Sofia Borges: The swamp
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“Reality as mud as dense as air” reads the spine of Sofia Borges’ book 'The Swamp', and equally, the series of photographs that she presents is as leaden as it is impenetrable. Spanning a seven-year period, it largely records Borges’ countless visits to natural history museums, zoos, aquariums and research centres, where the artifice of reality became her point of focus.(...)
Sofia Borges: The swamp
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“Reality as mud as dense as air” reads the spine of Sofia Borges’ book 'The Swamp', and equally, the series of photographs that she presents is as leaden as it is impenetrable. Spanning a seven-year period, it largely records Borges’ countless visits to natural history museums, zoos, aquariums and research centres, where the artifice of reality became her point of focus. For Borges, displays such as habitat dioramas serve as the ultimate form of representation, where objects have the virtuous task of representing “themselves” – a type, genre or group that is inherently bound to language through layers of history and meaning. As a motionless walrus lies in its plastic Antarctic locale and the beady eye of a fossilised bird catches your glance, what glares back at you from the depths of 'The Swamp' is not the thing itself, but the image, of an image, of an image.
Photography monographs
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When we view photographs of unfurnished interiors, what we see looks almost nothing like the homes we ultimately inhabit: blank, labyrinthine spaces, featureless rooms with walls that meet at odd angles and exits that lead nowhere. These strange and seamless spaces make up a peculiar genre of representation: views of the unfurnished interior in architects’ online(...)
Contemporary Architecture
September 2018
House tour: Views of the unfurnished interior
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When we view photographs of unfurnished interiors, what we see looks almost nothing like the homes we ultimately inhabit: blank, labyrinthine spaces, featureless rooms with walls that meet at odd angles and exits that lead nowhere. These strange and seamless spaces make up a peculiar genre of representation: views of the unfurnished interior in architects’ online portfolios. 'House Tour' which accompanied Switzerland’s award-winning contribution to the 2018 International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, is a playful yet thought-provoking celebration of this genre that is both familiar and not. In a series of essays, the contributors—anthropologists, art and architectural historians, and architectural theorists—consider the ubiquitous contemporary apartment, the void we inhabit with its standard measurements that reflect contemporary architecture’s key constraints. A striking visual journey, House Tour takes as its starting point almost three hundred photographs of such unfurnished interiors designed by leading Swiss architecture firms.
Contemporary Architecture
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Every city has at least one, and great cities often have more. From the Louvre to the Bilbao Guggenheim, the museum has had a long-standing relationship with the city. This ground-breaking volume examines the meaning of museum architecture in the urban environment, considering important issues such as forms of civic representation, urban regeneration, cultural tourism and(...)
The architecture of the museum : symbolic structures, urban contexts
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Every city has at least one, and great cities often have more. From the Louvre to the Bilbao Guggenheim, the museum has had a long-standing relationship with the city. This ground-breaking volume examines the meaning of museum architecture in the urban environment, considering important issues such as forms of civic representation, urban regeneration, cultural tourism and the museumification of the city itself. Bringing together an international group of distinguished scholars from a range of disciplines, this volume bridges the gap between museum studies and traditional architectural history. The contributors explore the conceptual architectural frameworks that govern the museum's diverse symbolic structures and focus attention on the complex ways in which museums function in the city. Ranging from the 17th century to the present day, the detailed and thoroughly researched case studies are drawn from Great Britain, continental Europe, South America and Australia.
Museology
The cosmic oval
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"The cosmic oval" is a nocturnal entrance into an exploration of feminist cosmologies, storytelling and the many ways of knowing and imagining the hot blue beginnings of time. By turn dreaming and waking, Ella Finer enters history and imagination from the sleep side, taking her cue from Anne Carson. Finer attends to cultural memory as composition, gathering cosmic guides(...)
The cosmic oval
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"The cosmic oval" is a nocturnal entrance into an exploration of feminist cosmologies, storytelling and the many ways of knowing and imagining the hot blue beginnings of time. By turn dreaming and waking, Ella Finer enters history and imagination from the sleep side, taking her cue from Anne Carson. Finer attends to cultural memory as composition, gathering cosmic guides with whom to listen beyond what is given to hear. In west London, the entrance to architect and theorist Charles Jencks’ "Cosmic house" is overlooked by "The cosmic oval," a representation of the origin of the universe referencing both contemporary scientific discoveries about its elliptical shape and ancient cosmogonic myths. Finer’s imagined conversation between the figures who inhabit the frieze surrounding the Oval, such as Hannah Arendt, Imhotep and John Donne, re-orchestrates cultural history to explore social scenes of study and the way knowledge moves through bodies and time.
Literature and poetry
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Facades play a key role as interfaces between the interior and exterior of build¬ings that are supposed to live with the climate in a dynamic way and not simply function despite of it. Many historic exam¬ples prove that they can perform purposes of both representation and protection, such as vernacular loam buildings in dry and hot climate zones, the double box windows of(...)
Detail 5 2026: Climate-adaptive facades
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Facades play a key role as interfaces between the interior and exterior of build¬ings that are supposed to live with the climate in a dynamic way and not simply function despite of it. Many historic exam¬ples prove that they can perform purposes of both representation and protection, such as vernacular loam buildings in dry and hot climate zones, the double box windows of historic European houses, or the diaphragm mechanisms of the Institute de Monde Arabe by Atelier Jean Nouvel. Climate buffers, solar chimneys, and photovoltaics are part of the toolkit of international architectural offices. For the police station in Chur by the Swiss studio Comamala Ismail, PV modules were installed on the facades at two different angles. As a result, they double as sun protection. Foster + Partners adapted traditional wind towers for the design of the Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi.
Magazines
A philosophy of gardens
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David Cooper identifies garden appreciation as a special human phenomenon distinct from both from the appreciation of art and the appreciation of nature. He explores the importance of various 'garden-practices' and shows how not only gardening itself, but activities to which the garden especially lends itself, including social and meditative activities, contribute to the(...)
A philosophy of gardens
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David Cooper identifies garden appreciation as a special human phenomenon distinct from both from the appreciation of art and the appreciation of nature. He explores the importance of various 'garden-practices' and shows how not only gardening itself, but activities to which the garden especially lends itself, including social and meditative activities, contribute to the good life. And he distinguishes the many kinds of meanings that gardens may have, from representation of nature to emotional expression, from historical significance to symbolization of a spiritual relationship to the world. Building on the familiar observation that, among human beings' creations, the garden is peculiarly dependent on the co-operation of nature, Cooper argues that the garden matters as an epiphany of an intimate co-dependence between human creative activity in the world and the 'mystery' that allows there to be a world for them at all.
Landscape Theory
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In the last decade, public discussions of transgender issues have increased exponentially. However, with this increased visibility has come not just power, but regulation, both in favor of and against trans people. What was once regarded as an unusual or even unfortunate disorder has become an accepted articulation of gendered embodiment as well as a new site for(...)
Trans*: A quick and quirky account of gender variability
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In the last decade, public discussions of transgender issues have increased exponentially. However, with this increased visibility has come not just power, but regulation, both in favor of and against trans people. What was once regarded as an unusual or even unfortunate disorder has become an accepted articulation of gendered embodiment as well as a new site for political activism and political recognition. What happened in the last few decades to prompt such an extensive rethinking of our understanding of gendered embodiment? How did a stigmatized identity become so central to U.S. and European articulations of self? And how have people responded to the new definitions and understanding of sex and the gendered body? In ''Trans*,'' Jack Halberstam explores these recent shifts in the meaning of the gendered body and representation, and explores the possibilities of a nongendered, gender-optional, or gender-queer future.
Social
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The book, ''Architecture as fabulated reality,'' marks the culmination of AAPK’s four experimental architectural projects, which employed virtual reality technology (VR) as the primary medium. The four projects explore a new emerging sense of spatiality, fabulating and questioning the notion of reality based upon shared backgrounds and attitudes to contemporary(...)
January 2020
Architecture as fabulated reality
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The book, ''Architecture as fabulated reality,'' marks the culmination of AAPK’s four experimental architectural projects, which employed virtual reality technology (VR) as the primary medium. The four projects explore a new emerging sense of spatiality, fabulating and questioning the notion of reality based upon shared backgrounds and attitudes to contemporary architectural discourse. To enhance ideas advanced by AAPK, the book invites four guest contributors from the architectural academic field in forms of critical essays or an interview. They reveal their collective interest in the power of the image and in forms of reality, in medium specificity and digital technology, and in presentation and representation along disciplinary lines. The subject of the book becomes clearer by curating and connecting each text, and meanwhile, makes it possible to reflect upon the situation that architecture is facing in the reality crisis caused by today’s digital technology or image culture.
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Founded by Swiss settlers in 1845, New Glarus in Wisconsin evolved from being a dairy farming and cheese production village to a popular tourist destination. Following a grave economic downturn in the 1960s and 1970s, the community discovered embracing the image of its cultural heritage, particularly traditional architectural details, as a way of survival. Consequently,(...)
Contemporary Architecture
December 2021
Swissness applied: Learning from New Glarus
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Founded by Swiss settlers in 1845, New Glarus in Wisconsin evolved from being a dairy farming and cheese production village to a popular tourist destination. Following a grave economic downturn in the 1960s and 1970s, the community discovered embracing the image of its cultural heritage, particularly traditional architectural details, as a way of survival. Consequently, they began to change their commercial building façades to appear even more Swiss. Since 1999, the town has even regulated the production of new buildings via its building codes to preserve this particular aesthetic evoking the familiar traditional Swiss chalet style. This volume investigates the transformation of European immigrant towns in the United States, exemplified by New Glarus. It features the results of extensive fieldwork on buildings in the village as well as design projections based on the local building code and evaluates the outcomes through different representation techniques.
Contemporary Architecture
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South Asia holds a unique place among the many regions of the world where modern architecture was understood as both a tool for social progress and a global lingua franca in the second half of the 20th century. Following the end of British rule in 1947-48, architects in the newly formed nations of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh (East Pakistan until 1971) and Ceylon (now Sri(...)
The project of independence: Architectures of decolonization in South Asia, 1947-1985
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South Asia holds a unique place among the many regions of the world where modern architecture was understood as both a tool for social progress and a global lingua franca in the second half of the 20th century. Following the end of British rule in 1947-48, architects in the newly formed nations of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh (East Pakistan until 1971) and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) proposed a novel understanding of modernity, disrupting the colonial hierarchy of center and periphery by challenging modernism's universalist claims. Architecture offered multiple ways to break with the colonial past. Through the establishment of institutions that embodied the societal aspirations of the period, and the creation of new cities and spaces for political representation, South Asian architects produced a distinct body of work in dialogue with global developments while advancing the theory and practice of low-cost, climatically and socially responsive design.
Modernism