Architectural Histories

This article explores the agency of the architectural travel sketch and considers its narrative and strategic value as a tool of remembering, distorting, and forgetting. Based upon original archival research, the paper focuses on annotated sketches that Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier (1887–1965) included in the 1950 book Le Modulor, in the chapter ‘Vérifications matérielles et coda’, mainly deriving from two journeys: the 1911 journey to the East and a 1948 visit to Turkey. The paper reconstitutes the background of this graphic material and explores how the resonance between the two journeys is creatively utilized in defense of the Modulor and how the reused sketches intervene in the revisited past, re-contextualizing it according to the strategic needs of the present. Exploring Le Corbusier’s method of sketching, editing, and redrawing, I argue that the references presented in the ‘Vérifications’ chapter retroactively construct ‘prefigurations’ of the Modulor system and lead to a synchronization of past and present. Finally, building upon concepts from memory studies, I discuss the travel sketch as an embodied-memory device, capturing the very act of the measuring and drawing hand, and providing a link to a corporeal experience that is constantly remolded and rewritten.

Panagiotis Farantatos

Title Pending 10728

标题待定 10728

Review of Antes de America: Fuentes originarias en la cultura moderna, an exhibition at the at Fundación Juan March, Madrid, Spain, 6 October 2023–10 March 2024, curated by Manuel Fontán del Junco, María Toledo Gutiérrez, and Rodrigo Gutiérrez Viñuales. This exhibition explored the artistic and architectural connections between Spain and the Americas, focusing on the reinterpretation of the forms and meanings of ancient Indigenous cultures of the American continent from the late 18th century to the early 20th century. It also highlighted the fascination with ‘the ancestral’, a paradigm that has significantly influenced the aesthetics of both the recent past and the present.

Francisco Mamani-Fuentes

Title Pending 17256

待定标题17256

The broletto, the medieval building that housed the communal administration of the Lombard cities, has long been the subject of studies that examine it from ethical, political, stylistic, and formal points of view. In recent years, focus in medieval studies has shifted to areas of the ‘margins of the communal world’, territories that, although relevant to historical change, have been neglected by historiography. In this contribution, I consider the architecture of buildings in fringe areas from the valleys in the Rhaetian and Bergamasque Alps that date to the communal age and that were significantly transformed between the 15th century and the early contemporary period. I begin with general remarks about the context and then use the communal palace of Clusone in Bergamo and the Palazzo Pretorio di Chiavenna (Sondrio) as case studies, drawing on unpublished documents in the municipal archives of the two cities.

Isabella Carla Rachele Balestreri

Title Pending 10418

标题待定10418

This paper deals with the relationship between continuity and change in architectural history, or, to be more precise, with the relationship between the continuity of built structures and the changes in their uses and meanings, using as a case study the Piazza del Duomo in Pistoia. The piazza is a kind of fossil of the communal age, surrounded as it is by the main public buildings of the late medieval city whose physical appearance has not been radically altered over time and whose functions have even remained largely stable. And yet the buildings are at the same time characterized by a history of continuous change, as a result of the Florentine conquest and the loss of political autonomy, as well as the internal evolution of the local ruling class. The paper focuses on these transformations, which adapted the public buildings to functions quite different from those for which they were originally built, all while preserving their external appearance, in order to ideologically exalt the ancient roots of civic identity as the main cornerstone — fictitious but credible — of Pistoia’s urban image.

Marco Folin

Title Pending 10435

待定标题 10435

Beginning in the 15th century, the reconstruction of Venetian state communal palaces, which served as the institutional seats of the city councils and judiciaries, was often seen as an opportunity for civic magistrates, along at times with Venetian officers, to develop plans to renovate their cities. These projects often led to the enlargement of central districts and to the transformation of cities’ roads and squares. I look at communal palaces from across the Venetian territorial state, focusing on Treviso, which clearly elucidates how the modification of public buildings often led to a redefinition of central urban space. An array of mostly unpublished drawings proposing urban redevelopment projects that were not always realised are key to reconstructing the city’s history, demonstrating better than other documents how communal palaces have enhanced its fabric.

Elena Svalduz

Title Pending 10428

待定标题 10428

Review of Susan Slyomovics, ed., Ordering Imperial Worlds: From Late Medieval Spain to the Modern Middle East, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023, 328 pages, 14 b&amp;amp;w illustrations, 49 color illustrations. ISBN 9781399517867. In this volume of essays in honor of Zeynep Çelik, scholars engage with her rich corpus on built environments of the Mediterranean. Utilizing transdisciplinary and often innovative methods, they draw on diverse voices across space and time to interrogate the idea of empire.

Michele Lamprakos

Decentering the Center: Dialogues with Zeynep Çelik

去中心化中心：与泽伊内普·切利克对话

A review of Harriet Harriss, Ashraf M. Salama, and Ane Gonzalez Lara, eds., The Routledge Companion to Architectural Pedagogies of the Global South, London: Routledge, 2022, 508 pages, 175 b&amp;amp;w illus. ISBN 978-1-003-01884-1. A comprehensive and necessary compendium that gives voice to a wide range of pedagogical experiences produced by the global South, demonstrating the relevance of this body of knowledge.

Leandro Manenti

Title Pending 17389

待定标题 17389

Review of Albert Narath, Solar Adobe: Energy Ecology and Earthen Architecture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024, 296 pages, 51 b&amp;amp;w illus. ISBN: 9781517914073. An investigation into the cultures surrounding adobe construction in the American Southwest in the 1970s.

Will Davis

Title Pending 17390

待定标题 17390

A review of Leqi Yu, Painting Architecture: Jiehua in Yuan China, 1271–1368, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022, 216 pages, 54 halftones, 12 color plates. ISBN: 978-988-8754-23-6. Yu’s book on Yuan jiehua, a traditional Chinese painting genre centered on architectural subjects and tectonic structures, examines its relationship with real buildings, painters, and politics. This review highlights her discussions on architectural representations, focusing on her accounts of the degree of accuracy in pictorial depictions, utilization of modular systems by painters, and artistic techniques employed to achieve verisimilitude.

Zhengfeng Wang

Title Pending 17345

待定标题17345

A review of The Gift: Stories of Generosity and Violence in Architecture. Exhibition curated by Damjan Kokalevski and Łukasz Stanek at the Architekturmuseum der TUM (Pinakothek der Moderne), from February 29 to September 8, 2024. The thought provoking, enjoyable exhibition features four examples of architectural gifts and the relation to their urban context in globally different situations. The notion of architecture as a gift is an inspiring concept, contributing to the discourse about complex power games, the symbolic meaning of monuments, and the agency of architecture.

Publication Information	Publisher: Open Library of Humanities，Publishing cycle: ，Journal Type: journal，Open Access Journals: Yes
Basic data	Year of publication: 2018，Proportion of original research papers: 89.47%，Self Citation Rate:25.00%， Gold OA Rate: 100.00%
Average review cycle	网友分享经验：21 Weeks

Architectural Histories

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