“Human beings swim in an ocean of materials.” With this sentence, anthropologist Tim Ingold announced his crusade against the abstract concept of “materiality” that had taken the academic world by storm. In his text Materials against Materiality, Ingold argues how the discrepancy between mind and matter has clouded thinking in social sciences and humanities, necessitating the concept of agency—that “magic mind-dust”—to set things into motion. However, if we think of the world only as matter, “bringing things to life is a matter not of adding a sprinkling of agency, but of restoring the generative fluxes of the world of materials in which they came into being and continue to subsist.” This thematic dossier aims to do exactly that: to “restore the generative fluxes of the world of materials” in which buildings came into being, focusing on the very real constraints these materials posed in their production, processing, and distribution.

One of the endeavours of ABE Journal-Architecture Beyond Europe has been to unravel the relations between colonial pasts, twentieth-century building cultures, and the “global” present, not only in terms of the materiality of built environments but also epistemically. One dimension of the latter entails interrogating the particular relationships and interactions between groups and individuals connected by colonial or postwar developmental constellations. Ten years after the thematic dossier Global Experts “off radar” in issue 4 of ABE Journal, it is clear that historiographical shifts are opening up new avenues to look at some of the same phenomena. The current and forthcoming issue of ABE Journal, therefore, open with a dossier investigating Architecture in the Foreign Aid-Funded Knowledge Economy. These dossiers engage explicitly with questions of the postcolonial / decolonial by critically examining but also going “beyond” the sole figure of the (white) expert and engaging more intensely with the views and contributions of those who have for too long been thought of as being located at the “receiving” end of knowledge exchange.

In the interest of capturing a broad range of topics across a wide geographical area―and which we cannot always do sufficient justice to through journal issues formed mainly around specific themes―we are publishing ABE 19 as an all-Varia or “open” issue. This is a natural extension of the open-access principle of the ABE Journal as such. Read more...