{"title":"The Return of Repressed Subjectivity in China: Feng Jizhong and Wang Shu","authors":"Guanghui Ding","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2020.1794130","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2020.1794130","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In the Chinese architectural field, subjectivity has been repressed first by political ideology in the Mao era and later by commodification under market conditions. By analyzing two architectural projects – Feng Jizhong’s Garden of the Square Pagoda and Wang Shu’s Xiangshan Campus, this paper examines how subjectivity has been repressed and returned. It draws on two complementary approaches toward subjectivity: Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on bodily experience and Michel Foucault’s analysis of power. Whereas the garden presented a subtle critique of the ideological and political repression of individual creativity, Xiangshan Campus protested the hegemony of instrumental reason in contemporary architectural production. By using productive power to articulate sensuous experience, the two architects endeavored to forge a resistant subjectivity, that challenges current tendencies to disarticulate mind and body, subjects and objects, emotion and rationality, architecture and lifeworld.","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/10.1080/20507828.2020.1794130","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60012757","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 Magic and Metaphysics of Shit: The Production of Space and Digital Technology","authors":"D. Capener","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2020.1792106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2020.1792106","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Reading Henri Lefebvre alongside Bernard Stiegler, this paper explores the changes that have taken place to the production of space in our age of digital technology. Lefebvre sensed the radical changes taking place in society through the implementation of computational technologies. He asked a prescient question: How is this space being produced? Lefebvre was unable to foresee the significant changes to the actual mechanics of the production of space brought about by the third industrial revolution. A thinker who does do this is Bernard Stiegler who is interested in how new digital technologies change memory via tertiary mnemotechnical devices – memory storage devices that are external to the human body. Reading Lefebvre alongside Stiegler might seem unusual, however I will demonstrate that implicit in Lefebvre’s argument regarding the production of space is memory and implicit in Stiegler’s argument regarding the exteriorization of memory in technics is space.","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/10.1080/20507828.2020.1792106","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41403417","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":"Hotspots and Touchstones: From Critical to Ethical Spatial Practice","authors":"J. Rendell","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2020.1792107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2020.1792107","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay starts with an event – what I have come to call “an ethical hotspot” – a moment in which my value systems were challenged and I found myself unable to continue to act as before, until I undertook some critical reflection. Marilys Guillemin and Lynn Gillam (2004) describe what they call “ethically important moments,” 1 which for them mark the “ethical dimension” of decision-making around the day to day dilemmas of research practice. For Guillemin and Gillam negotiating these dilemmas and their relation to institutional ethical procedures requires a degree of reflexivity on the part of the researcher. In this essay, I start by describing the ethical hot-spot that occurred in my life and then discuss how, by reflecting on these issues and the practices that I developed out of them, it might be possible to develop modes of ethical practice that I call – following Foucault – basanic.","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/10.1080/20507828.2020.1792107","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44209607","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":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20507828.2020.1802199","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":"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":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20507828.2021.1885164","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":"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":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20507828.2020.1789942","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":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20507828.2020.1794146","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":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20507828.2020.1789832","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":"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":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20507828.2020.1798164","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":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20507828.2020.1792111","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}