Positions - e-flux

Editors Nick Axel, Nikolaus Hirsch, Anton Vidokle

Contributors Reinhold Martin, Andreas Angelidakis, Keller Easterling, Ross Exo Adams, V. Mitch McEwen, Shannon Mattern, Douglas Spencer, Daniel Fernández Pascual, Alon Schwabe, Nicholas Korody, and more…

A rhetorical space for claims to be made, risks to be taken, and experiments to be rigorously conducted. A platform for the most challenging, provocative, and critical texts being written in the field of architecture today.

Positions is an independent initiative of e-flux Architecture.

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68 essays

Unprecedented

Anthony Vidler

The WZB, conceived a year later as part of the Internationale Bauausstellung (IBA) program, seemed to breach the codes of modernism even further. Its pavilions, diagramming historical building types, decked out in bright pink and blue stripes, and huddled behind an ornate late-nineteenth-century entrance block, seemed to many British and European critics to be a betrayal of the ethic of the Modern Movement.

Spaces of Cultural Resistance

Rhiarna Dhaliwal

An integral theme that runs across both the British and Mexico pavilions is to draw attention to the forgotten and underrepresented public spaces that shape and are shaped by diasporic and indigenous communities. These spaces, often unnoticed and overlooked, have become the foundation for both pavilions to highlight architectures that represent a future in which social practices of collectivization are celebrated and accounted for within the built environment.

From Zaria Rebel to Golden Lion

Antoinette Yetunde Oni

However, the biennale’s recognition of the Nigerian “artist-designer,” an honor typically reserved for better-known architects and architectural theorists like Lina Bo Bardi, Kenneth Frampton, and Paulo Mendes da Rocha, brings Nwoko’s ideas and design approach to the fore, as well as those of the Zaria Art Society movement he was a part of as a student. Nwoko’s work, which spans from painting, carving, and sculpture, to theater set designs and architecture, is characterized by experimental tropical builds and a veneration of traditional West African craft, and stands as a prime twentieth-century example of decolonial and decarbonized African architecture.

Course Correction: Reimagining Pan-Africanism

Derin Fadina

Yet despite its decline, Pan-Africanism’s ideals of emancipation, unity, and sovereignty remain in the collective African consciousness, informing political organizations and new cultural and artistic formations. The 18th Venice Architecture Biennale is one such formation.

An Ethereal Path

Sharon Lam

There is a Queenstown on every continent on Earth except for Antarctica. Wherever there is a Queenstown, indigenous land has been overwritten with names and symbols of British colonialism.

Contested Symbols of Coloniality and Nation Building

Alistair Napier

“Often, the story of Tropical Modernism is told as one of a gift to Africa,” explains Nana Biamah-Ofosu, co-curator of the Applied Arts Pavilion i…

Roll down your banners, take down your flags

Mahika Gautam

The backslashes represent the colonial acts of land division and dispossession that founded the country and allowed for the commodification and privatization of housing, which in turn led to housing alienation, defined here as the condition of being separated from our fundamental connections to home. In this sense, the eclectic team of six curators draw a structural connection between historical acts of settler colonialism and contemporary forms of housing alienation.

Securing Space, Securing Stories

Calvin Po

These dualities—both between the earthworks’ nurturing and defensive purposes, and between the frivolity of the Biennale and Ukraine’s participation while under invasion—make the Ukrainian Pavilion a surreal, conflicting experience.

Untangling Colonial Legacies

The Alumni of N.A.W. 4

e-flux Architecture is proud to announce a collaboration with alumni from the fourth cohort of New Architecture Writers, an intensive year-long progra…

Positioning Denise Scott Brown: Los Angeles, 1965–1966

Sylvia Lavin

People have stopped visiting Los Angeles. They know if they wait long enough Los Angeles will come to them. So, watch for Los Angeles, appearing sho…

Partitions: Architectures of Statelessness

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar

Partitions of territory are often ascribed to historically specific moments of accountability. While colonial partitions set the terms for politics an…

Touchlessness

Benjamin H. Bratton

The COVID-19 pandemic has included mass social mobilization toward a mutually-accountable separation from one another. Its bioethics sees each of us a…

School’s On/Off

Tom Holert

The Siren Call of Participation Lingering in the dispersed and forgotten archives of the post-Sputnik crisis age is evidence of myriad attempts at …

Proportional Representation

Adam Jasper

0. In a time out of joint, what is the most untimely question that could be asked? 1. In the 1990s, Peter Märkli built a museum for the scul…

The Elements of the House, revisited

Ethel Baraona Pohl

“It had rained earlier, and the fragmented, light-filled clouds worked off each other.” —Teju Cole1 rain What makes one housing build…

Letting Go

Andreas Angelidakis

Nick Axel Your work has always engaged with the dialectic between the abstract and the concrete, the virtual and the actual. In a lot of your early wo…

Plastic History

Shahar Livne

Nick Axel As a conceptual material designer, you’ve recently invented lithoplast. What is lithoplast? Shahar Livne Lithoplast is an experimental …

A Box of Chocolate

Emanuel Christ

Nikolaus Hirsch Your practice is known for museums, such as the Kunstmuseum in Basel, the Swiss National Museum in Zurich, or the upcoming extension t…

Dimensions of Practice

Manuel Herz

Nikolaus Hirsch You recently won a competition to build a new hospital in Tambacounda, Senegal. A project like this can be thought about as a product,…

Salutogenic Energies

Justin Fowler

Texas. Between the Rangers and the Cowboys, the gamers. A classicizing, stone-tiled arcade fronts the otherwise nondescript 80s-era husk of Arlington�…

Intimate Distance: The Technosexual Architecture of Camming

Nicholas Korody

On a southwest corner in Hollywood stands the Fountain Vine Plaza, a two-storey strip mall with stucco walls and a blue-tiled roof built in 1984.1 It …

Paleoacoustic Accommodation

Emma McCormick-Goodhart

We who draw do so not only to make something visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination. —John …

Real Worlds

Lawrence Lek

Nick Axel Architecture features prominently in your virtual reality and simulation work as a narrative device. How do you see the medium of open-world…

Vienna’s Red Herring

Andreas Rumpfhuber

I. Vienna, sometime in early January. I am on my way to visit the site of what might be a red herring for Vienna’s public housing model. Colleagu…

Getting There

Mimi Zeiger

“Queerness is not here yet. Queerness is an ideality,” writes José Esteban Muñoz in his introduction to Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Q…

Machines for Looking

Julian Rose

By the late 1960s, Alan Solomon was established as one of America’s most innovative and influential curators. He had organized dozens of exhibitions…

Memory, Hope, and Loss

Eva Hagberg

Many years ago, I graduated from college with a degree in architecture and moved to New York. It was 2003, and I got a job as a research assistant to …

Five Meta-Reviews and Some Footnotes on the (Im)Pertinence of Architectural Criticism

Pedro Gadanho

1. A Fire Station The critic sits at her office busy with her private quests and investigations. She has been trying to lose the label of being a c…

Rearticulating the Social

Andrés Jaque

Nikolaus Hirsch It seems as if the practice of designing architecture is changing. Not dramatically but there is—despite or because of the ubiquity/…

OOTB

Amelyn Ng

This building has never been built, nor does it ever plan to be. Yet this mythic edifice has been scrupulously documented, updated, circulated, and st…

Other Intoxications

Dan Handel

In what is arguably one of the most disturbing scenes in the history of cinema, Danny Torrance, a young boy left to his own devices by his neurotic pa…

The Women, Young Men, and Other Buildings

feminist architecture collaborative

The corner lot at 550 West 20th Street wears all the markers of a disused prison, because it is one. Somewhere else, in the media ether of do-good dev…

Still Got Love for the Streets

Charles Holland

When they talk about their work in public, Zurich-based architects Thomas Padmanabhan and Oliver Lütjens invariably begin with a series of seemingly …

Reclaiming Plant Architecture

Sylvia Lavin

Architecture was once a plant. By this I do not only refer to the grasslands and savannas that sheltered early homo sapiens or the trees used in the c…

Editorial—Thinking Through Buildings

Nick Axel and Nikolaus Hirsch

Since e-flux Architecture launched almost three years ago, it has become a locus for contemporary debate and research into architecture in the expande…

Critical Imageability

José Aragüez

Jencks was right when he predicted that “the iconic building is here to stay.”1 Its generalization and expansion in the form of so-called “image…

Before and After

Iñaqui Carnicero and Lorena del Río

Nick Axel Architecture is always a product of its time. It registers the social, economic, and political conditions within which a project has come in…

Memory and Oblivion

Marina Otero Verzier

“El Caballo” (The Horse), a seven-ton bronze equestrian statue of general Francisco Franco, was removed from Ferrol’s Plaza de España in 2002. …

Reconstruction and Ideology

Toyo Ito

Nick Axel You have done a lot of work after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami dealing with reconstruction. Can you speak to the type of effect t…

Inclusion/Exclusion

Stefano Boeri

Nikolaus Hirsch Architecture is a schizophrenic profession. There is, on the one hand a form of practice that believes in design and building as a pro…

Other Architectures

Giovanna Borasi

Nikolaus Hirsch Part of the architect´s profession seems to be the permanent reinvention of what it means to be an architect. A constant process of s…

Global Practice

Juan Herreros

Nikolaus Hirsch We are interested in the contradictions and potentials of today’s architectural practice, and in speculating on what this practice m…

At Scale

Sou Fujimoto

Nick Axel How do you see your role as an architect today? Sou Fujimoto My role as an architect is to create space for people, space that does not c…

Pandora’s Box

Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli

Nikolaus Hirsch You have a very expansive practice, ranging from design to curating, art directing, and editing. How do you understand the role of arc…

Broken Nature

Paola Antonelli

Nikolaus Hirsch What is design? Paola Antonelli I am not able to answer that question. It’s a little bit like asking what art is or what food is. …

Giving Form

David Adjaye

Nikolaus Hirsch Recent projects of yours have put you in a very political role, or at least one with a certain exposure in the political field. Has yo…

Certain Regulations Pertaining to Public Space in The City

Michael Sorkin

The City is a Res Publica. The Right to Access to most of the City will be universal. Everyone will be able to go everywhere in the City that’…

House Rules

Adam Jasper

Imagine you are looking through a sequence of photographs. One image after another, all of empty rooms. On superficial inspection, they all look the s…

Protocols for a Life of the Ordinary

Aristide Antonas and Thanos Zartaloudis

Thanos Zartaloudis The urban protocols started as a collection of images, designs, photographs, and sketches, which later took a new form in Archipela…

Towards an Environmental Architecture

Godofredo Enes Pereira

Global environmental change poses two immediate challenges to architecture: the first is how to respond to its myriad consequences, from rapid transfo…

This is not an exhibition

Alessandro Bava

Everybody knows that our cities Were built to be destroyed —Caetano Veloso As the architecture profession continues to struggle in a contem…

On Astroballoons and Personal Bubbles

Victoria Bugge Øye

Expanding the Self On a February evening of 1969, Coop Himmelblau’s Astroballon was presented at Galerie nächst St. Stephan, an avant-garde gall…

Is Ornamenting Solar Panels a Crime?

Elvia Wilk

We’re Solarpunk because the only other options are denial or despair. —Adam Flynn1 By now, dystopia may have become a luxury genre. Indulg…

Freeness

Beatrice Galilee

One or two years ago, describing Junya Ishigami’s architecture would likely conjure imagery of delicate and immaculately conceived structures tendin…

Habitable Art

Alessandro Bava

We’ll build houses like we used to, without roofs and without walls —Vincenzo Agnetti1 After World War II, the view of Milan from Monte St…

Republics of Makers

Mario Carpo

Computers are machines: so we tend to think they work like all the other machines we know. They don’t. Computers are a new kind of machine. They do no…

Platform Architectures

Víctor Muñoz Sanz

In Ansbach, Germany, sporting goods company Adidas is opening the first fully operational version of its so-called Speedfactory concept, in which trai…

Microscopic Colonialism

Andrea Bagnato

For much of their history European cities have been unhealthy places. Until the end of the nineteenth century, they were traversed by waves of infecti…

From “Indigenous” to “Muslim”

Samia Henni

In 1930, the French colonial regime celebrated the hundredth anniversary of France’s colonization of Algeria, known as Le Centenaire de l’Algérie…

Mere Decorating

Nicholas Korody

“Mere decorating,” we say without thought. The former modifies the latter with such frequency that the words appear natural together. In fact, the…

The Offsetted

Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe

Michael Bloomberg, once referred to as “America’s greenest mayor,” launched One Million Trees for New York (MTNYC) in 2007.1 This project, initi…

Architecture After California

Douglas Spencer

Karl Marx once observed that revolutionaries, seemingly engaged in “creating something that did not exist before,” will “anxiously conjure up th…

Sharing is Tables: Furniture for Digital Labor

Shannon Mattern

In 2012, Facebook signed on its one billionth user. To celebrate the occasion, the company commissioned filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu—of Amores …

Profound Modernity

V. Mitch McEwen

In short, when the muck comes back up onto the sidewalks, it is memory flooding back—a certain long-buried historic past that re-emerges suddenly …

Becoming-Infrastructural

Ross Exo Adams

It is hard to imagine how the many ruptures that have occurred in the composition of whatever may be called “normality” today do not render canonical …

Switch

Keller Easterling

In the comedy of errors that is US car culture, contradictions and cross-purposes seem to thrive. The mid-twentieth century monovalent highway network…

Unauthorized

Andreas Angelidakis

Athens used to be small town. In 1922, following the war the Greeks lost against Turkey, she was asked to take in a large part of the 1.2 million refu…

Pittsburgh, Paris, Charlottesville: The Infrastructure Question

Reinhold Martin

Consider the following exchange from the infamous press conference conducted by the President of the United States in the lobby of his fading, brassy …

Subject

Knowledge Production, Discourse

Positions is an independent initiative of e-flux Architecture.

Contributors

Reinhold Martin Pittsburgh, Paris, Charlottesville: The Infrastructure Question
Andreas Angelidakis Unauthorized
Keller Easterling Switch
Ross Exo Adams Becoming-Infrastructural
V. Mitch McEwen Profound Modernity
Shannon Mattern Sharing is Tables: Furniture for Digital Labor
Douglas Spencer Architecture After California
Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe The Offsetted
Nicholas Korody Mere Decorating
Samia Henni From “Indigenous” to “Muslim”
Andrea Bagnato Microscopic Colonialism
Víctor Muñoz Sanz Platform Architectures
Mario Carpo Republics of Makers
Alessandro Bava Habitable Art
Beatrice Galilee Freeness
Elvia Wilk Is Ornamenting Solar Panels a Crime?
Victoria Bugge Øye On Astroballoons and Personal Bubbles
Alessandro Bava This is not an exhibition
Godofredo Enes Pereira Towards an Environmental Architecture
Aristide Antonas and Thanos Zartaloudis Protocols for a Life of the Ordinary
Adam Jasper House Rules
Michael Sorkin Certain Regulations Pertaining to Public Space in The City
David Adjaye Giving Form
Paola Antonelli Broken Nature
Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli Pandora’s Box
Sou Fujimoto At Scale
Juan Herreros Global Practice
Giovanna Borasi Other Architectures
Stefano Boeri Inclusion/Exclusion
Toyo Ito Reconstruction and Ideology
Marina Otero Verzier Memory and Oblivion
Iñaqui Carnicero and Lorena del Río Before and After
José Aragüez Critical Imageability
Nick Axel and Nikolaus Hirsch Editorial—Thinking Through Buildings
Sylvia Lavin Reclaiming Plant Architecture
Charles Holland Still Got Love for the Streets
feminist architecture collaborative The Women, Young Men, and Other Buildings
Dan Handel Other Intoxications
Amelyn Ng OOTB
Andrés Jaque Rearticulating the Social
Pedro Gadanho Five Meta-Reviews and Some Footnotes on the (Im)Pertinence of Architectural Criticism
Eva Hagberg Memory, Hope, and Loss
Julian Rose Machines for Looking
Mimi Zeiger Getting There
Andreas Rumpfhuber Vienna’s Red Herring
Lawrence Lek Real Worlds
Emma McCormick-Goodhart Paleoacoustic Accommodation
Nicholas Korody Intimate Distance: The Technosexual Architecture of Camming
Justin Fowler Salutogenic Energies
Manuel Herz Dimensions of Practice
Emanuel Christ A Box of Chocolate
Shahar Livne Plastic History
Andreas Angelidakis Letting Go
Ethel Baraona Pohl The Elements of the House, revisited
Adam Jasper Proportional Representation
Tom Holert School’s On/Off
Benjamin H. Bratton Touchlessness
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar Partitions: Architectures of Statelessness
Sylvia Lavin Positioning Denise Scott Brown: Los Angeles, 1965–1966
The Alumni of N.A.W. 4 Untangling Colonial Legacies
Calvin Po Securing Space, Securing Stories
Mahika Gautam Roll down your banners, take down your flags
Alistair Napier Contested Symbols of Coloniality and Nation Building
Sharon Lam An Ethereal Path
Derin Fadina Course Correction: Reimagining Pan-Africanism
Antoinette Yetunde Oni From Zaria Rebel to Golden Lion
Rhiarna Dhaliwal Spaces of Cultural Resistance
Anthony Vidler Unprecedented

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