Resilience can mean a range of things, including the ability of a city or a community to recover quickly both physically and socially, through tangible and intangible elements, physical structures, and people. Built environment scholars have picked up on the concept of resilience in recent years, interpreting it in multiple ways and creating a broad range of narratives. These narratives need to be explored critically, considering who wrote them at what time for what audience and with what narrative goals. This article explores how various actors—from architects to film makers, from historians to politicians and planners —have consciously proposed a range narratives of resilience through their depictions of post World War II Hiroshima. It first briefly reflects on the meaning of resilience. It then builds upon earlier examinations of the destruction of Hiroshima and the construction of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and the Peace Memorial Museum by the Japanese architect Tange Kenzō to explore how different actors conceived of resilience, for whom and from which perspective they have built narratives. In the second section, the article explores how Tange and his team managed to bring their project to realization. It suggests that administrators, architects and urbanists, have used rebuilding visions and detailed reports to create resilience narratives aimed respectively at global and local audiences. Overall, the text demonstrates that together, disaster and rebuilding, their representation in the urban environment are all part of larger societal constructions of historical identity.

Post-war Hungary may seem the ideal place to develop a critical theory of capitalist society: the work of Georg (György) Lukács, the internationally acclaimed Hungarian philosopher whose 1923 book, <em>History and Class Consciousness</em>, was a major inspiration behind later neo-Marxist theories, offered a vantage point by which to assess the dominant ideologies. However, the authoritarian state-socialism of Hungary permitted only apologetic theorizations, using the Marxist critique of capitalist society and culture to justify its own form of domination. But even to philosophers of the Frankfurt School in Germany the reality of authoritarian socialism was a challenge they refused to confront. Was a critical theory in state-socialist societies even possible? And if so, how did it affect the theory of architecture? As in other state-socialist countries, architectural debates in Hungary between 1960 and 1990 displayed conflicting lines of thought. Critical theory was indeed possible in state-socialist Hungary, and it gave rise to the development of two characteristic positions: insistence on the ‘specificity’ of architecture, on the one hand, and the critique of ‘étatist’ planning, on the other. Both largely developed on a neo-Marxist or a post-Marxist basis. Therefore, the critique of a system that claimed the Marxian tradition for itself meant rejecting a monolithic ‘critical theory’, analyzing the objectivations, institutions and practices of state-socialist society.

This article defends an attention to past meanings of ‘Europe’ as a prospective idea, focusing on the circulation of architectural ideas between European states and settler territories in late colonialism. It proposes research that questions the relation between present-day European architectural expertise and ‘Europe’ as a colonial space-time horizon. The latter term denotes how past colonial futures, understood as circulatory formations, entailed an imagination of social spaces that was never fully actualized, acting instead as a guiding device. Drawing on archival research in South Africa and in Mozambique, the article examines how during the Second World War architects in the region projected a ‘European’ space that, while being envisioned in contrast to an unequal non-European space, was not simply a propagation of coeval space-time in European cities. In addition, it notes how professional discourse in the 1960s articulated the hierarchies of development that structure the domain of Europeanness. However, the article does not stress the mere denunciation of ‘Europe’ as integral to colonial rationality, recalling instead the potential of prospective ideas as a form of open daydream.

The first part of these field notes consists of three perspectives from Germany, Estonia, and Portugal on the meaning of ‘Europe’ for the historiography of architecture. The second part contains four reflections on the history and role of the EAHN in opening new and inclusive venues of inquiry vis-a-vis the fragile concept of ‘Europe’.

This introduction to the special collection 'The Meaning of Europe for Architectural History' raises issues about the relationship between knowledge and geopolitics, in particular the significance of 'Europe' for the production of architectural knowledge.

Architectural collections or reconstructed villages are popular tourist attractions in Europe and the United States, often promoting architecture as a demonstration of national and regional heritages. At times, these sites betray the biases of their creators, perpetuated through methods of display and their public interpretation. The architecture can be used as artifact or backdrop to promote ethics, history, or industry at the hand of curators, particularly when removed from its original context and constructed in a new one. When viewed through the lens of tourism, the collections become a constructed landscape of architectural heritage, experienced by visitors through a narrow understanding of time and place, propagated by fabricated historical connections or purposeful nationalist arrangements. Often accessorizing ‘authentic’ architectural heritage with reconstructions and reproductions, these collections suggest a skewed heritage landscape to the non-specialized visitor, emphasizing tourism over truth and entertainment over education. Following 19th century examples in Scandinavia and the broader introduction of international architecture through the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, early 20th century American collections at Greenfield Village and the Manitou Cliff Dwellings underscore the intent to capitalize on architectural heritage tourism, and how a diluted history is interpreted through the eyes of the modern tourist.

Sigfried Giedion called Herbert Bayer’s exhibition catalogue for the 1930 Section Allemande a “minor typographical masterpiece.” Like similar catalogues, it is inexpensive, provides an inventory list, has an introduction, functions as a guide, and is illustrated. However, the majority of its images are of installations, not their contents. Bayer accommodates the catalogue type for applied arts exhibitions by listing installations as objects, but he confronts the type by showing installations as display contexts that establish points of view, emulating, idealizing and interpreting the experience of the exhibition. By independently constructing ways of seeing and understanding the exhibition, the catalogue resists being an appendage to the exhibition, despite their close relationship. Giedion may have viewed Bayer’s catalogue as an important but secondary work of graphic design, but this article argues that it is of primary significance as an exhibition catalogue, an unusual essay on the book typology that is conscious of its history while moving outside — to other types of book design and to exhibitions — to transform it.

A summary of the EAHN conference in Dublin in 2016, EAHN: Fourth International Meeting, and an overview of the state of the field.

This article focuses on architectural drawings, some only recently discovered, that contain indications of authentic proportional systems from the ‘inner circle’ of Dutch seventeenth-century classical architecture. These drawings demonstrate how these architects used arithmetical grid systems as well as geometrical constructions in the hope of achieving their classical ideal of beauty and harmony. In light of these proportional systems we may propose a method for analysing other drawings from this period that do not have any proportional systems inscribed.

This essay explores the proportioning strategies used by Gothic architects. It argues that Gothic design practice involved conventions of procedure, governing the dynamic unfolding of successive geometrical steps. Because this procedure proves difficult to capture in words, and because it produces forms with a qualitatively different kind of architectural order than the more familiar conventions of classical design, which govern the proportions of the final building rather than the logic of the steps used in creating it, Gothic design practice has been widely misunderstood since the Renaissance. Although some authors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries attempted to sympathetically explain Gothic geometry, much of this work has been dismissed as unreliable, especially in the influential work of Konrad Hecht. This essay seeks to put the study of Gothic proportion onto a new and firmer foundation, by using computer-aided design software to analyze the geometry of carefully measured buildings and original design drawings. Examples under consideration include the parish church towers of Ulm and Freiburg, and the cross sections of the cathedrals of Reims, Prague, and Clermont-Ferrand, and of the Cistercian church at Altenberg. The sequence of images being analysed can be viewed as supplementary material at: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/ah.bq.s1