For the first time since its founding in 1967, the Berlin-based magazine opens its critical architectural discourse to an international readership through a fully bilingual English–German edition. Long known for its rigorous engagement with architecture as a social, political, and cultural practice, ARCH+ has shaped debates on housing, urbanization, ecology, labor, and power relations across generations. With its new bilingual publishing model and a digital monthly subscription, ARCH+ makes both its current issues and its extensive archive accessible beyond linguistic boundaries—inviting global readers into a body of architectural theory and critique developed over more than five decades.
Making the magazine bilingual is not a change of direction, but a structural adjustment. It acknowledges that the questions ARCH+ engages with are no longer bounded by national debates or linguistic spheres. Climate breakdown, housing crises, extractive regimes of spatial production, postcolonial power structures, and the transformation of cities demand shared vocabularies and transnational conversations. Bilingual publishing opens both the archive and the present to international circulation, without subordinating local specificity to global visibility.
This shift is accompanied by the introduction of a digital monthly subscription. For just EUR 6.90 per month, subscribers receive digital access to the current issue as well as the complete ARCH+ archive, including all issues published since 1968, via a PDF reader integrated into the website, preserving the magazine’s distinctive layout, graphic structure, and editorial rhythm. The archive is being activated and made accessible in stages rather than all at once. The archive is conceived as a working tool for research and teaching; tools for deeper engagement are currently in development.
“African Spatial Thinking / Denkraum Afrika”
As ARCH+ was historically published predominantly, though not exclusively, in German, the digital archive currently reflects this linguistic legacy. The current issue, “African Spatial Thinking / Denkraum Afrika”, introduces the bilingual format, establishing a new standard for all forthcoming issues and marking the starting point for a systematic expansion of English-language access.
“African Spatial Thinking” brings together architects, urbanists, theorists, and activists working across the continent and its diasporas, approached here as spaces of architectural theory, historical depth, and spatial intelligence. Through contributions engaging land regimes, (informal) urbanization, climate adaptation, modern architectural histories, and postcolonial planning, the issue examines how space is produced under conditions of colonial legacies, economic asymmetry, and environmental pressure, and how the resulting knowledge resonates far beyond the continent.
“African Spatial Thinking” does more than broaden representation. It challenges the geography of architectural theory itself. By publishing all contributions in English and German, ARCH+ addresses the familiar asymmetry in which ideas circulate globally only once translated into a dominant language, while locally grounded debates remain peripheral. “African Spatial Thinking / Denkraum Afrika” sets the tone for this next chapter: rigorous, situated, and explicitly international.
In this sense, ARCH+’s bilingual turn and the opening of its digital archive are infrastructural decisions about how architectural knowledge circulates today, who can access it, and under what conditions it becomes part of a shared discourse.
Further information on subscriptions and access to the digital archive is available here.
