Drawing on fieldwork in Cape Town, this essay moves transversally across different settings—situated assemblages made up of enunciations, actions, and codes—in order to explore “that which holds a society together”, which is the institution in the broadest sense. Confronted with the violence of inequality produced and maintained by enduring spatial structures, complexity, hybridity, and ambiguity come across as signs of hope. The main case brought up in this essay—the Edith Stephens nature reserve in Phillippi on the Cape Flats—is put forward as a promise for the future, whose ambiguous borders and oblique rationality provide means to “stay with the trouble” in starkly impoverished surroundings. It discloses the emergence of a “minor architecture” that, in taking its material from the alleged margins, differs from previous readings.

With this special issue of Architectural Theory Review, we set out to discuss theory (of architecture) as a practice. In order to resist what we perceive to be the persistent division of labour between theoria and praxis, we want to expand and reclaim what can be included under these rubrics.1 And we want to do this in such a way as to draw attention to the specificity of situations. Practices (of space, of architecture) are always entangled with the lives of people, places, and things. They refer to specific, situated problems in response to which we believe it is crucial to resist ready-made answers and to accept the constraints of the milieu in which we find ourselves. We thus call for situated, relational, and embodied perspectives in architectural scholarship rather than distant, autonomous, and authoritarian ones. But we also ask how, in undertaking this work, we can strive to reclaim a capacity for agency in situations that have become oppressive or where power relations have become imbalanced. We feel confronted with the difficult task of resisting how the situations we study are presented to us (through theory) and of speculating instead on how these situations might be envisioned otherwise by reclaiming other (forgotten, inconvenient, odd…) versions of such situations. We draw our inspiration from radical (feminist) thinkers, including Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, and Karen Barad. The relevance of these perspectives for architectural and urban studies—and more specifically, Donna Haraway’s “situated viewpoints” and Isabelle Stengers’ “ecology of practices” and “cosmopolitics”—are becoming increasingly evident.2 With this special issue, we ask explicitly how such approaches can inform new critical engagements with architecture and the city. Through slowing down, hesitation, and “category work”,3 we have invited scholars to resist the taxonomies and conceptual categories with which they have become accustomed, or feel obliged, to think. Our proposal for this special issue also reads as an invitation to reconnect with (hi)stories and (radical) imaginations that tell alternative stories. And through reconnecting with situated stories, we argue that other forms and imaginations of engagement, of resistance, can emerge. Hence our cry: Resist, Reclaim, Speculate! In asking how theory “as a practice” can respond to our cry, we believe three moves are necessary. Firstly, we ask: What are the methodological and ethical consequences of considering theory as a practice? Secondly, we take this challenge as an invitation to expand our understanding of what should be included in the discussion of architecture, which is also to ask what “matters” to the understanding of architecture? Finally, what kinds of stories emerge when we respect the situated nature of the spaces, buildings, plans, and issues we study? And how do these stories make a difference?

It is a pivotal moment for urban design. In practice, urban designers must engage with the threats from and responses to climate change, rapid and extensive urbanisation in patterns and places not ...

In 1970, the ethical code of the American Institute of Architects defined a coherent framework for practice, one that had characterised the architectural profession in America and Great Britain since the mid-nineteenth century. An architect should not act as a builder or developer; his only payment was the client’s fee, fixed by a mandatory schedule. This ethical framework was the cornerstone for architecture’s professional project: establishing the architect’s status within the competitive market economy by assuring his expertise and disinterestedness. During the 1970s, two separate groups of critics—consumer advocates on the political left, and advocates for a deregulated laissez-faire economy on the political right—used anti-monopoly law to dismantle the ethical codes of architecture and other professions. By 1980, the American architect operated within a changed world. Architects could play any role in the building process and they could compete freely by price. The disinterested expert had been transformed into a freewheeling marketplace competitor. Over the subsequent 35 years, this ethical and economic revolution has contributed to the fracturing of the firm, the adoption of new information technologies, the globalisation of practice, and the emergence of new models of public interest architecture.

Monochromaticity has been significant in twentieth-century visual art and its aims and disciplinary effects substantially theorized. In architecture and interior design, the rendering of buildings and spaces in a single colour has, in the last decade, gone from isolated instances to a notable international phenomenon across disparate styles. Looking to monochromatic art and its specific disciplinary history, this paper attempts to understand the ambitions, context, and consequences of monochromatic architecture. Characteristic of the critical reception of monochromatic art is a tension between the cultural meanings of colour and the physiological nature of colour perception. The immersive effects of the coloured interior are physiological, yet, as this paper argues, their use is cultural and argumentative.

This essay analyses the elite architect in Mexico during the twentieth century, understood as the architect who has triumphed by achieving success in terms of value systems, markers of distinction, and power structures inherent to the architecture profession. It examines, using various sources of evidence like personal interviews, the career trajectories of selected elite architects through a cultural lens that refracts two streams of culture: the Mexican culture and architecture culture. These two cultures produce the diverse context-bound patterns that evolve, and involve, the body of knowledge, the cultural and historical moment, the social sphere and its networks, and the political and economic constraints and supports, as well as the legitimation and commodification of this profession.

This paper investigates the implications of reception theory for a possible theory of architecture, not so much to construct such a theory for today, but rather to show how we are already beyond reception theory. Looking at the work of Fish, Iser, Jauss, and de Man, an argument is made that an architectural theory could have been formulated on the basis of reader-response criticism: this architectural theory would be that of an affective architecture, an architecture of affect, where the interplay of subject and object becomes the main focus of concern. This theory is shown to be a sub-species of what Meillassoux calls correlationism, and a link is made with the early written and built work of Le Corbusier. The essay ends by considering a radical afterlife for reception theory in the deconstruction of the notions of subject and object, which, according to the thought of Deleuze, become after-effects of the differential movement of architecture.

The concept of Einfühlung (empathy), a term coined in 1872 by the German philosopher, Robert Vischer, was highly influential in architectural theory from the last years of the nineteenth century until at least the first two decades of the twentieth. Heinrich Wölfflin and August Schmarsow, two important figures of art history, developed their respective concepts of architectural reception in a strong correlation to the idea of empathy. In their investigations into architectural creation, the idea of the human capacity to empathise with objects and works of art led both art historians to an understanding of art history as a discipline that was dedicated to retracing the dominant ideas of different epochs on a psychological basis.

Michelangelo Sabatino's first major book derives from his doctoral work at the University of Toronto and from a long-standing personal preoccupation with the book's theme: the vernacular as an oper...