About Histories of Postwar Architecture

Histories of Postwar Architecture — Journal Profile

Histories of Postwar Architecture (HPA) is a biannual, open-access, peer-reviewed journal devoted to the history of architecture in the second half of the twentieth century. It is published in Bologna, Italy, by the Department of Architecture of the University of Bologna, in partnership with the Department of Visual, Performing and Media Arts and the Department for Life Quality Studies of the same university. Its electronic ISSN is 2611-0075, the identifier recorded on this JournalsWorld record, on the journal's own masthead and in the Directory of Open Access Journals. The journal's own statement of purpose is deliberately wide: it publishes innovative and original papers on postwar architecture with no geographical, methodological, historiographical or disciplinary restrictions. In a field where the postwar decades were long treated as an epilogue to the heroic age of modernism, HPA exists to treat those decades as a central subject in their own right.

The timing of the journal's foundation matters. HPA began publishing in 2017 — the Directory of Open Access Journals records its open-access start in 2017, and OpenAlex likewise records the title as in DOAJ since 2017 — at the moment when the architecture of the postwar boom was ageing into heritage: housing estates, churches, schools, infrastructure and whole new towns built between the 1940s and the 1970s were being demolished, listed, restored or argued over across Europe and far beyond. A journal that could publish archival reconstructions, critical reassessments and conservation-relevant history in one place, free to read, answered a real need, and the Society of Architectural Historians' announcement of the inaugural issue, noting the international names on its Scientific Committee — among them Nicholas Adams, Eve Blau, Maristella Casciato, Carola Hein, Thomas Leslie, Mary McLeod and Joan Ockman — signalled from the start that this was intended as an international venue, not a local bulletin.

Quick facts

Scope and subjects

The journal's scope is a period and a problem, not a region. “Postwar” in its pages means the architecture of the decades after the Second World War, studied anywhere in the world and by any defensible method. Recurring subjects include: the reconstruction of war-damaged cities; welfare-state architecture, above all mass housing and its social ambitions; ecclesiastical architecture of the post-conciliar decades — the subject of a recent call for papers on churches built in concrete in and around postwar Rome between the 1950s and the 1970s, examining how religious building programmes became sites of structural and urban experiment on the expanding peripheries of the city; the international careers of individual architects and practices, as in the 2024 issue (number 15) devoted to Ricardo Bofill and the Taller de Arquitectura, tracing the practice's global trajectory and reception more than six decades after its foundation in 1963; modernism's travels and translations, including decolonial urbanism and knowledge exchange between centres and peripheries; architectural criticism itself — one announced issue asks how “committed”, “politicised” and “operative” criticism, in the senses debated since Manfredo Tafuri, actually shaped the historical narrative of architecture; materials and construction, from concrete experimentation to prefabrication; and the historiography of the period, including archives, exhibitions and the writers who first framed the postwar decades.

Calls for papers published by the journal over the years list the working vocabulary of the field: experimental and inventive design practices, global aspiration and local constraint, context negotiation, materiality, knowledge exchanges, modernity, tradition and transition, de-colonial urbanism, identity formation and the built environment, place-making, streetscapes and scale. A submission does not need to match a call, however. Alongside the themed Focus content, the Miscellanea section takes strong papers on any topic relevant to the history of architecture of the second half of the twentieth century, and the journal also publishes invited papers and reviews — the reviews section being the one place where Italian-language contributions sit alongside the journal's normal English.

How an issue is built

HPA's section policy, published on its own site, divides contributions in a way authors should understand before submitting. The Articles section has two routes in: Focus, which gathers papers submitted in response to a call for abstracts on the issue's theme, and Miscellanea, which is theme-free. For Focus, the process begins with an abstract of no more than 4,000 characters; the Editorial Team and the Scientific Committee judge proposals for originality, relevance and adherence to the call's topic, and full articles are then expected to run between 20,000 and 80,000 characters. A third element, HPA Contributions, collects writing on the issue's topic from members of the Scientific Committee and Editorial Team themselves, and Invited Papers brings in contributions the editors judge especially relevant — a section the journal states openly is not peer-reviewed, a transparency authors and readers should note when citing from it. Reviewed articles, with their abstracts and five keywords, are published within six months of submission according to the journal's stated policy, and a decision is promised within two months.

Editorial process, ethics and access

The journal operates a double-blind peer-review process, described in the Directory of Open Access Journals as double anonymous peer review. Submissions pass an initial quality assessment and plagiarism detection through iThenticate; reviewers judge factual and interpretative contribution, clarity of subject, relevance to the field, knowledge of the existing literature and quality of bibliography, originality, clarity of writing and methodological rigour. The journal adopts the AlmaDL Journals Code of Ethics, inspired by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) core practices, and states its data policy in open-science terms, encouraging authors to follow FAIR principles for research data where relevant. Long-term preservation is handled within the University of Bologna's AlmaDL Journals programme, and the DOAJ record notes preservation through the PKP Preservation Network.

Access could hardly be simpler, and it is one of the journal's strengths. Everything is immediately open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0): anyone may download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute or copy contributions with proper attribution, without asking further permission. Authors keep their copyright and may post the post-refereeing version on personal or departmental websites, in institutional repositories and on social media. There are no article processing charges and no submission fees — the journal states this in its own Publication Fees section and the DOAJ record confirms that it has no APC and no other charges — a model funded by its university publisher rather than by authors or readers. The DOAJ record gives a publication time of 16 weeks.

Metrics and indexing

HPA's formal standing in Italy is unusually strong for a young journal. It is recognised by ANVUR, the Italian national agency for the evaluation of universities and research, as a scientific journal for disciplinary area 10 (antiquities, philology, literary studies, art history), and since 2018 it has been rated a “Classe A” journal — the highest ANVUR class — for disciplinary area 08 (civil engineering and architecture), sector 08/E2, architectural restoration and history. Indexing, as listed on the journal's own site, includes the Directory of Open Access Journals, ERIH PLUS, BASE, Google Scholar, JournalTOCs, the Italian ACNP serials catalogue and others; Scopus accepted the journal in June 2022, as the journal itself records. OpenAlex, resolving the title through its ISSN endpoint to source S7407058583 at the time of checking (October 2026), recorded 289 works and 63 citations, with an h-index of 3 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.03; those figures describe a young, humanities journal whose influence travels mainly through books, exhibitions and conservation practice, and they will date quickly. The JournalsWorld record's H-index of 3 agrees with the OpenAlex figure. No Journal Impact Factor from Clarivate is claimed here, because none could be verified from a source fetched for this profile.

How to submit

Submissions are made online through the journal's OJS platform at hpa.unibo.it, after registering as an author. The practical route, drawn from the journal's own guidance and its calls for papers: watch for a themed call if you want the Focus route, or submit to Miscellanea at any time; prepare an abstract within the stated limit (4,000 characters for call proposals; calls have also asked for five keywords and a brief curriculum vitae of no more than 2,000 characters); write the full paper in English, anonymised for double-blind review — remove your name from the text and from the file properties; keep the length inside the journal's 20,000–80,000 character band (individual calls have expressed the equivalent as roughly 4,200–8,500 words); define your argument against the existing literature and name your sources clearly; and expect plagiarism screening and, if reviewers require it, revision under the Editorial Team's supervision. Book and exhibition reviews may be written in Italian. Because there are no fees at any stage, the only costs of submitting are time and care.

The journal in practice: what its recent issues show

Two recent editorial projects show the journal's method at work. Issue 15 of 2024 took a single practice — Ricardo Bofill's Taller de Arquitectura, the multidisciplinary team founded in 1963 — and read it internationally: how a Catalan practice's housing, urban projects and public buildings travelled across countries, how they were received, and how their standing has shifted in the continuing scholarly reassessment of postmodern architecture since Bofill's death in 2022. The editors framed the issue explicitly as a critical, updated perspective rather than a celebration, which is the journal's house style: monographic attention without hagiography. A 2025 call for the issue on ecclesiastical architecture in and around postwar Rome works the other way, from building type to city: churches built in concrete between the 1950s and the 1970s, often inside complex ensembles of schools, housing and landscape on Rome's expanding peripheries, produced by collaboration among architects, engineers, religious orders and public authorities in the years when the Second Vatican Council was transforming the institution that commissioned them. The call argues that these buildings remain marginal in the standard histories despite their role in shaping the city's social infrastructure and technical culture — precisely the kind of marginality the journal was founded to correct.

The announced issue on committed, politicised and operative criticism turns the same attention onto the journal's own trade. It asks how definitions of engaged criticism differ from Tafuri's notion of operative criticism, what rhetorical and intellectual tools such criticism used, whether it required party or group allegiance, through which periodicals and actions it circulated, and how far it bent the historical narrative of architecture itself. A journal willing to historicise its own critical inheritance, with a periodisation running from the end of the Second World War to the present, is signalling that “postwar” for HPA includes the history of writing about the postwar — historiography as a first-class subject, not a preface.

Fit, audience and standing

Who actually reads HPA? Its natural audience is triple. First, architectural historians working on the twentieth century, for whom it is a specialist venue with a recognised Italian evaluation class and Scopus visibility. Second, conservation and restoration professionals: the journal's ANVUR Classe A sector is architectural restoration and history, and its articles regularly supply the documented building histories on which listing, restoration and adaptive-reuse decisions depend. Third, architects and critics interested in the recent past as a design resource. For authors, the fit test is simple and the journal states it plainly: is the paper an original, innovative contribution on postwar architecture, grounded in sources, aware of the literature, and written to be read internationally in English? Work that merely describes a local building without a question will struggle; work that uses a local case to answer a general question — about welfare-state building, about concrete, about criticism, about decolonisation — is exactly what the Focus and Miscellanea sections exist to publish. The absence of fees removes the usual open-access calculation, and the university platform gives the journal a stability that author-pays titles cannot promise.

Similar journals

Authors weighing HPA against neighbouring venues should know the landscape mapped by this directory. The Journal of Architectural Education (ISSN 1046-4883, 1531-314X) is the long-established journal of architectural pedagogy, broader in period but centred on education and culture. Festival dell'Architettura Magazine (ISSN 2039-0491) is another Italian open-access architecture journal, oriented to research and projects on architecture and the city. Dimensions — Journal of Architectural Knowledge (ISSN 2747-5085, 2747-5093) publishes thematic editions on architectural knowledge from Germany, in print and open access together. Panorama, the journal of the Association of Historians of American Art (ISSN 2471-6839), is a close cousin in spirit — an open-access, society-linked art-historical journal — with an American-art remit. HPA's distinct offer within this company is its single-period depth: nowhere else is the postwar half-century itself the whole brief.

A final practical note concerns citation and discovery. Because HPA assigns DOIs and deposits its metadata openly, its articles surface in Google Scholar, BASE and the other aggregators listed on its indexing page, and its DOAJ record carries the journal's keywords — architecture, history of architecture, postwar architecture, architecture criticism, architecture theory, history of the city — which describe its centre of gravity accurately. Readers citing the journal should give the article DOI where one is assigned and the journal's ISSN 2611-0075; libraries cataloguing the title should note that it is electronic-only in the form recorded here, published from Bologna, and continuous since 2017, not a revival of any earlier print title of a similar name.

Frequently asked questions

Is Histories of Postwar Architecture open access, and what does it cost to publish? Yes — immediate open access under CC BY 4.0, authors retaining copyright, and the journal charges neither article processing charges nor submission fees, as stated on its own site and confirmed in its DOAJ record.

What is the journal's ISSN and publisher? Electronic ISSN 2611-0075. The publisher is the Department of Architecture of the University of Bologna, in partnership with the university's Department of Visual, Performing and Media Arts and Department for Life Quality Studies. The stored JournalsWorld record showed a numeric publisher code; the verified publisher is the University of Bologna, which OpenAlex also records as host organisation.

Is HPA indexed in Scopus and DOAJ? Yes to both, on evidence fetched for this profile: the journal records its Scopus acceptance in June 2022, and the DOAJ search API returns a full listing for ISSN 2611-0075 (one result, checked October 2026). It is also listed in ERIH PLUS.

How long does review and publication take? The journal states that it communicates a judgment within two months of submission and publishes accepted articles within six months; DOAJ records a publication time of 16 weeks. Treat these as the journal's stated service levels at checking time.

What languages and lengths does it accept? Articles in English; reviews also in Italian. Full articles are expected between 20,000 and 80,000 characters, with an abstract and five keywords.

Must my paper answer a call for papers? No. Themed calls feed the Focus section, but Miscellanea accepts papers on any relevant postwar topic, and invited contributions and reviews complete each issue.

Bottom line

Histories of Postwar Architecture is a young journal that has already earned a senior journal's credentials: university-published in Bologna, free to read and free to publish in, double-blind reviewed, DOAJ-listed, Scopus-indexed since 2022 and rated Classe A by ANVUR for architecture since 2018. For historians of the postwar built environment — and for architects, conservation specialists and critics who need that history in usable form — it is one of the clearest open doors in the field. Cite it by its ISSN, 2611-0075, and read it at hpa.unibo.it.