{"title":"A flat of one’s own: the Elisabeth Brugsmaflat in The Hague (1945–1958)","authors":"María Novas-Ferradás","doi":"10.1080/13602365.2023.2205436","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2023.2205436","url":null,"abstract":"In the 1950s, married women in the Netherlands were assimilated into the fixed ideal of heteronormative family and traditional family housing standards which were the norm; single women were not. Single women represented not only a separate category in post-Second World War society but also a stigmatised one. What was a woman without a man? Women were simply not expected to live alone. In the mid-twentieth century, however, high-rise residential projects were designed to enable women to live independently. Over a period of more than thirty years, Dutch women’s organisations and pioneering women architects made a key contribution to collaboratively develop emancipatory and innovative residential projects in the country’s biggest cities. In 1948, the Elisabeth Brugsma Foundation commissioned the architectural office Pot & Pot-Keegstra to build the Elisabeth Brugsmaflat in The Hague. The process was difficult, and took a long time, before the Elisabeth Brugsmaflat finally opened its doors in 1958. It was an important step to the progressive normalisation of women living independently, and also contributed to the improvement of housing standards for all.","PeriodicalId":44236,"journal":{"name":"METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture","volume":"45 1","pages":"402 - 433"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73505866","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":"Embodiment takes command: re-enacting Aldo and Hannie van Eyck’s homelife","authors":"Alejandro Campos-Uribe, Paula Lacomba-Montes","doi":"10.1080/13602365.2023.2167851","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2023.2167851","url":null,"abstract":"Grounded in an experiential understanding of architecture, this research explores ways in which architectural history can help bring works or ideas more vividly to the present. We propose here an embodied visit to Aldo and Hannie van Eyck’s house in Loenen aan de Vecht. In the house, layers of temporality, materiality, everyday living, and lived experience mingle with design solutions and worldviews affecting them. By immersing into the materiality of the Van Eycks’ home, the paper offers a lively, intensive, and qualitative understanding of the design and its connections with the architect’s contributions to post-war architectural discourses. The experiential account uses a mix of archival, ethnographic, and performative techniques, a proposed method that adds a necessary degree of complexity to architectural history. The method enacts a new form of knowledge where our bodies inform the findings, from materiality to meaning, and connects to new architectural history approaches, namely Architectural Anthropology and Performative Design Research. With all these elements, we are proposing a rich, empirical account of the project by means of three re-enactments of the Van Eycks’ homelife: a visit to the attic, table talk under the skylight, and a lively lunch in the garden. The account offers deep insights into how architectural ideas take material form, showing that specific ways of understanding history, time, or space, are indeed embodied within our built environment and that they can only be disentangled, with the help of our bodies, by performing actions within, in and around buildings.","PeriodicalId":44236,"journal":{"name":"METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture","volume":"78 1","pages":"482 - 509"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84067745","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":"Resisting Postmodern Architecture: Critical Regionalism Before Globalisation","authors":"Léa‐Catherine Szacka","doi":"10.1080/13602365.2023.2213561","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2023.2213561","url":null,"abstract":"In an age of climate emergency and amid the current global historicisation of the postmodern period, the concept of ‘critical regionalism’ is being reassessed, more than 40 years after it was first theorised by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre in 1981. With Resisting Postmodern Architecture: Critical Regionalism Before Globalisation, Stylianos Giamarelos insightfully scrutinised the critical regionalism project as a whole and from all possible directions: in its genealogy; its media construct; its application; and even as far as its misinterpretations and misopportunities. Looking at the positive worldwide dissemination and reception of the discourse of critical regionalism, Giamarelos poses the concept developed by Tzonis and Lefaivre, and later popularised by Anglo-American scholar Kenneth Frampton, as one possible response to the enduring crisis of modern architecture. The result is an important new resource in the currently growing literature on postmodernism and a study that outlines critical regionalism as an unfinished project for the twenty-first century. Yet, ultimately, this in-depth scholarly enquiry is not merely a history of postmodernism, but also an alternative history of modern Greek architecture, a commentary on architecture’s media production, and a study of operative criticism. Taking a step back, Giamarelos starts his book in the year 1980, as he returns to the well-known history of the First International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, ‘The Presence of the Past’. Announcing his ambition of telling that history from a very different perspective, the author approaches the event from the periphery and through the eyes of Greek architects Suzana and Dimitris Antonakakis. Amongst other things, the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale became famous for marking the decisive moment in which Frampton, by resigning from the show’s organisation committee, detached himself from other voices associated with postmodern architecture. As I have argued before, the Biennale also ‘enabled Frampton to develop ideas on critical regionalism that, though in reaction to the International Style, would open a path distinct to postmodernism’. Despite Frampton’s retreat, the 1980 Biennale turned into a theatre of many important encounters, mainly between Europeans and their American counterparts — following the lines already traced by Vittorio Gregotti’s 1976 ‘Europa/America’ exhibition at the Biennale. Yet, these encounters were ideologically charged; one of Giamarelos’ claim in this first chapter is that it might have been the American Review by Léa-Catherine Szacka Manchester Architecture Research Group, University of Manchester, UK lea-catherine.szacka@manchester.ac. uk","PeriodicalId":44236,"journal":{"name":"METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture","volume":"108 1","pages":"319 - 322"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75020532","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":"Big Mound: settler destruction as historic preservation","authors":"A. León","doi":"10.1080/13602365.2023.2193610","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2023.2193610","url":null,"abstract":"In 1869, the Osage burial monument known as Big Mound, located in the middle of downtown St. Louis, was destroyed. But the desecration of the site did not end there. The multiple destructions and memorialisations that this sacred site subsequently endured reveal the markers of settler colonialism, a form of occupation that replaces Indigenous populations with invasive societies. We can see this pattern take shape in the narratives constructed around the site, in the manner in which its destruction was enacted and recorded, and in the commemoration efforts made in 1929 under the sponsorship of the Colonial Dames of America. This association is dedicated to honouring the memory of settlers, the agents involved in the destruction and dispossession of Indigenous populations. The plaque installed by the group prioritises them over the Indigenous builders it is supposed to commemorate. Aggressions to the site have not stopped. In 2014, the Missouri Department of Transportation moved the marker to make way for the construction of the Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge. A few efforts have been made to palliate these actions and commemorate the monument. However, these efforts have elided and erased the claims of its builders — the Osage Nation — and constructed an image of these sites as empty, abandoned ruins built by supposedly distant, disappeared groups. By disconnecting the original builders from contemporary Indigenous groups, they have followed settler colonial frameworks resulting in acts of both physical and conceptual un-making that extend to the present. Undoing these frameworks is the first step towards reconsidering the broader site, which extends beyond the monument.","PeriodicalId":44236,"journal":{"name":"METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture","volume":"119 1","pages":"257 - 283"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86187384","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":"Infested empire: architecture and entomology in colonial Japan","authors":"M. Mullane","doi":"10.1080/13602365.2023.2186467","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2023.2186467","url":null,"abstract":"As Japan’s colonial empire pushed westward in the early twentieth century, insects pushed back. Colonists in Taiwan were besieged by the Formosan termite, a voracious but then relatively mysterious species that ate everything from government buildings to Shinto shrines. The Japanese government dispatched termite specialists to the island in response to document the damage and develop a solution. The problem was not only that termites could eat away at architecture in Taiwan; more dire was the possibility that they could travel throughout the empire and back to the mainland. Such an existential threat prompted entomologists to collaborate with architects and engineers and develop novel methods of study. Looking at entomological reports, architectural histories, and buildings that were both destroyed by termites and dedicated to displaying them, I show how termite-pocked buildings were mediated to map the Japanese colonial empire and physicalise its potentially dangerous interdependence. By approaching the special issue’s theme of ‘unmaking’ as an act of insect-led destruction, I argue that vulnerable wooden architecture served as a medium of connection between human and insect actors as both came to terms with empire.","PeriodicalId":44236,"journal":{"name":"METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture","volume":"36 1","pages":"213 - 233"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85140059","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":"Vacant spaces NY; Houses for sale","authors":"Michael Robinson Cohen","doi":"10.1080/13602365.2023.2197376","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2023.2197376","url":null,"abstract":"In the essay, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America’, Rosalind Kraus highlights the impossibility of identifying a singular throughline or aesthetic style that connected the contemporary art of her day. Seventies American art, she concluded, cannot be organised into a coherent list; in fact, it ‘is proud of its own dispersal’ and seems to intentionally negate ‘that need for a list’. The ‘index’ of Kraus’s essay title is not the alphabetical organisation of terms in a list, but rather denotes a mark or trace left by an action or object. Despite this alternate definition, and the nonconforming nature of seventies art, Kraus cannot fully discard the desire to instil a linear organisation and, thus, the list prevails in the structure of her essay. Each paragraph begins with a numeric marker providing some semblance of order to the reader and fulfilling the longing for a ‘synthetic’ device that lingers in the introductory paragraph of the essay. Kraus’s inability to avoid the impulse to list suggests not only the rhetorical power of the list, but perhaps speaks to her inability to embrace the entropy of the art of her day. A will to list is of course nothing new. Amongst architects, perhaps no one has committed to the practice of making lists more than Michael Meredith and Hillary Sample, the pair that heads the architecture firmMOS. In exhibitions and books, Meredith and Sample have previously made ‘visual lists’, to borrow a term from Umberto Eco, of scale figures, houses for sale, lo-fi architecture, and, most recently, vacant spaces. The image-based indexes made by MOS present items with a cool rationality that seems to eschew politics or really Review by Michael Robinson Cohen Founding member, Citygroup Architecture, Bard College Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, USA mcohen@bard.edu 310 Book Reviews","PeriodicalId":44236,"journal":{"name":"METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture","volume":"1 1","pages":"310 - 318"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85777659","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":"Roof politics: the materiality of interpellation","authors":"D. Wendel","doi":"10.1080/13602365.2023.2192756","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2023.2192756","url":null,"abstract":"In 2010, the Rwandan government rolled out a mandatory roof modernisation programme to replace grass thatch on every house and outbuilding in Rwanda. The initiative was ostensibly one of shelter modernisation, but rather more embedded in post-genocide nation and peace building. The paper considers Louis Althusser’s concept of ‘interpellation’ as a useful framework for understanding how the Rwandan government established relationships between architectural aesthetics, sovereignty, and peace. Ethnographic research with state ministries and interviews with rural residents reveal the ideological basis for those connections — how aesthetics regulated values and the reception of the programme by ordinary Rwandans. Historical research substantiates the persistent use of architecture aesthetics as a medium of interpellation mobilised previously in the name of morality, health, and modernity, and most recently, peace.","PeriodicalId":44236,"journal":{"name":"METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture","volume":"22 1","pages":"284 - 309"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90258625","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 city as precarious medium in granducal Tuscany","authors":"Victoria Addona","doi":"10.1080/13602365.2023.2195419","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2023.2195419","url":null,"abstract":"This paper focuses on the concept of infrastructural precariousness in early seventeenth-century administrative drawings that document urban and natural environments by the architect-engineer Gherardo Mechini. Each drawing responds to a report produced for the granducal administration on broken property: walls, streets, and banks crumbling due to floods, fires, storms, vandalism, or, more often, cumulative destruction over time. In addition to illustrating the textual descriptions of ruined architecture in lucid coloured washes, Mechini often pasted sheets picturing his proposed restoration directly above each image. A user could make, unmake, and remake virtually the built environment by flipping the paper up and down. He further collaborated on a series of topographic maps to picture Tuscan roads and land holdings. In what follows, I examine the innovative graphic solutions adopted by Mechini to visualise the legislative management of Tuscany’s precarious infrastructure and policies informed by nascent theories connecting architectural preservation to ethical rule. Drawing emerged as an expressive administrative instrument to probe how to maintain and improve the built environment and promote the perceived stability and unity of the centralised governing state.","PeriodicalId":44236,"journal":{"name":"METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture","volume":"58 1","pages":"191 - 212"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76018746","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":"Un-making architecture: an introduction to a critical framework","authors":"Jason E. Nguyen, Elizabeth J. Petcu","doi":"10.1080/13602365.2023.2213559","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2023.2213559","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue of The Journal of Architecture surveys the concept of ‘unmaking’ as an overarching facet of architectural thinking and production that has yet to be considered at a synoptic scale. When we refer to ‘un-making’, we mean the actions that result in the dismantling of architectural forms, modes of thought, and means of production. A historical study of these operations, we hope, might generate necessary theoretical frameworks to conceptualise transformations in architecture amid today’s unprecedented sociopolitical and environmental challenges. The aim of this special issue is twofold: first, it brings into dialogue topics from across different periods and geographies that explore varied yet related notions of un-making; second, it introduces a range of theoretical approaches to analyse architectural disassembly that might further conversations and actions to reimagine the discourses, institutions, and practices in the field today. How might past and ongoing instances of architectural destruction paradoxically help us develop more critical and comprehensive methods to undertake the study, reform, and design of the built environment? Through the lens of this issue’s collected historical studies, we argue that mechanisms of architectural un-making in design, environments and technologies, and politics are interdependent and must be considered in tandem to address the extraordinary architectural challenges of the twenty-first century. The forces that un-make architecture, and by which architecture un-makes, shape the physical and conceptual landscapes of the built environment as well as the world in which architecture operates. Instances of architectural unmaking can evidence human agency, such as the dismantling of the original Pennsylvania Station in New York City beginning in 1963 to make way for its now widely reviled replacement. In this case, destruction unfolded both physically, in the razing of the building by McKim, Mead and White, as well as metaphorically, in the suppression of monumental symbols of civic life in the urban field. Un-making in architecture can additionally arise from natural and environmental disasters. The destruction wrought by the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Hurricane Maria in 2017 in Puerto Rico, and the 2022 Pakistan floods highlights the urban and regional scales of natural catastrophes. Such natural and environmental forms of architectural un-making can be difficult to disentangle from human actions. For instance, the vulnerability of certain buildings, communities, and infrastructure in the Global South are linked to the lasting impacts of imperialism, including the design Jason E. Nguyen","PeriodicalId":44236,"journal":{"name":"METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture","volume":"1 1","pages":"183 - 190"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83465168","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":"‘Some residue of prejudice against atomic power’: Oscar Newman’s underground city and peaceful nuclear explosions","authors":"Eliyahu Keller","doi":"10.1080/13602365.2023.2181373","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2023.2181373","url":null,"abstract":"Beginning in 1957, the United States Government pursued an unimaginable enterprise. For eighteen years, and as part of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s ‘Atoms for Peace’ initiative, the controversial Project Plowshare employed hundreds of scientists, engineers, and policymakers, and facilitated 27 tests and 31 nuclear detonations for an outrageous goal: the use of nuclear weapons for constructive means. The experiments were designed to explore a range of energy-related and infrastructural projects such as gas and isotope extraction or excavations for the purposes of constructing new harbours, canals, and transportation ways. This article examines a speculative architectural project inspired directly by Project Plowshare: a proposal for an underground city to be built beneath Manhattan in a spherical cavity created by a nuclear bomb, suggested by the Canadian architect and planner Oscar Newman (1935–2004), and published in Esquire magazine in 1969. Rather than examining this project for its architectural qualities or plausibility, this article explores Newman’s underground city as a document that testifies to the conditions of its making and situates it as a concise, literal, and radical representation of the conditions under which architecture was imagined in the Cold War decades in the United States. In Newman’s underground city, architecture is embedded within a constellation of geopolitics, warfare, and propaganda, and makes visible the inherent dependability between technological progress, construction and development, and environmental destruction.","PeriodicalId":44236,"journal":{"name":"METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture","volume":"30 1","pages":"234 - 256"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81573736","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}