Articles

The history of virtual travel and immersive experiences extends well into the Middle Ages. Without leaving their room, many Christians undertook a pilgrimage to the Holy Land using only devotional manuscripts and the affective power of imagination. If done correctly, these imaginative journeys would not only provide the devotee with the benefits of physical pilgrimage, […]

First published in The Real Review 1, Spring 2016. Notes on Ann C. Huppert, Becoming an Architect in Renaissance Italy: Art, Science, and the Career of Baldassarre Peruzzi. Between the 14th and 16th century the European city developed from being civitas to what the architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri defined as machine for the extraction of […]

Though not to be published until 2005, in 1998 Toyo Ito – one of the architects featured in MoMA’s exhibition, A Japanese Constellation[1] [1] Held at the New York Museum of Modern Art, Spring and Summer of 2016, curated by Pedro Gadahno. – wrote a striking essay titled “Shedding the Modern Body Image: Is House […]

The second of the two articles by Platon Issaias on the critique of the idea of urban informality through the example of the urbanisation of Athens.

This essay is the first installment of a two-part investigation on the history of the Greek city and its distinct domestic architecture. The two essays aims to a critique of the popular category of ‘informal urbanism’ by interrogating the underlining relation between urban management and architectural form

The garden not only creates a minimum condition for a life, but it is the spatial device through which the power of the sovereign dominates the territory. In the harsh landscape of Iran gardens were micro-cosmos; camps that protected life and let it flourish within the tabula rasa.

The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred.

Meyer’s goal was to transform the collective potential of co-operation in architectural production, as a means of rescuing the working class from capitalism. Meyer perceived architects as workers, and for him, co-operation was both a collective mode of production and the link between architecture and the masses.

A critical stance towards the role of images is not to refuse them, but to open a gap—a critical distance—between images and their experience.

The more the “office” fulfilled its own effectuality, the more its plan became empty

What we should ask ourselves is not “What does this monument mean?”, but “What is this monument capable of doing?”

The year 1867 marks the publication of two seminal works: Marx’s Das Kapital, and Ildefonso Cerdà’s Teoría General de la urbanización. Both books shared the same belief in the emancipatory potential of science

The barest condition in which architecture can exist is presented here not as a stylistic exercise, but as a paradoxical act of representation, as a will to give to the conditions of the city its adequate form, whose meaning is the definitive renunciation of any will to representation.

In 1970, Manfredo Tafuri published a long article titled “Lavoro Intellettuale e Sviluppo Capitalistico” (“Intellectual Work and Capitalist Development”) in the journal Contropiano. Remarkably, “Intellectual Work and Capitalist Development” contains no reference to architecture proper […]