Irina Davidovici


Last Name

Davidovici

First Name

Irina

ORCID

0000-0001-7260-7133

Organisational unit

08617 - gta Archiv

Search Results

Publications 1 - 10 of 66
  • Grenzen ausloten: Architektur in den 1990er-Jahren
    Item type: Journal Article
    Davidovici, Irina (2017)
    ARCH+
  • A Genealogy of Generic Plans
    Item type: Book Chapter
    Davidovici, Irina (2025)
    Five Good Swiss Plans
  • The Autonomy of Theory: Tendenzen - Neuere Architektur im Tessin, ETH Zurich, 1975
    Item type: Book Chapter
    Davidovici, Irina (2021)
    Architecture Thinking Across Boundaries
    The exhibition Tendenzen: Neuere Architektur im Tessin, curated by Martin Steinmann with Thomas Boga, opened at Eidgenossische Technologische Hochschule in Zurich in November 1975. An open challenge to the orthodoxy of modernism that dominated both in Ticino and at ETH Zurich, this exhibition first brought the Ticinese built production of the 1960s and early 70s to a new audience and caused, through its intellectual outreach, a shift in the self-understanding and historiography of subsequent Swiss architecture. Steinmann’s catalogue essay “Reality as History: Notes for a Discussion of Realism in Architecture” identified beneath the formal heterogeneity of this oeuvre a reservoir of combined modernist and vernacular references, which could be appropriated through the deliberate articulation of conceptual positions. Unlike a conventional architectural survey, Tendenzen subsumed regional characteristics under theoretical concerns, illustrating a methodological approach transferable north of the Alps – and potentially further afield. Until the mid-1980s the exhibit toured throughout Europe, its catalogue thrice reprinted, while the built Ticinese production became the subject of intense international scrutiny in publications and first-hand architectural tours. Expanded translations of Steinmann’s essay appeared in thematic journals such as Bernard Huet’s architecture d’aujourd’hui issue Realisme-Formalisme (no. 190, 1977); its inclusion in K. Michael Hays’ theory anthology (2000) confirmed its significance for international debates around realism and autonomy. Taking the Zurich exhibition as a starting point, this paper maps out its theoretical legitimisation of Ticinese architecture, focusing on its effects on German Swiss practice and further echoes in global theory. Based on archival research of original exhibition material, as well as interviews with protagonists and witnesses, it asks to which extent Steinmann’s sophisticated reading created its own universalizing narrative, transcending the original exhibit and the buildings it depicted.
  • Sesc Stories. A Social Archive
    Item type: Other Publication
    Avermaete, Tom; Davidovici, Irina; Teerds, Hans; et al. (2019)
  • The Autonomy of Theory
    Item type: Monograph
    Davidovici, Irina (2024)
    gta edition
    Following the exhibition “Tendenzen—Neuere Architektur im Tessin” in Zurich in 1975, contemporaneous architecture in Ticino became the subject of fervent coverage in Swiss and international publications. This extended essay argues that the critical attention emancipated the narratives of Ticino architecture from the actual conditions of production, leading to the paradoxical divergence of its historiography from its history. Placing well-known external constructs, such as the notion of the School of the Ticino, against the robust skepticism of local architects and historians, the essay chronicles the long-term consequences of the misalignment between autonomous theory and situated knowledge.
  • Housing in translation: Henry Roberts’s Dwellings of the Labouring Classes
    Item type: Other Conference Item
    Davidovici, Irina (2022)
    European Architectural History Network: Seventh International Conference of the European Architectural History Network (EAHN), Madrid 15-19 June 2022: Programme and Abstracts
    Published in 1850, Henry Roberts’s housing manual The Dwellings of the Labouring Classes was immediately translated and widely circulated in France under the patronage of Louis Napoleon. One reason for its impact was the pragmatic rationalism with which it offered solutions to technical, economic, and spatial aspects of housing. By the time of its fourth expanded edition of 1867 (re-translated into French), excerpts and related publications by the same author had already appeared in Italian and German. The principles articulated by Roberts influenced a variety of housing typologies worldwide, from the semi-detached cottages of the Cité ouvrière Mulhouse to philanthropic tenements in London, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Brussels, Florence, Geneva, Amsterdam and New York. As the common kernel for an expansive and heterogeneous built production, Roberts’s Dwellings signalled the international rise of the housing expert. Moreover, the printed medium allowed the wide circulation of the new expertise across national and cultural boundaries, offering a common solution to the similar problems brought about by industrialization and accelerated urban growth. The manual instigated a cross-cultural conversation. Its various editions and translations consolidated a common body of knowledge and crystallised typological configurations that persist to this day. This paper focuses on the translations and (mis-) interpretations that accompanied the international dissemination of Roberts’s housing manual between 1850 and 1914. Not only does it examine the knowledge transfers enabled through translation and reprinting, but also the development of housing expertise through the interdependencies of printed and built media.
  • Wohngenossenschaften in Zürich
    Item type: Monograph
    Boudet Dominique; Claus, Sylvia; Davidovici, Irina; et al. (2017)
  • Architectural photography as conduit for tacit knowledge: The Heinrich Helfenstein estate at the gta Archive
    Item type: Other Conference Item
    Davidovici, Irina; Bruckmann, Ziu (2023)
    The architectural photography of Heinrich Helfenstein (1946-2020) is grounded foremost in an understanding of language. A trained linguist, his approach to image-making was shaped by semiology and post-structuralism. Helfenstein’s point of entry to architecture, as Aldo Rossi’s teaching assistant at ETH in the 1970s, was also the start of his career as architecture photographer. Some of his earliest photographs are also some of the most familiar, having been used to illustrate Rossi’s widely circulated Scientific Autobiography. The delicate and absorbing dialogue between images and words that resulted from this collaboration influenced generations of architects, whilst paving the way to an extensive photographic oeuvre. By the time of his retirement in the early 2010s, Helfenstein was one of the most celebrated Swiss architecture photographers, having worked with Diener & Diener, Peter Märkli, Peter Zumthor, Meili Peter, Gigon Guyer, Burkhalter & Sumi, and Valerio Olgiati, as well as artists Hans Josephsohn, Per Kirkby, and Meret Oppenheim among many others. Due to his approach, his photography not only helped disseminate Swiss architecture in the late 20th century, but actively shaped its discourse, particular its interfaces with art. Based on original material from the Helfenstein holdings at the gta Archives, this paper explores the formation of tacit professional knowledge through the vector of architectural photography. It accompanies the exhibit co-curated with gta archivist and architect Ziu Bruckmann.
  • Collecting Hi-Tech
    Item type: Other Conference Item
    Davidovici, Irina (2023)
    At face value, there is nothing high-tech about archiving high-tech architecture (HTA). Its most productive period, in the 1970s and 1980s, stopped short of the technological developments that would arguably have the greatest impact upon future archival practices, framed by the ascent of the digital. High-tech architecture’s overall reliance on analogue means of representation – line drawings, photos and photomontages, models – suggests at first sight a fully conventional set of conservation and storage requirements. Until, that is, one considers how the iconographic content of high-tech architecture overflowed into its means of dissemination. Just as the built high-tech architecture brought an entire level of (often rhetorical) sophistication to contemporary construction techniques, it can be argued that its representational apparatus, highly instrumentalized in order to convince publics and gain commissions, necessarily challenged conventional drawing and modelling techniques. The results often combine experimentation with a precision even more extreme as it predates digital drawing. The collection of high-tech materials therefore presents unique challenges to archival and conservation practices. This paper addresses the legacy of high-tech architecture from the perspective of the architectural archivist. It argues that, in parallel to the preservation challenges of high-tech buildings, the archiving of the drawings and models upon brings specific, often unnecessarily elaborate, demands. As the image of technology spilled over into the realms of construction and representation alike, collecting high-tech architecture requires genuine engagement – not only with its material outputs, but also with its conceptual and ideological content.
  • Perennial Mannerisms: Robert Maxwell’s Dialectical Method
    Item type: Book Chapter
    Davidovici, Irina (2023)
    Ideas, Faces and Places: Sweet Disorder and the Carefully Careless
    This paper is based on a talk given at the Irish Architecture Archive, Dublin, 15 September 2022, with the occasion of the exhibition 'Ideas, Faces and Places: Sweet Disorder and the Carefully Careless' on the work of Robert Maxwell and Celia Scott. It focuses on Robert Maxwell's research on Mannerism and in particular the comparative method that he developed from a re-reading of Rowe’s 1947 essay “The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa”. Maxwell departs from Rowe’s thesis that understanding Mannerism provides useful insights for the analysis of modernism, taking his readers through Rowe’s argument with the comparison of the two blank screens that adorn, on one hand the Casino of Zuccari, on the other, Le Corbusier’s transitional-phase Villa Schwob. This comparative strategy is extended to parallels between St Peter’s in Rome and the Cité de Refuge in Paris. But then Maxwell’s chapter goes beyond Rowe’s examples to the identification of Mannerist elements in the work of James Stirling, Peter Eisenman, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Rem Koolhaas and OMA, which he interprets as a set of strategies for coping with the pervasive uncertainty of our culture.
Publications 1 - 10 of 66