Hélène Frichot

Following Helene Cixous's steps towards a writing architecture

In her book Coming to Writing, Hélène Cixous suggests that the woman writer must always struggle to establish her right to write. Within the field of architecture the act of writing is often assumed to be a passive after-effect of the built form and not an active force that might substantially participate in the process of design and its material outcome in a world. Using Cixous as a guide, I will argue that a creative and critical practice of writing can materially contribute to the thinking and doing of architecture, especially with regard to the woman architect.

Resist, Reclaim, Speculate: Situated perspectives on architecture and the city

With this special issue of Architectural Theory Review, we set out to discuss theory (of architecture) as a practice. In order to resist what we perceive to be the persistent division of labour between theoria and praxis, we want to expand and reclaim what can be included under these rubrics.1 And we want to do this in such a way as to draw attention to the specificity of situations. Practices (of space, of architecture) are always entangled with the lives of people, places, and things. They refer to specific, situated problems in response to which we believe it is crucial to resist ready-made answers and to accept the constraints of the milieu in which we find ourselves. We thus call for situated, relational, and embodied perspectives in architectural scholarship rather than distant, autonomous, and authoritarian ones. But we also ask how, in undertaking this work, we can strive to reclaim a capacity for agency in situations that have become oppressive or where power relations have become imbalanced. We feel confronted with the difficult task of resisting how the situations we study are presented to us (through theory) and of speculating instead on how these situations might be envisioned otherwise by reclaiming other (forgotten, inconvenient, odd…) versions of such situations. We draw our inspiration from radical (feminist) thinkers, including Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, and Karen Barad. The relevance of these perspectives for architectural and urban studies—and more specifically, Donna Haraway’s “situated viewpoints” and Isabelle Stengers’ “ecology of practices” and “cosmopolitics”—are becoming increasingly evident.2 With this special issue, we ask explicitly how such approaches can inform new critical engagements with architecture and the city. Through slowing down, hesitation, and “category work”,3 we have invited scholars to resist the taxonomies and conceptual categories with which they have become accustomed, or feel obliged, to think. Our proposal for this special issue also reads as an invitation to reconnect with (hi)stories and (radical) imaginations that tell alternative stories. And through reconnecting with situated stories, we argue that other forms and imaginations of engagement, of resistance, can emerge. Hence our cry: Resist, Reclaim, Speculate! In asking how theory “as a practice” can respond to our cry, we believe three moves are necessary. Firstly, we ask: What are the methodological and ethical consequences of considering theory as a practice? Secondly, we take this challenge as an invitation to expand our understanding of what should be included in the discussion of architecture, which is also to ask what “matters” to the understanding of architecture? Finally, what kinds of stories emerge when we respect the situated nature of the spaces, buildings, plans, and issues we study? And how do these stories make a difference?

Affective encounters amidst feminist futures in architecture

This text argues that practicing theory within architecture means to continuously activate a project, and relentlessly performing a (re)positioning. Attempting a definition of architectural theory is not what matters here. What is at stake instead is the delineation of a few facets of (this thing called) theory, and the mapping of its changing.This paper engages with theory in architectural exhibitions and with hybrid architectural practices that combine design and building with research and curating. In 2013 and 2015 respectively, research and design collective Rotor and architect-curator Andreas Angelidakis presented architecture exhibitions in which material fragments were mobilized to develop a critical position. Rotor’s exhibition for the fifth Oslo Architecture Triennale, Behind the Green Door, investigated notions of sustainability in recent design and building practices. An ‘archive’ of 600 objects, from facade study models to software packages, was assembled and sorted to discuss the various ways architecture is today mobilized as a lever to induce the sustainable society. At Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, Angelidakis was asked to work with a collection of period rooms that once belonged to the Stedelijk Museum but were dismantled and stored away since the 1970s. 1:1 Stijlkamers featured six unconventional period room installations addressing the period room as a questionable display format for historical interiors and the format’s entanglement in processes of urban and museological modernization and historical preservation. Both exhibitions defy any simple distinction between critical theory and the so-called material turn. I argue that they not only engage with theory when they take a critical position on sustainability or the (historical) interior – their very handling of the material on display negotiates a legacy of theory which this paper aims to unpack. Angelidakis’s conceptual gestures in displaying the period rooms will be related to institutional critical artworks and to the Institutional Theory and the poststructuralist analysis of exhibition contexts that go with them. Rotor’s selection, ordering, and layered interpretation of exhibits will be discussed as a conscientious employment of the archive as exhibition format, where the overt negotiation of the tension between open-ended document and exhibition argument can be analysed along the lines of archival theory.

Welcome to The Promenade City : A Gentrifictional Cartography of Stockholm in the Postindustrial Age'

Abstract As we enter the age of cognitive capitalism and immaterial labor, postindustrial cities like Stockholm in Sweden are witnessing the emergence of both a post-regulatory planning policy climate and the concomitant transfer of responsibilities for design regulation and housing provision from the municipality to distributed networks of producer–consumers. As governments effectively withdraw from direct engagement in city-building efforts, new divisions of labor and new forms of control thus become apparent. This essay considers the implications of these shifts by addressing the “gentri-fictions” through which they operate. Deploying notions of chora and “container technologies” as they have been developed through the feminist scholarship of Luce Irigaray and Zoë Sofia, we ultimately advocate a radical rethinking of our relation to the unobtrusive environments that facilitate our (compulsorily productive) experiences of the city and our participation in real-estate games of occupation and exchange.

MATTHEW BARNEY'S CREMASTER CYCLE REVISITED: towards post-human becomings of man

Abstract: It is now well over a decade since the artist Matthew Barneys epic work the Cremaster Cycle was completed. This essay returns to the post-human becomings of man that populate Barneys elaborately cross-referenced, aesthetic pluriverse, in particular addressing how the man-form labours amidst and on his environment-worlds, inclusive of the architectural augmentations that assist in the production of such worlds. Revisiting Barneys Cremaster Cycle now offers the opportunity to ask what becomes of the exclusionary and exhaustive world-making performances of the Anthrop once he has placed extreme stress on himself and his mental, social and environmental ecologies, so that any mutual support system is brought to the threshold of exhaustion.

The Forgetting of the Ethics of Immanence

The compelling promise of emergence, and its attendant aesthetics, has by now found its recognised place in the field of advanced digital architecture. Respected in both the disciplines of philosophy and architecture, Manuel DeLanda deploys the concept of emergence as a means to demystify the dynamic properties of a world. Concurrently, digital architects fascinated in living systems celebrate this animate dynamism by investing it in their sophisticated, computationally driven design processes. DeLanda is also well known for returning the difficult concepts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattaris philosophical lexicon to the disciplines of science and mathematics. Many of these same concepts have been implicitly and explicitly influential in the new biotechnological paradigm in architecture and its productive use of the logic of emergence. This essay will argue that while the logic of emergence expresses great explanatory power and ventures a novel aesthetics, it risks forgetting an ethics of immanence.

Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth

Reviewed by Helene Frichot