Since 2000, when the Flemish Government Architect established the ‘Open Oproep’, an instrument for awarding large public building projects in Flanders, it has been relatively easy for foreign offices to compete for commissions that are more difficult to obtain in their own countries. Participating in a competition, however, is one thing, winning it is another. The prevailing building culture creates a certain pattern of expectations against which entries are measured; in a design competition, the architecture needs to connect to this culture to meet these (typically implicit) expectations. In terms of these cultural resonances, Dirk Somers has referred to the ‘brown banana’, a metaphor for an architecture of mutual interest stretching from London, via Flanders, Germany, and Switzerland to part of northern Italy. This is an architecture linked by a certain continuity, defined by both invention and convention. This article takes a closer look at the northwestern part of Somers’s brown banana: Flanders and Great Britain. It examines the work of four contemporary British firms that have featured prominently in the final selection since the ‘Open Oproep’ began; namely, Sergison Bates, Tony Fretton, Maccreanor Lavington, and Witherford Watson Mann. On the basis of publications and lectures about and by these firms, a comparison is made between Flemish architecture and building culture, on one hand, as it has been described in recent years and the theoretical position of the four British firms, on the other. Key concepts in this study are collective memory, accumulation, continuity, style, phenomenology, teaching, and writing.

Painted in Rome around 1615, Jusepe de Ribera's series of half figures personifying the five senses invites a diplomatic audience associated with the Lincean Academy to a performance of prudence, a virtue meant to characterize the judgment of both art and of sensory experience. Ribera's series is new evidence for how the demonstration of prudence in conversation motivated ownership and display of art and shaped art's contribution to natural philosophy. Ribera's “Five Senses” articulates the distinction between sense and prudence, and reveals the importance of discussion, dissimulation, and social performance to the way early Seicento art was produced and consumed.

This article examines the work of Antonin Raguenet (1839–1920), who directed from his studio in Paris between 1872 and 1914 a vast project of architectural taxonomy, the Matériaux et documents d’architecture et de sculpture. Though unique in its vast geographic scope and empiricist approach, Raguenet’s project remains relatively obscure in the current scholarship of art and architectural history. Published monthly in eight-page pamphlets totaling over five hundred serialised issues, the Matériaux et documents ultimately contained over fourteen thousand illustrations of ornaments collected from buildings, plazas, monuments, and cemeteries across the European continent.

Raguenet’s ornamental gaze moves seamlessly from Haussmann-era apartment buildings, to universal expositions in Paris and abroad, to the façades of Lavirotte, Schoellkopf, and Guimard, reflecting the production and reproduction of ornament literature during the period of the Belle Époque. The collecting and cataloguing of architecture elements into categories – windows, cartouche, doors, capitals, balconies, etc. – is aided by the maturation of print media, the passenger railroad industry, and the rise of photographic reproduction in the late nineteenth century. This reading of the Matériaux et documents will introduce its context, contents, and methodology, as well as the role of ornament in imagining and observing the emergence of a new ‘modern style’ at the end of the nineteenth century.

The article examines the neighbourhood of Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans following the Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It focuses on the rebuilding project initiated by Make it Right Foundation (2007-ongoing), founded by actor Brad Pitt. The article looks into media images of the rebuilding of Lower Ninth, and notes that the rebuilt architecture cannot be analysed outside of its relationship with media and images. The rebuilt architecture in Lower Ninth relates to image in multiple levels - it represents image of social justice and resilience, and aims to assign a new (image) value to the suburb. The article analyses the rebuilding within the framework of the relationships between contemporary architecture and media image and argues that these relationships are more complex than perceived by current architectural literature. It sees these relationships as productive in the case of this rebuilding, and aims to expand the space of their analysis.

This article offers a new interpretation of the concept of wonder in early modern Europe by focusing on large collections. It shows that many princely Kunstkammern were located above stables, and argues that the horses downstairs and the curiosities upstairs performed similar roles in the courtly display of power. The size and design of stables shaped how curiosities were exhibited and viewed. These majestic buildings facilitated cursory viewing experiences of the assemblage of a great number of animals and objects. They did not necessarily encourage the detailed examination of particular and unique exhibits.