Output details

The Architecture of Transgression

The output consists of an issue of the international journal Architectural Design (November 2013), proposed and co-edited by Mosley and Rachel Sara, including two articles they co-authored and one Mosley sole-authored. For a journal organised by theme, where each title is guest-edited by a specialist in the field, this issue expands the concept of transgression, first applied to an architectural context by Bernard Tschumi in his seminal essay ‘Architecture and Transgression’ (1976) that identified transgressive architecture as producing a paradoxical co-existence of both mental and sensory experience. These specially commissioned articles from leading academics and practitioners constitute a systematic exploration of the issues from a wide variety of perspectives, examining the concept not only in relation to architectural products themselves but also their conception, processes of production and the role and identity of those producing them in a broad range of contemporary practices. As set out by Mosley’s and Sara’s introductory essay (‘The Architecture of Transgression: Towards a Destabilising Architecture’), this issue re-scopes the field, pushing at the boundaries of what architecture is, and what it could or even should be. It highlights the positive impact those working on the periphery can have on the mainstream by demonstrating the ways in which transgressive practices have the potential to reinvent and reposition the architectural profession.

Mosley’s and Sara’s ‘Architecture and Transgression: An Interview with Bernard Tschumi’ probes Tschumi’s thinking about transgression in relation to contemporaneous architectures of informal development embodied in the Tower of David, Caracas and acts of occupation through the Occupy movement in New York, expanding the issue’s themes and reactivating the work of a seminal thinker in this arena. Mosley’s case-study, ‘An Architecture of Exception: Transgressing the Everyday’, develops this thesis further through examining the conditions and inherent fascination in architectural environments that have been de-stabilised.