Introduction: Architecture and Culture during a Global Pandemic

This Open issue of Architecture and Culture investigates the relationship between architecture and the cultures – geographical and disciplinary – through which architecture’s disciplinary knowledge is constructed at a time just prior to and amidst a global pandemic. This difficult and dangerous time has affected our editors, authors, peer-reviewers and publisher to differing degrees – academic parents have been negotiating their research while juggling family commitments, the greater online activity of work has freed up or put additional pressures on our technology and time, many involved in the journal have been stretched having to deal with new modes of working and researching. We are grateful to everyone for their patience, commitment and generosity to the journal and the production of this issue. The conditions and experiences of the pandemic have triggered conservations about the environment of academic publishing and we, as an all women editorial board with Suzanne Ewing and Diana Periton, want to create space to continue those conservations and strive for diversity of voices, narratives and perspectives. The community of Architecture and Culture authors, readers, reviewers and editors who support one another through and beyond the national and international networks of the AHRA (Architectural Humanities Research Association) are working collaboratively online and in the real spaces of their homes rather than their universities or offices toward a more open, equitable and discursive community of interdisciplinary architectural theorists, educators and practitioners.

The mandates of Architecture and Culture – to facilitate inclusivity and experimentation – remain paramount to the content included in this journal issue. Contributors to Volume 8 Issue 2 of Architecture and Culture are international in their spread. They are based in the United Kingdom (Tom Northey and Louis D’Arcy-Reed), North America (Andreas Luescher), South America- Equador (Christian Parreno), Norway (Ingrid Lønningdal), Denmark (Kristen Van Haeren and Rikke Munck Petersen), Belgium (Elke Couchez), the Netherlands (Gabriel Schwake, K.M Klaske Havik and Dorina Pllumbi), China (Jing Yang), Indonesia (Paramita Atmodiwirjo and Yandi Andri Yatmo), and New Zealand (Maria Rodgers, Bruno Marques and Jacqueline McIntosh). The authors range from early-career researchers to renowned professors who are working individually or in collaboration and are from a range of disciplines, inside and outside architecture although in this issue, there is a deeper but not exclusive reflection on conversations concerning landscapes and architecture.

While the issue is not curated, its content has been divided into two broad themes. At a time during the pandemic when many of us are no longer able to experience places, the first theme is concerned with the culture of place-making and is entitled “Embodied Experience, Audio/Photography/Drawing and Memory.” The second theme used to structure the sequence of content in the issue is concerned with participatory cultures and cultural identities and is entitled “Participatory Community Design, Nationhood and Politics.” The two sections both expand the cultures of interdisciplinary architectural research.

Northey’s Frontispiece and Endpiece explore how embodied on-site audio experience of the Swiss city of Bern can reengage with his linguistic, childhood memories of the city in which his grandmother lived. Contributing to the culture of embodied experience and memory in Theme 1, Northey’s submissions transgress computational design with acoustic and photographic research methods to engage with issues surrounding the intangible relationship between memory and place. Luescher’s research employs hand sketching and photography on site combined with reflective, poetic, biographical prose to examine how two museums are products of the Norwegian cultural principle of deep regionalism, particularly in terms of theatricality and environmentalism. Even if we have not visited the museums, Luescher’s prose enlightens us as to the degree of deep intertwining between memories of the poets to whom the museums pay tribute, the unique sites and architectural experiences of the museums. In a similarly empathic and close reading of what might appear unremarkable landscapes, Van Haeren and Munck Petersen use a visual essay methodology that incorporates exquisite photography with critical but playful captioning to read the Danish landscape Farum Midtpunkt, a famous social housing building. Their captions expand a method developed by ethnographer Clifford Geertz as “news way of seeing” called thick descriptions which “aim to bring together and make accessible the many layers, perspectives, scales of truths that manifest themselves within the subject of analysis” to quote the authors. Unlike Van Haeren and Munck Petersen’s article, D’Arcy-Reed’s black and white photo-essay and intuitive-led prose – backgrounded by Bernard Tschumi’s theorization of “collision-relationships” – employs psychoanalytic “site-writing” to diagnose and analyze The Hepworth Wakefield, an art museum in West Yorkshire, UK. Yang’s essay on the Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne, Switzerland and the Louvre-Lens Museum in Lens, France investigates the extreme expression of materiality, formal austerity and visual experience in Japanese architect, SANAA’s work. It argues that visual perception within the buildings is profoundly ambiguous, and that ambiguous perception of space encourages active bodily engagement to explore and confirm that perception. The final essay in the first theme of the journal is by Christian Parreno and Ingrid Lønningdal. As a collaborative piece, Parreno, inspired by Lønningdal’s Performance with Ruler and Digits Series, contemplates the creative process of design from anonymity to boredom and concludes that “performance projects” as distinctive typographies do not record boredom but instead accentuate iterative praxis.

In Theme 2 “Participatory Community Design, Nationhood and Politics,” the papers that explore participatory cultures in architectural production are all asking what an “architect” is and what architecture as a practice and a discipline can offer to communities and cultures. Havik and Pllumbi reflect on an historical example of collaborative design, incorporating their personal experience with interviews and critical commentary. Rodgers, Marques and McIntosh interrogate the methodology of community based participatory research in co-designing community spaces. Both of these papers navigate the hierarchies of knowledge and experience that shape participatory practice and they reevaluate the contribution of architectural knowledge in relation to other forms of knowledge, including experience, tradition and cultural heritage. This involves discussion of post-colonial implications of place making and nationhood and how architecture relates to indigenous cultures, which is also the topic of Atmodiwiro and Yatmo’s paper. As curators they are also analyzing how exhibition collection and design impacts on perceptions of architecture and its relationship to globalization and critical regionalism. Questions of representation are central to Atmodiwiro and Yatmo’s research, how materiality represents locality and national identity and how exhibition design represents concepts of architectural practice and production, as well representing a sense of place, community and identity. The final paper by Gabriel Schwake examines the historical evolution of the Israeli National Project of “Settle and Rule” mechanism through four periods of development. Through a careful study of plans examines how politics and economies of production affect urban settlements and biopolitics.

All of the papers in the issue are based on projects that happened before the global pandemic. In the changed context of lock-down and social distancing, there are important questions to ask about the form and process of collaboration and participatory research in architecture. What will community projects look like? How can architects facilitate participation and collaboration in these new conditions? Architecture and Culture endeavors to create a space for critical engagement with the current and future conditions of research and what new types of research methodologies and outputs can appropriately capture and articulate these conditions.

In terms of the culture of interdisciplinarity, the modes of research used by the contributors in this issue align with the aims of Architecture and Culture’s broader and purposely more inclusive range of publishable material. The articles range from the traditional 7,000 word illustrated essay to more experimental pieces, two of which use sound recording as both a method of research and as of representation and others that intertwine biographical narrative prose within and around traditional academically scholarly text. Audio and visual research methods are encouraged and explored to various degrees by all the authors. The way in which hand drawing and photography can be embedded in the architectural research process toward publication and the abundant use of powerful and emotive images posit research in architecture in a sensorial domain beyond the written word.

We have thoroughly enjoyed working with the authors included in this issue. We would also like to thank the peer-reviewers who generously gave their time to give constructive and positive feedback and to the production team at Taylor and Francis for their sustained support in copyediting and publishing the journal, in particular Sarah Ablett. We are also grateful to T&F for supporting our transition, this year, from 3 to 4 issues per year. Finally, as a mark of our support as editors of Architecture and Culture for the Black Lives Matter movement, this issue is named on the spine and devoted to the memory of George Floyd.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Igea Troiani

Igea Troiani (PhD) is a Professor and Subject Lead of Architecture at the University of Plymouth, UK. She was formerly Professor of Architecture and Dean of International Affairs at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU). She is an architect and academic with 25 years teaching and practice experience gained in the UK (Oxford), China (Suzhou), Germany (Münster) and Australia (Brisbane and Melbourne). Her three key areas of research are: the social production of architecture; architecture and media (focusing on filmmaking) and; architectural labour, neoliberalism and sustainable ecologies. Her research traverses the fields of architecture, urbanism, ecology, sociology, politics, economics, and visual culture. Her books include The Politics of Making (2017/2007), Transdisciplinary Urbanism and Culture (2018), Architecture Filmmaking (2019), and Visual Research Methods in Architecture (2021). Her forthcoming manuscript is entitled Playing the Game of Life: In Architecture (due out 2021). She is founding editor-in-chief of the international award-winning AHRA (Architectural Humanities Research Association) journal, Architecture and Culture. She has been a member of the AHRA Steering Group since 2006 and was formerly a member of Executive Committee of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia & New Zealand (SAHANZ). She is co-founder of the architectural studio, Original Field of Architecture, with Andrew Dawson.

Jessica Kelly

Jessica Kelly (PhD) is Research Degrees Leader and Senior Lecturer in Contextual and Theoretical studies at The University for the Creative Arts in Farnham. Her research explores the mediation of architecture in the mid-twentieth century. She is currently working on a book entitled ‘No More Giants: J.M. Richards, modernism and The Architectural Review’ for Manchester University Press (forthcoming 2021). Jessica is one of the managing editors of ‘Architecture and Culture’.