{"title":"Abject Objects: Perversion and the Modernist Grid","authors":"F. Proto","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2020.1801027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2020.1801027","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article challenges current psychoanalytical thought according to which the three Lacanian clinics of the neurotic, pervert and psychotic coexist in any given era, and suggests instead that identifiable environmental conditions are key to the surfacing of a specific and dominant construction of the self. In the case of the pervert, the narcissistic wounds inflicted by science and technology, as well as an increasingly hostile lifestyle dictated by the Industrial Revolution, become key factors that delineate a form of subjectivity in urgent need of overcoming internal splits. The modernist grid, which both the artistic avant-garde and the pioneers of modern architecture address during the first half of the twentieth century as the panacea for a corrupted world, is here discussed in terms of a subject whose imaginary worldview is determined by the vantage point offered by visual-machines, such as geometric grids, as applied to the production of a sanitized and overcontrolled urban environment. Both the mechanisms and outcomes of this interpretation of the evolution of Western city design are part of the original research question that this article addresses.","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20507828.2020.1801027","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49452613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rethinking the Individual–Collective Divide with Biodigital Architecture","authors":"Talia Bar","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2020.1792202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2020.1792202","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article suggests an expansion to perceptions of the individual and the collective in the context of the biodigital turn in architecture and the embrace of algorithmic, generative methodologies into its corpus of the past 20 years. Such an expansion subverts advanced capitalist hierarchies and promotes alternative (be)comings. For despite two decades of biodigital novelty narratives, which speak of a shift from humanist-formal processes in architecture to complex, generative and posthuman architectural practice, biodigital architecture, it is argued here, fails to account for bios (human and non-human) and therefore fails to promote real novelty/difference. Drawing on current posthumanist and nomadic theories of subjectivity developed by Rosi Braidotti and on turn of the twentieth century ethological theory of ecology developed by Jacob Von Uexküll, alternative materiality here emerges to transpose two biodigital practices, Achim Menges and François Roche’s, toward ethical paths.","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20507828.2020.1792202","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46952677","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Digital Crowd","authors":"Hazem Ziada","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2020.1794419","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2020.1794419","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Although digital technologies are implicated in intrusive surveillance and social fragmentation, their widespread uses in recent political protests demonstrate their potentials to support intense forms of collective life. Building on Mark Hansen’s new-media philosophy, this paper explores digital crowds as an intensified form of a contemporary phenomenon: the intertwinement of digital media with social life. Enveloped in technospheres of data-rich devices, the digital crowd forms hybrids with its environment of distributed digital intelligence, what Hansen conceptualizes as System-Environment Hybrids. Sampling the visible trace of such SEHs on Instagram, the article posits that their impacts on crowd formations signal a distinct form of collective life. It argues that the hybrid intensifies the affect and de-individuation processes of conventional pre-digital crowds, and extends such effects well beyond crowd events into persistent online environments of insatiable exchange. The paper speculates that intensified and persistent affect transform the emotional geography of the city.","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20507828.2020.1794419","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46771691","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Foreword: Collective Life is a Difficult Term","authors":"Lorens Holm","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2020.1886509","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2020.1886509","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20507828.2020.1886509","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45517184","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Secondary Virtuality, the Anamorphosis of Projective Geometry","authors":"Donald Kunze","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2020.1802195","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2020.1802195","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract It is tempting to construct theory about the Other using binary oppositions. Lacanian psychoanalysis avoids this by stressing the geometry of the Borromeo knot, whose three rings embody both sequentiality and self-intersection. This essay organizes Lacan’s topological options around a “secondary virtuality” by (1) considering Mladen Dolar’s expanded account of anamorphosis, (2) connecting the architectural void to the problem of non-enclosure of the standard figures of projective geometry immersion – the Möbius band, cross-cap, and Klein bottle - and (3) taking Pappus’s theorem, the origin of projective geometry, to the twisted and folded spaces of the uncanny, where unheimlich (“un-homely”) directly implicates architecture as an agency of topological transformation. Two examples, Chesterton’s “The Queer Feet” (1911) and the 1951 science-fiction film, The Day the Earth Stood Still, demonstrate the continued relevance of Pappus’s idea of secondary virtuality to Lacan’s correlation of the Other and ‘extimacy’.","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20507828.2020.1802195","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42810367","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
P. Guzzardo, Gustavo Cardon, Rodrigo Martín Iglesias
{"title":"The Algorithm that Ate the Street: The Storyboards","authors":"P. Guzzardo, Gustavo Cardon, Rodrigo Martín Iglesias","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2020.1792727","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2020.1792727","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract These eight storyboards were exhibited at the 16th Annual International Conference of the Architectural Humanities Research Association at the University of Dundee, UK. They were designed by Paul Guzzardo and Gustavo Cardon. The tableaus are set in barrios in Buenos Aires, Argentina. They were developed for two Buenos Aires architectural graduate workshops and UNESCO presentations in France, Lithuania and Sweden. 1 The storyboards were proposed as an alternative to the desiccated storylines that gag most urban design briefs. They offer a new mythic stew, as “triage way stations” to map a way out of the digital mesh-up we are slapped hard against and as mythic blueprints for a line of firewalls against weaponized data. Despite the fact that digital buckshot is coming at hyper-speed, a conversation about myth and the practice of architecture has been ignored. Myths contain seeds of new stories, stories that incrementally increase intelligence. 2","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20507828.2020.1792727","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41347620","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Mass” Housing in the Social and the Post-Social Worlds: Reading Hannah Arendt’s “Mass Society”","authors":"Andrew Stoane","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2020.1792151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2020.1792151","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt predicated her thesis on societal introspection on what she called “mass society” – a population which had rapidly grown, urbanized and atomized, bringing new imperatives for humans to live together in vast numbers and with closer proximities. Throughout, Arendt discusses how shifting boundaries of public and private define our cities and our lives. As her mass society of three billion now approaches eight billion, how has the relationship between public and private – city and household – played out in the staggering population growth of the sixty years since her book? This article will explore how these six decades since the publication of The Human Condition have seen fundamental transformations in the way we understand what we now call housing, its relationship with the city, and its relationship with collective life.","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20507828.2020.1792151","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42291221","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Researching Architecture and Urban Inequality: Toward Engaged Ethics","authors":"Yael Padan","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2020.1792109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2020.1792109","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper reflects on approaches to conducting “ethical research” on architecture and urban (in)equality in cities in the global south. It focuses on two themes: the formalization of institutional ethics procedures and protocols for conducting such research, and the need to move away from ethical frameworks that emerge from western structures for knowledge production. The paper will question whether ethical principles are universal or specific, and how they affect the possibility of knowledge co-production and its potential to generate pathways to urban equality. These questions arise from the history of contemporary research ethics procedures, which are rooted in the social norms of western modernity that views researchers and research participants as “autonomous individuals.” The paper will suggest that exploring the relation of the individual to the collective and understanding social existence as relationality, is fundamental in formulating an alternative type of ethics methodology.","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20507828.2020.1792109","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43715178","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Afterword: What Does Society Look Like?*","authors":"Lorens Holm","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2020.1886516","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2020.1886516","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20507828.2020.1886516","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44321453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fast Forward into the Past: Frederick Ackerman’s Radical Banality and the Affordable Housing Future That Could Have Been","authors":"F. Biehle","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2020.1792126","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2020.1792126","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The design of affordable housing is a pursuit inextricably linked to the project of modernism. In New York City the achievements of its housing authority would become immediately recognizable for their uncompromised realization of modern architecture’s promise for the future – reductive appearance, essential interior arrangements, and a siting defined by the elimination of the preexisting urban fabric. Without the idealistic cover of modernism, the enterprise can now be recognized as anti-urban from the start. Today, the superblock sites of low-income housing continue to stand alone as stigmatized suburban anomalies. This paper looks back at the birth of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) and asks what if in 1937, following the completion of both First Houses by Frederick Ackerman and Williamsburg Houses by William Lescaze, it was the radical banality of First Houses that had been embraced as the more appropriate template for the future? Could our future city have become more equitable?","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20507828.2020.1792126","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49027690","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}