Recent ced_haua_rw items

Beyond the Spatial Turn: Architectural History at the Intersection of the Social Sciences and Built Form

Sun, 16 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

In the past three decades, a growing number of scholars in the humanities and social sciences have turned their attention to the spaces of the built environment as a means to understand historical and social processes, thereby dramatically affecting our understanding of the latter. Edward Soja has defined the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences as “a response to a longstanding ontological and epistemological bias that privileged time over space in all the human sciences, including spatial disciplines like geography and architecture.” Soja thus positions spatiality against temporality, or space against history. In turn, the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has led to a “social turn” in disciplines that study the built environment, particularly architectural history.

In this paper, I discuss the ways in which Michel Foucault’s and Henri Lefebvre’s “spatial turn” have enabled both scholars to overcome what they understand as a disciplinary...

Idea and Form: The Integration of History in the Design Studio

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The increasing contradiction between “High-Architecture” and “Low-Architecture” that has been made explicit after the bursting of the “Brick-Bubble” calls for a revision of the teaching of design and history. The change in the European education curricula dictated by the Bologna Process (EHEA) has provided an appropriate context to implement brand new creative subjects, in which history is no longer an isolated subject narrated as facts of the past, but another tool that offers the students a framework to critically engage with the complexity of the built environment. “Idea and Form” is a recently created first-year undergraduate-program subject that interrogates how objects, buildings, cities, and landscapes are shaped focusing on the critical analysis of both their processes of creation and development. “Idea and Form” places its main focus on showing the dialectics between the creative processes and the contingencies of the everyday life, the single-handedly designed projects...

Everyday Urbanism Between Public Space and "Forbidden" Space": The Case of the Old City of Nablus, Palestine

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Considering the unpredictability of the continuous Israeli military invasions for most of the Palestinian cities, this study takes the Old City of Nablus as a case study to shed light on the importance of everyday life. This paper is part of an ethnographic research on the interrelationship between people and their built environment under an extremely conflicted political situation, and the households’ everyday living experiences that present their resistance and “sense of place”. It attempts to discuss the responsiveness of the everyday of the Old City of Nablus and its urban fabric competence not only to the socio-economic needs, but also to the accelerated political struggle and resistance facing the continuous invasion and occupation by the Israeli military.

To reveal the silenced stories, the paper’s structure follows an ethnographic, exploratory, and analytical approach based on the researcher’s observations, interviews, photos, and available literature. This...

Out of Conceived Space: For Another History of Architecture

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This paper discusses two processes of production of space and how historiography of architecture relates to them. The first one is based on professional design of extraordinary spaces (monuments) and is widespread during the 20th century, even in the design of ordinary buildings. We understand it through Henri Lefebvre’s ‘conceived space’: the architect’s intellectual work dominates the builder’s manual work by means of abstract concepts, tools and codes. Its products are the objects of prevailing histories of architecture reinforcing the very concepts used before. In contrast, the second process relates to Lefebvre’s ‘lived space’. It is collective and cooperative, characterized by people’s engagement and negotiation on nonhierarchical building-sites, in which design, building and use are simultaneous. It creates everyday spaces in constant change, such as Brazilian favelas. Prevailing histories of architecture do not include this second process, because there are no concepts,...

From Separate Spheres to Gendered Spaces: The Historiography of Women and Gender in 19th Century and Early 20th Century America

Sat, 18 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

How has the study of the built environment changed the historiography of gender? This paper analyzes the shifts in the historiography of women and gender in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American history. It examines the evolution from a metaphorical concept of spheres to a more complex understanding of the interactions between space and gender. In the 1960s, feminist historians introduced the concept of ‘separate spheres’ as a way to understand the history of women in the nineteenth century. When historians, in the 1970s and 1980s, began to study actual spaces it became clear that the relationship of gender and space was more complex than the dichotomies of public and private, male and female, urban and suburban, which reinforced the idea of separate spheres. The study of actual spaces demonstrates that the boundaries of everyday life were more porous than those idealized by separate spheres and spaces. Further, scholars in the 1990s were able to show how the...

Old Space, New Urbanism: Israeli Perspective on the Spatial Turn

Sat, 18 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In 2004, the municipality of Tel Aviv initiated a New Urbanistic urban-renewal project for one of its main thoroughfares, Ibn Gvirol Street. The plan prioritizes pedestrian traffic and encourages mixed uses. It was preceded by a design for the adjacent former Arab dwelling of Someil, made in 1997. In this plan, the remains of the village along with its topography are to be demolished, making way to a new design: integrated in all aspects of the urban texture.

This place, historically extrinsic to the urban continuum, had a potential for functioning as an Other Space in the city. It is persistently different from its context within space, society, and political allusions. Its historical capacity as a place for the disenfranchised makes it a possible Thirdspace – where Henri Lefebvre locates the struggle for Right to the City. However, New Urban plans are now transforming this site towards assimilation into the city.

New Urbanism draws from the past in search for...

Making Plans: "Architecture Begins and Ends in Pictures"

Sat, 18 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This paper was prepared for the Interrogating Theories and Methodologies strand. It explores, briefly, the practical aspects of the production and keeping of architectural drawings as historical evidence of built spaces and their use in the publication of architectural research. It looks at the role that drawings have played in the constructions of histories of architecture in the field of residential design, through a series of published examples the 20th Century ‘picture books’. For architects, the case study - a written appraisal of recent building work, illustrated with drawings and photographs, - has long been the staple of professional magazines and journals.

Published studies of new buildings fuel contemporary discourse and in time form the basis of much architectural history. During the last few decades case studies have changed, in particular the carefully drawn black and white plans and sections appear far less frequently. In journals they are often replaced...

The Conversion of the Palace of the Republic, 2004-2005, A Technology of Changing Atmospheres

Sat, 18 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Gentrification theory deals with the issue of converted buildings. However, it solely offers a diminished reading of the process of so-called aestheticization and of other sensual refurbishments that take place when undesired, decaying buildings are made desirable. Often, this rather ‘mundane’ process remains a black-box. In this paper, a reconfigured attention to atmospheric settings such as converted buildings are, is offered. From an Actor-Network-Theory point of view, it will be argued that when speaking of conversion as a process that transforms buildings one mainly speaks about material-semiotic changes made in the buildings’ atmospheres. Atmospheres in this view are actors of sociality that create their own actor-networks. Translated to converted buildings, thus, Atmospheric-Actor-Networks (AAN) configure how the sensual refurbishment of those buildings takes shape. With this perspective in mind, emphasis is placed on a case study of the conversion of the Palace of the...

Historicizing the View from Below: Aerial Photography and the Emergence of a Social Conception of Space

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This article seeks to reconnect the late-twentieth-century theoretical development of a social conception of space in the social sciences and urban planning with a technique that was developed in the early twentieth century, during World War I: aerial photography. As a tool of representation, aerial photography has often been linked, in the work of numerous late-twentieth-century scholars, to "top-down" urban planning programs that ignored the psychological needs of urban inhabitants on the ground. As we will see, however, the new ways of seeing offered by the airplane led, simultaneously, to the emergence of a "bottom-up" approach to urban planning that focused on the everyday experience of urban residents. The view from above, in fact, gave rise to the view from below.

Making Place: The Cultural History of the Built Environment

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Urban theorists have offered a number of powerful and popular concepts for mapping spatial relations. These languages have delivered considerable benefits to the theorization of spatial production. But the terms are often of less utility in telling the histories of particular places. They often confuse, rather than enlighten, when it comes to understanding the constellations of representation, action, meaning, and power at play in the histories of specific features of the built environment. The concepts themselves are not at fault; rather it is the tendency to see them as concepts and concepts only that hinders. As a cultural historian, I believe that uncovering spatial histories demands a close attention to specific, contingent processes, change over time, and struggle among discourses and actors. Revealing the way that spaces become actual places requires distilling from abstractions precise accounts of particular actors and discourses related in a process of flux and...

Formless Diagrams: The Employment of Studio Methods in the History Classroom

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Efforts to cross boundaries separating history classrooms and design studios are hampered by the very different objectives of historical and design teaching. Whereas design requires synthesis and clarity, the study of history should challenge and complicate students’ assumptions about the relationships between design and culture. More importantly, studio-based considerations of historical objects—often through the study of ‘precedent’—necessarily emphasize the formal and instrumental value of a work, while historical knowledge requires instead an emphasis on the ideological and cultural underpinnings of form. This paper views the productive tensions between these differing objectives through the lens of the diagram. The potential for diagramming exercises as components of history-based learning is examined through projects completed by my students in the context of semester-long historical research assignments. These activities complement written work with less traditional...

History of Spaces as a Pivotal Tool for Planning Practice: Analyzing Fractures and Continuities with Schoolchildren for the Master Plan of Dicomano, Italy

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

On the occasion of the drawing up of the new Master Plan for the Municipality of Dicomano (Tus-cany), the authorities requested not just a project from the planners, but the initiation of a process that ‘could create and develop a dialogue between inhabitants and institutions’. The dialogical planning included a one-year Laboratory with schools (for children between 8 and 11 years), which involved young generations in the discussion of urban values, sense of belonging and transforma-tion of spaces. The idea was that of valorizing children’s knowledge on city space, and their role of “multipliers” for involving their families in the planning process. A specialized team of architects and planners followed the experience, seeking to avoid the “marginalization” of results and guaran-teeing their confluence into the “adults’ plan”. Being Dicomano a city destroyed twice during the XX century (by an earthquake in 1919 and the IIWW in 1944), the first idea was to rebuild the his-tory...

The Virtual (Re)Construction of History: Some Epistemological Questions

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In recent years, some historians started to experiment with computer-generated virtual environments as a new medium for representing spatial history beyond the written language; unfolding new potentials for understanding and representing history. The new medium introduces often neglected sensory modalities and the exposition of some aspects of history that may otherwise go unnoticed. It affords the use of phenomenology and semiotics as theoretical lenses for interpreting the past in ways not possible in traditional media. It also often employs symbolic realism (the use of perspectival constructions that emulate everyday experience) to enable new forms of individual and social engagements with the past. In doing so, it raises new epistemological questions not typically encountered by historians using traditional media. This paper aims to clarify some of the assumptions and premises at work in reconstructing the past using computer-generated virtual environments. It examines...