Towards a Critique of Architecture's Contemporaneity

Pursuing historical analogies between nineteenth-century theories and the current practices captivated by digital reproducibility, this book offers a critical take on architecture's contemporaneity through four essays: tectonics, materiality, cladding, and labor.

Gevork Hartoonian is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Canberra, Australia, and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He has taught in American universities, including Pratt Institute and Columbia University, NYC. He has been a visiting professor of architectural history at Tongji University, Shanghai, in 2013 and 2016. During these visits, he also delivered lectures at the South East University, Nanjing, and the China Academy of Arts, Hangzhou. Hartoonian is most recently the author of Reading Kenneth Frampton: A Commentary on Modern Architecture 1980 (2022) and Time, History and Architecture: Essays on Critical Historiography (2018). His previous publications include, among others, Global Perspectives on Critical Architecture (2015), The Mental Life of the Architectural Historian (2013), and Architecture and Spectacle: A Critique (2012). The Korean and Thai editions of his Ontology of Construction (1994) were published in 2010 and 2017. Hartoonian is currently editing a book entitled The Visibility of Modernization in Architecture: A Debate (Routledge, forthcoming).

0. Introduction 1. On Tectonics 2. On Materiality 3.On Cladding 4.On Labour 5 Afterword