Dr Marko Jobst

This introduction foregrounds islands in terms of constructed space and sets the ground for a mutually beneficial cross-disciplinary exchange between island studies and architecture. As shown by this collection of essays, islands and insularity are a keen and indeed urgent topic of concern for many architectural thinkers and practitioners today, both as actual objects of inquiry and as metaphors. In focusing on the former, this volume offers a global range of studies that productively illustrate the scope and diversity characterising current architectural research. The opening premise of the volume, which gave it its title, is philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s notion of ‘instituting worlds’ as discussed in his early essay ‘Desert Islands’. The seventeen chapters in the book, summarised in the introduction, each shed a light on this premise, and expand it to stress the importance of architectural thinking when approaching contemporary challenges facing islands across the world.

This chapter looks at Great War Island, a river island located in Belgrade, Serbia. The island’s name comes from its role as the historical site from which to stage attacks on the city, yet the warfare the island represents in popular imagination is ongoing: over ecological preservation, capital investment in the city, and as a potential site for sourcing fresh water. Rather than pursue the seeming opposition between ecology and capital, the chapter investigates the island through the notions of fiction (inherent in Gilles Deleuze’s ‘Desert Islands’) and ‘fictioning’ (as developed by David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan) to ask what it might mean to speak of a queer institution of second origins of the world – and what role architecture assumes in the institution of worlds as well as in their un-institution.

This book addresses the London Underground in the context of architectural histories and theories.

Featuring contributions from a range of significant voices in the field, this volume renews the conversation around what it means to speak of the 'queer' in the context of architecture, and offers a fresh take on the methodological and ...

The contributors offer a variety of approaches to the challenges presented in discussing the relation between affect and architecture, and how this is contextualised in the broader field of affect studies.

This text offers a writerly experiment aimed at developing a possible method of critical speculative fiction. The subject is an imaginary island modelled on the Cycladic island of Amorgos, Greece, which is depicted here as an all-encompass-ing design project driven by technologically advanced commercial machinations. The resulting fragments of speculative fiction blur the distinction between manmade and natural, architecture and landscape, commerce and myth. In doing so, the text offers a mode of writing heavy on mediated images populated by speculative subjectivities, while avoiding presenting an overtly critical stance. As such, it casts itself as a writerly equivalent of certain traditions in speculative architectural drawing.

Islands have a long history of appealing to the architectural imagination and have served as sites for architectural expressions of cultural specificity, cultural conquest, and cultural hybridisation over millennia. From offshore financial centres to immigrant detention camps, tourist havens to military bases, the architectures of islands concretise the forces at play in our contemporary, crisis-ridden societies. Collecting writings by a wide range of established scholars together with exciting new voices in architecture and affiliated disciplines, this book shows the pertinence islands hold for critical spatial thinking and practice today. Covering war and colonialism, detention and tourism, the topics raised in this book range from issues of urban development to close readings of buildings – whether ruined, designed, projected, preserved, or absent. Combing case studies, critical historiography and pieces of experimental writing, the chapters disclose the variety of ways in which architecture can be used as a lens for analysing, disclosing and untangling island specificity. This volume offers a very timely, vibrant, and methodologically varied approach to the subject of architecture and islands. Its global reach, innovative outlook, and rich material will be of interest to scholars and students in architecture, landscape architecture, geography, and urban design and planning, alongside arts and literary studies.