This study primarily elaborates one particular form of cultivation, namely the Rodosto Farm Colony in Tekirdağ (Raidestos/Rodosto), as a short-lived exercise of resettling for the survivors of the Armenian Genocide. In 1921, Near East Relief (NER) procured 6,000 acres of land from the Greek Government to assist the increasing number of Armenian refugees from Constantinople and Anatolia. Shortly, the land turned into a farming colony, including housing units built collectively with mud bricks and wooden studs. According to NER, the farm grew into two self-supporting villages consisting of cottages, woodshops, bakeries, and a school, accommodating a total population of five thousand. However, with the Population Exchange between Turkey and Greece in early 1923, the colony again faced deterritorialization. Two decades later, in 1940, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret offered an architectural project, “Les Constructions Murondins,” to accommodate those who became homeless due to their migration to southern France from German-occupied northern France and Belgium. Unlike Corbusier’s previous work on “the mass-production houses” built with industrialized and standardized materials, proposed after the first war early in the 1920s, these units were conceived as the in-situ constructed houses with local materials, including rammed earth blocks, tree trunks, and tar paper to be collected from the surroundings. The practicability of Les Murondins would allow their collective construction by prospective inhabitants and local carpenters. Hence the paper compares and contrasts these two projects in terms of their social, tectonic, and operational parallels to reveal the changing nature of informality tensed by the intricate relations of design authorship, tectonics, and practicality.

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In 1983, Jonathan Glancey wrote an article on the TV-am Building, by Terry Farrel & Partners, in The Architectural Review. A few years later, in 1987, John Summerson reviewed Clore Gallery, the extension to Tate Britain by Stirling, Wilford & Associates, in the same journal. Both authors, writing in the year of each building’s completion in London, connected the works to postmodernism and attributed humour to them as a positive architectural quality. Glancey’s and Summerson’s reviews allow a detailed look into the experience of architectural humour, which often makes an appearance in the discourse on postmodernism, but is rarely analysed in relation to concrete examples. However, the context and the way in which the authors chose to present their ideas reveal that humour cannot be understood merely as a quality inherent to buildings, but rather as a product of the relationship between buildings and their discourse. Both reviews presented humour as an essential English quality, which was particularly present in 18th and 19th century architecture in England and was brought back with TV-am and Clore Gallery. At the same time, Glancey and Summerson connected humour to the mastery of the individual architect, endorsing a conflation between humour as a quality in a built work and as an architect’s personality trait, which was present in other instances of the building’s media coverage at the time.

This presentation is a dialogue between two of the case study buildings which my on-going PhD thesis investigates. Currently titled “Designing for amusement: Expressions and Repressions of Humour in Postmodern Architectural Culture”, the thesis explores a suspicion against humour in Western architectural thinking and the rudimentary acceptance the term gained in the discourse concerning postmodernism in the British context. The presentation will address, through the case studies, two of the dissertation's main research questions: “how have critics perceived architectural humour” and “why did an interest in humour emerge in this particular moment”?  

Can a building be funny? This paper examines the use of humor as an architectural instrument for promoting urban change in the light of aesthetic and social theories of humor. Although the use of humor in architecture has often been associated with the brief but glorious postmodern period, when architecture was defiant, ironic, and amusing, its significance and meaning in architectural production in local contexts remain unexplored. Moreover, assessing Israeli architecture through the concept of humor contradicts the rationale of modernism as the local ethos praised functionality and disregarded redundancy and ‘lack of seriousness’. During the first half of the 1990s, Israeli architecture underwent a turning point, as a young, rebellious generation of architects introduced imported postmodernism mainly in Israel's economic and cultural center of Tel Aviv-Yafo. In conjunction with this stylistic transformation, the country swiftly transitioned into neoliberalism following a severe economic crisis in the mid-1980s that dominated the construction industry and nearly halted public building investments. The Kalisher School of Art was commissioned by a private donor in the early 1990s and designed by a young architecture firm that has already demonstrated an attentive approach to local urban fabrics and their inhabitants. The school complex is located next to Tel Aviv’s city market, an industrial zone that was considered derelict and abandoned though relatively quickly succeeded in its urban transformative mission since the project’s completion in 1997. Using the planning and administrative history of the complex, this paper unveils the humorous toolkit used in the making of architecture and suggests that humor can translate beyond the limits of the building to promote urban and social change. It further proposes that the transition from an architectural scale to a social one parallels Henri Bergson's conceptualization of humor as a sophisticated solution to a unique social human problem.

This dissertation reconstructs the role of the expression tabula rasa in Western architectural discourse about the city during the twentieth century. Specifically, the research focuses on this idea's material and conceptual translations into a set of ideological neutralisation tools in the context of urban transformations. The expression tabula rasa, better known in Western philosophical discourse as a metaphor for the malleability of the human mind, emerges in the architectural debates at the end of the twenty century to describe different operations that put into practice the overlap of modern rationality on existing reality such as: the material demolition and destruction of entire partsof cities; a non-linear understanding of historical time and references; the use of disruptive representation techniques. The thesis argues that the tabula rasa is the most powerful and, at the same time, problematic legacy of modern architectural discourse in the urban realm since it unveils the interconnection between the modern ideas of progress and novelty and the implicit installation of a culture of erasure. In this way, the city becomes a laboratory, an available space for testing new economic, political and social experiments. At the same time, the installation of these ideas implies a series of negative externalities, which are still little discussed in the architectural debate, such as the overproduction of building waste, overexploitation of resources, and social injustices resulting from dispossession and forced evictions. This dissertation explores the idea of tabula rasa through the investigation of some of the design and intellectual works of three canonical figures of 20th century architectural and urban theory and directly involved in its dissemination: Le Corbusier, Kenneth Frampton and Rem Koolhaas, specifically their early writings and interconnected ideas about the city and
urbanism.

This project investigates how models of spatial representation and reproduction of astronomical time served as instruments for colonial projects in the Andean region of America during the XVI century. In particular, this research studies the formative stages of the city of Santiago, Chile, first as an administrative centre built during the Inka conquest of the Andean territories, re-founded later by Spanish conquistadors as a Hispanic colonial city. Cities like Santiago share a common two-fold colonisation process, where urban space represents the ontological dispute between the Andean and Hispanic worlds. Despite a historical antagonism, Inkas and Spaniards largely coincide in the strategies deployed during their corresponding colonising campaigns, where the foundation of administrative centres was instrumental for the organisation and synchronisation of the empires, due to the introduction of systems of spatio-temporal order. Largely linked to religion, space and time became intertwined in social and productive cycles, implementing astronomical calendars that were represented by means of architecture and spaces built into the urban fabric. The christianisation of local calendars and the opportunistic occupation and resignification of sacred spaces, helped to inadvertently preserve some indigneous features. The hierarchical role reserved for spaces of religious worship, symbolically integrated into day-to-day life, meant that cities worked as devices to set and reproduce certain individual and collective ritual performances that facilitated implanting the culture of the coloniser, while reformulating that of the colonised. Here, the Spanish conquest meant not only a radica break in the trajectories of indigenous lives, but also a complete redraw of most systems of knowledge, directly impacting the cultural significance of both existential and historical time. The proposed study will examine the effect of colonisation on the experience of everyday urban life during early colonial times.

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Social interaction is critical for mental and physical health. In an increasingly digitally connected world, how could architecture support communal life in our cities? My Ph.D. research entitled ‘‘Inhabited utopias’’ explores El Barri Gaudí, one of the collective housing prototypes that emerged worldwide during the 1960s from the counter-cultural movements that longed for social equity. In opposition to the widespread linear and repetitive housing blocs that built fragmented, scattered, and individualistic cities, the Neighborhood was conceived as a spatial village within the city. Rather than a finished construction, it was thought of as an organic system, a combination in space of private cells organized around a wide range of common spaces. The Neighborhood aimed to build a more inclusive, diverse, and connected city. This dissertation analyses el Barri Gaudí, through three essential moments: utopia, materialization, and inhabitation. My research gathers original and unpublished material from archives and a series of interviews I conducted with the interdisciplinary design team -Taller de Arquitectura- directed by Ricardo Bofill. In addition, extensive fieldwork based on direct observation and data collection is conducted to understand how the Neighborhood is currently inhabited. This methodology allows us to contrast its ideal conception to its final use.
Many of the challenges faced by El Barri Gaudí are still present today, such as immigration, social equity, inclusive design, and the need for affordable housing. After being revisited to address essential issues of our current societies-new relationship realities, climate crisis, post-anthropocene point of view- the Neighborhood has the potential to give us relevant information for the conception of future co-housing designs, typologies and regulations. This research aims to understand what we can learn from this experience to build on a higher sense of community in cities.

In the opening article of the first issue of Majallat al- ‘Imarah, the first architectural magazine in Arabic published in 1939, Sayyid Karim (1911-2005) titles this article “What is Architecture?” Karim described the architecture of Egypt at that period to be suffering a “chaos” (fawḍa). Karim was not the only Arab architect who emphasized a form of disruption. In his article, Karim highlighted the end of the phase in which architecture is understood as art and the beginning of another phase in which architecture is science. In his manifesto, Karim celebrated the era of science and technology. He stated, “modern architecture is art ... a scientific art” (al- ‘Imarah al-ḥadītha fan ... fan ‘ilmī).¹ Karim situated architecture between art and science. This split between architecture, art, science, and technology did not emerge until the nineteenth century. A history reader notices that this type of question did not become critical until after the industrial revolution and after science took a leading role in many aspects, including the practice of building. These changes made the architecture discipline a challenge to define itself. In this presentation, I focus on the definition of the practice of building (architecture) between art and science in Arabic writing. I examine Karim’s article and situate it in a historical trajectory of architecture’s definition. I start with writings from the ninth to the seventeenth century to highlight two main points. First, the premodern practice of building was imbedded under mathematics as a practical geometry (handasa ‘amaliya). Second, theory and practice appeared side by side; it was common to discuss the ‘ilm (science/knowledge) of geometry and the ṣinā’a (art/craft) of carpentry, mason, and smith.

¹Majallat Al-ʻimārah., 1939, vol 01, Issue 01, 14.

In the fall of 2018, I got an opportunity to look around the timber structural architecture in the early modern period of Germany, around 1910-1940, with Japanese architects. We looked around these in Dortmund, Wuppertal, and other suburbs that modern architectural history rarely has not covered. We published a book as a result, Holz Bau, in 2019 with Katsuya Fukushima, Hiroko Tominaga, and Rejiro Sawaki. This book will be re-published this September by TOTO Publishing.
This timber structure is also called emerging wood structure, 新興木構造 in Japanese. Simply put, this structure is a technique using short and small pieces of wood joined together and creating an arch for a wide space instead of using an iron structure, for example, an exhibition space, gym, hanger for the airforce, etc. This technique was first studied in Germany in the 1910s and introduced to Japan through the architectural media. And this technique in Japan constructed some buildings in practice, and some still exist.

In this book, I wrote a theory about architectural technology; the distribution of new logical technology might have a contradictional relationship with the freedom of design. Since I studied the 1970s in the Japanese architectural scene, I have had this awareness. Therefore, I wrote this essay to deal with these two ages. I analyzed the inconvenience of the distribution of the new technology from the view of vendor lock-in dealt with in economics. In my opinion, there are two modes of technology in architecture. One is the technology that is created and used only for one-time architecture. The other one is the technology to promote to design of the architecture as applicable to many architectures. This technology was created as a prototype and tried to get a similar technology for that architecture implemented in society.

Particularly in the latter mode, it is essential to note that when superior technology is implemented too widely in society, vendor lock-in kicks the freedom of design off. Architecture is an activity that takes place within the market. The invention of rational technology can create a monopoly market. It means that this market is losing freedom for design. In this presentation, I will present my thinking around these problems, refer to the keyword below, the wood construction technology investigated by Friedrich Zollinger and the design of Hugo Heering in Germany in the 1920s, the corrugated construction technology studied by Kenji Kawai and the "Genan" the works of Osamu Ishiyama. Referring to these keywords, I want to think together about the trip in the architect's technical approach.

A field in Sociópolis, La Torre (València, Spain) in winter 2022.
Film photograph taken by the presenter.

There are few more indelible themes in the history of architecture than what Reyner Banham memorably named the “well-tempered environment.” Banham’s 1969 book was an earnest (if also wry) narration of the technologized interior—the equipment of heat, light, air, and water that had supposedly brought the architectural environment under control. This history was, as he himself admitted, more interested in ends rather than means, with the final provision of comfort rather than the systems of power that provided the critical external supports to interior environments. But where had such expectations come from, to begin with?

This presentation will outline an alternate genealogy of the well-tempered environment by returning to a moment before Banham’s history, when the distribution of comfort was more uneven and far less certain. Its focus is on a particular object of both technological and architectural interest: the household fireplace. Specifically, it will consider the work of early nineteenth-century engineer and writer Robert Stuart Meikleham, who composed the first English-language histories of fireplace technology in 1825 and 1845. Though Meikleham wanted to tell a story of what he called “the progress of personal and fireside comfort”—a kind of early draft of the “well-tempered environment,” chronicling the inventions of “ingenious men” like himself, Count Rumford, and Benjamin Franklin—a close reading of his work reveals a more conflicted story. Indeed, what his books reveal is not a history of technology, but rather a history of fuel; of how the comforts of the nineteenth-century British household were supported not by technical mastery, but by their anomalous use of coal. At the time, there was no shortage of resourceful cultural responses to the problem of conserving fuel—from Russian and Dutch “closed stoves” to the underfloor heating of the Chinese Kang, among many other examples discussed in Meikleham’s histories. By contrast, the fuel folkways of the English were exemplified in the national attachment to the “open hearth”—a roaring pile of coals that sent roughly ninety percent of its heat up the chimney—whose persistence could only be explained through their access to the surplus energy of fossil fuels.

This paper asks, in other words, what it would mean to tell the history of household comfort not as a one of technological control, but rather—as Meikleham and others saw it, at the time—as a story of thermal profligacy and, ultimately, failure. What would it mean for the history of architecture to retell the story of the “well-tempered environment” not from the standpoint of improving gadgets and devices, but instead from the perspective of fuel?

This postdoctoral research project in architectural history aims to examine the role of architecture in “development aid” and the mutual learning processes between the Global North and South in terms of ecological sustainability, focusing on self-help manuals that were circulated globally, predominantly in the 1970s and 1980s. These manuals which assembled and presented planning, building and survival knowledge in the form of comic strips were produced by the Communication Centre of Scientific Knowledge for Self-Reliance (CCSK). The CCSK, founded in Paris in 1983 by Hungarian-French architect Yona Friedman and Slovenian-born Austrian architect Eda Schaur, was funded by the United Nations University and collaborated with the International Council of Scientific Unions. The manuals were made available for reproduction by individuals or organizations and were distributed with a particular focus on India. The CCSK manuals designed for then-called “developing countries” are compared with Friedman’s manuals and books aimed at individuals in the Global North. Thereby the study addresses questions regarding the conceptualization of the relationship between experts and users and transfers of knowledge. Its underlying proposition is that the CCSK manuals can tell us more about the Global North than the Global South, with the predominant theme being the ecological crisis. The CCSK manuals seem to present a romanticized picture of the mode of survival of slum dwellers in “developing countries” and render it into a model of an alternative lifestyle for the Global North, one that was purportedly better able to adapt to a future life of resource scarcity. This project thus aims to explore how sustainable architectural practices have emerged in the engagement with “developing countries” and so-called “simple technology.”

Since its beginnings, constructions of architecture’s origins have played a crucial role for the discursive formation of architectural theory as a discipline and a system of thought. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this has led numerous architects, architectural theorists, and writers to explore notions of architecture’s origins in their work. One of architecture’s most prominent origin myths, which has been retrospectively canonised as the only one of its kind to survive from classical antiquity, was delivered by the Roman military engineer and architect Vitruvius in his treatise De Architectura (c. 30-15 B.C.). Vitruvius’s founding myth constructs the invention of architecture as a result of the ‘community of man’, which emerged in the wake of a kind of ‘civilising catastrophe’, represented by a raging forest fire. My paper offers a critical re-examination of architecture’s founding myths by taking Vitruvius’s myth as a starting point for my inquiry. I draw on Roland Barthes’ and Massimo Cacciari’s work on mythologies in order to interrogate the ways in which architecture’s origins have been imagined and rendered through the framework of mythical speech. Doing this allows me to explore the complexities and idiosyncrasies inherent in constructions of the origins of architecture, especially those relating to representations of nature and the ‘natural.’ My paper gives particular attention to notions of complexity and multiplicity, and the ways in which these have often been systematically glossed over or excised from discussions of the origins of architecture. I explore the complex relationships between architecture and nature in order to dislodge the theoretical hegemony of canonical representations of the origins of architecture, such as the ones articulated by Vitruvius and Leon Battista Alberti. With this paper, I hope to shed new light on the ways in which notions of the origins of architecture have been deployed to guarantee and uphold certain assumptions about architecture as a discipline.

With the advent of the so-called Ottoman Baroque, Istanbul witnessed a unique and rapid process of renewal of its architectural idiom which completely changed the silhouette of imperial capital. Hitherto, this unprecedented phenomenon of transculturation has been insistingly interpretated as the outcome of the longstanding Franco-Ottoman relations. However, most aspects of the architectural production of the period such as the new decorative vocabulary, unique planimetric experimentations, typological inventions, etc. demonstrate a more direct relationship with the Italian cultural sphere rather than what has been pointed out till now. To complete the picture offered by the previous scholarship, this dissertation aimed to explore the genesis of the Ottoman Baroque with a brand-new attention to its ties with Italy especially at the very initial stage. The methodological approach which was adopted also differed from the previously established patterns. On one hand, the main typological novelties were questioned with particular emphasis on significant case studies pointing out at specific Western European models. On the other hand, an in-depth analysis of the single elements composing the column order (such as capitals, shafts, bases, pedestals, and entablatures) interrogated the limits and the nature of the new architectural repertoire with the objective of retracing its possible origins. The presentation at DocTalks will try to give a panorama on this peculiar field of Architectural History and Cross-cultural Studies with a quick overview of the dissertation.