Building Word Image

This group aims to explore how the domains of the verbal and the visual shape, filter, and direct our relationship with the built environment. Building on the group’s work in previous years (http://doi.org/10.5334/ah.220), we are interested in further investigating the methodologies through which we can open up the field of architectural historiography to word-image studies. This entails expanding the prism of historical evidence that informs architectural research, especially towards neglected sources and archives. It also involves reconfiguring how we observe, read, and relate these sources—such as forms of media, texts, and images—to one another and to the built environment. Lastly, this approach prompts architecture to redefine its thresholds, making space for a broader spectrum of spatial elements, including objects, processes and agents that experience, inhabit, and produce it.

Our most recent initiative, ‘Media and Objects of the Home,’ presented an original global panorama of domesticity, whereby the mediatisation of seemingly meaningless everyday objects became the primary lens through which we could problematise and re-categorise domestic modernities. By examining how objects—from doorbells featured in popular Western sitcoms to early Chinese advertisements for refrigerators—are represented and mediatised, we explored how the everyday is articulated across diverse spatial, virtual, and historical contexts. We asked how objects can speak of this realm, considering the perspectives of their own “vital matter,” of their users, and the spaces in which they are activated.

Furthermore, this group merges historical, discursive and media analysis with the examination of archival sources belonging to both canonical and non-canonical collections, from recipe books to commercial catalogues, and from nationally sponsored magazines material to advertising. Consequently, the group’s inherently interdisciplinary scope reflects a critical stance towards conventional disciplinary boundaries, aiming to question architectural history’s methodological and epistemological frameworks.

Our interests include:

We invite researchers working on any periodicity to get in touch with us and join the group in exploring how original word-image studies can redefine how we write architectural histories.