Lee Stickells

The Right To The City: Rethinking Architecture's Social Significance

Recent changes in Architectural Theory Review’s editorial structure have been accompanied by a recasting of the journal’s aims and scope. The changes in editorial approach have accentuated the use of review as a verb, emphasizing the investigation of relationships between current critical issues, the legacy of past debates, and the continued reconfiguration of enduring concerns in architectural theory. Forthcoming issues will reinforce that emphasis through the effects of a formal strategy: each special issue of ATR will concentrate on reviewing the implications and legacies of a particular object – whether a text, a drawing, a building, or otherwise.

Conceiving an architecture of movement

Ideas about movement were fundamental for Modernist architecture of the early twentieth century and are ubiquitous in contemporary theory and practice. The shifting theoretical terrain in which bodily movement is made sense of has continuously produced different understandings of architectural possibilities. For example, where in much early Modernism, and in present conventional practice, movement is often articulated in terms of technical, functional circulation and narrativised aesthetic experience (the architectural promenade), other recent practices adopt more ambivalent approaches. The emphasis in these later practices is on the relationality of programmatic elements, articulated in terms of dynamic coexistence, continual variation and fluid, interconnected space. In this way, they connect to a pervasive concern with mobility in the late twentieth, and early twenty-first century: culture is increasingly seen as dynamic and hybrid, societies are defined through complex webs of interconnection, and social theory is focused on the nomadic. In this context, examining changing conceptions and structuring of bodily movement within architecture provides a means for productively reengaging with modern architectural history.

Journeys with the Autonomous House

Abstract Australia’s first prototypical autonomous house was constructed and occupied on the grounds of the University of Sydney between 1974 and 1979. This paper focuses on various concepts, actors, materials and technologies that circulated in the production of the house. The student designer-builders planned a structure integrating systems for domestic energy production, water capture and heating, waste treatment and food production. They patched together a set of concepts and technologies that ranged from the period’s fashionable international tropes in energy-conscious design (Trombe-Michel walls and methane digesters), to colonial Australian tactics for rural self-sufficiency (the Coolgardie Safe). The students’ travels, transnational countercultural ferment, and the global circulation of radical educators and key architectural texts, all played a part in the production of the house. The project fed back into international media circuits via publication in architecture and radical technology journals. This paper foregrounds the mediation of global and local concerns in the house, and reflects on what insight it allows into the circulation and materialisation of countercultural architectures – their reformulation and reconfiguration as ideas and bodies travelled across the world.

Architecture and the Welfare State

A counter to the old adage (or perhaps cliché) nestled in Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” lyrics suggests, instead, that you do know what you had; you just did not think you would lose it. Mitchell’s song expressed an intense disillusionment with the trajectory of post-war prosperity, especially its environmental impact. Questions concerning what architecture “had” in the post-war period, and what it might have lost, trouble much of the substantial, and growing, body of architectural scholarship investigating the second half of the twentieth century.1 Such anxiety also seems to underpin the editors’ ambitions for Architecture and the Welfare State – a rich and timely pan-European study of the role of architecture and the built environment in the post-war construction of the welfare state, centred on the 30 “golden years” between 1945 and 1975. In the introduction, editors Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel draw on scholarship in fields such as sociology and political economy to articulate the welfare state as a largely European invention. Definitions and categorisations of the welfare state are subject to ongoing debate, but the book draws on some key references, such as the Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State (Oxford University Press, 2010), to outline a fairly stable framework within which the architectural scholarship sits. Gøspa EspingAnderson’s The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Polity Press, 1990) is identified as a catalyst for much research on the post-war welfare state from an economic, social, and political viewpoint. To understand what is meant by the term “welfare state” in the resulting literature, though, the editors point to a 2002 definition provided by sociologists Wil Arts and John Gelissen:

Architecture, Evidence, and “Evidentiality”

This issue of ATR focuses on the role of evidence in shaping and maintaining architectural knowledge. How dowe knowwhatwe know?How do we keep that knowledge in check? How and why is architecture, as a field of knowledge, extended into other and possibly multiple domains of “truth”? How is it allowed to contract? How and why does knowledge atrophy? The very possibility that a “we” emerges from the body of knowledge that evidence substantiates suggests a strong bond between what is known, how it is known, and the uses and responsibilities to which that knowledge is put and to which its adherents are subject. These bonds are, by extension, cemented by the instrumentalisation of knowledge—and, again, the evidence that upholds it—to various ends, from the strong force of polemic to the weak forces of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. And behind these bonds, always, are knowledge and practices that are subject to audit and thereby to a continual process of confirmation and revision.

Special issue on writing architecture

The weekend of August 15 and 16 in the year 2009 was a fine one in Brisbane. A late winter sun shone on two glorious days when the air was cool, the humidity of spring not yet begun, the low sun brilliant. Throughout this whole weekend of meteorological flash and sparkle, a group of scholars was clustered, enthralled, on uncomfortable chairs in a windowless room in Brisbane’s Institute for Modern Art. The occasion was a conference: ‘‘Writing Architecture: A Symposium on Architectural Criticism and the Written Representation of Architecture’’. Nineteen papers were presented over the two days, some invited and others selected from an international call, with participants from all over Australia as well as New Zealand, Sweden, France and Peru.

Interview with Reinhold Martin

One of the recurring considerations in this special issue is that of historicity: How does historical specificity bear on architectural criticism? How is the historian a critic and the critic a historian? How does the anthologization of history, theory and criticism produce occlusions and exclusions? Apropos to these concerns, in his most recent book, Utopia’s Ghost, Reinhold Martin argues that: ‘‘Simply to historicize postmodernism seems inadequate and, in many ways, premature’’. Through a close reading of buildings, projects and texts from the 1970s and 1980s, the complex intersections of temporality, ideology and history at work in the production of postmodern architecture are subjected to critical analysis. With an eye to the implications for writing architectural history and criticism, Charles Rice (CR) and Lee Stickells (LS) discussed the book with Reinhold Martin (RM).

Interview with Reinhold Martin: Utopia's Ghost 1 1. This interview was conducted via email during August and September of 2010.View all notes

One of the recurring considerations in this special issue is that of historicity: How does historical specificity bear on architectural criticism? How is the historian a critic and the critic a historian? How does the anthologization of history, theory and criticism produce occlusions and exclusions? Apropos to these concerns, in his most recent book, Utopia’s Ghost, Reinhold Martin argues that: ‘‘Simply to historicize postmodernism seems inadequate and, in many ways, premature’’. Through a close reading of buildings, projects and texts from the 1970s and 1980s, the complex intersections of temporality, ideology and history at work in the production of postmodern architecture are subjected to critical analysis. With an eye to the implications for writing architectural history and criticism, Charles Rice (CR) and Lee Stickells (LS) discussed the book with Reinhold Martin (RM).