Emilio Distretti

This paper explores the role of the Libyan Coastal Highway across history: originally built by fascist Italy during colonisation, in the postcolonial era Libya demanded Italy commit to the construction of a new motorway as part of the reparation process for its crimes. Only in 2008 was an agreement reached. Through it, Italy used the promise to build a new road as a bargaining-chip to secure Qaddafi’s cooperation in containing migrant mobility across the Mediterranean. This paper explores the different ways in which the Libyan road has endured as a space and a tool of power by tracing historical and political continuities across time, from colonisation to demands for postcolonial reparations and migration governance. Drawing inspiration from the notion of “coloniality”, the paper investigates the colonial continuum expressed by the Italian/ Libyan reparation process, and seeks to posit alternative pathways towards the unresolved question of postcolonial justice around the Mediterranean.

Italian Colonialism, Coloniality, and the Future of Reparative Justice in the Mediterranean

The Life Cycle of the Libyan Coastal Highway

Mark Wasiuta (ed.), *The Archival Exhibition : A Decade of Research at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, 2006–2016*

Ines Weizman

in: Mark Wasiuta (ed.), *The Archival Exhibition : A Decade of Research at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, 2006–2016*, New York: Columbia University Press

Creative destruction, or the assembly of things

David Burns

Roads to Maralinga

Sam Jacoby

Drawing is an important means to analyse information and develop rigorous arguments both conceptually and visually. Going beyond the how-to drawing manual, this book provides an instrumental approach to drawing, especially computer-generated drawings; it outlines how drawings should be used to convey clear and analytical information in the process of design, as well as the communication and discussion of a project. In depth examples are provided how to communicate effectively. The final section demonstrates how to transform case-studies, directly connecting an analytical approach with the design process. 

Drawing Architecture and the Urban

Modern architecture’s relationship with mass media has often been framed as purely visual, dominated by the apparatus of photography and glossy magazines. Ines Weizman expands this view, turning our attention to the interplay between the visual and the aural in architecture’s representation. Through Heinz Emigholz’s films and Adolf Loos’s sensitivity to acoustics —heightened by his hearing loss— Weizman invites us to experience buildings as both seen and heard. In this expanded media framework, architecture’s materiality, like Michelangelo’s stone, is not a static object for documentation but a vessel to be activated, resonating with layers of political, cultural, and social histories.

Listening to Buildings

A study of the history of before-and-after images of catastrophes, bombed-out cities, and large-scale political transformations.

Catastrophes, bombed-out cities, large-scale political transformations: "Image complexes" of humanitarian and ecological upheaval document the world as a sequence of catastrophes. But who decides how events are presented, determines the resolution of our visual worlds, and controls the circulation or censorship of images?

Eyal and Ines Weizman trace the history of the before-and-after image from nineteenth-century photography to contemporary satellite images and discover a gap that not only conceals the devastating event: it is the human subject itself that is in danger of disappearing from the images. Does humanitarian work, the documentation and reconstruction of war crimes, in which people's fates and rights should be at the centre of attention, paradoxically enter a post-human phase? How can the gap between images become a site of critical counter-reading rather than a symbol of erasure?

In the context of their current research, Eyal and Ines Weizman discuss the history, present, and future of the paradigm of the before-and-after image in an exclusive conversation with Marie Glassl.

The Architecture of Disaster

Before & After 

Five people are passing through a gate leading to the souk of the Tangier kasbah on a winter’s day in 1935. To the viewer’s far left, a boy walks barefoot. In the middle, two Berber women draped in layers of cloth are wearing large straw hats. One carries a hefty clay vessel on her back; the other, closer to the photographer, shouldering a basket, gazes casually at the camera. Towards the center, a man in a cloak and turban carries an empty basket. These four people seem to be returning from the market. To the right, a woman in European clothes is the only figure who is walking in the opposite direction, with her back to us. The characters appear unrelated, each is in his or her own world. Their layered clothes suggest it’s winter. The short shadows tell us the time is around midday. In the gate’s vaults, straw bags are displayed for sale. Through the gate, one can see market stalls; in one of them, I detect the head of a mannequin. Then the grains get too coarse.

Against erasure

A woman in Tangiers

Covering the hundred year history of the Bauhaus, this book is framed by two material concepts: dust & data. While dust foregrounds new approaches to the material analysis of objects and ruins, data designates new approaches to managing the enormous amount of information accumulated about the subject over the years.

An extraordinary group of leading international scholars, architects, theorists, artists, and novelists unearth new details about the history of the school and reveal the perspectives of marginalized, dislocated, silenced, and dispersed voices that have gone unheard - until now. These include the voices of queer architects, of the (too) few women practitioners, of those in the global South who studied at the Bauhaus or were influenced by its ideas, and the perception of the school beyond the Iron Curtain of the Cold War.

The essays, conversations, and documents collected here cover a time span that starts with the inception of the Bauhaus school in 1919 in the immediate aftermath of World War I and extends through several stages of dislocation to its demise on the eve of World War II. This collection also engages with the school's multiple afterlives. It deals with the migration of teachers and students, the dissemination of its ideas into various cultural contexts, the state of the buildings that were left behind, and the circulation of objects produced by Bauhaus protagonists.

Altogether this book offers an unprecedentedly complex and unique conversation regarding Bauhaus history, underpinned by its ideological and cultural interpretations, and is an invaluable resource for scholars and practitioners alike.

Traces of the Bauhaus Across 100 Years

Dust & Data

Dubravka Sekulić

On Extra–legal Space in Belgrade

Glotzt Nicht so Romantisch!

Godofredo Enes Pereira

Militancy, Research, Architecture and Psychiatry

CERFI (Analysis Everywhere)

Mark Campbell

Connoisseurship & the Art Market

Bernard Berenson

Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence reflects on the relevance of the concept of dissidence for architects today. Although dissidence is primarily associated with the political and cultural practice of individuals in the eastern Bloc during the Cold War, contemporary aesthetic practices have in recent years developed a host of new methodologies and techniques for articulating their distance from and critique of dominant political and financial structures. This book maps out the possibility of dissidence in architecture in a variety of historical and geographical contexts. Rather than breaking away from the history of the political struggles of the Cold War the book shows how contemporary architectural gestures and techniques of dissent, as well as the ‘dilemmas’ associated with it, connect with a deeper and more complex history. This collection of essays from architectural practitioners and scholars demonstrates the multifaceted dimension of this subject and constructs a robust lexicon of concepts that will point to possible ways forward for politically and theoretically committed architects.

Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence

Alvaro Arancibia

Lucia Alonso

Space standards are a deliberately technocratic translation of housing experience, use, and demand into measurable minimum floor areas and dimensions by calculating standard furniture sizes, circulation, and activity zones in a dwelling. This paper discusses how space standards register regulatory cultures and affect housing design and perceptions of housing quality from a design research perspective. The definition and enforcement of standards depend on local design governance approaches. Housing standards are of particular importance to the protection of minimum subsidised housing supply in dualist rental systems with differentiated regulations, due to greater inequalities between private and subsidised housing sectors. 

This is characteristic of countries with neoliberalised housing access. Two archetypical cases are discussed here: England, whose privatisation of council housing is considered exemplary for Western neoliberal housing policy; and Chile, who is seen as the main Latin American neoliberal model. This comparison explores how neoliberal processes in housing relate to space standards, wider *laissez-faire* housing and social welfare histories, and design experimentation in subsidised housing. It further deals with the common issues of affordable housing in market-driven contexts, such as the peripheralisation of areas with less infrastructures and services, residualisation of social housing tenure, typological stigmatisation or preferences, homeownership prioritisation, and private-sector support through subsidies. 

The discussion of housing design and space standards connects problems of design governance to technical, legal, and socio-spatial discourses, through which responses to cultural, social, and economic contexts, as well as changing modes of living, can be analysed.

Typological experimentation in England and Chile

Space Standards and Housing Design

The coloniality of Italian fascist architecture

Equitable access to decent housing remains a major global challenge, particularly for lower-income populations reliant on subsidised, affordable homes. This is exacerbated by the continued commodification of housing, demographic change, and the increasing time many people now spend at home. Addressing these challenges requires, as this book argues, stronger state intervention, closer cooperation between housing regulators, providers, and occupants, and a more robust evidence base that links housing policy, supply, quality, and design, along with a shift towards more long-term social and environmental housing values.

This book examines how housing design governance and lived experience shape the quality of homes and the wellbeing of residents, analysing the political, economic, social, historical, and environmental drivers of design. Drawing on new and rich comparative data and evidence from England, Chile, China, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland, it explores how contextual standards, cultural norms, and regulatory practices influence everyday life and perceptions of subsidised housing.

Combining historical, technical, and social perspectives through a comparative international lens, this interdisciplinary design research offers a multidimensional understanding of housing quality. It provides insights for policymakers, housing providers, and designers, demonstrating how design research and lived experience can inform standards and policies to create more inclusive, adaptable, and sustainable homes and neighbourhoods, with implications for contemporary housing practice.

Housing Standardisation and Design Governance

An Unseen Archive of Nuclear Colonialism

Nuclear colonialism is a uniquely 20th-century form of imperialism. It destroyed countless lives and cultures, permanently displaced people and traditions, and launched an endless desire for the development and testing of weapons with ever-increasing destructive capabilities. Its most lasting consequences, however, persist in the DNA and lands of its Indigenous victims. In the decades since the first nuclear detonation in 1945, Indigenous peoples around the world have been disproportionately affected by the intergenerational trauma of the atomic blasts – their lands repeatedly colonised, irradiated and abandoned. As remediation and repatriation of nuclear landscapes increase, an important question emerges: is a land poisoned by atomic blasts still the land it once was?

Efforts to transfer contaminated land to its traditional owners ring hollow in the Australian desert, writes David Burns

Nuclear colonialism in Maralinga

After the First World War and under the British Mandate, Haifa grew from a small Ottoman port town into a regional metropolis and industrial center around a deep seaport. The city was part of an open space that extended from Cairo to Damascus through Beirut, in a region where Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon were part of the same fluid, interconnected space. During the Second World War, it became a border town. Under French Vichy, the border between Lebanon and Syria ran sixty kilometers to the north and hardened only after the creation of Israel in 1948 and the wars with Lebanon. Haifa's architectural modernism developed in relation to the city's geopolitical environment. No building better manifests Haifa's predicament than the modernist casino building, built in 1934, ostensibly for British officers in Haifa's Bat Galim seafront district.

Conversations about Colonial Modernism in Haifa

The Architectural Casino 

Charlotte Grace

This article explores the "solidarity pedagogy" methods used for researching (with) the revolutionary Autonomous Administration of North-Eastern Syria, also known as Rojava, and how this compares to my pedagogical commitments at the RCA

From Students to Comrades

This essay focuses on one night — 3 October 1943 — when the Arab and Jewish elite of Haifa, a Mediterranean port town then under the British Mandate, were gathered in the Bat Galim Casino, along with British officers and international businesspeople, to hear the legendary Joséphine Baker1 in a performance benefitting General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French fighting force. That night, eighty years before the attacks of 7 October and their genocidal aftermath, now seems just a heartbeat before the Nakba. Many of the people watching Joséphine Baker would later be expelled from the city they loved, possibly by others sitting next to them in that same casino. Many Palestinians driven out of Haifa found refuge in Gaza, Lebanon, and the region. Where are their descendants now?

Joséphine Baker in Haifa

The Palestinian seafront of the future

in: Ronit Porat, *Hunting In Time*, Sternthal Books, 2024, 60-69.

The 1930 killing of a Berlin clockmaker

Synchronised by murder 

Fieldwork for Future Ecologies

The Empty Well, the Trig Point, and the Sign

Jingru Cheng

This book proposes a new interdisciplinary understanding of urban design in China based on a study of the transformative effects of socio-spatial design and planning on communities and their governance. This is framed by an examination of the social projects, spaces, and realities that have shaped three contexts critical to the understanding of urban design problems in China: the histories of “collective forms” and “collective spaces”, such as that of the urban *danwei* (work-unit), which inform current community building and planning; socio-spatial changes in urban and rural development; and disparate practices of “spatialised governmentality”. These contexts and an attendant transformation from planning to design and from government to governance, define the current urban design challenges found in the dominant urban xiaoqu (small district) and shequ (community) development model. 

Examining the histories, transformations, and practices that have shaped socio-spatial epistemologies and experiences in China – including a specific sense of community and place that is rather based on a concrete “collective” than abstract “public” space and underpinned by socialised governance – this book brings together a diverse range of observations, thoughts, analyses, and projects by urban researchers and practitioners. Thereby discussing emerging interdisciplinary urban design practices in China, this book offers a valuable resource for all academics, practitioners, and stakeholders with an interest in socio-spatial design and development.

RCA School of Architecture Research

Research: ,

The Life Cycle of the Libyan Coastal Highway. Italian Colonialism, Coloniality, and the Future of Reparative Justice in the Mediterranean, Emilio Distretti

Roads to Maralinga, David Burns

A woman in Tangiers. Against erasure, Ines Weizman

The coloniality of Italian fascist architecture, Emilio Distretti

An Unseen Archive of Nuclear Colonialism, David Burns

Nuclear colonialism in Maralinga. Efforts to transfer contaminated land to its traditional owners ring hollow in the Australian desert, writes David Burns, David Burns

The Architectural Casino . Conversations about Colonial Modernism in Haifa, Ines Weizman

From Students to Comrades, Charlotte Grace

The Palestinian seafront of the future. Joséphine Baker in Haifa, Ines Weizman

The Empty Well, the Trig Point, and the Sign, David Burns

Research: Themes (7), Types (2)