To go back to travelling theory, Said’s thesis that looked at literary theory that travelled through time and Europe, and made a leap to the United States, might be seen now as concerned with structures of hegemony: political, institutional, ideological, that drive culture. He doesn’t look at the rise of the periphery as a source of sub fusc power relations whereby ground up, not top down, empowers the un-empowered. This was a source of different theory, which has also travelled, and one that we often find in the articles submitted to On Site review , itself being a journal of a periphery, albeit within first world culture. In Rafael Gómez-Moriana’s piece in this issue about touristic architecture in Barcelona we see a penultimate version of contemporary architecture entirely dedicated to spectacle, celebrity and brand. If we look at the exhibition Reconceptualising Urban Housing at the 2023 Venice Architectural Biennale in our last issue, 45: houses and housing , we find an array of contemporary architecture dedicated to building community and environmental integration of space and materials. And in issue 44:play , Ruth Oldham and Émilie Queney have a long conversation about drawings and projects that measure the play in architectural systems, the play between parts that don’t quite fit. These, and many many other kinds of architecture in many countries often war-torn or recovering from disaster of some type, borrow from each other: theory is travelling laterally around the margins of powerful cultures that cannot see beyond their own increasingly polarised preoccupations. Theory travels rhizomatically, rather than by declaration. £
Edward W Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic . London: Faber and Faber, 1984. My copy, full of bookmarks and scraps of paper, bought in Barcelona in 1989 at Herder Books; its pre-EU price 1.880. In it, Chapter 10, is his essay ‘Travelling Theory’, first published in Raritan: A Quarterly Review , (1982) 1: 3, 41-67.
STEPHANIE WHITE is the editor of On Site review . In the spirit of indisciplinarity tried to aerate the narrow study of architectural theory through a number of other fields: Nouvelle histoire in France, the reflexive turn in ethnography from Santa Cruz, cultural geography whose theoreticians seemed to concentrate at UBC in the 1990s, and postmodern and postcolonial literary theory. It opened up a multiplicity of ways to position architecture in complex global systems.
55 on site review 46 :: travel
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