In Southeast Asia, a space characterized by intense regional and global traffic networks since the sixteenth century, the architectural landscape is often seen as a palimpsest of styles. The hybrid and syncretic nature of Southeast Asian architectural forms is seen as the result of the successive waves of contacts that marked the history of this part of the world called by some the “Asian Mediterranean” (F. Gipoloux). In this genealogy of architectural types, the colonial moment has been often considered a rupture that introduced radically new forms in vernacular architecture. Following this logic, the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century are considered as moments of further intensification of this architectural acculturation. The adoption of the international style in the megacities of the "Asian tigers," nerve centers of the global economy, is symbolic of an urban development superficially tuned to the "global" rather than the local.
By equating the evolution of architectural forms in Southeast Asia to a transfer, mainly from West to East, this approach evades the complexity of the formation of the architectural landscape of Southeast Asia. This issue of ABEproposes to focus on the development of "syncretic" architectures of Southeast Asia by precisely tracing the circulation of techniques and architectural forms through a contextual approach. Local, regional, global have not followed each other sequentially - such a model presupposes the existence of a local, "original," culture. Instead, these three levels of traffic have coexisted in the past. Far from simple sedimentary layers laid down over time, the production of Southeast Asian architecture has been multiscalar, rhizomic and a longue durée phenomenon. For this reason, the concept of "returns" is a particularly useful one for analyzing both "colonial" and "traditional" motifs that appear in contemporary architecture.
When rethinking the local and the global in Southeast Asian architecture, we must move beyond the binary oppositions between the vernacular and the foreign, the colonial and the post-colonial, and the modern and the traditional, while still exploring how actors used such categories dynamically. Only in this way can we explain the coexistence of such seemingly contradictory categories.

Dans le sillage de la révolution industrielle à la fin du XVIII^e siècle et des bouleversements induits par la circulation accélérée des biens et des hommes qui en résultent, les villes d'Europe et des empires coloniaux connaissent un profond renouvellement urbain. Destructions et patrimonialisation vont de pair. Ces transformations urbaines s'accompagnent donc d'un important mouvement pour l'étude, la documentation et la protection d'un patrimoine menacé par cette modernisation à marche forcée. Un nouveau rapport à la tradition émerge, donnant naissance à de véritables identités culturelles.

Dans ce numéro thématique d’ABE Journal, les différentes contributions explorent la question de la « fabrique de la tradition » dans le monde post-colonial du point de vue de l'architecture et de son décor. Situés dans les limites dans l'ancien monde musulman, les cas étudiés ici, de l'Algérie coloniale à l'Asie centrale tardo-soviétique, semblent tous révéler la même tension à l'œuvre présidant à la naissance à des styles « néo-islamiques », devenus depuis de puissants marqueurs identitaires.

“On Margins: Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration,” builds on the following two premises: that the dynamic of a situated and re-situated perspective is foundational to feminist histories of architecture, and that feminist historiographical approaches destabilize presumptions of fixity that have propelled the writing of architectural histories. Through histories of architectures that emerged from individual or collective acts and experiences of migration, the texts in this collection investigate migration and confinement as drivers for modern architecture and its histories, focusing on works by professionally qualified women architects as well as uncredited makers of the built environment. These architectures of migration bring into view margins—whether architectural, structural, cultural, (geo)political, environmental, or economic. This themed section, as one intervention in the broader “Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration” collection sited on three open-access platforms—namely the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Aggregate as well as ABE—posits expanded historiographies that emerge from intersections of architecture, migration, and margins. These offer possibilities to restore absences and silences in the historical record and open onto new theorizations and perspectives situated around the world.