Abstract
A common perception of contemporary architecture revolves around a handful of world-renowned celebrity designers who jet around the globe delivering works of artistic genius to well-heeled clients. Meanwhile, actual architectural practices are much more mundane and grounded, centring on challenges related to economics, politics, culture, history, and society. This handbook, edited by C. Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns, and Hilde Heynen, provides a comprehensive overview of the contemporary state of architectural thinking and practice as interpreted by leading scholars in the field. The collection does not provide a potted history of architectural theory but rather brings together a group of commissioned pieces to summarize the current debates of architectural thinking. The book reveals that architectural theorists grapple with many of the same issues that dominate human geography: materiality, performativity, embodiment, nature, power, agency, development, scale, and so on.
The book is inspired by four guiding themes – interdisciplinarity, cross-cultural frameworks, theory/practice, and provisionality/open-endedness – and is structured in eight thematic sections: power/difference/embodiment, aesthetics/pleasure/excess, nation/world/spectacle, history/memory/tradition, design/production/practice, science/technology/virtuality, nature/ecology/sustainability, and city/metropolis/territory. Looking across the eight sections, I was relieved to find that the canonical approach to architectural theory of the 20th century as put forward by well-known architectural historians such as Sigfried Giedion and Lewis Mumford has been superseded by a pluralist perspective that draws from post-structuralist, post-colonial, feminist, and neo-Marxist theories. As such, the contributions are grounded in the ideas of familiar social theorists such as Foucault, Lefebvre, Simmel, Benjamin, de Certeau, Deleuze, Derrida, Latour, and Castells, as well as prominent geographers such as Soja, Thrift, Harvey, Sassen, and Davis. Meanwhile, gratuitous name-dropping of well-known architects is kept to a minimum, although the usual suspects (Le Corbusier, Wright, Koolhaas, Gehry, Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron, Libeskind, etc.) are occasionally noted. Most surprisingly, there is less of an emphasis on art, aesthetics, style, and trends than I was expecting, and this suggests that architectural thinkers do not perceive buildings as artistic achievements but rather as material interventions with particular cultural, political, and social implications.
While there are many crossovers with current issues in human geography, architectural theorists also provide different interpretations and perspectives on the world. A significant thread throughout the book involves the notion of architectural practice. Several contributors explore the relationship between how we think about the built environment and how we act upon it, whether as design professionals, policymakers, activists, citizens, or otherwise. The book also provides fresh perspectives on virtual architecture and how imagination and reality can be combined in productive tension to realize new environments. Finally, debates about heritage, preservation, and vernacular building provide an opportunity to consider how memories, histories, and cultural meanings are embedded in material forms.
Conversely, there are a few significant omissions in the book that could be ameliorated with a stronger engagement with human geography. There continues to be a bias towards Northern Europe and North America; only a handful of contributors address the concerns and practices of architectural production in the Global South. Likewise, design practitioners tend to take centre stage in the narratives of architectural production while the vibrant and increasingly influential work of participatory design and building is underemphasized (an omission that the editors readily acknowledge in the introduction). The lack of a global perspective and non-practitioner voices suggests that there is still work to be done in opening up architectural theory and practice to a broader range of ideas and actors. Finally, a few of the contributors argue that architecture can act as a tool of dissent or a critique of contemporary conditions of social inequity and neoliberal capitalism, but it is unclear how these ideas can be operationalized and how architectural production can and should be used as a catalyst for social change.
As a whole, this collection provides a useful introduction to the highly varied field of architectural theory and is appropriate to a broad audience of academics who study the built environment. Like any good handbook, it encourages readers to dig deeper into the subject and to draw on and learn from multiple ideas and approaches. The book is simply too large and broad-ranging to be read from cover to cover but human geographers would benefit from reading a few sections to inspire and broaden their own interests. Architecture shares with geography a transdisciplinary perspective as well as an emphasis on the groundedness of ideas, but it provides different interpretive lenses to interrogate the built environment and understand how it changes over time. Hopefully, this book will provide new opportunities for further discussions across the disciplines.