Jadaliyya (J): What made you start the journal Architecture Beyond Europe, and who are the scholars involved in its editorial work?

Mercedes Volait (MV): Several related concerns prompted the launch of the journal in 2012. One is that modern architecture outside the West features poorly in the literature devoted to architectural history, and when it does surface, it is principally for the conspicuous global starchitecture of the last decades or for colonial icons, as if nothing else worth study had been built worldwide during the nineteenth and twentieth century. Another problem is the national or civilizational frames commonly used to analyze modernity. It is assumed that modernity is intrinsically Western, and reached non-Western settings through imperialism.

One lesson I gained from studying the rise of the architectural profession in modern Egypt for my PhD (1993) is that other factors, such as autochthonous aspirations to change and innovation, also paved the way to new architecture. It is time to reverse the lens and focus on the local production of modernity, rather than on its diffusion from the West. That is not to say that “indigenous modernities” grew in isolation: many Egyptian architects were educated in Europe, the US, or the Soviet Union and kept links with their places of training. They joined regional or international professional networks, were exposed to Turkish or Brazilian modernism, and eventually worked out of Egypt or in partnership with non-Egyptian associates. The challenge is to apprehend the diverse, multi-directional, transnational dynamics and conditions that made architecture modern anywhere, and the variety of connections.

One way to achieve this is to provide a specialized forum promoting scholarly exchange and collaborative research. The architectural historians (all based in Europe) involved in the editorial and advisory boards of the journal are all engaged in transnational studies, whether their interest lies in the exile, travel, and migration of architects, the internationalization of building culture, the imperial expansion, postcolonial nation-building processes, the role of international organizations, the architecture of diplomacy, or the intercontinental flux of ideas and concepts. There is still much to excavate on such topics.

J: What particular topics, issues, and areas does the journal address?

MV: Content-wise, the primary interest of the journal is to encourage a historical approach to the interconnected nature of architectural production and practice, broadly understood, through the study of phenomena and situations that cut across national or cultural lines. The core of the journal is a guest-edited section including three to five articles on a given topic, but ABE also welcomes stand-alone articles. Topics addressed so far range from the exportation of Scottish cast iron to Argentina in the nineteenth century to an Indian journal advocating Western modernism on the eve of independence, or the convoluted routes of a hotel design from Montenegro to Iraq during the Cold War.

The emphasis on history explains why the journal has a permanent rubric, entitled “Documents/Sources,” which is specifically devoted to presenting primary material relevant to the journal’s fields of interest, in an effort to point out unknown sources or ways of reading them. Other regular rubrics are “Dissertation Abstracts” and “Book Reviews,” in order to keep pace with new research and increase the circulation of knowledge among the scholarly community concerned.

An important goal of the journal is to complexify our understanding of the forces (including power) that shape architecture and to foment debate among a plurality of academic perspectives. Hence the Debate section, currently guest-edited by Mark Crinson of the University of Manchester, but also the multilingual policy defended by the journal, in order to offer visibility to European research and in return to expose it to other scholarly traditions. Languages of publication are currently English, French, or Italian, but we do hope to be able to include others in the future, for example Spanish or German. In any case, abstracts and keywords are all made available in five languages (French, English, German, Italian, and Spanish).

The concern for outreach led us to publish the journal, with immediate full-text access to its content, on Revues.org, the journals’ platform of OpenEdition (a comprehensive digital publishing infrastructure whose objective is to promote research in the humanities and social sciences) that receives an average of 2.8 million visits per month. Revues.org is supported by prestigious French research organizations and has a critical mass ensuring long-term sustainability. The journal was accepted by Revues.org after an international peer-review process.