OASE 108

The history of architecture can not only be read as an accumulation of buildings and designs, but also as a pendulum movement between the appreciation and the rejection of projects, oeuvres and positions, driven by varying arguments. In addition to conventional general publications, reviews in professional journals and criticism in magazines, other media increasingly play a part, such as weekend supplements of newspapers, social media, newsletters, political arenas and forums that cultivate architecture.

Oeuvres and projects are subject to trends, to waves of appreciation by audiences and critics. As a result, it is sometimes unclear what it is that makes architecture good, less good or bad.

This issue of OASE investigates how changing appreciations, for a wide variety of reasons, can act as productive misunderstandings and as levers that can take architecture criticism a step forward and help architecture reflection to break free from any given canon or from its straitjacket of assumed certainties.