Thresholds 54: Record

Edited by Hana Meihan Davis and Bridget Peak. 

Thresholds, the annual peer-reviewed journal produced by the MIT Department of Architecture and published by the MIT Press, is now accepting submissions for Thresholds 54: Record.

Noun / An embodied account, or collected evidence of the past, especially kept in writing, image, or some other enduring form.

Verb / To intentionally transcribe in lasting form, with the goal of preservation or safekeeping for future reference, reproduction, or recovery—officially or unofficially.

A record is inheritance, to record is empowerment. Records are not merely collected data; recording erases and instantiates. History exists as a constellation of traces we piece together—ghosts of what came before, haunting the world around—in us as we are in them. Our planet, our cities, our bodies keep score. Each mine drilled, every foundation laid, even the whispers of pollution left by past empires are blips on a geologic time scale that betray human conquest. Implicated more than most, the architect’s built and unbuilt records impress themselves above and below Earth’s surface. The artist intervenes, creates, fabricates, and destroys records of countless varieties. The historian sees records in material, building worlds from broken vases, from photographs, paintings, and species now extinct. Today, the act of recording has reached unprecedented frequencies. How do we interpret and interact with records in the present? Do our tweets and reels comprise a communal record, or merely crowd out coherence—censorship by way of accumulation? How are histories redacted and rewritten? How can we reclaim the authority of the record in the face of our colonial legacy? Between the records we create and the ones we inherit, is there a productive space for us to intervene in the inevitability of our trace? 

Thresholds 54: Record invites you into this liminal space between noun and verb, it grapples with friction between the record and the act of recording. We seek to explore the duality of record / record in art and architecture, through history, criticism, and future imaginary. We are interested in contributions across disciplines, geographies and timescales, in the role record(ing) plays in both unworlding and rebuilding. We welcome writing on records intentional and incidental, recording active and passive. What new stories can be told with the lost Fatimid archive of a Cairo synagogue? Who determines fact and fiction, authorship and ownership at the Smithsonian? How might activists in Hong Kong or elsewhere resist erasure in the face of oppression? Can a documentarian evidence the harms of fracking to design a different future? Will record[ing] be our recovery?

Clay tablets and oracle bones, paper and PDF, trails of 0101010 that litter the digital sphere, sonic recordings, landfills brimming with waste material, artefacts of people moved across territories, museums, national archives, sites of excavation and extraction, architectural models, criminal records…traces that result from an active recording are but a fraction of the debris we leave in our wake. Record[ing] mediates between an unpredictable future and the legacy of our past. 

Submission deadline: June 1, 2025

Submission guidelines
Please send your submission to thresh [​at​] mit.edu. Written submissions should be in English, approximately 3000 words in length, and formatted in accordance with the current Chicago Manual of Style. All submissions should include a cover letter (max. 200 words) as well as a biography (max. 50 words) and contact information for each author. Text submissions should be sent as .doc files. Where applicable, images should be submitted at 72 dpi as uncompressed .tif files. All scholarly submissions are subject to a double-blind peer review. Other creative proposals are not limited in size, medium or format.