Paolo Soleri and Arcology: An Analytical Comparison to Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn

The city proposals of Paolo Soleri, he called them arcologies, are monumental and complex geometric megastructures intended to project great heights above desert horizons. These proposals purposefully abandon conventional notions of the city. Soleri was physically isolated in his remote Arizona urban laboratory, Arcosanti, and philosophically detached from the professional urban design community. His proposals were often too easily understood as foreign and radical dystopian architectural metaphors meant to provoke thought more than to project an actual future. There is limited discourse on Soleri and this tends to isolate him in a vacuum, ignoring possible connections or parallels in his work and that of his contemporaries or predecessors. Contextualizing Soleri in history and with other more prominent architects makes his work more accessible, allowing for a more complete evaluation of the merits of compact three-dimensional cities of great density. With the ecological future of the planet in a state of crisis due to rapid climate change and explosive population growth in developing countries, there is an imperative to explore possible urban living solutions that in the past may have been deemed “too radical”. Two preeminent architects are needed to understand Paolo Soleri. Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn. Wright served as a mentor that Soleri could react strongly against conceptually. Kahn was a peer whose heralded built work has strong similarities to the limited architectural oeuvre of Soleri. Therefore, Kahn’s work provides one the best simulations of the potential architectural qualities of arcologies

Landscape History and Theory: from Subject Matter to Analytic Tool

This essay explores how landscape history can engage methodologically with the adjacent disciplines of art history and visual/cultural studies. Central to the methodological problem is the mapping of the beholder � spatially, temporally and phenomenologically. In this mapping process, landscape history is transformed from subject matter to analytical tool. As a result, landscape history no longer simply imports and applies ideas from other disciplines but develops its own methodologies to engage and influence them. Landscape history, like art history, thereby takes on a creative cultural presence. Through that process, landscape architecture and garden design regain the cultural power now carried by the arts and museum studies, and has an effect on the innovative capabilities of contemporary landscape design

Fantastic architecture and the building of Europe in Valerio Evangelisti’s Eymerich fiction

Concomitant with the horizontal expansion of EU territory through physical and political enlargement is a genealogy narrative, which emphasizes the ostensible roots of Europeanness in classical antiquity and Christianity. In the face of this sanitized genealogy, which lies at the heart of the European constitutional project, a range of alternative and more inclusive narratives circulate in contemporary European popular fiction. This paper focuses on a series of fantasy novels by the Italian author Valerio Evangelisti, featuring Inquisitor Eymerich as hero-investigator. In his highly popular novels, Evangelisti seeks to uncover layers of shared historical memory untainted with post-Enlightenment rhetoric. The central architectural tropes of Evangelisti’s imaginary world are those of a castle and a convent, epitomizing the temporal and sacral power in European history. Each isolated from its outside environment and built on layer upon layer of subterranean chambers and corridors, the castle and the convent conceal a past quite different from the one championed in the official European genealogy. Memories of pagan worship and Islamic or Judaic learning – banished from the official rhetoric – continue to thrive, dark and threatening, in the subterranean strata of Evangelisti’s European edifice. Evangelisti thus provides an incisive critique of the official European story of origin, which threatens to suppress any alternative visions of European history or unorthodox avenues for European identity formation

Tropic Architecture

Mannerist architects in the Cinquecento created what can be called “tropic architecture.” They set out to break the rules of classical architecture, but the rule-breaking was done systematically, by applying rhetorical tropes, or figures of speech, to architectural composition, the four most common being metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. According to Paul Oskar Kristeller, rhetoric was an important basis of Renaissance humanism. Students learned tropes and other figures of speech from well-circulated classical texts such as the Rhetorica ad Herennium and Quintilian’s Institutio oratorio. Examples of tropic devices can be found in works such as Giulio Romano’s Palazzo del Te and Michelangelo’s Porta Pia. There are many examples of mannerist works of architecture in the twentieth century that used the same tropic devices. The use of tropic devices in architectural composition results in an architecture that is a form of poetry

Review Essay: Diplomatic Material: Affect, Assemblage, and Foreign Policy by Jason Dittmer, and The Microbial State: Global Thriving and the Body Politics by Stefanie R. Fishel

No abstract available

De relatieve autonomie van de (school)architectuur en de complexe werking van de historische tijd

This text on school-architecture principally presents an architectural point of view. However, by focusing on how the two disciplines (architectural criticism and the history of pedagogy) deal with the problematic of time, the text touches the interdisciplinary question. In the first two paragraphs we stress the relative autonomy of the architectural discipline. By referring to the theories of the Italian architect Aldo Rossi, we make a distinction between the architectural form and the function of the building. The architect confronts the material sustainability of the architectural form to the occupational variability of institutional regimes. He demonstrates that historical buildings and monuments still have sense, even when the inhabitation, the use of the buildings and the initial meaning of the buildings have changed. In the next two paragraphs we try to re-investigate the relationship between the school programme and the architecture of an educational edifice. Therefore, we make use of two series of metaphors. A first sequence of terms is borrowed from computer technology. We compare the school building, the school regime and the events occurring in a school setting; to the hardware, the software and the way one makes use of a computer. For the second sequence of terms we make use of the ‘time theory’ of Fernand Braudel. The French historian distinguishes the longue durée from the social history and historical events: ‘des structures, des conjunctures, des événements’. Referring to the material sustainability of architectural artifacts, we argue that many architectonic questions are rooted in the longue durée. We even boldly state that architecture acts against the social history of customs and institutions. In a last concluding paragraph we will show, how in the design process, these categories are inverted. While designing a building, the solid becomes fluid, and the material reality becomes a possibility. In the design process the architect invests in the longue durée and the material qualities (the hardware) of institutional buildings such as a school, but in this way the designer finally can formulate a critique on the functioning of an institutional regime, and the use of the architectonic artifact