One and Many Details: Considering the Contingencies of Building as Empirical Evidence for Architectural Pedagogy

The study of built objects has always played a key role in the education of the architect. At the earliest stages of training most of us sat in front of buildings and drew them, trying to capture their overall features and minute details. What appears simple is, in fact, an extremely meaningful exercise. It presumes that drawing an existing...

How to Speak?: A conversation with Alberto Pérez-Gómez about the necessity of Language to Understand and Practice Architecture

Elaborating on a host of historical and theoretical references, in this conversation Alberto Pérez-Gómez suggests a course of action for the development of the architectural discipline; opposing the banality of scientism and rationalism, and recognizing instead the need for a degree of obscurity and ambiguity as essential to the full exercise of...

Narrative Methods for Writing Urban Places

This fifth issue of the Writingplace Journal examines different narrative methods, understood as procedures, techniques or ways of relating or recounting events, and how they can be used to appraise and imagine the city. The editorial process of the issue has been developed within the context of the EU-funded COST Action ‘Writing Urban Places’,...

Writing, Filming, Building: Using a Taxonomy of Moviegoers to Appraise Spatial Imagination in Architecture

How do we envision possible futures for the built environment? What allows us to imagine spaces that do not yet exist? While superstitious approaches to these questions often explain spatial imagination as an ineffable or arcane process, this article advances a simple description of how built space can be understood, envisioned and ultimately...

Transactions; or Architecture as a System of Research Programs

This study of the historiography of architecture and the built environment develops the thesis that well-known modernist histories of architecture, such as those written by Reyner Banham, remain unable to appraise the many nuances and complexities that characterize modern architecture. It is argued here that, among other reasons, they are unable...