Contemporary architectural publishing. U+D, 1/2014

Histories of Postwar Architecture n.7 December 2020, 2020

Hélène Jannière (Université Rennes 2) and Paolo Scrivano (Politecnico di Milano), scientific coordinators of the Mapping Architectural Criticism network, are guest editing the next issue of HPA – Histories of Postwar Architecture. A call for papers has been launched on the topic Committed, Politicized, or Operative: Figures of Engagement in Criticism from 1945 to Today. Deadline for paper submission: July 31, 2020 Please find more information below Hélène Jannière (Université Rennes 2) et Paolo Scrivano (Politecnico di Milano), coordinateurs scientifiques du réseau Mapping Architectural Criticism, sont les rédacteurs invités du prochain numéro de HPA – Histories of Postwar Architecture. Un appel à contribution a été lancé sur le sujet Committed, Politicized, or Operative: Figures of Engagement in Criticism from 1945 to Today. Date limite pour l'envoi des propositions: 31 juillet, 2020 Veuillez trouver plus d'informations ci-dessous ---- Presentation In a 1995 article on the renewal of architectural criticism, French architect and critic Bernard Huet referred to Charles Baudelaire to define art criticism as necessarily – in the poet’s words – “partial, impassionate, political”. During the 1990s, perhaps as a reaction to the 1980s, when in many specialized publications architectural criticism was identified as “communication” or even as promotion of architects and architectures, it emerged an extensive nostalgia for a notion of criticism associated to the historical avant-gardes. In this “committed” criticism or in the “politicized” one it was possible to emphasize the critic’s influential and active role in discovering, promoting, and intellectually supporting groups of artists or architects. The idea of a “golden age” of criticism has thus spread, being from time to time related to the end of the 19th century, to the 1920s, and to the 1960s and 1970s. This issue of HPA intends to collect studies devoted to historical examples of “committed” and “politicized” criticism, reflecting on the real meanings of these concepts and on the themes and subjects to which they are tied. On the one hand, the figure of “committed” critic might be linked to the art and architecture avant-gardes from the end of the 19th century onward, hence defining a privileged relationship between critic and artist/architect; on the other, “politicized” criticism can be characterized as the understanding in political terms of architectural and city phenomena. Among the questions the issue wants to address are: in which way do these definitions of “committed” and “politicized” criticism come close to or differ from the definition of “operative” criticism, in the various meanings that have been attributed to it since Manfredo Tafuri? What are the theoretical tools, the rhetorical constructions, and the intellectual and political references of “committed” and “politicized” criticism? Should the latter be necessarily bound to the author’s belonging to a party or political group? What are their principal ways of circulation (specialized periodicals, journals, targeted actions)? In which measure did “politicized” criticism influence architecture’s historical narrative? And finally, what are the interlacements and the convergences between criticism’s intellectual and artistic engagement and the political commitment? The issue of HPA intends to include contributions dealing with specific case studies or themes, with a periodization that spans from the end of the Second World War to the present date. Guidelines and deadlines Please find the complete guidelines and deadlines for the submission in the pdf attached. About HPA HPA – Histories of Postwar Architecture is a biannual open-access peer-reviewed Journal that aims to publish innovative and original papers on post-war architecture, with no geographical, methodological, historiographical or disciplinary restrictions. Find more information about the journal here.

The Journal of Architecture, 2016

EGA, 2022

Siracusa: LetteraVentidue, 2019

Architects write a lot, especially now when conceptual aspects have become central in the advanced reflections and narrative forms increasingly intersect the quest of design practices for an ultimate legitimation. In the growing mass of the publishing offer, these keywords try to highlight recurrent issues, tracking synthetic paths of orientation between different critical positions, with particular attention to what happens in the neighbouring fields of the arts and sciences. This is the English version of the book published in 2016. It is now available at the publisher's website: https://www.letteraventidue.com/it/prodotto/272/exlibris

If in the analysis of the relatively recent history and theoretical development of architecture one had to exclude the last twenty-five years, one would be immediately struck by a “partial” lack of a distinct and evident evolution of new design methodologies. If the final product of an eighteenth century architectural thought is physically embodied in, for example, an Italian palazzo, a quite similar procedure is still employed two hundred years later in the design of a Modernist housing scheme. If one sets aside the emergence of new building typologies, architectural “styles”, the use of new materials like steel and reinforced concrete, and the changes in built form which these materials brought up, one notices that the critical thinking procedure is still very similar. On the other hand, this intellectual stable situation in the architectural field cannot neglect the artistic input which certain individuals brought to the architectural world in those periods. For example, the techniques adopted by artists/architects like Michelangelo and Palladio differ significantly from those used by Novak and Spuybroek, albeit the result is somewhat a happy and positive evolution in design terms! In between these two extremes reside the architectural formal inventions of Mendelsohn and Gaudi. By examining the characteristics of these periods, it becomes quite clear that a shift from a mechanical or manual approach to informational and digital synthesis occurred in the architectural profession. The aim of this paper is to scrutinise the details of this transformation and to discuss the hypothetic futuristic role of architects, no more as intellectual craftsmen (painters, sculptors, master-masons), but as innovative digital programmers, IT engineers and software script-writers. In brief, this paper will examine the progression of architects’ approach to design from Euclidean geometry to scripts and codes.