Encounters: architectural agency

Abstract

In this double issue of The Journal of Architecture, authors question the power of architectural agency and explore the role of architecture in socio-environmental transitions through the analysis of various forms of encounter. They ask if and how architecture has the power to transform entrenched ways of being and acting in this world. Just how much can architecture change and reconfigure existing social patterns? Conversely, how are changing social structures and relationships reflected in the transformation of architecture, and how and what it represents? These questions are, of course, tied with that of the role of ‘the architect’. The diversified endeavours in reconstructing, envisioning, translating, altering, and consolidating are interrogated through articles set out to examine architects who occupy specific positions in the history of architecture. By rewriting these historical instances in the light of today’s debates, precisely to re-evaluate their roles in relation to unsung influences and relations, unrecognised contextual processes and forms of work, the pedestal of authorship is replaced with the revelation of a necessary plural and multivalent practice — the many and the together in ‘the architect’. The notion of ‘encounter’ is intrinsic, as argued by Mariana de Oliveira Couto Muszyński, to Bartolomeu Costa Cabral’s approach to architectural design, and in particular the project that combined a primary school and a public bathhouse in the Castle district of Lisbon. She reminds us— in (still) pandemic times— of the purpose of public buildings: to enable encounter and transaction between human beings. In her study, she demonstrates how Costa Cabral went against the grain of the expected language of design of his time to explore contextually, socially, and pedagogically responsive spatial arrangements that contribute to not only the paradigm shift of school design in the post-war era but also the provision of communal spaces where architecture becomes the agency of social transformation. She highlights the radical belief that, indeed, architecture can change the way in which we exist in and relate to the world. Similarly, Gary Boyd traces how Britain’s over six hundred pithead baths were designed and developed as part of a ‘colossal social experiment’, which was a consequence of the encounter between the cooperative stance of the Miners’ Welfare Commission in the 1920s and 30s, and the innovative, modernist language of design by the architectural team, manifesting civic aspirations against the outdated technologies of the mining industry itself. Their introduction showed impact on society far beyond the limits of the work place. The notion of co-creation is relevant to Ecem Sarıçayır’s discussion of Frank van Klingeren’s ‘open architecture’ in the Netherlands of the 1960s and 70s. Deljana Iossifova