{"title":"Introduction: We Construct Collective Life by Constructing Our Environment","authors":"Lorens Holm, Cameron McEwan","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2021.1885164","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2021.1885164","url":null,"abstract":"This special double issue of Architecture and Culture on architecture and collective life is predicated on the centrality of the agency of the individual. This introduction is written by individuals, even if we write it together. We acknowledge the individual – a bio-technic necessity – even as we critique it. These papers explore architecture and collective life from diverse geographical and epistemological backgrounds. They are moreover anthropocentric even if they diverge from the centrality of the human as universal subject, as in Yael ARCHITECTURE AND CULTURE","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":"8 1","pages":"529 - 548"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20507828.2021.1885164","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47560409","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":"Forms of (Collective) Life: The Ontoethics of Inhabitation","authors":"C. Boano","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2020.1802199","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2020.1802199","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Is there space for an ontological urban design? Or better still, following the words of Elisabeth Grosz, is there space for an “ontoethics” of the urban? While contributing to the reflection on the role of ethics as a relational practice, this paper is digging back into the notion of forms-of-life in Giorgio Agamben’s political reflections, aiming to foreground a possible ethics of the city. This aims to highlight the implications that ontology and ethics have in constructing a politics of life as they bring differences in how we live, act, what we value and how we produce and design. Particularly, to substantiate such ethics, three key characteristics of an affirmative life are put forward: the capacity to care and to connect; the capacity to repair, endure and hold together; as well as to imagine and experiment alternative life-forces to oppose politics of oppression and capitalist extraction of values.","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":"8 1","pages":"549 - 563"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20507828.2020.1802199","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45140722","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 Architectural Other","authors":"J. Hendrix","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2020.1789942","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2020.1789942","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Jacques Lacan defines the Other as the linguistic superstructure of the unconscious. It is the collective network of relations into which the subject is inserted, as the subject is inserted into language. It is the matrix of laws, rules and customs that define the subject. The individual subject finds itself inserted into the symbolic order, the field of the Other, which is the unconscious, and which determines the reality, identity, and desire of the subject. What effect does collective life have on the psyche of the individual? Does collective life (civilization) have its discontents? Architecture is managed by committees, writers, and media spokespeople. What is the role of the individual in the collective life of architecture? Architecture enacts a struggle between the maintenance and dislocation of the individual and collective life. How does the struggle between maintenance and dislocation, individual psyche and collective Other, play out in buildings and cities?","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":"8 1","pages":"498 - 512"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20507828.2020.1789942","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47468747","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 Female Body Politic: Enacting the Architecture of The Book of the City of Ladies","authors":"P. Haralambidou","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2020.1794146","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2020.1794146","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This visual essay and explanatory text presents my practice-led research focusing on two works by medieval author Christine de Pizan. Conflating the act of writing a book – a thesis against institutional misogyny – with the construction of an imaginary city, the first work, The Book of the City of Ladies, 1405, has been seen as a proto-feminist manifesto. I focus on the under-researched architectural and urban allegory depicted in the text, which imagines a utopia inhabited solely by women and constructed for them by a woman and on the manuscript's accompanying illuminations displaying three different stages of the construction of the city. Inspired by Aristotle’s Politics and revisiting the ancient Greek metaphor, by which a state or society and its institutions are conceived of as a biological human body, in The Book of the Body Politic, 1404, de Pizan offers her version of a medieval political theory, which I connect with her allegorical city.","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":"8 1","pages":"385 - 406"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20507828.2020.1794146","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44782048","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":"On Not Being Able to Build: Thinking Space, Boundaries and the Other with Lacan’s Discourse of the Capitalist","authors":"Angie Voela","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2020.1789832","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2020.1789832","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Jacques Lacan’s fifth Discourse, or Discourse of the Capitalist, suggests that relations of difference are being immobilized or rendered redundant. What individuals are left with is a variety of strategies with which they try to cope, upholding a modicum of consistence and reality. Drawing on cultural examples and Bernard Stiegler’s use of psychoanalysis, this paper examines the relationship between experiences of space, the feeling of nonbeing and the encounter with the Other. If controlling space and enforcing spatial boundaries is the last strategy for keeping vestiges of the Other in working order, a radical re-thinking of space/milieu and objects/designs is necessary for individuals to starting imagining a future beyond capitalism’s creative stagnation and catastrophe.","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":"8 1","pages":"420 - 432"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20507828.2020.1789832","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46141342","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":"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":"8 1","pages":"564 - 582"},"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":"Gathering-In-Action: The Activation of a Civic Space","authors":"Mhairi McVicar","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2020.1798164","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2020.1798164","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The Grange Pavilion project began in 2012 when residents of Grangetown, Cardiff began to consider what they might do to act as a catalyst for the redevelopment of a former Bowls Pavilion vacated following funding cuts under austerity budgets. In a context of then Prime Minister David Cameron’s Big Society speech, the Localism Act 2011, and the launch of Cardiff Council’s Stepping Up Toolkit encouraging community groups to form and take over council services and assets, residents understood the task of activating a civic space as something which might become an “all-consuming project.” This paper reflects on eight years (to date) of gathering, valuing, and preparing for the intended and unintended consequences of taking on a small civic space, and critically considers the role of architectural education and practice within a Community Asset Transfer.","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":"8 1","pages":"468 - 483"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20507828.2020.1798164","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45638483","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":"Shaping Collective Life in Twentieth Century Belgian Social Housing","authors":"A. Migotto","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2020.1792111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2020.1792111","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract During the twentieth-century the rise of social housing programs triggered two specific architectural transformations: firstly, the process of rationalization of the domestic realm; secondly, the integration of residential units with open spaces, civic buildings and services. The latter became central to spatially structure the relation between autonomous individual living patterns, the social needs of everyday life and the political/ideological implications of this relation. The paper discusses the transformation of social housing projects in Belgium during the twentieth-century focusing on two cases, the garden settlements in the 1920s and the Modernist neighborhood units of the 1950s and 1960s, where the question of collective life became central. Acknowledging the opposition between “community” and the “social” throughout modernity, the paper interrogates how these cases attempted to reconfigure urban and architectural principles in light of the shifting value of collectivity in housing.","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":"8 1","pages":"583 - 602"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20507828.2020.1792111","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49346685","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":"8 1","pages":"452 - 467"},"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":"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":"8 1","pages":"377 - 381"},"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}