Volume 58, entitled Legacy, marks the transition of the editor-in-chief position from Arjen Oosterman to Stephan Petermann. To avoid simplistic boasting or navel gazing, as the magazine introduction states, they decided to dive into Volume’s pre-history, starting in 1929 and stopping where Volume started. What is Volume’s legacy after 75 years of magazine making?@en

The 1988 competition for the German Historical Museum in Berlin was on several layers a controversial project that testifies to the publics’ potential to embrace a diverse culture of dispute. Even before the competition, the idea of a museum on German history was fiercely debated, especially in the face of National Socialism. Aldo Rossi’s proposal that won the competition featured a collage of typological forms reminiscent of historical German monuments. But critics contested its monumentality and naïve use of iconography, while the jury was accused to have violated competition regulations. The fall of the Berlin Wall eventually ended the debate, but this did not go without reaction: The head jury Max Bächer protested to the then-chancellor Helmut Kohl, demanding compensation for Rossi’s lost prize.

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By the end of the 1950s, the US periodicals Αrchitectural Forum and Architectural Record restructured their editorial policies relating to their uses of pieces of architectural criticism. From the one side, Architectural Forum published by Time Inc., was attempting a widening of their readership through the use of flagrant architectural criticism under the supervision of the enthusiastic editor-in-chief Douglas Haskell, who assembled a team of talented journalists with foremost being the name of Jane Jacobs, acclaimed critic and writer. One the other side, Architectural Record, published by the informative organization F. W. Dodge Co. was led by Emerson Goble, a conservative editor who was openly opposed to architectural criticism and who paradoxically sustained a stable collaboration with Lewis Mumford whose articles in the magazine dealt with issue of social restructuring, morality, technological progress, and the development of the contemporary mega-cities. The current study will refer to the role and uses that the two intellectual critics held in the two respective magazines in the context of professional architectural journalism of the mid-20th century USA.@en

The travels of Dutch architect Arthur Staal to Greece in the 1930s and his views on the Greek landscape.@en

Comparison of the design process of the two master architects' projects in Berlin, through archival research@en

In 1944 amidst the Nazi occupation, a book on Greece circulated in the Netherlands, was quickly sold-out and circulated again in 1946 and 1951. Its title was Hellas. Een reis door Griekenland [Hellas. A journey through Greece] and its author was Arthur Staal (1907-1993), a young architect who found himself in the epicenter of the developments of Dutch modernism, and whose achievements in the drawing board were paralleled with his ventures in faraway countries of the Middle East and the Mediterranean. The country of Greece, and its landscape were of particular importance to him and the development of his architectural thinking.@en

The Architectural Record during its midcentury years of 1942 to 1967, was a riveting centre of architectural journalism following and participating in the changing development of the architectural profession. Through the Second World War and the Korean War that brought functionalist modernism to the foreword and through the emerging consumer market of the 1950s, the magazine’s editors’ mission was one of “helping this new-born architectural infant to learn to walk, talk, and attain his full power.” Through archival research, this study deals with the particular history of the Record editors, publishers and contributors along the course of US midcentury modernism and the developing “image of the architect”.@en

Το 1964 o Walter Gropius απηύθυνε ομιλία απέναντι σε κοινό Αμερικανών αρχιτεκτόνων την οποία ολοκλήρωσε απαγγέλοντας το ποίημα του Σεφέρη, «Γέροντας στην ακροποταμιά» (1942). Δεδομένου, ότι η συγκεκριμένη ομιλία ήταν μία από τις τελευταίες δημόσιες ομιλίες του Gropius και το γεγονός ότι το αντικείμενο της ομιλίας διακρίνεται από την κριτική που ασκεί προς την αμερικανική αρχιτεκτονική κοινότητα με αποκορύφωμα το ποίημα, προκαλούνται τα ερωτήματα σχετικά με την θέση του Gropius στην αρχιτεκτονική κριτική σκηνή της Αμερικής και πως αυτή διαμόρφωσε την ύστερη φάση της καριέρας του μεγάλου αρχιτέκτονα. Στο παρόν κείμενο θα αναφερθούμε πρώτον, στο κείμενο της συγκεκριμένης ομιλίας, και δεύτερον - μέσω αρχειακής έρευνας- στην σχέση που διατηρούσε ο Γερμανο-Αμερικάνος αρχιτέκτονας με ορισμένους από τους πιο σημαντικούς κριτικούς αρχιτεκτονικής της Αμερικής σκηνής: Lawrence Kocher (Colonial Williamsburg archives), Joseph F. Hudnut (Harvard Archives), Russel Hitchcock (Smithsonian archives), John Ely Burchard (MIT archives) και Lewis Mumford (UPenn archives). Εκτός από τα παραπάνω, σημαντική πηγή υπήρξε και το αρχείο Walter και Ise Gropius του Harvard.@en

In this series of articles, PhD scholars from various universities explain their research and their way of working. What is the focus of their academic work? What question(s) do they want to answer? And what problems have they encountered? Phoebus Panigyrakis (TU Delft) is researching the content, editorial policy and impact of the magazine Architectural Record in the period 1942-1967.@en

‘I am that idiot,’ said Timothy Morton, stepping onto the podium. We proceeded to listen to the professor of English at Rice University, Texas, for the next couple of hours.@en

Architecture as a practice is bound to social, political, economic and material restrictions. It is only as a cultural discourse that it may gain autonomy, revolving around the question of what do the produced architectural forms actually mean for our contemporary setting as argued by architects, academics, critics/journalists, students or friends of the art. This discussion has its roots in the idea of contemporaneity itself and during the 19th century it was labelled as the “debate on style”. Today, the concept of style is undergoing a reconsideration after its banishment under the realm of modernism and the doctrine of functionalism. In the 21st century, contemporary architecture displays an over-production of forms that need to be managed and branded and in this context style re-emerges as a field of business strategies for architects who are willing to develop the identity of their firm and their designs. This paper investigates contemporary theories of style from the field of design management and their possible application in the field of architecture. A research gap has been identified between a) the vague arthistorical and philosophical concept of style in architectural discourse where it is regarded according to Ackerman, as a self-evident truth upon which our historical conception is based and b) the relatively recent theories of marketing and design management where effort is made to define style as a process of designing or styling strategies that may lead an architecture firm to get a certain positioning in their target environment. The paper will first consider several conceptions of style from the field of design management, then overview the conception of style as it stands in architecture, and thirdly, it will consider the matter of stylistic consistency in architectural practice as the pivotal turn for stylistic strategies. In conclusion mention will be made on the implications of style and its re-invention towards the notion of criticism. The main objective is to point out that the current consideration of style either as a retrospective tool of historical categorization, or as the central object of criticism is undergoing a paradigm shift. More as a tool of marketing than as the result of a collective consensus, style is being employed by architecture firms for their prospective endeavours and market engagement and as such should it be critically looked upon.@en