This graduate reading seminar examines some of the historical literature on migration in a global perspective, focusing on the nineteenth century through the present. It focuses on theoretical approaches to the study of migration as well as on case studies, moving between longue-durée and comparative issues on the one hand and local effects of…[Read more]

Program of the Sensory Histories of Place workshop, organized by me and Elvan Baştürk Cobb, at ANAMED in 2015.

Rising on the shoulders of the İstanbul Araştırmaları Yıllığı / Annual of Istanbul Studies, the relaunched YILLIK: Annual of Istanbul Studies is now peer-reviewed. Thanks to a reformed advisory board, whose expertise covers all periods and disciplines in the study of Istanbul’s past and present, the journal now sets a much higher academic…[Read more]

LEED® is a North American system created to assess sustainability parameters in buildings. It is managed by USGBC®, that was formed in the early 1990s. LEED®’s technical aspects are examined in order to clarify its operation premises, following the research hypothesis that these premises would have impact in the disciplines of architecture and ur…[Read more]

Analysis of the idea of “efficiency” and its deadlock in environmental studies, mainly discussing the Jevons Paradox.

This monograph explores the ambivalent position of Artigas in the political-cultural debate of the Cold War, during the 1950s, when two principal art movements were opposed. On one side, socialist realist tendencies that emerged in post-revolutionary Russia, particularly after the ascension of Stalin, who intended it to be the new art of the…[Read more]

The urban turn in Henri Lefebvre: its spatial tenets and his architectural references

Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED©) is a certification used to assess the degree of environmental sustainability attained by a project. However, LEED© has an impact not only on the technical specifications, but also on design. The objective of this paper is to evaluate what the impact of its version for neighborhoods (LEED© ND…[Read more]

Alexander Cuthbert published a daring anthology on architecture and urban design, completed in 2011. The project began in 2001 resulting in three volumes: Designing Cities (2003), The Form of the Cities (2006) and Understanding Cities (2011). Unlike other anthologies on architecture, this author organized it as follows: critical selection of…[Read more]

Henri Lefebvre’s (HL) large production about cities, urban, urban space and society could indicate its relevance to the architecture produced after the heyday of the neoliberal cycle and its crisis in 2008. This author introduced the practical-sensitive basis in the debate between the spatial and social processes to discuss the ideological d…[Read more]

In the end of the 1980’s, the current hegemonic discourse about the environmental crisis settled the notion of “sustainability”. This notion was formulated in the Brundtland report, which argued that innovation in technology would overcome the impasses of environmental exploitation, in a way that could even result in social development. We choos…[Read more]

Late twentieth-century social and linguistic theory tells us that the view from the tall building transforms us into analysts and historians, disembodied readers of the civic ‘text’. This paper argues that the proposition would have been familiar to seventeenth-century City-dwellers, and does so by pursuing the experience of the elevated obs…[Read more]

Alberto Pérez-Gómez’s 1983 Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science is used here as a vehicle for exploring the behavior of disciplinary boundaries in the context of crisis both historically and theoretically. Responding to his contemporaneous architectural crisis of the 1970s instigated by the rise of positivism, Pérez-Gómez uses Ale…[Read more]

Aris Konstantinidis’s Weekend House in Anavyssos (1962–1964) holds an emblematic place within his oeuvre. This article uncovers the architect’s own role in building the global reception of this project through a tripartite account of its global published life from the printed page to the digital website over the last five decades (1962…[Read more]

In the contemporary discourse on migration, it feels peculiarly seamless to discuss “bans and border walls” in a single breath. However, the global preoccupation with travel restriction and border security must not be taken as an inevitability. States arrive at bans and walls as preferred means of migration control as a result of making spe…[Read more]

Between 1880 and 1924, an estimated half million Arab migrants left the Ottoman Empire to live and work in the Americas. Responding to new economic forces linking the Mediterranean and Atlantic capitalist economies to one another, Arab migrants entered the manufacturing industries of the settler societies they inhabited, including industrial…[Read more]

Architecture Space and Society Research Centre, Birkbeck (University of London) Friday 1st March 2019
Keynes Library, School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square
Registration: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/conquest-and-construction-tickets-55022443610

What role does destruction play in the continued existence of a historical monument? Is destruction an inevitable part of its identity? Huyssen in his 2003 book, Present Pasts, suggests that, “…the only monument that counts, is the one already imagined as ruin.” On the other hand, the creation of the monumental itself is led by a quest for immor…[Read more]

The ruins of church-mosques, museums, and ancient cities inform material culture as allegories inform spiritual life, invoking transcendence amidst desacralization. Drawing on Benjamin, Jameson, and Koselleck to advance our understanding of the functioning of ruins across time, this ethnography of ruins engages with the paradoxes generated by…[Read more]

The process of managing information in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) design projects remained relatively unchanged between publication of works of Bavarian theorist Albrecht Dürer and French mathematician Gaspard Monge in the 1500s and 1700s respectively, and the widespread adoption of computer aided design (CAD) in the early…[Read more]