react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture

How do we imagine the places where we are? How do we construct them and construct images from them? Drawing on a diverse set of scholars whose work draws attention to the local as a theoretical apparatus for art and architectural history and practice, this volume centers histories of, and critical approaches to, local placemaking and its imaginaries. The city of Santa Barbara, where a critical mass of our editorial team is located, underpinned developmental conversations for this issue, implicit in the way we posed questions about the local, the contingent, the vernacular, and the small. Here, we take local architect Jeff Shelton’s underpass renovation project on lower State Street as a point of departure for imagining beyond an apparently unified vision of “beautiful” Santa Barbara. Through the project’s playful destabilization of Santa Barbara’s “California Spanish” style, the plurality of the town comes into view, shattering its unified aesthetic vision into disarranged facets. This fracture is suggestive of a kaleidoscope, which we take as an analytic for considering Santa Barbara’s urban fabric across space and time. By suggesting dimensions not immediately apparent to the eye, the kaleidoscope evokes the diverse content of contributions to this volume. Articles in this issue address the plurality of place in historical interpretation and social praxis by investigating how local places and things evade categorization, disaggregate the seemingly cohesive, and create structures for community formation and minority agency.