{"title":"The Architecture of Global Governance: Paths of Approach","authors":"Sven Sterken, Dennis Pohl","doi":"10.1080/13264826.2023.2241238","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2023.2241238","url":null,"abstract":"International organisations and global governance studies typically refer to “architecture” as the structures of decision-making, power distribution, or financial flows. This position paper challenges this conventional understanding by delving into its primary meaning—the built environment. It charts ways in which architectural design, historiography, and criticism become relevant for the study of international organisations and, inversely, how multilateral diplomacy (e.g. “informal” networks such as the G20) questions existing architectural typologies and narratives. The study focuses on the meanings and expectations embedded in the spaces utilised by global governance actors. By evaluating the architectural discipline’s ability to conceptualise these spaces beyond their symbolic dimension, we emphasise the material characteristics and cultural connotations that shape negotiations, agreements, and treaties. Understanding their agency highlights the influential but often overlooked spatial dimension within international diplomacy and unveils how the built environment contributes to the imagination and materialisation of international governing.","PeriodicalId":43786,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Theory Review","volume":"86 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135799418","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Seat at the Table: United Nations and the Architecture of Diplomacy","authors":"Olga Touloumi","doi":"10.1080/13264826.2023.2244608","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2023.2244608","url":null,"abstract":"The end of World War Two found diplomats and politicians negotiating architectures of global governance and the future world order. During those initial conversations, tables emerged as the quintessential object of liberal internationalism. Diplomats understood the politics of seating and how tables silently installed hierarchies, entangling their shape and form with discussions on emerging cultures of assembly and the possible organisation of the UN’s public spheres. Who gets a seat at the table? Does the table have a head? How close or far away should the delegates sit? Who sits next to whom? These were all questions running through the delegates’ minds each time a new committee deployed itself around desks. Architects and designers were called in to design diplomatic encounters within the UN Headquarters. The goal was to humanise what aspired to become the machine of international relationships while architecturally articulating an even bigger bureaucratic organisation that would bring order and peace against the chaos, fear, and paranoia that the war generated. This essay will examine the emergence of the circular table as a tool and a technique of multilateralism, ultimately interrogating the role that design and architecture played in shaping global governance.","PeriodicalId":43786,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Theory Review","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135799638","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cosmopolitan Subaltern: Transnational Spatial Agency on the Fringe of the Worlding Cities of the Global South","authors":"Amanda Achmadi, B. Josey","doi":"10.1080/13264826.2023.2181836","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2023.2181836","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Kampung is a historical form of vernacular urbanism in Indonesia with similar typologies occurring across Southeast Asia. As an urban form, it plays a crucial role in absorbing rural–urban migration symptomatic of not only postcolonial urbanisation in the Global South, but also precolonial and colonial trade networks. Kampung’s adaptability in accommodating diverse aspirations and cultural influences makes it no less cosmopolitan than the formally planned cities it was situated in. This paper examines kampung’s urbanism in contemporary Indonesia and theorises it as a form of subaltern cosmopolitanism. It reveals the interlaces of a localised regional practice of bottom-up urbanism with subnational and transnational professional design networks on the fringe of Indonesia’s most rapidly “worlding” urban centre outside Java: Makassar. It reveals how urbanity is produced through a coalescence of sub-national diversity, mobile intellectual actors, and transnational network of design activism that spans the developing urban region of the Global South.","PeriodicalId":43786,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Theory Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"600 - 620"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44734680","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A New Perspective on Architectural Hybridity in Modern Bangkok","authors":"Chatri Prakitnonthakan","doi":"10.1080/13264826.2022.2199619","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2022.2199619","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43786,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Theory Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"621 - 623"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46080623","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Value of Others: Modern Heritage and Historiographic Inequity","authors":"E. Denison, G. Ren","doi":"10.1080/13264826.2023.2194660","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2023.2194660","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Inspired by growing calls for the equitable recognition of other experiences—especially non-white and non-western—in the historiography of the modern era, this paper explores the themes of transnational architectural practice and cosmopolitanism through the lens of cultural heritage—specifically modern heritage—and how values are ascribed, invariably asymmetrically, to the tangible and intangible legacies of our recent past. In deference to the theme of Cosmopolitanism’s Others, the paper argues for equitable histories not merely as an intellectual exercise, but as a prerequisite to attaining just and sustainable futures. One small step in this direction is the formulation of The Cape Town Document on Modern Heritage (2022) under the auspices of the global collaborative, MoHoA (Modern Heritage of Africa/Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene), a decentring and restitutive framework for an equitable and sustainable approach to the theory and practice of modern heritage in a planetary age.","PeriodicalId":43786,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Theory Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"578 - 599"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42968100","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Functional Environs: Austin Tetteh’s Situated World(mak)ing Planning Practice, 1950–80","authors":"Albert Brenchat-Aguilar","doi":"10.1080/13264826.2023.2180808","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2023.2180808","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Functionalist sociologist and planner Austin Tetteh was the first African Dean of the Faculty of Architecture at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in 1971. KNUST soon became a pioneer anticolonial institution that nonetheless incorporated the neocolonial influences of its global staff in order to succeed. European planners in KNUST advocated for architectural functionalism and rapid action, reacted to European rationalist planning, provided paternalist education, considered expertise as universal, and saw humans as resources of the capitalist market economy. On the other hand, although continuist, Tetteh presented an approach to planning that was informed by sociological functionalism, emphasized the detriments of colonial legacies, sought collaboration instead of imposition from Europe, spoke to global networks from a socio-geographic situated position, and considered humans as active resources for national and continental developmentalism. The term “Environ”, used by KNUST staff and students in the 1970s, summons these aspects from an African situated cosmopolitan perspective on ecology and society.","PeriodicalId":43786,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Theory Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"458 - 485"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43797259","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ville Blanche: Levantine Gentlemen, Architectural Modernism and the “White City” of Tel Aviv, 1930–48","authors":"Tzafrir Fainholtz","doi":"10.1080/13264826.2023.2194661","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2023.2194661","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article explores the untold story of Levantine architects who were active in Tel Aviv of the 1930s and 1940s, following the trajectories of cousins Zaky and Robert (Hillel) Chelouche and their contemporaries. Members of Palestine’s French speaking Sephardic-Mizrachi elite, these architects went to study in Paris at a time when French modernist architecture and urban planning was applied to France’s colonial project, and brought back with them to Tel Aviv architectural ideas which helped shape the city as a Mediterranean modern town, similar to other cities of the period, such as Casablanca. The contribution of these Levantine gentleman-architects to Tel Aviv’s celebrated architectural heritage has been largely overlooked by the prevailing narrative of the city as a “Bauhaus city,” of central European modernism. This article is challenging this narrative by presenting the important work and impact of these architects, and their clients, in the city, proposing a new understanding of the heritage of the so called “White City.”","PeriodicalId":43786,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Theory Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"405 - 426"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42026961","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Landscape “Difficult to Describe”: The Model Village and the Capital City","authors":"P. Springstubb","doi":"10.1080/13264826.2023.2195672","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2023.2195672","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In mid-twentieth-century Punjab, grassroots development projects sought to modernize the countryside by decentralizing power to villages. The capital city Chandigarh, built in the same period, seems to represent the opposite: a national symbol of a newly independent India’s centralized power. Yet, this article argues, rural and urban were reciprocal and volatile counterparts. Through the work of M.S. Randhawa, it reorients analysis of Chandigarh to reveal how the materiality of landscape itself was a medium for territorial planning, indelibly linking—and managing the distinctions between—city and countryside. A botanist and civil servant, Randhawa used landscape to realize modernizing agendas and to constrain social change in projects from model villages and a “bioaesthetic” plan for the city to new land-grant universities that ushered in the Green Revolution’s industrialized agriculture. His work offers a revisionist history of development’s practitioners and periodization. It shows how an uneven fabric of late-colonial rural uplift shaped the contours of postcolonial, state-directed agrarian transformation. Following the civil servant in the landscape, this article calls for the grounding of abstract theories like development and state formation in histories of their local inflections.","PeriodicalId":43786,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Theory Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"486 - 518"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43725946","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Crystals in the Colony","authors":"D. Martinez","doi":"10.1080/13264826.2023.2194659","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2023.2194659","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines the Crystal Arcade, the project of a little-known architect, Andrés Luna, read through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s contemporaneous Passagenwerk, at the same time as it is described within the complex context of Luna’s own family history—one entangled with the tragic history of the First Philippine Republic. It uses Benjamin’s “literary montage” to conjure the spectral presence of the colonial-cosmopolitan subject within his manuscript. I contend that the Crystal Arcade cannot be properly understood outside of a transnational framework and network, or without considering the conditions under which a colonial-cosmopolitan consciousness formed. Situating the Crystal Arcade and the Passagenwerk within this transnational milieu is intended to allow the reader to locate an often too marginalized history within the heart of the nineteenth-century global metropolis while at the same time allowing us to place that history at the forefront of the theorization of the global city.","PeriodicalId":43786,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Theory Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"384 - 404"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44632697","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Displaying Socialist Cosmopolitanism: China’s Architectural Aid in the Global South, 1960s–70s","authors":"Guanghui Ding, C. Xue","doi":"10.1080/13264826.2023.2194662","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2023.2194662","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract After World War Two, modern architecture was disseminated worldwide by western architects. However, the role of Chinese architects in Asian and African countries during the Cold War has been largely overlooked. Chinese-aided projects were initiated by communist leaders and executed through state-owned design institutes and construction companies. This article explores these projects as a cultural expression of socialist cosmopolitanism, as China sought to reshape the world order of the 1960s through political, cultural, and material interventions. It argues that architects from state-owned design institutes helped newly independent Guinea and Sri Lanka form national identities through architectural intervention by adopting cosmopolitan ideas that maintained sensitivities to differences and appreciation for others. By embracing situated cosmopolitanism and socialist ideologies, Chinese political leaders and building professionals saw themselves as partners with revolutionary ambitions who respected others with geographical and cultural differences on the global stage.","PeriodicalId":43786,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Theory Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"547 - 577"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49567748","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}