Architecture in Development: Systems and the Emergence of the Global South
Cover of Architecture in Development: Systems and the Emergence of the Global South (Routledge 2022).
Architecture in Development: Systems and the Emergence of the Global South
Published April 2022 by Routledge
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This extensive text investigates how architects, planners, and other related experts responded to the contexts and discourses of “development” after World War II. Development theory did not manifest itself in tracts of economic and political theory alone. It manifested itself in every sphere of expression where economic predicaments might be seen to impinge on cultural factors. Architecture appears in development discourse as a terrain between culture and economics, in that practitioners took on the mantle of modernist expression while also acquiring government contracts and immersing themselves in bureaucratic processes. This book considers how, for a brief period, architects, planners, structural engineers, and various practitioners of the built environment employed themselves in designing all the intimate spheres of life, but from a consolidated space of expertise. Seen in these terms, development was, to cite Arturo Escobar, an immense design project itself, one that requires radical disassembly and rethinking beyond the umbrella terms of “global modernism” and “colonial modernities,” which risk erasing the sinews of conflict encountered in globalizing and modernizing architecture.
Encompassing countries as diverse as Israel, Ghana, Greece, Belgium, France, India, Mexico, the United States, Venezuela, the Philippines, South Korea, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Turkey, Cyprus, Iraq, Zambia, and Canada, the set of essays in this book cannot be considered exhaustive, nor a “field guide” in the traditional sense. Instead, it offers theoretical reflections “from the field,” based on extensive archival research. This book sets out to examine the arrays of power, resources, technologies, networking, and knowledge that cluster around the term of “development,” and the manner in which architects and planners negotiated these thickets in their multiple capacities—as knowledge experts, as technicians, as negotiators, and as occasional authorities on settlements, space, domesticity, education, health, and every other field where arguments for development were made.
Contents
Introduction • Arindam Dutta, Ateya Khorakiwala, Ayala Levin, Fabiola López-Durán, and Ijlal Muzaffar for Aggregate
Part I: Developmental Time
Chapter 1 • Incompletion: On More Than a Certain Tendency in Postwar Architecture and Planning • Arindam Dutta
Chapter 2 • God’s Gamble: Self-Help Architecture and the Housing of Risk • Ijlal Muzaffar
Part II: Self-Evidence
Chapter 3 • Planning for an Uncertain Present: Action Planning in Singapore, India, Israel, and Sierra Leone • Ayala Levin
Chapter 4 • To Which Revolution? The National School of Agriculture and the Center for the Improvement of Corn and Wheat in Texcoco and El Batán, Mexico, 1924–1968 • Nikki Moore
Chapter 5 • From Rice Research to Coconut Capital • Diana Martinez
Chapter 6 • “The City as a Housing Project”: Training for Human Settlements at the Leuven PGCHS in the 1970s–1980s • Sebastiaan Loosen with Viviana d’Auria and Hilde Heynen
Part III: Bureaucratic Organization
Chapter 7 • Folders, Patterns, and Villages: Pastoral Technics and the Center for Environmental Structure • Ginger Nolan
Chapter 8 • The Technical State: Programs, Positioning, and the Integration of Architects in Political Society in Mexico, 1945–1955 • Albert José-Antonio López
Chapter 9 • “Foreigners in Filmmaking” • Felicity D. Scott
Part IV: Technological Transfer
Chapter 10 • The Making of Architectural Design as Sŏlgye: Integrating Science, Industry, and Expertise in Postwar Korea • Melany Sun-Min Park
Chapter 11 • Infrastructures of Dependency: US Steel’s Architectural Assemblages on Indigenous Lands • Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió
Chapter 12 • Reinventing Earth Architecture in the Age of Development • Farhan Karim
Part V: Designing the Rural
Chapter 13 • Globalizing the Village: Development Media, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, and the United Nations in India • Olga Touloumi
Chapter 14 • “Ruralizing” Zambia: Doxiadis Associates’ Systems-Based Planning and Developmentalism in the Nonindustrialized South • Petros Phokaides
Chapter 15 • Food Capital: Fantasies of Abundance and Nelson Rockefeller’s Architectures of Development in Venezuela, 1940s–1960s • Fabiola López-Durán
Chapter 16 • The Jewish Agency’s Open Cowsheds: Israeli Third Way Rural Design, 1956–1968 • Martin Hershenzon
Chapter 17 • Floors and Ceilings: The Architectonics of Accumulation in the Green Revolution • Ateya Khorakiwala
Part VI: Land
Chapter 18 • Policy Regionalism and the Limits of Translation in Land Economics • Burak Erdim
Chapter 19 • Leisure and Geo-Economics: The Hilton and Other Development Regimes in the Mediterranean South • Panayiota Pyla
Chapter 20 • Antiparochì and (Its) Architects: Greek Architectures in Failure • Konstantina Kalfa
✓ Not peer-reviewed