Although the contents of this issue were wrapped up and posted online as 2020 was getting underway, a little behind schedule, it has taken some time to consign the issue, finally, to print; which is to say that the editorial has been quietly nudged down my list of things to do over the course of the last weeks. What began as a mild delay I could explain away with unremarkable excuses quickly became exacerbated by the most extraordinary turn of global events. (A note of thanks, therefore, for the patience of the production team at Taylor and Francis.)
It hardly seems right, now, to pretend that these introductory remarks were penned back in November or December of 2019, when they should have been written, when the protest movement in Hong Kong and the unprecedented opening act of the Australian bushfire season—followed by widespread flooding—seemed enough to keep those of us for whom the year’s end is the hot bit from slipping into a summer reverie. As the financial impact on universities, and then the economy generally, of selective border closures and forms of self-determined or dictated isolation gave way to various forms of lock-down—from the midst of which I now write—we have been quickly forced into new habits that are unlikely to see us return to our old (2019!) behaviors without reflection. Already these last months have seen a sudden and massive recalibration of the conditions of intellectual work and institutional life. Even if this is not exactly without precedent, it has not happened in most of our lifetimes. We have been forced to think seriously about a great deal, drawing fresh distinctions, on new terms, between the essential and the desirable.
In a world that suddenly expresses those distinctions in policy and regulation and expenditure, it is hard to argue that architectural theory—or the intellectual work that happens in and around architecture—is anything but superfluous to the immediate tasks of containment and treatment. We can understand many of the measures in place to control rates of transmission to be primarily spatial, and we can, in unison, reach for that bit of our libraries with which we can make this point persuasively. However, we need look only to the likes of Giorgio Agamben or Slavoj Žižek and to how their responses to these turns of events have been received to understand that mere habit, even intellectual habit, will not do. He may be a little blunt, but in a recent think-piece Justin E. H. Smith captures a mood that may yet prevail: “Honestly, at this point whoever’s left of the vanguard of continental philosophy should probably just start hawking men’s vitamin supplements on late-night TV.”1 Today there seems to be a more precarious gap between thinking and action than there did a few weeks ago, and more of a need, too, to argue for the necessity of thinking about architecture, and testing that which is signaled by the term, as the authors in this journal do. As for the world at large, much will depend here upon what the next year brings. We can hardly predict how the present pandemic will play out, nor how its aftermath will affect even our best laid plans. In a clip doing the rounds these last few days, Naomi Klein recalls the words of Milton Friedman (a curious pairing), who observed in 1982: “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.”2 The cultivation of a landscape of ideas seems like one task of a journal like this—or rather, seems like one task this journal can, should, strenuously pursue.
To that end, I have, together with Jasper Ludewig (from the next issue, the journal’s Associate Editor), asked a number of our colleagues from around the world to say something of the work to be done now, and through it, the work to done in cultural and academic institutions. Their responses will be published as soon as they are ready on the ATR online platform and will be edited into a collection for the second issue of 2020. The first issue of 2020 is already in production, with fascinating reflections on topics of surprising relevance to our changing circumstances.
In January, while on a visiting appointment at Penn State University, I followed the recommendation of a friend and read Stefan Zweig’s memoir The World of Yesterday (Die Welt von Gestern, 1943)—a melancholy yet impassioned account of his life in letters, but also of the effects of the experience of the First World War upon his sense of security around a European literary experience and its demands for freedom of movement and expression.3 I’m not yet ready to say that we are beyond the world of our own yesterday, now, since the changes to come that will shake us as the war shook Zweig are indeed still in the future. He was, though, writing of this time from the midst of exile and a second, more profound experience of deracination (from which he would not return)—or, rather, in order to make sense of his present by reflecting on the crises that had piled up from that earlier moment to the time in which he wrote. Perhaps there is something to be drawn from this. The landscape of ideas on which our future will be built will be well-served by a clear-eyed and demanding approach to the intellectual legacy of our field. In this respect, the mission of ATR is, at its base, unchanged—and the papers in this issue capture the scope of that mission.
The pages that follow include four contributions on a range of topics—unlike the first two numbers in this volume, this is an open issue. An article by Rosemary Spooner (University of Glasgow) explores the fabric and media of the international exhibition in Glasgow in 1888 as complementary sites of imperial formation and confirmation—and of Glasgow as a city in which those processes were reinforced time after time. Joanna Merwood-Salisbury (Victoria University of Wellington) considers the intersection of urbanism, sanitation and politics in her reading of the debate around New York’s turn-of-the-century tenement block—and, through it, the twinned matters of evidence and expertise as it concerns the analysis and production of high-density urban housing in that moment. Where both these papers explore architecture’s content and expression through historical cases, Gareth Abrahams (University of Liverpool) pursues the idea of assemblage and, through it, the edges of architecture’s intersections with the philosophical discourse of Deleuze and Guattari. His contribution to the issue tests the notion of architecture that takes shape in that relationship. Rounding off the issue is a “final word” in this volume (23) by Alexandra Brown and Léa-Catherine Szacka (of Monash University and the University of Manchester, respectively), building on the guest-edited issue with which they began the year (“The Architecture Exhibition as Environment”). In their contribution to this issue they turn to the reconstructed Architectural Association members’ room, built and toured across the mid-1970s. As much a relic as a work of ideological propagation, it contained and (in so doing) transformed the AA’s idea of itself.
Perhaps the model they share will prove timely.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Andrew Leach
Andrew Leach is Professor of Architecture and Associate Dean (Research) in the University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning. He was the 2019-20 Stuckeman Visiting Professor of Interdisciplinary Design at Penn State University, and is Editor-in-Chief of ATR. Recent books include Sydney School and Crisis on Crisis.
Notes
1 Justin E. H. Smith, “It’s All Just Beginning,” The Point, March 23, 2020, www.thepointmag.com/examined-life/its-all-just-beginning/
2 See coverage in “‘Coronavirus Capitalism’: Naomi Klein’s Case for Transformative Change Amid Coronavirus Pandemic,” Democracy Now, March 19, 2020, https://www.democracynow.org/2020/3/19/naomi_klein_coronavirus_capitalism
3 Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York: Viking Press, 1943).