The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The “Strangely Familiar” program began in 1994, springing from an invitation
from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Architecture
Centre in London to mount an exhibition around the general subject of architectural
history. The group that founded the program—the four editors
of this book—were a loose affiliation, brought together by the desire to promote
communication among different disciplines and a pressing need to interest
the public in debates about architecture and the city.
The first Strangely Familiar manifestations—an exhibition and
publication—consisted of a collection of narratives and stories produced by
an invited group of teachers, writers, and thinkers from a number of disciplines,
including architectural history, art history, urban history and planning,
feminist theory, geography, sociology, and cultural theory. The loose
groupings of the stories into three themes—experience and identity, memory
and remembering, resistance and appropriation—offered one strategy of
navigating through the collection; but this was by no means the only one,
as the contributions overlapped considerably in both content and resonance.
Strangely Familiar: Narratives of Architecture and the City (Routledge,
1996) resulted from a collaboration between the editors and graphic designers
Studio Myerscough, in which text and visual identity were integrated
on the basis of parity. The aim of this synthetic process was to
produce a document both visually stimulating and accessible, particularly
in comparison with more conventional academic publications.
0.1 | Strangely Familiar exhibition, RIBA Architecture Centre, London,
December 1995–March 1996.