Recent Publications
Publications
Architecture, the most durable of the arts, is inextricably linked to issues of memory, nostalgia, and history. Yet, in this impatient century, the discipline’s relationship to the past has become increasingly fraught. The stream of readily accessible information has trapped us in a perpetual present, and our attention spans have been reduced to 140-character bursts. As archives overflow and data multiplies, these accumulating facts lack any theory of significance. Is history still relevant in a media landscape where time passes at an accelerated pace?
This issue of Perspecta—the oldest and most distinguished student-edited architectural journal in America—proposes that amnesia, often seen as a destructive force, might also be understood as a productive one, that the gaps it creates might also provide spaces for invention. Contributions from a diverse group of scholars, artists, and practitioners explore the paradoxical nature of amnesia: How can forgetfulness be both harmful and generative? What will we borrow or abandon from yesterday to confront tomorrow? What sort of critical genealogies can be repurposed, suppressed, or manufactured to reenergize current practice? How might we construct counter-narratives, rebel histories, and alternative canons that are relevant to our present moment?
Perspecta 48 considers the uses and abuses of history and ignites a debate about the role of memory in architecture.
Karsten Harries—The two faces of nostalgia
David Chipperfield—Notes on the New National Gallery
Saskia Sassen—Making presence
Edward Eigen—Dredging up the unknown: interpretive notes on Edward Forbes’s Aegean expedition
Russell Thomsen—The future of Auschwitz
Mario Carpo—Big data and the end of history
TJ Demos—Painting and uprising: Julie Mehretu’s third space
Sam Jacob—Put the needle on the record
Anthony Vidler—Platonic paradigms: a memory of the School of Athens
Maria Shéhérazade Giudici—From theater of memory to framework for memories: John Soane’s museums
Marco Frascari—The ambiguity of non-finito architecture: the deceiving of time
Kyle Dugdale—They too were silent
Richard Mosse—Come out (1966)
Esra Akcan—Open architecture as adventure game: John Hejduk in a noncitizen district
Stanislaus von Moos—Ruin count: Le Corbusier and European reconstruction
Matt Roman—You are how you collect
Andrew Kovacs—Archive of affinities
Gary Leggett—The three to five points of architectural photography
Sylvia Lavin—Today we collect everything
Iwan Baan—62nd Shikinen Sengu
Amale Andraos—New Holland Island: strategies of the void
Stephan Petermann & OMA/AMO—Gütersloh ice core drilling
Hans Ulrich Obrist—In conversation
