Is the village still relevant as a model in times of general urbanisation? The village has remained underexposed in the historiography of architecture and urbanism. This is also true of the contemporary architecture debate, which is still dominated by the avant-garde, urbanity, institutional types of building and the reuse of the city. Recently, however, more attention has been paid to the village, partly due to the demand for spatial densification, climate challenges and biodiversity. There is a need for a qualitative approach to village densification in the Netherlands and Belgium, but also a growing interest in preserving and restoring the identity of villages and landscapes.
OASE 117 contributes to the debate on the architecture and urbanism of villages, examining them not as the antithesis of modernity, but as its complex product. Eight essays analyse images, inventories, idealisations and transformations of villages within the changing political-social contexts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Geert Bekaert Prize for Architecture Criticism
Book
Reviews
From Words
to Buildings
In this issue of OASE, the history of the
architectural book review is outlined through case studies. This Call is written by Christophe Van Gerrewey and Hans Teerds. The deadline is 20 December 2023.
What
does the author’s ‘owning’ of a project mean? And does this sense of
ownership still prevail in contemporary architecture culture? Other more
open forms of cooperation and co-creation are emerging alongside the
concept of individual singular authorship.
Through a
series of concrete projects, the contributions in this issue explore the
field of tension between architectural aesthetics and issues of energy,
technology and materiality. Ecological practices in architecture must
not only be effective in providing solutions, but inevitably raise
questions of beauty, affection and perception as well.
Call for Abstracts OASE #115 about “Interferences: Migrating Practices in Europe”, written by Justin Agyin, Kornelia Dimitrova,
Christoph Grafe and Bernard Colenbrander. Deadline is June 19, 2022. Read the full text of the OASE #115 Call for Abstracts in the PDF.