Islands have a long history of appealing to the architectural imagination and have served as sites for architectural expressions of cultural specificity, cultural conquest, and cultural hybridisation over millennia. From offshore financial centres to immigrant detention camps, tourist havens to military bases, the architectures of islands concretise the forces at play in our contemporary, crisis-ridden societies.
Collecting writings by a wide range of established scholars together with exciting new voices in architecture and affiliated disciplines, this book shows the pertinence islands hold for critical spatial thinking and practice today. Covering war and colonialism, detention and tourism, the topics raised in this book range from issues of urban development to close readings of buildings – whether ruined, designed, projected, preserved, or absent. Combing case studies, critical historiography, and pieces of experimental writing, the chapters disclose the variety of ways in which architecture can be used as a lens for analysing, disclosing, and untangling island specificity.
This volume offers a very timely, vibrant, and methodologically varied approach to the subject of architecture and islands. Its global reach, innovative outlook, and rich material will be of interest to scholars and students in architecture, landscape architecture, geography, and urban design and planning, alongside arts and literary studies.
Catharina Gabrielsson is Docent in Architecture and Associate Professor in Urban Theory and Design at the School of Architecture KTH, Stockholm. Her research centres on the relationship between architecture, art, and urban development, combining critical historiography with philosophy and artistic research. She is co-editor of Neoliberalism on the Ground: Architecture and Transformation from the 1960s to the Present (2020), Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies (2017), and Deleuze and the City (2016).
Marko Jobst is Senior Lecturer at Leeds School of Architecture. He is the author of A Ficto-Historical Theory of the London Underground (2017) and co-editor of Architectural Affects After Deleuze and Guattari with Hélène Frichot (2021) and Queering Architecture: Methods, Practices, Spaces, Pedagogies with Naomi Stead (2023). His research interests include the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, affect and queer theories, and experimental modes of writing.
