1,720,963 research outputs found
Domestic, production and debt: For a theory of the informal
No full textIn recent decades, the unprecedented concentration of people in cities around the world, coinciding with the collapse of any safety net welfare state policies used to provide, have provoked a series of staggering effects, a ‘housing crisis’ possibly similar to the one experienced in 19th century industrial centres. Decency and basic rights are ignored and social responsibility or even a philanthropic agenda are replaced by the rhetoric of ‘bottom-up’ and DIY. Unapologetic entrepreneurialism is disguised and sold as emancipation. Spaces and neighbourhoods of extreme poverty in Cairo, Rio, Tunis, Athens or Shenzhen are celebrated as cases of improvised urbanization and self-building ingenuity. Yet, there is no cause and effect relationship between space, architecture, the economy or the political. There is no architecture as a ‘representation’ or a ‘diagram’ of a power relation external to its own production. The domestic is not a scale of design, a ‘response’ to a given, predetermined framework, but the construction of the problem itself. The most emblematic object from the discipline of architecture that is used to unpack the above is Le Corbusier’s Maison Don-ino. Yet, it remains rather ambiguous. From a pure diagram of power relations, to an object that is often reduced ‘stylistically’ to its abstract, formal qualities, it is still as enigmatic as in 1914. As part of a broader research project on Athens and Mediterranean cities, the paper will discuss this relation between urban management and architectural form. What is the link between the domestic, production and debt? How forms of domestic ethos, habits and practices of domestic life could be related with administrative and managerial processes? How this could be used to developed a theoretical framework to confront the distinctions between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’, representation and machine, critique and practice
The Absence of Plan as a Project
No full textIn less than two centuries, the city of Athens grew from an Ottoman town of 6,000 inhabitants to a dense metropolis of four million people whose overwhelming sprawl covered the landscape of the Attica Basin. This profound expansion was the result of several consecutive population influxes, as a series of disruptions – violent changes in the city’s social consistency, marked by crises, social conflicts, and increasing housing needs – that required immediate political responses. Beyond a mere historiographical documentation of their development, the evolution of these projects suggests a link between the political initiatives, institutional decisions, and social practices that formulate the Athenian and the Greek method of urbanization. Since Athens’ initial stages of development as a modern city, the discourse on Athenian urban planning and architecture has been linked to a particular mode of economic development in which space and landownership are seen as the most fundamental and necessary assets of production. The Athenian housing market has been in constant flux for nearly 200 years due to a variety of factors – speculative or opportunistic, conscious or spontaneous, desperate, deliberate, urban or peripheral. This range of spatial and building practices has defined a method of city planning in which the state is content to provide only the basic platforms and regulatory framework, which, in the form of protocols and archetypes, have prescribed the environment for these flexible praxes to flourish. This chapter investigates the genealogy of events and projects that exhibit the foundation and evolution of modern, urban Athens – a political project within a spatial apparatus that has been progressively based and developed on abstract planning norms and architectural systems. In this particular case study, the “plan” operates at its most fundamental configuration, and its essential qualities comprise a basic framework that governs both the needs of the short-term present and the unforeseen possibilities of special development
ADS7 Ecologies of Existence: Architecture and Modes of Living
No full textArchitecture Description Standard: ADS7 Brie
Rationalising Violence: Leros
Get PDFThe paper considers Leros in the Greek Dodecanese as a case study in the history of rationalist architecture of the fascist Italian regime, implicating varied forms of surveillance, exile, detainment, and incarceration. The paper explores the enduring legacy and impact the colonial and military architecture, policy, and planning have had on urban and architectural forms, local labour economies, and the community that continues to the present day. The research spans from the Italian occupation of Leros to the establishment of detention centres for refugees today, following the chronologically overlapping trans-institutional transformation of Italian military and medical infrastructures into notorious mental health care facilities and camps for political prisoners and violently displaced children from mainland Greece. The paper focuses on the relationships established by the plan, the architecture, the strict imposition of gerarchia [hierarchy], as defined elsewhere by Diane Ghirardo, and associated governing frameworks, which established a unique urban form and social fabric. The paper explores not only the aesthetic and formal qualities of the architectural object but also the socio-political diagram embedded in the logic of the ambitious building programme of the Italian occupation. It will further examine the spatial tactics and policies that supported Italian control and, consequently, the gradual erosion of agrarian traditions and capabilities of the local population, forcing them into a complex co-dependence. It is precisely the interdependence and co-existence of architecture and labour that perpetuates the island’s role as an apparatus of control, creating a carceral campus of surveillance and exile
From the Flat to the City: The construction of Modern Greek Subjectivity
Get PDFAthens is not built by large scale masterplans. Large public or private housing projects are nowhere to be found. Even an empirical observation of the city makes one thing immediately apparent: the city is defined by a construction model that is actualised by a singular building unit. The polykatoikia systems, is made of buildings, on average four to five storeys high, organized in irregular, fragmented plots in a patchwork of discontinuous grids, made of in situ, labour-intensive concrete frames, filled with bricks, plastered, something that ultimately looks like a stack of slabs with rather continuous balconies. The essay develops a critical reading of this model, presenting the way this domestic environment and distinct architectural typology mediated social conflict and economic development in post-war Greece. Architecture and urban management are presented here relating production with the role and the function of family and inheritance, the real estate market, law, and the construction industry
Leros: Island of exile
Get PDFLeros:Island of Exile looks in detail at Leros in the Greek Dodecanese as a case study into the history of rationalist architecture of the fascist Italian regime and its continued legacy and impact on urban and architectural form and the local community into the present day. The research spans from the Italian occupation of Leros, and follows its transformation into notorious mental health care facilities, camps for political prisoners and violently displaced children from mainland Greece, to detention centres for refugees today. Hitherto the island remains relatively un-researched or discussed within architectural scholarship and almost unknown as a case-study within the larger body of literature about Italian colonial projects. The majority of academic research on the island is from within the medical community, psychology, social and political sciences. The paper focuses on the re-purposing of previous military infrastructures from the Italian regime, also used as mental health institutions, for current day refugee detainment and processing centres as part of the Greek government's response to the Mediterranean refugee crisis
ADS7: Ecologies of Existence, Radical Municipalism
Get PDFADS7’s main research question is what kind of architecture could emerge if we consider ecology, subjectivity and living, as indispensable political and architectural categories. To do so, ADS7 proposes a way of thinking and designing architecture as a collective political practice. In 2018, we will focus on the relation between governance, social movements and architecture, what we define as “the architecture of urban revolutions”. The city has historically been the centre of politics, of social transformation and of the constitution of problems, claims and demands. The very idea of the city is defined by conflict, not necessary located in dialectical oppositions but on a field of forces, interests and power relations. This is why the question of governance, inside, outside, in opposition or in parallel with any official or institutional structure, is not only crucial but formative for the definition of an ecological project: each revolution projects a transformation of modes and ideas of governance. Today again, we observe a fascinating shift in governance, what is often called as “radical municipalism”. With its most recognised example in Barcelona, where the social movement Barcelona en Comú won the municipal elections, radical municipalism consists of a model of governance based on direct democracy and the feminisation of politics that has in the right to housing and the city its main objects of concern. In our point of view, the radical and transformative possibility of these new municipal movements lies precisely there. And, it’s what poses a brilliant architectural challenge. Architecture is a practice that has a profound multiscalar nature to organize its complex characteristics and defining parameters. Resources, materials, infrastructure, labour conditions, construction methods, social practices, symbols, ideas and habits, diagrams of use and activities are all formative elements of architectural and urban space
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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