{"title":"Radical practices, radical pedagogies: intercultural explorations in language and meaning","authors":"Jacqui Alexander, Samuele Grassi, G. Mellos","doi":"10.1017/S1359135522000550","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1359135522000550","url":null,"abstract":"This article reflects on the visual, spatial, and textual devices deployed by the Architettura Radicale in the 1960s and 1970s through a discussion of a pedagogical project developed for undergraduate architecture students from Monash University, Australia, as part of a travelling intensive based in Prato, Italy. At the time, Prato became the subject of debate about the rapid expansion of consumer culture in Italy, as underscored in Claudio Greppi’s graduating project, ‘Territorial City-Factory’ (1964-5). This architectural proposal rendered the area between Prato and Florence as a totalising city-factory, a proposition that was later developed under Archizoom as ‘No-Stop City’ (1968-70). Greppi’s recasting of Prato as a site for political and architectural experimentation became the catalyst for a teaching-led research project, re-examining the work of the Radical movement in Tuscany. In collaboration with architect and artist Gianni Pettena, the intensive sought to draw out the performative and embodied approaches implicit in his own work and that of his peers including UFO and 9999, as well as the rhetorical devices embedded within the critical fictions of Superstudio and Archizoom. By first dissecting and then redeploying these techniques in response to a site-specific brief, the ultimate pedagogical aim was to expose the students to an expanded range of architectural approaches and to re-evaluate the nature of radical practices ‘within and against’ the omnipresent struggles of late capitalism, and the contemporary cultural and educational context of neoliberalism and the university.","PeriodicalId":43799,"journal":{"name":"arq-Architectural Research Quarterly","volume":"5 1","pages":"315 - 330"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85125108","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}
Jacqui Alexander, Samuele Grassi, G. Mellos, Gianni Pettena
{"title":"The ‘becoming-complex’ of architecture","authors":"Jacqui Alexander, Samuele Grassi, G. Mellos, Gianni Pettena","doi":"10.1017/S1359135522000562","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1359135522000562","url":null,"abstract":"Gianni Pettena (1940) has been described as an ‘architect by training and artist by protest’, and an ‘architect actively on strike’. Both a member of the Florentine branch of the Architettura Radicale and a selfproclaimed outsider – as insinuated by his contribution to the iconic Global Tools portrait, in which he holds up a sign: Io sono la spia, or ‘I am a spy’ – Pettena’s work was unique among the group in its deep affinities with the land art and the American countercultural movement, as an extension of earlier, anti-capitalist ideas pursued in Italy that explored the decoupling of function from form in architecture.","PeriodicalId":43799,"journal":{"name":"arq-Architectural Research Quarterly","volume":"41 1","pages":"385 - 391"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78320838","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":"ARQ volume 26 issue 4 Cover and Back matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s1359135523000027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1359135523000027","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43799,"journal":{"name":"arq-Architectural Research Quarterly","volume":"128 1","pages":"b1 - b2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86095333","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":"Sweeping criticism: Rem Koolhaas’ Kunsthal in Rotterdam and the new Europe","authors":"Tibor Pataky","doi":"10.1017/s1359135522000574","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1359135522000574","url":null,"abstract":"Previous research on the Kunsthal Rotterdam - designed by OMA/Rem Koolhaas from 1987 to 1992 - has been limited in scope and depth, taking into account only a fraction of the available archival sources. The few scholarly articles to be published in the past twenty years have focused on the relation between interior and exterior (2003), the role of montage (2015), the concept of the ‘pliable’ floor (2018), and a first project for the Kunsthal that never materialised (2016).1 The subject of this article, namely the relation between the project and its context of origin, has not yet been addressed. My argument is based on a research project that reconstructs the genesis of the arts centre in minute detail, drawing on extensive archival research and interviews with several OMA staff members and municipal representatives involved in the project.2 The account dovetails with the discussion of three distinct phases in the Kunsthal's design - the first project, the inception of the second scheme, and the development of the project between 1989 and 1992 - with ‘digressions’ on the respective historical backdrop, concluding with the particularly intricate relation between the project and the prospect of European unification at the turn of the 1990s.","PeriodicalId":43799,"journal":{"name":"arq-Architectural Research Quarterly","volume":"51 1","pages":"300 - 314"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90166631","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":"ARQ volume 26 issue 4 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s1359135523000039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1359135523000039","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43799,"journal":{"name":"arq-Architectural Research Quarterly","volume":"36 1","pages":"f1 - f4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74088162","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":"Civil landscapes","authors":"R. Risser","doi":"10.1017/s1359135522000549","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1359135522000549","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on philosophical writings ranging from the Enlightenment and the Romantics through to the contemporary world - including, among others, Rousseau, Hegel, and Thoreau - I explore the civil dimensions of Cornelia Hahn Oberlander’s gardens and landscape designs. I argue that Oberlander’s landscapes are not merely visual delights; they are civil, humanist works. I survey a selection of her designs, from collaborations with Arthur Erickson and Renzo Piano to her public housing projects and the playgrounds that she designed in-and-around her home of Vancouver, Canada. A secondary argument I make is that Oberlander’s gardens and landscapes are not merely aesthetic objects, but artworks, and they do the work of art as Hegel describes it: showing us something of our human spirit, and specifically our creative and political geist.","PeriodicalId":43799,"journal":{"name":"arq-Architectural Research Quarterly","volume":"1 1","pages":"345 - 356"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84743578","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":"Community Place Initiatives post-austerity, and how a ‘civic’ School of Architecture might support them","authors":"C. Butterworth, T. Schneider, Maša Šorn","doi":"10.1017/s1359135522000495","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1359135522000495","url":null,"abstract":"Austerity measures have been discussed widely since sweeping cuts have been made to local government budgets following the global financial crisis of 2007-08. More than a decade later, the impact of these measures on everyday lives of communities is still growing. We use the context of austerity to discuss our research in partnership with Community Place Initiatives in the city of Sheffield, UK, and to examine the approaches they use to attempt to overcome the shortcomings and challenges of precarity. This article focuses on revealing the impacts that budget cuts have had and are still having, and speculates upon what these findings mean for the role that schools of architecture can play outside the academy. We draw on research conducted by Urban Education Live Sheffield - a team of researchers and educators from the School of Architecture, University of Sheffield in the UK, and the Department of Architecture, Technische Universität Braunschweig in Germany. The team is part of a broader international project, Urban Education Live (UEL), a multidisciplinary research project with partners from across Europe funded by the ERA-NET Cofund Smart Urban Futures (ENSUF) programme, established by the Joint Programming Initiative Urban Europe. Through a multi-modal ethnographic and design-led approach combining interviews, case studies, and ‘live’ pedagogy, we examine how Community Place Initiatives in Sheffield deal with a context that has fundamentally changed the ways in which they operate in, or in relation to, their place over the past decade. We explore how collaborations between these local partners and architectural researchers and students can be mutually beneficial within this context, in order to speculate upon how such collaborations can be more effective in their contribution to local place-based urban capacity building and future resilience.","PeriodicalId":43799,"journal":{"name":"arq-Architectural Research Quarterly","volume":"60 1","pages":"331 - 344"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90324594","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}
G. Boyd, Aoibheann ni Mhearain, J. McLaughlin, Tara D. Kennedy
{"title":"Visualising St Brendan’s: mapping a conservation management plan for Birr Community School","authors":"G. Boyd, Aoibheann ni Mhearain, J. McLaughlin, Tara D. Kennedy","doi":"10.1017/S1359135522000604","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1359135522000604","url":null,"abstract":"Paradigmatic of a cultural shift in Irish education in the 1960s, St Brendan’s Community School in Birr, County Offaly was designed by Peter and Mary Doyle as a flexible and extendable mat-building articulated by generous social spaces including exterior courtyards and an interior ‘street’. Owned by the Department of Education and Skills, administered by a Board of Management and occupied by approximately one thousand staff and pupils daily, St Brendan’s has been in continuous use since its opening in 1980. Generations of students have benefited from the intimate relationship between the cultural and social life of the school and the architectural form, fabric, and technology that facilitates it. But by the beginning of the twentieth-first century, due to the lack of consideration given to such aspects at the time it was conceived and constructed, the building was suffering from ongoing material degradation and issues in environmental performance. This article reflects on a research project undertaken on the school, which aimed to provide the means by which its learning environment and energy use could be improved and optimised in a manner consistent with the integrity of the architects’ conceptual thinking and built design: the opportunity for St Brendan’s to continue its course as a successful paradigm, this time for twenty-first-century education through the reconciliation of its future use with its social and education heritage. Guided by the ‘three dimensions of modernity’ - social, technical, and aesthetic - this process involved the development of new ‘ways of seeing’ and ‘methods of action’ applied to the school realised through the production of a series of representations that collectively identified, mapped, and re-presented the significances and values of the school, element by element. The relationships between these phenomena were complex and necessitated an innovative interdisciplinary approach. St Brendan’s may have embodied a radical new social agenda for education and indeed society in twentieth-century Ireland in its architecture, but the building remains unlisted and, until recently, its significance (nationally and internationally) has been much overlooked. Part of this project’s agenda, therefore, involved raising awareness in the value of the building among existing and potential future stakeholders. The creation of accessible forms of communication that would both synthesise and make clear the complex data generated and the relationships between them was of central importance to the team’s approach. The paper ultimately argues that while attuned to a specific site, these techniques contain the possibility of a wider application, a new visual literacy for the conservation of twentieth-century buildings.","PeriodicalId":43799,"journal":{"name":"arq-Architectural Research Quarterly","volume":"31 2 1","pages":"357 - 376"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89115402","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":"Alistair Fair on supporting transformation","authors":"A. Fair","doi":"10.1017/s1359135522000331","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1359135522000331","url":null,"abstract":"Queer Spaces: An Atlas of LGBTQIA+ Places & Stories, edited by Adam Nathanial Furman and Joshua Mardell, is a landmark work in the history of architecture and the city. Bringing together some fifty contributors to discuss almost one hundred buildings and sites (and a few unbuilt projects), this global survey offers a much-needed and diverse overview of the ways in which, since the eighteenth century, queer people have created and appropriated spaces, buildings, and places, for a diverse range of uses from the intensely personal to the highly public. The book’s title is clearly deliberate. Although it has echoes of Aaron Betsky’s seminal Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire,1 the plural in the title of the current work – ‘spaces’ is key. Whereas Betsky’s title implied a singular ‘queer space’, Furman and Mardell are concerned to highlight a range of voices and perspectives, from around the globe. For the editors of this volume, queer spaces have a fundamental significance: they are ‘places where you can express yourself without fear or shame.’2 Olivia Laing’s foreword quotes the lyrics to the Pet Shop Boys’ song ‘Being Boring’ in support of this idea: ‘I never dreamt that I would get to be / the creature that I meant to be’, representing what Laing calls ‘the idea of a hidden self, a mysterious creature that can emerge from its chrysalis, given the right conditions.’3 Queer spaces are thus the ‘ecosystem’ that supports this transformation, ranging from buildings designed to support particular ways of living, to subversive, perhaps transient appropriations and adaptations of the built environment. Discussions of queer architecture and urbanism have emerged in print since the 1990s but, though ground-breaking and essential, have often been narrowly focused in terms of place, ethnicity, and gender.4 In contrast, Queer ‘...how, since the eighteenth century, queer people have created and appropriated spaces, buildings, and places ...’","PeriodicalId":43799,"journal":{"name":"arq-Architectural Research Quarterly","volume":"9 1","pages":"279 - 282"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82659880","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}