This text proposes an alternative reading of the typological and symbolic meanings commonly associated with the hypostyle hall, tracing its lineage over the course of more than 5,000 years. First, it examines the etymology of the term “hypostyle,” then it explores the architectural concept of type and related terms and how the hypostyle hall challenges or expands their definitions. Through close readings of selected historical examples, I offer a spatial-political interpretation of this architectural type. I argue that this interpretation is a useful tool for reconsidering the metaphors connecting the political body and the architectural body. In this sense, the hypostyle hall is especially relevant today because of its generative potential in deciphering and designing architecture. It occupies a nearly perfect intersection between a singular example (model) and a general rule (type) and, thus, between the self and the community.

The small island nation of Cyprus has had a long history of conflict – one that is marked in the morphology of the urban environment and in the Buffer Zone that segregates the nation – a space of redaction in the Cypriot landscape, and an enduring spatial division between the north and south of Cyprus. The restricted access to the Buffer Zone currently limits quotidian memory practices and the ability to engage with both individual and collective meaning-making. This paper outlines a research project that we have been conducting within Cyprus to create an open-access digital archive and explore the potential of 3D scanning to enable new forms of engagement with cultural heritage and a sensitive negotiation of spaces of conflict and loss. Through this work, we explore the idea of heritage-as-negotiation, witnessing, and meaning-making that gives voice to past events that shape and haunt the present.

This article examines E.J. Salisbury and F.E. Wrighton’s botanical studies of the flora which thrived in London following the bombings of World War II, and which have established in the city since. This flora is revealed as a complicated new nature which thrived specifically due to the topographic conditions produced by bombing. This visual essay combines photographs of contemporary occurrences of bombsite plant species with a historical and theoretical text producing a “plantarium,” a hybrid interpretation of the Flora and herbarium as forms of botanical knowledge. In positioning these plants as a living archive, they are understood as “historical facts.” Thinking through Rebecca Solnit’s use of the term “saeculum” and through a reflection on the temporality of the photograph, with reference to Ariella Azoulay, the article suggests that contemporary occurrences of the bombsite flora can propose alternative historical temporalities for thinking the relationships of our violent past to the present.

Between 1954 and 1964, the United States Information Agency (USIA) and the Office of International Trade Fairs (OITF) designed, exhibited, and participated in the International Damascus Fair. The US pavilion for the First International Damascus Fair in 1954 was the first time the United States had participated in such a fair during the Cold War and marked the importance of fairs in the US’s “soft power” arsenal of “cultural diplomacy.” US participation in the International Damascus Fairs sheds light on the ways in which the USIA and OITF curated a message that attempted to achieve social, economic and political changes in the Arab world. The fairs were a place for fairgoers to witness the US and Soviet ways of life as if at first-hand, staging an unspoken confrontation in which each nation attempted to sway allegiances. Starting with the first pavilion, This is Cinemara (1954) and ending with Medicine USA (1964), this paper traces how the consumer life was packaged within the shell of the suburban home alongside its productive farm in US pavilions in an attempt to “win the hearts and minds” of the Syrian people.

This paper interrogates how the exhibition TUMU: Young Architecture of China, held in Berlin in 2001, came to promote a group of university-affiliated architects through narratives recontextualized and reinvented across cultural borders. It focuses on the exhibition’s representation of the previously largely unknown work of faculty members from the newly launched Graduate School of Architecture at Nanjing University. I evaluate the way in which, despite misrepresentation by the exhibition curators and subsequent architectural critics, the sudden overseas exposure of the nascent faculty group affected the professional career of its members, legitimized pedagogical reforms and inaugurated professional debates. The aim is to show how the inter-constitutive relationship between the exploratory, speculative architectural practices and their (mis)representations in asymmetrical cross-cultural contacts can lead to unforeseen and enriching discursive constructs.

ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue that the categorization and normalization processes of the UN mandate can be understood through the established image schemas in Pyla which circulate within the social body. Johnson introduced the idea of image schema as a fundamental model for individuals’ spatial experiences. At the same time, he emphasized the relationship between the establishment of the individuals’ reality and power relations. As a result, bodily experiences are formed unconsciously by the consequences of power relations and its objects. Furthermore, this paper aims to consider the concept of ‘regions’ by Goffman as an affective methodology to explore how the normalized buffer zone village becomes part of a social-architectural performance. Goffman defined region as ‘any place that is bounded to some degree by barriers to perception’. By introducing Goffman’s concepts of region, this paper aims to uncover the multiplicity of performance and to critically reflect on the complexity.

Tahtakuşlar is a village in South-Western Anatolia populated by a minority Alevi group called Tahtacı Turkmens. The Ethnographic Gallery there was founded by one of the residents to publicize and perpetuate the villagers’ socio-cultural heritage. The core collection of the gallery consists of typical ethnographic material which includes the founder’s family belongings from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Later additions, which are seemingly irrelevant to Tahtacı Turkmen identity, include disparate objects ranging from radios of the 1960s and 70s to stuffed animals, Shamanic objects from Native American tribes, and gifts from contemporary international visitors. We argue that a New Materialist engagement with this unusual collection reveals Tahtacı Turkmen identity as an ongoing production involving the entanglement of historical and contemporary discourses and the materiality of spaces and objects. We aim to show how both Tahtacı Turkmens and ethnographic collections are liberated from their dominant identifications and re-produced in unfamiliar ways in the Ethnographic Gallery.