Styliane Philippou is an architect and architectural historian. She completed her studies in Architectural Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens and her PhD at the University of Edinburgh. She has practised in Athens, Edinburgh, London and Paris, and has taught architectural design, history and theory at the universities of Edinburgh and Plymouth. Her research has been published widely, she has served on the editorial boards of architectural and other scholarly journals, and lectured in Britain, USA, Brazil, Finland, the Netherlands and France. Her book Oscar Niemeyer: Curves of Irreverence (Gold Medal winner of the 2009 Independent Publisher Book Award in the category of Architecture) was published in 2008 by Yale University Press. She lives in Paris.

360 Degrees Architecture

Architecture worthy of human beings thinks better of men than they really are.
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Functionalism Today’

360 degrees architecture, that is, all about all architecture: architecture as an institution, as a discipline and a practice, as a process directly involved in the productive energies and development of society, in the life of the city and its citizens, critical and reflexive.
360 degrees architecture, that is, architecture in all its contexts, forms, shapes and scales, representations, interpretations, ambiguities and contradictions, convictions, fears and uncertainties, fictions and myths – worn-out ones and not yet worn-out ones – dreams dispelled and dreams upheld, utopias and ironies, ideologies and ambitions, achievements and failures, complexities and simplifications.
360 degrees architecture, that is, an attempt to open, and preserve open, discussions on the architectures of the past, the present and the future, on architecture wherever it may be found, near or afar, in buildings and in landscapes, in cinema, in literature, in art, in music, in fashion, in politics, in history and in the writing of history, in reality and in fantasy, in polite and not-so-polite places, in homes and in rubbish heaps.
360 degrees architecture, that is, architecture of any material and persuasion, ordinary or extraordinary, familiar or strange, popular or erudite, orderly or chaotic, traditional or radical, sensuous or rational, safe or reckless, reverent, irreverent or subversive.
360 degrees architecture, with an emphasis on experience rather than theory, and with the aim to challenge persisting categorizations and assert that, in architecture, the spatial, the utilitarian, the conceptual, the symbolic, the quirky and even the much-maligned ornamental are not isolated but integrated with one another.