Editorial

This issue focuses on the problem of the interpretation and meta-interpretation of architecture. The prevailing approaches are metainterpretational, that is those, which do not interpret architectural works themselves but existing interpretations of architectural works. We have chosen various, mostly borderline interpretational positions. Two papers focus on the subject of meta-interpretation concerning non-professional or amateur interpretations, or relations between a non-professional and professional interpretation of architecture with the aim of finding characteristic procedures in both of them and explore the broad scale of interrelations between the interpretation or use and the abuse of a work of architecture. In the two other papers prevail meta-interpretations of both the form analysis and the prevailing reception or “interpretational sediments” of a specific architectural  work. The third pair of papers are “meta-interpretations” of interpretational possibilities of writing genres dealing with architecture as well as the procedures of marginalization and the rediscovery of the work of women architects. Finally, the two closing metainterpretational procedures explore the interpretational methods of an architect and a philosopher: Peter Eisenman’s method of close reading and Emmanuel Levinas’ phenomenological method. These meta-interpretational methods thus deal with both interpretational methods themselves as well as with borders between interpretation and formulated experience; personal attitude; the judgments based on taste and interpretation and forms of writing on architecture. On the basis of the professional training of the involved metainterpreters we have categorized their papers into three groups: the historiographical, the theoretical and the philosophical meta-interpretations.

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