Geographies Of Architecture Research Articles

The ruin(s) of Chiloé?: An ethnography of buildings de/reterritorializing

Studying buildings can be a rich entry point into emerging cultural geographies. The archipelago of Chiloé in southern Chile is experiencing rapid change since the country’s extreme turn toward neoliberal governance in the 1970s. Once a rural, communal, and sea-faring region, it has been transformed by industrial aquaculture in recent decades which has driven a new urban landscapes and consumer-oriented lifestyles. This paper offers findings from an ethnographic study of changing consumption geographies, from iconic tourist sites linked to the region’s rich heritage geographies, to the new corporate retailers and shopping malls. Specifically, the new shopping mall clashes with the heritage and tourist landscape of colonial era churches and other unique heritage architectures that have captured the attention of tourists and investors. We glimpse a dynamic architectural geography in flux, as an array of buildings pulls the population in multiple directions at once, making it an ideal case study of the competing forces of what Deleuze and Guattari called de- and re-territorialization, an appropriate analytic for understanding the powerful forces of commodification.

Buildings as non‐human narrators: Between post‐phenomenological and object‐oriented architectural geographies

This paper intervenes in the current debate on architectural geography and the lives of buildings, aiming to provide some suggestions in light of the recent development of post‐phenomenological and object‐oriented geographical theorisation. Despite the fact that new non‐representational approaches in architectural geography do pay attention to the materialities and agencies of non‐human actors, we argue that such readings often tend to remain phenomenological and human‐centred and fail to experiment more radically with a post‐phenomenological, object‐centred stance. Analysing an example of filmic it‐narration by a fictional speaking building, namely Wim Wenders’ The Berlin Philharmonic (2014), we situate the device of non‐human narration as an experimental field for advancing a critical reflection on geographic epistemologies. Critically analysed in its paradoxes and oscillations, with its double dialectic of both empathy and defamiliarisation, it‐narration provides new insights into architectural geographies by enacting a post‐phenomenology that is consciously and aesthetically object‐oriented. We take both architectural geography and narratology as a testing ground to show the possibilities of expanding such conceptualisation within a broader range of geographical subfields.

Entering the Fifth Dimension: modular modernities, psychedelic sensibilities, and the architectures of lived experience

In this paper, we elaborate on the Fifth Dimension, an extraordinary, largely overlooked architectural example of 1960s psychedelia that was installed in a small Scottish resort town. Made up of 17 domed chambers, each designed to stimulate psychedelic sensory experiences for its intrepid visitors, the Fifth Dimension was the creation of London‐based environmental artist Keith Albarn using his experimental “Ekistikit” modular building system. We argue that the qualities and impacts of this highly inventive, utopian “fun palace” interrogate stereotypical depictions of countercultural, psychedelic creativities. We discuss how they also intersect with current geographical scholarship concerned with sensation, play, and the built environment. Two key elements of the Fifth Dimension are examined. First, building on critical geographies of architecture, we focus on Albarn's innovative system to exemplify how pioneers of environmental design used advanced modular technologies to radically re‐configure the possibilities of dwelling and working in flexible building structures. Second, drawing on aesthetic theories of the sensory, we demonstrate how the structure was designed to stimulate transformative psychedelic sensibilities as a novel form of disruptive politics to induce critical dispositions towards the built environment. Our argument is underpinned by the call for a recuperation of sensational and affective experience in the design and inhabitation of built environments. We contend that this bears particular significance for an emergent geography of play and enchantment.

New directions in the theorisation of temporary urbanisms: Adaptability, activation and trajectory

This article rethinks processes and practices of urban temporariness in a more agile, localised and context-specific way, where rhythms and dynamics of the everyday are clearly acknowledged. It discusses the directions of research required to theorise ‘temporary urbanisms’. To do so, three overlapping literatures are used: Lefebvrian conceptualisations of rhythms and the everyday; evolutionary analyses of path of change and path creation; and geographies of architecture. This article recognises that although temporariness is (evidently) a universal urban condition, diverse discursive and practical dynamics exist directing urban temporariness along particular channels and shaping space significantly while impacting people’s living environments.

Towards a material approach in rural geography: Architectural experiments in China’s rural renaissance and reconstruction movements

Existing literature in rural studies and rural geography has tended to examine rurality as a representational, discursive and cultural construction, while there have been limited efforts that examine how material processes and practices co-produce and co-constitute the social relations and cultural subjectivities that contour rural changes. This paper addresses this gap by arguing for the relevance and necessity of a material approach in rural studies, building on but also advancing existing works that look beyond social constructivist conceptualisations of rurality. To this end, it reports on a case study of architectural experiments in Haotang Village in Henan Province, as part and parcel of the proliferating rural renaissance and reconstruction (RRR) movements in reform-era China. To illustrate the empirical nuances, this study draws insights from the literatures on the critical geography of architecture, with focus on three theoretical registers: event-ness, cultural meaning and relational effect. It puts forward two arguments in relation to architectural experiments in Haotang. First, it suggests that the embodied practices that produce, consume and maintain architectural materiality continue to mediate or effectuate the production of unstable, dynamic cultural meanings; and second, it claims that the encounters between humans and the material world involve a redefinition and reorganisation of social life and relations, catalysing progressive changes such as enhanced community solidarity and motives for self-governance.

Temporal injustice and asylum reception centres in Norway: towards a critical geographies of architecture in the institution

A temporal injustice is inherently built into the asylum-seeking system. Asylum seekers lack control over their biographical and their everyday time. In Norway, most asylum seekers live in reception centres while their applications are processed. This article develops a conceptual framework for understanding the asylum centre by drawing on geographical literature on architecture and contributions from migration studies on temporality. It analyses the ways in which the reception centre becomes a focal point in the asylum seekers’ lives and how people’s lived experiences, the asylum institution and the materiality of the buildings housing the centres come together in the particular temporalities produced by the asylum-seeking process. People’s agentic capacities within institutional and material structures are conceptualised as ‘orientations’. The paper analyses the lived experience of residents in three different reception centres in Norway. The temporal frames operating in the reception centres are expressions of power that produce blurred, uncertain and clashing temporalities. In this context, the reception centre operates as a material disorientation device where institutional durability, temporary dwelling and decaying as well as sub-standard materialities are significant aspects of the asylum seekers’ experience. However, some residents are able to re-orient their perspective and find ways of coping with the uncertainty and waiting. These strategies are identified as ‘reorientations’ to show how the governance and the inhabitation in the centres come together and how people engage with the reception centre through stubborn everyday strategies of inhabiting the centre. In conclusion, the paper reflects on the limited possibility that improving the material conditions may have for a better experience of the asylum-seeking process: it is the interaction between the material, the institution and the lived experience that creates the temporal injustice.

Cultural geography of vernacular architecture in a cross-cultural context: houses of the Dai ethnic minority in South China

ABSTRACTThis paper addresses the cultural geography of the vernacular architecture of the Dai ethnic minority in Dehong Prefecture, located on the border between southern China and Myanmar. The objectives of the study include: exploring the characteristics and distributions of built forms, identifying the hybridization of ideal Dai pattern-built forms in Southeast Asia caused by the influence of the Han Chinese, and discussing the continuity and change of vernacular architecture in a cross-cultural context. The field methods include a physical survey of the cultural geography of Dai living as rice farmers in lowland geographies, a detailed investigation of their houses, and in-depth interviews with local informants about the dynamics of changes under socio-political constraints in China. The findings provide insight and knowledge about the cultural geography of architecture in a cross-cultural context.

THE CONCEPT OF RUSSIAN ARCHITECTURE IN THE BALTIC PROVINCES BETWEEN THE GREAT NORTHERN WAR AND THE COSMOPOLITANISM OF THE 19TH CENTURY

The goal of this article is to examine the role of the new Russian rulingpower as it related to cultural policy in the Baltic provinces betweenthe Great Northern War (1700–1721) and the Russian Revolution (1917),in order to engender a discussion about the Russian influence inEstonia’s architectural history – its content and meaning – based onprimary sources in the archives of Estonia, St Petersburg and Moscow.The historiography of this topic dates back nearly a century; as aneighbouring country and an important centre of political power andculture, the influence of St Petersburg as the main Russian metropolishas been always been taken into consideration and studied in thehistory of Estonian art history. The articles by Sergey Androsovand Georgy Smirnov that appear in this volume have provided theinspiration to try and re-examine the entire spectrum of Estonia’sposition between East and West, and to point out the main subjectsin this new context and the relationship to the new geography ofarchitecture in the Age of Enlightenment and the stylistic changesof the 19th century.

Embodied Architectural Geographies of Consumption and the Mall Paseo Chiloé Controversy in Southern Chile

In recent years, the geographies of architecture have expanded to include the affective and emotive dimensions of everyday life and the politics of urban space. This article explores these embodied geographies of architecture in an emerging urban landscape that has the built environment at its core: the postdictatorship retail landscape of neoliberal Chile. By drawing on findings from ethnographic research around the role of affect and emotion in the controversial development of a particular shopping mall in southern Chile, we get a better sense of how retail capital expands into new territories and how it responds to and enrolls embodied geographies in the process. Although this process does include the expansion of a particular kind of spatial technology that works through affective architectural interventions, this article also illustrates how such an expansion relies on prevailing imaginative and emotional geographies in important ways. As such, this embodied architectural geography does not sideline human subjectivity but explores its complex relationship with the materiality of landscape and affective architectural space. Key Words: affect, emotion, imaginative geography, landscape, shopping mall.

Politics of dissensus in geographies of architecture: Testing equality at Ed Roberts Campus, Berkeley

This paper evokes the writings of Jacques Rancière to propose a concept of politics for geographies of architecture that is attentive to the polemical conditions under which more equal ways of composing built environments emerge. Discussing Ed Roberts Campus, a building designed and operated by the disability community in Berkeley, California, it argues for a politics of architecture that does not entail conflicts over power or identity, but revolves around a testing of materials that alters the bodily circumstances built form offers for collective inhabitation. Such testing sets in motion an uncertain process where a building undergoes constant destabilisation by new claimants who verify and expand its equality. The paper then counterpoises this disruptive politics to institutional practices in order to investigate how its fragile after‐effects might be sustained.

ARCHITECTURAL MODELLING OF “SOUND” PERGOLA

The article describes architectural solutions of pergolas adapted for the reproduction of synthesized acoustic space. The solution is represented by means of computer modelling and visualizes both processes and ob-jects on the example of construction and calculations. The project design of architectural models is an integral part in the practical reconstruction of the geospatial space studied by the architectural geography.

Cities in music videos: Audiovisual variations on London’s neoliberal skyline

Despite the resurgence of music video clips in the YouTube era, they have not received attention as a specific subject of inquiry in either cultural or urban geography. This article is aimed at providing a full consideration of music videos with a focus on the urban realm. In particular, the paper concentrates on how neoliberal iconic buildings and city skylines emerge in music videos by using London as a case study. Drawing from recent developments within architectural geography and urban morphology, as well as in the geocultural subfields of music geography, media geography and film geography, the paper shows how a partial return to critical traditional interests and text-based research styles could be still useful to appreciate the mutable, fluid, and affective ways in which skylines are mediated. The empirical part of the paper provides an analysis of three music videos set in London and with lyrics and music that refer to a mood or feeling ascribed to London’s iconic architecture.1

Architectural scripts: construction procurement within the user worlds of building events

ABSTRACTThe concept of the ‘building event’ has been central within recent geographies of architecture, marshalled against the assumption that buildings are stable or textual. Buildings, in these studies, emerge out of contingent relations among various configurations of human and non-human actors. Yet it is possible, other studies suggest, that this focus on the ‘building’ as the centre of the ‘building event’ has overlooked long-standing historical processes that are only visible if we consider aspects of contemporary construction industries. This study examines the relation between building events and construction industries from the point of view of one ‘big thing’ that has received little explicit attention from geographers: the procurement route and its associated selection procedures for architects and contractors. ‘Big things’ that circulate throughout the construction industry, procurement routes are organised around an understanding of building as a process that is nevertheless static and object-like. I examine engagements between procurement routes and architects through interviews, document analysis and participant observation. I suggest that procurement routes are additional actors within ‘building events’, resembling the actor-network theoretical notion of the ‘script’ while, unlike the script, anticipating their own de-scription. I conclude by pointing to opportunities for geographies of architectural scripts.

The gaps of architectural life: the affective politics of Gordon Matta‐Clark's Conical Intersect

This paper contributes to a burgeoning concern with the ‘critical geographies of architecture’. The central argument is that recent architecture–geography encounters – inspired by non‐representational approaches to material mutability and affective inhabitation – are failing to connect with socio‐political framings of the architectural. In this light, the paper aligns Gordon Matta‐Clark's architectural artwork Conical Intersect (1975) with the Deleuzo‐Guattarian axiom of micropolitics and macropolitics to re‐insert the architectural subject as a microtexture of political forms imbued with (1) asymmetrical assemblages of material volatility, (2) restricted capacities of ‘dwelling or being with’ architecture and (3) bounded notions of living affectively. I suggest Conical Intersect foregrounds architectural space as a meeting of dreamworlds and institutional effects. In its piercing of that space of interaction, the artwork produces an architectural form freed from the conventions of legal and physical constraints to suggest the potency of alternative modes of living with and living in architecture that should be of primary interest to critical geographies of architecture and beyond.

Becoming big things: building events and the architectural geographies of incarceration in England and Wales

This paper advances geographies of architecture beyond frequently studied ‘signature’ buildings by drawing attention to non‐iconic, non‐utopian, banal counterpoints – in this case, new prisons. It argues that by attending to ‘signature’ buildings, architectural geographies have overlooked the critical and underexplored circumstances and contingencies of more quotidian constructions, neglecting the mundane processes of procurement, commissioning, tendering, project management and bureaucratisation – here termed ‘architectural assembly’. Advancing scholarship in carceral geography by considering the processes and assemblages that shape (what will become) carceral spaces, it focuses on what happens before a building takes physical form. The paper draws on a major RCUK‐funded study of prison architecture to move architectural geographies more meaningfully towards a consideration of the bureaucratisation of architectural practice, as underexplored aspects of building ‘events’. It calls for geographers to pay greater attention to the banal geographies of architectural assembly, and to the banalities of production more widely.

Spatial agency and practising architecture beyond buildings

This paper provides new direction for geographic scholarship on architecture by focusing upon architectural projects that go well beyond designing and producing material objects. Recent work on practising architectures by social and cultural geographers has examined the multiple processes of human and non-human actors that cohere and congeal to produce buildings. Responding to concerns that geographers are failing to work closely with architects, I introduce ideas of spatial agency to examine the practices of architects working beyond buildings. Arguing that the profession has always been under threat, I outline why socially progressive architects are rejecting claims as expert technical problem-solvers or artistic form-givers by instead initiating and contributing towards explicitly spatial projects prioritizing social and economic objectives. By calling for creative engagement with such projects, I set forth an agenda for a politically progressive geography of architecture.

1960년대 말 김수근의 도시건축에 나타난 인공대지에 관한 연구 - 세운상가 및 여의도계획을 중심으로 -

The purpose of this research is to analyse Kim Swoo Geun's concept of the artificial land illustrated in his article 'Urban Image of the Future' (1962) and to consider how the concept was applied to the proposals of his two urban architecture projects in late 1960s - Sewoonsangga (1966~67) and Yeouido Master Plan (1969). His article shows that the causes of his adoption of the artificial land were related to 'segregating a pedestrian road from a motor way', 'increasing a building floor area along with securing a large green space', 'giving dwelling units flexible sizes', and 'longing for futurism', but of course the artificial land idea was applied to the two projects in varying degrees. Nevertheless, 'segregating a pedestrian road from a motor way' was the most clear factor of the artificial land in the two projects, and 'longing for futurism' was a fundamental inspiration for both of them. Also, because the size of the projects was enlarged from one building to an urban plan, if comparing the two, this paper argues that Yeouido Master Plan came to closer to Kim Swoo Geun's 'Urban Image of the Future' than Sewoonsangga. Even though Kim's acceptance of the artificial land concept could be criticized for its limitation in execution, especially owing to the gap between ideal and reality; it can be considered significant enough to weigh up both Kim's and Korean architecture's developmental phases within the world architectural geography and to expose the deep strata of Korean modern history.

UnMaking Public Housing Towers

ABSTRACTThrough the case of a Puerto Rican public housing project, Las Gladiolas, this article argues that demolitions should be understood as long-term physical and emotional processes of home un making. It focuses on the diverse appearances of lifts and stairs in public housing representations, residents' everyday life, memories, and legal arguments to tell a nuanced story about their meaning and materiality in the un making of home. Drawing together strands from critical geographies of architecture, geographies of home, and emotional geographies, these internal building technologies are approached as active mediators in the way personal and communal life was negotiated and remembered, as well as in the anti-displacement struggle unfolding in the final throes of the buildings' existence. The loss of home through long-term deterioration and displacement is situated in its historical and cultural context, since the island's public housing trajectory has been continually framed by dominant national aspirations of homeownership.

Constructing communities: the community centre as contested site

Drawing on original empirical research and theories of cultural geography, this article investigates the multiple ways community is produced, understood and valued through a closer interrogation of the community centre as a contested site. The paper investigates the symbolism of the buildings [see Dovey, K. (1999) Framing Places: Mediating Power in Built Form. Routledge, London] as they are claimed and framed by local government; the use of the buildings and how this contributes to what we might call the overall assemblage or forming of the building [see Lees (Towards a critical geography of architecture: the case of ersatz colosseum. Cult. Geograp.; 2001 8:51–86), De Landa (2006) A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity, Continuum, London, Jacobs (A geography of big things, Cult. Geograph. 2006;13:1–27)]; the affect of the buildings or architecture on community use [see Thrift, N. (2004) Intensities of feeling: towards a spatial politics of affect, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 86(1), 57–78]; and disruptive, haptic, unintended or ‘queer’ use of such spaces (see Grosz (2001) Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA). In so doing, we argue that an investigation of architecture can offer key insights and contributions to debates in wider policy, particularly in relation to the values and affordances of ‘community’ in the UK today. By focusing on the community centre, we also shift the existing focus of much architectural research away from what Jacobs has called ‘big things’ [Jacobs (A geography of big things, Cult. Geograph. 2006;13:1–27, pp. 4–5)] onto ordinary, everyday and mundane architectures of community centres. Secondly, we argue that, particularly the newer breed of ‘community facing social enterprise centres’, construct and imagine notions of communities in inherently problematic ways, and while in some instances such productions and imaginings are disrupted through use, the architecture nevertheless continues to be claimed by local government as a powerful indicator of (a particular notion and construction of) community.

Developing an “ecology of learning” within a school sustainability co-design project with children in New Zealand

This paper analyses the inter-relatedness of layers of involvement, as contributing to learning, within a school sustainability project (the eco-classroom project). This engaged students, staff and community members (including professional practitioners) in an architectural co-design project that resulted, after 4 years, in a built classroom. The paper utilises an “ecology of learning” diagram to indicate layers and show connections, which are evidenced by findings from the project, alongside relevant literature in geographies of architecture and childhood, pedagogies of sustainable learning and children's participatory and co-design examples. In conclusion, the ecology of learning approach is critiqued and encouragement of more sustainability co-design projects with children is recommended. It is proposed this could lead to improved processes for all participants while promoting authentic and relevant sustainability learning.