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Editorial

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

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1In their introduction to the Dossier section of this issue of ABE Journal, on “Transactional Spaces” Rixt Woudstra and Michael Faciejew note a tendency in architectural culture “to abstract architecture’s role relative to economic systems, akin to what Karl Marx, in the Critique of Political Economy, called the ‘idealization of the gold coin,’” which eluded its concrete nature. Instead, they argue, buildings and structures “have a real existence that determines how and why money circulates,” and they urge readers of the four essays collected in their guest-edited section to see “the acts taken by business people, politicians, bank officials, and others in commissioning and erecting such buildings, not as mere and neutral transactional requirements, but concrete decision making processes with ethical implications.”

2Buildings as ethical artifacts have been discussed on multiple approaches in work published in this journal over the years. In issue 24, we investigate the particularly fraught conjunction of architecture and finance through examples stemming from a varied geography and chronology, in structures that range from notable designs to improvised sheds and illustrate how transactions, shaped by diverse scales and materialities, express their role as both “material exchanges and social encounters,” as our guest editors quote from Georg Simmel. In the Standard Bank of British South Africa, Alex Bremner finds a structure peculiarly appropriate in “facilitating and symbolizing the violent and racialized nature” of the mining industry that supported it, within the wider frame of the gold standard international monetary system. Eva Schreiner shifts our attention from metropolitan bank architectures to the “hinterland”—in this case, the Ottoman countryside as it was exploited by German capitalism invested in cotton production and trade—and sees factories, farm fields, and provincial mansions as spaces of financial transaction and contestation. Another mansion—this time in Zurich—is thought through by Will Davis together with the planter economy at its base (in Sumatra, Indonesia), questioning approaches that distance metropolitan sites from remote colonies: in Davis’s words, “the villa is a site of colonial encounter without having to house the violence of the colonial act itself.” Lastly, Ewan Harrison investigates how a luxury hotel in Freetown, Sierra Leone, simultaneously acted as an instrument of neo-colonialism in support of British capital operations in a post-imperial context and as a key piece in the independent country’s economic plans. The issue’s Documents/Sources essay by Jason Nguyen forms a fitting coda to this collection as it delves into a meaningful set of maps and drawings that reveal how even provisional magasins in Québec helped form the infrastructure of corporate globalised finance.

  • 1 Sergio Ferro’s work is better known in France—where he has lived, worked and published since 1972—e (...)

3Beyond the Dossier section, this issue includes one Varia article where Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi investigates how the Aga Khan University Hospital in Karachi was designed to embody, in architecture, the Imam’s theological quest for harmony between the spiritual din (faith) and the material dunyā (world), within the context of a broader vision for Pakistan. Our Debate section, in turn, authored by Silke Kapp, is devoted to the ongoing rediscovery by English-language scholarship of Marxist architect and thinker Sérgio Ferro’s written oeuvre and its potential for redressing architectural history and theory tenets.1

4An introduction to the PhD dissertations of Saptarshi Sanyal, on architectural cultures and critique in late-colonial India and Ibstissem Rezgui, about European architects at work in Annaba, Algeria (1930-62)—and three book reviews—Kristina Jõekalda’s review of Alex Bremner’s Building Greater Britain, Maroš Krivý’s reading of Amy Thomas’s The City in the City, and Anna Ripatti’s assessment of Petra Brouwer, Martin Bressani, and Christopher Drew Armstrong’s edited volume Narrating the Globe—complete issue 24 of ABE Journal.

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Notes

1 Sergio Ferro’s work is better known in France—where he has lived, worked and published since 1972—even if not always fully understood. For a French-language recent reading of Ferro’s thinking, see Sandra Fiori, “Sérgio Ferro au prisme d’une histoire brésilienne, (re-)lire Dessin-Chantier,” Les Cahiers de la recherche architecturale urbaine et paysagère, no.2, 2018. URL : https://journals.openedition.org/craup/591.

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Ricardo Costa Agarez, Johan Lagae, Sarah Melsens et Tania Sengupta, « Editorial »ABE Journal [En ligne], 24 | 2024, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2024, consulté le 09 décembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/abe/16454 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13933

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Ricardo Costa Agarez

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Johan Lagae

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Sarah Melsens

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Tania Sengupta

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