Re-Viewing the Review: A Preview

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Notes

1. Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens), “Wednesday, February 7, 1906,” in Autobiography of Mark Twain, vol.1, eds. Harriet Elinor Smith et al., (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 339.

2. Heidrun Friese, “Thresholds in the Ambit of Discourse: On the Establishment of Authority at Academic Conferences,” in Little Tools of Knowledge: Historical Essays on Academic and Bureaucratic Practices, ed. Peter Becker and William Clark (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 306. Her “epitext” category is complemented by the “peritext,” which she associates with the way in which “[a]cademic discourse is traversed by numerous social lines of demarcation, whose tensions and separations incessantly open and close discursive and rhetorical spaces,” 300. Friese refers to the web of various different relationships in play at the same time during an academic conference, a “nexus of transits in which discourses, like texts, incessantly refer to each other, transform each other, and cross each other out. Quite different texts that actually belong to quite different situations become constantly transferred and intercut. They are connected to each other. At the thresholds they survey and respond to each other,” 306.

3. Twain, Autobiography, 339.

4. Angela Andersen, “‘A Tenacious Reputation for Unreliability:’ Re-Viewing Evliya Çelebi’s Description of the Diyarbakir Ulu Cami in the Seyahatname,” in this issue. The quotation in Andersen’s title is taken from Suraiya Faroqhi’s “Foreword” to Robert Dankoff, ed. An Ottoman Mentality: The World of Evliya Çelebi (Leiden: Brill, 2004), xvii.

5. Jorge Luis Borges, “John Wilkins’ Analytical Language,” in Selected Nonfictions, ed. and trans. Eliot Weinberger (London: Penguin, 1991 [1942]), 231. See also, of course, Michel Foucault’s discussion of Borges’ “Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge,” in the preface to The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970 [1966]), xv.

6. Amanda Reeser Lawrence and Ana Miljački, eds., Terms of Appropriation: Modern Architecture and Global Exchange (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).

7. Twain, Autobiography, 339.

8. Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 58, 61. For Bloom, see, for instance, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1973).

9. Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, 62.

10. Rosa Ainley, “Looking Back Again and Looking Forward. Re: Review and Reconstruction in Writing and Architecture,” in this issue.

11. Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, trans. Maureen Freely (London: Faber and Faber, 2009 [2008]).

12. Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories of a City, trans. Maureen Freely (London: Faber and Faber, 2006 [2003]); and Istanbul, Memories and the City, trans. Maureen Freely (New York: Knopf, 2017 [2015]).

13. Deriu refers us to Walter Benjamin’s notion of collecting as renewal, described as a childlike activity, like “touching things and giving them names … To renew the old world – that is the collector’s deepest desire ….” See Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 61.

14. Francesco Zuddas, “Radical Notes: Archizoom Re-Viewed via Ivan Illich,” in this issue. Zuddas’ notion of “establishing alliances” is reminiscent of a practice noticed among students by Mark Cousins, long-term teacher at the Architectural Association, London – the practice of co-opting, for example, Jacques Derrida’s writings not for what they actually say, but for what the co-opter would like them to say.

15. See Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1971).

16. Architectural Theory Review, aims and scope https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=ratr20 (accessed April 2020).

17. In “Eating Oysters, Naked: Realizing Critical Architectural Discourse,” in this issue, Andrew Steen notes that Vriesendorp’s drawing is captioned variously by Baird Eating Oysters with Boxing Gloves, Naked or simply Oysters with Boxing Gloves, Naked. The image also appears in Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 132, where the caption reads A machine for metropolitan bachelors.

18. Momoyo Kaijima, Junzo Kuroda, and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, Made in Tokyo: Guidebook (Tokyo: Kaijima Institute Publishing Co. Ltd., 2001).

19. Ibid., 18.

20. Lys Villalba, “Made in Tokyo: 15th Year Update,” 2015, https://www.lysvillalba.net/Made-in-Tokyo-15th-Year-Update (accessed August 2020).

21. See Momoyo Kaijima, Laurent Stalder, and Yu Iseki, eds., Architectural Ethnography (Tokyo: TOTO Publishing).

22. Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, ed. and trans. John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 1977).

23. Patrizio Martinelli, “Fragments and Visions of a Spatial Discourse: Re-Viewing Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces,” in this issue.

24. Perec, Species of Spaces, 91.

25. Xavier de Maistre, Voyage autour de ma chambre, 1794, a parody of the grand travel narrative, available online at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40248 (accessed August 2020).

26. See Javier Fernandez Contreras, The Miralles Projection: Thinking and Representation in the Architecture of Enric Miralles (San Francisco and New York: ORO Editions, 2020).

27. Renegades: Bruce Goff and the American School of Architecture (curatorial team led by Luca Guido, Stephanie Pilat and Angela Person), Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma – Norman, originally scheduled to run 23 January–05 April 2020. The virtual exhibition can be visited here: https://gibbs.oucreate.com/renegadesonline/. There is also an extensive, scholarly catalogue accompanying the exhibition: Luca Guido, Stephanie Pilat, and Angela Person, eds., Renegades: Bruce Goff and the American School of Architecture (Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020).

28. Enric Miralles, Cosas vistas a izguierda y derech (sin gafas), PhD thesis, first version, 1987 (COAC library D-27317), 5, quoted in Javier Fernandez Contreras, The Miralles Projection, 21.

29. As an echo of the chain library, think of the recent tendency to monumentalize the book, seen in examples such as the self-declared “colossal volume” that is the Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture (2004), or the OMA Book Machine re-view exhibition at the Architectural Association, London (May 2010).

30. See Regin Schwaen, “Judging a Book by its Cover,” in this issue.

31. Anne Hultzsch, email to the editors, 12 November 2019. The event details are as follows: “Architecture Published,” Wednesday, 13 June 2018, National Library of Estonia. Contributors included Petra Brouwer (University of Amsterdam and Editor of Architectural Histories, the EAHN Journal), Maarten Delbeke (ETH Zurich), Francisco Diaz (Universidad Católica de Chile and Editor of Ediciones ARQ), Rute Figueiredo (ESAP–Porto School of Arts), Charles Rice (University of Technology Sydney and then Editor of The Journal of Architecture), Mika Savela (Editor of Arkkitehti, The Finnish Architectural Review), André Tavares (ETH Zurich), and Erik Wegerhoff (ETH Zurich).

32. Here, the ethics or reviewing are closely related to those of referencing – see Hélène Frichot, Creative Ecologies: Theorizing the Practice of Architecture (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019), esp. “OOOh, no!” 101–9.

33. See Collins Online Dictionary, https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/review (accessed September 2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Diana Periton

Diana Periton is an independent researcher in architectural history. Her work focuses on the development of the discipline of urbanism in France in the early twentieth century, asking what urbanism’s various practitioners understood a city to be. She currently teaches at the University of Westminster in London. Publications include essays in the Journal of Architecture and in books such as The Intimate Metropolis, 2009 (which she co-edited with Vittoria Di Palma and Marina Lathouri), Reading Architecture and Culture, 2012 (ed. Adam Sharr) and Economy and Architecture, 2015 (eds. Stephen Kite, Mhairi McVicar, Juliet Odgers). She is a founding editor of Architecture and Culture.

Stephen Walker

Stephen Walker is Head of Architecture at the University of Manchester. His work brings together aspects of theory with a broad range of empirical examples, including Mediaeval Breton architecture, ring-roads and the work of contemporary artists (in particular, Gordon Matta-Clark and Helen Chadwick, about whom he has presented and published extensively). More recent work has focused on the architecture of traveling street fairs and fairgrounds. He has been book review editor of Architecture and Culture since its launch.