A rhetorical space for claims to be made, risks to be taken, and experiments to be rigorously conducted. A platform for the most challenging, provocative, and critical texts being written in the field of architecture today.

Positions is an independent initiative of e-flux Architecture.

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68 essays
Anthony Vidler
The WZB, conceived a year later as part of the Internationale Bauausstellung (IBA) program, seemed to breach the codes of modernism even further. Its pavilions, diagramming historical building types, decked out in bright pink and blue stripes, and huddled behind an ornate late-nineteenth-century entrance block, seemed to many British and European critics to be a betrayal of the ethic of the Modern Movement.
An integral theme that runs across both the British and Mexico pavilions is to draw attention to the forgotten and underrepresented public spaces that shape and are shaped by diasporic and indigenous communities. These spaces, often unnoticed and overlooked, have become the foundation for both pavilions to highlight architectures that represent a future in which social practices of collectivization are celebrated and accounted for within the built environment.
Antoinette Yetunde Oni
However, the biennale’s recognition of the Nigerian “artist-designer,” an honor typically reserved for better-known architects and architectural theorists like Lina Bo Bardi, Kenneth Frampton, and Paulo Mendes da Rocha, brings Nwoko’s ideas and design approach to the fore, as well as those of the Zaria Art Society movement he was a part of as a student. Nwoko’s work, which spans from painting, carving, and sculpture, to theater set designs and architecture, is characterized by experimental tropical builds and a veneration of traditional West African craft, and stands as a prime twentieth-century example of decolonial and decarbonized African architecture.
Yet despite its decline, Pan-Africanism’s ideals of emancipation, unity, and sovereignty remain in the collective African consciousness, informing political organizations and new cultural and artistic formations. The 18th Venice Architecture Biennale is one such formation.
Sharon Lam
There is a Queenstown on every continent on Earth except for Antarctica. Wherever there is a Queenstown, indigenous land has been overwritten with names and symbols of British colonialism.
“Often, the story of Tropical Modernism is told as one of a gift to Africa,” explains Nana Biamah-Ofosu, co-curator of the Applied Arts Pavilion i…
The backslashes represent the colonial acts of land division and dispossession that founded the country and allowed for the commodification and privatization of housing, which in turn led to housing alienation, defined here as the condition of being separated from our fundamental connections to home. In this sense, the eclectic team of six curators draw a structural connection between historical acts of settler colonialism and contemporary forms of housing alienation.
These dualities—both between the earthworks’ nurturing and defensive purposes, and between the frivolity of the Biennale and Ukraine’s participation while under invasion—make the Ukrainian Pavilion a surreal, conflicting experience.
The Alumni of N.A.W. 4
e-flux Architecture is proud to announce a collaboration with alumni from the fourth cohort of New Architecture Writers, an intensive year-long progra…
People have stopped visiting Los Angeles. They know if they wait long enough Los Angeles will come to them. So, watch for Los Angeles, appearing sho…
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar
Partitions of territory are often ascribed to historically specific moments of accountability. While colonial partitions set the terms for politics an…
Benjamin H. Bratton
The COVID-19 pandemic has included mass social mobilization toward a mutually-accountable separation from one another. Its bioethics sees each of us a…
Tom Holert
The Siren Call of Participation Lingering in the dispersed and forgotten archives of the post-Sputnik crisis age is evidence of myriad attempts at …
0. In a time out of joint, what is the most untimely question that could be asked? 1. In the 1990s, Peter Märkli built a museum for the scul…
“It had rained earlier, and the fragmented, light-filled clouds worked off each other.” —Teju Cole1 rain What makes one housing build…
Andreas Angelidakis
Nick Axel Your work has always engaged with the dialectic between the abstract and the concrete, the virtual and the actual. In a lot of your early wo…
Shahar Livne
Nick Axel As a conceptual material designer, you’ve recently invented lithoplast. What is lithoplast? Shahar Livne Lithoplast is an experimental …
Emanuel Christ
Nikolaus Hirsch Your practice is known for museums, such as the Kunstmuseum in Basel, the Swiss National Museum in Zurich, or the upcoming extension t…
Nikolaus Hirsch You recently won a competition to build a new hospital in Tambacounda, Senegal. A project like this can be thought about as a product,…
Justin Fowler
Texas. Between the Rangers and the Cowboys, the gamers. A classicizing, stone-tiled arcade fronts the otherwise nondescript 80s-era husk of Arlington…
On a southwest corner in Hollywood stands the Fountain Vine Plaza, a two-storey strip mall with stucco walls and a blue-tiled roof built in 1984.1 It …
Emma McCormick-Goodhart
We who draw do so not only to make something visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination. —John …
Lawrence Lek
Nick Axel Architecture features prominently in your virtual reality and simulation work as a narrative device. How do you see the medium of open-world…
Andreas Rumpfhuber
I. Vienna, sometime in early January. I am on my way to visit the site of what might be a red herring for Vienna’s public housing model. Colleagu…
Mimi Zeiger
“Queerness is not here yet. Queerness is an ideality,” writes José Esteban Muñoz in his introduction to Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Q…
Julian Rose
By the late 1960s, Alan Solomon was established as one of America’s most innovative and influential curators. He had organized dozens of exhibitions…
Many years ago, I graduated from college with a degree in architecture and moved to New York. It was 2003, and I got a job as a research assistant to …
1. A Fire Station The critic sits at her office busy with her private quests and investigations. She has been trying to lose the label of being a c…
Nikolaus Hirsch It seems as if the practice of designing architecture is changing. Not dramatically but there is—despite or because of the ubiquity/…
Amelyn Ng
This building has never been built, nor does it ever plan to be. Yet this mythic edifice has been scrupulously documented, updated, circulated, and st…
Dan Handel
In what is arguably one of the most disturbing scenes in the history of cinema, Danny Torrance, a young boy left to his own devices by his neurotic pa…
feminist architecture collaborative
The corner lot at 550 West 20th Street wears all the markers of a disused prison, because it is one. Somewhere else, in the media ether of do-good dev…
When they talk about their work in public, Zurich-based architects Thomas Padmanabhan and Oliver Lütjens invariably begin with a series of seemingly …
Architecture was once a plant. By this I do not only refer to the grasslands and savannas that sheltered early homo sapiens or the trees used in the c…
Nick Axel and Nikolaus Hirsch
Since e-flux Architecture launched almost three years ago, it has become a locus for contemporary debate and research into architecture in the expande…
José Aragüez
Jencks was right when he predicted that “the iconic building is here to stay.”1 Its generalization and expansion in the form of so-called “image…
Iñaqui Carnicero and Lorena del Río
Nick Axel Architecture is always a product of its time. It registers the social, economic, and political conditions within which a project has come in…
Marina Otero Verzier
“El Caballo” (The Horse), a seven-ton bronze equestrian statue of general Francisco Franco, was removed from Ferrol’s Plaza de España in 2002. …
Nick Axel You have done a lot of work after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami dealing with reconstruction. Can you speak to the type of effect t…
Stefano Boeri
Nikolaus Hirsch Architecture is a schizophrenic profession. There is, on the one hand a form of practice that believes in design and building as a pro…
Giovanna Borasi
Nikolaus Hirsch Part of the architect´s profession seems to be the permanent reinvention of what it means to be an architect. A constant process of s…
Juan Herreros
Nikolaus Hirsch We are interested in the contradictions and potentials of today’s architectural practice, and in speculating on what this practice m…
Sou Fujimoto
Nick Axel How do you see your role as an architect today? Sou Fujimoto My role as an architect is to create space for people, space that does not c…
Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli
Nikolaus Hirsch You have a very expansive practice, ranging from design to curating, art directing, and editing. How do you understand the role of arc…
Paola Antonelli
Nikolaus Hirsch What is design? Paola Antonelli I am not able to answer that question. It’s a little bit like asking what art is or what food is. …
David Adjaye
Nikolaus Hirsch Recent projects of yours have put you in a very political role, or at least one with a certain exposure in the political field. Has yo…
The City is a Res Publica. The Right to Access to most of the City will be universal. Everyone will be able to go everywhere in the City that’…
Adam Jasper
Imagine you are looking through a sequence of photographs. One image after another, all of empty rooms. On superficial inspection, they all look the s…
Aristide Antonas and Thanos Zartaloudis
Thanos Zartaloudis The urban protocols started as a collection of images, designs, photographs, and sketches, which later took a new form in Archipela…
Godofredo Enes Pereira
Global environmental change poses two immediate challenges to architecture: the first is how to respond to its myriad consequences, from rapid transfo…
Alessandro Bava
Everybody knows that our cities Were built to be destroyed —Caetano Veloso As the architecture profession continues to struggle in a contem…
Expanding the Self On a February evening of 1969, Coop Himmelblau’s Astroballon was presented at Galerie nächst St. Stephan, an avant-garde gall…
We’re Solarpunk because the only other options are denial or despair. —Adam Flynn1 By now, dystopia may have become a luxury genre. Indulg…
Beatrice Galilee
One or two years ago, describing Junya Ishigami’s architecture would likely conjure imagery of delicate and immaculately conceived structures tendin…
Alessandro Bava
We’ll build houses like we used to, without roofs and without walls —Vincenzo Agnetti1 After World War II, the view of Milan from Monte St…
Mario Carpo
Computers are machines: so we tend to think they work like all the other machines we know. They don’t. Computers are a new kind of machine. They do no…
Víctor Muñoz Sanz
In Ansbach, Germany, sporting goods company Adidas is opening the first fully operational version of its so-called Speedfactory concept, in which trai…
Andrea Bagnato
For much of their history European cities have been unhealthy places. Until the end of the nineteenth century, they were traversed by waves of infecti…
In 1930, the French colonial regime celebrated the hundredth anniversary of France’s colonization of Algeria, known as Le Centenaire de l’Algérie…
Nicholas Korody
“Mere decorating,” we say without thought. The former modifies the latter with such frequency that the words appear natural together. In fact, the…
Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe
Michael Bloomberg, once referred to as “America’s greenest mayor,” launched One Million Trees for New York (MTNYC) in 2007.1 This project, initi…
Karl Marx once observed that revolutionaries, seemingly engaged in “creating something that did not exist before,” will “anxiously conjure up th…
In 2012, Facebook signed on its one billionth user. To celebrate the occasion, the company commissioned filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu—of Amores …
V. Mitch McEwen
In short, when the muck comes back up onto the sidewalks, it is memory flooding back—a certain long-buried historic past that re-emerges suddenly …
Ross Exo Adams
It is hard to imagine how the many ruptures that have occurred in the composition of whatever may be called “normality” today do not render canonical …
Keller Easterling
In the comedy of errors that is US car culture, contradictions and cross-purposes seem to thrive. The mid-twentieth century monovalent highway network…
Andreas Angelidakis
Athens used to be small town. In 1922, following the war the Greeks lost against Turkey, she was asked to take in a large part of the 1.2 million refu…
Consider the following exchange from the infamous press conference conducted by the President of the United States in the lobby of his fading, brassy …
Category
Architecture, Interviews & Conversations, Design, Urbanism
Subject
Knowledge Production, Discourse

Positions is an independent initiative of e-flux Architecture.

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