On Arrows

A series of original essays on the history of British postwar architecture through the concept of performance—and the ubiquitous (but elusive) image of the arrow.

In the 1950s, the figure of the arrow had a strange kind of ubiquity in architectural drawings, publications, and advertisements, symbolizing everything from the circulation of cold and warm air in a kitchen fridge to the flow of traffic in assorted New Towns. Twenty-five years earlier there were barely any arrows within architectural publications, and 15 years later they had all but disappeared. In On Arrows, Laurent Stalder looks back at the near past to trace the idea of performance in architecture by following this pervasive yet relatively unnoticed figure within the history of British architecture.

During its short, intense period of use, the arrow pointed beyond any one singular author, typology, or scale, to the operative dimension of architecture and its environments, working both as an appropriate representational technique and a concrete tool for design. Stalder uses the arrow to move through the different dimensions of performance, mapping out the changing set of constellations that made up postwar British architecture and its environments: the constructive aspects, structural properties, infrastructural innovations, spatial challenges as well as their aesthetic and practical consequences. It is the arrow, he writes, that brings together debates from within different disciplines—from building physics, to sociology, structural design, and historiography, inscribed as they are in the materials, spaces, and buildings that are all too often considered in isolation from one another.

Laurent Stalder is Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, where his teaching and research focus on the intersection of technology with nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century architecture.