Abstract: When the pieces of Maison du Peuple (Victor Horta, Brussels, 1896–99) disappeared from their precarious storage site in 1983, questions of ownership, provenance, and material value were placed center stage. In the ensuing legal case, the building's dense post-demolition provenance became subject to the scrutiny of the Belgian courts. The case was an inflection point in a long battle to salvage Maison du Peuple: a disaster for the stolen parts but a liberation for those that remained. The demolition of Maison du Peuple had already catapulted the building to international fame, but the theft of it nearly twenty years later aroused a more local outrage. Custodians and owners rushed to take advantage of a surge of interest in the deconstructed art nouveau icon, in a new cultural moment. Through a detailed unraveling of the most dubious ownerships of Maison du Peuple, this article argues that it was precisely during moments of crisis that the reputation of Maison du Peuple was reconfigured and its future stability secured.
Abstract: The provenance of the half-timbered house Am Strom 53 in Warnemünde, Germany, is noteworthy not only for the brief tenancy by Edvard Munch between 1907 and 1908, but because its four-hundred-year-plus itinerary as a property object charts an intricate trajectory through Northern Germany's shifting property regimes: (pre)feudal, Hanseatic, fascist, communist, and neoliberal. Drawing on archival and on-site investigations, the article reconstructs how Am Strom 53 has reproduced, resisted, and short-circuited these changing regimes of ownership for the better part of five centuries. Taking a cue from recent theories of infrastructure as "that which repeats," the article proposes that provenance research gains critical purchase when the legal infrastructures that define property relations break down. This opens apertures onto the patterned repetitions that, at different historical junctures, have sustained and conditioned relationships to buildings as property. In the case of Am Strom 53, one such aperture is opened by the slow, sputtering collapse of the property form known as the house mark : an ancient legal symbol that has periodically resurfaced to haunt both the house and the German property system at large.
Abstract: In a softly lit room of the Museo Correr in Venice, slender easels elevate Renaissance masterpieces to eye level. The objects in question—art mounting mechanisms designed by architect Carlo Scarpa (1906–1978)—have become Scarpa's most iconic furniture pieces, apotheosis of Italian postwar design, protagonists of recent exhibitions, and sold at auction. Their iconicity has fueled their transformation from design objects into highly desirable art objects. Long embedded in narratives of Scarpa's greatness, the easels' provenance had never been questioned. Now that these tailored, skillfully crafted objects circulate on the art market, however, their provenance as well as their authorship have become critical. Drawing on early sketches, oral histories, and photographs, this article attends to the easels with a degree of attention usually reserved for the paintings they support.
Abstract: Operation Siporex presents the opportunism arising out of industrial architectural components by following the movement of a single material across continents. Siporex, a brand of autoclaved aerated concrete, was a building block developed in Scandinavia that transformed the building industries in postwar Europe before spreading globally. With its revolutionarily lightweight material properties, Siporex was a material that was designed to move from its inception. First comprised as a set of building elements, the company rapidly developed an all-encompassing ecosystem that was hailed as the system that could meet every need and complete constructions in record time. Simultaneously, away from the building site, Siporex made its way into local vocabularies that in turn began defining new contexts. Following the material from a small town in Norway to the former capital of Cote d'Ivoire, this contribution outlines a larger story of negotiations, strategic uses of governmental development aid, and corporate profitability. Siporex, a hidden building block that transformed the city of Abidjan, remains not only a simple building element but as a promise left behind.
