SKRDC · Architecture as a Cross-Cultural Exchange: The Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition, 1965-2017
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2018-09-01 → 2021-01-29
- EU contribution
- €177,599
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Architecture as a Cross-Cultural Exchange:The Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition, 1965-2017
This Marie Sklodowska-Curie postdoctoral project engages with the intense processes of global interconnectedness that characterise the post-WWII era and tries to understand its effects on historiography and architecture culture at large. It sets out to develop a new methodology for writing the history of architecture post-WWII that can reflect much more accurately than existing histories the intricacy of globalisation and its effect on the built environment. The Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition (1965-present), a long-running international ideas competition from Japan, serves as the case study, showing how architectural ideas are not simply exported, imported, or translated but also move between different cultural contexts through a complex process of transculturation. The project relies on the concept of “contact zones” that was first suggested by literature scholar Mary Louise Pratt as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (Pratt, 1991). A history organised around “architectural contact zones” (competitions, exhibitions, congresses, seminars, biennales, summer schools, emergency aid programmes) advances a fundamental revision of canonical and increasingly discredited narratives of architectural history founded on a genealogy of heroic individual designers and supported by Eurocentric and North American examples. Organising history around intense meetings between architects from different cultural backgrounds leads to an increased acknowledgement of architecture as a cross-cultural, multi-authored endeavour that includes contributions by those otherwise marginalised by dominant narratives. In a society that is increasingly characterised by the exchange between cultures and actors, the writing of this different form of history is of paramount importance.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
To open up new lines of inquiry for the writing of architecture history currently caught up in ‘static’ chronological periods, geographic preferences, heroic figures, aesthetic styles, and fixed gender categories, it is necessary to introduce an entirely new analytical research methodology to the field of architecture. This project investigates the possibilities of such alternative approach by organizing history around complex cross-cultural exchanges, or “contact zones”, between different architecture cultures. To elucidate the potentials of such social spaces ‘where different cultures meet and inform each other’, I focus on an unprecedented example in architecture culture where “East” and “West” meet: The Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition (SKRDC). SKRDC is an international housing idea competition organized by the Japanese architecture magazine Shinkenchiku since 1965. Through not only studying the competition briefs of the past 52 years, the characteristics of the winning entries and multiple honourable mentions and the judges’ final remarks, but also the difference in nuance between the Japanese and English debates resulting from the actual design proposals as well as the wider ‘aftereffects’ disseminating into both Japanese as well as English literature, I trace the reciprocal transfer of architectural knowledge and how that affected larger local and international architectural debates. While the SKRDC here serves as a qualitative case study to develop and test my analytical research method, the larger aim of this study is to construct a new historical narrative. By applying the analytical model to different architectural contact zones around the globe, I foresee to contribute to the rewriting of the history of modern architecture into a more inclusive and unbiased “cross history”, which is non-static and interdisciplinary in character and includes hitherto underrepresented aspects such gender dimensions.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- EIDGENOESSISCHE TECHNISCHE HOCHSCHULE ZUERICH · ZuerichCoordinatorSwitzerland
- TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITEIT DELFT · DelftNetherlands
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union