Critical Practices of Making Architecture and Writing History Across the Mediterranean

Abstract

How can two different Mediterraneans be treated as one: both the temporal level of things that have been done and produced in the Mediterranean area as a lived space, and the temporal level of things that have been said and written about it-its scholarly re-imagination? The different approaches to researching, writing about, and practicing architecture in a physically concrete region that has been continuously reimagined in scholarly discourse have led to this Special Collection, titled 'The Two Mediterraneans that Live Apart, Together: Making Architectures and Writing Histories'. Written both as a prologue and an epilogue to the four papers featured in this Special Collection, this editorial essay offers fresh perspectives on the region and its strong global connectivities throughout history. Together with the papers that it introduces, the editorial ventures into the ambiguously constructed yet curiously pervasive category of Mediterranean architecture, while attempting to dismantle the established categories and convictions that has hitherto defined it in Western scholarly discourse. Overall, the main goal is to present just a glimpse of how architectural and urban historians across the Mediterranean and/or of the Mediterranean dwell on the diverse local knowledges produced in each place and period, critically resituating the Mediterranean both as a 'real' and an 'imagined' sea of global interconnectedness.