Albena Yaneva
Biographic Data
| ID | 173564 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Albena Yaneva |
| GIVEN NAMES | Albena |
| FAMILY NAME | Yaneva |
| SIGNATURE | YANEVA A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Manchester |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1153-269X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 103 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
School buildings as performative machines: The New Architectural Devices of Control
The past two decades saw a growing attention to the role of design for the geography of education and simultaneously shifted architectural attention towards the understanding of different forms of pedagogy. Yet, careful empirical engagements with the material architecture of contemporary school buildings and the experiences they mediate are still scarce or missing. Focussing on how mechanisms of control are imagined and practiced in the design an…
Diamants et éponge
Comprendre « le vol » d’un bâtiment et appréhender le flux continu de ses transformations. Tel est l’enjeu, défini conjointement dès 2008 par Bruno Latour et Albena Yaneva dans le texte programmatique « “Donnez-moi un fusil et je ferai bouger tous les bâtiments” : le point de vue d’une fourmi sur l’architecture » (Latour et Yaneva 2008). Plaidant pour une approche qui cesserait d’ériger les bâtiments en structures terminées une fois pour toutes, …
The architecture of the hybrid lab: Spacing graphene research
Building on and renewing a long line of STS research of lab materialities, this article sheds light on a type of architecture organized around the 'heroic agency' of a new nanomaterial, graphene. It examines how design responds to the dynamic and multi-applicational ambitions of contemporary science. An ethnographic study of the National Graphene Institute in Manchester allows us to see how the building's design has epistemic and social effects, …
Latour for Architects: Thinkers for Architects
Bruno Latour is one of the leading figures in Social Sciences today, but his contributions are also widely recognised in the arts. His theories 'flourished' in the 1980s in the aftermath of the structuralism wave and generated new concepts and methodologies for the understanding of the social. In the past decade, Latour and his Actor-Network Theory (ANT) have gained popularity among researchers in the field of architecture. Latour for Architects …
Giants in the lab: Model conservation and the anaphoric progression of design
How is an architectural model consolidated and re-assembled in conservation to be able to continue to communicate a design concept? How does the work of care and preservation of models reveal knowledge about the often taken-for-granted dynamics of creative processes? To provide answers, this article draws on Etienne Souriau's philosophy of creativity and follows how the 'modes of existence' of creative works are re-enacted in the anaphoric progre…
Dajcie mi rewolwer, a poruszę wszystkie budynki”. Architektura z punktu widzenia Teorii Aktora-Sieci (ANT)
Nasz problem z budynkami to dokadne przeciwiestwo problemu, z ktrym zmaga si Etienne Jules Marey, przeprowadzajc swoje synne badanie fizjologii ruchu. Przy pomocy wynalezionego przez siebie "fotorewolweru" (ilustracja 1) chcia on uchwyci lot mewy w taki sposb
What Is Cosmopolitical Design? Design, Nature and the Built Environment
Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move»: An ANT’s View of Architecture
Our building problem is just the opposite of Etienne Jules Marey’s famous inquiry into the physiology of movement. Through the invention of his “photographic gun” (Fig. 1) he wanted to arrest the flight of a gull so as to be able to see in a fixed format every single successive freeze-frame of a continuous flow of flight (Figs. 2, 3), the mechanism of which had eluded all observers until his invention. What we need is the reverse: the problem wit…
City, culture and society special issue (Vol. 3 – Issue 2), 2012: Traceable Cities
Staging scientific controversies: A gallery test on science museums' interactivity
The “transfer” model in science communication has been addressed critically from different perspectives, while the advantages of the interactive model have been continuously praised. Yet, little is done to account for the specific role of the interactive model in communicating “unfinished science.” The traditional interactive methods in museums are not sufficient to keep pace with rapid scientific developments. Interactive exchanges between laype…
Making the Social Hold: Towards an Actor-Network Theory of Design
The article illustrates the potentials of an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) perspective to design. Drawing on ANT's assumption that objects with their scripts and incorporated programs of action compel and rearticulate new social ties, I argue that design triggers specific ways of enacting the social. It is impossible to understand how a society works without appreciating how design shapes, conditions, facilitates and makes possible everyday socialit…
How Buildings 'Surprise'
Can old buildings faithfully transmit social meaning? Conservation studies have taught us for decades that buildings are valuable for their historical substance and symbolic value gradually acquired with time. Drawing on an Actor-Network-Theory-inspired perspective to tackle buildings, this article questions the philosophy of preservation studies and their definitions of building and agency. Following the process of renovation of the 17th century…
Understanding Architecture, Accounting Society
Scaling Up and Down: Extraction Trials in Architectural Design
How do architects imagine, see and define a distant object that is meant to become a building? How does it become knowable, real? To answer these questions, I follow architects as they fabricate models and scale them up and down at different rates of speed. Instead of being a logical, linear procedure for generating a new object that becomes progressively more knowable, ascending from the abstract to the concrete, scaling is a versatile rhythm, r…
When a bus met a museum: Following Artists, Curators and Workers in Art Installation
In this essay, I intend to offer an alternative to viewing the museum and the exhibition through the visitor's expectations. Instead, I shall follow all those actors whom the viewer usually does not meet in the museum: the artists, the curators, the technicians and the workers. The visitor knows they exist and that they have worked hard to stage all these art installations for the public, but he or she has never seen them working, discussing and …
Chalk Steps on the Museum Floor: The `Pulses' of Objects in an Art Installation
This article argues against the well-established wisdom in sociology of art that a sudden artistic or institutional gesture can `elevate' an ordinary object to the status of `artwork'. Instead, it affirms that there is a gradual process of `becoming art'. The mechanism of artistic activity does not consist of a single transformation of one huge difference into something artistically significant; it is rather related to the deployment of various s…
Scaling Up and Down: Extraction Trials in Architectural Design
How do architects imagine, see and define a distant object that is meant to become a building? How does it become knowable, real? To answer these questions, I follow architects as they fabricate models and scale them up and down at different rates of speed. Instead of being a logical, linear procedure for generating a new object that becomes progressively more knowable, ascending from the abstract to the concrete, scaling is a versatile rhythm, r…
Making the Social Hold: Towards an Actor-Network Theory of Design
The article illustrates the potentials of an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) perspective to design. Drawing on ANT's assumption that objects with their scripts and incorporated programs of action compel and rearticulate new social ties, I argue that design triggers specific ways of enacting the social. It is impossible to understand how a society works without appreciating how design shapes, conditions, facilitates and makes possible everyday socialit…
Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move»: An ANT’s View of Architecture
Our building problem is just the opposite of Etienne Jules Marey’s famous inquiry into the physiology of movement. Through the invention of his “photographic gun” (Fig. 1) he wanted to arrest the flight of a gull so as to be able to see in a fixed format every single successive freeze-frame of a continuous flow of flight (Figs. 2, 3), the mechanism of which had eluded all observers until his invention. What we need is the reverse: the problem wit…
Chalk Steps on the Museum Floor: The `Pulses' of Objects in an Art Installation
This article argues against the well-established wisdom in sociology of art that a sudden artistic or institutional gesture can `elevate' an ordinary object to the status of `artwork'. Instead, it affirms that there is a gradual process of `becoming art'. The mechanism of artistic activity does not consist of a single transformation of one huge difference into something artistically significant; it is rather related to the deployment of various s…
When a bus met a museum: Following Artists, Curators and Workers in Art Installation
In this essay, I intend to offer an alternative to viewing the museum and the exhibition through the visitor's expectations. Instead, I shall follow all those actors whom the viewer usually does not meet in the museum: the artists, the curators, the technicians and the workers. The visitor knows they exist and that they have worked hard to stage all these art installations for the public, but he or she has never seen them working, discussing and …
Latour for Architects: Thinkers for Architects
Bruno Latour is one of the leading figures in Social Sciences today, but his contributions are also widely recognised in the arts. His theories 'flourished' in the 1980s in the aftermath of the structuralism wave and generated new concepts and methodologies for the understanding of the social. In the past decade, Latour and his Actor-Network Theory (ANT) have gained popularity among researchers in the field of architecture. Latour for Architects …
School buildings as performative machines: The New Architectural Devices of Control
The past two decades saw a growing attention to the role of design for the geography of education and simultaneously shifted architectural attention towards the understanding of different forms of pedagogy. Yet, careful empirical engagements with the material architecture of contemporary school buildings and the experiences they mediate are still scarce or missing. Focussing on how mechanisms of control are imagined and practiced in the design an…
The architecture of the hybrid lab: Spacing graphene research
Building on and renewing a long line of STS research of lab materialities, this article sheds light on a type of architecture organized around the 'heroic agency' of a new nanomaterial, graphene. It examines how design responds to the dynamic and multi-applicational ambitions of contemporary science. An ethnographic study of the National Graphene Institute in Manchester allows us to see how the building's design has epistemic and social effects, …
When a bus met a museum: Following Artists, Curators and Workers in Art Installation
In this essay, I intend to offer an alternative to viewing the museum and the exhibition through the visitor's expectations. Instead, I shall follow all those actors whom the viewer usually does not meet in the museum: the artists, the curators, the technicians and the workers. The visitor knows they exist and that they have worked hard to stage all these art installations for the public, but he or she has never seen them working, discussing and …
Chalk Steps on the Museum Floor: The `Pulses' of Objects in an Art Installation
This article argues against the well-established wisdom in sociology of art that a sudden artistic or institutional gesture can `elevate' an ordinary object to the status of `artwork'. Instead, it affirms that there is a gradual process of `becoming art'. The mechanism of artistic activity does not consist of a single transformation of one huge difference into something artistically significant; it is rather related to the deployment of various s…
Scaling Up and Down: Extraction Trials in Architectural Design
How do architects imagine, see and define a distant object that is meant to become a building? How does it become knowable, real? To answer these questions, I follow architects as they fabricate models and scale them up and down at different rates of speed. Instead of being a logical, linear procedure for generating a new object that becomes progressively more knowable, ascending from the abstract to the concrete, scaling is a versatile rhythm, r…
How Buildings 'Surprise'
Can old buildings faithfully transmit social meaning? Conservation studies have taught us for decades that buildings are valuable for their historical substance and symbolic value gradually acquired with time. Drawing on an Actor-Network-Theory-inspired perspective to tackle buildings, this article questions the philosophy of preservation studies and their definitions of building and agency. Following the process of renovation of the 17th century…
Understanding Architecture, Accounting Society
Staging scientific controversies: A gallery test on science museums' interactivity
The “transfer” model in science communication has been addressed critically from different perspectives, while the advantages of the interactive model have been continuously praised. Yet, little is done to account for the specific role of the interactive model in communicating “unfinished science.” The traditional interactive methods in museums are not sufficient to keep pace with rapid scientific developments. Interactive exchanges between laype…
Making the Social Hold: Towards an Actor-Network Theory of Design
The article illustrates the potentials of an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) perspective to design. Drawing on ANT's assumption that objects with their scripts and incorporated programs of action compel and rearticulate new social ties, I argue that design triggers specific ways of enacting the social. It is impossible to understand how a society works without appreciating how design shapes, conditions, facilitates and makes possible everyday socialit…
City, culture and society special issue (Vol. 3 – Issue 2), 2012: Traceable Cities
What Is Cosmopolitical Design? Design, Nature and the Built Environment
Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move»: An ANT’s View of Architecture
Our building problem is just the opposite of Etienne Jules Marey’s famous inquiry into the physiology of movement. Through the invention of his “photographic gun” (Fig. 1) he wanted to arrest the flight of a gull so as to be able to see in a fixed format every single successive freeze-frame of a continuous flow of flight (Figs. 2, 3), the mechanism of which had eluded all observers until his invention. What we need is the reverse: the problem wit…
Dajcie mi rewolwer, a poruszę wszystkie budynki”. Architektura z punktu widzenia Teorii Aktora-Sieci (ANT)
Nasz problem z budynkami to dokadne przeciwiestwo problemu, z ktrym zmaga si Etienne Jules Marey, przeprowadzajc swoje synne badanie fizjologii ruchu. Przy pomocy wynalezionego przez siebie "fotorewolweru" (ilustracja 1) chcia on uchwyci lot mewy w taki sposb
Giants in the lab: Model conservation and the anaphoric progression of design
How is an architectural model consolidated and re-assembled in conservation to be able to continue to communicate a design concept? How does the work of care and preservation of models reveal knowledge about the often taken-for-granted dynamics of creative processes? To provide answers, this article draws on Etienne Souriau's philosophy of creativity and follows how the 'modes of existence' of creative works are re-enacted in the anaphoric progre…
The architecture of the hybrid lab: Spacing graphene research
Building on and renewing a long line of STS research of lab materialities, this article sheds light on a type of architecture organized around the 'heroic agency' of a new nanomaterial, graphene. It examines how design responds to the dynamic and multi-applicational ambitions of contemporary science. An ethnographic study of the National Graphene Institute in Manchester allows us to see how the building's design has epistemic and social effects, …
Latour for Architects: Thinkers for Architects
Bruno Latour is one of the leading figures in Social Sciences today, but his contributions are also widely recognised in the arts. His theories 'flourished' in the 1980s in the aftermath of the structuralism wave and generated new concepts and methodologies for the understanding of the social. In the past decade, Latour and his Actor-Network Theory (ANT) have gained popularity among researchers in the field of architecture. Latour for Architects …
Diamants et éponge
Comprendre « le vol » d’un bâtiment et appréhender le flux continu de ses transformations. Tel est l’enjeu, défini conjointement dès 2008 par Bruno Latour et Albena Yaneva dans le texte programmatique « “Donnez-moi un fusil et je ferai bouger tous les bâtiments” : le point de vue d’une fourmi sur l’architecture » (Latour et Yaneva 2008). Plaidant pour une approche qui cesserait d’ériger les bâtiments en structures terminées une fois pour toutes, …
School buildings as performative machines: The New Architectural Devices of Control
The past two decades saw a growing attention to the role of design for the geography of education and simultaneously shifted architectural attention towards the understanding of different forms of pedagogy. Yet, careful empirical engagements with the material architecture of contemporary school buildings and the experiences they mediate are still scarce or missing. Focussing on how mechanisms of control are imagined and practiced in the design an…
Sociology (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Visual arts (6 works) · Architecture (5 works) · Art (5 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Architectural engineering (4 works) · Engineering (4 works) · Museums and Cultural Heritage (4 works)