, so catalysing new genres of housing citizenship within dislocated and impoverished black communities. This segue from mutual aid projects to civic associations and finally political resistance is a critical and largely overlooked narrative in the last period of apartheid from 1976 to the late 1990’s. How the return to housing as a site of rights formation dovetails with Arrigone’s earlier transnational material research as well as to the earlier popular struggles in Latin America is the core of this paper.

In 1975, a group of filmmakers assembled in New York City around a large table bearing a map of the world and, as the “Liaison Producer” recalled, “carved it up.” The group, designated “regional animators,” had been hired as experts for the vast audio-visual program being prepared for Habitat: The United Nations Conference on Human Settlements, which took place in Vancouver in 1976. Their task was to provide technical assistance to over 100 countries from the developing world, thereby assuring, or so they claimed, that nations without filmmaking expertise would be able to “speak for themselves” through the medium of film to the vast audience gathered for the conference. In addition to filmmakers from the Canadian National Film Board and New York, the group included filmmakers from Chile, Mexico, Kenya, Zambia, Iraq, Pakistan, Yugoslavia, and more. Each was allocated a vast area of the globe; after assisting in regional training sessions detailing the documentary mode sought by the UN, they were dispatched to work with local planning or other government agencies, along with architects, aid agencies, and local filmmakers to shoot contemporary development projects, often also working on post-production. The Zambian filmmaker was assigned to southern African states, the Iraqi filmmaker to Arab-speaking countries, francophone Canadians to countries that had once been French and Belgian colonies, etc., each developing techniques to document and disseminate knowledge being produced about architectural, infrastructural, and agricultural projects throughout the so-called Global South. This paper aims to follow some of these “roving experts” as they moved from one troubled context to the next throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, tracing the complex topology of their collaborations and how they were positioned by the UN—as at once harbouring the capacity to transfer a universalized technical knowledge and as somehow having regional expertise that ranged across national contexts with distinct legacies of European colonial rule.

In 1929, the African-American architect Robert Taylor realized his late employer Booker T. Washington’s vision: opening an industrial school in Kakata, Liberia. They called it “the Tuskegee of Africa” after their original effort, the Alabama school founded to uplift the black population– culturally and economically–in the years after emancipation through a combination of classroom and workshop training. Taylor played an important role as founder of the architectural program. He worked with students to design and construct campus buildings in a hybrid between Beaux-Arts eclecticism and proto-functionalism, navigating the racial politics of architecture as a representation of the Tuskegee project. In Liberia, the centre of the Back-to-Africa movement, Taylor advised on campus planning. He advocated building temporary rammed earth huts using native expertise while developing an industrial curriculum that would eventually teach students to produce a modern campus of concrete and steel, impervious to the tropical elements. While impressed by the resourcefulness of indigenous knowledge, Taylor offered designs to work towards as a visible index of student development. Yet Taylor’s positionality had radically changed; rather than a southern-bred carpenter’s son making good, the MIT-trained designer acted on behalf of American philanthropists and the Firestone Company. The school was to train the local population to support the rubber industry, a neo-colonial arrangement brokered by the African-American leadership of the Liberian government. By the end of that year, the League of Nations would find many of those officeholders guilty of modern slavery, forcing tribal boys to build infrastructure for American industry. That “native labour” would be necessary to achieve Taylor’s own campus plans went unquestioned in the architect’s official report. This transnational effort underscores a common reality of south-south exchanges: decolonization is not evenly distributed. It reveals how in Liberia, architecture, education and race identity worked together to naturalize a particular model of labour exploitation, while in Alabama, the Tuskegee narrative of uplift dissociated building labour from the economies of slavery that had made industrialization possible. Furthermore, it allows us to consider the specific ways that architectural pedagogy supported this colonial agenda, beginning with the Beaux-Arts and ending with a drafting room in Kakata.

In 1934, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, John Collier, launched the first comprehensive “Social and Economic Survey” of Native American Tribes in the United States. This effort sought to respond to two overlapping crises: one concerned the dire housing and living conditions of most Native Americans; the other was the upheaval of the Great Depression and the government’s ensuing New Deal initiatives. Collier sought to connect these crises for the implementation of specific infrastructure and housing projects for Native Tribes, managed through New Deal agencies such as the Civilian Conservation Corps as well as through other agencies exclusive to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Structured in standardized, schematic forms—in contrast to the narrative reporting previously used by the BIA—the Survey was conceived as a particularized census for a huge variety of Tribes, thus homogenizing a great number of possible answers, as well as the questions themselves. The Survey was implemented by the Bureau’s superintending jurisdictions: regional offices tasked with handling the U.S.’s intrinsically fragmented “Indian problem” yet directed from a central office in Washington DC. In Southern California, the Survey was carried out by the Mission Indian Agency, dispatching officers to each Native American Reservation to collect data. This paper will explore this data assemblage effort on Native American housing in relation to the modes of accounting developed by the Mission Indian Federation (established 1919)—one of the most influential pan-Indigenous organizations in the twentieth century—crystallizing a network of different Tribes through a shared anticolonial discourse and specific institutions for “home rule and human rights.” While the BIA’s Mission Indian Agency operated a vertically-nested system of bureaucracies which, through instruments like the survey, individualized Tribes and subjects as colonial “wards” in an imagined pastoral society—with housing projects based on the colonial ranch type—the Mission Indian Federation attempted a horizontal mapping of housing needs and desires across a variety of Tribal authorities and their distinct cultures. The Federation’s data-gathering practices contrasted with the Agency’s not just in terms of the presumed architectural “solutions,” but also as a practice of diplomacy rather than control. In other words, the Mission Indian Federation offers an example of how an early Fourth World decolonial network institutionalized the sharing of data on spatial conditions across different epistemologies and regimes of sovereignty.

Baku, the oil-rich capital of the Azerbaijani SSR, was the site of both the Soviets’ first comprehensive city plan (completed in 1927), and home to two experimental socialist residential neighbourhoods, Stepan Razin and Armenikend, that tested the affordances of the new socialist land regime. Stepan Razin, a worker settlement close to the oil fields, was a modified English Garden City with standardized houses that offered capacious units and public green spaces. When this low-density experiment proved too expensive to repeat, the planners—designing with little oversight from large state structures in this early period—developed large block-based urban schemes to increase the number of units and “economize on the length of piping, paving, interior sidewalks, street lighting, etc.” required for Baku’s Soviet leaders to fund and maintain. The distinctly Constructivist Armenikend block 171, built to test this new paradigm, sat on an enlarged block that allowed for more housing units, integrated social services, shared green space, and reduced vehicular traffic. Armenikend, this paper argues, thus marks the birth of the socialist residential superblock. The superblock proved a persistent planning model throughout the Soviet era because it took full advantage of socialist land ownership structure and was agnostic about architectural language. In the 1935 General Plan for Moscow, a shift to architectural neo-classicism notwithstanding, large residential blocks mimicked Armenikend’s model integrated housing, landscape, schools, and cultural and commercial facilities on large consolidated blocks. In the Khrushchev era (1953-1964), the Soviet housing crisis was again addressed with superblock microregions (mikroraiony) of prefabricated housing and services, though then on urban outskirts. Although Armenikend block 171 was small compared to later examples, it nonetheless showed the way to exploit land nationalization and architectural standardization for the benefit of the socialist domestic sphere.

The scholars of urban planning and architecture of the world behind the Iron Curtain have increasingly studied the architectural production of the socialist realm, never as ardently as in the last decade. Amongst the Eastern Bloc countries, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia, stands an anomaly, Albania. Understudied, isolated, and arguably suffering the harshest interpretation of
communist doctrines, Albanian cities are omitted from the narratives of the socialist urban production of the past century. This paper aims to fill this gap and inquire into the relationship between ideology and urban planning in Albania.
Tirana, the capital of Albania, is a city of problematic twentieth-century urban politics and foreign rulers’ urban plans. Following the Italian and German imprints on the city, the fifty years of the Communist Party’s rule forged the Tirana of confinements and limitations. Its built environment served as a tool of imprisonment and surveillance. In my paper, I study Tirana’s Blloku neighbourhood: housing Hoxha’s residence and apartment buildings constructed for Party leaders, Blloku stood out of reach of a regular Albanian, looming large in the capital’s built environment. To examine the creation of Blloku and its juxtaposition with the existing city, to assess and analyse its political and social bearings, and to explore the project and process of urban isolation, I study the daily newspapers from the period, city plans, and oral history interviews collected in the recent period. I argue that Blloku served as a facilitator of communist rule, its seclusion furthering the division between the ruling party and its subjects, perpetuating
the narrative of fear.
The particularities of the Cold War Albanian communist politics heavily impacted the urban planning and architecture of its cities, and as such, they allow for an inquiry inquire into yet another layer of the communist urban production in post-war Europe.

This paper presents selected outcomes of my PhD research, which traces transformations of rubble into materialities of postwar architecture during the period of early reconstruction of Warsaw (1945-1949). In that period, the so called “rubble productive reuse” became a crucial field for the introduction of planning into the architectural production of Poland. The paper reveals the role of rubble transformation in the urbanisation of Warsaw during the period of Polish Three-Year Economic Reconstruction Plan (1947-1949). The paper concludes by showing how an implementation of different materialities of rubble in the first communist construction sites reconciled many otherwise contradictory visions of postwar political economy of architecture.
In the wake of WWII, and resulting from six years of German occupation, the territory of Warsaw was a forest of ruins growing out of 25 million cubic meters of rubble. Soon, the labour-intensive and technologically advanced transformations of ruined territory positioned rubble as a crucial resource for the early reconstruction. Used as a building material in reconstruction sites since early 1947, rubble becomes a common concern for architects, engineers, economic planners and politicians of various factions. Narrating histories of the earliest worker housing estates of the late 1940s Warsaw, the paper shows how these concerns evolved into struggles to introduce planning into building activity occurring within the city. As a result, the narrative recasts the history of modernization and etatization of Polish architectural production in terms of two rubble materialities: standardised modules of rubble concrete and bricks salvaged in the state-wide action of demolitions. The analysis of the political economy of these two materialities allows to grasp a competing professional and political planning agendas which shaped the postwar urban environment of Warsaw during the decades following the war.

A Socialist city can be identified by its unique structure and form. Typically, this recognition is characterised by the rigid built order, the microdistricts and the Soviet mass housing block. As this phenomenon can be found in multiple cities all over the former USSR, it is evident, that the political ideology has manifested itself not only in constrained collectivism, the standardisation of life but also in its built environment. The ‘living machine has influenced millions of people’s lives and is one of the most significant built urban design plans. Even though the political ideologies during the Soviet era varied, one mutual aim was to raise the collective by abolishing private ownership of property and land. Yet by investigating the Soviet Socialist city (Sotsgorod) another very specific form can be detected. It sits in the city as a foreign matter, an object alien to its rigid surroundings. It was neither designed, nor explicitly planned by the Socialist state, yet it can be found in 48 of the 50 largest cities within the former Soviet Union. These multiple findings are large scale areas of garages. The Socialist garage has a generic micro-city quality and within that, it consists of three main properties. It embodies an architectural element on a plot; it is initially constructed for an object of consumption ‘the car’ and it assembles into odd micro-city formations adducing a 'Siedlung' character resulting in a diverse form of dwellings within the Sotsgorod. Hence this typology is not only interesting concerning its distinct formal properties, but also its functional role goes way beyond the original purpose. Next to a wide range of economical use from small shops to public saunas, they also developed into small communities and even housing solutions. The Soviet garage allowed people to modify space and individualise in an exceptional manner.

The Soviet Academy of Construction and Architecture, restructured by Khrushchev in 1955, reported directly to the Communist Party and was responsible for development of new building standards to replace the outdated Stalinist regulations. It produced “The Norms and Regulations of Planning and Construction” establishing new methods of standardized construction both as a universally accepted architectural technique based on the unit of concrete panel and as a totalising political strategy. The Academy was a complex hierarchical system supplemented with extensive nomenclature and suggesting a highly efficient system, in reality, however, it was disorganized and tainted by the system of top-down control. The totalising project of redesigning the entire Soviet society with the help of a concrete panel caused a collision of various standards—units, techniques, form, materiality, value, and even aesthetics—while failing to acknowledge conceptual shifts of scale between an architectural object and urban space.
This ideological confusion sparked the formation of experimental collectives under the cover of the Academy’s research institutes. This paper focuses on the activity of the group of soviet urban designers and architects, The NER Group (1960-1970), who developed the “New Unit of Settlement" model for future cities based on sociological organization of the city. The main ideology of their alternative urban model was based on creative communication in a classless society, where the city was no longer dependent on its industrial centre, but formed around the centre of communication instead. Their futurist proposals of decentralized urban environments reimagined architectural practice based on a “human” unit of settlement—a new module of urban space. This unit of measurement differed from the Corbusian mathematical Modulor: it foregrounded a human being with one’s unique emotions and creative needs as the centre of urban space. This paper focuses on the shift from the politicized symbolism of Soviet concrete panel unit towards the introduction of a “humanistic” Modulor in Soviet urban planning in the late 1960s, which relocated the site of Soviet subjectivity away from the numerical systems of control towards humanism as a new form of governance. I argue that this change of scale paradigms helped conceptually resolve the illusive split between theory and form in Soviet architecture, and, on an ideological level, between the Soviet State and the rest of the world.

This paper will trace a network of modern carceral enclosures that developed in mid to late nineteenth century Germany, a period in which the architectural and spatial logics of the penal colony, the rural labour colony, and the resettlement program of internal colonization were brought into dialogue. Thinking through the question of scale, contrasting the territorial program of the village and colony to the house and barrack, it will ask how reform-based concepts and practices of settlement were worked out at both the cartographic and the typological level of plan and detail. This paper will consider the founding of the Wilhelmsdorf worker’s colony, established in 1882 by the Evangelical pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, the construction of the sewage farms of Berlin, which doubled as “modernized” prison labour camps—described at the time as “sites of salvation”—and the Prussian Settlement Commission’s program of internal colonization, established by the German Ministry of Agriculture in 1886. Over a thirty-year span, the commission constructed over 600 of what its executive board of Ministers described as “model villages” along the contested eastern borderlands of the Prussian-Polish Provinces, introducing new economic and segregationist land-policy weapons into this long-established zone of conflict. The Commission was assembled in the wake of several mass expulsions in the early 1880s of non-citizen agricultural workers who hailed mainly from the Slavic East; its objective was to enforce the decrees of the Settlement Law, an anti-migrant land-use policy of incentivized settlement and forced displacement. Together, these institutions of enclosure and reform, which transformed Germany’s rural landscape, provide a view onto the origins of eugenic thought in Europe and its alchemical roots, and mark out a set of German imperial and modern planning practices that mobilized space, territory, and environment as agents of “progressive” reform. Perhaps more importantly still, these enclosures spatialized a rule of difference that resided ontologically at their centres and whose forms broadly speak to the partitioning powers of architectural modernism.

Before intense wheat-growing campaigns, in the 1930s, transformed the landscape of Alentejo, in south Portugal, the region was largely seen as inhospitable, underpopulated and unproductive, unable to contribute to the country’s much-needed agrarian development. Concurrently, the State struggled to adequately institutionalise the underage delinquents, vagrants, criminals and outlawed youths that roamed the streets in Lisbon and Porto. Establishing an agricultural reform school in Vila Fernando, Portalegre, in 1881, was presented as a modern response to both questions: a purpose-built structure that enabled the government to regenerate, re-socialise and moralise young offenders in a setting clearly removed from nefarious urban influences; and a concrete attempt at reclaiming large expanses of economically irrelevant land. Once re-educated, the former pupils of Vila Fernando and their families were to become leaseholders in the area and, thereby, agents in the dissemination of up-to-date techniques that would finally ‘civilise’ farming in the region – front-line troops in the battle to settle Alentejo, against its perennial desertification.
In a country where notably few new structures were built to answer ‘modern’, 19th-century needs, with judicial and penal systems woefully underserved, Vila Fernando was an exception. Explicitly combining European models (particularly, Mettray in France and Ruiselede in Belgium, in the re-education concept, and Italian experiences in land reclamation and colonisation), its ambitious proposition – architecturally and socially – was polemical, denigrated, underfunded and finally never completed.
Framing Vila Fernando within domestic and international developments in penal policy, social rehabilitation and internal colonisation, my paper examines the territorial, para-urban and architectural project conceived for this ultra-peripheral outpost of modern European statecraft. The colony-school, outdated (and unfinished) when it opened in 1895, epitomised Portugal’s struggle to deploy the institutions characteristic of a developed nation, when its imperial ambitions were curtailed, industrialisation lagged and conservatism stifled culture and society. I will discuss the specificities of Vila Fernando’s remit and how institutionalising children and youth – not adults – in colonisation settlements potentiated the rhetorical capacity of these territories of incarceration to transform at once land, lives and societies.

Since the beginning of the 1930s, GULAGs were a mainstay of the economy and a driving force behind the main geopolitical projects of the Soviet Union. They played a critical role in mega-infrastructure projects to colonise hitherto unexploited territories, such as the Belomor Canal, main hydroelectric power stations, railway lines, large industrial plants and cities, whilst prison labourers from GULAG campuses contributed to the building of the network of Secret Cities called ZATOs (an abbreviation for Closed Territorial Formations). Settled and inhabited by the Soviet Union’s elite scientists, these secret cities could be located neither in maps nor in official records for over 5 decades, yet they lay at the heart of mega-infrastructure projects such as the Soviet Atomic, space travel, nuclear energy and weaponry research projects.
The Zato’s perimeter wall, consisting of concrete walls and barbed wire, resembled the prison-like environment of the Gulag itself. Its “voluntary prisoners” had been invited to live in total dedication to national infrastructure projects, and to live an entirely isolated, idealised Soviet city life, made possible by rich supplies from those “beyond”. For its inhabitants, the perimeter symbolised their connection to a higher purpose and would later evoke feelings of nostalgia and a sense of being protected.
This paper links the story of the city’s excluded builders (exclusion) to that of its residents who sacrificed their freedom for a higher purpose (retreat), revealing a tight correlation between the prison infrastructure of Soviet GULAGs to the network of secret scientific research centres. By reviewing the ZATOs’ perimeter wall and its relevance in history, this paper will then address the contemporary condition of the ZATOs (which number over 40, and a population of 1 million), questioning whether they would be able to exist without their wall.

Prefabricated timber dwellings have been used as instruments of rural control and colonization for decades. In the nineteenth century, balloon frame construction facilitated the colonization and domestication of the American “wild west,” and the Manning Portable Cottage laid the groundwork for the territorial annexation of Australia by the British. In the twentieth century, the “System Döcker” helped enable Germany’s imperial conquest of east Africa. What has not received sufficient attention is the fact that prefabricated timber structures have sometimes been weaponized in colonized regions. That is to say, they have been used to subjugate and harm indigenous populations. The modern history of the prisoner barrack bears out this fact; in this presentation, I highlight the history of one barrack in particular, namely the “Typ Pferdestall” or “Horse stall Type,” which was employed by the Nazis rather extensively within the concentration camp system between the years 1941 and 1944.
The Horse stall barrack type, technically known as Type OKH 260/9, was an animal stall which, by many accounts, was retrofitted by the Nazis for human use. It found its way to Auschwitz and Buchenwald, among other camp locations, and was industrially mass produced using pre-cut timber. In practice, it was primarily used to house forced labourers, especially Soviet and Jewish labourers. It must also be seen as an extension of the Nazi’s racial policies, functioning as an instrument of mass suffering, illness, and humiliation. My analysis assesses the design of OKH 260/9 in the context of the history of intensive farming in the German countryside. I also situate it in relation to settler colonialism, Social Darwinism, and imperial Germany’s quest of Lebensraum in Eastern Europe.
I draw on a combination of archival materials and primary sources in making my case. I also offer forensic observations using extant remnants of OKH 260/9 itself, which I had opportunity to study in 2015 and 2016.

In the years 1819-1827 seven agricultural colonies were created in the young new kingdom of the united Netherlands (today the Netherlands and Belgium), by a Society of Benevolence founded in 1818. Tens of thousands of ‘colonists’ from the larger cities were involved in the transformation of the barren lands in the north-west of the Netherlands, into agricultural landscapes with a variety of farming structures, where they were provided with modern agricultural training and moral education, to make them self-sufficient. The colonies predate other agricultural colonies, such as Mettray (1838), but also differ in their basic aim, especially before being transformed substantially in 1859. Originally, these were not penal colonies, but designed to survey, teach and improve, or ‘normalize’ people, turning them into valued members of an economically successful nation that could further cultivate the territory. Cultivation and colonisation were crucial elements in the shaping of the young kingdom, and connects to ideas about reform and the creation of a new order with all their spatial, political and ideological implications.
In my paper I would like to concentrate on the system, the ‘engineering’ of these agricultural colonies and relate these to other European rural domestic colonies and related settlements (‘new towns’) in the time-span covered by this session, up to WW II. This type of colony should solve large socio-economic problems of contemporary society with the aid of architecture, in a mixture of reform spirit and ideology, traditional building and architectural design on the one hand, and on the other, a systematic, rational and quantitative approach, which includes social, civil and military engineering that appears highly experimental, detached and modern. Seen as instruments of state politics, these institutions challenge our understanding of the long and intimate relationship between engineering and colonization.

Since the late 1960s, architecture has renegotiated its urban interface through a pervasive turn towards the interior. Across a range of types and functions, buildings have incorporated large-scale interior spaces, here designated by the term ‘atrium’, in excess of typical programmatic or functional requirements. From the voids of atrium hotels, the winter gardens and interior streets of corporate and commercial buildings, to the caverns of museums and cultural buildings, these spaces have motivated and incorporated new approaches to function, use and experience in line with neoliberalism’s ethos of flexibility.

As part of a systematic account of the emergence of the atrium within architecture, the paper will focus on how its emerging presence was registered in building codes in the early 1980s, in particular those governing fire safety. It will show that the distinct spatial parameters of the atrium, its scale and spatial connectivity, presented unforeseen challenges to established approaches to fire safety, and prompted architects and regulatory authorities to develop flexible approaches to the development and application of building codes. Over time, this flexible approach would develop as the basis for understanding a building’s technical performance, and in particular its environmental performance, as the negotiation between different kinds of expertise – architectural, technical, and regulatory.

In making its argument, the paper will focus on a small set of examples emerging from the technical literature. Its method thus aligns with recent approaches that construct a bureaucratic history of architecture. It will argue that the emergence of the atrium shows a particular relationship between a spatial condition and technical possibilities, but that this relationship is not a deterministic one; spatial provision does not determine technical solutions, nor do technical solutions determine spatial outcomes. Rather, flexibility emerges between the spatial and the technical as a way of approaching regulation and the development and deployment of expertise. The atrium thus figures as, and can be defined in terms of, the confluence of different kinds of adjustability: of environment, of function, and of use, the effects of which have contributed to a broader spatial renegotiation of architecture’s urban role.

This paper deals with solar architecture in the course of the flexibilisation of energy sources and resulting urbanization process in the UK, both before the Conservative Party won the 1979 general election and after. Since the early 1970s, different actors, inventors and innovators, architects and engineers, affected by the Alternative Technology-movement, and supported by state and market, had been experimenting with renewable energy, impacting institutions, norms and values. Energy projects profited from government funding as a response of the welfare state to 1973 “oil shock”. The new town of Milton Keynes, centrally planned and built after 1967 in compliance with the ideology of the „non-plan“, serves as a case study and lens for alternative approaches to production and conservation of energy, implemented the MK Development Corporation and supported by the Open University. When under the Thatcher government, public subsidy for housing and energy projects, was withdrawn, MK started promoting home ownership, as flexible new technique of governance, through house exhibitions, which centred on the theme of energy: Home World (1981) and Energy World (1986). This paper, from the perspective of architectural, economic and social history, transition and critical energy studies, argues that home energy became transformed, while the energy system stayed intact. The responsibility for supply, heating and insulation, referring to the cost / efficiency argument, was then assigned to the consumer, first-time home buyers, as well as the building companies or the new type of architect-developers, rather than classically the town planners and local housing authorities. The year 1986 marked a turning point, as MK in the designated „energy efficiency year“ became the energy capital of the UK, championing both active and passive solar, due to the expertise established; 1986 was also the year, when London’s financial market was deregulated and the British energy sector denationalized, in the context of an economic liberalisation.

Like many European countries, Sweden finds itself in the midst of a severe shortage of housing. In 2016, the Swedish Government that over half a million new dwellings would need to be built by 2025 (doubling the rate of production at that time), if, on a purely quantitative basis, there are to be enough dwellings to house the population. Thus an enormous biopolitical project was launched, without fanfare, envisaging an architecture at the scale of the population without giving strategic direction as to the form that that housing would take. In this paper, the Stockholm-based practice Secretary Office for Architecture presents a study of 14,471 apartment plans (all multi-res housing approved in the 26 municipalities that make up the Stockholm region at the highest point of the recent real estate and construction boom, 2017). Carefully tracing shifts in the placement and permeability of walls, the treatment of fenestration, and in the size, type, and sequence of rooms that make up an apartment, we use this archive of the present to identify and describe the vestigial traces of Swedish modernist apartment plans in contemporary production, locating points of deviation and mutations and linking them to the performance-based “re”-regulation of housing in the late twentieth century. In particular, we trace quantitative shifts — under the rubric of “Shrinkage”— in order to explore an emerging biopolitical regime characterised by a “densification of the interior”.

Calling himself an overaged Provo, architect Frank van Klingeren (1919–1999) was most active during the 1970s in the Netherlands. His ideally non-hegemonic architecture and anti-authoritative position as an architect are seldom discussed and researched today. However, his architectural practice raises important questions about “open architecture” and participatory design—and, as such, provides a valuable contribution to contemporary discussions of flexibility. Van Klingeren’s radical ideals offered experimental answers to social and urban issues of the seventies, such as urban renewal, urban development, and—a particularly pressing concern for him—the issues of pillarization (verzuiling) and community (building). His two (at their time, radical) community centres, De Meerpaal and Het Karregat, should be perceived as embodiments of these ideas. Nevertheless, as much as these buildings brought him fame, the discussions and stir that his architectural practice generated also caused him agony. Shifting social, economic, and ideological realities of the 1980s introduced new ideals of space and leisure that led to public demands for alterations to his community centres. In response, Van Klingeren went to court to protect the flexibility of his designs by invoking his intellectual property, acting in seeming conflict with his anti-authoritative and participatory architectural principles. This paper investigates architectural flexibility and its limits as it emerges in Van Klingeren’s thinking and practice as well as his court case. To do so, I juxtapose an analysis of his written works with an interpretation of archival material. I investigate his democratically inclined architectural principles of flexibility as they appear in various written works such as his poems, stories, and critical essays. I interpret these alongside archival materials consisting of court documents and his correspondences about the renovation of De Meerpaal.

At the same time that flexibility was being constructed as the potential to rearrange, repurpose and even reclaim spaces within modernism, the 1960s and 70s saw the technical concretisation of a parallel conception of design as an open system, into a number of methods and technologies. Influenced by the linguistic and cognitive paradigms underlying the programming languages in which these strategies were being implemented, the intention of these systems was to produce architecture the same way one might derive spoken or written sentences from a set of grammatical rules. Some of the many examples of these concretisations include Christopher Alexander’s “pattern language” (1977) or the shape grammars proposed by George Stiny and James Gips in the 1960s, which were used to encode the individual styles of Andrea Palladio or Frank Lloyd Wright into flexible combinatorial design systems.

The majority of the historical record of this early digital architecture consists of texts written in assembly, FORTRAN, Lisp and other programming languages. These historical texts and the technical systems in which they were inserted still remain outside traditional historiographical methods. The present paper looks at how these forms of digital flexibility, variation and indeterminacy were linked to new forms of writing and literacy associated with the computer in the early 1970s. It looks in particular to the specific case of shape grammars and the programs, diagrams and formal descriptions used in their proposition. Shape grammars not only exemplify the application of linguistic models as a means to implement design as an open combinatorial system, but also embody a moment in architecture dominated by formalism, semiology and linguistics, leading, as Manfredo Tafuri would put it, to “a syntax of empty signs” within “a language that speaks only of itself.” (Tafuri 1974)

The Arab house, just as the Ottoman house, has material and formative characteristics that are common in a wide geographic area. Its main structural component is stone — as opposed to wooden beams in the Ottoman house. Under the Ottoman rule, the new city of Haifa, located in the southern periphery of the Empire, was established as a port city and controlled the Levant area. During the second half of the nineteenth century, Haifa became a cosmopolitan city and a transportation hub that linked Europe to the Empire and the East. This study explores how Ottoman traditions affected the construction of the Haifa Arabic house. Which were the components both types of homes shared? What elements are vernacular and which “universal” in both buildings types? Significant technological and administrative changes led to several immigration waves of individuals as well as nuclear families to Haifa. Construction of the port and the Hijaz railway, as well as other Tanzimat reforms (1839-1876) triggered the need for living quarters. New entrepreneurs set up homes for rent. Growing demand for housing changed the structure of family dwellings and residential building characteristics. The residential model shifted from the “Liwan house” — widely spread throughout the Levant as a central component in the extended family home — to the “Central hall house”, or units for the nuclear family.

Examining long-term influences of local buildings and innovations imported from Europe or the heart of the Ottoman Empire, this paper traces how this syncretic model was designed: a combination of traditional autochthonous masonry with new building materials and new imported building elements. Joining the vernacular with the international, the Central hall house ushered in the new traditional-modern house model, ultimately changing the city’s landscape.

Following the aftermath of the Cold War and the fall of communism in East Europe, as well as the recuperation of the post-Yugoslav states, yet re-drawing the lines of geographical and cultural multitude, it is observed that the remains of the Ottoman Era are being re-appreciated as the vernacular of the nations from Adriatic to Thracian milieu.

Apart from technology, programme, identity and semiotics of the Ottoman house as the vernacular and common denominator of the post-Cold War Balkan societies, this paper aims to reflect the stripped image of Ottoman identity off from the phenomenon, on behalf of providing a mental image of the house acting as a cross-cultural mediator that operates in the level of semantics of basic spatiality. Thus, neither focusing on a physical embodiment of the Ottoman house, nor group of dwellings, this paper is based on the conviction that not the corporal embodiment of the house, but the incorporeal and omnipresence of inside-ness and the uninterrupted feeling of being in represents the essence of the so-called vernacular.

In order to address what the Ottoman house refers to and which are its essential roots — by asking questions whether it is a stereotype or a spatial scheme, hierarchical planning of private and public space, or the use of significant interior and exterior elements; or the taxonomy of the building mass, or the separation of gender ¬— this paper will comprehend the cross-cultural continuity of the phenomenon. It will address questions related to sofa/hayat (the specific spatial entity acting as a transition space connecting individual rooms to the rest of the house, or the interiority of the house to the exteriority of the street), as a molecular space but not a molar house, acting both unitary and collectively. By utilizing a multi-fold reading methodology and focusing on the examples from Mostar (Herzegovina), Prizren (Kosovo) and Thessaloniki (Greece), Buldan (Turkey), the existing literature on the subject (Eldem, Kuban, Ögel, Akın etc.), as well as the concept of interiority and urban rooms in relation to the general history and theory of space (Lefebvre, Sennet, etc.) this paper would permit to discern the locality of the phenomenon together with its transversality in space and time.

The problematic dichotomy of “East” and “West” has long been used to frame medieval architectural history. This division has pressed unique architectures, such as those of Sicily, Syro-Palestine, Cyprus, and post-crusade Greece, into stylistic categories that they do not easily fit. In this paper, I examine such stylistic categories as they have been applied to medieval Mediterranean monuments in locales that saw periods of intense cultural interaction.

Historiographic arcs in many countries have claimed – or disavowed – monuments that display traits from multiple, canonical medieval architectural styles, such as Gothic, Islamic, or Byzantine and their subsets, often in the service of nationalist or imperialist aims. For example, buildings of post-crusade Jerusalem were declared by French architectural historians of the nineteenth century to be not only Gothic, but belonging – albeit clumsily – to regional French Gothic variant styles, showing the reach of francophone power in its outré-mer.

Some Greek architectural historians, writing as the country emerged from the German occupation in World War II, noted that Byzantine architectural traditions had remained uncorrupted in the post-crusade Peloponnese, despite the presence of Frankish settlers and their sculptors for the duration of their domination of the peninsula. But, how did the medieval populations of these places interpret the buildings around them, and how was architecture employed to create identity? How can we re-evaluate such nationally determined attributions and recover medieval architectural meaning?

I argue that extant monuments in such defined, heterogeneous contexts can reveal how medieval architecture, over time, both reflected and inflected the mixed socio-cultural character of their locales. I demonstrate that the transmission of architectural knowledge, memory practices, and social exchange created highly localized and “stylistically” fluid buildings that frequently fused initially disparate architectural practices into monuments of shared experience and identity.

The southwest of France has frequently been defined by its austere and militarized church architectural aesthetic during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in contrast to the proliferation elsewhere of bar tracery and large expanses of glass that came to characterize Gothic style. Certainly, this was rooted in very active Cistercian and mendicant church builders, battling the ever-present heretical movement of the Cathars.

What began as a solution to the physical and spiritual needs of local communities changed into a fusion of ecclesiastic and military architecture to convey a larger message of authority. However, the association of churches in the southwest of France with military architecture came to define the region in later centuries, occasionally resulting in a manufactured aesthetic created during nineteenth century restorations. Documents show that restoration authorities argued over what the “ideal” and “original” state of the churches must have been.

Although there is a definitive, formal connection between fortification and church architecture, some monuments were not eloquent enough in their medieval architectural heritage to satisfy late nineteenth and early twentieth century historians, who sought to transform them into an idealized state rooted in the spirit of Viollet-le-Duc. Complicating this picture is the fact that many of the thirteenth century communities in the southwest of France were a mix of English, French, Spanish, and Catalan origins: an Occitan identity that defied the very notion of a nation state or a national style.

Using the churches at Monflanquin and Rudelle as case studies, I will attempt to deconstruct the fortified architectural identity to reveal the variations of church architecture actually present, illustrate the debate among the restoration teams of the early twentieth century, and question whether the architecture of the southwest of France really has a homogenous regional style.

The seismic social and political changes which Spain underwent during the early nineteenth century cannot be over-emphasised, and yet the country’s (then unknown) wealth of art, and architectural antiquities still made it an essential extension of the Grand Tour. At the same time, the endless political turmoil and Mendizábal’s confiscation of church property, unsurprisingly, brought about a crisis of national identity with particular architectural implications.

Witness to this crisis was the Royal Academy of San Fernando whose responsibility had been, since its founding in Madrid in 1752, to protect and promote Spain’s architectural monuments. Its initial publication solely presented the ‘Moorish’ architecture of Granada and Córdoba in Antigüedades Árabes de España, (1787- 1804). This narrow focus was to widen greatly in the nineteenth century in response to the academy’s increasing awareness of the wealth and complexity of Spain’s architectural heritage, culminating in the wondrous diversity of architectural taxonomies in the publication Monumentos Arquitectónicos de España, (1856-1881). The publication of this work coincided with the public reading of José Amador de los Rios’ El Estilo Mudéjar en Arquitectura (1859) in which the word ‘Mudéjar’ was used as an architectural term for the first time in an attempt to define the individual character of Spanish Gothic while encompassing its diversity, and was immediately contested by Pedro de Manzano.

The Mudéjar Alcázar and parish churches of Seville were central to Amador de los Rios’ thesis. This paper uses published and unpublished drawings of these buildings made by Spanish and foreign artists to elucidate its gestation and draw attention to the inherent problems in the use of this architectural term.

Byzantium and Old Rus’ are always the least locations in the Gothic imaginary checklist. However, the preserved monuments present important cases to test the ability of Gothic to be implemented in local architectural styles.

The complex of the Palaces of Despots of Mystras, began as a residence of a Frankish castellan, was enlarged and rebuilt by local rulers during a century and a half. The western part with the Throne Hall is considered to be the latest addition to the residence, probably commissioned by the Byzantine Emperor, Manuel II, and dated to the beginning of the 15th century. Its decoration presents a variety of Gothic decorative details. The whole complex is characterized by pointed forms of arches, doors and windows.

The Faceted Palace in Novgorod the Great commissioned by the archbishop Evfimiy II in 1433 is the easternmost civil edifice in Brick Gothic style. The brickwork, construction techniques, the specific forms of the vaults are the cross-cultural product of the local commissioner and the “German master builders”, who, as the Chronicles tell, were invited to build the monument.

Both, the Despots of Mystras and Novgorod the Great were strongly interconnected with the countries of the Western Europe, but the ways Gothic was integrated into their own distinct thesaurus varied. In Mystras, the heart of Morea, where Byzantium was to take hold and be renewed, the despots built the palace with the pronounced Gothic decoration and the latter was also introduced to the church architecture. The archbishop, de facto the head of Novgorodian Republic, on the one hand, lived in a Gothic palace, and on the other, developed a special program of renovation for the local churches, which were to imitate the old local ecclesiastical architecture. This report will seek to explore the specifics and venture to explain the reasons of these two versions of Gothic inspiration in the Byzantine Oecumene.

Abstract In 1960, amidst the larger Pan-Arab movement, Palestinian-born, American-educated Saba George Shiber started his career in Kuwait, first in the Department of Public Works and later in the Development Board. In 1968, the firm Pan-Arab Consulting Engineers (PACE) was established by British-educated Kuwaiti architect Hamid Shuaib, Palestinian-born, American-educated architect Charles Haddad, and American-educated Kuwaiti engineer Sabah Alrayes, and went on to construct key buildings in Kuwait, UAE, Yemen, and several African nations. The stories of Arab actors such as Shiber, Haddad, Shuaib, Alrayes, and many others are often missing from the architectural history of Kuwait. Kuwait’s architectural modernism boom, which reached its apex in the 1970s, is often attributed to the 1951 Masterplan of the British firm Minoprio, Spenceley and MacFarlane and subsequent plans by Colin Buchanan. However, the reality is that Kuwait’s boom was facilitated through actors such as Shiber, Shuaib, and Haddad. With a series of forward-looking Emirs, who were open to change, Kuwait became a site of exploration and experimentation. The story of Kuwait is unique for three reasons. Firstly, its leadership were eager to physically materialize an Arab project, and architecture was the mechanism by which this Arab-ness came to fruition. Secondly, politics took a backseat to modernization and the desire to become cosmopolitan. Lastly, it embraced Arab professionals that were educated and/or practiced in the larger Arab region. For while the imagined Pan Arab State was never fully realized, its central tenet of Arab identity and solidarity took hold in Kuwait. Through archival research and interviews, and by focusing on how these Arab architects mediated between their foreign education, their strong Arab identity, and their interactions with foreign firms, this paper will tell the story of an Arab city constructed by Arab actors for an Arab society.

Tel-Aviv, the so-called "white city" is often described as the "Bauhaus city", the work of central European architectural Genius. A description which marginalized and all but obliterated the great contribution of native, Levantine architects to the development, modernization and building of the city.

Two of the most outstanding of these architects were the cousins, Zacky (1893-1973) and Robert (Hillel) Chelouche (1904-1972) who had, each his own practice in the city. Natives of the multicultural city of Jaffa, and sons of a prominent North-African family, they were part of a polyglot society, which had deep roots in the middle-east but also great affiliation to European culture and to the French Language. Educated in Paris they were taught by architects who were active in the French colonial project, and on their return to Tel-Aviv, they brought with them modernist expertise and built extensively in the city, creating a rich heritage very similar to that of contemporary Mediterranean cities such as Casablanca. Cosmopolitans and well educated they kept their professional network in Europe, with connection to the French professional press and to international organizations, and yet, though both well respected they never became a true part of the mainstream architectural Zionist Central/East European milieu, creating instead their own milieu, building mainly for a small affluent community of Sephardic and Mizrahi families.

Challenging the prevailing Bauhaus narrative of the "white city" this paper aims on telling the untold story of modernist architects who were born in Palestine and active in Tel-Aviv. Presenting the architectural biography of two of these architects, it will present the role played by the middle-eastern gentleman-architect in forming the city's unique identity and will offer a re-thinking of Tel-Aviv modernist heritage in relation to that of other "White Cities", as a distinctively Mediterranean town.

In 1962, Balwant Saini (1930-) established a Graduate Course in Tropical Architecture at the University of Melbourne (Australia). Indian born, Saini had received his own architectural training at Melbourne where he studied at the School of Architecture, graduating in 1954. Working in India after graduation, Saini returned to Melbourne in 1958 to take up a teaching position and begin a PhD on indigenous building technologies in Papua New Guinea. Melbourne’s Tropical Architecture course could be completed as a Masters or taken as a short course over 4 weeks. The course attracted students from across the region including Thai architect Dhanit Sridhora, Emmanuel Kingsley Osei of Ghana, architect Chua Ka Seng of Malaysia, and architects Jon Lim and Chew Chee Sun of Singapore. The program was modelled on the Department of Tropical Architecture established in 1955 at the Architectural Association’s in London. Saini had met Fry prior to this, when he took a year out from his undergraduate degree and worked on the Capital Project in Chandigarh under Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret. In 1973, Saini left Melbourne to take up the Chair of Architecture and Head of School at the University of Queensland (Brisbane Australia). He continued to teach the Graduate program in Tropical Architecture and together with Hungarian architect Steve Szokolay, hired by Saini on the recommendation of Otto Koenigsberger, the University of Queensland became a leader in the Architecture Sciences and the study of Tropical Architecture. Saini retained the Chair of architecture for nearly 2 decades and is currently Emeritus Professor.

Saini’s narrative (brown rather than white, teacher rather than student, and Australian rather than European or American based) disrupts and unsettles the accepted networks on tropical architecture in the mid-twentieth century. His story is also one that has been neglected in both histories of tropical and Australian architecture. This paper seeks to rectify both. His story, however, has added significance. Saini’s teachings, it will be argued, shifted a focus in tropical Australia from the ‘comfort of the white man’ and the acclimatisation of settler communities to shelter, development and economic progress. Encouraging Australian architects, educational organisations and governments to engage with its Pacific and South-East Asian neighbours (identified as new markets), it also forced these same institutions to look again at the plight of the nation’s own indigenous communities and the housing of Australian Aboriginals in northern Australia. While the former is widely accepted as outcome of the transatlantic network of tropical architecture and architects, the place of the latter debate on Aboriginal housing in this same network has yet to be considered and fully understood.

Transnational or say, cross-border, architectural design became obvious and prevailing after World War II. The transnational design and planning were practiced in the armature of design consultancy, helping reconstruction and foreign-aid. Famous examples are seen in those projects like Le Corbusier’s works in India, British architects’ “tropical modernism” works in its (former) colonies. Although not white, Japanese architects’ works in the Middle East and Southeast Asia can be seen as the same category. These works effectively met the desires of modernization and nation-building in those newly independent countries. They powerfully disseminated the ideas of modern architecture and have authoritatively occupied the pages on modern architectural history.

Parallel to the “main stream” dissemination of modern architecture in the world, Chinese architects imported their design to the developing countries since the late 1950s. China began its journey of foreign aid from the 1950s including constructing parliament houses, stadiums, theatres, schools, hospitals, factories and infrastructures, first in Asia, then Africa, the Oceania and Latin America. Up to now, China has delivered more than 1,000 buildings in more than 150 countries. Although motivated by diplomatic manoeuvre, they embodied China’s responsibilities in the international society, alleviated social problems and served local society. Technically, they are the extension of modern Chinese architecture during its evolution of the past 60 years. China learnt from the western experiences of modernist architecture, digested in domestic practice and promoted to the developing world with adaptive technologies. They bear the fruits of cultural and technical exchanges between donor and recipient countries. Together with other means of foreign aid, buildings and constructions in Asia and Africa in the 1960s-1970s are prelude to today’s One Belt One Road initiative.

The Chinese government and professionals have spent tremendous efforts and overcome unthinkable difficulties in constructing the aid buildings abroad. However, these buildings are largely unknown in the world and unwritten in the English literature - this pity forms huge academic gap. This paper examines the typical construction aid projects delivered by the Chinese government, design institutes and professionals to the developing countries during Mao's era (1958-1976). The unreasonable high percentage of expenditure in construction aid might burden the life of ordinary people, however, they gave Chinese architects rare opportunities to practice modernism in overseas environment. The strength of state's technical forces and wisdom of designers are crystallized in conference halls, factories and stadiums built in Asia and Africa. They in-turn informed the similar designs in China and abroad.

In terms of authorship, there are some prominent figures like Gong Desun, who designed buildings in Mongolia and Dai Nianchi, who designed buildings in Sri Lanka in the 1960s. They are the second generation of Chinese architects. However, their intellectual wisdom is more displayed through the socialist system of “design institute”, which represent the will of state and government. These Chinese architects are the unsung heroes in promoting the transnational architecture in the developing countries.

The author has investigated the cases through extensive study at home and abroad. The key designers and constructors were interviewed, archives were read and site surveyed. The paper is hoped to fill the academic gap of transnational architecture beyond Europe and North America in the Cold War, and enrich our understanding of Asian and African architecture.

Private transport in the seventeenth century city was intricately bound up with class and gender. Horse riding was mostly a male affair, while aristocratic women moved around in carriages. But since the exigencies of rank and decorum sometimes dictated unpractical numbers of horses, some members of the highest nobility preferred more modest ways of transport, such as litters carried by footmen. Devotional treatises of the time recommended pious noblewomen to attend religious services incognito, so as to avoid the worldly distractions of seen and being seen. They should shun the public eye and enter and leave church “like an angel” in a closed sedan chair. At the same time, monastic communities went to great lengths to accommodate carriages turning and parking at their doorsteps, as they vied for aristocratic patronage.

This paper explores the cultural practices of mobility in and around the drive-ins of convents and churches in Paris and Brussels, from the perspective of their users. Their movement was channelled by implements and framed by ornament. It will be argued that these spatial and architectural implications of patronage were defined by rank and honour as well as by the religious culture of devotion à la mode, which required frequent movement between different sites, be it in state or incognito.

H. H. Richardson incorporated porte‐cochères—covered carriageways —into many of his domestic designs. While the literature on Richardson is enormous, this particular motif has yet to be explored in detail. My paper examines three of Richardson’s houses from the late 1860s to the 1880s to examine why acknowledging mobility and travel was so important to the architect in his domestic commissions. Beginning with one of his first designs after returning to America from studies at the Ecole des Beaux‐Arts —his own house in Staten Island, New York of 1869—Richardson accommodated arrival and departure by carriage into the domestic realm. He went on to make a porte‐cochère an important element of the main façade in his Watts Sherman house of 1874 in Newport, Rhode Island, one of his most influential designs. Finally, in his gate lodge for Frederick Lothrop Ames in North Easton, Massachusetts of 1880‐81, Richardson expanded the covered driveway to mythic scale.

Focusing on the porte‐cochère in Richardson’s work helps underscore both the practical and functional side to his designs and the internationalism of his interests. It is arguably French architecture of the Second Empire that first influenced Richardson to take up the motif when he began his practice as an independent architect. A brief review of the novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton set in the 1870s and 1880s shows how knowledge of the differences among carriage types (e.g.: broughams vs. landaus vs. coupes) was a necessary accoutrement among the moneyed set who commissioned bespoke houses in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Finally, the porte‐cochère in Richardson’s houses serves to connect his suburban villas and country estates to the transportation infrastructure that burgeoned in late nineteenth‐century America. New commuter trains facilitated the development of suburban residences and Richardson designed nine railroad stations for the Boston and Albany Railroad, most of which incorporated covered driveways. The domestic porte‐cochère thus connects Richardson’s houses to a modern network of transportation and communication.

A nationwide project to boost the number of privately owned cars, masterminded by government minister Alexey Kosygin, was launched in the USSR in 1965. In line with the romantic ideals of the time, the Soviet government hoped to reach a ratio of 20 cars per 1000 people within a decade. To that end, a deal was signed with Italian car manufacturer FIAT and the plan was to create a behemoth infrastructure in the USSR in order to build and service new cars. Architect Leonid Pavlov was tasked with handling the ambitious project.

In 1967, Pavlov proposed a new reconstruction plan to drastically rebuild Moscow, which included the construction of speedways cutting through the city. That project was largely inspired by Le Corbusier’s The Radiant City. According to Pavlov’s plan, the new buildings, both residential and administrative, that would be erected along the proposed speedways would be large and would have large details so that they could be easily seen while driving or riding in a high-speed car.

Pavlov’s reconstruction plan never came through but a couple of giant service stations, designed by the architect, were built on the outskirts of Moscow and became important examples of Soviet architecture of the early 1970s. Pavlov also designed several filling stations and camping sites for tourists travelling by car.

Pavlov did draw at least some inspiration for his projects from his Western counterparts as, after being tasked with creating the USSR’s new automobile infrastructure, he visited the United Kingdom and France. But his primary sources of inspiration included the architecture of Soviet avant-garde, which he got acquainted with through his teacher Ivan Leonidov, and even Suprematist paintings.

As a result, one-of-a-kind buildings were designed, but their construction during the rule of Leonid Brezhnev (a period in the history of the USSR also known as the Stagnation Era) became quite a challenging job, completed with varying degrees of success.

Alongside German motorways there are 45 churches and chapels (“Autobahnkirchen”). Neighbouring Europe counts only a handful of comparable buildings. For that, motorway churches seem to be a special outcome of the German Autobahn. The first motorway church was erected in 1958. The origins of this special building type ranges between high speed and silent devotion, which is reflected in architecture in the disposition of rooms, in the artistic design and liturgical equipment.

Located at an unconventional site, far away from the territorial parish, they address to a specific group of recipients: the motorists. In a country of unrestricted speed limits driving the motorway is marked by fear of accidents and sudden death. Therefore, motorway churches are meant so represent a place of silence, contemplation and shelter in surroundings of noise, speed and exhaust fumes. This led a private entrepreneur to build the first motorway church in Adelsried (near Augsburg) in 1958. It was designed by the architect Raimund von Doblhoff. Shortly after, three further motorway chapels were erected. One of them was designed by Carl Hecking, a former employee of Dominikus Böhm. All these projects started non-institutional and were initiated by private people. When St. Christophorus was inaugurated in 1978, it became the first milestone of this genus. It was planned by the architect Friedrich Zwingmann and the artist Emil Wachter. New architectural and artistic standards became visible, especially in the concrete reliefs, which refer equally to biblical themes as to the automobile.

The lecture focuses on the origins of the motorway churches in Germany, primarily demonstrated by the first example in Adelsried.

The term ‘traffic architecture’, conceptualized in Colin Buchanan seminal book, was part of a global venture to adjust the urban environment to the growing demands for motorization. On an urban scale, it embodied a reformist ambition to reconcile the conflict between accessibility and aspirations to preserve traditional conceptions of pedestrianized public space. On a building scale, it referred to architecture that embodied traffic uses with more conventional architectural uses. While usually segregating motorized traffic from pedestrian movement, in these projects, architects were compelled to consider the conflicts between vehicular movement and the static nature of architecture.

This paper explores a case study, part of the planning of the Ayalon Crosstown Expressway in Tel Aviv. In 1978, four multidisciplinary teams, led by architects, were commissioned to study the prospect of selling air-rights above the highway in order to finance its construction, creating ex nihilo urban fabric, maximizing the value of otherwise ‘wasted’ space. Like similar projects around the world, the objective was speculative and not architectural, yet for some of the architects, it offered an opportunity to envisage architecture anew by developing a systematic approach to architectural and urban design that embraced traffic engineering’s methods of the quantitative, three-dimensional order of vehicular flow, regulating car traffic into buildings. Others prioritize the more conservative ensemble, concealing transport infrastructure underneath, leaving architecture and public space free of traffic.

Considered at first as an opportunity for reforming cityscape, making it financially lucrative, or radicalizing it through the creation of mega-structural development, we argue that ‘traffic architecture’ carried the proposition that architectural integration with motorization would initiate the next evolutionary stage of modern architecture. Using this case, we ask how traffic, as a concept and as materiality, affected architecture in the 1970s and what is the significance of these experiments on the history of post-war architecture.

This paper examines the Jerusalem Palace Hotel (1928-1929), designed by Turkish architect Mehmet Nihat Nigisberk, and the Ankara Palas Hotel (1927), designed by Vedat Tek and Kemalettin Bey, who was Nigisberk’s mentor. The hotels’ design and construction reflect dramatic regional social and political transformations, and the continuation of national, international as well as professional networks, demonstrating connections between the formation of post-World War I identities.

In Palestine, British mandatory rule (1918-48), with similarities to colonial rule, promoted large-scale modernization that included, alongside government buildings, typologies affecting social life, such as hotels. Being the most important new Muslim-Palestinian building in the city, the Jerusalem Palace Hotel fostered interaction between the British administration, foreign elites and local Muslim leadership. It also hosted international congresses and exhibitions, serving as a site of contact between the emissaries of new Muslim nations.

The Turkish Republic (founded 1923) implemented a similar process of modernization, especially rebuilding Ankara as its capital to house the administrative and social functions of a modern city. The Ankara Palas Hotel, as the first state-commissioned hotel and the largest of the period, not only accommodated tourists, but also provided space for political and recreational activities, such as diplomatic meetings and official celebrations, as well as gatherings of social organizations.

Both hotels boasted modern functions and technologies while also evidencing the negotiation of the Ottoman historicist style in their design approach. Elements from local Muslim monuments were added in the Jerusalem Palace Hotel to represent emerging Palestinian identity, and the Ankara Palas Hotel re-appropriated the late Ottoman ‘national’ style in order to represent Turkish identity. This paper aims to discuss the political and social roles of these lavish city hotels that thus inscribed new national identities on a modern typology, by sanctioning spaces for local as well as international interaction.

Conceived in 1962 as a means to jumpstart the economic development of a young Republic, the Cyprus Hilton asserted aesthetic claims of luxury, modernity and development, advancing American soft politics as well as local state efforts for nation-building. The 71st building of Hilton Hotels International Inc., the Cyprus Hilton, however, had many encounters with ethnic antagonisms and military conflict in Cyprus and its region. This paper considers various ‘moments’ in the history of the Hilton during the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, that speak to the conflicting uses of its spaces, which sometimes celebrated the bi-communal co-operation between Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots and reinforced the government’s efforts towards the building of a peaceful and prosperous state; and sometimes became a site of intercommunal or larger geopolitical tensions, which culminated in 1974, when the island of Cyprus was violently divided, and the Hilton site experienced bombing and the killing of the US ambassador.

These competing moments of “contact” in the Cyprus Hilton subverted the tourism industry’s official narratives of luxury and peaceful relaxation. Examining how hotel rooms were used by war reporters, medical personnel, or United Nations peace keepers; hotel lobbies held diplomatic meetings for peace negotiations; and hotel gardens became sites of locals’ demonstrations, the paper underlines the peculiar role of the hotel, not only as an instrument of economic or national development, but also as a space of contestations were local politics became intricately entangled with geopolitical strategizing that also had its part in the shaping of the landscapes of tourism and the politics of leisure on the island and the region.

The Motel Agip of Dar es Salaam was built in 1964, the year of the birth of independent Tanzania, by Agip, the commercial branch of the Italian national hydrocarbon agency ENI (Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi). Strategically located at the center of the city, between the Asian commercial district and the new government’s headquarter (former colonial administration and white neighborhood), the motel can be read as the materialization of ENI’s and the Tanzanian state’s overlapping interests. The facility, together with its adjacent service station and car showroom, was part of Agip supply-chain expansion into the African continent and at the same time, it was the result of the government’s strategy to develop tourist facilities across the country with the support of foreign investors.

But “the Agip”, as it was commonly referred to, was much more than just an advertising for Agip ad Tanzania’s achievements. It was also a space of work, leisure, transit, consumption, identity definition, and cultural exchange and appropriation where multiple actors got in touch or simply coexisted for a while.

This paper inquires the history of the motel, from its inauguration to its closure in the late 1990s, as a space where the political, social, and cultural evolving dynamics of postcolonial Tanzania are shaped, manifested, and enacted. Based on archival material, oral history accounts, and the close reading of the motel’s design features, the paper will unveil its multiple performances as both a contact zone and a postcolonial device of “differential inclusion”.

The facility management profession that emerged in the 1960s and 70s was charged with maintaining and regulating flexible workplaces, especially large open offices for collaborative intellectual work. Yet this broad mandate elided conflicting imperatives, as facility managers struggled to reconcile the rhetoric of improving employees’ collective well-being with mounting pressure to cut costs. This paper traces the origins of facility management and the early tensions over its aims and methods, and explores the political stakes of its evolving relationship to the discipline of architecture.

In the late 1950s, management consultants Eberhard and Wolfgang Schnelle developed their Bürolandschaft office design approach around the premise that patterns of verbal communication in an office evolved continuously. Their fantasy of an endlessly reconfigurable infrastructure for creative work was in sympathy with designs by Yona Friedman, Cedric Price, and other radical architects. When the American furniture company Herman Miller adapted these principles to create a line of modular workstation components, it proposed an integrated approach to space planning, management science, building maintenance, and furniture procurement. By 1979, when Herman Miller founded its Facility Management Institute to advance this technocratic method, the optimism of the Bürolandschaft had receded. The oil crisis had punctured the illusions of limitless expansion, perpetual mobility, and environmental uniformity that initially made large open offices seem compelling. As corporate real estate became a precious resource, intricate office layouts designed around collaboration gave way to dense rows of cubicles and IT infrastructure.

This paper examines how the objective of reconfiguring building interiors for collaborative ‘knowledge work’ led to multiple reconfigurations of the practice of workplace design itself. It analyses the early vicissitudes of facility management by examining key antecedents and theoretical models proposed in Germany and the United States, and considers how economic shifts eventually undermined the profession’s utopian premises.

This paper presents a situated analysis of the documents on one successful architect’s desk and through this insight into a central and undertheorized technique of architectural practice: charm. Recent scholarship has drawn on the history of science and media studies to analyze the impact of early twentieth-century managerialism on the professional practice of architecture. In these accounts, strict adherence to rational protocols implemented through administrative forms including contracts, specifications, and other paperwork templates transformed a tumultuous construction industry into a reliable business. By adopting this new infrastructure of control, architects transformed their practices from social clubs into efficiently managed offices. In so doing, they found a new means of solidifying their social status. However, even driven by profit, trust and credibility relied on more than rational procedures. During what has been called both the Progressive Era and the rise of the Jim Crow era in the United States, the rigorous, technical
practices of these methods relied upon their practitioner’s ability to embody and carefully navigate long-standing cultural codes. To develop a more nuanced understanding of socially accepted forms of professional relationships, I look at the correspondence between architect Charles Downing Lay and the artist curator Bryson Burroughs regarding their renovation of the lobby of the Century Club’s NYC clubhouse. In particular, I analyze their letters in light of a contracts and specifications manual from Lay’s desk that included templates for professional correspondence. Echoing then-popular etiquette manuals, these letterforms consciously mixed litigious bureaucratic standards with well-mannered social formats and phrases. Referring to the manner in which architects interact with their clients and colleagues, charm is an all-together different form of flexible, professional practice. Lying somewhere between the rational and the
charismatic, it both relies on codified rules and thrives through its ability to operate outside of them.

Animated by rapid developments in information technology, the appetite for free and dynamic space evident in the architectural experiments of the Sixties implicated the anxieties of a transient subjectivity subject to what Alvin Toffler had, in 1965, referred to as ‘future shock’. The image of abstract information patterns disembodied from their material instantiations would progressively permeate consciousness, a cultural condition that Katherine Hayles has defined as virtuality.

Situated within the historical time of the punch card and enticed by the idea of self-organization, the Fun Palace offers a relevant case to investigate the complex interplay between technology and pleasure, and more specifically between self-organization and under-specification in the Sixties’ culture of emancipation. Mediated by the figure of the grid, the practices of modulating air, charting performance and indexing pleasures push towards information and organization as the new objects of design, and with it, the redefinition of the role of the architect as that of systems designer. Underpinned by cybernetics, Price’s so-called ‘anti-architecture’ would aim to give away the stability of its body for an inbuilt non-programme – which would take the form of an interactive and evolving system regulated through feedback gathered from participants – as the means to pursue the project’s emancipatory ideals. Crucially, embedded in the agenda of the Cybernetic Committee constituted to design it, self-organization became realized within the material corpus of its work.

This paper looks closely into the archive of the project to argue, on the one hand, that the self-directed modus operandi of the Fun Palace organization as conveyed through its grids proves resistant to the modern commodification of thought. For it challenges architectural design metaprescriptives related to authorship and finitude by means of the libidinal mobility of the Fun Palace agenda, one that constantly puts itself into play by way of pleasure and excess. Drawing on Roger Caillois’s taxonomy of games on the other hand, the cultural role of the Fun Palace grids is assessed in relation to what could be read as ‘vertigo’ haunting the Sixties social experience.

At the same time that flexibility was being constructed as the potential to rearrange, repurpose and even reclaim spaces within modernism, the 1960s and 70s saw the technical concretisation of a parallel conception of design as an open system, into a number of methods and technologies. Influenced by the linguistic and cognitive paradigms underlying the programming languages in which these strategies were being implemented, the intention of these systems was to produce architecture the same way one might derive spoken or written sentences from a set of grammatical rules. Some of the many examples of these concretisations include Christopher Alexander’s “pattern language” (1977) or the shape grammars proposed by George Stiny and James Gips in the 1960s, which were used to encode the individual styles of Andrea Palladio or Frank Lloyd Wright into flexible combinatorial design systems.

The majority of the historical record of this early digital architecture consists of texts written in assembly, FORTRAN, Lisp and other programming languages. These historical texts and the technical systems in which they were inserted still remain outside traditional historiographical methods. The present paper looks at how these forms of digital flexibility, variation and indeterminacy were linked to new forms of writing and literacy associated with the computer in the early 1970s. It looks in particular to the specific case of shape grammars and the programs, diagrams and formal descriptions used in their proposition. Shape grammars not only exemplify the application of linguistic models as a means to implement design as an open combinatorial system, but also embody a moment in architecture dominated by formalism, semiology and linguistics, leading, as Manfredo Tafuri would put it, to “a syntax of empty signs” within “a language that speaks only of itself.” (Tafuri 1974)

In recent years, interest in the role of women as designers or patrons of architecture in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland has continued to gather momentum, building on the pioneering research of Dana Arnold, Richard Hewlings and Lucy Worsley, among others. But a work of architecture is a corporate creation, dependent on a variety of intellectual and manual skills constituted within the distinct, albeit related, realms of design and construction. To date, the role of women in the making of architecture remains somewhat contested: while Elizabeth McKellar described the early modern building site in London as ‘overwhelmingly male’, Linda Clarke and Chris Wall later presented substantial evidence of women as operatives in many building crafts prior to the introduction of capitalist wage relations at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
In an attempt to clarify the role(s) of women on the building site, this paper will first consider the historical evidence: how do we reconcile the binding of girls to trades like bricklaying, carpentry and plastering, duly recorded in guild minutes and registers, with the limited evidence of any corresponding graduation to the roles of ‘mistresses’ of those trades? And to which aspects of building construction did women make a meaningful contribution, if any? Having interrogated the documentary sources, this paper will then focus on the careers of property developer Sarah Archdall and lime-burner Margaret Todderick: from different ends of the building (and social) spectrum in Georgian Dublin, their voices and concerns are uniquely recorded in the form of petitions made to the House of Commons of the Kingdom of Ireland. Taken together, these stories, from the margins of construction history, reveal a more complex picture of female creative and economic agency in the long eighteenth century.

Before 1834, the Palace of Westminster was a small urban enclave within the larger urban worlds of London and Westminster. In addition to its role as the home of both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, it provided lodgings for many families who worked in and around Parliament. The buildings of that urban enclave varied in date from the thirteenth century to the eighteenth century, and were constantly under repair or adaptation. Women were involved in creating the pre-1834 palace of Westminster, whether as suppliers of materials or in the adaptation of older buildings to meet new needs over the centuries. This paper examines the role of women in creating the appearance of Parliament’s buildings on the eve of a catastrophic fire in 1834, and considers the range and scope of women’s influence on a distinctive landmark complex over the centuries.
The collection of buildings that collectively made up the Palace of Westminster by 1834 allow a particularly wide view of women’s involvement in pre-modern building practices because of the regularity of alterations. While the medieval buildings were largely designed and built by men, women took part in the supply of materials to various construction projects within the palace. They had often worked alongside male family members and then replaced them on their deaths. This custom gives us a glimpse of the role women could play in pre-modern trade and building practices outside the formal trade guilds. Later, more detailed records kept by the Office of Works allow us to examine how women were able to influence particular projects within lodgings assigned to their families within the palace complex. Thus a range of women from a variety of social backgrounds, from the Speakers’ wives through to women from much more modest backgrounds, shaped Westminster.

If ephemeral architecture is the other half of modern architecture, it has nonetheless occasioned little interest from historians, particularly with respect to nineteenth-century France. Although it gained importance in the context of Napoleonic propaganda and the Napoleonic tradition, its status in the opinion of that time still remains contradictory; André Chastel once described the feasts of the Renaissance as the missing link between monuments of stone, but the situation was quite different in Paris following the French Revolution. Between the coronation of the Emperor in December 1804 and that of his nephew Napoleon III in May 1852, non-permanent arrangements for celebrating key political events constituted an alternative reality – splendid but imperfect – parallel to the main stream of built production. This duality was a key problem in Europe, at a time when the antique model remained preponderant even as liberal and capitalist society was developing.

The funeral car of Napoleon by Henri Labrouste, then still a young architect yet to erect a building of his own, echoed the famous funeral car of Alexander the Great, and marked a climax in the opposition between ephemerality and the will to inscribe a symbol for eternity. Widely commented in the professional press of its time, as well as in popular journals and newspapers, Victor Hugo himself described it as "a kind of golden mountain slowly moving... beyond the great white phantom-like statues". This paper, based on analysis of the funeral car’s architecture and of the setting planned for Paris on the occasion, will situate this moment in the context of political Parisian feasts of the first half of the nineteenth century. A reading of contemporary reactions and comments will underline, on the one hand, the contradiction between the Classical model and its quest for eternity, and, on the other, contemporary contingencies and opportunistic issues.

This paper examines the role of ephemeral public entertainment infrastructure as both contributor and responder to the censorship and sanitisation of urban life, through a focus on case studies from early nineteenth-century Berlin. In 1815 Schinkel designed the urban décor for the Homage ceremony to Friedrich Wilhelm III, King of Prussia. Though the Merseburg event was a closed royal affair, the ceremonial decorations included a grand public gesture: the illumination of the Schloss Merseburg, where the ceremony was to take place, against the night sky. Such events reflect Schinkel’s consummate ability to manufacture Stimmung, defined as ‘mood’, ‘atmosphere’ or ‘ambiance’. For Schinkel, an image or a display transmitting Stimmung could provoke a sense of spatial or temporal dislocation (Ortsversetzung), which in turn created in the viewer an emotive – if heavily manipulated – response. With the celebrations at Merseburg, Schinkel pulled such experiences of Ortsversetzung from the interior of the theatre even further into the public realm. The Merseburg celebrations notably coincided with the increased State policing of public life after the withdrawal of Napoleon’s troops from their occupation of Berlin, aided by the peace talks at the Congress of Vienna of 1814-15. The Prussian monarchy had been pressured by Austria at these negotiations to introduce a series of reactionary censorship and surveillance measures, designed to control expressions of individualism and German nationalism in its population. The practice of Ortsversetzung through temporary public entertainment infrastructure in early nineteenth-century Berlin thus contained a paradox: it responded to this state-imposed censorship of civic life by staging the illusion of escape through the provision of controlled spectacle in the city. Such temporary spectacles contributed to a collective civic identity, yet they were also part of an overriding sentiment of withdrawal from public life.

In 1791 the Venetian Republic placed 100 markers to define permanently the border of the Venice lagoon. Yet the boundaries of Venice and its lagoon are by their very nature unstable and subject to continuous negotiations. The whole operation revealed a paradox: how to define for eternity the boundary of 550 square kilometres of marshes and navigable waters that made the existence of the Republic possible? The positioning of these humble markers – made either in stone or bricks and ranging from 1 to 1.5 meters in height – proved inadequate to fulfil such an ambitious goal, and represented the swan song of a Republic that fell a few years later under Napoleon.

Today the markers that define the area of conterminazione lagunare – the area under the control of the Magistrato alle Acque (the Venetian Magistrate of the Waters) – have lost political relevance in national and international terms. Some have been removed, some have been relocated, and some have been brutally overpowered by contemporary infrastructures like bridges and train embankments. Yet a kind of "revenge" of the markers has been accomplished: the lagoon that the Venetian Republic considered and wanted to maintain eternal is today under serious threat, while the majority of the markers still survive and stand in a crucial position to read the contemporary phenomena that affect Venice. The ever-changing border between the lagoon, the mainland and the sea hosts projects – the expansion of the Tessera airport, San Giuliano Park, the cluster of hotels around Mestre station, the transformation of the brownfields of Porto Marghera, the Port and the mammoth cruise ships that cross the historic centre and the lagoon, the MOSE project mobile gates to fight the high tide – are crucial for understanding the possible future of a city that considered itself eternal but was inexorably discovered to be ephemeral.

This paper addresses the topic of ephemerality and monumentality via the study of public lettering: on the eighteenth-century capital’s monuments, parapets, walls and doors. It will problematise the relationship between written discourses circulating within the city, and by which its citizens communicated immediately with one another, and the material supports on which these were inscribed. It will compare the different modes of address - visual and oral, as well as written – by which the royal and municipal institutions of state sought to stabilize the rapidly changing spatial and temporal dimensions of the city, its sense of place. And it aims to suggest ways in which the temporal experience of urban text contributed to debates on urban beauty.

The ancient monuments of Athens were first placed at the center of the European architectural discourse in the mid-18th century, through the travels and publications of people like Julien-David Le Roy, and James Stuart. After the foundation of a modern Greek nation-state in the 1830s, these monuments became the objects of an equally systematic, but more local and nationally charged discourse of archaeology and preservation. However, before, during and after this process of institutionalization, the monuments of Athens were subject to the needs, practices and beliefs of the people that lived around them: The anonymous commonfolk of Athens who, from the late-Ottoman period until the first decades of the Greek nation-state, performed a range of different secular and religious practices with, around, on and inside these monuments. Ranging from extraction and reuse of antique fragments in new vernacular constructions (spoliation) to their appropriation on-site for religious purposes (veneration), these ephemeral and informal practices pose an important counterweight to the official treatment of such artifacts by archeological authorities or erudite audiences.
The aim of this paper is to examine some of these practices of spoliation and veneration of antiquities in 19th-century Athens, in order to demonstrate that (a) before state archaeology cleansed and stabilized the forms of these objects and imposed its own meaning and narrative on them, Greek antiquities were objects in material and conceptual flux through local, ephemeral practices; and (b) these ephemeral practices stemmed from a local system of beliefs and lore; a popular culture that projected meanings and claims projected onto the antiquities which were, at times, at odds with the national-romantic narrative that portrayed the modern population of Greece as the heirs of Classical antiquity.

Peter and Alison Smithson (1923-2003/ 1928-1993) met Lucio Costa (1902-1998) when they attended a conference organized by Architectural Design on Capital Cities (1958). The winners of the Berlin Hauptstadt competition (1954) were impressed enough with the planner of Brasilia (1957). They sent him an invitation to join the new CIAM (1959). Although this initiative did not prosper, when the couple won the commission for the British Embassy in Brasilia (1964), their agreement with the Ministry of Works designated Costa as consulting architect. Costa acted as mentor to the Smithsons; telling them what to see in their trips to Brazil provided unusual references for the Embassy design. The 'squashed crocodile" or "form riding the landscape" proposed by the Smithsons is explicitly related to their visit to the eighteenth-century Fazenda Babylonia. Ultimately, the project was cancelled (1968), but the North-South interpersonal relationship endured.

The analysis of archived and published material in England, the United States and Brazil suggests a lively conversation between the Smithsons and Costa on issues that did not cease to be topical and radical (i.e. fundamental) in the swinging sixties. One is the use of infrastructure and landscaping to generate significant urban form for a motorized mass society; indeed, the Smithsons and Costa collaborated again on planning ideas for flooded Florence (1967). Another is the use of vernacular, mechanical and natural sources to properly characterize modern celebratory buildings (i.e. monuments) at home and abroad, in both cases managing communication with different social groups. The Smithsons overdo Corbusian influence in Brazil and neglect that of the English picturesque, while now and then sounding like old imperialists. However, they honestly acknowledge the pioneering, exemplary nature for better or for worse of built Brazilian works vis-à-vis European efforts, belying later historiographical surveys.

Between 1971 and 1973, the trips of important East-German architects such as Gerhard Kosel and Roland Korn show the strong political will towards exporting GDR housing industrialization experiences to Chile. At the same time, the reception they had in CIMEC-CORFO and Universidad de Chile, as well as the invitation to take part in VIEXPO ’72 confirm this interest also had a stronghold in Chile. However, heavy industrialization strategies as the ones used in the GDR didn’t have much impact in the actual industrialization of housing construction in Chile, despite these attempts and the argumentation for it prevailing on both sides at the time.

The expertise brought to Chile by the GDR in the course of these events marks a critical station in a much larger and far more complex decentralized network of techno-political cooperation and exchange that was established between Chile and the GDR between 1971 and 1973. This network began to operate as part of a more general agreement regarding technological and scientific cooperation signed in 1971. It was eventually intensified and charged with content through ambitious individuals.

The political agenda regarding the right to housing was largely triggered by the fact that GDR had made this a constitutional requirement. Using the means of two public exhibitions in 1971 and 1972 the public was meant to be engaged in this topic.

At the same time, a bidirectional exchange of experts was established, trying to provide the Chilean side with the required expertise. This began with the idea of integrating actual technological artefacts that were no longer aiming at repeating the East-German approach to housing within the Chilean context but were rather aiming at an application of administrative knowledge to optimize planning and productivity.

In the words of Álvaro Siza Vieira, written in a letter addressed to Oriol Bohigas in 1976, the empathy, exchange and comradeship between the Portuguese and Spanish architects were crucial “to keep conscious the enthusiasm while waiting for a more favourable environment.” Coming from a long period of authoritarian political regimes, in those years both countries were building a new environment towards democracy, at the same time that the crisis of traditional conceptions of architecture was consolidating in the world.

Within a professional sphere that was looking for new theoretical and practical paths, those architects expanded their communication networks. Thus, it was reinforced the dynamic of exchange and encounter with the Latin-American architects, fundamentally based on a shared set of historical perceptions, political views and collective memories. In truth, these were years of “entusiasmos compartidos” (shared enthusiasms), as expressed in the title of Oriol Bohigas’ book of memories — one of the main protagonists and key agent in the promotion of an Iberian-Latin-American network of relationships in the architectural field since the 1960s.

The purpose of this paper is precisely to present and map the global panorama of contacts and exchanges between Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American architects and critics, during the period of Iberian transition to democracy. By looking at the interchanges published in the architecture journals of the both sides of the Atlantic and by analysing the numerous international meetings promoted in the scope of organizations such as, among others, the UIA — with Havana (1964), Buenos Aires (1969) and Madrid (1974) —, this paper aims to point out the main nodes of a possible network that, in this period, was particularly focused on the social and economic problems of the city and on the role of the architect as an active agent in the society.

In the 1960’s counterculture emerges within the openness of architectural culture to the large scale of the territory, the complexity of the global city, the interdisciplinarity of the built environment, and, to that extent, the social responsibility of architects.

Arising out of the European welfare security realm, these actions, experiences or after-effects summoned an intense interdisciplinarity between the world of technology and humanities, bringing sociology or anthropology to the centre of the discussion. This explosion opened the architectural discipline to the real world far beyond what had hitherto been the western beaux arts tradition. An unprecedented realism is confronted throughout the 1960’s. From that moment on, Latin America definitely becomes the vanguard of this new era.

The beginning of a new historical path could be detected in Latin American architectural culture, as it has been pointed out on “Latin American Architecture as a Historiographic Category” (Torrent, 2015). Writings and practices conducted in Latin-America focused on the search for a new ethic in architecture, whose aim was to encompass an original link between tradition and innovation. This vision goes beyond the buildings’ science construction and envisions a wider cultural scope to the foundation of an ethical architectural approach to the real-world problems.

By relating the spatial and social nature of the Peruvian Previ process (Turner coord.), this paper tries to identify the overlaps between Social Housing response and the thoughts on urban design considering the Metabolist Fumihiko Maki’s “theory on collective form” (1964) and his contribution on the outcomes of Previ – the only Metabolist idea actually built. It argues that Latin American revolution and Japanese Metabolist ideology during the 60’s embodies a developing radical modernity, as well as a process of social restructure to fundamental human rights redefining collectivity. Finally it considers the impact on the Portuguese SAAL (1974-1976) experience questioning Siza’s Bouça neighbourhood in Oporto.

This presentation will discuss the question how the activities of Berlin’s construction groups contributed to the urban commons—that is, to which extent they contributed to the creation of urban resources beyond the state and the market. These construction groups—small associations of middle-class investors who built flatted multi-storey buildings for owner occupation—exemplify the contradictions of non-commercial goals in a capitalist housing economy. On the one hand, construction group members resisted top-down governance and the commodification of collective life. On the other hand they were comparatively privileged individuals with a high level of education and ample financial resources. I argue that Berlin’s construction groups contributed to the “urban commons” by promoting an idea of the city as a place of heterogeneous culture, intellectual inspiration and personal freedom. They also created architectural spaces for neighbourly encounters and non-traditional work-life arrangements. Their ideas reflected an early-twentieth-century concept of the metropolis as a productive clash of differences and creative innovation. I also argue that these contributions were limited. Construction groups only made up a tiny fraction of Berlin’s population of the time, and their activities were largely confined to the window of opportunities during the first decade of the twenty-first century, when the local real estate market was comparatively relaxed. Most importantly, construction groups neither challenged hegemonic structures nor the system of capitalist housing provision.

This proposal takes the bet to consider an immaterial value – that is, hospitality – as a concrete catalyser of change in the urban agency. A much-debated concept in the past few years, hospitality shifted from a philosophical understanding to an activist use. Rekindled in the context of the migrants’ crisis, however it embraces a larger scope, aspiring to recreate common bonding. Recently, the French association PEROU (Pôle d’exploration des ressources urbaines) approached UNESCO for listing hospitality as an Intangible Cultural Heritage. This paper will examine how PEROU, a hyper-collective dealing with a series of collectives – architectural collectives, neighbourhood collectives, militant associations, etc. –, turned hospitality into a tool of urban change. Created in 2012 and directed by a landscape designer (who calls himself a “gardener”) and a political scientist, the association played an important role in spreading the use of spatial common resources, aiming to host precarious populations and/ or ameliorate their habitat and societal connections. While taking in account all the architectural interventions coordinated by PEROU, I will focus on the projects which consider the idea of hospitality at the core of their approach. On the one hand, I will examine the agenda and strategies at stake in those projects, and, on the other hand, I will reflect on how PEROU shaped their understanding of hospitality all along their actions. Hence, I will analyse the scale of their interventions, from the urban dimension (the Calais Jungle, Paris d’Hospitalité, etc.) to micro actions (such as the “Embassy” in Ris-Orangis, near Paris). But I will also question how PEROU’s ephemeral actions – particularly declaring Jardins d’Eole in Paris as a place of hospitality – might operate as urban changers. In my attempt to differently situate the on-going urban mutations, I am eventually interested to grasp the larger picture of a paradigm at work, that is, transgression as a manner of breaking the existing norms and reimagining the world.

At the time of its completion in 1982, the model settlement Documenta Urbana in Kassel was widely dismissed as a failure in addressing the then pressing challenges of urban renewal. Today, almost forty years later, it is slowly being re-evaluated and seen differently: as a pioneering project of small-scale collective housing and a critical reaction to mass housing complexes of the immediate post-war era. Built in connection with the seventh edition of Kassel’s art festival Documenta, the settlement can be seen as a prominent example for the rediscovery of the commons in 1980s West Germany. It was designed by a diverse group of architects known for their community-minded approach, among them Herman Hertzberger, Otto Steidle, Roland Rainer, Hinrich and Inken Baller, Johannes Olivegren and the landscape architect Raimund Herms. As a group they rejected the idea of holding a competition and decided to work collectively instead, aiming to let collective action inform their architecture. Through its developer, the social housing cooperative Neue Heimat, Documenta Urbana stands – albeit somewhat awkwardly – within a tradition of satellite towns built in many West German cities since the end of World War II. When the demand for housing changed markedly in the late 1970s, Neue Heimat struggled to adapt to the saturated market. Documenta Urbana made use of this unique moment by challenging Neue Heimat’s top-down way of working. This paper investigates how in turning away from the idea of mass housing, Documenta Urbana presented a twofold critique: firstly, by aiming to re-introduce the idea of the commons into the architectural discourse; secondly by enacting an architectural statement, exploring new typological ideas of small-scale collective housing and new collaborative design processes. In approaching these topics, the paper looks closely at the built settlement itself and at how it broadens the idea of what an architectural project can be, from an individual invention to a collective enterprise that accommodates and gives impulses for the inhabitants’ future actions.

In 1955, the Greek architect Constantinos A. Doxiadis described what lay beyond the eastern flood dyke of Baghdad in anarchistic terms, “This reminds [me] of an army without leaders, of a society without classes, without order, without pattern.” This neighbourhood—ʿĀṣima—was the largest migrant settlement in Baghdad at the time and functioned as an “urban commons” that would be celebrated by Colin Ward, but was targeted for erasure by the Iraqi state who had hired Doxiadis to design a national housing program. This paper examines this process through the architectural and urban professions that encountered rural cultivators who had been forced into debt bondage and eventually dispossessed from their lands leading them to migrate to Baghdad between 1920 and 1965. This mass migration resulted in uprooted peasants importing customary architectural forms, like the ṣarīfa, from the Shatt al-Arab marshes into the material conditions of the capital. The ṣarīfa denoted an antediluvian domicile of prefabricated reed mats laid over a barrel-vault shaped roof supported by a ridge pole and a wooden frame—a “primitive hut”—which was both transient and intransigent in the face of material progress. The resulting neighbourhoods arose on state and private lands, culminating in an architecture of dispossession. This paper demonstrates how ʿĀṣima functioned as a “space of exception” where the simulated architectures of state-building, macroeconomic theory, and architectural design were allowed to disintegrate. Specifically, it was produced by “regimes of dispossession” that coercively redistributed resources like land, water, housing, and debt financing from dispossessed groups to other classes (Levien 2018). And, yet, these very migrants would participate in overthrowing the Hashemite regime that sought to remake their life-worlds during the 1958 anti-monarchic revolution, only to be dispossessed once more by the new regime they brought into power.

Concrete frame manufacturing campuses of early twentieth-century Detroit were adjacent to the public domain, like the fields of single-family dwellings that surrounded them. The tartan pattern of Detroit’s neighbourhoods—20-foot fronts and 34-foot lots—echoed in the concrete factory (20-32-foot bays), a correlation that gave the city mat-like regularity. For the first half of the twentieth century, factory campuses were integrated into, and formed a crucial part of Detroit, Hamtramck and Highland Park. Pedestrian access was essential; the “Motor City” was a worker’s city. Architecturally, a ubiquitous structural system simultaneously held up the building and subdivided it into equal increments; large windows let in natural light, supplemented by top lights and clerestories. These expandable buildings were designed to maximize worker productivity through spatial design, the architectural version of welfare capitalism. They also provided sites where labour unions finally conquered the US auto industry. Protests surrounded them, invaded them, and occupied them. The walk-outs of 1933 were followed by a crucial sit-down strike in 1936 in Flint. The concrete factories saw the emergence of collective action in the auto industry after years of simmering labour unrest and suppression. Still-intact daylight factories—like the Murray Body Corporation—have become informal dwellings and urban collectives. They stand in sharp contrast to the windowless industrial plants that replaced them after WWII, conglomerates surrounded by massive earthen berms and security fencing, private enclaves in the city. This paper seeks to theorize a history of collective action and collective architecture in the workplaces of industry. Part of a multi-year project dedicated to “mapping the concrete frame” and “prototyping obsolescence” in the daylight factory, its outputs include a dynamic “Nolli map” of Detroit’s industrial campuses, tracking change over time to show its impact on city dwellers.

Founded in 1495 in Lisbon, the All Saints Royal Hospital was the first public hospital built in Portugal by royal initiative. Created in the context of the assistance reform carried out by King D. João II, it resulted from the merger of small, medieval hospitals, creating a more efficient institution in terms of hospital assistance and administrative functioning. The building, inspired by the Renaissance in terms of architecture, marked the city design, the public spaces and circulation, having become a symbol of royal power and urbanism until the beginning of its demolition in 1775. In terms of care, it was a meeting point for different forms of knowledge, from the European space and from the newly visited Asian, African and American continents. The understanding of the building, its characterization as a health space, including public health aspects, its social location and the appreciation of the role it played as a reference construction in the built heritage of the city of Lisbon and as an ordering element of the urban space, constitute the main objectives of the research projects “All-Saints Royal Hospital” (a partnership between the Lisbon City Council and the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of Universidade Nova de Lisboa) and “Hospitalis – Hospital Architecture in Portugal in the Beginning of Modernity: Identification, Characteristics and Context” (PTDC/ARTHIS/30808/2017 – European Institute of Cultural Sciences Padre Manuel Antunes and ARTIS, School of Arts and Humanities, Universidade de Lisboa). Parting from the on-going research in both projects, in this communication, we intend to highlight the importance of the All-Saints Royal Hospital, the most relevant health institution in Lisbon and an innovative institution testing a new architectural model, which will play a major role in the urban design of modern Lisbon from the 16th century renovation to the 18th century reconstruction. Having been referred by countless individuals who visited the capital, the hospital stood out for its grandiosity and visual impact, and at the same time for its functional architecture, with particular characteristics and needs, considered since the first moment of its planning and design, while serving the city and promoting health. Thus, our proposal propose an innovative approach by discuss the characteristics of health and public health in Lisbon of the Early Modern Age, from the analysis of this hospital, its architecture and the building as an element of urbanism in the city. We will also consider institutions such as Lazaretto and Health House, which cooperated with it.

Contrary to scholarly views that once emphasized the squalor and disorder of pre-modern European towns and cities, historians have recently shown that, by as early as the fifteenth century, many cities boasted sanitation infrastructures and interconnected networks of institutions devoted to the management of health and hygiene. Absent from this new turn to the history of public health are histories of hospitals devoted solely to the care of the mentally ill that began to proliferate throughout Europe from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Histories of these institutions tend to remain tethered to teleological narratives that cast them as harbingers of greater humanity and progress or greater oppression and social control. They are neither. Using the rich records of Santa Dorotea, Florence’s first mental hospital, I argue that these hospitals should be analysed in the context of an early modern region’s constantly changing public health goals and challenges in concert with the institutional and architectural infrastructures created to meet them. Established in the wake of one of Grand Ducal Tuscany’s worst confrontations with bubonic plague (1630), Santa Dorotea’s founders were profoundly influenced by the new culture of public health that had emerged to create a healthy city resistant to disease. They explicitly aimed to create a medical and Christian therapeutic space that would help keep streets and households clean and orderly while offering a “salutogenic” space for the severely mentally ill. They were attentive to air quality, light, and climate control—environmental factors that figured large in contemporary medical theory—but also to the healing effects of proper diet and Christian devotion. Far from being stand-alone institutions, the founders of early modern mental hospitals like Santa Dorotea saw them as integral parts of a larger public health infrastructure that served to promote and maintain a city's health.

Searching in Germany for early case studies of a salutogenetic architecture, one finds striking examples in the 19th century, when hygienic and social reform approaches anticipated the achievements of modernism during the Weimar Republic. Thus, well-known cases such as the Karlsruhe Dammerstock-Siedlung (1929) by Walter Gropius with its sun-oriented row houses could be interpreted as an adaption of the "Sonnenbaulehre" (an early “Theory of Solar Architecture”) postulated around 1800 by the physician Bernhard Christoph Faust. Yet the example of Karlsruhe shows that already since the early 18th century the built environment -from the symbolic to the social level- had been shaped taking into consideration health and basic services. 1715 the decision was made to move in the symbolic centre of the court and its entire household from the historically grown, medieval Durlach to a barely six kilometres detached site determined by the environmental conditions of the forest and the floodplain. The plan of an ideal city based on the geometric scheme of circle and rays expressed the will to also improve fundamentally the living conditions of the citizens. Health-enhancing architectures and infrastructures played a central role and stood in a tension between centrality and decentralization, between control and self-determination. The focal point of the new urban complex was still the castle with its elaborate garden facing the city, including several water features. But in addition, the cityscape of Karlsruhe was shaped by model stone houses newly developed and arranged for citizens. They provided sufficient light and air for better home hygiene and enabled self-sufficiency through kitchen gardens and private groundwater wells. The first radial city plans show a clear arrangement of the parcels of land. With increasing population and expansion of buildings and infrastructure (housing, transport, market, wastewater, etc.), the building plots and gardens changed: they turned into polygonal, kinked and residual plots. Sophisticated designs were necessary to adhere to the sun symbolism of the original fan beam plan.

This paper examines the role of architectural features of lazzaretti in promoting a salubrious quarantined environment and in preventing the spreading of the plague. From the sixteenth century onwards, lazzaretti were established as a long-lasting protection against plague at borders and important trading centres of the Italian peninsula and the Mediterranean region. Merchants, travellers, and goods coming from infected or suspected lands were quarantined and disinfected inside lazzaretti. Each lazzaretto and the corresponding Health Office constituted a fundamental nodal point of a system designed to preserve not only the health of the city, region or state but also of Europe as a whole. Indeed, quarantine and its procedures were based on shared information concerning the state of health in foreign lands. Letters, bans, protocols and procedures were shared between Health Offices of different states in order to have a consistent system in the Mediterranean area. Architectural models too were directly and indirectly shared. Even though the institution hosted mainly healthy subjects and typically operated in times beyond plague outbreaks, the architecture was designed to provide a healthy and clean space. The aim was to avoid any plague outbreak potentially brought by the continuous trade interaction with infected and suspected regions. From the choice of the location, the presence of winds and natural sources of water, to specific architectural features, lazzaretti and their procedures stressed the importance of the quality of the built environment. By analysing different lazzaretti in the Mediterranean region and their administrative documentation, this paper argues that their architecture reflects early modern notions of contagion and plague. These ideas paid great attention to the senses and to cleanliness which are then in turn echoed in the architecture and in protocols of lazzaretti.

Dr Bernard Mandeville, provocative author of Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits (1714) argued vice was a necessary condition for economic prosperity, and philanthropy concealed self-interest. ‘Pride and Vanity have built more Hospitals than all the Virtues together’, he asserted. Yet, in 1844, Dr Thomas Laycock’s epidemiological report on the city’s health correlated low-lying areas, poverty and reduced lifespan, writing: ‘Wealth influences health, the two in inverse ratio to each other’. This was not news: in 1727, York resident and King’s physician Clifton Winteringham, documented recurrent disease across the city in Commentarius nosologicus, morbos epidemicos. Though Mead’s Discourse Concerning Pestilential Contagion (1720), was reinforced by Lind’s Essay on the Most Effectual Means of Preserving the Health of Seamen (1757) concerning disease transmission, the plight of poor people remained unaffected. Locating architectural projects in York’s epidemiological history, this paper confirms Mandeville’s assertion, arguing good health remained a luxury. Rather than products of disinterested civic virtue, some schemes masked political motives: the County Hospital’s subscription stitched benefactors into the patronage network; the Asylum leveraged philanthropic building for social capital. The riverside promenade, racecourse and bathhouses were for paying customers; that piped water was for the rich; in 1844 poor people still drank contaminated river water.

On March 2nd 1269 Philip from Pistoia, archbishop of Ravenna, in presence of a large group of people, ordered the commune of Ravenna to assign a substantial urban area for the construction of the church, the convent and the cemetery of S. Domenico. The document describes the properties to be expropriated, in particular the church of S. Maria in Gallope, a turreted palatial complex whose construction dated back to the Byzantine times (VI century), and a number of houses. The centrality of the place, previously linked to the exarchal residence, thus assumed a new character oriented towards the settlement of the Dominicans in Ravenna.

Subsequently, on October 19th of the same year, the municipal council ordered the extimatio of the area, and in a meeting discussed the construction modalities, including the property’s boundaries detailed description, the construction of a new road and the project’s financial details.

The interest for this case study relies on the double instrumentum, archiepiscopal and municipal, testifying a concordia inter clericos and laycos that, yet written in the communal statute for over 50 years, assumed here a specific programmatic character. The reconstruction of the pre-existing and subsequent topography of the site, based on the emphyteutic lease documents (V-XIII cent.), superimposed on the rectified redesign of the Gregorian cadastre, allowed an in-depth study of the design models of the locus fratrum predicatorum in Ravenna, and through the comparison with other coeval examples, the individuation of the typical formation process of the western conventual building.

Late Gothic Friary architecture represents a flourishing in Ireland and a certain group of more remote monasteries beyond the River Shannon in Connacht of Franciscan and Dominican Orders demonstrate the coming of age of Gothic design. The ‘pre-Reformation’ period 1400- 1600, was one of change which characterises shifts in architectural process and monasteries of Connacht are viewed here as a set, demonstrating the nature of cultural change. This paper examines certain premises in the architecture of the Friary regarding the nature of Gothic as an international style, as it is manifest in Ireland. It is proposed here that the spatial arrangement and change in function in the mendicant monastery required alterations in the form of the building type, to adapt to site restrictions of city living. Two distinctive aspects of the Orders of Friars were the commitment to a mendicant life, and the mission to reach salvation to the poor. The friars were members of the international community in which mobility of individuals was common. General characteristics shared by friaries: the church building developed from a two-cell structure to a broad nave, to accommodate large numbers of people attracted by the friars’ reputation as preachers. The chancel containing the choir and high altar remained relatively small. Friaries at Galway-city, Kilconnell, Claregalway, Moyne, Rosserk and Roserrilly are examined with a focus on Quin Abbey. Quin is a valuable control, situated on fortifications walls of an earlier castle, which provided limits for the new building. Rebuilt in 1433, it was necessary to prioritise each element within a confined space according to location and function. The cloister is the central feature to the north of the church, itself a narrow, nave-chancel type with a projecting transept. This gives us a 15th century view of architectural monastic blue-print as applied to the Orders in Ireland.

Mendicant convents changed substantially throughout time. In Portugal, like in other European countries, the friars first establish themselves in small existing churches, but a few years later they started to build their own churches and conventual spaces, which they successively enlarge and reformulate over the centuries. The continuous enlargement of the conventual buildings was motivated by the growth of both the friars’ communities and their followers and it was made possible by the support of different donors. This process of continuous expanding affected not only the buildings (church and conventual spaces) but also their precincts and had an important impact on the urban space. Within the process of enlargement of the churches, the friars also build porches in the main and/or in the lateral facades to create space for the increasing number of people that attended their religious services. But besides this, the mendicant porches also served to carry out several political and social activities, thus becoming spaces of great importance in the cities. In the following centuries, these medieval porches were destroyed, not only by the architectonic and artistic transformations that the mendicant buildings suffered between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries but also by the restoration interventions that took place in the early twentieth century. Therefore, today there is no material evidence of the friars’ porches, but the several references to these spaces founded in the documentary and cartography sources allow us to virtual reconstitute some of them, offering a renewed perspective on the architecture of the mendicant orders and their relationship with the city.

In 1226, in Sandomierz, which was then the second (after Cracow) most important town in Lesser Poland, a Dominican convent was founded. Soon, the friars erected a church of St James – absolutely innovative at the time (made of bricks, with rich ceramic decorations and an elongated choir). The Tartar invasion of 1259 put an end to the functioning of the settlement surrounding the church and in 1286 the city was moved to a new place. Prince Leszek II the Black gave the Dominicans safe grounds within the city walls for a new cloister but the friars, instead of moving there, added a defensive tower to their church of St James. A new complex was built only in the second half of the 14th century and its church (of St Mary Magdalene) obtained rather conservative, non-mendicant forms, referring to the local collegiate church. For the following decades, an unusual situation of two Dominican convents functioning in parallel in a relatively small city could be observed. The goal of the paper is to analyse how the changing spiritual and social rules and economic conditions influenced the functioning of both convents within urban structures between 1200 and 1500. In the first years of their presence in Sandomierz, the friars had support from princes and bishops, and the church of St James was a place of two significant cults – of St Hiacynth and of 49 martyrs. That probably influenced their decision to remain in the location outside the city walls, threatened by further attacks. At St Mary Magdalene, on the other hand, the Dominicans had to face the initial distrust of the citizens, who feared losing valuable grounds (already in the 15th century though, they became the main benefactors of the convent). Moreover, it seems that the differences between the old monastery favoured by the elites and its “bourgeois” competitor were reflected in the architecture of both convents.

This paper explores significant transformations in the architectural presence of Observant mendicants from the late medieval to the early modern period, taking as its case study the Observant Franciscan province Brescia. The earliest (Conventual) Franciscan foundation in Brescia was by St Francis in 1220. In 1422, St Bernardine of Siena initiated the first Observant Franciscan establishment, Sant’Apollonio, which grew to include several Observant houses outside the city’s walls during the late medieval period. These were all damaged during the sack of Brescia in 1512 and later demolished in the 1516 Spianata, when all structures outside the gates were razed (improving military defensibility). A new Observant foundation, San Giuseppe, was then built right at the heart of Brescia from 1519–80. Already before the Spianata was announced in 1515, however, the Observants were preparing this move. Therefore, I first analyse the possible ideological (apart from practical) motivations for this move to the centre, considering for example pastoral incentives and rivalry with the centrally located Franciscan Conventuals. I then consider how these motivations for centrality are expressed by the features of the convent and church of San Giuseppe itself. Highly relevant in this respect is a cycle of mural paintings in the second cloister which offers views on all the Observant convents in the province of Brescia. As I argue, these architectural vistas constitute the culmination of a decade’s long process that promotes the Observant Franciscan architectural presence of this province, at the Brescian Observant headquarters and in the city centre. These frescoes can be interpreted in the light of the conflictual separation from the Milan Observance in 1472 and Venetian geopolitical policies. Moreover, they also communicate a fascinating dialogue between peripheral and centralized architectural presence that can contribute new insights to more generalized tendencies in Observant housing at the time.

The new Kuwait City, a leader in a now familiar tabula rasa approach to urban planning among the Arab Gulf States, was built over the old town in 1951. Such transformations gained popularity in the second half of the twentieth century with the escalation of the oil economy that led to the building of new cities on existing sites in the Arabian desert, including cities located in present-day Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Bahrain. When he accepted the post for Chief Engineer in charge of the Department of Public Works at Kuwait Municipality, the Palestinian-born American-planner Saba George Shiber documented the first Arab oil boom in Kuwait City, criticized the contemporary urban scene across the Arab world, and provided guidelines on how these “new” Arab cities should be constructed. Although he died early in his career (1968) before he could witness the results of his groundwork, his preliminary plans and publications influenced the actual plan for Kuwait City specifically and the state as a whole as well as the rest of the Gulf States.
While greatly influenced by the American practices and theories of planning-architecture, Shiber also guided American practices that were building in the Arabian Desert for the first time. His twelve years of experience designing, building, and reviewing the urban scene in the Arab world endorsed the gradual translation of the universal model of urban-architecture into new architectural vocabularies that were compatible for the desert climate and environment and reflective of the Arab urban heritage. When prominent American design and construction firms, such as The Architects’ Collaborative (TAC) had the opportunity to build in the Arabian Peninsula from the 1960s through to the 1990s, they used his study as a reference. These firm’s prior knowledge, design, and construction technologies were not compatible with the new region and climate. Therefore, newfound on-site expertise initiated major design and construction innovations applicable to large-scale buildings and urban planning. This paper traces Shiber’s influence on TAC and other international practices in the Arabian Peninsula during the first and second oil construction booms and also highlights Shiber’s original translation of the concept of collaborative design.

Interactions between European experts and Turkish dignitaries largely influenced modern Turkish architecture, particularly in the first half of the 20th century. In recent decades, scholars have widely acknowledged the exchanges between the German-speaking world and Turkey. Building on the existing research, this study highlights the contribution of Dutch architect Dudok to Turkish architecture. The focus of the paper is contrary to the conventional modernist view, and instead shifts the emphasis on the perspective of a port city. Dudok's unrealized project for Konak Square is not only insightful for modern architecture but also provides an invaluable take on designing port cities.
The shift in the perception of space and definition of place in port cities is a direct consequence of global history. After the foundation of the Republic of Turkey, the waterfronts of Izmir became primary sites for the application of the modern planning ideas. However, the question of how to build in port cities after the fall of cosmopolitanism remained overlooked during the 20th century. Instead, how to build a modern country was the main focus of the government. The top-down modernization failed to understand Izmir and its changing dynamics. This process resulted in the rapid transformation of Izmir’s waterfronts as a site for housing development. This experience stands as a testimony for the importance of reading port cities from a holistic perspective.
In response to the complex dynamics of Izmir, Dudok's project for Konak square is used to understand the design process of a port city. In conclusion, this paper points out that Dudok's attempt is a crucial reminder that the waterfront is a Janus-faced area. Understanding the post-cosmopolitan era highlights the characteristics of Izmir’s waterfront. It suggests that decision-makers and designers must equally consider the perception of port cities both from the land and sea. Dudok’s solution for Izmir in the mid 20th century also shines a light on how to design in port cities today.

By 1951 Israeli modernizers had at their disposal 93 percent of the nation-state territory, and about 700,000 Jewish migrants they had to settle after deporting a similar number of Palestinians during the 1948 civil war. The ensuing population dispersal task was assigned to the nascent state Planning Division that has drawn significant scholarly attention. But apparently, studies of its seminal Israeli masterplan render a partial perception of the Zionist settlement project. These studies fail to address the competing agendas of various agencies that controlled major infrastructures above and below ground.
This paper questions the role of the National Water Carrier (NWC, est. 1952-1964) and its largely invisible infrastructure in the mechanism of Zionist settlement. New archival materials and STS (Science, Technology, Society) methodologies assist in revealing the formative tension between an urban and a rural coalition, and between two methods of settlement—one dispersing population in a hierarchical order, the other occupying the land by means of a comprehensive agricultural spread. The first successful yet tense convergence of these agencies was in the flagship settlement of the Lachish region (est. 1954- 1955). This was also a prime destination for the NWC that carried water from the green north to the southern desert in the order ‘to make the desert bloom.’
In the mid-1950s these coalitions implemented two spatial networks in Lachish. The centralized network of the Planning Division devised a hierarchical settlement scheme around urban centres that were placed on the main traffic arteries. The economic logic of this scheme ensured efficient circulation of agricultural products in the area. By contrast, the hydraulic network of the agriculture division followed the needs of mass irrigation. This network, which was promoted by Zionist agencies that predated the state, linked scattered agricultural units into semi-autonomous spatial and statutory entities. This system prioritized a total-area development that undermined the hierarchical regional layout of state planners.

This paper describes the practice of a non-profit development collective based in Kutch, India and their work with indigenous communities in the wake of the 2001 Gujarat Earthquake. Examining the emergence of three settlements – Hodka, the home of a semi-nomadic indigenous community of craftspeople, Junawada, a longstanding settlement of pastoralists and Sadar Nagar, a relocation settlement of peoples from central Bhuj, Kutch – as they developed in the aftermath of the earthquake and over the following decade, this paper maps the relationship between indigenous building practices, the professional knowledge of third sector development agencies and the broader socio-political context. This paper describes how architectural languages and spatial forms common to the communities were articulated by a synthesis of informal and formal architectural and building practices in the context of emergency redevelopment strategies, and how these practices were moulded over time towards normative indigenous ways of being urban. It argues that in so doing, design practitioners invited the development of spaces of resistance, in which communities could begin to re-articulate situated and individual visions of communal life which resisted hegemonic expressions of modernity in favour of existing hybrid modernities common to the communities. Likewise, it argues that by making an opening for professional knowledge in indigenous life, communities gained for themselves access to institutional power, professional systems and resources otherwise denied them through normative development models. This reciprocity is legible in the urban and architectural fabric. As such, this paper suggests, what is visible in the redevelopment of the three Kutchi settlements are common spaces that serve competing visions of urbanity and citizenship. These new spaces derived from synergies that emerged through the active co-production of architectural, urban and spatial form by lay and professional people concerned with the formation of a viable indigenous urbanism for the twenty-first century.

In Rome, during the first decades of the Eighteenth century, ephemeral sceneries designed for ceremonies that took place about every month often included a sculptural group on background architecture, overhanging a natural element. It is worth noting that a significant representation of the nature was linked with a building illustration, and that finally the nature itself buried this representation. Indeed, just few hours after that those sceneries had been unveiled in a public place, in the middle of the night, there were spectacularly burned by pyrotechnical effects. The cooperation of so many trades such as architects, sculptors, pyrotechnists, or even masons to create an event with such a short life time amplifies the paradox.
Despite the engravings, it is difficult to apprehend those constructions which, often attached to a façade, were taller than the buildings in the cramped squares they occupied, and spanned almost the entire width of this space. Those ephemeral sceneries did modify temporarily the place. Moreover, some permanent architectures were modified to welcome those ephemerals like that of the Palazzo Colonna, support of Chinea’s sceneries. Those settings were finally potential models for permanent and emblematic projects, like that one of the Fontana di Trevi. Similarly to the ephemeral sceneries, this fountain is attached to a façade, in front of which there is a carved group overhanging a rocky mass, all immersing a place so narrow. The impact of those ephemeral buildings on the permanent architecture lead to the concept of a “monumentalisation” of the ephemeral.
Finally, the effects of the ephemeral sceneries on the sense, creating this je ne sais quoi that characterize the indefinable nature, is representative of practices of the age of reason. It is about to focus on the temporality of this event too, also characteristic of the Enlightenment experience. The study of these sceneries will allow approaching the notions of space and time through the relationship nature/culture at the dawn of the Enlightenment in the pontifical state.

1814 marked the threshold of a new era in the history of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. Following the twilight of Napoleonic France, His Majesty Victor Emmanuel I of Savoy (1802–1821) triumphantly entered Turin on 20 May and the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815) restored Sabaudian sovereignty over the mainland domains of the Kingdom. A drawing conserved in the Archivio Storico della Città di Torino depicts the neglected proposal for an ephemeral, domed Neo-Medieval structure on a high podium, designed for the urban celebrations organised in 1834 by the civic administration in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the return of the King. A temporary structure was indeed built as the centrepiece of the pyrotechnic show (21 May) and horse races (22 and 29 May) put on in Piazza San Secondo as part of the festive initiatives (17–29 May). Yet, the realised version, described by the Gazzetta Piemontese as a ‘Temple of circular shape, in the Ionic order,’ was distant from the Neo-Medieval iconography of the drawing to take refuge, instead, in deep-seated Neo-Classical imagery. Through the case of the unrealised Neo-Medieval project, this paper reveals the unexpected role of medievalist ephemerality in challenging the dominant classicist hegemony in Modern Italy. Countering the biases that read Italian revivalist architecture as an exercise in taste, it insists that Medievalism and Neo-Medieval architecture mirrored a calibrated political strategy against the backdrop of the Restoration and that medievalist ephemerality held a special place in communicating political notions to a wide audience

This paper aims to describe a hotel garden as a contact zone where Oriental and Western cultures and tastes encountered. The paper draws upon a garden in Joseon Hotel in Seoul, Korea, that was constructed during the Japanese colonial era, the early twentieth century. By analysing drawings, maps, photos and literary works about the hotel garden, this paper examines how the garden played a role in forming the images and introducing the concepts of Joseon to Westerns. Vice versa, the West was similarly introduced to Koreans.
When colonisation of Korea began in 1910, the Japanese Bureau of Railway established not only train stations but also hotels to promote tourism and railway networks. Joseon Hotel is one of the hotels built by the Japanese Railway; its planning was a national and colonial project to form a base for the Eurasia railway network and a location for the Joseon Industrial Exhibition of 1915, thereby promoting a meeting place for Korea and the world.
The hotel garden is arranged in two disparate areas: a part of a former Korean altar built in 1897 to serve as a site for the performance of the rites of heaven, and a rose garden newly designed in 1914. Structures remaining from the former altar such as a temple, gate and animal sculptures transformed historic icons into aesthetic objects without historicity and delivered an Oriental taste of Korea to Western travellers. The garden, meanwhile, introduced the Occident and exotic cultures through different roses from Belgium, a fountain, a tennis court and an orangery with palm trees, which were unfamiliar to Koreans.
Located at the forefront of a colonial capital where the movement of peoples and commodities occurred, the Joseon Hotel garden functioned as a place for transculturation, the introduction of plants and objects without ecological and social contexts.

The World’s Theatre (Teatro del Mondo) was a floating building designed by Italian architect Aldo Rossi for the opening of the Venice Architectural Biennial of 1980. It was an ephemeral structure at the borderline of art and architecture and one of Rossi’s most eloquent examples of architettura parlante exemplifying his use of archetypes and symbolic culture to evoke the genius loci through local mythology and elements of collective memory. Rossi’s World Theatre paved the way for a particular approach to postmodern architectural production that defined the cultural landscape of the 1980s, and its enigmatic display was almost a prediction of the onset of the post-Cold War era’s ‘new world order.’ The essay proposed herein centres on the investigation of the political meaning of the ‘World Theatre’ in reference to the 1980s’ Venetian Biennial of Architecture on Postmodernism and to texts by Rossi’s contemporaries, Manlio Brusatin, Francesco Dal Co, Daniel Libeskind, Paolo Portoghesi, Vittorio Savi, and Manfredo Tafuri. It also proposes to explain Rossi’s understanding of the notion of Genius Loci and his reinterpretation of the technique of Architecture Parlante, intended as the architectural tradition used by architects of the enlightenment to respond to emotional inner states through the application of conventional forms and images, and to research the sensation of body-movement, disembodied forms of abstraction, and mental states of Einstein’s geometry of space-time as a form of architectural experience. In this context, Rossi’s project presents itself as an expression of the late twentieth century architects’ return to the parlante tradition through a renewed interest in semiotics, ultimately reinterpreted in terms of the meaning of, in Jean La Marche’s words, ‘architectural object[s] […as] signs of life, of the collective, of the present, and of the timeless.’

This paper examines the reconstruction of North Korean cities, specifically Pyongyang and Hamhung, after their almost complete destruction in the Korean War of 1950-53. As one of the first violent conflicts of the Cold-War Era, it entailed massive destruction and the loss of around two million lives on both sides, occasioning a wave of solidarity from many “fraternal” socialist states that got involved in the reconstruction of the North. Countries like Romania, Albania, and Hungary sent assistance in material; numerous Chinese soldiers joined the workforce; while the Soviet Union and the GDR provided economic, technological aid, training and expertise. Most of the country’s recovery relied on the international assistance, including COMECON aid, trade relations and loans.

The planning of North Korean cities was based on European models for overcoming traditional and colonial urban structures, while its architecture adopted a simplified “Koreanized” version of Socialist Realism. The plan of the new Pyongyang was developed by Kim Jong Hui, a Soviet trained architect, the central area of the city was reconstructed with help pf Chinese workers, material and machinery, while the city of Hamhung was planned and rebuilt by the Deutsche Arbeitsgruppe (DAG) between 1955 and 1962. Due to the diversity of the organizations involved and their relations with North Korean partners, the work efficiency and the final results had different results and considerations. The DAG was autonomous, as an heir of the pre-war workgroups for planning and construction that worked on rebuilding almost the entire city, including state institutions, housing and production plants, and therefore it was able to manage its budget and production schedule independently. On the other hand, Korean architects trained in USSR, GDR or China were integrated into the state planning institutes, and many Soviet and Chinese reconstruction projects were shared with local institutions so the real scope of assistance is difficult to trace except in specific references of symbolic importance.

In the times of destalinization and the Sino-Soviet split, international aid gradually became the object of criticism by the North Korean leadership, coinciding with the growing personality cult of Kim Il Sung, purges and repression. The architecture developed by the fraternal socialist countries was tagged as low quality and foreign, and it was used in the discourses that formed Juche ideology followed by neo-Korean architectural modernism.

With cement being the material condition for infrastructural development, cement plants are meta-infrastructure – infrastructure for infrastructure itself, the necessary prerequisite of every large-scale infrastructural project in the 20th century. Thus, they were also of particular importance for the development of multinational investments in CMEA countries and countries that cooperated with this economic organisation.

However, this paper views cement factories not primarily as economic investments but as architectural (and urban) joint projects, investigating how the concept of multilateralism was materialised––or failed to materialise. Therefore, in order to understand the dynamics behind such projects, I propose to turn the attention to the meta-level of a particular company, Zementanlagenbau (ZAB) Dessau, which acted globally and was a key actor in the planning, coordination and execution of CMEA joint investments with participation, among others, of Bulgarian, Cuban and East German companies and institutions. This perspective is especially helpful in gathering insights in the decision-making and logistics behind particular realisations––scrutinising the implementation of multilaterism, with all its challenges, beyond the proclaimed political agenda.

The choice of regions and projects in my paper is dictated by the core areas of the ZAB’s international activity within the framework of CMEA. In Syria, the joint projects of cement plants by CMEA members were realised in the whole country, starting already in the late 1950s and continuing until the 1980s, whereas in Ethiopia the construction of the largest cement plant, New Mugher I and II bundled the competences of diverse actors in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Most of the previous architectural scholarship tackling cross-border collaborations within the socialist bloc focused on the role of experts and political economy in fostering mobilities of architecture and technology. Sociotechnical devices that enable such travels remain marginalised within historical inquiry. Among them are norms — a peculiar type of standard ensuring the integration of planned economies both at the state and inter-state levels. Since the 1960s, the broad introduction of norms has allowed the translation of technologies of standardization across COMECON countries, the coordination of resource allocation, creation of multilateral institutional ties, including technological cooperation with capitalist countries. However, in the discussion of socialist architecture, norms still appear mainly as an importunate obstacle for one’s creative practice.

This paper proposes to look at the process of norm-making as one of the modes of multilateral cooperation among socialist design institutes. Using archival and oral history research, the paper addresses the process of negotiation of shared building norms for theatre architecture during the 1970s among three leading socialist organizations in the field: GIPROTEATR (Soviet Union), Scénografický ústav (Czechoslovakia), and Institut Für Kulturbauten (East Germany). The normalization of theatre building typology offers a lens onto negotiations of state-sponsored culture and urbanism that goes beyond discussions of standardization merely within industry and infrastructure. Looking at norm-making from the perspective of particular design projects, the meetings of architects, engineers, and foreign construction firms at international places of mediation, such as OISTAT and the Prague Quadrennial, might help not just to ‘place’ socialist architecture within the political-economic context, but to understand how this context is created through and within entangled architectural practices.

Recent scholarly work on China has devoted much attention to policy directives that aim to export a “China Model” of infrastructure-led urban and regional development to emerging economies in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Less attention has been paid to the origins of those infrastructure models, which form the centrepiece of the Chinese government’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This paper addresses that gap by studying the development of China’s airport infrastructure from the 1980s to the present. In so doing, it posits aviation as an insightful lens for framing the multidirectional processes by which infrastructural expertise was imported into China from Europe, Japan, and North America during the post-Mao period of Opening Up and Reform. In particular, it focuses on a series of cooperative research, training, and development programs—organized jointly by Chinese, French, and American transport agencies, airport operators, and tech firms—that have fuelled the co-production of airport architecture and aviation technology on a global scale. In so doing, the paper demonstrates how large-scale infrastructure projects operate not only as emblematic manifestations of multilateral cooperation, but also as economic vessels for channelling reciprocal cross-border investments between multiple state actors. Drawing on fieldwork conducted at airports in Atlanta, Beijing, and Paris—and on expert interviews with architects, planners, and engineers—the paper argues that an analysis of the transnational origins of China’s infrastructural expertise can help us to better conceptualize the processes by which the “China Model” of infrastructure is currently being exported—or rather re-exported—abroad.

This paper discusses current large-scale construction projects aiming to create infrastructures of global commodity chains in Ethiopia. It focuses on aspiring textile and garment manufacturing hubs made up of export processing zones, logistics facilities and transport networks. In their ambitious endeavour to turn the country into “a leading manufacturing hub in Africa” (Growth and Transformation Plan II, National Planning Commission 2016) Ethiopian national authorities have been cooperating with multiple international and national partners in order to plan and build these spaces of globalized production – including development agencies, globally active consultants, planning and construction firms. In recent years, under the umbrella of the Belt and Road Initiative, Chinese state and private companies as well as banks acquired a very prominent position among the actors involved in infrastructure provisioning. These physical interventions reconfigure global supply chains and transnational economic interdependencies as they reshape urban spaces and urbanization patterns. They are perceived by some as materializations of a new “scramble for Africa”, or alternatively framed as heralds of a new “age of choice”, echoing earlier periods of competitive infrastructural development interventions by colonial powers or Cold War antagonists.

The paper addresses the provisioning of architectures, infrastructures and urban spaces of global commodity production as current instances of multilateralism. Probing into the complex web of actors involved in their planning and on-going realization processes, it seeks to address modalities of cooperation and coordination, negotiations and conflicts across different scales and places, and thereby to contribute to a methodological discussion on how to study multilateral constellations and processes of producing urban space. My aim is to situate current infrastructure provisioning within different temporal and spatial layers of transnational infrastructure and industry development or debris – from Italian-built textile factories and roads to GDR manufacturing equipment export and technological aid, to World Bank logistics improvement projects, Turkish clothing producers going bankrupt, and railway construction sites about to be abandoned by Chinese contractors. I argue this offers an empirical entry point to study globalized production chains and multilateral infrastructure provision as a crucial nexus within the larger political economy of uneven spatial development.

This paper introduces the theoretical construct of the "commons"--as described by Hardt and Negri in Commonwealth (2009) as natural resources, social practices, and modes of sociality--to address notions of public space in Helsinki as an essential component and often contradictory medium for the underlying social and political values of the welfare state. Welfare state modernization addresses building initiatives for social housing, historically conceived as living practices, resources for health and wellbeing that could be quantified and managed. What role does the management of landscapes--an essential aspect of the commons--play within the welfare state, and how were they measured and assessed?

An examination of the social, political, and urban planning in the city centre (beginning at the Central Railway Station, including Central Library and Square, and extending around Töölö Bay), reveals the centrally located open natural park spaces as part of a national and perhaps regional identity that challenges and resists the communitarian ideals and scientific management of welfare state ideology. This especially in comparison with two iconic examples of iconic Finnish settlement and demonstrated by numerous participatory urban initiatives based in the capital city. Landscape and public space are the blind spot of the welfare state apparatus.

The many new social housing estates that were constructed in Denmark between 1950 and 1980 suggested new urban typologies, combining large housing block structures with vast, green, lush park-like environments and open spaces. These estates and their embedded green spaces were closely tied to the welfare state, which subsidised and regulated them. However, we contend that they can also be understood as ‘welfare landscapes’ in a broader sense. The landscapes’ spatial organisation articulates specific ideas about the facilitation of citizens’ welfare, e.g. through playgrounds, communal squares, pedestrian streets, community gardens, etcetera. Following its adoption in the 1950s, the word ‘welfare’ did not have a stable set of values or a clear ideology in Danish post-war culture (Kjældgaard, 2018); rather, it was continuously contested in a heated cultural debate – in which, we argue, welfare landscapes took part. Thus, the landscapes of social housing estates were spaces of tension regarding welfare ideals – between economic wealth and social well-being, the individual and the collective – and of potential friction between human dominance and ecological processes.

To better understand how social housing landscapes articulated ideas about welfare, we zoom in on the social housing area of Farum Midtpunkt (1972–1976), north of Copenhagen. Comprising 3,500 residents, it is one of the largest estates built during the last years of Denmark’s post-war building boom. This meticulously planned urban structure has a large number of narrow, designed green spaces that give the impression of wilderness – inaccessible to humans, but highly significant to residents’ perceptions of the area. Drawing on studies of historical documents and the site’s spatial organisation, we present these green spaces as a lens though which to understand discussions about the meanings of welfare and its inherent tensions in 1970s Denmark.

The welfare landscapes of the expansive modernist housing areas constructed in Sweden during the 1960s and 70s were developed using government-sanctioned ideas about universal citizens who would live, work, and play in identical ways. Designers developed housing blocks with modular room dimensions that would accommodate homogeneous furnishings, as well as standardized common landscapes like laundry spaces, playgrounds, traffic plans, and town centers. While these plans for collective living were envisioned to support women’s new roles in the labor market, women were at the same time imagined as housewives occupying auxiliary, specific roles in the areas of domestic work and leisure activities.
When the national government’s modernist ideals about landscapes did not materialize into real built environments, tales about women’s everyday problems and travails came to the forefront. Moreover, reports about women’s difficulties in these common spaces became representative of the larger “problem of the suburb.” These notions also became fixed in time, with few follow-up reports commissioned. We re-visit these popular historical views on the suburbs’ “failed landscapes.” And from a feminist perspective, our research in widely divergent parts of Sweden (from Botkykra to Tibro to Helsingborg to Malmö to Skärholmen to Södertälje), we show that women residents’ affective and caring practices (Fraser, Hardt, Muehlebach, Tronto) challenge binary perspectives about welfare landscapes and, in particular, divisions such as work/pleasure, communal/individual, and unsafe/safe. Since the time of their construction, women’s individual and communal actions for local childcare and allotments, maintenance of playgrounds, and access to consumer goods became specific, local iterations of enduring and re-productive communities.
Connecting government reports, building norms, media accounts from the mid-20th century, and interviews conducted with long-time women residents of five housing areas, we explore discrepancies between ideals, stigma, and tenants’ own accounts of their experiences and changes. How have working-, housewife-, and activist women co-opted and complicated concepts underpinning the welfare state’s supposedly unsuccessful utopias?

Though the welfare state deserves to be deemed the most consequential compromise in modern European history, it has been little analyzed through that lens. Compromise itself remains undertheorized in political philosophy; it is simply absent from architectural histories. This paper proposes to investigate the notion of welfare landscapes by considering them terrains for compromise, i.e., spatial entities under dispute, around which processes of voluntary accommodation between antagonistic urban constituencies unfolded. The paper will sketch an analytic framework, presenting key points for a possible theory of architectural compromise, one focused on architecture’s aesthetic powers over political representation, their operations and limits. In parallel, it will undertake a synthetic account of the contested protection for public enjoyment of the Appian greenbelt in Rome between the 1950s and 1970s.
The largest expanse of campagna within the municipality’s bounds, the Appian Way and surrounding lands were the object of continuous give-and-take among property owners, developers, institutions, and an increasingly mobilized civil society. The myriad instances of negotiation between privates and functionaries, or of governmental mediation between builders and conservationists rendered recurrently tangible the welfare state’s central goal: safeguarding the postwar interclass settlement through the observance of conciliation, thereby securing lasting social harmony on egalitarian bases.
However, the area’s unique attributes, environmental no less than archeological, brought to the fore paradoxes of administrative action that more customary interventions managed to conceal –and that accounts of welfare programs tend accordingly to obviate. Preserving the territory’s classical topoi within a countryside turned metropolitan park aimed to help assuage dehumanization across Rome’s mushrooming peripheries. History’s imperious presence evidenced the perils of Italy’s accelerated transformation, causing actors on the ground to strike a middle course formulated in scenic and managerial terms, a compromise that would smooth the very modernization that the welfare state professed.

In his 1975 article about planning ideology and the Welfare State, Malcolm Harrison identified ‘specific social benefits’ as ‘possible welfare objectives‘ of town and country planning in the post WW2 period. Some of these social benefits, such as the need for recreation, and the right to leisure facilities were materialised in ‘green and open spaces including public parks, recreational topographies, and shared spaces on housing estates’, creating what can be called ‘Welfare landscapes’. At the same time, Britain saw the creation of a vast number of new landscapes, away from housing estates: the open spaces linked to the delivery of large-scale infrastructural projects – the ‘economic backbone’ of the post-war Welfare State. This paper will focus on the landscapes of these new infrastructures with a special focus on power stations, commissioned by the Central Electricity Generating Board.

The creation of landscapes around post-war power stations was informed by Section 37 (‘Amenity Clause’) of the 1957 Electricity Act. It required the minimalisation of the impact of generating and transmission sites on scenery, flora and fauna, and resulted in the appointment of members of the Institute of Landscape Architects on new power station projects. The involvement and advocacy of the landscape profession led to the policy of ‘public relation value’ in the mid-1960s, that safeguarded the needs of communities by using parts of the CEGB sites for ‘specific social benefits’.

Through the analysis of landscapes around key power stations, this paper analyses how the understanding of welfare materialised in post-war British infrastructural projects. By examining how these landscapes fostered social welfare, contributed to building communities and addressed growing concerns of environmental crisis it argues that these examples are key in understanding the broader impact of welfare planning on the British countryside.

Whilst discussing the residential culture of the 17th century Helen Searing (1997) remarked that: ‘arguably, the very concept of ‘home’ as we know it was invented by the Dutch’. The meaning of home is still widely up for debate, but a pivotal role for the Dutch in its creation has a long history. Already in the 17th century, foreign visitors to the Netherlands were highly observant of the differences between Dutch residential culture and that of their homeland. Four characteristics of Dutch architecture seem of key importance to them: highly developed interiors, relatively high standards of comfort, cleanliness and innovative urban planning. One visitor branded the Netherlands as ‘a country full of palaces’, an opinion that at the time does not seem to have been rare.
These characteristics will have mainly been brought forth by the layout of Dutch houses. They not only point to outward notions of status and representation, but also refer to private life within the home. This paper will demonstrate how through typological analysis of floor plans these characteristics can be illustrated. By analysing floor plans of Dutch premodern residential architecture, it can be argued that Dutch homes were standardized relatively early on and designed with user comfort in mind. Current scholarly discourse on Dutch premodern residential architecture has mainly focussed on the development of the floor plan in relation to the construction (Meischke 1969; Prak 1991). How social characteristics like residential culture, high standards of comfort and cleanliness may have interacted with the development of floor plans is hardly discussed. With a new typological analysis, the layout of the Dutch home may be further explained in the context of the city and society.

The connection between coal and comfort was commonplace in British culture by the late eighteenth century. In his 1789 treatise on coal mining, The Natural History of the Mineral Kingdom, John Williams wrote that ‘No country in the world depends so much upon the productions of the mineral kingdom, for the means of comfortable accommodation, wealth, and power, as the island of Britain.’ Similarly, large-scale historical studies—beginning with the foundational account of E.A. Wrigley—have emphasized connections between demographic growth, urbanization, industrialization, and coal.
How did these immense changes play out inside? This paper looks at schemes by architects, natural philosophers, and other interested actors aimed at ‘improving’ the household hearth in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Britain. For instance, in 1714, when Newtonian experimentalist J.T. Desaguliers translated a French treatise on the fireplace into English, he added a series of descriptions recounting his trials with coal-fired hearths. Later in the century, Count Rumford and Scottish polymath James Anderson proposed ways to improve the circulation of heat, while they simultaneously explored the management of citizens and resources in parallel tracts on political economy. By 1845, the two-volume On the history and art of warming and ventilating rooms and buildings compiled the above schemes alongside many others, now recast a history of interior comfort as the course of civilization, itself (culminating, naturally, in the coal-fired homes of the British Isles).
These texts and others show how the problem of the fireplace attracted thinking across multiple scales, drawing the individual interior and its ideally comfortable inhabitants into a web of connections between fuel, comfort, national identity, and historical change.
The eighteenth-century has long been associated with a ‘culture of consumption’ through which a growing swath of the British population had access to new goods and services. Did the consumption of domestic fuel resonate or diverge from more visible modes of consumption? Who, in the end, was allowed to be comfortable as coal became Britain’s fuel?

Situated south of Leuven, within a one-day travel distance from Brussels, the castle of Heverlee was one of the main residences of the Croÿ dynasty. It was Anton of Croÿ who purchased the seignory with accompanying hereditary title of sénéchal of Brabant in 1446. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, William of Croÿ and his wife Mary of Hamal built a new residence on the site, supplementing the existing uncomfortable living tower with a fully-fledged L-shaped residence. Three generations later it became one of the favourite residences of Charles III of Croÿ (1560-1612), duke of Aarschot and Croÿ, count of Beaumont and prince of the Holy Roman Empire. As one of the highest noblemen in the Low Countries Charles was considered a patron of the arts and architecture, as well as a military commander. During his lifetime he developed an obsession with the recording of his heritage for his posterity, even though he died without children. Part of this obsession were the so-called besoignés and specifications, describing the domain of Heverlee to an amazing level of detail. This extraordinary source covers everything in the castle – even the collection of linen at the disposal of the duke – as well as the entire surrounding domain with gardens, orchards and a private hunting forest. The content of this description hints at an amazing level of technology, with – for example – fountains spraying water to seven or eight feet high. In this paper, we will explore how these descriptions, in combination with iconographic sources of the castle and its surroundings, give insight into the level of comfort concerning food, personal hygiene and technological advances.

This paper focuses on Edinburgh in the seventeenth century and considers the efforts made by the civic authorities to improve the safety and amenity of the domestic architecture of the city by attempting to improve, in particular, water supply and waste disposal (infamously, a problem in Edinburgh right up until the nineteenth century).
Using the existing legal structure of the Dean of Guild Court to oversee and enforce, the city gradually developed a regulatory framework, partly in response the threats of fire and disease, which gradually shaped the appearance of the city and the structure of the new buildings within it. By the end of the century, the High Street as the main thoroughfare had taken on a more unified, lithic appearance and the wealthier burghers were living in housing that was more spacious and better serviced. Those changes, however, whilst the civic input was important, were at least as much due to the private enterprise of the members of the various trades organisations, who developed the modern flat and tenement block, partly in defiance of the city’s regulation.

Building upon the ‘urban decline as opportunity’ argument, this paper departs from the notion that the early modern shrinking town should not only be studied from a decline perspective. Instead, I would like to examine the argument that the urban transformation was also deployed by house
owners to ameliorate their living environment and increase the user comfort of their property, focusing on a case study of the shrinking Dutch town between 1750 and 1840.
In the long eighteenth century the exceptional urbanisation of the province of Holland, the main urban centre of the Dutch Republic, slowed down. Many towns, including Amsterdam, Leiden and Haarlem, had to contend with economic and demographic stagnation or decline, resulting into a
declining real estate market. Rather than the construction of new buildings and subsequent infilling, renovation, conversion and demolition became the central building activities. Parallel to an urban ‘demolition-wave’, many country houses in the west of the Republic were demolished from the end
of the eighteenth century.
Seen from the urban decline as opportunity perspective, vacancy and demolition opened up the tightly-packed seventeenth century town, offering the possibility to enlarge houses and rear-gardens and re-use vacant plots as gardens, orchards or meadows. Through the analysis of archival documentation, maps and contemporary sources I will discuss the spatial make-over of the shrinking Dutch towns of Leiden, Haarlem and Enkhuizen, focusing on the renovation of the rear part of the town house and its garden and the redevelopment of vacant plots. I will argue that this transformation can be contextualized within a longer tradition of the use of greenery in Dutch towns, both as embellishment and functional necessity, with the shrinking town offering a new opportunity to increase user comfort and live the ideal country life close to home.