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ABE Journal is dedicated to the study of architecture and urbanism for scholars of art, architecture and history. Focusing on colonial and postcolonial aspects of the wider built environment from the
19th century onwards, it also considers issues such as professional networking, the circulation of media, and the transmission of models, technologies and doctrines from and to Europe. Published by the research center InVisu (CNRS/INHA) in Paris, the journal is committed to encouraging a diversity of approaches and methodologies, including cross-cultural and transnational perspectives.

Latest issue
23 | 2024
Material Constraints

Contraintes matérielles

“Human beings swim in an ocean of materials.” With this sentence, anthropologist Tim Ingold announced his crusade against the abstract concept of “materiality” that had taken the academic world by storm. In his text Materials against Materiality, Ingold argues how the discrepancy between mind and matter has clouded thinking in social sciences and humanities, necessitating the concept of agency—that “magic mind-dust”—to set things into motion. However, if we think of the world only as matter, “bringing things to life is a matter not of adding a sprinkling of agency, but of restoring the generative fluxes of the world of materials in which they came into being and continue to subsist.” This thematic dossier aims to do exactly that: to “restore the generative fluxes of the world of materials” in which buildings came into being, focusing on the very real constraints these materials posed in their production, processing, and distribution.

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