Candalepas Associates | Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman | Jean Renaudie / Renée Gailhoustet | 6a Architects | Dominique Coulon & Associés | Nøysom Arkitekter | Reyner Banham
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We draw lines to make sense of things. We make a border; delineating inside and out, urban and rural, centre and in-between. This issue is about the matter that makes up the line, the bits that are made one-dimensional, inscribed indiscriminately in black ink and pushed out of sight and mind. In the keynote for this issue, we have chosen to explore our own rich and nebulous definition of periphery, pulling together words, images, and references that aim to evoke rather than explain.
From broad territories to suburban streets, the lines that make political delineations are violent. Andrea Gibbons looks at racial segregation in Los Angeles, where the ‘redlining’ policies that determined suburban development have had a severe and lasting impact that persists today. Just a short distance south, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman examine the Tijuana-San Diego border as a site where geopolitics become intensely local. They reassert the migrant as an individual, away from the language of caravans and the abstraction of aerial views. And, across the Atlantic, RESOLVE approaches the thick cultural knit woven by diaspora, following marginalised linguistic landscapes to produce a site of cultural production, built of banana boxes in Brixton Market.
Life happens in the margins: in the unseen edges that skirt and circle the centre. David Neustein has found that Candalepas Associates’ mosque in the Sydney suburb of Punchbowl harbours a sanctum, even amid rising racial tensions. Meriem Chabani and John Edom revisit Les Étoiles d’Ivry, a strange and intense series of ’70s developments that shoulder up against the Périphérique in Paris. Jonathan Meades questions how you might list ‘that which isn’t’, his preservationist plea a hark back to Subtopia and Ian Nairn’s long-favoured ire of the 1950s. In this issue, Gillian Darley revisits his scorching indictment of post-war urban planning practices, while Eleanor Beaumont writes a love letter to Croydon in opposition to this kind of untempered disdain, and Douglas Murphy considers 6a’s new MK Gallery a re-ignition of a lost social democratic dream.
In volume II of the book of books, we feature an interview with Elizabeth Grosz, along with features based on new books: Manon Mollard looks at life beyond the Périphérique following Xavier de Jarcy’s 2019 book Les Abandonnés; Tom Wilkinson assesses the typological investigation presented by Olivia Erlanger and Luis Ortega Govela in Garage, and Owen Hatherley wanders the borderlands of Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey in his review of Border by Kapka Kassabova.
This month’s Reputations is on Reyner Banham, whose technological modernisms have unfolded into a post-human condition in which remote or once-peripheral places become rigorously connected: such is the case in Chinese Taobao villages, now networked centres for e-commerce. In this issue’s Outrage, Lesley Lokko reflects on how student protests in South Africa have re-centered debate from the margins to the heart of power, and appraising the elder end of the populous, Catherine Slessor finds that while elderly people are often placed at a physical (and existential) edge, Dominique Coulon’s retirement home in Basel is a sheltered site of graceful withdrawal.
The full table of contents is available here.
