11 | 2017
Paradoxical Southeast Asia
In Southeast Asia, a space characterized by intense regional and global traffic networks since the sixteenth century, the architectural landscape is often seen as a palimpsest of styles. The hybrid and syncretic nature of Southeast Asian architectural forms is seen as the result of the successive waves of contacts that marked the history of this part of the world called by some the “Asian Mediterranean” (F. Gipoloux). In this genealogy of architectural types, the colonial moment has been often considered a rupture that introduced radically new forms in vernacular architecture. Following this logic, the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century are considered as moments of further intensification of this architectural acculturation. The adoption of the international style in the megacities of the "Asian tigers," nerve centers of the global economy, is symbolic of an urban development superficially tuned to the "global" rather than the local.
By equating the evolution of architectural forms in Southeast Asia to a transfer, mainly from West to East, this approach evades the complexity of the formation of the architectural landscape of Southeast Asia. This issue of ABEproposes to focus on the development of "syncretic" architectures of Southeast Asia by precisely tracing the circulation of techniques and architectural forms through a contextual approach. Local, regional, global have not followed each other sequentially - such a model presupposes the existence of a local, "original," culture. Instead, these three levels of traffic have coexisted in the past. Far from simple sedimentary layers laid down over time, the production of Southeast Asian architecture has been multiscalar, rhizomic and a longue durée phenomenon. For this reason, the concept of "returns" is a particularly useful one for analyzing both "colonial" and "traditional" motifs that appear in contemporary architecture.
When rethinking the local and the global in Southeast Asian architecture, we must move beyond the binary oppositions between the vernacular and the foreign, the colonial and the post-colonial, and the modern and the traditional, while still exploring how actors used such categories dynamically. Only in this way can we explain the coexistence of such seemingly contradictory categories.
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Dossier : Paradoxical Southeast Asia
Sous la direction de Caroline Herbelin-
Editorial: Paradoxical Southeast Asia [Texte intégral]Éditorial: au-delà des paradoxes de l'Asie du Sud-Est [Texte intégral | traduction | fr]
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Colonial-Vernacular Houses of Java, Malaya, and Singapore in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries [Texte intégral]Architectural Translations in the Rumah Limas, Compound House, and Indische Woonhuis
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Locating the Domestic in Vann Molyvann’s National Sports Complex [Texte intégral]
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Varia
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The Ottoman-Turkish House According to Architect Sedad Hakkı Eldem [Texte intégral]A Refined Domestic Culture Suspended Between Europe and Asia
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Débat
DebateSous la direction de Mark Crinson-
What is Europe? [Texte intégral]
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The Buddha’s Europe (or Should It Be Europe’s Buddha?) [Texte intégral]How “Europe” was Transformed through the Study of Buddhist Architecture
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Architecture, Migration, and Spaces of Exception in Europe [Texte intégral]
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Europe: Post-coffeehouse, post-museum, into the unknown [Texte intégral]
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Provincializing colonial architecture [Texte intégral]Provincialiser l’architecture coloniale [Texte intégral | traduction | fr]
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Europe, Le Corbusier and the Balkans [Texte intégral]
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Documents/Sources
Documents/Sources-
Penser la restauration des monuments historiques au Maroc dans les années 1920-1940 [Texte intégral]L’approche pionnière et humble de Boris Maslow
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Positions de thèses
Dissertation abstracts-
The Itinerant Red Bauhaus, or the Third Emigration [Texte intégral]PhD Thesis in Architectural History and Theory, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, under the supervision of Professors Reinhold Martin, Barry Bergdoll, and Jean-Louis Cohen, Columbia University, New York, NY, 2016
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Recensions
Reviews-
[trans. from Hebrew by Orit Gat, first published by Babel, Tel Aviv, 2005], London: Pluto Press, 2015
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Haim Yacobi, Israel and Africa: A Genealogy of Moral Geography [Texte intégral]Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge 2016 (Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Geography, 1)
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Louis P. Nelson, Architecture and Empire in Jamaica [Texte intégral]New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016
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Peter Scriver and Amit Srivastava, India [Texte intégral]London, Reaktion Books, 2016 (Modern Architectures in History)
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Paris, Éditions B2, 2016 (Territoires)
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