In the state socialist period, a unique relationship unfolded between modernism and vernacular construction, particularly in the context of the Soviet- and COMECON-aided collectivisation of mobile pastoralism and urbanisation in the Mongolian People’s Republic. This paper examines the transformation of Soviet historiography on the Mongolian ger—a portable self-made dwelling assembled from a wooden frame and wrapped in felt or other materials for insulation. Reconstructing the knowledge hierarchies and changing framings of ger offered by Mongolian and Soviet architects, scholars and government officials between 1935 and 1980, the article highlights the role this historiography played in the broader ideology of state socialist modernisation. Particularly, the paper demonstrates how histories of ger allowed the construction of Mongolian “national” socialist realist canon after the destruction of Buddhist monasteries and how it balanced promises of progress with housing provision delays and material constraints in the development of state-sponsored herding collectives. Finally, the paper retraces the reification of ger for ethnonationalist mobilisation aimed to align future visions of Soviet and Mongolian mobile urbanisms via the trope of “shared nomadic heritage”.

“Human beings swim in an ocean of materials.” With this sentence, anthropologist Tim Ingold announced his crusade against the abstract concept of “materiality” that had taken the academic world by storm. In his text Materials against Materiality, Ingold argues how the discrepancy between mind and matter has clouded thinking in social sciences and humanities, necessitating the concept of agency—that “magic mind-dust”—to set things into motion. However, if we think of the world only as matter, “bringing things to life is a matter not of adding a sprinkling of agency, but of restoring the generative fluxes of the world of materials in which they came into being and continue to subsist.” This thematic dossier aims to do exactly that: to “restore the generative fluxes of the world of materials” in which buildings came into being, focusing on the very real constraints these materials posed in their production, processing, and distribution.

One of the endeavours of ABE Journal-Architecture Beyond Europe has been to unravel the relations between colonial pasts, twentieth-century building cultures, and the “global” present, not only in terms of the materiality of built environments but also epistemically. One dimension of the latter entails interrogating the particular relationships and interactions between groups and individuals connected by colonial or postwar developmental constellations. Ten years after the thematic dossier G...

Ever since Helen Ibbitson Jessup and Huik Akihary published the first surveys on colonial and early post-independence architecture and urban planning in Indonesia in the late 1980s, architectural history scholarship on the topic has broadened substantially. This includes new surveys based on recently unlocked archival collections, monographs on individual architects, as well as studies on urban planning practices in cities like Jakarta or Semarang. Primarily following the footsteps of Dutch ...

The current issue of ABE Journal-Architecture Beyond Europe continues the dossier investigating “Architecture in the Foreign Aid-Funded Knowledge Economy” initiated in ABE 21 and focuses on the role of (architectural) education and pedagogy. In doing so, it engages with a topic that has received growing scholarly attention in recent years, notably through the Radical Pedagogies project initiated by Beatriz Colomina, and which was already given some attention in ABE previously, among others b...

This ABE Journal themed section investigates how ad-hoc private initiatives, small-scale homebuilding enterprises, and common-interest developments, such as housing co-operatives, have shaped housing and urban land development practices between the end of WWII and the rise, in the late-1980s, of the global, neoliberal housing markets. Beyond the affluent, industrialized states of Western Europe, speculative housing development thrived as a viable alternative to top down policies, thus contrib...

This investigation approaches the annual Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition (1965-2020) as a productive cross-cultural medium of exchange that generates new architectural knowledge. It situates this international competition of ideas in a long history of transnational encounters, to identify the contours of the ideological shift from the consolidation of modernist ideals to their critique. The paper highlights the iteration of the lack of “comfort” of modernist architecture, tracing the origins of this critique by referencing the 1977 and 1988 competitions, during which the respective judges Peter Cook and Toyō Itō challenged architects to devise innovative housing proposals to attain “comfort in the metropolis.” It initially employs a synchronic approach to investigate the origins of Cook’s competition theme, the multiple winning entries, the judges’ final remarks, and the after-effects of the competitions to apprehend how discrete geographies negotiated the notion of comfort. Next, the paper juxtaposes the outcomes of both years of the competition to offer a diachronic analysis of how architects have conceived the house and the city differently through time. This investigation reveals that the mechanism of this longstanding, idea-based competition confronts two judges’ positions to understand their cultural and architectural differences.

In the interest of capturing a broad range of topics across a wide geographical area―and which we cannot always do sufficient justice to through journal issues formed mainly around specific themes―we are publishing ABE 19 as an all-Varia or “open” issue. This is a natural extension of the open-access principle of the ABE Journal as such. The range of topics that feature in ABE 19 also reflects some of our recent internal discussions and debates as an editorial team, along with our editorial b...

Im April und Mai 1968 reisten zwei führende Mitarbeiter des Dessauer VEB Zementanlagenbau (ZAB) aus der DDR ins kubanische Nuevitas. Der ZAB Dessau befand sich mitten im Bau eines Zementwerkes nahe der kubanischen Kleinstadt in der Provinz Camagüey im Osten des Landes. Anlass für die Reise war die Inbetriebnahme der ersten Ofenlinie des Werkes, vor allem aber ging es darum, „widersprüchliche Berichte und Meldungen“ über eine „komplizierte politisch-ideologische und technische Situation“ auf d...