UWA School of Design

The Politics of Architectural Pedagogy in Iran explores the evolution of architectural pedagogy during two significant socio-political upheavals in Iran: The White Revolution (1963) and the Islamic Revolution (1979). It examines how these transformative periods influenced the field, providing valuable insights into the intersection of architectural education and broader socio-political shifts in Iran.

By examining the critical role of education in achieving geopolitical objectives during the Cold War, this book explores architectural pedagogy as an agent for resistance and revolution. It highlights how architectural pedagogy not only reflects radical ideologies but also actively engages in socio-political transformation. The book uncovers how architectural pedagogy became one of the mechanisms to accomplish revolutionary goals. This is evident in initiatives like the "Pedagogical Revolution" during the White Revolution (1963), aimed at modernizing educational institutions, and the "Revolutionary Pedagogy" during the Islamic Revolution (1979), which sought to serve the masses and the religious revolutionary society. In this way, the book adds a new geopolitical perspective to the contemporary discourse of radical pedagogies.

This book explores the intricate connections between architectural pedagogy and politics through a transdisciplinary approach. It analyzes original multilingual documents, including political agendas, cultural agreements, curricula, teaching methods, student works, exhibitions, and conferences. It will be of interest to architectural historians and architecture students, particularly those interested in Global South development, modernism, architectural pedagogy, international relations, and Middle Eastern studies.

The architectural curriculum in Iran has been changed five times in the last five decades (1963–2017). In each period, efforts to change the content and structure of the curriculum were based on the architectural profession’s vision with regard to sociopolitical and economic issues, such as the agenda of development in the White Revolution and Islamizing the society after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The curriculum as a sociopolitical artifact can be defined as a systematic set of relations between people, objects, events, and circumstances that is changed and developed based on the sociopolitical agenda. This paper focuses on crucial moments in the transformation of architectural education between the two contemporary revolutions in Iran, the White Revolution and the Islamic Revolution. The story of the transformation of the curriculum began in 1963 when a new system of architectural education, Italian pedagogy, was brought to Iran and decolonized the curriculum from the previous p...

Proceeding from Manfredo Tafuri’s discussion of historical writing as a process of shifting stones, this paper perceives all revisionist architectural criticism as an act of mining, to unearth the implications of both the verbal and visual discourse founded on the modern concept of architecture as language. This mining is particularly evident in the surge of European to English translations published within post-modern architectural little magazines. For the purposes of this essay, I examine the case study 9H journal, produced between 1980 and 1995 by a voluntary editorial team of Master of Science students at the Bartlett School at University College, London (UCL). 9H was one of the first British little magazines to mine Eurocentric revisionist theory to form international relationships with theorists and practitioners. In 1983, 9H translated Otto Wagner’s nineteenth-century manifesto ‘Modern Architecture’. A comparison of Wagner’s original and 9H’s post-modern publication reveal no shifts in verbal language, yet significant transformations in visual language through the editorials selection of images. Through a historic framework constructed from the writings of Kenneth Frampton, Roland Barthes and Beatriz Colomina, identifying both the text and the rhetoric of the image as transmitting linguistic and cultural meaning, this paper seeks to address the following: to what extent does the interaction of language and images in architectural publication influence the reading of the text? What post-modern interests did this translation serve through the ways the 9H editorial transformed Wagner’s visual language? Finally, what is obscured from Wagner’s language through 9H’s visual transformation? This investigation proposes mining within architectural historiography as a critical method to navigate the discursive formations that emerged within the counter-culture of mainstream post-modernism, and in a current milieu where the image dominates, it encourages theorists and practitioners to understand the important connoted meanings embedded in photography and drawing.

Paper presented at GOLD: the 33rd annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ) 2016.

In light of shifting disciplinary structures, critical examination of the relationship between school-affiliated institutional magazines (or 'institutional artefacts'), and their representation of extraneous, third-party architectural production is of increasing importance to scholarship. This conference, entitled 'The Site of Discourse', focuses squarely on this relationship between the constructive, corporeal practising of architecture and its symbolic, incorporeal representation in the architectural magazine. The rise in production of institutional artefacts coincided with the onset of postmodernism in an attempt to reclaim pedagogy as the medium for architectural and urbanist experimentation. In the 1980s, which I define as a second-generation of post-modern architectural discourse, practitioners and theorists in London embarked on an empiricist mission in the revision and publication of Eurocentric theory from the Enlightenment to post-modernism. From this critical paradigm, this essay takes as its case study the UCL-produced architectural journal 9H, and considers it against a number of empirical concepts. Informed by Foucauldian concepts of 'institution' and 'discursive formation', this paper coins and puts to work the term 'institutional artefact' to answer the following complex questions at the interface of the theoretical and the material: Does 9H display a singular discourse or a discourse of debate? Is 9H serving the pedagogical aims of the institution or rather cultivating an external audience? In so exploring, this paper hopes to achieve two things: first, to demonstrate that the British empiricist mission of the 1980s represents an aim to create a cultural language for architecture in the face of commercial and pedagogical pressures; and second, to reveal the methodological implications of institutional discursive formations versus the presence of individual figures that arise from the study of an institutional artefact as a site of discourse.

Farrah, Sally. 2015. “On 9H: The relationship between institutions and discursive formations.” Paper presented at The Site of Discourse: Thinking Architecture Through Publication, Lisbon, Portugal, 30 September 2015. Publication forthcoming in 2017.

Kenneth Frampton migrated from London to the United States in 1965, and by the early-1980s his condemnation of American Populist architecture would reach its apogee as 'the reduction of architecture to pure scenography'. This notion of scenography remained a central category within Frampton's critical regionalist position of 1983, and tectonic position of 1990, and this investigation explores its full meaning. Within this paper, representations are considered quotations, and defined as the ideological sites of articulation and mediation between architectural practice and theory. Proceeding from this definition, Frampton's criticism of architecture as 'pure visuality', or architecture as pure representation, opens up a retrospective critique of his own use of representation to further clarify his position on the relation between practice and theory. These sites occur in the form of writing, building, model, and drawing, and I examine these in Frampton's formative critical language during his time as Technical Editor of Architectural Design (1962-1964), and as a part-time practising architect at Douglas Stephen and Partners (1960-1965). First, I reveal Frampton's initial exposure to scenography in 1960s London, demonstrating that, within this cultural context his AD represented a counter-position to the picturesque tendencies of Townscape evidenced in Architectural Review. Secondly, I examine project critiques by Frampton, demonstrating the similarity between his theoretical language and his editorial representations through the sites of photography and model. Finally, I conduct a reading of Frampton's constructed drawings for AD covers which reject the theoretical and visual language of the picturesque and the scenographic. These case studies illuminate general trends in Frampton's AD, and reveal that Frampton's editorship displays the first verbal and visual quotations of his later tectonic ideology, and that his aim to represent a critical history of modern architecture, as epitomised in Modern Architecture: A Critical History (1980), can be evidenced in his earliest written and visual output.

The Bauhaus school's utilisation of both the model medium and axonometric projection in the early-twentieth century perhaps best typifies the historical links between technology, rationalisation, and representational techniques. By the late twentieth century, however, the choice by the architect or theorist to utilise either medium has, in some cases, come to represent the exact opposite; an anti-technological ideological position. In light of this transition, this study explores the influence of axonometry as a technique of representation, and its influence on post-modern praxis in England and America. To illustrate, it locates the re-emergence of axonometry and isometry in 1960s Britain through two key cultural producers: Kenneth Frampton, and Peter Eisenman. Specifically, I will conduct a comparison of Frampton's use of axonometry in his co-edited volume with Douglas Stephen and Michael Carapetian entitled British Building: 1960-1964 (1965). This will be compared with Eisenman's thesis, entitled A Formal Basis of Modern Architecture, completed at Cambridge University in 1963, and supervised officially by Sir Leslie Martin, as well as unofficially by Colin Rowe. Eisenman employed isometry as the analytical method to examine canonical modern projects. By 1968 when designing House I, Eisenman would shift to wire-frame axonometry, which I demonstrate signifies a seminal development in his oeuvre from perceptual to conceptual representation. This paper hopes to address the following: what historical, social, and ideological meanings did the technology of axonometry acquire in the post-modern period? And through axonometry, how do both Frampton and Eisenman conduct their markedly different anti-technological critiques of modernism? By locating axonometry's first significant post-modern re-emergence in transatlantic culture, this paper provides a theoretical basis to examine contemporary revivals of axonometry in architectural and curatorial praxis.

Unique in its power to interrelate multiple planes with minimal distortion, the axonometric negotiates, as Alan Colquhoun notes, between the archaic and the modern. In this paper, we evidence this notion, as well as positing other spectra that the drawing type spans: from the strategic to the poetic, the primitive to the acutely detailed, from urban to conceptual space, from the bird's eye to the mind's eye. There are numerous trajectories possible in a reading of history through the lens of the axonometric, but the path herein collects instances from the medieval, via Massimo Scolari, to Le Corbusier, Kazimir Malevich, and Ivan Leonidov. Each drawer is situated in a vastly different context, but their divergence is key: they are bound by the drawing type, and its ability to transcend and translate is testament to its versatility as a drawn language. By studying different types of axonometrics and the motives for their employment, as well as their nature as operative, we uncover connections that are driven by warfare, politics, and theoretical shifts. We observe how qualities such as points of view, orientation, and promiscuity of the rules of projection can be inextricably bound to the author's conceptual and critical locale. We explore Le Corbusier's oeuvre, uncovering how a launch into the aerial vantage through a roof-centric axonometric view may have been instrumental to the development of his "five points" of architecture. We pursue a connection that sees the axonometric extend from figural to cognitive space in the hands of Leonidov. Where others identify the post-modern era as the critical locus for the axonometric, these explorations indicate an earlier genesis. Lastly, we suggest that inheritances from Le Corbusier and Leonidov can be traced into the last pre-digital moment of architectural drawing in the 1970s and 80s.

Building on a theoretical framework established previously, this paper examines key drawings and projects from the infamous Manhattan series, produced by the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), which went on to form the Appendix of Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York (1978). We situate their work in relation to that of two key proponents of the paraline medium: Ivan Leonidov; and Oswald M. Ungers. While the theoretical inheritances from both of these figures to OMA are well-documented, we are interested in examining the drawn lineage. To examine the Manhattan drawings is to walk through a set of drawing techniques that become increasingly estranged from these forefathers. From “The City of the Captive Globe” (1972) – an Ungers-homage in plan-oblique – to “New Welfare Island” (1975-76), a trimetric which employs Leonidovian destabilisation, the practice make forays into novel drawing construction. The “Welfare Palace Hotel” (1976-77) combines techniques resonant with Leonidov, but utterly distinct, and becomes irreverent and celebratory in a way that serves as joyful complement to the text of Delirious New York itself. While many authors have noted Leonidov’s formal and theoretical influence on Koolhaas and OMA - including Robert Maxwell (1981); Robert Gargiani (2006); Francesco Marullo (2013); and Pier Vittorio Aureli (2015) - there is a paucity of critique regarding both Leonidov’s and OMA’s unique archaic and modern methods. If the plan-oblique can be understood as an elementary form of paraline drawing, then the laborious reconstruction of the plan in trimetry and obliques, introduce both a conventional and conceptual complexity. Koolhaas’ Delirious New York, and the lesser-known writings of Elia Zenghelis, will be used as lenses in our reading of OMA drawings. Architectural and urban positions emerge from the hierarchical relationships exposed in the trimetric and elevation-oblique techniques themselves, such as the privileging of surface over tectonics; the rejection of abstraction; analogies of post- mortem and anthropomorphism; the cropping of the frame; and the role of cuteness. This paper contributes to a growing body of recent scholarship regarding the architectural drawing as mental space.

Kenneth Frampton migrated from London to the United States in 1965, and by the early1980s his condemnation of American Populist architecture would reach its apogee as ‘the reduction of architecture to pure scenography’. This notion of scenography remained a central category within Frampton’s critical regionalist position of 1983, and tectonic position of 1990, and this investigation explores its full meaning. Within this paper, representations are considered quotations, and defined as the ideological sites of articulation and mediation between architectural practice and theory. Proceeding from this definition, Frampton’s criticism of architecture as ‘pure visuality’, or architecture as pure representation, opens up a retrospective critique of his own use of representation to further clarify his position on the relation between practice and theory. These sites occur in the form of writing, building, model, and drawing, and I examine these in Frampton’s formative critical language dur...

The Bauhaus school’s utilisation of both the model medium and axonometric projection in the early-twentieth century perhaps best typifies the historical links between technology, rationalisation, and representational techniques. By the late twentieth century, however, the choice by the architect or theorist to utilise either medium has, in some cases, come to represent the exact opposite; an anti-technological ideological position. In light of this transition, this study explores the influence of axonometry as a technique of representation, and its influence on post-modern praxis in England and America. To illustrate, it locates the re-emergence of axonometry and isometry in 1960s Britain through two key cultural producers: Kenneth Frampton, and Peter Eisenman. Specifically, I will conduct a comparison of Frampton’s use of axonometry in his co-edited volume with Douglas Stephen and Michael Carapetian entitled British Building: 1960-1964 (1965). This will be compared with Eisenman’s ...

Between 1528 and 1537 Garofalo produced ten canvases for the recently founded convent of Poor Clares at San Bernardino in Ferrara. Although the cycle is unrivalled as a group of works by a single artist for a female convent throughout the Renaissance, it has so far attracted little attention. This article deals with early reports on the paintings, the early history of the convent and finally focuses on one canvas for the nuns’ choir: a large – almost two by three metres - Crucifixion, which Garofalo dated in March 1533. It will be argued here that the semi-circular shaped Crucifixion would have hung high on the nuns’ side of the division wall, above a grille. Through this window the nuns would have been able to see the Elevation of the host in the outer church, whereby the vision of the corporeal (Christ’s body) would blend with the nuns’ spiritual devotions. Garofalo’s painting would therefore have served as an important devotional tool for the nuns.

In the Renaissance, love was usually defined in binary oppositions: love of the spirit versus love of the body, the celestial versus earthly Venus and the heavenly Eros versus his terrestrial counterpart. In the early 1500s, however, patrons in Mantua and Ferrara ordered pictorial decorations that reflected a more refined thinking about love. Artists and humanists at the courts of Mantua and Ferrara did not renounce the sensual in favour of the rational, but instead showed concord between the two Venuses and between Eros and Anteros. Local treatises on love did not try to remove sexuality from love nor follow the usual hierarchy of the senses but stressed the ennobling force of love, sensual or spiritual. This paper will discuss the ‘culture of love’ at the courts of Mantua and Ferrara and compare the paintings for Isabella d’Este’s studiolo to Garofalo’s little known decorations at Palazzo Costabili in Ferrara where all the senses are activated to move the audience to feelings of love.