Like so many of our open issues, this number of Architectural Theory Review tugs on the loose threads of several recent thematic issues.
The first article, for instance, by Federico Soriano and Maria Dolores Palacios Díaz returns to the theme of mannerism in contemporary architecture—not as the historiographical question treated by Luke Morgan (through landscape), Tiffany Hunt (through Bruno Zevi), and Matthew Critchley (through Anthony Blunt and the methods he tracks) in ATR volume 24, number 2 (2020), but as a matter of architectural design, superhistorical relationships, tactics bound less to specific historical circumstances than to resonance, quotation, and the architect’s command of history itself. Against an historical notion of mannerism, informed by Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), they identify mannerist “characteristics” amongst works of modern, postmodern, and contemporary architecture. The mid-century literature on this period-style (in architecture, and elsewhere) less explains the architectural works we encounter in this essay (from Palladio to EMBT) than invites a dialogue between historically derived principles and (now) historically situated practices.
Felix McNamara, in the next paper, explores the post-war aesthetic politics of the quaint in commercialised images of Irish environments, emphasising the power of this aesthetic category as a means—across political divides—to cultivate the past in particular visions for the present. The postcards of the John Hinde Studio and the urban design schemes of the Tidy Towns programme are used specifically to help disclose the Irish identity aesthetics of the 1960s and 1970s. The paper argues that these quaint phenomena contributed to Irish post-war liberal modernisation and its fostering of international tourism, presenting carefully constructed, commercialised images of the “pre-modern” and the “traditional.” It also argues that the quaint is an ordered, controlled measure that provokes action against that which digresses from the norms it represents. In this regard, McNamara highlights anti-Traveller discourses sublimated in the aesthetic means of the Tidy Towns programme. Ultimately, he advocates for attention to quaintness as a means to advance understanding of the use of aesthetics in the politicising of history.
In his essay on “Metabolic Infrastructures,” Peter Šenk turns to the ways in which references to the organic processes of metabolism have shaped and influenced the design and thinking of architecture and the built environment. Šenk contrasts current approaches in urban metabolism studies for the design of sustainable cities with the metaphorical approaches of the Japanese metabolism movement from the 1960s and 1970s. Acknowledging the risks of literal translations and the assumed immediate applicability of organic concepts in metabolic urbanism leading to potentially technocratic outcomes, Šenk alerts us to the potential of integrating metaphorical interpretations of metabolism as found in the poetic architectural projects of the Metabolists themselves. Effectively, he argues for what he calls metabolic infrastructure to produce more meaningful outcomes that integrate aspects of vitality and the multiple relationships between organisms and their environments, bridging the metabolic rift between literal and metaphorical organic analogies.
In an echo of issues raised in issue 1 of this present volume (“The Architecture of Global Governance”), Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió examines how canonical mid-century modernism in Palm Springs, California—so-called “desert modernism”—is implicated in the structural conditions of Native American dispossession. Carrió formulates the methodological basis for a revisionist historiography of US mid-century modernist architecture attuned to the intense campaigns of dispossession and concerted Indigenous resistance spanning from the 1930s to the 1970s. Central to the paper’s argument is the notion of “jurisdictional technics” through which architectural production is understood as one mode of organising “relations of authority among and between competing regimes of order.” The discussion traverses shifts in the scales and media of settler-colonial jurisdiction, examining the role of mapping, legal precedent, and practices of categorisation as the technical adjuncts of a mid-century architectural culture associated with Albert Frey and Richard Neutra. Inversely, the paper also explores the Indigenous appropriation of the techniques of colonial sovereignty, analysing the case of the Agua Caliente Tribe’s engagement with colonial bureaucracy in Palm Springs, culminating in the first long-term commercial lease of Native American land in US history.
Aaron Tobey takes up the themes of “Cosmopolitanism’s Others” (volume 26, number 3, 2022) as he resituates a selection of large-scale architectural projects commissioned by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s and designed by US architecture firms. He does so by reading these projects against two of the government’s key political agendas at the time: economic planning and Pan-Islamism. Contextualising architectural archival material with government documents, Tobey argues that the Saudi government utilised these projects not only as a state-building exercise but also as a way of engineering broader transnational economic and ideological relations that still resonate today in the region and beyond. Moreover, Tobey complicates common conceptions of the architectural projects of Saudi Arabia’s building program as precursors to contemporary Islamic Modernism, results of US imperial hegemony, or, as the works of architectural genius. Rather, he makes apparent how architectural production operates as part of larger world-making processes situated within a more complex network of relations.
Concluding the issue are two papers developed from a session at the annual meeting of the Society of City and Regional Planning History, held in New York (and remotely) in 2022—a discussion on the stakes of the city in the work of Mitchell/Giurgola Architects, and of Romaldo Giurgola in particular. A contribution by Philip Goad explores a scheme declared by one critic (and then others, in his wake) as the runner-up in a competition to design the new Boston City Hall. Goad positions this unrealised proposal as a humanist response to the late modern city, less a monument than a concretised strategy based in relationships at once visual, historical and experiential. The second of these papers, by Catherine Lassen and Cameron Logan, also looks at an unrealised project by this same office—this time less an unofficial silver medallist than a scheme that went through several iterations before the architects finally withdrew rather than compromising their integrity. As the authors show, this project for the American Institute of Architects headquarters in Washington, DC (ultimately built by The Architects Collaborative) draws the city into its historical site, framing moments of deep historical significance with a recurring vocabulary of design elements. Both these papers reflect on both the nature of the historical American city and the work of the architect in preserving, isolating, and protecting monuments
In his review of Marko Jobst and Naomi Stead’s Queering Architecture (2023), Stathis Yeros observes that architectural scholarship has been slow to engage queer theory as a productive framework for interpretation and critique. Yeros argues that the growing discourse on queerness and social justice, as embodied in Jobst and Stead’s volume, is beginning to inform a new literature on architecture’s role in developing counter narratives and oppositional aesthetics capable of reorienting architectural thought and pedagogy away from the normative subjects upon which the discipline has been built. “The book’s undeniable strength,” Yeros concludes, “is that it frames a timely discussion within the emerging field of queer architectural studies, which has much to offer contemporary design theory and practice.”
Aleksandr Bierig’s review of Moritz Gleich’s Inhabited Machines (2023) opens by asking whether buildings “dream of becoming machines” endowed with “clock-like regularity,” and, if so, what in fact remains for the architect other than to house their many services, “the real technical and cultural significance of architecture?” Bierig’s exploration of these questions charts the long and fruitful relationship between architectural and mechanical/machinic thought, seeing in Gleich’s study a simultaneous extension of the historical arc against which this relation has typically been understood as well as an expansion of its conventional frame of reference. What emerges in Gleich’s account, according to Bierig, is a narrative of social control and an escalating dependence on fossil fuel consumption through which the traditional preoccupations of the architect disappear into myriad components, gizmos, and contrivances. In its big conceptual moves and expansive timeframe, “Gleich’s book is an essential guide to the machinic genealogy of our modern built environment,” Bierig concludes, even if the question it ultimately leaves unanswered—how to imagine a future beyond the grasp of the machine?—remains suspended throughout the analysis.
Finally, Michael Hill’s review of Mari Hvattum’s Style and Solitude (2023) rounds out the book reviews in this open issue of ATR. Style, Hill argues, is often “looked upon with suspicion, seen as superficial and dependent on the sort of featurism that architecture should have evolved beyond.” Working through Hvattum’s argument, Hill examines the productive role style has played as an enduring discursive site for the discipline: “In architecture, style was as much a practice as a category of art history […] the means by which architects could debate morality and philosophy. […] Style bound architecture to urban fabric and linked structures across time and place; without it, buildings were mute and architects alone.” Returning to the question of style as explored in Hvattum’s exegesis, suggests Hill, will elevate the concept’s significance for contemporary architectural theory at a moment when it seems most derided and dismissed.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).