Mapping Controversies in Architecture

by Albena Yaneva

The book tackles a number of challenging questions: How can we conceptualize architectural objects and practices without falling into the divides architecture/society, nature/culture, materiality/meaning? How can we prevent these abstractions from continuing to blind architectural theory? What is the alternative to critical architecture? Mapping controversies is a research method and teaching philosophy that allows divides to be crossed. It offers a new methodology for following debates surrounding contested urban knowledge. Engaging in explorations of on-going and recent controversies and re-visiting some well-known debates, the analysis foregrounds, traces and maps the changing sets of positions triggered by design: the 2012 Olympics stadium in London, the Welsh parliament in Cardiff, the Heathrow airport runway extension, the Sydney Opera House, the Eiffel Tower. By mobilizing digital technologies and new computational design techniques we are able to visualize the variety of factors that impinge on design and track actors' trajectories, changing groupings, concerns and modalities of action. The book places architecture at the intersection of the human and the nonhuman, the particular and the general. It allows its networks to be re-established and to run between local and global, social and technical. Mapping controversies can be extrapolated to a wide range of complex phenomena of hybrid nature.

Genres: Architecture

144 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Albena Yaneva is an anthropologist of architecture with a PhD from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des mines de Paris (2001). Her work spans the disciplinary boundaries of architectural theory, science and technology studies, cognitive anthropology and political philosophy. It has been translated in German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.

Reviews

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is a bit tricky to review. The prologue contains a very conversational tone; “If you find yourself strolling…” and “If you follow your curiosity…” and “now you know, just as I do…” all interspersed with a lot of ellipses. It switches to a more academic tone for the introduction, but then Chapter One swings back to ‘you take great delight, just as I do’ in wondering around a building in Cardiff Bay. It sits a bit uncomfortably - I have not been to Cardiff Bay, so I haven’t taken great delight in exploring the space, just as she did, and her two photos don’t give me enough feedback to suggest how I should feel. The author uses the phrase ‘just as I do’ fourteen times throughout the book, and whilst sometimes it seems appropriate, other times it seems naïve or condescending. From Chapter 2 onwards she sets the tour-guide voice aside and writes with a scholarly tone again.

The most interesting chapter from my point of view was her attempt to answer the question ‘who made the Sydney Opera House possible?’ and suggests that it is neither architect, engineer, governments, nor society, but a ‘mesh’ of collaborations; a collective effort.

Lots of interesting questions are raised about the manner through which building designs make it to fruition and their ability to generate symbolic connotations – not all of them are answered, which in some ways, is as it should be.