I Borden

Imaging architecture: The uses of photography in the practice of architectural history

Photography in architectural history is often used in a highly conventional manner, simply to depict, describe or identify the buildings under discussion. This paper, which provides a critical overview of the use of photographic imagery within the academic practices of teaching and publishing architectural history, considers alternative imaging strategies—dialectical imaging and temporality—to show how various political, social and other meanings of architecture may be created by photographs as well as by the written word. Concepts derived from Brecht, Benjamin and Hildebrand are used to expand on notions of the dialectic and temporality, and the latter in particular is developed into sub-categories of the everyday, the event, dissemination and the narrative.

Space beyond: spatiality and the city in the writings of Georg Simmel

This paper examines the writings of Georg Simmel for their consideration of space and spatiality in the context of the modern metropolis. It argues that questions of space not only are central to much of Simmels understanding of the city, but also offer many insights into the formulation of social space as currently being debated in multidisciplinary studies today. In Simmel, a treatment of methodological procedure, size, number, density, exclusivity, boundaries, fixity, distance and movement in space is developed into a conception of space as being beyond the physical, and into a consideration of such things as epistemology, metaphysics, oscillating scales, visibility and experience. Space is shown to be a pervasive entity, embedded in the continual reproduction of society and cities.

Speaking the City: Skateboarding Subculture and Recompositions of the Urban Realm

Architecture offers itself to us as an object and the city to us as the ultimate technical object: the fantastical concentration of wealth, power, blood, and tears crystallized in office towers, roads, houses, blocks, and open spaces. The appearance of the urban is, then, seemingly that of a thing, a finite set of spaces--it is alternatively the machine, the artefact, the body, the experiment, the artwork, the reflective mirror, the clothing, the labyrinth, and all the other metaphorical understandings by which people have sought to comprehend its objectival character. But architecture is no object. At an interdisciplinary nexus, as an intrinsic element of everyday life, architecture is not composed of isolated and monumental objects. Architecture is ambient and atmospheric, and architecture allows us to tell

From chamber to transformer: epistemological challenges in the methodology of theorised architectural history

While many architectural historians are conscious of their methodological procedures, this aspect of architectural history is rarely singled out for any prolonged consideration. In addition, while many architectural historians have, in recent years, made increasing reference to various forms of theory in order to inform their interpretations, this aspect of their work has been similarly devoid of any concentrated analysis. In order partly to redress this situation, this article does not offer any worked examples of historical analysis but, rather, focuses on the epistemological challenges facing the architectural historian. In particular, the article argues for the necessity of engaging with different kinds of critical theory in order to understand architecture. As a result, nine challenges can be identified for the discipline of architectural history: to theory as the object of study, to new architectures, to the framing of interpretative questions, to the critical nature of history, to interdisciplinary debates, to the opening of methodological procedures, to selfcritical development of the discipline, to re-engagement with critical theory, and to praxis. Only when these challenges are met, the authors contend, will a proper methodology of architectural history be constructed.

The Singapore Flyer: experiencing Singaporean modernity through architecture, motion and Bergson

This article explores the post-construction history of the Singapore Flyer observation wheel as an experiential symbol of Singaporean modernity. Using an interdisciplinary intersection of history, theory, interpretation and photography (specially commissioned from the Singaporean photographer Christopher Cheng), the Flyer is disclosed as a mobile architecture by which the visitor is prompted to consider their position in relation to the wheel itself, to Singapore, and to the wider world. The ideas of Henri Bergson in particular are used as a speculative tool.

Skateboard City: London in Skateboarding Films

London has been part of the worldwide phenomenon of skateboarding, from the early 1970s right through to the present day. Important sites in the city include the highly contested ‘Undercroft’ area of the Southbank, early purpose-built skateparks such as ‘Skate City’, ‘Rolling Thunder’, ‘Maddog Bowl’ and ‘Rom’, public spaces such as Kensington Gardens and Crystal Palace, and appropriated street sites in locations as diverse as the Shell Centre, Bishopsgate and St Paul’s. This chapter charts the documentation of skateboarding in the UK capital as caught on film, showing how these sites made up a vibrant skateboarding scene. In doing so, it also charts the dramatically changing technologies by which these film documentations occurred, from the earliest days of amateur movies and sporadic news coverage (capturing the relatively innocent arrival of skateboarding as a youthful pastime), through camcorder footage of the burgeoning street-skateboarding scene of the 1990s (raising issues of subculture, urban space and masculinity) through to today’s scene, where a plethora of art-based films, documentaries, social media clips and guerrilla-style advertising have become an integral part of a rich and pluralistic skateboard scene. Film is thus shown not only to help record different space and sites, but also to have expressed and given voice to a changing set of social meanings over the last 40 years.

The limehouse link: The architectural and cultural history of a monumental road tunnel in London's Docklands

In the Docklands area of London lies the ‘Limehouse Link’, a dual-bore road tunnel used by around 80,000 cars each day. A monumental and highly expensive piece of construction, the Limehouse Link has nonetheless received almost no attention from architectural historians or others concerned with the history of construction, engineering or urban development. This article provides an introduction to the Limehouse Link, explaining some of the fundamental characteristics of its construction and position in Londons urban landscape. More importantly, the article then considers how one might understand an everyday yet monumental construction such as this: a tunnel without obvious aesthetic form, design intent or symbolic meaning, but which nonetheless has an undeniable presence in the city. The Limehouse Link is therefore interpreted in terms of the car drivers immersive experience of the tunnel, more active constructions of this experience through sensory qualities of sound, representations of the tunnel in different media and art, ways of knowing the history of Limehouse, and, in particular, as a kind of aesthetic experience. The article concludes that driving through the Limehouse Link is to engage in a different way of knowing the postmodern city.

Book Review: Spaces of modernity: London’s geographies 1680-1780

the Palais Royal is understood as the site of ‘an alternate ordering of society to that which existed in France at the time’. More generally, each heterotopia ‘stands in contrast to the taken-for-granted mundane idea of social order that exists within society’, or is seen ‘as juxtaposing another way of acting against that which prevails and dominates’. The difficulty here is not with the notion of heterotopia, but with the social and spatial homogeneity which this understanding of space forces onto non-heterotopic places, as ‘prevailing’ social orders become singular, identifiable and hegemonic. This social theory is unsatisfying both theoretically and empirically. The position is particularly problematic when it comes to discussing modernity, as Hetherington wants to do. He understands modernity through and against Zygmunt Bauman’s work, and thus as a mode of ordering which combines and opposes total freedom and total control. Here heterotopias are those spaces which produce a utopics of freedom and/or discipline, and become the points of passage through which social relations can be remade in modern form: the Palais Royal and the French Revolution, the Masonic lodge and the public sphere, and the factory and capitalist production. However, in setting these transformative spaces against the undefined background of the Ancien Régime Hetherington replays a commonplace history of modernity: a break from one state, a period of transformation, and the establishment of another state. Instead of letting the complexities of the historical geographies of modernity weave an alternative story of partial, fragmented and interlocking states and transformations, this sociology seems to be defined by the compulsions of a conventional temporal ordering of social change. This is also emphasized by what the examples have in common. It is not simply that, as Hetherington argues, all of them are associated with the new bourgeois class, although that may lead to emphasizing some stories and occluding others. It is more that they all share the same spatial scale: the architectural. Because of this they share a tale of the willed transformation of space towards utopic goals (although, admittedly, the Palais Royal is more a place of unintended consequences than either the Masonic lodge or the factory). It also means that there is no place for the landscapes, networks and frontiers that offer different geographies of modernity at other scales: regional, national and global. Instead of a heterogeneous panoply of modernities whose strands and surfaces interweave and crosscut through a variety of spatialities, we are only offered a few walled-off heterotopias which, in the way the examples are researched and presented, are not pursued in enough depth to reveal their detailed histories, ambiguities and connections. The badlands have a much more complex geography than this one.