The Journal of Architecture

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Encounters: architectural agency

Deljana Iossifova & Doreen Bernath

To cite this article: Deljana Iossifova & Doreen Bernath (2022) Encounters: architectural
agency, The Journal of Architecture, 27:2-3, 173-175, DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2022.2132027
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2022.2132027

Published online: 14 Nov 2022.

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Editorial
Encounters: architectural agency

Deljana Iossifova

In this double issue of The Journal of Architecture, authors question the power
Manchester Urban Institute
of architectural agency and explore the role of architecture in socio-environ-
The University of Manchester UK
mental transitions through the analysis of various forms of encounter. They
[email protected]
ask if and how architecture has the power to transform entrenched ways of
being and acting in this world. Just how much can architecture change and
ORCID 0000-0003-0477-1462
reconfigure existing social patterns? Conversely, how are changing social struc-
tures and relationships reflected in the transformation of architecture, and how
and what it represents? These questions are, of course, tied with that of the
Doreen Bernath
role of ‘the architect’. The diversified endeavours in reconstructing, envisioning,
translating, altering, and consolidating are interrogated through articles set out
Architectural Association
to examine architects who occupy specific positions in the history of architec-
London, UK
ture. By rewriting these historical instances in the light of today’s debates, pre-
[email protected]
cisely to re-evaluate their roles in relation to unsung influences and relations,
unrecognised contextual processes and forms of work, the pedestal of author-
ORCID 0000-0002-3287-9676
ship is replaced with the revelation of a necessary plural and multivalent prac-
tice — the many and the together in ‘the architect’.
The notion of ‘encounter’ is intrinsic, as argued by Mariana de Oliveira Couto
Muszyń ski, to Bartolomeu Costa Cabral’s approach to architectural design, and
in particular the project that combined a primary school and a public bathhouse
in the Castle district of Lisbon. She reminds us — in (still) pandemic times — of
the purpose of public buildings: to enable encounter and transaction between
human beings. In her study, she demonstrates how Costa Cabral went against
the grain of the expected language of design of his time to explore contex-
tually, socially, and pedagogically responsive spatial arrangements that contrib-
ute to not only the paradigm shift of school design in the post-war era but also
the provision of communal spaces where architecture becomes the agency of
social transformation. She highlights the radical belief that, indeed, architec-
ture can change the way in which we exist in and relate to the world. Similarly,
Gary Boyd traces how Britain’s over six hundred pithead baths were designed
and developed as part of a ‘colossal social experiment’, which was a conse-
quence of the encounter between the cooperative stance of the Miners’
Welfare Commission in the 1920s and 30s, and the innovative, modernist
language of design by the architectural team, manifesting civic aspirations
against the outdated technologies of the mining industry itself. Their introduc-
tion showed impact on society far beyond the limits of the work place.
The notion of co-creation is relevant to Ecem Sarıçayır’s discussion of Frank
van Klingeren’s ‘open architecture’ in the Netherlands of the 1960s and 70s.

# 2022 RIBA Enterprises 1360-2365 https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2022.2132027

She argues that the architect closed his ‘open architecture’ — much celebrated
projects characterised by the removal of internal barriers to generate hinder
[nuisance] and ontklontering [declotting] — when he chose to defend his
authorship, disregarding opportunities to reach out and collaborate with
users and grassroots organisations, as ’architects together’. Sarıçayır defines
the five elements of openness in van Klingeren’s architecture — all central to
current professional discourse: disciplinary diversity in the production of build-
ings (i.e. transdisciplinary collaborations); consideration of the needs of con-
temporary and future user groups; the construction of ‘unfinished’
architecture to allow for the adaptation and appropriation of buildings by
their users; encouraging non-expert discourse around architecture; and allow-
ing for ‘meaningful encounters’ in not trying to prevent conflict.
In their survey article, Francesca Lanz and John Penlebury argue for an under-
standing of adaptive reuse as a process. They draw attention to the temporality
of buildings, their occupation before and after intervention, and the entangle-
ment of adaptive reuse with social, cultural, and political entailments. They
argue that any attempt to ‘define’ what we may mean by ‘adaptive reuse’
may fail to account for the complexities that are entangled with disciplinary
backgrounds and theoretical traditions. Encounter, here, is the opportunity
to learn and collaborate across different fields. This approach was central, as
Maximillian Sternberg recounts, to Hans Döllgast’s campaign for the restor-
ation of Alte Pinakothek, unusual for an architect of his generation. Remaining
sceptical toward the Modern Movement, Döllgast resisted the two radical
options of returning to a past — as if Nazism had not happened — or
fleeing into the future, like many of his contemporaries. Rather, he relied on
skilled local craftsmen and remained committed to a ‘non-style’, as Sternberg
reveals, which speaks to values of co-creation. By recognising architecture
that is born of disparate intentional and incidental acts, and respecting both
constructive and destructive events in collective memories of spatial environ-
ments, Döllgast explored possibilities of nuanced reinterpretation where his-
torical and modern architecture became contemporaneous and co-extensive
with one another. In a more contemporary sense, the tendencies of adaptive
reuse and desired heterogeneity is evidenced in Kate Jordan’s exploration of
the encounter between church buildings and secular society in London. She
suggests that an ‘infrasecular lens’ may help to account for the complex trans-
actions that take place in the city. Churches are here considered ‘third spaces’
that fulfil community functions and offer opportunities for exchange.
Simon Weir’s piece on the paranoid critical method elegantly weaves
together elements from the history of psychoanalysis, Salvador Dali’s
method, and Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York. It enables the conjunction
of different time periods, places, knowledges, and approaches to trigger new
interpretations of unexpected encounters. Koolhaas’ interest in the ‘paranoid
critical method’ is here reframed as an attempt to break from the dogmatic
concrete architecture of Le Corbusier and to embrace the anti-constructionalist
possibility of a ‘concrete irrational subject’ proposed by Dalí, thus hinting at the
re-positioning of architects as involved subjects in the communal acts of archi-
 175 The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 27
Numbers 2–3

tecture. Álvaro Velasco Pérez study traces Le Corbusier’s encounter and com-
plicated relationship with Algeria. He argues that, armed with modernism
and the technological leap of flight, Le Corbuiser conceived his architectural
response through the visions of the Meridien, the pentapole, and the enigma
of la femme à la licorne, thus propagating an alternative colonialism of a
lyrical order. Examining the Tunisian work of French architect Joseph Hiriart,
Lauren Etxerpare acknowledges the colonial context within which it was pro-
duced. The style of Hiriart’s architecture was used to designate the grotesque
civilising mission upon which Europe would embark during the inter-war
period, when infrastructures and the hygienist attitudes attached to them
became prevalent in colonised cities. Etxerpare demonstrates how nationality
and religion as identity markers in colonial Tunisia are folded into the architec-
tural profession — providing a glimpse into a multi-faith world that today
seems bizarrely impossible.
Similarly, working with notions of identity-making, nation-building, globali-
sation, and westernisation, Roberto Fabbri argues that recent museum archi-
tecture in the Gulf seems to be designed to highlight linkages with local
context. He discusses visual metaphors and analogies in such architecture to
foreground the contemporary encounter between, in the simplest of terms,
the Middle East and the West. Similar to the figure of ‘the architect’ revealed
in Fabbri’s study, Sarah Borree’s research further inflect the architect, who is
subsumed by contextual and representational conditions. She reveals their
reluctant admission of photography in the 1920s and 30s, which started to
compete with and dominate over drawings as expressions of architectural
experience. Eventually, their reluctance gave way to acceptance, and photogra-
phy became complicit in storytelling through the incorporation of distinct visual
metaphors as language of design to instil cultural contents that in turn anchor
the public values of projects.
By explicating the aspirations of these studies towards open, social, and col-
laborative praxis, the architect as public agency can be asserted as audacious
and precarious acts that recognise and negotiate with the inevitable conflation
of the publicity of architecture. The content of this double issue demonstrates
quite clearly just how architecture and architectural practice — still often con-
sidered the result of individual design genius — are entangled with the political;
how, thus, architecture and architectural practice, even architects themselves,
are and become implicit in the (re)production of social and political structures.
Be it Döllgast’s seemingly gentle interventions in post-Second World War Ger-
many’s reconstruction, as articulated by Sternberg, or the transformation of
and in social life triggered by the introduction of miners’ baths in Britain in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as traced by Boyd, the archi-
tect’s agency is inevitably enmeshed with that of their team or ‘the social’, as
argued by Etxepare, which transforms and amplifies contextual trajectories of
development and change. In this sense, the personal becomes political. As
part of the broader cultural, economic, and political ecologies, architectures
and their architects may, indeed, be in a position to alter short- and long-
term praxis beyond the limits of a building.