Reziproke Räume. Texte zur Kulturanthropologie und Architektur
Cultural Anthropology meets Architecture 1
Johanna Rolshoven/Manfred Omahna (eds.)
Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 2014
German, 160 pages, paperback
ISBN 978-3-89445-486-9
EUR 20.00

This book shows the diversity of points of contact between cultural science and architecture with the aim of sparking interdisciplinary discussion. Cultural anthropology and architecture are two different disciplines that were linked in response to an idea that has emerged repeatedly over the past thirty years. The encounter between cultural anthropology, i.e. cognitive interest on the level of humanities and social sciences, and architecture, which is a practical and pragmatic discipline, is now awaiting a more specific focus striven for and initiated by a handful of intermediaries and cross-border interdisciplinary specialists. Subsequently, the debate here concerns the relationship of urban development professionals to urban environments as well as production processes and appropriation of space, which evidently do not always succeed one another smoothly, but rather occur – perhaps even more frequently – in forms of day-to-day alienation and subversion by the moving and mobile users of urban space.

Manfred Omahna is assistant professor at the Institute of Urban and Architectural History, TU Graz.