Calls
A35 (2024) THEORY OF ARCHITECTURE AS HERMENEUTICS
The subject of architecture is not merely aesthetic or technical, if by that we mean autonomous values, as configured in the Western mentality from the 18th century onwards. Rather, it is primarily ethical. The practice of architecture must be guided by a notion of the common good, while retaining a political dimension, understood as the human quest for stability and self-understanding in a changing and finite world. It is about proposing spaces for embodied communication which, by seducing us, promote justice, consequently indispensable for our psychosomatic health. Instrumental theories are unable to account for this dimension, regardless of whether they are driven by technological, political or formal imperatives, or by the desire to emulate some scientific model (for example, recently, bio-mimicry). The alternative that theory can provide for an ethical practice can be found in recent hermeneutic ontology, particularly in the works of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur and Gianni Vattimo. I propose the theory of architecture as hermeneutics, understanding language as an emergent phenomenon, in continuity with embodied consciousness, taking up the ontological intuitions present in the late work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Unlike some scientific or deconstructivist methodology, hermeneutics allows us a critical openness to the self-evident qualities of historical artefacts, leading us to recognise and value the responses produced in historical contexts that we identify as meaningful orders. The same mindset suggests a careful and courteous reading of historical documents - the architectural theories of times past, for example - conceding that important questions about the meaning of the discipline underlie the discourse, beyond the limitations imposed by local beliefs, prejudices and power games. The world of our experience includes the artefacts that constitute our artistic traditions, including architecture: spatio-temporal forms whose transformative power we can still discern, in moments of recognition that are entirely new, yet strangely familiar. By understanding these forms of specific embodiment and articulating their lessons in view of our own tasks, we will have a better chance of constructing an appropriate architecture and an intersubjective reality that can fulfil its social and political task as an affirmation of culture. The task of architecture is the formal manifestation of a social and political order out of the chaos of experience, starting with the perceptions of meaning that our culture shares in its habits and embodies in its historical vestiges, projecting poetic alternatives that can transcend the stifling or repressive frameworks of inherited institutions.
Authors are invited to submit articles that reflect on this, taking into account the text that Professor Alberto Pérez-Gómez, guest editor, has prepared to set guidelines or incite responses. We expect elaborate interpretations of buildings or urban proposals, historical reviews of the contexts mentioned therein, current affairs or criticism of what we have wanted to be the object of research, for the monograph that will be called the theory of architecture as hermeneutics.
Guest editor: Alberto Pérez-Gómez. McGill University, Montreal.
15 May 2024: deadline for article submissions.
15 July 2024: deadline for external reviewers (60 days).
30 September 2024: decision deadline from article submission (90 days)
DOSSIER (A35). THE LEGACIES OF COLIN ROWE; MATHEMATICS, CONTEXTUALISM, COLLAGE CITY AND BEYOND.
Guess Editor: David Grahame Shane
Colin Rowe transformed and changed over his lifetime, constructing and refining his intellectual and conceptual apparatus in response to his changing circumstances. There can be little doubt that the single most formative experience of the young Rowe was his time with Rudolf Wittkower at the Warburg Institute, after his earlier architectural education at Liverpool University, whose Professor Patrick Abercrombie guided the re-building of London after WW II. Rowe attempted unsuccessfully to adapt Wittkower’s diagrammatic analyses to Le Corbusier’s St Dié with his students Robert Maxwell and James Stirling. Later with the Texas Rangers he began to unpack the Wittkoverian geometry into the urban landscape, studying Le Corbusier’s League of Nations with his colleagues Robert Slutsky, Bernard Hoesli and John Hedjuk. He continued this process to recoup the traditional, classical city via Camillo Sitte in the 1950s with Alvin Boyarsky at Cornell, and then in the mid-1960s with Wayne Copper and Tom Schumaker. From this hybrid base, Rowe constructed a new, meta-historical, reflexive, curatorial apparatus of the “city as museum” outlined in Collage City with Fred Koetter and the Roma Interrotta Team (1978). As argued in Recombinant Urbanism (2005) many of the subsequent Urban Design movements unfolded from this layered, diagrammatic, multi-scalar approach to communal history, memory and the environment in the following half-century ranging from the Neo-Rationalism, De-construction, New Urbanism, Parametric Urbanism, Landscape Urbanism, Ecological Urbanism, Strategic Urbanism, to the emphasis on Historic Preservation, Adaptive re-use, the self-built megacity and the informational city. Even in Covid Urban Designers still struggle with the complexity and contradictions of classical and modern continuities that made Rowe’s intellectual struggle so difficult and dynamic.
It seems an appropriate time to revisit Contextualism and Collage City and Roma Interrotta within the framework of contemporary urban design networks, and the new tools of representation available in the contemporary metacity of information.
In this sense, authors are invited, from among other related instances, to focus on Contextualism, Collage City and beyond, to investigate Colin Rowe’s mid-twentieth century role in appropriating Sitte’s 1890’s reaction to Von Forster’s 1860 imperial design for the Vienna Ringstrasse. Rowe’s critical appropriation paved the way for later iterations and code shifts that greatly expanded into a more fragmented, inclusive Collage City. It took Rowe several iterations to develop this concept with Fred Koetter and with his Roma Interrotta team. Moreover, authors are called to explore strength and weaknesses of the mutations of Rowe’s classical impulse as it, in its turn, evolved with urban design beyond the binary into the 21st century.
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A36 (EXTRA) PLURIVERSAL BOGOTÁ
Guest Editors:
Dr. José Javier Alayón González (Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia)
Dr. Giaime Botti (University of Nottingham Ningbo China, Ningbo, China)
Dra. Alejandra Estrada (Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia)
Dra. Sandra Caquimbo (Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia)
The extra issue of 2024 will be devoted to Bogotá and its "other worlds". This city - one of the world's highest altitude capitals and by far the most populous of them - sits at 2560 metres above sea level between the Sumapaz páramo, the eastern range of hills and the Cundinamarca-Boyacá highlands. Its municipal urban land is occupied with a medium to very high population density which, since its occupation by the original peoples, has required managing a fragile balance with this territory brimming with water. However, less than 1.5% of its original wetlands remain today. Highlighting this geographical condition and the tensions between the different realities that inhabit it, this monographic issue of the journal Astrágalo on the Andean city joins other intensive looks at cities such as A27 in Delhi or A29 in Seville, which seek a transdisciplinary understanding of contemporary urban phenomena.
The approach of this call is based on two of those that preceded us. On the one hand, the pluriversal politics and the ontological re-equipment of cities by Arturo Escobar in "Designing for a real world" (A30 in 2022) and, on the other, the dis-integration of "Divided cities" by Alona Fernández with Introduction to the number by Roberto Fernández (A29 in 2021). In this sense, we want to question the capital of Colombia about the challenges posed by the first author in order to solve what the second one shows. Some questions in this regard would be: Is there a transition towards a rururban pluriverse? What are the actions that operationalise these decolonial approaches? What does the city contribute to the debate on the future and how does it respond to the socio-environmental conflicts of the present? What socio-environmental conflicts (tensions) have shaped Bogotá and what are the recent urban challenges that respond to them?
The "realities are plural and in continuous construction" explains Escobar (2020) and the urban civilising phenomenon, since classical times, tends to unify and separate us from the earth. Therefore, the concept of the pluriversal city explores the idea of a city where many worlds fit, reconnected with our planet and rethinking our modes of existence on it. We invite those who reflect, propose or execute actions on Bogotá - from architecture, urban planning, landscape architecture, geography, the arts, philosophy, history or sociology - to publish their proposals or results in response to Escobar's call to terraform (re-earthing) cities, or to remedy the conditions of "division, segregation, tearing apart, conflict" proposed by Fernández. We want to place special emphasis on research that contributes to a new design for the pluriverse, a world where there is room for other worlds based on actions such as: recommunalising social life; relocalising social, productive and cultural activities; reinforcing autonomies in the face of globalisation; depatriarchalising, de-racialising and decolonising social relations; or terraforming life and building networks between initiatives and transformative alternatives (Escobar, 2022).
This call aims to be an X-ray of contemporary Bogotá, an alternative panorama of itself and its relationship with other Colombian, Latin American and world cities. On this occasion, the Visual Article section aims to contrast various perspectives from the perspective of research and creation, and therefore calls for the joint nomination of two or more artists to illustrate the themes of this issue. The selection of the visual article will be the responsibility of the editorial team, who will act as blind peers.
Call for submissions: launch on 8 November 2023.
Deadline for submission of articles: 30 September 2024.
Communication to authors: 30 November 2024.
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A37 (EXTRA) EMANCIPATORY HOUSING
Guest Editor: Dr. Jorge Minguet Medina (Escuela de Arquitectura, Universidad de Málaga)
The dwelling of the average citizen - not the palace or the convent - was not considered Architecture until the latter, subjected to the labour pressures of decommunalisation and the Industrial Revolution, became a mass of urban and overcrowded population. It was fear of this mass - as much or more than mercy for it - that drove the development of collective housing as an architectural discipline which, consequently, incorporates, from its very birth, a normalising aspiration conducive to the social conformity of its inhabitants. "If the working man has his own house, I have no fear of revolution", said Lord Shaftesbury, one of the first and most important philanthropists dedicated to the promotion and study of social housing.
Today, a revolution is not to be expected. Perhaps because of this, housing conditions and access to them are escalating to levels of hardship and misery unthinkable a few decades ago, without there being a reaction to match the problem on the part of public administrations on any scale. Decades of deregulation and insistence on individualism and the laws of the market have turned the housing market not only into one of the deregulated ones, but also into one of the preferred markets for international speculation, which is increasingly alien to the fact of inhabitation. The globalised influences that confront the forced migration of people with the free flow of financial capital and digital nomads, have come to incorporate previously inconceivable difficulties, which refer to scales far removed from the local and regional. The public administrations responsible for housing, which operate at these smaller scales, are either helpless in the face of these problems or, if they have a neoliberal ideology, they deliberately reinforce them. Thus, the housing market, transferred from local to global scale, gradually ceases to be accessible to the average citizen and inhabitant, not only as an owner, but even as a tenant.
However, Human Rights, numerous National Constitutions, and other often overlooked declarations of rights at all levels continue to recognize the Right to Housing as fundamental. This right is essential for the personal and social development of the individual, a cornerstone for both democracy and capitalism - though the latter, when taken to extremes, tends to contradict it. We need to think of housing as an element capable of making us gain autonomy and of consolidating our identity and sense of belonging, as well as the most basic relationships in our immediate social environment: it provides us with a place in the world.. The democratisation of society is not possible without solving the most pressing housing problems. Housing is emancipatory, and this capacity can be developed at all scales: from the detailed design of housing, to policies at all scales, including international ones, for its regulation, promotion, control, etc.
Papers are invited to reflect on these issues from any of these perspectives or scales: from the historical narrative of the related issues, globally or locally; to proposals for measures, policies, and systems of design and construction, as well as of tenure and management, aimed at understanding and promoting this emancipatory dimension of housing. This call expressly seeks to embrace the multidimensionality of the problem, and hopes to create links between very diverse but somehow convergent approaches to the broad idea being pursued.
Call for submissions: launch on 16 May 2024.
Deadline for submission of articles: 14 October 2024.
Communication to authors: 14 December 2024.
