Who Gets to Write?
January 2023
For our inaugural issue, Who Gets to Write?, we were interested in exploring the accessibility of architectural discourse. Our discipline is shaped by those among us who have time and space for writing and reflection—luxuries we, as newly-minted practitioners and academics, often find hard to come by. In fact, we started Architecture Writing Workshop as a way to structure our continued engagement with architectural writing and editing in the face of the demands of our daily work-life.
This issue includes our first roundtable discussion, Speaking of Writing, with Scott Colman, Sydney Shilling, and Brittany Utting; an essay by Stefan Novakovic, On the Economics of Writing (About Architecture); a building analysis by Mai Okimoto, A Neighborhood Within; and Matthew Allen on The Right to Read.
We’re excited to welcome you to the conversation.
Pouya Khadem, Sebastián López Cardozo, Mai Okimoto, and Lauren Phillips
with Scott Colman, Sydney Shilling, and Brittany Utting
On the Economics of Writing (About Architecture)
by Stefan Novakovic
by Matthew Allen
by Mai Okimoto
by Sebastián López Cardozo and Lauren Phillips
CROSS-TALK
I Would Prefer Not To, an oral history project produced by MIT’s Critical Broadcasting Lab, invites practitioners to reflect on the significance of rejecting an architectural commission. In the podcast’s November 2023 episode, host Ana Miljački speaks with Liz Diller (Diller Scofidio + Renfro) about instances when contentious commissions can offer avenues for subversion and positive change. Among other things, Diller reflects on the commission to design Moscow’s Zaryadye Park and the political context which led to her studio’s decision to undertake it.
PLAT 11: Soft equips its readers with tools for blurring and piercing through the disciplinary edges of architecture. In the journal’s latest issue, editors Jane van Velden and Paul DeFazio celebrate the conversational, the sensorial, the fuzzy. The collected contributions paint an architectural landscape of cooperation and compromise. Of note is an article by Hélène Frichot, “A Soft On for Caring Relationships,” which traces contemporary interpretations of the term “soft” in architecture and speculates on their broader significance for the field.
Figuring Territory, Canadian Centre for Architecture’s newest web issue, interrogates the relationship between the semantic implications of the term “territory” and its malleable realities. Edited by Claire Lubell, Alexandra Pereira-Edwards, and Andrew Scheinman, the issue sheds light on the perpetual figuration and re-figuration of territory. In “On Phantom Islands and Unknown Lands,” contributor Victoria Addona takes readers through a cartographic history of “phantom islands,” and reflects on the role of colonial powers in claiming control and ownership over unknown territories through mapping and figuration.
New York Review of Architecture’s 32nd print issue (Nov/Dec 2022), brings together a collection of essays, reviews, and columns to make sense of the world. (Even their classifieds are worth a read.) The topics covered are wide-ranging: Anjulie Rao asks what the student debt crisis means for architecture; Randa Omar finds some fault in recent architectural facelifts; Kate Wagner talks class at the American concert hall. Of particular note in the issue, Leslie Kern and Samuel Stein speak about the uses and misuses of the term gentrification, and consider the challenges of implementing Vienna-style social housing in the U.S. and Canada.
The Avery Review’s 59th issue (December 2022) covers a range of topics—the traces of social reproduction in the urban fabric, the articulation of dreams and aspirations in spaces, and the spatial legacies of slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean. In "Poetics of Disorientation and the Caribbean Reader,” contributor Isabel Guzzardo Tamargo describes the processes of witnessing and remembering placeless histories and landscapes through the lens of Kei Miller's poetry.
Log 55 (Summer 2022) gathers a series of articles under the broad theme of “Observations on architecture and the contemporary city,” with a subsection, “Notes on the Desert,” guest edited by Francesco Marullo. If the choice of words for the theme titles set a cool and unassuming tone—a decision likely stemming from the issue's origin as an open call—the articles themselves please and surprise. A particularly interesting take is Marija Maric’s in “Bricks, Blocks, and (Block) Chains,” which examines blockchain’s link to the commodification of land