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Gigliotti, Angela, editor | Monterumisi, Chiara, editor | Prencipe, Monica, 1986-, editor

Canons and icons : re-wondering a transcultural contamination

2025 - Edizioni Quasar

314 pages : illustrations (some color) ;

Includes bibliographical references.

The book critically examines how architectural canons and their icons are formed, contested, and transformed through long-term processes of transcultural exchange. Responding to the growing need to pluralize and nuance these categories against dogmatic Western-centred narratives, the volume addresses canon and icon not as fixed reference points, but as historically contingent constructs shaped by power, mediation, and epistemic struggle. Bringing together contributions that span architectural history, visual culture, education, media, and institutional frameworks, the book investigates how travel, exhibitions, publications, professional networks, and cultural and diplomatic infrastructures have mediated the circulation of architectural models, imaginaries, and practices.

Rather than framing contamination as a neutral encounter between discrete cultures, it is theorized as a dynamic and relational process—generative, conflictual, and asymmetrical—through which local and global actors, knowledge systems, and modes of production are continuously renegotiated.

Through a series of case studies from the long twentieth century, the volume challenges binary frameworks such as centre and periphery, originality and derivation, North and South, foregrounding instead hybridization, adaptation, and reversal. Particular attention is given to the often-obscured roles of mediators and neglected actors—segregated by gender, class, labour, or race—in shaping architectural histories behind the scenes of canonical narratives. Rather than offering a comprehensive survey, Canons and Icons proposes contamination as a space of mediation and a structuring condition of modernity. By exposing the historical, political, and economic mechanisms through which canons are legitimized and reproduced, the book opens toward decolonial, plural, and non-hierarchical approaches to architectural history and its futures. [Publisher's text]

Collected essays.

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