Architects are now more than ever part of an interdisciplinary context. The emergence of creative art-based practices, film making, post-disaster designs and slum management, as part of the architecture discourse and curriculum, is an indication of how broad architecture has become, and the extent to which it has already merged peripheral practices into its core.
This new volume in the AHRA Critiques Series is a statement about how broad, complex, influential, and, ironically central, architecture has become in the contemporary culture, economy and society, despite the marginal position the profession currently occupies. Peripheries questions and challenges the boundaries of architectural research by bringing together subjects and relevant streams of investigation, some of which rarely feature in architectural research and practice titles.
Divided into four themes, Places of Formation and Insight, Practices at the Edge, People on the Margins and Edge Readings, each section presents a selection of high calibre interdisciplinary research papers, from a range of renowned contributors including Stephen Walker, Gerry Adler, Dana Vais and author Glen Patterson. The volume also includes a Dialogue between Murray Fraser, Christine Boyer and Kim Dovey. Each section interrogates a peripheral aspect of the built environment, and brings to the fore peripheral case studies. Chapters discuss architecture in United States, Lebanon, Egypt, Japan, Romania, and Europe. Hence, the book takes Architectural humanities discussions to new cultures, societies and practices and towards a global level of influence and impact.
1. Introduction: Transcending the boundaries of architecture Ruth Morrow and Mohamed Gamal Abdelmonem 2. Peripheries dialogue: a roundtable debate on architecture Mohamed Gamal Abdelmonem Part I: Peripheral Places of Formation and Insight 3. Shadows in the farthest corners: the pursuit of national identity in Japanese architectural aesthetics Simon Richards 4. Identity in peripheries: Barking and its others Thomas-Bernard Kenniff 5. Centre or periphery? The architecture of the travelling street fair Stephen Walker 6. Designing bare essentials: ALDI and the architectures of cheapness Gary Boyd Intervention A: Is this central? Glen Patterson Part II: Practices at the Edge 7. The degree zero of space: Romanian urban periphery interpreted through Andrea Branzi's theory Dana Vais 8. Obsolete industrial space in the expanded field Maros Krivy 9. Inhabiting the edge: architecture and transport Infrastructure Intertwined Phoebe Crisman 10. Heritage at the periphery: the York Street Vaults, the Roman baths, Bath David Littlefield Intervention B: The Kevin Kieran Award Murray Fraser Part III: People on the Margins 11. Re-imaging the periphery: the reproduction of space in Cairo Gehan Selim 12. Homogenic love in the city: CR Ashbee’s new Dublin Brian Ward 13. Energising the building edge: Siegfried Ebeling, Bauhaus bioconstructivist Gerry Adler Intervention C: ‘We want to make really good buildings and we just happen to be on the edge’ James Benedict Brown Part IV: Edge Readings 14. Metropolitan narratives on peripheral contexts: buildings and constructs in Algarve (South Portugal), c. 1950 Ricardo Agarez 15. Positions of periphery to centre: the Festival of Britain Sarah Lappin and Una Walker 16. The strange case of the speaking walls: the testimony of architecture in the contemporary crime novel murder scene Keith McAllister 17. This is how stories of conflict circulate and resonate Mohamad Hafeda Epilogue: Lessons from the Peripheral Ruth Morrow Index
Biography
Ruth Morrow is Professor of Architecture at SPACE: School of Planning, Architecture and Civil Engineering at Queen's University Belfast.
Mohamed Gamal Abdelmonem is an architect and lecturer in Architecture at SPACE: School of Planning, Architecture and Civil Engineering at Queen’s University Belfast.
"This is a valuable volume and worthy of closer reading. I hope it will spur others to deepen the interrogation of other boundary and peripheral cases, pushing the limits of architecture and imagination to new frontiers." — Khaled Adham, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review
