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Editorial

Éditorial
Tania Sengupta, Johan Lagae, Sarah Melsens et Ricardo Costa Agarez

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  • 1 Christopher Cowell, “The Kacchā-Pakkā Divide: Material, Space and Architecture in the Military Can (...)
  • 2 Tim Ingold, “Materials against Materiality,” Archaeological Dialogues, vol. 14, 2007, p. 1-16. DOI (...)

1Building materials have frequently been subtexts or recurring or incidental figures in various earlier articles of the ABE Journal. We have also featured contributions such as Christopher Cowell’s piece “The Kacchā-Pakkā Divide: Material, Space and Architecture in the Military Cantonments of British India (1765-1889),”1 (ABE 9-10) focusing on discursive categories stemming from building materials and construction methods that played profound roles in military built-environment in colonial India. The Theme section of ABE 23 explicitly takes up the question of building materials within connected architectural histories. Rather than the more abstract and nebulous notion of “materiality” (as raised by Tim Ingold)2, it engages with the very matter of materials. Sharing the interest in construction and construction sites of fields like construction history and production studies, the present issue’s editors—Monika Motylińska, Robby Fivez, María Ignacia Jeldes Olivares and Paul Sprute—make a simultaneously particular and expansive case. They urge us to consider very specific building materials, or construction systems tethered to specific materials, and to think historically in terms of particular locations and socio-political-cultural contexts. Equally, they engage in the transnational geopolitics and related mobilities of such materials, their processing and application technologies, related machinery and knowhow. The temporal span covering late nineteenth and large swathes of the twentieth century almost touches and yet is distinct from our own time.

2One distinctive aspect of the Theme section articles is the idea of (material) constraints i.e., the type of limitations and boundary conditions that emanate, for example, from materials’ physical/chemical properties, their availability/unavailability, or the lack or insufficient knowledge of them. How these attributes shaped building in local contexts, while being inflected by wider currents, is the focus of this issue. It therefore brings back the question of materials (and relatedly, of extraction) at the heart of today’s climate crisis and sustainability discourse while resisting some of their ahistorical tendencies, instead adopting a situated and historical frame. Noteworthy here is the interdisciplinary composition of the guest editors' expertise, spanning fields such as architectural history, economic geography, and science and technology studies (STS).

3All the pieces involve interactions between actors and agencies from different nations formed around particular materials or building elements. They take us through encounters between a variety of geographies, political economies and conditions of modernity: colonial, postcolonial, capitalist, socialist, and more generally, wealthy/powerful and poorer nations connected through materials and technological exchange. They highlight issues around material scarcity, material-specific typologies as instruments of identity, material constraints facilitating capitalist resource extraction and profit, and local improvisations of modern materials and material technologies.

4For our Sources section, Igor Bloch presents his archival navigation of some fascinating mail-order pocket manuals from post-WWII Belgian Congo—containing house and furniture building, craft and housekeeping pedagogy for potential Congolese housebuilders—which Bloch suggests were colonial social-engineering instruments. Pauline M. Bezemer summarises her PhD on twentieth century housing estates in four sub-Saharan African cities in relation to shifting state policy and cultural paradigms, ending with cognitive mapping and ethnography of present-day residents’ perceptions. ABE 23 concludes with book reviews by Will Davis (of Miel Groten’s The Architecture of Empire in Modern Europe: Space, Place, and the Construction of an Imperial Environment, 1860-1960) and Ricardo Agarez (of Michael Falser’s (ed.) Picturesque Modernities: Architectural Studies in Global Regionalism (1890-1950)).

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Notes

1 Christopher Cowell, “The Kacchā-Pakkā Divide: Material, Space and Architecture in the Military Cantonments of British India (1765-1889),” ABE Journal, no. 9-10, 2016. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/abe.10893.

2 Tim Ingold, “Materials against Materiality,” Archaeological Dialogues, vol. 14, 2007, p. 1-16. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203807002127.

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Tania Sengupta, Johan Lagae, Sarah Melsens et Ricardo Costa Agarez, « Editorial », ABE Journal [En ligne], 23 | 2024, mis en ligne le 30 septembre 2024, consulté le 14 octobre 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/abe/16265 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12ebi

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Auteurs

Tania Sengupta

The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, United Kingdom Orcid ID: 0000-0002-9484-7450

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Johan Lagae

Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Ghent University, Belgium Orcid ID: 0000-0002-7791-6477

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Sarah Melsens

French National Center for Scientific Research, CNRS, France ; FLAME University, India Orcid ID: 0000-0002-9588-6232

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Ricardo Costa Agarez

ISCTE-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Portugal Orcid ID: 0000-0002-1170-6661

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Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont susceptibles d’être soumis à des autorisations d’usage spécifiques.

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