Past Calls for Papers
Worlding. Energy. Transitions.
Across the planet, ecosystems and communities are threatened with perpetual wildfires, surging seas and coastal storms, and the radioactive dust and tailings of a new generation of industrial-scale mining that drives the energy transition at a planetary scale—among many other harrowing new realities. The planet is careening towards its worst global warming scenarios.[1] How can this sense of urgency contribute to a radical world restructuring rather than another depoliticized project of green neoliberalism and individual corporate responsibility? How can designers build—in pedagogy, representation, and praxis—the world of climate justice?
A radical body of scholarship and practice is emerging—one in which designers align themselves with the movements for climate and social justice, advocating for a different kind of political economy and society that could transform, among other things, the built environment. This worlding—a radical reimagining of world systems at multiple scales—represents a project of rupture with the historical patterns of extraction and racialization that underpin the present moment. So how might designers operate within this space? How might they generate new or reclaim existing practices to think, imagine, value, and act in ways that restructure, rather than reproduce relations of extractivism and toxicity? How might they build new forms of solidarity with movements at the frontlines of the climate crisis to envision, materialize, and govern this new energy order?
This themed issue aims to identify and amplify practices of design research and action that engage the concepts of worlding, transitions, and energy. We probe questions of system change in the socio-spatial reconstruction of energy, including: how to conceptualize such transformation—whether mitigation, adaptation, and transition, or, given the lack of sufficient political action, examine other notions such as revolution, reform, reconstruction, retreat, collapse, and survival? While we often benefit from and otherwise consume the growing body of technical research on building performance, various forms of technological and nature-based carbon dioxide removal, and other forms of computational climate research, this issue intends to collect works that are more expansive and systemic in their approach to climate justice and the energy transition. By worlding, we mean the use of media and methods like fiction, game design, storytelling, and what leaders of the Not An Alternative arts collective refer to as Red Natural History: a tradition of natural history that seeks to break the cycle of colonial reproduction in the discipline by leveraging its methods, tools, and institutional resources to support the broader, contemporary struggle for climate and environmental justice—though we are open to many forms of worlding beyond this frame. By energy transitions, we mean the shift or diversification from fossil fuel sources to other forms of technology (e.g. batteries, solar photovoltaics, and distributed generation and storage), including the disparate network of sites and non-sites (e.g. the mines, the waste disposal ponds, the manufacturing centers, and the end-use technological deployments) that might make a structural decarbonization possible along with the new forms of infrastructure, collectivity, governance, and ecology they imply and produce.
JAE accepts contributions in the categories of Essay, Design, Narrative, and Image. Essay manuscripts might contextualize earlier transitions in socio-technical energy systems—such as the shift from house-hold fuel wood to grid electricity, or the electrification of urban and rural areas in the 19th and 20th centuries worldwide. To do so, essays may critically look back—at historical analogs like Reconstruction, the New Deal, the Moonshot, Oil Crisis, and other periods of massive investment and experiments in energy systems—and forward—at speculative world-building proposals to reorganize human and planetary systems around decarbonization and decolonization. Contributions might also address specific architectural projects to highlight design’s complicity in the expansion and perpetuation of fossil capitalism—whether through carbon-intensive building materials, fossil-fuel intensive infrastructure of pipelines and roadways, and oil company headquarters—or to celebrate earlier experiments, with their frictions and failures, that transformed energy discourse and practice. Put another way, we are interested in the material histories of the political ecology of the energy system that are grounded in real places and real peoples’ stories.
Contributions in the categories of Design and Narrative might address the way that different dimensions and attributes of energy—social, material, systemic—might bear on the pedagogies and professional manifestations of this transformation. We are interested in contributions that situate energy technologies and low-carbon landscapes in the thickness of specific geographies that foreground their myriad contradictions—the supply matrices of, say, lithium-ion batteries that link resource communities like Narsaq, Greenland and the Atacama Desert of Chile with dense centers of renewable energy technology like Northern Virginia and the Land of the Living Skies in Canada. We are also interested in the broader media apparatus of design, including architectural drawings, models, and texts as well as board games, theaters and performative arts, graphic novels, and other genres of the political arts that manifest energy imaginaries as sites of material–political imagination.
Submissions could also take the form of discursive framing of images, syllabi, or pedagogic experiments, or serve as “keyword” entries that dislodge familiar terms or take on new terms, narratives, projects, and tactics of a reinvigorated design movement (to think of a few possible keywords: adaptive reuse, apocalypse, catastrophism, carbon sink, carbon budget, carbon calculator, carbon offset, carbon capture, carbon negative manufacturing, embodied energy, entropy, ecocide, eco-terrorism, metabolism, realism, sick building syndrome, sequestration, symbiosis). Throughout, we invite contributions that upend the normalized state of energy to imagine and build more just worlds.
The submission deadline for all manuscripts for this theme issue is February 5, 2024. Accepted articles will be published in issue 78.2 (Fall 2024). For author instructions please consult the author guide.
[1] As interim and assessment reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the United Nations Environment Programme illustrate.
Photo Caption: Mirror Shield Project, by Cannupa Hanska Luger. Action on November 18, 2016 at Oceti Sakowin Camp, Standing Rock, North Dakota © The artist. Photograph courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York City
Infidelities
What does it mean to be loyal? To a discipline, to its institutions, to a practice, to yourself…?
With these questions, we are interested in addressing issues of race, religion, and subjectivity in relation to architecture, cultural politics and spatial relations. As Muslim people of color working at the margins of architecture, art and social practice, we have always felt like infidels since we are not loyal to the discipline and its institutions, but neither are we loyal to the multiple belongings of ourselves. Yet, infidelity is neither refusal, criticality nor counter politics. It is a fertile ground that emerges through a certain discomfort with institutional power, social and moral codes, and rules that attempt to regulate behaviors. It has the potential to create transversal relations across difference.
If you feel such discomfort, we are looking to build affirmative agencies with you, wherever you may be.
In architecture, fidelity often translates to notions of accuracy and definition that lend a particular legitimacy and universality to forms of knowledge production. Conversely, infidelity might signal a mode of working with imprecision found through lower resolutions. By resolution we do not only mean the density of pixels in an image or screen, but the many technological processes that underpin the production of images and architectural representations. What kinds of designs might an ephemeral and imprecise approach to the digital produce? Ephemerality is also a quality of marginalized environments, such as those of the refugee camp, where an array of other design vocabularies challenge the glossary of mainstream architectural design. The camp produces its own temporality where terms such as ‘durability,’ ‘permanence,’ ‘sustainability,’ ‘infrastructure,’ and ‘urban’ can no longer be considered fundamental qualities of architecture.
Could infidelity be a way of thinking through forms of knowledge and knowing that have been left aside or labeled as ‘exceptional’, ‘local’ or ‘indigenous,’ suitable only for those geographies from which they arise? The colonial inheritance that shapes the grounds of academia tends to prioritize certain forms of knowledge as legitimate, to have a fidelity, and to be following a rigorous (and particular) methodology. Paradoxically, within design practice and theory, methodology becomes a crutch to evade meaningful processes of epistemic de-positioning and repositioning. In such a context, infidelity is a means to making worlds otherwise, outside universalized western paradigms. It signals our disloyalty to ontologies inapplicable to our pluriversal interests and incapable of making worlds that work for us. Such disloyalty is found in Chris Cornelius’ drawings reimagining Alcatraz, or David Fortin, Eladia Smoke, Wanda Dalla Costa and Elder Winnie Pitawanakwat’s Indigenous Peoples’ Space. It is also found in Feda Wardak’s work of building with communities at night while challenging systems of surveillance, Cave Bureau’s Anthropocene Museum and Dr. Thandi Loewenson’s “Whisper Network.”
What might infidelity mean as pedagogy? To operate within gendered and racialized institutional contexts, we, like all other marginalized peoples, take on personas to navigate the oppressive structures we call our working lives and contexts for study. As Moten and Harney have stated, the university might still be a refuge of sorts, but it is not the enlightened space we would want it to be, and so ‘one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can.’[1] We appropriate their phrasing to note that the only possible relationship to the university today is an infidel one; we know that to exist we must learn to be both inside and outside. Our engagements necessarily proliferate copies of ourselves and of our disciplines whose fidelity might be considered poor.
For this issue of the Journal of Architectural Education, we are looking for essays, designs, narratives and images (un-mappings, modified film-stills, text/picture chimeras, visual elegies, laments, ghazals, war-cries, love songs and drum beats…) that can build affirmative agencies across our diverse positionalities and locations. We are interested in thinking with infidelities as relations capable of producing other architectures and dreaming of new institutions that see disloyalty and inaccuracy as ethical modes of engagement. How might we produce infidel methodologies that not only question how, but who and what gets to be regarded as the poor copy? Why are certain traditions of thinking not allowed entry into the hallowed grounds of architectural theory? Why are Sufi cosmologies not allowed space next to Deleuzian virtualities? How might we as infidel researchers, practitioners and theorists, queer the conditions that shape our relationships with our multiple environments? How do we account for the situated knowledges we embody? What are the spatial implications of new vocabularies of infidel telling, writing, and making? Beyond the fictions of mainstream architectural production and pedagogy, what other worlds does an epistemology of infidelity open up for design?
The submission deadline for all manuscripts for this theme issue is July 31, 2023. Accepted articles will be published in issue 78.1 (Spring 2024). For author instructions please consult the author guide.
[1] Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013), 26.
INSPIRATIONS/CONTEXTS/UNGROUNDINGS
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WRITING/IMAGING: HEART BEATS AND DRUM-BEATS
1. Jamaal May – A Brief History of Hostility
https://poets.org/poem/brief-history-hostility
2. Brian Doyle – Joyas Voladoras
https://theamericanscholar.org/joyas-volardores/
3. Katherine McKittrick and Alexander G. Weheliye – 808s and Heartbreak
https://trueleappress.com/2017/10/12/808s-heartbreak/
4. Nass el Ghiwane – Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0vW3QJz3hQ&list=PLOFQ6rf2hbhQu9KNxq1P_c…
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METHODS/STRATEGIES: MAKING AND UNMAKING
1. Linda Tuhiwahi Smith. “Introduction.” In Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books, 1999.
2. Christina Sharpe. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
3. Glen Coulthard. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
4. Gayatri Spivak. Outside in the Teaching Machine New York: Routledge, 2012.
5. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Minor Compositions, 2013.
6. Winter School: Wolff Architects, with Ola Hassanain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTiniheUm3U
7. Sara Ahmed. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
8. Sara Ahmed. “Complaint as Queer Method.” Feminist Killjoys (blog). 24 March 2022. https://feministkilljoys.com/2022/03/24/complaint-as-a-queer-methodb/
9. Sara Ahmed. “Wound Up.” Feminist Killjoys (blog). 4 January 2017.https://feministkilljoys.com/2017/01/04/wound-up/
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LANDSCAPES/WORLD-SCAPES: KNOWING AND UN-KNOWING
1. Zoe Todd and Anja Kanngeiser. “From Environmental Kin Study to Environmental Case Study.” In History and Theory, Vol 59, No. 3, 2020, 385-393.
2. Nasra Abdullahi + Miriam Hillawi Abraham. “The Horn of Africa: Fracturing Timelines.” In The Funambulist. 21 June 2021.https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/they-have-clocks-we-have-time/the-ho…
3. Zoe Todd, Ozayr Saloojee and Émélie Desrochers-Turgeon. “Kerogenic Relations.”https://202122.transmediale.de/almanac/kerogenic-relations
4. Menna Agha and Ola Hassanain. There, is the city… And, here are my hands. Prague: VI PER Gallery, 2021.
5. Africa is a Country (http://www.africasacountry.com)
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ERROR, (IM)PRECISION AND UNLEARNING
1. Francesca Hughes. The Architecture of Error: Matter, Measure, and the Misadventures of Precision. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014.
2. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London ; Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books, 2019.
3. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. “Queering Homophily.” In Pattern Discrimination, edited by Apprich et al. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. https://mediarep.org/bitstream/handle/doc/13259/Pattern_Discrimination_5…
4. Donna J. Haraway. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press Books, 2016.
5. Jack Halberstam. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Deserts
This issue of the Journal of Architectural Education explores the environment of the desert in its geopolitical, infrastructural, and aesthetic dimensions, acknowledging that deserts continue to transform the architectural imagination and collective intelligence. Historically, from predominantly Eurocentric and Western perspectives, deserts have been considered precarious and unsafe environments where hostile climatic circumstances and extreme temperatures prevent life from thriving. The desert — from the Latin desertum, left, abandoned, withdrawn—has for centuries been reduced to a mystical trope: interpreted as unknowable and sublime. The architectural discipline is also implicated in the misconception of deserts, with critics like Reyner Banham arguing that in this environment “nothing officially exists.” Yet there is life here—rich in history, traditions, and the cohabitation of humans, flora, and fauna.
Some of the earliest and most enduring civilizations emerged and thrived through the desert, where they have been subject to the forces of environmental racism for centuries. The contemporary desert is a physical and conceptual battlefield where spatial conflicts pose existential threats to human and non-human life. The desert is a site of divergent and often diametrically opposed spatial typologies, from nomadic camps to military bases, ancestral cities to agricultural civilizations, industrial complexes to illegal resorts, utopian communities to logistical epicenters. The desert, in this light, is not ‘absent’ or ’empty,’ but a site of abundance co-opted by violent occupations, extractive campaigns, and colonialist expansions, exacerbating violence across the most contested regions of the planet.
We suggest that the desert demands renewed attention.
Today, deserts cover 33% of the land surface of the planet, including cold and hot deserts on every continent. With climate change and its resultant migrations, the extent, form, and population of this arid geography will shift dramatically in the coming decades. It will encompass new territories, attracting new settlements, assembling new constituencies, demanding new approaches to scholarship, pedagogy, and design in the drylands.
Deserts are sites of immeasurable vastness, entangled with deep time and the magnitude of the earth, host to numerous forms of living from minerals to insects, from plants to animals and humans. Beyond reductive readings of deserts as conceptual abstractions or conditions of scarcity, this issue seeks to unravel a wide-ranging diversity of resources beneath the deserts’ alleged homogeneity—a productive drive for life instead of indifference. Perhaps, in this moment of extreme climatic changes, global warming, and mass extinctions, the desert might offer an opportunity to question the principles of our unsustainable ways of living and to suggest different strategies of coexistence between humans and non-humans, life and non-life.
Imagining this issue as a non-linear constellation of ecological, cultural, logistical, and critical interpretations, we encourage contributions considering the desert as not only a condition against the logic of occupation and displacement, violence and extraction, precariousness and erosion, but also as an enduring place of cultures, rituals, poetics, mythologies, imaginaries, alliances, and forms of living that call the desert home, thriving and resisting entropic tendencies: lessons for an alternative understanding and a radically different future.
We are looking for different contributions able to unveil the diversity and complexity of the desert ecosystem through a multiplicity of voices and perspectives. Essays might address how design and pedagogical practices theoretically and critically articulate the notion of desert within the global environmental and political crisis. Designs, instead, might focus on specific projects by authors and/or their students that investigate, research, or speculate upon the desert and its multitudinous expressions of life (human and non-human). Narratives might focus on sharing brief material or cultural histories—or more personal, direct, and experimental story- telling—which often exceeds disciplinary requirements. Finally, (Cartographic) Images may include provocative visual material able to render, describe, analyze, and map the desert in its ceaseless condition of becoming.
The submission deadline for all manuscripts for this theme issue is February 6, 2023. Accepted articles will be published in issue 77:2 (Fall 2023). For author instructions please consult the author guide.
Reparations!
Is it possible to continue imagining an asymmetrically broken future without addressing the historical urgency of reparations? If gentrification is the means by which historically accumulated wealth reenacts its racial history in our present spatial reality, then why has a decade-plus of concern about gentrification not already generated wider speculations about redistribution and reparations? What if reparations do not require inventing processes of wealth transfer from scratch or tracking people in new ways, but rather redirecting flows and patterns that are already here? What if reparations and gentrification are similar processes, running in reverse directions?
Because massive displacement, exploitation, erasure, capture, and predation are proportional to the wealth amassed via the enslavement of Black and Indigenous peoples, imaginaries about the future cannot continue to overlook the imperative of reparations. Reparations for the enslavement of Black and Indigenous peoples might be addressed in the context of ecological justice, climate change, land use, aesthetics, historical narratives, and many other aspects of architectural practice and education. Questions about reparations might challenge what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang identify as the “settler-moves to innocence” that aim to reconcile settler guilt and complicity and rescue settler futility, critiques of generic “place-based” development or other urbanistic patterns, as well as dialogue with movements toward defunding of the police and the broader abolition of the prison industrial complex.
Reparations! invites architectural design proposals, speculative studies, and scholarly research addressing reparations in the built and destroyed environment. As architecture gives shape to asymmetrical effects on the environment, we ask how reparations look, operate, and affect Black and Indigenous communities, and what the potential effects are upon the state of architectural education and practice. How can architectural institutions work towards reparations? What happens after the fuel of gentrification ignites the engine of reparation? What are the futurisms that amend Black and Indigenous peoples, and reconstruct the world of the subaltern and the dispossessed? What models of pedagogies of reparations are currently being deployed, rendered, and imagined?
This themed issue will address the possibilities, challenges, and varieties of reparations by inviting contributions that address the tensions between accumulation and redistribution, erasure and visibility, disenfranchisement and collective empowerment, historical neglect and social and racial justice. Design as Scholarship contributions might address how design and pedagogical practices are addressing questions of collective repair and stances against hegemony and white supremacy. Scholarship of Design contributions might reveal historical accounts of reparations at the intersection of abolitionist, decolonial, antiracist practices operating within and against conventional architectural practices and institutions. Reparations! also invites critiques, calls for action, design projects, community building programs, manifestos, and speculative narratives of emancipatory futures in the form of Micro-Narratives and Discursive Images.
The submission deadline for all manuscripts for this theme issue is July 30, 2022. Accepted articles will be published in issue 77:1 (Spring 2023). For author instructions please consult the author guide.
Pedagogies for a Broken World
The 2000s have so far foregrounded a century of things breaking down all around, yet measures of exclusion, erasure, and violence have shaped the world for centuries. From stolen Indigenous lands to forced and enslaved labor, systemic inequalities and inequities have functioned as a cruel common denominator across cultures and histories. Continued and growing economic gaps, the rising specter of white supremacy, together with neglected and crumbling infrastructures, melting ice caps, rising oceans, and the persistent inadequacy of affordable housing, healthcare, and education form a continuum of necropolitical practices, of which police brutality against Black and Brown lives has been the most agonizing expression. Historically, architectural pedagogy has been centered around and upheld the white supremacist, progressivist worldview. What happens when architectural pedagogy is, instead, centered around various forms of breakdown and related epistemologies?
Breakdowns have world-disclosing properties. For broken-world theorists such as Steven J. Jackson, Shannon Mattern, and Achille Mbembe, breakdowns reveal the real limits and fragility of the world. Such bold and raw recognition of the fragility of and prospects for the world—firmly situated within a specific historical moment—is fundamental for the necessary adjustment, reframing, and fixing of it. Indeed, seeing the world for what it is enables recasting our characterization of it: from “broken” into “unfinished,” from narratives of progress to tactics of resistance and care. Architecture serves as not just the stage for such breakdowns but, at times, as the very means through which social ideals and their challenges are constructed and disseminated. Injustice, inequality, and white supremacy have been deeply embedded in architecture’s protocols, tools, and organization of labor, as well as in its means of production and education. Thus, architecture is deeply entangled in both the brokenness of the world and the potential for its reframing.
Pedagogies for a Broken World aims to provide a platform for examining architectural education in the context of a broken world. What is architecture in that context and where and how do we teach it? How must the social and legal contracts change to adjust and fix architectural pedagogy for the broken world? What might constitute a broken-world pedagogy, both now and historically? How can architecture be engaged in the pedagogies of resistance, care, and repair? Pedagogies for a Broken World aims to demonstrate that these questions and practices are not only relevant socially, but also spatially, and to promote novel forms of scholarship and collaboration. Vital changes are already underway—some formal, situated at universities and involving reshaping curricula and handbooks alike, while others occur outside of the domain of the university, establishing new connections and new spaces in which co-learning, co-authoring, and co-liberating take place. This issue of JAE aims to capture these initiatives as well as imagine new ones, inviting a wholesale reimagination of architectural education and its priorities.
Contributions in the categories of Design as Scholarship and Micro-Narratives might address the way that different dimensions and manifestations of brokenness—social, material, systemic—affect forms of practice and pedagogy. They could take the form of manifestoes or discursive framing of syllabi, as well as lecture samples, along with short narratives that elucidate links between design and pedagogical practices and systemic, social, and climactic brokenness. Contributions in the category of Scholarship of Design might reveal different historical attitudes toward myriad forms of brokenness through the examination of pedagogical projects, schools, architectural and space-making practices. We are especially interested in contributions that frame epistemological lessons from different legacies of dispossession that have been foundational to the formative histories of both the land and the peoples of the world.
The submission deadline for all manuscripts for this theme issue is February 1, 2022, 5 pm US Eastern Time Zone. Accepted articles will be published in issue 76:2 (October 2022). For author instructions please consult the author guide.
Health
Architecture has, for centuries, been understood to foster individual health, public health, physical health, and mental health. And yet, in the face of major public health crises, architecture is implicated in complications that it alone cannot solve. Businesses, governments, schools, and others have responded to COVID-19 with a mix of individual, social, technological, and design strategies such as temporary barriers between people, physical distancing, and improved building ventilation. And yet, these interventions cannot address the fact that the virus’s impact falls unevenly along stark economic and demographic lines, and urban and rural divides. Further, Black Lives Matter has gained global traction and exposed state violence against people of color as a major public health issue, catalyzing public spaces and streets as sites of action and protest. Architecture and the built environment are newly understood as instigators, agents, and mediators of power dynamics that have as much potential to contribute to health crises as to remedy them, and scholars and practitioners are critically reconsidering what constitutes both individual and public health.
This issue of JAE aims to assemble a collection of research, design projections, ideas, and opinions that interpret anew the contemporary and the historical relation between health and architecture. From the scale of buildings to interiors, from landscapes to urbanism, and from individual to public spaces, what do architects, landscape architects, urban designers, architectural historians, and architectural theorists make of architecture’s current or past relationship to health? Contributions to the category of Scholarship of Design and Micro-Narrative might reveal and contextualize different historical and contemporary turns toward health through examinations of buildings, materials, architects, practices, infrastructures, and larger systems from immigration to economics to climate change. Contributions to the category of Design as Scholarship might interrogate the question of designing architecture for health: what kinds of social, technological, or political agendas can designers enact in a world increasingly anxious about health, without assuming health to be a binary condition of “well” or “unwell,” or resorting to ableism? And in an increasingly global, digital, and neoliberal landscape, how will access to these spaces be facilitated? How does public infrastructure facilitate public health? How will architects re-imagine individual and collective spaces of health and well-being, and the palliative landscapes that contribute to these? How will architects create spaces of patient-hood? What once-alternative approaches to daily life will become the norm? How can designers balance the merits of increased digital surveillance and control with the threats to society and privacy? What habits, outcomes, and practices are beyond control? How does design address newly reimagined forms of democracy, of citizenship? These questions, and many others, are at the heart of this issue.
The submission deadline for all manuscripts for this theme issue is July 30, 2021, 5 pm US Eastern Time Zone. Accepted articles will be published in issue 76:1 (March 2022). For author instructions please consult: https://www.jaeonline.org/pages/submit.
building stories
Once upon a time, this killed that. It was a dark and stormy night, indeed.
Even so, all cultures build and all cultures tell stories. Both stories and buildings orient our lives, but in different ways. In stories we are othered. That is, stories of others – real or imagined, in books or on a screen – help us to see from another perspective, to empathize, to imagine other ways to cope with disasters and trauma, and to expand our capacity to be human. Architecture, intentional or not, frames our lives and our world, allowing us to see the world in new and even unexpected ways. We experience both buildings and stories over time. Just as books and films offer a variety of temporalities – narrative time, story time, and reading/watching time – architecture unfolds across a range of time, through our daily and annual routines and rituals, and on and on, across our lifetimes. As a built artifact, buildings weather and materials age. The meaning and experience of buildings, just like books and films, evolves. The sharing of stories and the shared experience of architecture build connections among us. Stories, similar to architectural form, are translated and interpreted across time and cultures and help to form, and also reveal, our identities – as individuals and cultures.
How do the acts of storytelling and building intertwine? What possibilities emerge when we consider the building of worlds and the worlds of building? How has architecture been inspired by stories? How has it been understood through fiction, film, and other forms of storytelling? How has it contained stories? Buildings are characters in books and film. Cities support plot in genres such as noir fiction and film, creating atmospheres and environments that are as essential as the corpse. And, stories envision places we have never been (or that may not exist) and radically reframe places we already know. How do architects utilize storytelling techniques, existing narratives, and invented plots to imagine real possibilities and possible realities? Further, what is the role of storytelling in pedagogical practices? Can the histories we write and the projects we draw, offer a room of one’s own or reveal an invisible city?
The Journal of Architectural Education issue 75:2 seeks Micronarratives, Design as Scholarship, and Scholarship of Design submissions that investigate the relationship between building and storytelling.
Please review the Author Guide prior to submitting your manuscript. Please complete your submission at: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/joae.
Built
[The architect] should not mistake the mere bulk of the work for a true achievement; but above all he must inspect each building for the rare and precious artifice it may contain.
Leon Battista Alberti
On the Art of Building in Ten Books
Is there any room left for the rare and precious artifice that the built may possess? Sarcastic as it may sound, the question denotes a crisis. Architectural design faculty are increasingly turning away from the activity of building toward other modes of work that fulfill the requirements of academic promotion.[1] Articles, books, installations and exhibitions have become more secure routes to produce research, yielding the ironic question: why build? At the same time, architectural practices have less time and fewer resources for research and speculation.
Tacitly or explicitly, building in the most basic and bare sense can be a unique form of inquiry for architects. A building requires rigor in practice and conception. It is a repository, not just of questions, but also of responses that contain scholarship opportunities for designers, builders and/or inhabitants. How do we position this knowledge to shape critical discourses that engage processes, technological impacts, and other topics within the field? What are the philosophical interrogations and responses that “the built” offers?
With this issue we make room for knowledge and questions that emerge from the built. What are the particular and critical discoveries that can be garnered from a close relationship with the edifice and its conception? Does engagement with the social, cultural and economic forces actualized outside of the studio space, through the act of building, generate particular forms of scholarship? Can we simulate this mode of working in the academy? How does pedagogy consider the contingencies of building?
The Journal of Architectural Education issue 75:1 seeks Design as Scholarship and Scholarship of Design submissions that originate from architectural projects which have been built. How do we assess the value of the most basic of architectural activities anew? This is an occasion for architects and design scholars to reflect on built work, either personal or from others, and to create scholarship that situates such knowledge within contexts that can establish new directions for architecture to get back to the matter of building.
The submission deadline for all manuscripts for this theme issue is July 31, 2020, 5 pm US Eastern Time Zone. Accepted articles will be published in issue 75:1 (March 2021). For author instructions please consult: https://www.jaeonline.org/pages/submit.
[1] McKinsey Global Institute, Reinventing Construction: A Route to Higher Productivity (McKinsey&Company: February 2017).
Othering
What else is there? Who else is other?
In the immediate global order of the post-Holocaust, post-Hiroshima world, scholars took on the task of expanding the stories we tell of ourselves to give accounts of others. In anthropology, geography, sociology, literature, art, and history, intellectuals developed methods and approaches that positioned human cultures in new relations to those formerly excluded, subordinated or defined as other. Scholars proffered ecological understandings of human life and the built environment, attentive to the complexity and fragility of the natural world and global cultures. More recently, research on gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class, for example, has been a powerful tool for challenging our reliance on grand narratives. Within architecture, it has helped to evaluate inequalities and to expand our study of actors in the creation of cultural landscapes and built environments to include all those buried in history. Because these approaches reflect upon their own practices of othering, they have helped make us aware of the limitations of our own experiences, and encouraged empathy towards differing perspectives. As designers, educators, and theorists, acknowledging who/what/how we other is one way to take responsibility for our privileges and prejudices, and to appreciate how the world is shaped by difference.
How do we take stock of othering in architecture and to what end? The political and activist concerns animating discussions today produce a matrix of possible otherings: architecture as an analytic and practice that interrogates the ways we distinguish, label, and categorize people, institutions, codes, and norms; and, in reverse, how attention to the processes of othering can interrogate architecture’s own exclusions in education, history, geographies, and practices. What bodies are identified or excluded from different forms of representation? In what ways do the sociological structures of architectural education produce others, that is, subjects and subject matters beyond the pale of campus walls? To what degree can architectural practice promote equity, diversity, and inclusion, especially in representational and symbolic practices that police or subvert social order? In short, the possibility to question how architecture participates in distributing the “us” and the “other” is now upon us. Despite their relegation to the margins, others have shaped architecture’s trajectories as fundamental figures in its formulation and legitimization. Through their absent presence they complicate, critique and challenge basic assumptions and traditional practices. They represent and manifest difference and diversity through the intersections of class, race, age, sexuality, disability, and gender.
The Journal of Architectural Education issue 74:2 seeks Scholarship of Design, Design as Scholarship, and Micro-Narratives that address othering in the pedagogy, practice, and study of architecture. Given the myriad of possible others—geographical, anthropological, sociological, and psychological inclusions and exclusions—how might an assessment of othering in architecture look? How do representations and image-making practices construct an other? How do architecture’s others occupy positions of power? In what way do building codes, zoning regulations, or participatory decision-making structure segregation processes? Does professional architecture’s commitment to competition culture open practice to others? How might we evaluate, promote, or resist activist strategies for inclusion, such as experimental curriculums, alternative admissions criteria, and/or decolonized studio culture? How do we postulate or challenge future architectures of othering?
The submission deadline for all manuscripts for this theme issue is February 1, 2020, 5 pm US Eastern Time Zone. Accepted articles will be published in issue 74:2 (October 2020). For author instructions please consult: https://www.jaeonline.org/pages/submit.
H2O
As an expression of aesthetic luxury, water has found its way into architecture through reflective pools, festive fountains, and even suburban swimming pools. While deeply experiential, such treatment discounts the many pluralities and values that water holds. It is a natural resource, an ecosystem to be managed, and, even, a sacred element. From a celebratory role in one culture, water in another context, becomes a critical metric for human development. As an economy, it is a commodity to be sold, bought and fought for across personal, state and national borders. As the human race enters an epoch marked by critical water issues, how might its role and value be defined, re-defined and challenged through the built environment? Across scales, in projects ranging from modest to expansive, design reveals a culture’s attitude towards water. Indeed, values about water become subconsciously embedded in design proposals, reflecting a multiplicity of world-views. How, then, can deeply ingrained values about water be brought to the surface and challenged through the practice of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design and planning? How can designers question and then craft changes in socio-cultural, religious, environmental, political and economic values regarding water?
From non-design criteria, values are developed that underpin the planning of cities, the designs of critical landscape infrastructure, conservation of aquatic habitats, celebratory public places, and the detailing of taps and toilets in buildings. When water is scarce, values underpin policies regulating rain-water and snow harvesting in private buildings. Values encourage massive expenditures for the unsustainable infrastructural footprints of many north-American cities just as resilient landscape infrastructure is dismissed as mere greenery. As sea-levels rise around the world, values surreptitiously dictate which communities will survive and which will decline. Values govern the massive habitat loss along the Gulf Coast as it succumbs to shipping corridors while the world casts a disapproving eye on the Arabian Gulf for its celebration of oil wealth through desert water follies. Values drive millions in India to visit one of the most polluted rivers in the world, just as the Army Corps of Engineers sets apart unsustainable riverine flood infrastructure as untouchable. And while some developed nations have the luxury of liking or disliking composting or low-flush toilets, many in developing countries have no choice. Water and its availability, quantity, quality, modality, price, management, and use affects public policies, federal budgets, capital markets, election campaigns, public health, food security, and housing. This issue of the Journal of Architectural Education asks, how can design progressively negotiate these many pluralities across scales and concerns?
Submissions for JAE 74:1 may include interrogations or provocations, reflections or predictions, drawn from across a range of design disciplines, scope and scales. Scholarship of Design submissions may reveal, analyze and question values through theoretical or critical lenses. Design as Scholarship submissions may uncover and speculate ways in which designs of the built environment – from systems, processes, places to objects and details – challenge or perpetuate these values. We are particularly interested in historical precedents, manifestos, and anticipatory projections which undertake the kind of radical reframing towards water that may, in turn, inform future development in the Anthropocene.
The submission deadline for all manuscripts for this theme issue is August 1, 2019. Accepted articles will be published in issue 74.1 (Spring 2020). For author instructions please consult the author guide.
Work
Architects have always been concerned with the effects of what their design produces: What do our buildings/environments look like? How are they experienced? How do they perform? Concerns for how architecture is produced, however, have been largely sidestepped until more recently when digital fabrication and various types of information delivery systems recast the nature of how we work and the types of skills necessary to perform various tasks related to the production of buildings.
Our social and ethical responsibility as designers in relation to labor does, however, have a legacy. Nineteenth and early twentieth century theorists’ attention to workers, be they builders (think John Ruskin) or designers (think Adolf Loos and Walter Gropius) addressed issues of labor in a period of industrial and economic transformation. Today, in a radically changed global context, can we similarly rethink work? With our work increasingly undervalued and often unrewarding, is it possible to reevaluate the nature of what we do, how we perform tasks, with whom we collaborate, and under what ethical directives? Within broader shifts in what constitutes labor for design professionals, how can architects lead, nudge, and recalibrate the labor of those in related fields and for ourselves? And furthermore, how can architectural education acknowledge, assist, and even innovate in this recalibration?
Without making an Arendtian distinction between work and labor, we make the assumption that work and labor are two sides of the same coin. Work is what an architect does in their daily life; labor is their role in the larger economic equation. But even here, historical and theoretical positions of this sort – as they pertain to architecture – need to be debated. Where should our labor be focused – in service, in making, or in the production of information? Are there constructive moments of intersections between these activities? If we still believe that architectural production operates in the midst of historical conditions of labor, management, and resources, is it now possible to survey where, in this digital and neoliberal era, architectural work is or is not singular, in the past and in the present, in order to theorize a more meaningful future? How might studio, history/theory, professional practice, and fabrication/structures courses all become arenas for this speculation?
The Journal of Architectural Education Issue 73:2 seeks Scholarship of Design, Design as Scholarship, and Micro-Narratives that address educating architects for better empowerment and more adept participation in our contemporary society. Given the myriad types of work architects produce – from imaging representations that engender new worlds, to integrating advance technology for building, to theorizing “design” and “professionalism” – what is the academy’s role in preparing students to be smart, agile, and responsible professionals? What training should be reinforced to redirect hegemonic values to address inclusivity and diversity? How should we envision the labor of architects in the next 10, 20, 50 years? How can the academy model the ethos and aspirations we hope to produce as a society and be a model for collaborative work?
The submission deadline for all manuscripts for this theme issue is February 1, 2019. Accepted articles will be published in issue 73.2 (Fall 2019). For author instructions please consult the author guide.
Atmospheres
From Yves Klein’s Fire Fountain, to Andrea Branzi’s interior spaces of No-stop City, to Nicholas Schoeffer’s Cybernetic Sculptures, to Francois Roche’s I’ve heard about, and Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project, a wide range of architects have searched for ways to produce experiential environments in which the object of architecture acts on the psychological condition at multiple levels. With increasing technological intensity architects are capable of generating augmented realities, virtual worlds, and responsive environments. Projects are conceived of and produced at the convergence architecture and other fields of inquiry such as psychology, physiology, and neuroscience. All this combined with the extensity of information networks and the widespread use of mediated tools that regulate every aspect of our life, including our bodies, the atmospheric dimension of the architectural project calls for a redefinition of past theories from the phenomenological to functionalist approaches.
While the architectural model conventionally approaches the atmospheric dimension in terms of its influence on the senses, this issue of the Journal of Architectural Education proposes to revisit the idea of the atmospheric through the lens of the experiential economy, hypermediated culture, and the politics of global communities. What is the nature of an atmospheric architecture in the post-digital age? In a world saturated with screens of all kinds, how is architecture generating or reenacting atmospheric conditions? With the emergence of new forms of vision, often addressed as immersive, augmented, or engineered, how might the architectural field engage with scientific studies that question the potential psychological and physiological impact of architecture on human experience? While such transdisciplinary approach questions the capability of the architectural object to bridge the physical, artificial, and virtual dimensions of space, what would be the nature of an experimental architecture capable of influencing our sense of space, its materiality, and morphology? Further, what would be the conditions of its representation?
The Journal of Architectural Education, Issue 73:1 seeks Scholarship of Design, Design as Scholarship, and Micro-Narratives that approach the notion of atmosphere in architecture from its multiple aspects, to include the political, social, and/or cultural. What is the modus operandi of an atmospheric architecture? How would it be experimentally formed? What would be a pedagogical program capable of generating atmospheres as an objective? Submissions may include work that reveal the history and theory of atmospheres in architecture; report on new pedagogical and experimental models that question the impact of visualization, simulation, and fabrication technologies on the human perception of atmospheres; and/or examine design methods that transform our understanding of atmospheres.
The submission deadline for all manuscripts for this theme issue is August 1, 2018. Accepted articles will be published in issue 73.1 (Spring 2019). For author instructions please consult the author guide.
preserve
Traditionally understood as the post-operative process through which elements of the built environment – buildings, districts, landscapes – attain cultural significance, the discipline of preservation continues well-established modes of engagement: the critical consideration of, and advocacy for, cultural artifacts through close evaluation and written/drawn support as well as the stabilization of those artifacts through often ingenious technical means. Yet, preservation’s umbrella is growing, with the expansion of the discipline occurring on several fronts.
The first of these expansions is, it might be argued, nearly as old as the discipline itself; the broadening definition of what merits consideration. While previous generations grappled with whether such “unorthodox” artifacts as utilitarian structures, Googie architecture, or even Modernist works were worthy of preservation, we now ask the same of the ephemeral. For example, how do we think about pollution as an unintended human mark? How do we ascribe value to the night sky, which is not shaped by human hands but rather by the meanings that human cultures attach to it? Meanwhile, shifts in the way architects think about the material and energy regimes associated with the things they create have begun to elongate the time periods under their consideration – in some cases drastically so. When a technology as simple as cladding is understood as dissipating energy gradients in service of the work the building is performing, have we arrived at a point where buildings presuppose their own preservation? Are buildings becoming Ships of Theseus intended to allow material/energy flows to wash through them over millennia and, if so, how does one solve this paradox of preservation? Still others are actively questioning the modes and tools of preservation practice, exploring the power of dance, installation, sound, and other non-traditional means to preserve. By overlaying event on space do these practitioners cast artifacts in a different light and engender a new appreciation of them? Surely these experimental preservationists share an affinity with many of those who view architecture primarily as a cultural practice and who, calling on a habit of mind long established in preservation, often find themselves trading in the currency of time rather than that of form.
The Journal of Architectural Education, Issue 72:2 seeks Scholarship of Design, Design as Scholarship, and Micro-Narratives that critically examine the shifting intellectual landscape of preservation. Has preservation truly overtaken us? Is it time to redraw and/or erase disciplinary boundaries between preservation and architecture? What do we undertake when we preserve, by what means is it accomplished, and at what moment(s)? Submissions may include work that examines the history and theory of preservation with respect to these changes, describes emerging paradigms in preservation, or proposes pedagogical approaches or practice methods that interrogate the changing nature of the discipline.
The submission deadline for all manuscripts for this theme issue is February 1, 2018. Accepted articles will be published in issue 72.2 (Fall 2018). For author instructions please consult the author guide.
a/to project
“World of particular secret affinities: palm tree and feather duster, hairdryer and Venus de Milo, champagne bottles, prostheses, and letter-writing manuals.”
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
To have an “idea,” architects have long experienced, consists in embarking on the adventurous project of letting it emerge through a mode of production that simultaneously entails forms of theorizing practice and practicing theory. Often the possession of an idea is contested by the reality of encountering it, anew, in the unfolding of a project. Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Carceri etchings, Zaha Hadid’s The Peak calligraphic drawings, Achim Menges’ FAZ Pavilion biomimetic studies, all portray a body of knowledge where the project becomes the very same search and discovery of a and another project. In a state of remaining open but defined, speculative but mnemonic, infinite but confined, projects are tools for thinking before they transcend into other languages. For many reasons, however, the “stuff” that generates the full life of a project is often undisclosed. Drawings, models, startling encounters and discoveries, failed experiments and changes of course, the matter that matters to the signification of a project seems to play a secondary role when the final project is disclosed.
What artifacts and actions have designers explored to discover their projects? Normative drawings and models that are scaled versions of the proposed exist. But what else is there? A series of digitally fabricated plaster casts? A prototypical detail? A registration of material weathering? A production workflow? The ostensibly fleeting nature of everything that surrounds and constructs the evolution of an idea into a building or product comprises the projection of a project, and thus, before a project becomes a noun, it is a verb: to project. This forms a constellation of practical and theoretical actions that perform in all kinds of directions, intentions and encounters. With all its contradictions, mistakes and unforeseen outcomes, the full life of a project includes an architectural story that is rarely told. Therefore, making visible the materiality of an entire project suggests a valuable tool for learning. To project is to go beyond a surface or an edge and it is within this intrinsically transgressive nature that projects are not just things, but active places for discovery.
The Journal of Architectural Education Issue 72:1 seeks Design as Scholarship and Micro-Narratives that critically examine and expose the project and projection of architecture as a tool for thinking. This may include work that engages with experimental forms of projection, processes of material and speculative translations, drawings and artifacts that consciously make a project, as well as unexpected instances and narratives that disrupt a project towards other explorations. Submissions may also include projects of projects, and projecting and projectable works that intersect the practice of architecture, pedagogical methodologies and critical demonstrations of what may constitute an architectural project. This call seeks to uncover the side of architectural projects that is always there, but rarely seen.
Please note, this issue is not accepting scholarship of design.
Environments
The rise of the Anthropocene—the era of humanity’s radical transformation of the planet—is a long-overdue acknowledgement that the environment is inseparably conflated with the world constructed by humanity. This is recognition that not only has the scope of human activity reached a point at which it has the capacity to fundamentally alter the geophysical processes of the planet, but also a realization that the environment itself is a human construction rather than a neutral description. With etymological roots in the acts of surrounding and enclosing, the environment is both a space and a representation: it situates humans within a world, and defines the manner in which that world is understood, experienced, and engaged. This makes the environment a fundamentally architectural issue. Rather than simply the context within which architecture performs, the environment is actually defined by architecture—and, like architecture, it has been and continues to be manifested in various incarnations with multiple meanings and implications. These various environments are revealed at all of the scales at which architecture operates, such as a room, a building, a façade, a city, and an infrastructure.
Since technology plays a significant role in framing the “nature” of the environment, it is not surprising that it has been invoked as both the source of environmental degradation as well as the hope for its rectification. Having been almost universally described in terms of quantifiable biophysical phenomena—such as global warming, desertification, deforestation, pollution, and resource exploitation—the environment has been primarily framed as a mere collection of resources to be quantified and technologically sustained for human use. The architectural discipline has mirrored this narrow understanding—having emphasized the development and incorporation of green technologies and materials, as well as the quantification or resources through LEED evaluation and certification. Is resource quantification, however, the only way to understand environmental performance? Are there qualitative forms of performance that might sponsor new and potentially valuable environments? Is there another way to understand technology’s relationship to environments other than simply as a deus ex machina capable of preserving humanity’s unsustainable tendencies through a perceived mitigation of their negative effects? Can humanity’s relationship to its environments be fundamentally transformed rather than simply sustained? Are there other scales at which this relationship can be interrogated?
The Journal of Architectural Education Issue 72:2 seeks Scholarship of Design, Design as Scholarship, and Micro-Narratives that critically examine architecture’s prevailing approaches toward environments, and which speculate on possible alternatives. This may include work that engages environmental philosophy, the history and future of environmental technology, interrogates the limits of human perception and measurement, examines the means and scope of human control over natural variation, explores the chronic nature of technological accidents and crises that arise from the limitations of such control, examines new approaches to architectural pedagogy that extend the scope of architecture’s engagement with environments, and manifest new areas of human engagement with the natural world that transform our relationship and understanding of environments.