Authors:Jorge Mejía Hernández, Esin Komez Daglioglu Pages: 3 - 8 Abstract: The qualities that characterise open works of art have become prevalent in mainstream architecture theory. Trying to elucidate why openness appears to mean so many different things and at the same time remains an ethereal concept, it seems worthwhile to reflect on potential justifications for its use. While the notion can be effectively and persuasively used to discuss the ethics that should govern our profession, beyond that axiological role its meagre explanatory power suggests that new directions in open architecture might require that we recognise its theoretical shortcomings and start looking for new and better ways to explain exactly what we’re talking about when we talk about the architecture of our time. PubDate: 2023-03-03 Issue No:Vol. 16, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Esra Akcan Pages: 9 - 20 Abstract: Drawing on the author’s book Open Architecture, this essay studies the relation between migration and architecture as a matter of human rights, and thereby exposes the historical roots of contemporary racisms, while giving due acknowledgment to the Black and Brown migrants in the making of even the most established European architectural projects. This analysis not only exposes the weaknesses of a world order predicated on the limited and constructed idea of the nation-state, but also outlines architecture’s ways to build resistance through the concept of openness. Defining open architecture as a new ethic of welcoming toward the immigrant, the essay alludes to the formal, programmatic and procedural aspects of latent open architecture, such as flexibility and adaptability of form, collectivity and collaboration, participatory processes, and multiplicity of meaning. PubDate: 2023-03-03 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.2.6423 Issue No:Vol. 16, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Sebastiano Fabbrini Pages: 21 - 40 Abstract: This essay sets out to reflect on the prospective transformation of two Italian panoptical buildings that straddle the border between different places and times: the prison of Ventotene and the hospital of Gorizia. Local authorities have recently put forward a proposal to turn the former into a European school and the latter into a European prison. Both of these hermetic, unbending architectures have particular historical significance. Ventotene is the island where Altiero Spinelli was incarcerated by the Fascist regime and wrote the manifesto that paved the way for the process of European integration. Gorizia is the town where Franco Basaglia began his career, elaborating the theory of mental health that led to the closing of all Italian asylums. The proposed Europeanisation of these structures of confinement and isolation, which embody the exercise of disciplinary power in its most extreme form, speaks to the problem of opening the total institutions of modern statehood and repositioning them within the increasingly decentralised, indeterminate order of the European Union. PubDate: 2023-03-03 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.2.6066 Issue No:Vol. 16, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Armando Rabaça Pages: 41 - 66 Abstract: This article discusses the possibilities of signification in architectural interventions involving historical remnants, focusing on the notions of spolia and of opera aperta. The notion of spolia has been the province of art history since the Renaissance. In bringing it to the field of architectural design, the focus will shift from the historical realm to the conceptual possibilities opened up by spolia in architectural practice. The aim is to analyse the association between the creative reuse of and intervention in historical remnants and the multiplication of possible significations through various examples. Methodologically, the article expands the linguistic drive of the contemporary debate on spolia to the structural linguistics upon which Umberto Eco built the poststructuralist concept of open work. More precisely, the essay resorts to the notions of ‘sign’ and ‘sign structure’ as a vehicle to explore the possibilities for the semantic and syntactical openness of spolia. Toning in with Eco’s arguments on the open work, the openness associated with spolia will be seen as dependent on the loosening of the formal and typological structures of established architectural codes. PubDate: 2023-03-03 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.2.6076 Issue No:Vol. 16, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Ezgi İşbilen Pages: 67 - 84 Abstract: One of the many ways in which architecture is conceptually opened up is by adopting systems theory in building technology. In this context, open systems denote modular design and construction; a system of standardized, mass-produced parts that can be configured in various ways opens a field of possibilities. However, there is a significant gap between the high expectations for the implication of the open systems principle and its results. This essay explores the potentials and consequences of openness in architecture through a historical case study. The Packaged House project (1941–47), designed by Konrad Wachsmann (1901–1980) and Walter Gropius (1883–1969), is a prefabricated housing system devised to meet the housing shortage in the US during and soon after WWII. It was an open spatial design system, a modular construction system and a commercial enterprise all in one. Although it was cultivated in the most favourable political and economic landscape for prefabricated building systems, the Packaged House failed to be widely reproduced. Drawing from the conflicting histories of the Packaged House, the discursive formation of the post-war dwelling, changing definitions of openness, and varied representations, this essay dissects the fantasies of the open building systems as well as their practical and symbolic features. PubDate: 2023-03-03 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.2.6089 Issue No:Vol. 16, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Xavier Van Rooyen Pages: 85 - 104 Abstract: Since the 1960s, open architecture has sought to move away from fixed objects built for eternity and instead towards the development of indeterminate proposals. Today, in the midst of health and climate crises, some architects are reconsidering the need for an evolving and adaptable architecture that encourages multiple uses. Sanitary confinement has made us aware of the urgency of flexibility in housing. Climate crises, on the other hand, require that buildings can be converted in order to avoid obsolescence. This article examines how the different design processes used by Office KGDVS, MVRDV, Sanaa, and Sou Fujimoto, among others, go beyond the unitary and homogeneous models of open architecture proposed in the 1960s in order to respond to a crucial desire of contemporary society: the need for singularity. As we theorise it, the free plan wanted to be singular and specific instead of neutral, in order to absorb obsolete uses into broader programmes. The free room, on the contrary, absorbs multiple uses on the scale of the dwelling and encourages multiple reconfigurations. The confinement measures taken by many governments in response to the Covid-19 pandemic have taught us that architecture must make uses possible that will undoubtedly be even more diversified tomorrow than they were yesterday. PubDate: 2023-03-03 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.2.6093 Issue No:Vol. 16, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Başak Uçar, Pelin Yoncacı Arslan Pages: 105 - 120 Abstract: Maps are preeminent ways of collecting, organising, verifying, historicising, and even mystifying territorial knowledge. They embrace a multiplicity of readings and readers, and mediate between the visible and the invisible. In constant re-definition, maps transform and maximise themselves by connecting different layers of information and initiating uninterrupted performances. Without delineating a fixed meaning, maps respond to the city’s openness via diversity, incompleteness, and unpredictability. New developments in computer science and information technologies have turned maps into grittier models that define the new granular front of the open map. This article studies open maps in terms of participation and multiplicity, part and whole relationships, and resolution vis-à-vis Jasper Johns’s paintings, Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map and the World Game, and the MIT’s Real-time Rome project. PubDate: 2023-03-03 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.2.6068 Issue No:Vol. 16, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Konstantinos Apostolidis Pages: 121 - 134 Abstract: This article departs from Ian Hacking’s concept of ‘styles of reasoning’ to argue that open architecture is not necessarily an ontological, but rather a methodological category, and that in order to understand open architecture we require an appropriate style of architectural reasoning. Stanford Anderson’s approach to Imre Lakatos’s methodology of scientific research programmes in architecture is used to develop the idea that a precise style of reasoning forms an explicit understanding of architectural openness, and is elaborated further using Michael Hays’s notion of critical architecture as an alternative approach to open architecture, which is free from any predetermined logic. The article concludes with an attempt to identify similarities between the work of Anderson and Hays as a basis for an open style of architectural reasoning. PubDate: 2023-03-03 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.2.6095 Issue No:Vol. 16, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Nina Stener Jørgensen, Guillaume Laplante-Anfossi Pages: 135 - 144 Abstract: This essay looks at the algorithm written by Franco-Hungarian spatial artist Nicolas Schöffer for the Tour Lumière Cybernétique, a cybernetic light tower created for Paris’s La Défense district in the 1960s and ’70s. By revisiting the tower’s computer programme, this essay aims to understand how it was thought to operate as an open system by receiving data from its surrounding environment. The review of the programme questions how the probability distributions Schöffer included in the algorithm to ensure a random treatment of predictable city data was imagined to avoid stagnation, repetition and programmatic saturation, all elements essential to maintaining the tower’s open framework. The goal of the essay is to provide a coherent interpretation of the computer programme as well as a comprehensive description of its mathematical elements, so that future readers of La Tour Lumière Cybernétique can gain an insight into the behaviour of the tower. PubDate: 2023-03-03 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.2.6069 Issue No:Vol. 16, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Ecem Sarıçayır Pages: 145 - 156 Abstract: Architect Frank van Klingeren was most active during the 1960s and 1970s in the Netherlands. In response to the social and urban challenges of the time, Van Klingeren developed various experimental architectural forms and concepts. This essay discusses his comparatively well-known community centres De Meerpaal and Het Karregat by focusing on his commitment to unfinished architecture, open plan through wall-less designs, and his insistent attempt at creating social encounters through these spatial principles. To provide historical contextualisation of these architectural principles I engage with a theoretical framework developed by Esra Akcan which provides the first full-fledged conceptualisation of open architecture. I look at archival materials such as Van Klingeren’s poems, essays, and interviews as well as the designs of his community centres and their reception in national and international journals and newspapers. In addition to extending our knowledge of Van Klingeren’s seldom studied architectural practice, this essay aims to contribute to the concept of openness in architectural studies with the case of Van Klingeren’s spatial practice. PubDate: 2023-03-03 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.2.6078 Issue No:Vol. 16, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Alberto Geuna, Claudia Mainardi Pages: 157 - 170 Abstract: Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal have been at the forefront of European architecture for decades, as attested by numerous awards throughout their careers and culminating in the receipt of the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2021. Although much has been written and said about their relationship to the notion of openness in architecture, in this essay we explore the cultural context surrounding a particular aspect inherent in their way of working and conceiving the project: the desire to favour the maximum freedom of use, or liberté d’usage, particularly of – but not limited to – domestic spaces. Liberté d’usage is a declination of openness that brings forward the aspects of flexibility and adaptability suitable to contemporary architectural space, while engaging with its imaginative, atmospheric and emancipatory characteristics. This article elaborates on this view of freedom in architecture, pinning it against its cultural backdrop, and particularly the largely forgotten figure of Jacques Hondelatte, Lacaton & Vassal’s professor and mentor. PubDate: 2023-03-03 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.2.6060 Issue No:Vol. 16, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Robert Alexander Gorny, Andrej Radman Abstract: Epiphylogenesis is a neologism coined under Stiegler’s anthropotechnical theorisation of the co-evolution of brains and tools. In line with feminist and decolonial theorists like Claire Colebrook and Kathryn Yusoff, it foregrounds that there has never been such a thing as ‘the human’. There are only differentiation processes that historically make humans who they are, and do so in different ways. As such, it has gained some currency in a stream of neo-materialist theories that have revisited anthropogenesis, or the quasi-causality of becoming human, that operates by way of progressively differentiating environments and technics. In addition to primary memory as the genetic information expressed in DNA and secondary memory acquired epigenetically through a complex nervous system, there is also tertiary memory, which Stiegler named ‘epiphylogenetic’. It is the accumulation and retention of historical epigenetic differentiations within the spatio-temporal organisation of material environments. Specifically, the formation of organisational technics includes writing, art, clothing, tools, and machines, but also architecture and urban planning. This outsourcing of memory from the organic changes the conditions for further phylogenetic becomings, given that evolutions continue to be extrinsically organised (‘ex-organised’) by associated technicised milieus. PubDate: 2022-07-12 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.1.6291 Issue No:Vol. 16, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Setareh Noorani Abstract: In this essay turned collective text-archive, I explore, through proliferating Stieglers thought, epigenetics as the genetic transfer of experience, seeing it as our inherited tools, codes, and processes that enable us to construct radical political alternatives. Similarly, the global West has inherited institutions and their systems – such as the archive – retaining specific perspectives founded on a Eurocentric epistemic model proximate to whiteness, masculinity, and heteronormativity, while obscuring or forgetting Other knowledges. A main question is: who and whose knowledge is in need to be constructed as indispensable, as present outside of the gap' What knowledge constructs whose subjectivity' Part of the confrontation exists of tracing the archive’s outside space, entangling with Other ways of doing that enable us to rethink institutions. This means then partially coming to terms which knowledge and bodies we need to survive collectively and in solidarity. And thus, what urgent, vibrant archives are we already passing on, beyond our own (knowledge) lifespan' This essay-text-archive makes visual the layered and multi-authored process of creating this knowledge resource. It intends to deconstruct and queer the position of the footnote, as archival trace and life’s whisper – with its curator-writer-editors as performing the essential care-work of mediating this archival effort. PubDate: 2022-07-12 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.1.6287 Issue No:Vol. 16, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Claire Mary Colebrook Abstract: What is the problem of epiphylogenesis' We can define and understand the term, but what does it do and what does it demand of us' Indeed, one way of thinking about epiphylogenesis is through Bernard Stiegler’s claim that some forms of technology generate or enable long circuits of desire, and that this needs to be recalled in a time of short-circuits. Epiphylogenesis requires both that we pose problems differently, and that ‘we’ are, or should be, a problem to ourselves. Let me unpack this by beginning with what presents itself as a major problem: climate change, and the end of the world. What are we going to do' How can we change course' How do we save the world' The posing of the question in this way is only possible if there is a distinct ‘we’ who must then deliberate a course of action in relation to the world. Epiphylogenesis shifts the question towards the very possibility of this ‘we.’ How do formations of what comes to think of itself as ‘the human’ come into being, and what worlds and capacities do such formations make possible' For Stiegler the problem of climate change is ultimately the problem of who ‘we’ are, along with a constitutive tendency towards the failure to confront this question. PubDate: 2022-07-12 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.1.6240 Issue No:Vol. 16, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Gokhan Kodalak, Stavros Kousoulas Abstract: Kodalak’s essay revisits Gilbert Simondon as a postwar philosopher, who formulated a new way of conceiving individual modalities—from crystals, technical objects and biological organisms to psychic phenomena and social collectives. Simondon’s metaphysical conception of ontogenesis—that explains how individuals emerge from a pre-individual field of metastable potentials through processes of individuation—helped him reconceive technical objects, no longer as passive automata, but as exuberant individuals, active and full of life, with irreducible modes of existence of their own. With this new vision, Simondon invites us to rethink our relationship with technical objects beyond the mythological attitudes of technocracy, technophilia, and technophobia, which can be further developed today for reconceiving architecture’s own technical modes of existence and charged relations with technology. Kousoulas’ essay begs the question: Why Simondon in a volume dedicated to Stiegler' It is not that Stiegler’s oeuvre cannot be examined without referring to the crucial influence that Simondon had for his thought. More important than this, it is only through Simondon that Stiegler makes sense. Simondon is keen to remind us that sense, first and foremost, stands for directionality: to make sense is to grasp a direction. Without Simondon’s critical reformulation of our technological becoming, Stiegler’s project remains null. In a non-zero-sum game, Stiegler through Simondon and (retroactively) Simondon through Stiegler, produce the norms and values of a directing sense that can indeed compel us to engage in our worldly endeavours with neganthropic care. PubDate: 2022-07-12 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.1.6162 Issue No:Vol. 16, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Agnieszka Anna Wołodźko Abstract: Ars Daemones is a manifesto that responds, problematises and encounters conditions and implications of the practice of technologies of spirit as specified in the Ars Industrialis’ two manifesto written by B. Stiegler in 2005 and 2010. Most importantly, the present manifesto focuses on the question of possible conditions and material implications of practice that Stiegler framed within his word of mystagogy. Here, the mystagogy as a knowledge that escapes capture, that demands “contexts, milieus, practices, gestures, rituals, and technologies” is defined as demonology, following G. Deleuze, where both, mystagogy and demonology, call for condition of relationality, movement and an embodied experience. For Stiegler, the knowledge of mystagogy, because of its risky and excessive character, enables to learn and practice care, and it is through the work of art that we can experience of what degrees of care such an excess of another plane need. Through fables of three bodies as experienced through the work of three artists, Ars Daemones will braid material narratives of care. The selection of the three artists, is contaminated by each other by the common question of the risk of care looking for practices of knowledges that rather than survive, would enable to thrive. The manifesto is thus written through the experience of vegetariat present in the work of Špela Petrič, through transbodies and xenologies in space present in the work of Adriana Knouf and through the practice of virophilia in the work of Pei-Ying Lin. Ars Daemones fabulates while experiencing the practices of “I” that is already contaminated and contaminating. PubDate: 2022-07-12 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.1.5974 Issue No:Vol. 16, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Lila Athanasiadou, Goda Klumbyte, Antoinette Rouvroy Abstract: In this article Lila Athanasiadou and Goda Klumbytė engage in a conversation with Antoinette Rouvroy to revisit Guattari’s "Three Ecologies" and discuss their dynamics in and for the digital age. While a lot of the discourses on algorithms and digital future invoke catastrophic imaginaries of totalizing control, this conversation works with a propositional format, teasing out affirmative politics by pointing to spaces of potentiality within the environmental, the social and the mental realm. Starting from the environmental ecology and thinking of data as a waste, Rouvroy discusses planetary exhaustion as the result of the depletion of natural resources, forced labour practices and the assumption that data hold the answers to the problems posed by global capital. Proposing a space for material experimentation, she speculates on the potential of emerging subjectivities that remain irreducible to data flows. Within social ecology, Rouvroy advocates for the urgency to center digital policy as the space in which the new forms of institutions emerge in order to reorient the power of computation towards the commons. Lastly, within the mental ecology, Rouvroy reconceptualizes the legal subject as a performance that operates within the proliferation of asignifying data signs, reimagining a “we” beyond the gathering of reductions. PubDate: 2022-07-12 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.1.5933 Issue No:Vol. 16, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Christopher Smith Abstract: This paper explores the ‘forethought’ of Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1994). In particular, the paper focusses on the coupling of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and the impact of these figures on the relay of ideas concerning organs, organic matter and technology, or what Stiegler would come to call ‘organized inorganic matter’. The paper will also consider the ‘afterthought’ that derives from Stiegler’s book and its potential to prompt a rethinking of architectural experimentation and organization. The paper turns to Neil Spiller’s Communicating Vessels project and particularly to one joyous mechanism that came to be titled Little Soft Machinery (2006). The project enfolds all manner of architectural oddity, somewhere between the organic and inorganic. PubDate: 2022-07-12 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.1.5852 Issue No:Vol. 16, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Georgios Tsagdis Abstract: The present essay advances Stiegler’s neganthropological project by supplementing its genetic structural framework with a metabolic plane of analysis. Neganthropology demands the creation of technologies (exosomatic tertiary inscriptions) that arrest and reconfigure entropic flow, enabling thus collective and personal individuation as well as the diversification of noetic life. All life however must live in and through the ‘now’, which it transforms. This ephemeral yet general metabolic operation of life constitutes the minimal negentropic unit that can be maintained, a ‘now’ that neganthropology must attend to. To do so, technology, life and thought must be examined together, none being elevated to the status of a model for the other two. In attempting a non-hierarchic configuration of the three, the essay proposes a new architecture. PubDate: 2022-07-12 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.1.5671 Issue No:Vol. 16, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Davide Landi Abstract: Since ancient times, the analogy of the body in relation to buildings was central both in Western and Eastern architectural and urban design. Over time, the prevalence of economies over inhabitants’ experience led to the adoption of architectural and urban strategies to improve spatial efficiency and specialisation. The analogy of body-buildings was affected negatively. Nonetheless, the 21st-century technological revolution transformed the city and its inhabitants into something different. These are quantified cities which are experienced dynamically by quantified post-human beings. Consequently, a renewed paradigm body - built environment is established. Taking this position into consideration, this article critically investigates the paradigm Hyper City – Post-Human body. In this, the article introduces an alternative psychological interpretation of the analogy body - buildings. It is built around an acknowledgement of a necessary continuity between digital and physical domains to effectively question the notion of urbanisation. PubDate: 2022-07-12 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.1.5660 Issue No:Vol. 16, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Tim Gough Abstract: This paper proposes a transductive architecture informed by Stiegler’s organology, and shows how such an organology exists already within the work of Le Corbusier. I show how his early work developed from a more conventional formal ontology, exemplified by his Artist’s Studio project of 1910, firstly towards a more playful compositional strategy in the Dom-ino house and the mass concrete houses of 1915, and then onto a fully organological approach where the relations between elements – existing and new buildings, inhabitants and environments – are primary (in transductive manner), and the terms of those relations (us, the building) come, as it were, afterwards. Citing Vers une architecture and analysing Villa Savoye as a tertiary protention that responds to the tertiary retentions of baroque and neo-classical Paris, I show how our ontology of architecture can profoundly change not only how we talk about it, but how we engage and become it. PubDate: 2022-07-12 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.1.5648 Issue No:Vol. 16, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Jacob Vangeest Abstract: This article operationalizes Bernard Stiegler’s conceptualization of the Neganthropocene, expanding his consideration of thinking (penser) as care (panser) or pænsée beyond the anthropo-techne limitations of his thought through the notion of a posthuman asignifying semiotics. It begins with an overview of Stiegler’s notion of the Neganthropocene as a mode of epochal thought building towards noesis and pænsée with the use of epiphylogenetic and exosomatic memory systems. Here, Stiegler’s approach is exposed as anthropo-techne centric, which in turn limits the possibilities of noesis. Turning to the work of C.S. Peirce, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, an alternative formulation of epiphylogenetic memory is provided through the interrelation of trees and forests: in particular the coastal redwood (sequoia sempervirens). This asignifying semiotics provides the criteria for infusing Stiegler’s epiphylogenesis beyond the human. In turn, Stiegler is brought closer to the theories of entangled care presented in the work of theorists such as María Puig De La Bellacasa and Natasha Myers, allowing for a more dynamic design process. PubDate: 2022-07-12 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.16.1.5606 Issue No:Vol. 16, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Lea-Catherine Szacka, Salomon Frausto Abstract: The editorial introduction to this issue of Footprint questions the complex concept of populism, explaining how, in recent debates, it has more and more often been related to architectural issues. Partly based on the analysis of political philosopher and historian Jan-Werner Müller, our understanding of the term reaches to both ends of the political spectrum. Yet rather than simply aiming to provide a clear definition of populism, this editorial sheds more light on a debated concept, showing its multi-facetted aspects in relation to space and aesthetics. Through the categories of media, politics and aesthetics, this introduction also shows the logical progression between the different pieces included in the issue. Acknowledging the complex nature of the word populism is essential for the understanding of the variety of takes included in this issue. PubDate: 2022-05-31 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.15.2.6310 Issue No:Vol. 15, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Mary McLeod Abstract: In February 1989, architectural historian and theorist Mary McLeod published her now seminal essay entitled ‘Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to Deconstructivism’ in Assemblage 8. In the essay, she examined the relationship between architecture and politics in the 1980s, a time of unprecedented change. The following conversation discusses the circumstances under which the essay was originally written and offers her reflections thirty years later to think about the relationship between architecture and populism today. PubDate: 2022-05-31 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.15.2.6305 Issue No:Vol. 15, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Stephan Trüby Abstract: Is there an architectural and urban planning agenda at work behind the politics of contemporary (neo-)fascists and populist, radical and extremist right-wing forces' The Right-Wing Spaces research project, which has been running since 2018 at the Institute for Principles of Modern Architecture (Design and Theory) (IGmA) at the University of Stuttgart, suggests that the answer to this question is fairly unequivocal, at least in the German context: ‘architecture … seems to have become a key tool of an authoritarian, populist right with a revisionist take on history.’[i] The interim findings of the project were presented in ‘Rechte Räume: Bericht einer Europareise’ (Right-wing spaces: report on a journey through Europe), ARCH+ 235 (2019), an issue that was guest-curated by IGmA, as well as in my 2020 essay collection Rechte Räume: Politische Essays und Gespräche (Right-wing spaces: political essays and conversations). [i] Stephan Trüby, Rechte Räume: Politische Essays und Gespräche (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2020), 138. The Right-Wing Spaces research project is headed by Philipp Krüpe (IGmA) and myself, https://www.igma.uni-stuttgart.de/en/research/research-projects/page_0002_0001/. PubDate: 2022-05-31 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.15.2.6299 Issue No:Vol. 15, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Rachel Engler Abstract: This paper examines the idea of architectural style on evangelical Christian campuses built during the Cold War, a period during which religious cosmologies came into contact with the prospect of nuclear disaster, allowing for a temporary alliance between secular and religious visions of the end of human history. In this context of Cold War-era end-of-the-world thinking, and in relation to the biblical anticipation of the apocalypse, I consider the contrasting choices of so-called futuristic and neo-vernacular idioms in the building projects of television evangelists. What does it mean to revive styles of the past, or to build in a mode oriented toward the future, when the end of history is imminent' Design undertaken within the framework of assumed apocalyptic narratives troubles notions of permanence and durability—historically vital terms for thinking about building. The paper takes two primary case studies: Robertson’s Regent University in Virginia Beach, which hosts the Christian Broadcasting Network and was built in a “Jeffersonian” vernacular; and Oral Roberts’s Tulsa university, unique at the time for its gilded modernism. PubDate: 2022-05-31 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.15.2.6132 Issue No:Vol. 15, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Elena Markus, Nina Frolova Abstract: The Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces in Kubinka near Moscow is a quintessential example of the post-Soviet populist ideology, representating a mixture of ostensibly religious values with multiple secular cult objects. PubDate: 2022-05-31 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.15.2.6128 Issue No:Vol. 15, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Owen Hopkins Abstract: This essay explores the defining role that council housing has played in populist politics in Britain from the post-war era to the present. Central to this was Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy scheme – an archetypal populist policy that became totemic of her broader reconfiguration of British society. Building on the demonisation of council housing that paved the way for Right to Buy, today, it stands as the implicit foil for the present right-wing government’s populist advocation of ‘beauty’ (i.e. traditional styles) as a way of removing objections to future development. Meanwhile, the populist left argues for a return to the mass council house building of the post-war era, despite the recent success of small-scale, tactical council housing projects, such as those by Peter Barber Architects. The essay argues that the polarised and asymmetrical nature of this debate, conflating questions of aesthetics, typology and planning and tenure type, is typical of populist politics, ensuring a middle ground is by definition impossible. The essay concludes with the contention that if populist politics tends towards a monocultural architecture and urbanism, then a built environment that allows room for different forms, ideas and agendas may itself help foster a politics of pluralism. PubDate: 2022-05-31 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.15.2.6127 Issue No:Vol. 15, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Dennis Pohl Abstract: The digital era has supposedly had a drastic impact on contemporary forms of political debate. Live-tweets, podcasts, and posts have become the main channels for politics, polemics, and populism alike. But these tendencies are not only an acceleration of the politics of media brought about by the logics behind television, cybernetics, and computation in the post-war era. They gained strength when populist politics appropriated information access via mass media, which once promised the emancipation of ordinary citizens by architectural means through pop-culture. In this essay I seek to elaborate how Cedric Price’s 1965 design of the Pop-Up Parliament dealt with a media-technical condition of politics, while proposing that architecture was an integral part of the media network of governing. Price’s project is paradigmatic of the 1960s, a period when the media operations of information compression, prediction, and audience targeting became more decisive for politics than the content of debate. This analysis allows us, on the one hand, to problematise conventional definitions of populism towards a media-based concept, and on the other, to further our understanding of architecture as a political medium operating directly with media such as documents, television, and computers. This essay argues that the advent of digital media calls for a different architectural history of populism, one which engages with the operativity of media and cultural techniques, rather than relying upon the symbolic representation of ideology in architecture. PubDate: 2022-05-31 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.15.2.6115 Issue No:Vol. 15, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Pierre Chabard Abstract: Cet article s’attache à retracer la généalogie des idées portés par le réseau anglo-saxon d’architectes new classical qui partagent le souhait de renouer avec les traditions prémodernes et avec une « architecture classique », largement idéalisée et réinventée. Résonnant avec les arguments réactionnaires et identitaires de la droite populiste actuelle, cette doctrine architecturale s’est structurée au tournant des années 1980 au plus fort des débats autour du postmodernisme et s’est développée depuis lors, en dehors des scènes courantes de l’architecture contemporaine, à la faveur d’importants relais politiques (notamment, au Royaume Uni, celui du Prince de Galles) et de la structuration d’un cadre institutionnel et d’une commande spécifiques. Au-delà de leur positionnement stylistique, les protagonistes de cette new classical architecture revendiquent une volonté de revenir aux modes de construction artisanaux traditionnels et manifestent un certain rapport au temps résolument anti-historiciste qui rejoint ce que Zygmunt Bauman a appelé la retrotopia. PubDate: 2022-05-31 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.15.2.5402 Issue No:Vol. 14, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Sophie Suma Abstract: Summary Entry Theatricalizing: the media as a space of representation Popularizing: the wall as a symbol Transgressing: Architecture as an Instrument Output ________________________________________________________________________________________ Keywords: Trump, architecture, dramality, media, populism Entry In 2004, in the credits of the opening episode of the first season of the reality show The Apprentice (NBC, 2004-2014), Donald Trump presents New York as his city. This introductory sequence shows Trump in his limousine talking about business and power, driving past the various buildings he had built and on which his logo appears. After listing all of his professional conquests and making an inventory of the companies he has developed in real estate, fashion, aeronautics and leisure sectors, Trump announces that he needs an "apprentice", a new collaborator who will be able to help him manage his transactions. According to him, the Trump Tower in the heart of Manhattan is the place to be. The background music is none other than For the Love of Money by The O'Jays (1973), which gives some additional clues to the tone of the series, where the candidates are dismissed one by one at the end of each episode by the now famous and infamous words : “you’re fired”, which sound like a sentence in the mouth of the promoter. As we begin to understand the purpose of the show, the first episode of The Apprentice welcomes the candidates who will reside in the tower for the duration of the adventure. Trump also organizes a tour of the building's interior, work spaces and meeting rooms, and even his own top floor apartments. Immense and luxurious, the rooms follow one another and reveal an anthology of golden and ostentatious ornaments. Fountains and fountains, chandeliers and furniture in a classical style, and pink marble on almost every wall. Everything here seems to be made to measure. Champagne flutes in hand, the candidates are amazed by so much luxury. Fascinated, they gaze at the large floor-to-ceiling windows framing a breathtaking view of the city, giving the impression of owning New York. Trump presents this place as a symbol of professional success and business supremacy. The Trump Tower is his pride and joy, and he displays it for all to see through the reality show by inviting the public into the intimacy of his family. Here is an illustration of what Mark Burnett (President of MGM Television, creator and co-producer of The Apprentice) has defined as drama. Taken from the English dramality, it is a neologism proposed by the producer to qualify his reality shows. It refers to the association of the words drama and reality, two elements now establishing the new paradigm of reality as seen by television in the 1990s. This television drama featuring Donald Trump on the small screen long before he became President of the United States is not chosen at random, as this program also shows how he views American space, architecture and territory. Thanks to the various episodes of The Apprentice, Trump appeared regularly on television for more than a decade. His repeated appearances have certainly brought Trump's ideology into popular and political spheres, but they also give us the definition of drama. Television dramality is established through three different processes: theatricalization by dramatizing "authentic" facts and emotions (as close as possible to a real frame of reference), popularization by showing everyday activities, transgression by hijacking social codes and decency. I then hypothesize that if dramality is a television genre, it also takes shape in the way Trump mediatizes his political activities and public appearances. His descents down the escalator of the Trump Tower, from the time of The Apprentice to the day of the candidacy for the 2016 Presidential elections, his popular Border Wall Speeches, his transgression of democracy and his neglect of American myths demonstrate the close relationship he maintains with dramaturgy. The proposed executive order entitled "Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again" and the July 4, 2019 show at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington illustrate his contradictory position, between conservatism and symbolic violence. It is perhaps through the critical analysis of this spatial and architectural drama that the image of an anti-democratic President emerges : one who does not seem to put the interests of Americans before his own, but rather announces a form of nationalism. PubDate: 2022-05-31 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.15.2.5394 Issue No:Vol. 14, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Gabriel Cuéllar, Athar Mufreh Abstract: Whereas real estate-driven development tends to invest in singular and concentrated sites, resident-led development thrives in scattered patterns. The properties of community land trusts (CLTs) — one of the foremost models of resident-led development whereby land is claimed and used by a community without landlords — are almost always dispersed in a context where every property line is a potential obstacle to development. What these populist landholdings lack in terms of economy of scale is compensated for by virtues of proximity. This article examines the historic phenomena of property scattering and spatial patterns of CLTs across the US, articulating the possibility of designing patterns of scattered landholdings that support the values of resident-led development. PubDate: 2022-05-31 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.15.2.5391 Issue No:Vol. 14, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Jesse Foster Honsa Abstract: A "housing crisis" is often naively understood as a simple market imbalance between supply and demand, frequently occurring within cities in a capitalist mode of development. If that were the case, the solution would be to simply open the pipes and build more houses, a regulatory action delegated to technocrats. But as Reinhardt Koselleck reveals, crisis is a concept constructed by special interest groups with the aim of challenging absolute power, enlarging a sphere of popular criticism towards business-as-usual. This paper considers the operative nature of 'housing crisis' and related terms by investigating their use as a tool for urban reform in the 19th and 20th centuries in London. In newspaper articles, think tank publications and government reports, criticism often took on qualitative dimensions, leveraging change to housing practices. Crisis itself has had different meanings, from a moral apocalypse to a political risk to an historic opportunity. This is in contrast to how the term is used today, where it is no longer a climactic moment of decision and relief, but a perpetual and seemingly unsurmountable condition. While London's housing crisis is today universally accepted according to experts' statistics, it is rarely addressed on popular aesthetic grounds. PubDate: 2022-05-31 DOI: 10.7480/footprint.15.2.5386 Issue No:Vol. 14, No. 2 (2022)
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