Introduction

Over recent decades, architectural history has increasingly contested the authority of singular narratives and Eurocentric paradigms by expanding its canon to incorporate previously marginalized figures and geographies (Banham 1996). While this "extra-canonical" tendency follows in the footsteps of Hitchcock, it is through Beatriz Colomina’s “intra-canonical” lens (Kotsioris 2020) that a more radical interrogation emerges—one that dismantles and reassembles the canon's internal mechanisms. Drawing on Bourdieu’s cultural theory, Christopher B. Steiner (1996) compellingly portrays the canon as a self-replicating structure, shaped by market logics and social erasures, which naturalizes its own arbitrariness. This volume arises from a sustained critical engagement with the conceptual scaffolding of canon, icon, contamination, and transculturality—not as fixed categories but as vessels of meaning, semantically capacious and historically charged. Our editorial endeavour is rooted in an extensive state-of-the-art analysis and aims to foreground the complex entanglements of architectural narratives, practices, and exchanges across the Nordic South axis, reaching beyond European boundaries into the Global South. Far from offering a comprehensive or definitive overview, the contributions gathered here engage these terms as dynamic constructs—susceptible to dilution or ossification, yet still rich with critical potential. By reframing canons and icons through the lenses of transculturality and contamination, this book explores architecture as a field of hybrid negotiations, contested genealogies, and plural epistemologies. Contamination, once pejorative, becomes a transformative logic of cultural production, while transculturality gestures toward interconnected networks of influence and adaptation. The result is a methodological and ideological repositioning: moving from national affiliations to disciplinary and positional complexity, and from rigid taxonomies to situated readings shaped by race, gender, class, and labour. In this framework, architectural history is not dismantled, but reimagined –as a polyphonic and fluid territory shaped by exchange, resistance, and re-interpretation.