摘要：ABE Journal , with ABE standing for Architecture Beyond Europe, was founded exactly 8 years ago, in 2012. It emerged out of an ongoing conversation among scholars from around 15 European and some extra-European countries, in the context of a EU-funded cost (Cooperation in Science and Technology) Action that sought “to create a broader understanding of the worldwide spread of European architecture across empires during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by focusing on its vectors, connections, semantics and materiality in a large range of geographical and linguistic contexts engaging both Western and non-Western environments”. 1 Those involved felt that this discussion could make an important enough contribution to the larger field of architectural history to warrant its continuation in the form of an open access, online journal. From the very beginning, and based on experiences of the cost Action, a deliberate choice was made to provide a scholarly platform offering authors from various contexts and academic backgrounds the possibility of publishing in a variety of languages, in order to complement the Anglophone scholarship on these topics, and to even counter its dominance in the field. A further development from the cost Action in the journal—as the latter’s title suggests—was also a recognition of the co-production of architecture through European and non-European as well as intra-European encounters, rather than it being reducible merely to a singular and/or dominant notion of “European architecture”. “Architecture beyond Europe” thus also meant opening up newer sites, agents, interactions and fundamental paradigms of viewing architectures beyond the frameworks of western modernity whether in global contexts or within Europe.
