Submission deadline: March 31, 2023
Mapping, as a means of interpreting reality, is today’s new form of critical production. This being said, it becomes essential to claim this practice of criticism in a demanding and ambitious view, based on rigorous and factual analyses. The construction and sharing of a critical mapping can offer new perspectives of understanding an increasingly complex and plural reality of architecture.
J–A Jornal Arquitectos thus intends to call for proposals for mappings that focus on emerging themes of contemporary architecture, such as the debates on the conditions of the profession, the effects of legislation, the technological and digital turn, the geography of archives, gender issues, post-colonial perspectives, ecological emergency, migratory flows, political and social tensions, among other possible topics.
This call seeks to expand the field of critical intervention in architecture through the exploration of new possibilities of discourse that go beyond the conventional practice of writing, such as the use of mappings, cartographies, chronologies, axonometries, diagrams, statistics, among other forms of textual and graphical representation.
J–A Jornal Arquitectos
J–A is a quarterly publication of Ordem dos Arquitectos, the Portuguese architects association. Relaunched in 2022 with a bilingual series that follows the motto “towards a reactivation of criticism”, J–A engages in the ongoing process of questioning the professional practice and the reconfiguration of the disciplinary field of architecture.
On one hand, architects are currently agents who have an increasingly plural and multifaceted action on society, both through the practice of design and through a singular capacity for analysing the architectural, urban and territorial reality. Architects spatialise problems and solutions; in other words, they design new realities, physical or imaginary, and map local and global phenomena of a cultural, social, economic, productive and infrastructural nature. In contrast to the traditional professional separation between design and research, the new J–A commits to a critical convergence.
On the other hand, architecture today is an expanded field, one in a state of growing instability and complexity, revealed in the limits of its autonomy and its disciplinary boundaries. With modernity, architecture has found itself somewhere between its material and formal issues and its political and social dimensions, converging in the spatialisation that is inherent in them. In contrast to the divide between the authorial and ideological fields, the new J–A seeks to re-establish its critical ties. In short, we are interested in an approach to architecture that incorporates disciplinary specificity into the context of its professional challenges and its conditions of production.
The new J–A comprises seven critical sections:
–a mapping of a phenomenon or reality, as the result of this open call;
–a report on a topical subject matter;
–an interview with relevant figures on a specific issue;
–an essay on an urgent matter for the profession or discipline;
–a critique of a built work with public impact;
–a review of a recent exhibition or publication;
–a visual portfolio on a specific theme.
Submissions
The call is open throughout 2023, while the first submissions are expected to be received until March 31. The selected proposals will be monitored by the editorial team, and the mappings to be published will be remunerated. The response to the call must be sent to j-a [at] ordemdosarquitectos.org, including:
–authors and title;
–synopsis up to 500 words;
–visual and graphic material.
Publication in J–A will have the following characteristics:
–eight to ten pages (230x300 mm);
–black and white with one colour;
–bilingual model (Portuguese/English).
Please check the mappings published on the first two issues, “The field of criticism since 1968” on J–A no. 261—July 2022 and “Forensic Architecture” on J–A no. 262—October 2022.
