Iteration: Episodes in the Mediation of Art and Architecture

This edited volume considers the ways in which multiple stages, phases, or periods in an artistic or design process have served to arrive at the final artifact, with a focus on the meaning and use of the iteration. To contextualize iteration within artistic and architectural production, this collection of essays presents a range of close studies in art, architectural and design history, using archival and historiographical research, media theory, photography, material studies, and critical theory. It examines objects as unique yet mutable works by examining their antecedents, successive exemplars, and their afterlives―and thus their role as organizers or repositories of meaning. Key are the roles of writing, the use of media, and relationships between object, image, and reproduction. This volume asks how a closer look at iteration reveals new perspectives into the production of objects and the production of thought alike.

Written by an international team of contributors, offering a range of perspectives, it looks broadly at meaning and insight offered by the iteration―for processes of design, for historical research, and for the reception of creative works.

Robin Schuldenfrei is Katja and Nicolai Tangen Senior Lecturer in 20th Century Modernism at The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. She has written widely on modernism as it intersects with theories of the object, architecture and interiors. Her publications include Luxury and Modernism: Architecture and the Object in Germany 1900-1933 (Princeton University Press, 2018) as well as numerous articles, essays and the two edited volumes: Atomic Dwelling: Anxiety, Domesticity, and Postwar Architecture (2012) and, co-edited with Jeffrey Saletnik, Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse, and Modernism (2009).