Architecture historian Hans Ibelings wrote 'Modern Architecture: A Planetary Warming History'. It differs from the history books you know in terms of format, narrative, subject and presentation. If form and function have been the points of contention for the past two hundred years, ecological footprint and nature-inclusiveness might be those for the coming centuries.@en

On December 5 1964, the Boston Architectural Center organized the first conference on the use and impact of the computer on architectural design and the architectural and engineering professions. Under the title “Architecture and the Computer” the conference centered around technical subjects of computer and design graphics as well as deeper concepts of creativity and design intuition. Although the conference seems to belong to the prehistory of digital architecture the problems that it set continue to attract the interest and anxieties of 21st century architectural discourse. The address will 1) establish the historical context of the 1964 conference (organizers, participants, financing etc.); 2) will present the contributions and questions set by architects (Walter Gropius, Serge Chermayeff, Edward Durrell Stone) and AI foundational experts (Marvin Minsky); 3) and will report on the consecutive coverage of the conference and its subject by the architectural press. Archival material will be presented from: the Boston Architecture College Archives, Columbia University (Serge Chermayeff papers), and Harvard (Walter & Ide Gropius).@en

The adoption of modernism in the architectural scene of USA was a problematic process to say the least, with the burden of this change being left to experimental publications such as Plus magazine. While the building production of skyscrapers and the architectural feats of early 20th c. USA were depended on the advancements of technology, the cultural appreciation of modernism lagged behind being accused of “wild theories”, “extremist,” and “un-American”. Not to mention the social and urbanistic advancements of modernism that one may say were never implemented. In the architectural press, the paradox persisted with massive technical information on new construction techniques and products coexisting with traditional and colonial designs of Beaux-Arts trained architects. Even the most progressive editors, like Howard Myers, or Michael Mikkelsen that introduced pivotal architects like Le Corbusier or Mies to the US audience, were opposed to the production of a mainly-modernist magazine. This paper tells the story of a magazine that appeared briefly between 1938-1939 to do exactly that. Plus: Orientations of Contemporary Architecture and explores the connotations between modernism as “the other” in midcentury USA.@en

The developments of the media revolution in mid-20th century US rendered publishing into a massive industry with unprecedented influence on both economic and cultural aspects. The fusion of the newly formed corporate media world with architecture meant for the inclusion of architectural media (magazines, professional networks, and cultural institutions) in the world of advertising, marketing, and management. Some interesting results were the commissioning of studies by statistical and marketing agencies on the definition of their target audience of architects and engineers. Under the scope of publishers, advertisers, and sales departments the architectural media developed new business models favoring advertising, instead of subscription revenue. And publishing and editorial policies that defined the portrayal modernist architectural products as well as the “image” and “self-image” of architects and how “they” reach their markets. This paper will address the merger between advertising and publishing initiatives of major mid-20th c. US architectural media: F.W.Dodge Co., Time Inc., and Reinhold Publishing Co. as well as the institution that conditioned and regulated their competition: the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC).@en

In 1949, under Grace Morley’s directorship, the San Francisco Museum of Art (SFMA) mounted the traveling exhibition Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region, one of the episodes that best encapsulated the conflict of perceptions and interests between the country’s East and West Coasts in the postwar debates upon identity and autonomy. Contrary to prevailing assumptions that the show was a delayed reaction to the 1948 MoMA symposium organized by Philip Johnson to refute Lewis Mumford’s arguments over the existence of a “Bay Region Style”, it was the consequence of an effective regionalist agenda aiming to educate the public about the social, political, and ecological concerns of Northern California traditions. This essay explores the crucial, yet overlooked role that women in architectural media, particularly Architectural Record’s Western editor Elisabeth Kendall Thompson (EKT), played in the conception, materialization, and publicity of this exhibition. In addition, it focuses on EKT’s agency in promoting the humanism of Bay Region architects within and beyond this landmark event. The EKT papers and SFMA’s archives provide evidence of her silent efforts to present the roots of a “Bay Region School” as interdependent with the region’s unique physical and cultural geography, and thus to offer new lens through which Eastern critics could re-evaluate modernist architecture in California vis-à-vis the mechanical and formalist criticism proposed by the MoMA in 1932. Her training as an architect and a writer, as well as her connections to both Coasts’ professional, academic, and editorial circles were instrumental in the process of codification of Bay regionalism. As Architectural Record Western editor not only did EKT provide her journal with works and ideas she knew first-hand, but also, she was responsible for creating narratives that had the effect of establishing for San Francisco Bay a room in the pantheon of architectural history.@en

At the dawn of the atomic age the US architectural scene was shocked to the awe and devastation brought by the atomic bomb and was quick to adapt it thinking on city planning. As early as December 1945, Alfred Caldwell was proclaiming in a feature article of the Journal of American Institute of Architects: “Now we have a weapon that makes cities the most dangerous place in the world.” For Caldwell, as well as Hilberseimer and a growing group of advocates, decentralization was the only rational solution to civil defence in the wake of the US bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the following years, this direction for dispersed urbanism was propagated by the mass architectural media of the time and institutionalized through workings between the American Institute of Architects and the US Atomic Energy Commission of 1946, the gubernatorial agency for the promotion and regulation of atomic energy to all facets of US industry. But a counter-argument to urban dispersion was also harbouring among the architectural community, namely by architects such as Josep Lluis Sert, who having taken the lessons of the US CIAM to his heart stood in defense of central city areas and “the historical pattern of towns.” This paper traces the history of this debate on urban dispersion and investigates the connections between administrative, academic, media, and professional bodies that interconnected and conditioned the architectural matters of the time.
@en

We hear it all the time: Architecture can do a lot. It’s all about life-changing designs, dreamy projects that look beyond the discernible future and tackle global issues. In fact, once architecture wakes up, stops bickering, and gets out of bed, it’s going to solve a long list of problems. One of them is the climate crisis, which was the subject of the recent International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam. And as the title of its tenth iteration stated: IT’S ABOUT TIME: The Architecture of Change. Rightly so, because it turns out we have been hitting the snooze button for about 50 years!@en

By the end of the 1950s, the US periodicals Αrchitectural Forum and Architectural Record restructured their editorial policies relating to their uses of pieces of architectural criticism. From the one side, Architectural Forum published by Time Inc., was attempting a widening of their readership through the use of flagrant architectural criticism under the supervision of the enthusiastic editor-in-chief Douglas Haskell, who assembled a team of talented journalists with foremost being the name of Jane Jacobs, acclaimed critic and writer. One the other side, Architectural Record, published by the informative organization F. W. Dodge Co. was led by Emerson Goble, a conservative editor who was openly opposed to architectural criticism and who paradoxically sustained a stable collaboration with Lewis Mumford whose articles in the magazine dealt with issue of social restructuring, morality, technological progress, and the development of the contemporary mega-cities. The current study will refer to the role and uses that the two intellectual critics held in the two respective magazines in the context of professional architectural journalism of the mid-20th century USA.@en

Volume 58, entitled Legacy, marks the transition of the editor-in-chief position from Arjen Oosterman to Stephan Petermann. To avoid simplistic boasting or navel gazing, as the magazine introduction states, they decided to dive into Volume’s pre-history, starting in 1929 and stopping where Volume started. What is Volume’s legacy after 75 years of magazine making?@en

The 1988 competition for the German Historical Museum in Berlin was on several layers a controversial project that testifies to the publics’ potential to embrace a diverse culture of dispute. Even before the competition, the idea of a museum on German history was fiercely debated, especially in the face of National Socialism. Aldo Rossi’s proposal that won the competition featured a collage of typological forms reminiscent of historical German monuments. But critics contested its monumentality and naïve use of iconography, while the jury was accused to have violated competition regulations. The fall of the Berlin Wall eventually ended the debate, but this did not go without reaction: The head jury Max Bächer protested to the then-chancellor Helmut Kohl, demanding compensation for Rossi’s lost prize.

@en

‘I am that idiot,’ said Timothy Morton, stepping onto the podium. We proceeded to listen to the professor of English at Rice University, Texas, for the next couple of hours.@en

Το 1964 o Walter Gropius απηύθυνε ομιλία απέναντι σε κοινό Αμερικανών αρχιτεκτόνων την οποία ολοκλήρωσε απαγγέλοντας το ποίημα του Σεφέρη, «Γέροντας στην ακροποταμιά» (1942). Δεδομένου, ότι η συγκεκριμένη ομιλία ήταν μία από τις τελευταίες δημόσιες ομιλίες του Gropius και το γεγονός ότι το αντικείμενο της ομιλίας διακρίνεται από την κριτική που ασκεί προς την αμερικανική αρχιτεκτονική κοινότητα με αποκορύφωμα το ποίημα, προκαλούνται τα ερωτήματα σχετικά με την θέση του Gropius στην αρχιτεκτονική κριτική σκηνή της Αμερικής και πως αυτή διαμόρφωσε την ύστερη φάση της καριέρας του μεγάλου αρχιτέκτονα. Στο παρόν κείμενο θα αναφερθούμε πρώτον, στο κείμενο της συγκεκριμένης ομιλίας, και δεύτερον - μέσω αρχειακής έρευνας- στην σχέση που διατηρούσε ο Γερμανο-Αμερικάνος αρχιτέκτονας με ορισμένους από τους πιο σημαντικούς κριτικούς αρχιτεκτονικής της Αμερικής σκηνής: Lawrence Kocher (Colonial Williamsburg archives), Joseph F. Hudnut (Harvard Archives), Russel Hitchcock (Smithsonian archives), John Ely Burchard (MIT archives) και Lewis Mumford (UPenn archives). Εκτός από τα παραπάνω, σημαντική πηγή υπήρξε και το αρχείο Walter και Ise Gropius του Harvard.@en

The Architectural Record during its midcentury years of 1942 to 1967, was a riveting centre of architectural journalism following and participating in the changing development of the architectural profession. Through the Second World War and the Korean War that brought functionalist modernism to the foreword and through the emerging consumer market of the 1950s, the magazine’s editors’ mission was one of “helping this new-born architectural infant to learn to walk, talk, and attain his full power.” Through archival research, this study deals with the particular history of the Record editors, publishers and contributors along the course of US midcentury modernism and the developing “image of the architect”.@en

In this series of articles, PhD scholars from various universities explain their research and their way of working. What is the focus of their academic work? What question(s) do they want to answer? And what problems have they encountered? Phoebus Panigyrakis (TU Delft) is researching the content, editorial policy and impact of the magazine Architectural Record in the period 1942-1967.@en

In 1944 amidst the Nazi occupation, a book on Greece circulated in the Netherlands, was quickly sold-out and circulated again in 1946 and 1951. Its title was Hellas. Een reis door Griekenland [Hellas. A journey through Greece] and its author was Arthur Staal (1907-1993), a young architect who found himself in the epicenter of the developments of Dutch modernism, and whose achievements in the drawing board were paralleled with his ventures in faraway countries of the Middle East and the Mediterranean. The country of Greece, and its landscape were of particular importance to him and the development of his architectural thinking.@en

The travels of Dutch architect Arthur Staal to Greece in the 1930s and his views on the Greek landscape.@en

Comparison of the design process of the two master architects' projects in Berlin, through archival research@en

Architecture as a practice is bound to social, political, economic and material restrictions. It is only as a cultural discourse that it may gain autonomy, revolving around the question of what do the produced architectural forms actually mean for our contemporary setting as argued by architects, academics, critics/journalists, students or friends of the art. This discussion has its roots in the idea of contemporaneity itself and during the 19th century it was labelled as the “debate on style”. Today, the concept of style is undergoing a reconsideration after its banishment under the realm of modernism and the doctrine of functionalism. In the 21st century, contemporary architecture displays an over-production of forms that need to be managed and branded and in this context style re-emerges as a field of business strategies for architects who are willing to develop the identity of their firm and their designs. This paper investigates contemporary theories of style from the field of design management and their possible application in the field of architecture. A research gap has been identified between a) the vague arthistorical and philosophical concept of style in architectural discourse where it is regarded according to Ackerman, as a self-evident truth upon which our historical conception is based and b) the relatively recent theories of marketing and design management where effort is made to define style as a process of designing or styling strategies that may lead an architecture firm to get a certain positioning in their target environment. The paper will first consider several conceptions of style from the field of design management, then overview the conception of style as it stands in architecture, and thirdly, it will consider the matter of stylistic consistency in architectural practice as the pivotal turn for stylistic strategies. In conclusion mention will be made on the implications of style and its re-invention towards the notion of criticism. The main objective is to point out that the current consideration of style either as a retrospective tool of historical categorization, or as the central object of criticism is undergoing a paradigm shift. More as a tool of marketing than as the result of a collective consensus, style is being employed by architecture firms for their prospective endeavours and market engagement and as such should it be critically looked upon.@en