Solicited: Proposals
Having served as director of two Los Angeles-based non-profit organizations dedicated to architectural exhibitions, I am often implicated in the...
Solicited: Proposals
Western cultural institutions like the museum often presuppose an orderly spacing of time. The queue, in this sense, is anticipatory, but almost...
Solicited: Proposals
Architects are often taught that everything is architecture. That they are educated in a discipline with no boundaries, which reaches all aspects...
Solicited: Proposals
A decade and some years ago, I was preoccupied with the question of laying out the fundamentals for a new institution, an institution for the...
Solicited: Proposals
I once designed the exhibition for the collection of an important museum. The brief was simple: we were asked to work with the relationships...
Solicited: Proposals
This contribution is intended to be listened to.
The exhibition is open only at specific hours, from dusk to midnight. During these...
Solicited: Proposals
It is timely to write a self-reflexive account of building the permanent architecture collection at M+, a museum for visual culture encompassing...
Solicited: Proposals
You are most likely sitting down while reading this. If not, please look for a place near you where you can take a seat and spend a moment. This...
Solicited: Proposals
Dear reader,
What happens in an architecture exhibition? What, and who is it for? What does it do, and how does it do it? Solicited: Proposals...
Coloniality of Infrastructure
Humanity has been a constant, sometimes blind force in the history of the living world. To achieve its project of universal domination once and...
Coloniality of Infrastructure
The plain of Tavoliere, which makes up the largest portion of the district of Foggia, in the upper part of Italy’s southeastern Apulian region,...
Coloniality of Infrastructure
In the mid-twentieth century, apartheid South Africa was home to some of the largest, deepest, and most profitable mines in the world. Operating...
Coloniality of Infrastructure
Since the 1950s, various petroleum and gas wells have been dug on African Saharan soils. Thousands of kilometers of pipelines have been built on...
Coloniality of Infrastructure
Garissa Lodge
Garissa Lodge is widely known as the first “Somali mall.” A multi-story building hosting mixed-use shopping and residential...
Coloniality of Infrastructure
In her 2019 novel The Old Drift , Namwali Serpell writes about the Kariba Dam, southern Africa’s largest hydroelectric power source, and the...
Coloniality of Infrastructure
I
The Italian colonization of Libya began in 1911 and escalated under fascist rule, leading to the brutal repression of armed resistance led by...
Coloniality of Infrastructure
It is July 1990. Janet Love, an uMkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation,” abbreviated MK) commander sits by herself in an office in Johannesburg...
Coloniality of Infrastructure
In the mid-1880s, Kimberley’s diamond mines began constructing massive complexes to house their laborers. 1 The closed compounds—so named because...
Coloniality of Infrastructure
Coloniality of Infrastructure is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture, Critical Urbanisms at the University of Basel, and the African...
Treatment
De Hogeweyk, in Weesp, the Netherlands, might seem eerily familiar, even if you’ve never been there. 1 That is entirely by design. Opened in...
Treatment
The strange story of the dreaming nurses of Münsterlingen came to me by a chance find in the archives. While researching the extensive experiments...
Treatment
In 1925, on an undeveloped tract of forested land at the outskirts of the young city of Houston, entrepreneur and oil magnate George H. Hermann...
Treatment
In the April 1881 issue of The Modern Review , a British periodical published from 1880 to 1884, a sardonic Frances Power Cobbe wrote: “It is the...
Treatment
When scholars first charted the nineteenth-century “invention” of the modern hospital around a half century ago, they posited a crucial change: a...
Treatment
Treatment is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zürich,...
Survivance
Applications Invited: Transdisciplinary Scholar to Assist in Re-Designing Higher Education.
Project Tasks: Whose knowledge? What is...
Survivance
The movement that began from our fields
Has travelled well beyond our fields,
Your nefarious game stands exposed,
This people's movement...
Survivance
And the dandelion does not stop growing, because it is told it is a weed.
The dandelion does not care what others see.
It says, “One day,...
Survivance
My little Tasmanian farm sits at 43° south. At this latitude, we are closer to Antarctica than we are to the top of Australia. The southerlies...
Survivance
As I began writing this essay, an opinion piece titled “A Giant Poor Sighted Bird Stands in the Way of India’s Green Goals” from Bloomberg Green...
Survivance
Illuminating the overlooked history of so-called twentieth-century architecture in Hawai‘i, this special preview of A Justice-Advancing...
Survivance
Lubumbashi, a market
Seforah is sent by her mother to Marche Kenya 1 to purchase sombe 2 and ngai ngai 3 seeds along with bitoyo 4...
Survivance
The word nostalgia derives from a sickness of home, from the trauma and longing one feels after being artificially and involuntarily ripped from...
Survivance
Those of us subject to and subjected to the most brutal of human degradations have had to cultivate modes of being, other kinds of living, so...
Survivance
In the mid-1980s, I was looking for a place to live and photograph. 1 A place to lean into, to know in an intimate way. For years, I had been...
Survivance
Unleashing Ecocide
The paradox of Western supremacy is that it begins with its own. Its practices of dispossession, barbarism, violence, and...
Survivance
I’ve been still too long and my memory of home sustains me.
But my memory of home is fuzzy and I need you to remember with me.
I’ve been...
Survivance
Axel Wieder You have recently participated in a series of online discussions on indigenous or more specifically Sámi art and architectural...
Positions
The COVID-19 pandemic has included mass social mobilization toward a mutually-accountable separation from one another. Its bioethics sees each of...
Survivance
This feels like an in-between moment—something tricky to be present to, as if we are caught between a contested and violent past and a not-yet...
Survivance
The artist Julia Norton recently described a unique form of epilepsy that she has been managing, one that took her years to get diagnosed due to...
Survivance
Cultivate Christchurch, the Aotearoa New Zealand based urban farm and youth wellbeing project, has inspired people all over the world with its...
Cascades
Life Support
What time is it? 6am? 10pm? I am once again waking up to the reflection of my face against the perpetual darkness outside,...
Survivance
Within the last decade, fueled by global marketing campaigns and health trends, the coconut and its primary derivatives—oil, butter, milk, sugar,...
Survivance
Hearing the buzz
We humans evolved to survive in a world with specific types of matter and energy; our particular hominid ancestors thrived...
Survivance
The video Wet-on-Wet (2021) by Jenna Sutela and Markus J. Buehler will be available to watch here on e-flux Architecture for the duration of...
Cascades
On June 26, 2029, the Director launched the new moon. It was named Ruda, after the ancient pre-Islamic lunar deity. It made the bioluminescent...
Survivance
They said with wonder and admiration, you are still alive, like hydrogen, like oxygen.
—Dionne Brand 1
In Christina Sharpe’s book...
Survivance
1. Pinch Points
I write from the watery, mountainous Pacific Northwest of North America. This is the bioregion that pulses between the tar...
Survivance
The Macon Housing Authority says they may have found a time capsule buried in the ground. The CEO of the authority, June Parker, says they...
Cascades
The first people I fell in love with were terrorists. The German fear of the communist Red Army Fraction (RAF) peaked in 1977, when I turned eight...
Survivance
Dominions of Mythologies
All of us caught in the hurricane of the modern world are refugees from our bodies and our senses. It’s the natural...
Survivance
Gender-based violence in South Africa is often referred to as a silent pandemic, yet one that is widely known. In the first five days of the...
Survivance
Dig. Geology and its kin network of extraction, natural resources, architectures of geomorphic transformation (dams, river straightening,...
Cascades
The North American Rift was discovered shortly after the end of the Great War, when it bisected a tractor on the morning run. Initial, informal...
Survivance
Survive. Exist. Strategize. Close. Endure. Hide. Reveal. Persist. Hope. Thrive. Plan. Create. Mobilize. Open. Propel. Writing and speaking about...
Survivance
Midway through my life, I wake to find myself in a techno-dystopia, with no sense of where my proper pathway has gone. I have a muse, but no...
Survivance
Blackgirls young and old are memory keepers, cultural workers, love pillars, freedom mappers, and actors. 1 Radical love is a regular praxis...
Cascades
I have to write a story I am not entitled to tell. A parallel botanical story of myself. A story that I was made to tell.
Once upon a time,...
Survivance
Sigidm hanaa’na̱x, Smgyigyit, Łagyigyet, ada txa’nii gyeda galts’ap.
Sm Łoodm ‘Nüüsm di waayu. Mootgm Goot di nooyu.
La̱xsgyiik di...
Survivance
As mostly solitary animals, octopuses tend to avoid humans. They spend their time in the depths of the sea in places we cannot easily visit. They...
Survivance
Having spent most of my life between cultural dissonance and cultural isolation, double consciousness has always been a part of my daily reality....
Cascades
I’ve been walking along this mountain belt for hours. I think I’m getting close—at least, according to the footage my drone captured yesterday....
Survivance
The South African Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer once wrote that “[to write a short story] is to express from a situation in the exterior or...
Survivance
Welcome to the shores of Moreton Bay, just to the east of the sunny, sub-tropical city of Brisbane (or Meanjin , in the language of the Turrbal...
Survivance
In the small north island township of Tāneatua stands Aotearoa New Zealand’s first living building. This building, known as Te Kura Whare , is...
Survivance
My 7’ x 30’ forty-eight-piece mono print installations exist in two combined forms: a set of twenty-four primary prints accompanied by a set of...
Survivance
While generational resilience and resistance in the United States has been in my blood for four generations, like most immigrant families, my...
Survivance
There is flame, there is light. The flame scorches my pages, light illuminates and brightens them. When I write with the flame, it is because...
Survivance
Survivance is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, with guest editors Natchee Blu Barnd, Black...
Cascades
“This can’t be architecture…” Kali wrote on his yellow layout paper while gripping his clutch pencil. He sat obtuse against his chair looking at...
Cascades
Part 1
What we consider our core tradition of moral and political theory today springs from this question: What does it mean to pay our...
Cascades
When the Contagion reached Hong Kong in 1997, Philip Tose traveled to 2047 to take a lump sum loan from himself. Most people blamed the magnitude...
Cascades
Cascades is a collaboration between MAAT - Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology and e-flux Architecture within the context of the...
Exhausted
For almost all of human history, reproduction was inexorable, unimpeded, and imperative, as well as socially and medically dangerous. Reproduction...
Exhausted
The heraldic symbol of the Red Hand is believed to embody Ulster’s founding legend, in which the first to touch the land in a boat race claims its...
Exhausted
“Akka,” Umesh began, making eye contact through the rearview mirror as he expertly chauffeured the car down the highway, and I sat in the back...
Exhausted
The In/Fertile Crescent
From the delta of the Tigris-Euphrates to the valley of the Jordan river, curving around the Great Syrian Desert and...
Exhausted
Soil is the basis of life and a symbol of fertility. It has played a crucial role in history, giving birth to and fostered a variety of cultures...
Exhausted
For many Native American communities, understandings of family, fertility, and “collective continuance” are closely rooted to the protection,...
Exhausted
Exhausted is a collaboration between SALT and e-flux Architecture within the context of CLIMAVORE: Seasons Made to Drift , a new solo...
Confinement
Apparently, we are cursed. In early September, they call. “We need an exhibition display for a show to be viewed remotely. Optional lockdown, no...
Confinement
In 2019, I started working on a project to reinforce a wall, which is still in progress. The wall divided the corridor from a room at Residency...
Confinement
In her text about Afro-pessimism and its intellectual consequences, Catherine Malabou calls for a different understanding of life in prison than...
Accumulation
In 1963, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew (1959–1990) called Singapore a “society in transition,” pushing the country on an upwards trajectory towards...
Accumulation
In Yangon, Myanmar, displays of conspicuous wealth adorn high-end real estate developments located at strategic downtown intersections and...
Confinement
Nick Axel: As you move through this series of drawings, you start to realize you’re moving through a landscape, one that’s inscribed with...
Confinement
Covered in vaseline, polycarbonate, and mylar tape, the circular compound eye of knowledge occupies spaces and dreams, zones and fields, areas and...
Confinement
Nathaniel Whitfield The university and the prison both exist as metaphors and metonyms. As part of the Underground Scholars Initiative and the...
Confinement
This text takes form through a spatial and (ever)special dialect. 1 Liminal spaces between letterforms and words are (re)inhabited to extend...
Critical Cooking Show
The cooking show is as old as television itself. But why do we like watching the making of a meal that most of us will never cook, let alone eat?...
Confinement
On December 1, 2020, when the result of the Covid-19 test performed twelve hours earlier came back positive, I was transferred to a secure...
Critical Cooking Show
Kitchen tools offer a support structure that generates social, environmental, and spatial situations, due to the gestures they involve and...
Confinement
Somewhere between the stereotomic stonework of classical architecture and the “service cavity” logic of the modern plenum wall lies a different...
Critical Cooking Show
Olive trees hold the living knowledge of Mesopotamia. Since ancient times, they represent life, peace, and solidarity in the region. Soil...
Confinement
The diffuse house is the archetypal form of domestic space under late capitalism. The diffuse house operates 24/7. The diffuse house is...
Critical Cooking Show
In Laura Wilson’s Trained on Veda , a malted loaf and evolving artwork connected bakeries and galleries through veda bread. This film departs...
Confinement
Every night on this planet, about six percent of humans sleep in tents. We can guess this figure based on the 1.6 billion who lack adequate...
Monument
Since the 1980s, a number of buildings have been reconstructed in Germany that are intended to contribute to the formation of German identity....
Monument
The Perpetrator
On November 29, 2017, I was in Rotterdam, having a meeting in a café, when I received a text message from my mother. I’d been...
Critical Cooking Show
The New World Syrup & The Fever Hand is a performance lecture inspired by the return of yellow fever in South America. This old disease is...
Confinement
The three of them were summoned to the parlor. As per the protocol, they would from there on out be addressed as Subjects A, J, and P,...
Critical Cooking Show
Filmed during and just after a two-month lockdown in Marseille, Let Us Heal Together is a visual exploration of a chalky, herbaceous landscape,...
Confinement
Six degrees of separation is the theory that humans are always six or fewer social connections away from one another. Six degrees of freedom...
Critical Cooking Show
In Moon Cook , Nelly Ben Hayoun and chef Rabah Ourrad both prepare a traditional North African dish, couscous royal, from their respective...
Critical Cooking Show
Danças is a meditation on the employment and preparation of three ingredients that connect the cuisines of Turkey and Brazil—okra, chilies, and...
Confinement
Meghan Rolvien At first, every landscape presents itself as immensely chaotic. Your maps question territorial realities and present a certain...
Confinement
The Homogenizing force of capitalism is incompatible with any inherent structure of differentiation: sacred-profane, carnival-workday,...
Critical Cooking Show
Consider the space of your kitchen. Who do you share it with? Are they human? Non-human? Could others be let in?
Softening Cultures takes...
Confinement
This is a large and a small building at the foot of the Andes mountains. In fact, it is an aggregate of twelve different buildings separated from...
Critical Cooking Show
To be contemporary might mean to re-learn how to dwell in instability, in uncertainty. Now that the notion of progress (or capitalist modernism)...
Confinement
On December 7, 1927, Antonio Gramsci reached the island of Ustica after five attempts to cross the sea from Palermo. He was the fifth political...
Monument
Searching for forms and histories in the architectures of diaspora, migration, and the overlooked, we may find possibilities for forms of...
Critical Cooking Show
Riders Not Heroes investigates the precarious conditions of food delivery riders in Milan. It makes the case for riders as essential workers,...
Confinement
1
9:00–10:00 am
Reinsurance, call 115, distribution of exceptional travel certificates, medical appointments, contact tutor for budget...
Sick Architecture
March 20, 2020
I am in New York, “the epicenter of Covid-19,” the news on TV keeps blaring, as if proud of the achievement. New York has...
Monument
After the Maidan revolution and Russian military occupation of Ukraine in 2014, the realm of memory has been occupied by militarism and political...
Sick Architecture
In the March 1923 issue of National Geographic , a sketch of a tired-looking businessman invites the reader to the Tucson Sunshine-Climate Club....
Sick Architecture
Sylvia Rivera’s Home
On the bleak spring morning of April 6, 1996, the TV station WPQG interviewed Sylvia Rivera at her home in New York. The...
Critical Cooking Show
In a long, narrow, modernist kitchen, Mayar El-Bakry, a Swiss-Egyptian designer, is cooking. Using anonymously designed cooking tools and objects...
Confinement
Sara Sherif How did your work against the violence of prisons with The Funambulist begin?
Léopold Lambert I think it started from an...
Sick Architecture
i.
Not what is critique. Not what is a concept or a book. But perhaps, why this critique, this concept, this book? Why Geontologies and its...
Monument
We know that narratives are made of silences, not all of which are deliberate or even perceptible as such within the time of their production....
Sick Architecture
My childhood playspace was in the basement of a condominium in suburban Connecticut. The room was allowed to be messy, disorganized, and filled...
Sick Architecture
Eyes set on a village in the distance, a man stands in the midst of a peaceful landscape. Two crutches support his posture. His hands rest firmly...
Critical Cooking Show
Nature is Healing presents the reflections of a character who has fled Brooklyn for the countryside during the spring of 2020. The protagonist...
Confinement
An illustration of loneliness, togetherness, sameness, selflessness, laziness, asceticism, libertinism, domestication, inhabitation,...
Sick Architecture
In 1975, tired of its reputation for being a “soft state” blemished by charges of corruption, security threats, labor unrest, and uncontrolled...
Sick Architecture
California and its northern population center, San Francisco, owes much of its character and development to disease. “Gold Fever,” as it was...
Sick Architecture
On May 28, 1914, the Institut für Schiffs- und Tropenkrankheiten (Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases, ISTK) in Hamburg began operations...
Critical Cooking Show
An antidote to our relationship with the material world—generally framed by a rationalist apprehension of reality— object*oriented*magic creates...
Confinement
Dear xxxx,
I hope everything is well.
I moved in. It is a bit strange. The space is immense.
The place here is organized so the...
Sick Architecture
With the early twentieth century development of a series of immigration stations, quarantine facilities, and hospitals at the main ports of entry...
Sick Architecture
I
As the plague smoldered in Milan in 1630, three French youths—a scholar, a painter, and an artisan—journeyed to the city from the north, in...
Sick Architecture
Whitewash is extremely moral. Suppose there were a decree requiring all rooms in Paris to be given a coat of whitewash. I maintain that that...
Sick Architecture
Sick Architecture is a collaboration between Beatriz Colomina, e-flux Architecture, and the Princeton University Ph.D. Program in the History...
Critical Cooking Show
A confluence of forces—human invention, neoliberal economic legislation, a wellness food trend, and patents taken out on nature—have led to the...
Confinement
Nick Axel How has Forensic Architecture’s work with witnesses evolved over the years?
Eyal Weizman In our first experiments, we were...
At The Border
The Tijuana-San Diego border region is a global laboratory for engaging the central challenges of urbanization today: deepening social and...
Critical Cooking Show
Broadcasting from Crown Heights, Your Mouth Has Power is a collective message from Brooklyn about food sovereignty, resilience and culture...
Confinement
Prologue I
A schedule. Planning for a project. And to make things clearer, some things are put in color. Not just in color. Outline and...
Are Friends Electric?
To be wary, to beware, or to be aware: there are choices to be made by the architect in handling the algorithm. Semantic hairsplitting might be...
Are Friends Electric?
Networks and Society
Whether it is online or in our daily physical routines, we interact with others—close friends, acquaintances, familiar...
Critical Cooking Show
Empathy begins with acknowledging the position of our body in the world, not simply towards a different body, but also across time and dimensions....
Confinement
To build a public building was to create a place for citizens to gather. To build a house was to create a place for a family and friends to be...
Settler Colonial Present
When the CCA’s new Double Ground campus expansion opens in San Francisco in 2022, students will be learning and making on land where people...
Monument
The Black Archives is an Amsterdam-based historical archive for conversations, activities, and literature from Black and other perspectives that...
Settler Colonial Present
In the last few decades, new approaches have been taken to address the urban and territorial impact of public works in Chile, particularly in...
Settler Colonial Present
The Deceptive Tranquility of Settler Colonial Landscapes
One of the ways in which settler colonialism operates is by concealing its logics in...
Critical Cooking Show
The Case of Meat explores manifold stories behind the meat industry in Argentina. Taking off from the personal narrative of Tata Moya, an...
Critical Cooking Show
Critical Cooking Show is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Istanbul Design Biennial within the context of its fifth edition,...
Settler Colonial Present
The plantation is a persistent but ugly blueprint of our contemporary spatial troubles.
—Katherine McKittrick 1
Sustainability is...
Monument
In the seventeenth century, Duke Jacob Kettler of the Duchy of Courland, a Polish-Lithuanian vasal state in an area that is today western Latvia,...
Settler Colonial Present
In the wake of the contra-monument protests led by the Black Lives Matter movement, I made a post on a social media group of the architecture...
Settler Colonial Present
These are unprecedented times. The Covid-19 crisis lays bare our interconnectedness. We are all in this together. Or so we are told. On March 27,...
Settler Colonial Present
The Settler Colonial Present is a collaboration between the Settler Colonial City Project and e-flux Architecture, featuring contributions by...
Confinement
As the destruction of the environment deepens and broadens, leaving no leaf unturned, we continue to perform what once took place inside...
Confinement
The Prison of Language
In his inaugural lecture for the opening of the Chair of Semiology at the Collège de France in Paris (1977), Roland...
Confinement
We are outfitted with senses that convey the surfaces of things…our ways of probing the viscera of the world is to turn them into yet more...
Monument
El Valle de los Caídos, sixty kilometers outside of Madrid, houses a colossal basilica and an eighty-meter-high cross that towers over the...
Confinement
Black desire
Enclosed
Clouded, shrouded, 10, 11, need
Chapter 6
Health
MY PRESENT STATE OF HEALTH
‘My...
Confinement
Dream House
The Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh tells a story of the journey to the Cedar Forest. On each day of the six-day journey, King...
Confinement
Nikolaus Hirsch Your drawing is an axonometric representation of the Cape Coast Castle, a building outside of Accra, the city where you have...
Confinement
Confinement is a collaborative exhibition taking place both online at e-flux Architecture and on site at ETH Zürich, curated by gta...
Monument
And we, Spectators, always, everywhere,
looking at, never out of, everything!
It overfills us. We arrange it, It falls apart.
We...
Monument
Sebastia, a small archaeological town, sits on top of a hill Northwest of Nablus, Palestine surrounded by Shavei Shomron, an illegal Israeli...
Monument
On a gloomy winter day of 1970, Willy Brandt, the Chancellor of the German Federal Republic (1969–1974) stepped out of his car and slowly walked...
Monument
In October 2019, along a dusty stretch of a back road in northwestern Mississippi, workmen and activists installed a historical marker, the fourth...
Monument
Monument is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and Het Nieuwe Instituut, featuring essays by Arna Ma čkić, Wayne Modest, Philipp...
Accumulation
Researchers, activists, and citizens are speaking more and more about “getting away from the system of production.” The goal is no longer simply...
Accumulation
I. Moraine (Kangerlussuaq, Greenland)
Delayed in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, we stand at the moraine of the Greenland Ice Sheet. We are a short...
Accumulation
Buildings are primarily characterized in the discipline of architecture as objects. The composition of a building, for example, is what...
Accumulation
“If you’re in trouble, you don’t think straight,” Ibrahim, an electrical engineer with the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) described Ghana’s...
Accumulation
Just as the fear of hell drives the marketing schemes of paradise, so too does the desire of paradise fuel the schemes of hell.
—Anna Tsing 1...
Accumulation
Precarious Entanglement
In the Anthropocene—the current terminal period of neoliberal capitalism marked by climate change, environmental...
Accumulation
The insurance industry is an influential consolidator of knowledge about risk. Accident after accident and plague following plague, insurers earn...
Accumulation
Every year, humans move more earth, and more rock. More than what rivers carry with them as they rush to oceans and lakes. More than what is...
Oceans
Singapore, 2030
A tropical storm is brewing. A group of anonymous hackers recently leaked confidential government documents showing that...
Oceans
Frequency Fishing
It’s only when we dive that we understand.
—Pak Harun Mohamad 1
“[To] get a sense in air of [a dolphin...
Software
Not so many centuries ago places, buildings and cities were their own and only form of visual representation. They stood in one place and could...
Software
A scene from a likely near future: an architect wakes up to a chirping phone. She sits up and looks at the messages that prompted the noisy wakeup...
Software
Architects deal in imagined conditions, seeking to imbue their images with a mix of plausibility, desirability, and futurity so irresistible that...
Software
It feels like only yesterday that a cat was a cat and a computer was a computer. But today, instead of tidy distinctions, humans, animals, and...
Software
The Communist bosses of Peiping dropped a bamboo curtain, cutting off Peiping from the world.
— Time magazine, March 14, 1949 1...
Software
On the surface, the way we document buildings may still look the same. Modeling software, like any other tool in history, helps architects depict,...
Software
Software as Infrastructure is a project by e-flux Architecture as part of " Eyes of the City " at the 2019 Bi-City Biennale of...
Oceans
The Azores archipelago has long been considered a site of geostrategic relevance for geopolitical and resource exploitation due to its natural...
Housing
Staircases can be perspicaciously complex. The staircase is one place where architects visually and physically connect people within buildings,...
Housing
Historically, the idea of home has mirrored a faithful image of society’s deeper social structures. Consequently, housing has often been used as...
Oceans
The oceans throughout history provided seemingly inexhaustible fish for people brave and skillful enough to exploit them. Whenever fish catches...
At The Border
Introduction
After three months of stringent restriction on travel to and within the EU, Monday June 5 was heralded by the EU Commission as...
Oceans
Earth’s oceans are a permanent feature of its surface. They are visible, even though very faintly, six billion kilometers away in deep space. On a...
Housing
Most philosophers—in fact, most people—would agree that use presupposes property; that in order to use something legitimately, one needs the...
Housing
In the wake of World War II, decolonization and the Cold War reshaped urbanization processes around the planet. 1 The untangling of Western...
Oceans
Flying above oceanic anchorages near the world’s largest oil ports reveals a tangle of all sorts of cargo ships waiting to bunker (refuel), as...
Housing
Grady Ranch is a vast, 1,039-acre estate in the rolling hills northwest of San Rafael, CA. The Ranch has been at the center of a controversy since...
Housing
George Kafka Can you explain the genesis of FICA and, in simple terms, how the model works?
Renato Cymbalista (FICA) Around four years...
Housing
Georg Vrachliotis What are the biggest issues facing housing today?
Nathalie de Vries We have to create livable cities while living...
Housing
There is a contradiction at the core of contemporary urbanization. Cities and urban regions are expanding rapidly and exert a growing political...
Oceans
In March 2019, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) acquired a leaked letter that would signal a new stage in their struggle...
Housing
“The difference between a good and a poor architect is that the poor architect succumbs to every temptation and the good one resists it.”...
Housing
When groups of lesbians started to break into and squat vacant council properties across London in the early 1970s, they had to learn how to...
Housing
Rent control and anti-eviction measures in general have attracted enormous attention in recent years because they directly addresses the issue of...
Housing
We will never again shout, sneeze, or cough unmasked without provoking anger and fear. We will never again hug each other without the thrill of...
Housing
"Apartment Buildings for New York" is a previously unpublished manifesto by Frei Otto written in 1959. It is a continuation of Otto’s...
Housing
Housing is a collaboration between e-flux architecture and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology Chair for Theory of Architecture featuring...
Oceans
monster
From monstrum, monere : to show, warn, or remind
by which gods give notice of calamity
Hence:
monstrous
premonition...
Education
Remote education was originally invented to overcome distance, to make learning accessible to those who could not converge in centralized...
Oceans
The Weather
As an embodied experience and agentic force, weather moves, scars, imprints. Our armpits dampen in response to the heat; our jaws...
Oceans
0000
The horizon is the interception of sight with the surface of the planet. It is a space that marks both a position and a transient flux:...
Oceans
Oceans in Transformation is a collaboration between TBA21–Academy and e-flux Architecture within the context of the eponymous exhibition at...
At The Border
Unlike tracings which propagate redundancies, mappings discover new worlds within past and present ones; they inaugurate new grounds upon the...
At The Border
In May 2012, the United Kindgom’s then-home secretary Theresa May announced in an interview the introduction of new, groundbreaking legislation in...
At The Border
In early March 2020, the Turkish government found itself stuck in a military conflict with Russia in Idlib, a border city in northwest Syria. The...
At The Border
Almost everyone, outside of North Korea, thinks that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) will eventually collapse and be absorbed by...
At The Border
30 hours.
On Thursday, March 12th, the newspapers were on fire. Every four hours their headlines changed. We woke up to the news that the...
At The Border
The colonial genealogy of the contemporary nation-state border frames any politics of their opening. Borders are opened when they are approached,...
At The Border
Red Zones
The first time Italians heard the expression zona rossa (“red zone”) was in June 2001, in the lead up to the G8 in Genoa. In...
At The Border
The South China Sea is a semi-enclosed sea. It is located south of China and Taiwan; east of Vietnam; and west and north of the archipelago...
At The Border
Within the short course of a few days, we’ve all come to meet and live on Zoom. 1 In pivoting to online learning, we deliberate on how new forms...
At The Border
The border between the US and Mexico was first defined by the “United States and Mexican Boundary Survey” (1848–1855) in accordance with the...
At The Border
1. The Beetle and the Seagrass Against the Port
If property depends on clearly defined boundaries … then coastal/marine property is...
At The Border
1. Wall
On February 27, 2020 Ned Norris, Chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation, addressed the United States House of Representatives...
At The Border
¶
I imagine limbo as an extraterritoriality without walls, without corners, windows, entrances or exits. I can also cast it as ocean and...
At The Border
Jostling around our necks, the dosimeters flashed their readings and the ticking of the handheld geiger counter spasmed sporadically in alarm. We...
At The Border
The US-Mexico borderlands can be defined by shifting and intensifying bands of ultraviolet radiation that impact bodies in asymmetrical ways,...
At The Border
What is the opposite of an exodus? Not the flooding of people into a city, but its emptying out by a kind of implosion—the city withdrawing into...
At The Border
The Dam
On the 10th of March, news reports emerged suggesting that Bulgaria had released water downstream from the Ivaylovgrad Dam on the...
At The Border
In Pursuit of a Single Map
Munir is a 23-year-old high-school-educated data technician hired by a private geospatial mapping company in...
At The Border
Borders are indispensable to capital’s formatting of the world. As social institutions, borders not only mediate relations of capital and state...
At The Border
At The Border is a collaboration between A/D/O and e-flux Architecture within the context of its 2019/2020 Research Program, featuring...
Education
Ralf and Robert arrive to collect me from my hotel on a snowy Vienna morning to drive to the wartime labor camp at Mauthausen. I've been invited...
Education
I began writing this essay weeks before I left South Africa in November 2019 for good; picked it up again a week after my arrival in New York...
Education
It is for the sake of the present and of the future that they are willing to die.
—Frantz Fanon 1
But if we rediscover time beneath the...
Education
The beginning of the twentieth century in England saw an increase in social welfare and educational reforms, the birth of the Garden City...
Education
The other day, Matt Mullenweg (chief executive of Automatic, which owns the WorldPress blogging platform) stated: “This is not how I imagined...
Education
In the United Kingdom, the Education Act of 1944 introduced secondary schooling for all children in government funded education, with a system of...
Education
The April 1968 issue of the American magazine Progressive Architecture and the May 1968 issue of the UK Architectural Design journal both...
Education
The late 1960s saw the birth of two radical ideas in the fields of education and environment. In education, the deschooling movement began with a...
Education
Representation fails to capture the affirmed world of difference. Representation has only a single center, a unique and receding perspective,...
Education
Architectures of Education is a collaboration between Nottingham Contemporary, Kingston University, and e-flux Architecture, and a...
New Silk Roads
This visual essay was assembled out of partly spontaneous and short, and other carefully planned and longer trips through Tajikistan and...
New Silk Roads
On October 15, 2015, a clash broke out between the residents of Okunraiye, a town in Ibeju Lekki, an area east of Lagos, and the workers of...
New Silk Roads
rec·la·ma·tion
noun
1. the process of claiming something back or of reasserting a right.
1.1 the cultivation of waste land or land...
New Silk Roads
On September 08, 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping gave a speech at Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University to launch the Silk Road Economic Belt...
New Silk Roads
The “strategic invisibility” of desert spaces accommodate the pursuit of activities out of public view and beyond the realm of judicial and civic...
New Silk Roads
Belt and Road is a project in both writing and reading history. To date, international scrutiny has fallen overwhelmingly on the former; how...
New Silk Roads
The 3rd Digital Belt and Road conference was held in Tengchong, southern China, in early December, 2018. Initiated by the Chinese Academy of...
New Silk Roads
There is a mud volcano on the periphery of Gwadar, a coastal town in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, locally known as “ sumunder ki naaf ,” or...
New Silk Roads
The standard way of writing about infrastructure is to start from the question of space and treat time as a consequence. Infrastructures create...
New Silk Roads
New Silk Roads is a collaboration between Aformal Academy and e-flux Architecture. The project has been supported by Design Trust and...
Positions
The Siren Call of Participation
Lingering in the dispersed and forgotten archives of the post-Sputnik crisis age is evidence of myriad...
Intelligence
Learning is not a process of accumulation of representations of the environment; it is a continuous process of transformation of behavior...
Intelligence
From the point of view of the ordinary educated citizen … the World Encyclopaedia would be a row of volumes in his own home or in some...
Intelligence
The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can...
Intelligence
I. A Catalog of Catalogs
We are so lucky… We are so lucky to have been raised amongst catalogs!
— Meg Swan, Best in Show 1...
Intelligence
Intelligence is an Online ↔ Offline collaboration between e-flux Architecture and BIO 26| Common Knowledge , the 26th Biennial of Design...
Positions
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...
Collectivity
The Original Sin
When addressing contemporary housing crises, it is common for architects, planners, and the public to refer to a shortage...
Collectivity
Urban collectivity, the emotional connection of individuals to place and to others, has been at once a strength and weakness of cities since the...
Collectivity
Nothing works. And to worry that things might go wrong is to miss the point. Things will always go wrong.
Problems, errors, risks, and...
Positions
“It had rained earlier, and the fragmented, light-filled clouds worked off each other.”
—Teju Cole 1
rain
What makes one...
Collectivity
1989 was the year the Berlin Wall fell. The year of protests in Tiananmen Square. The year Frederik Willem de Klerk initiated the end of apartheid...
Collectivity
We enter the terrain at sunset. It is silent, and even the water in front of us does not give away any movement. Along the dusty entrance, a wall...
Collectivity
Collectivity is a collaboration between the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2019 Thematic Exhibition and e-flux Architecture,...
Positions
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...
Liquid Utility
Mumbai’s water network has long distributed water, difference, and inequality through the city. Delivering over three billion liters of water...
Positions
Nick Axel As a conceptual material designer, you’ve recently invented lithoplast. What is lithoplast?
Shahar Livne Lithoplast is an...
Overgrowth
Many conventional economists argue that a healthy economy needs to grow at between 2–3%. This conveniently overlooks the fact that, if all...
Overgrowth
Nikolaus Hirsch The notion of time seems to be very essential to Rotor's practice. Your work on material cyles provides a different...
Positions
Nikolaus Hirsch Your practice is known for museums, such as the Kunstmuseum in Basel, the Swiss National Museum in Zurich, or the upcoming...
Overgrowth
Nick Axel Your practice, Snøhetta, has for the past thirty years pioneered questions of sustainability and problematized ecological challenges...
Overgrowth
Architecture today is addicted to four basic products: steel, concrete, glass, and plastic. Each is a figure in the hyper-industrial world in...
Positions
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...
Conditions
At the end of 1975, after Morocco invaded Western Sahara, the Saharawi resistance began to gather photographs belonging to Moroccan soldiers who...
Conditions
In 1954, a young Egyptian girl living in a village hundreds of kilometers away from Cairo could start her primary education in a brand-new school...
Conditions
In Mumbai, the word “slum” carries not just a pejorative linguistic connotation, but also juridical weight. Since 1995, with passage of the Slum...
Positions
Texas. Between the Rangers and the Cowboys, the gamers. A classicizing, stone-tiled arcade fronts the otherwise nondescript 80s-era husk of...
Conditions
In Johannesburg, spaces are divided with walls of varying thicknesses, sizes, gradients, and varying degrees of opacity. Physical walls and...
Conditions
In 1962, Jørn Utzon, the architect of the Sydney Opera House, published a short yet seminal essay titled “Platforms and Plateaus.” 1 The text is...
Conditions
1.
In his 1957 book Oriental Despotism, historian Karl Wittfogel regaled his readers with the bleak fate of the East Asian rice farmer,...
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Conditions
Conditions is a collaboration between the Sharjah Architecture Triennial and Africa Is a Country, Ajam Media Collective, ArtReview, e-flux...
Positions
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....
Liquid Utility
An unprecedented local referendum in 2011 forced the city of Berlin to remunicipalize its water utility after more than ten years of partial...
Positions
We who draw do so not only to make something visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination....
Liquid Utility
Puerto Rico is composed of several sub-tropical islands in the eastern Caribbean. Sources of fresh water in Puerto Rico are abundant. 1 Hundreds...
(2014).jpg,1600)
Positions
Nick Axel Architecture features prominently in your virtual reality and simulation work as a narrative device. How do you see the medium of...
Are Friends Electric?
Trust is good, control is better.
—Vladimir Lenin 1
For an outsider, particularly one without any Mandarin to lean on, thinking...
Are Friends Electric?
Discourses about the possible alliance of art and technology have informed institutional projects across the history of modern art and contributed...
Positions
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....
Are Friends Electric?
The word “homophily” was coined in a highly-cited 1954 essay by Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton on friendship in a mixed-race housing...
Are Friends Electric?
Daniel Birnbaum Koo Jeong A’s augmented reality artwork density (2019) hovers in the air in a hidden garden in Regent’s Park, London. Nobody...
Are Friends Electric?
Mud is another element. One comes to love it, to be like a wading bird, happy only at the edges of the world where land and water meet, where...
Are Friends Electric?
Are Friends Electric? is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and Moderna Museet within the context of its exhibition Mud Muses: A Rant...
Positions
“Queerness is not here yet. Queerness is an ideality,” writes José Esteban Muñoz in his introduction to Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of...
Overgrowth
Emergency exits frame and regulate contemporary life in the city—a life of excess, expenditure, and accumulation. Hidden, usually behind the...
Overgrowth
Nick Axel How would you describe your Living Room project?
Sandi Hilal Living rooms are traditionally where the private home opens itself...
Overgrowth
In her book In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism , Isabelle Stengers calls into question the dominant perspective of growth,...
Positions
By the late 1960s, Alan Solomon was established as one of America’s most innovative and influential curators. He had organized dozens of...
Overgrowth
Less and less do you need to force things, until you arrive at non-action. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone
—Lao Tse 1...
Overgrowth
Go, go, go, said the bird: Humankind
Cannot bear very much reality
—TS Eliot 1
It’s about 10am on a Saturday morning at Stansted...
Positions
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...
Overgrowth
February, 2019. The large, natural harbor in the innermost part of Prestfjorden, Vesterålen is throbbing with activity in the pitch black,...
Overgrowth
Your tour will begin in less than one minute. Please put on your hard hats and headphones now.
You are on a construction site. This is a...
Positions
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...
Overgrowth
Overgrowth. Excessive growth. Uncontrolled proliferation, even. Degrowth. Growth in reverse. Green Growth. Economic growth with a...
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Overgrowth
In the days of the wheel so much energetic expenditure was used in overcoming friction: a constant drag on progress and perpetuity. Caused by the...
Overgrowth
There exists a point at which anticipation is exhausted and naked absence is exposed. No matter what the guardians of neoliberal wisdom suggest,...
Positions
Nikolaus Hirsch It seems as if the practice of designing architecture is changing. Not dramatically but there is—despite or because of the...
Positions
This building has never been built, nor does it ever plan to be. Yet this mythic edifice has been scrupulously documented, updated, circulated,...
Positions
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...
Positions
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...
Positions
When they talk about their work in public, Zurich-based architects Thomas Padmanabhan and Oliver Lütjens invariably begin with a series of...
Positions
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...
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Positions
Since e-flux Architecture launched almost three years ago, it has become a locus for contemporary debate and research into architecture in the...
Liquid Utility
Inherently multiplicitous and predisposed to vary, water confounds attempts at fixity. Water’s defining traits are a tendency toward...
Becoming Digital
Contemporary life is sustained by the mediums and networks of global supply chains and logistics. As they infiltrate everything from our material...
Liquid Utility
The notion that land requires improvement because its inhabitants are also in need of civilizational uplift, and vice versa, is no accident of...
Becoming Digital
For some time now, our practice, MILLIØNS has been studying and experimenting with something that we have called, somewhat vaguely and informally,...
Liquid Utility
According to the worldview of my ancestors, wai (water) is everything. To us, the Indigenous peoples of Aotearoa New Zealand, known collectively...
Becoming Digital
The digitization of the contemporary world enables even the farthest reaches of our planet to be connected with relative ease and be transformed...
Becoming Digital
“Attention,” a voice began to call, and it was as though an oboe had suddenly become articulate. “Attention,” it repeated in the same high, nasal...
Liquid Utility
When our small group of activists began resisting the privatization of Seattle’s municipal transportation system in 2012, we were confronting a...
Becoming Digital
More than a decade ago, I would have found the idea of a forensic institute to be rather abhorrent. Coming from the field of left activism and...
Liquid Utility
In Cochabamba, the third largest city in Bolivia, water and its scarcity are at the center of daily life. Water is both a productive source of...
Liquid Utility
To the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure
Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment
Thank you, Chairwoman Napolitano,...
Liquid Utility
Not only the sun. Man-made tunnels, cisterns, and terraces to channel and retain water in Sicily have turned the largest Mediterranean island into...
Digital ×
Nick Axel What brought you to this idea of building a 10,000-year clock?
Daniel Hillis I started thinking about it in the late 1980s,...
Digital ×
Nick Axel How did the project of unMonastery come about?
Ben Vickers In 2011, I was working for the Council of Europe doing social...
Digital ×
Nick Axel Your work stems from a series of false correlations, the first one of which is the correlation between the amount of space and the...
Digital ×
Nick Axel You launched Openwater a few years ago. Can you tell us about it? What’s it trying to do?
Mary Lou Jepsen The idea of Openwater...
Digital ×
Nick Axel What is calm technology?
Amber Case The question of calm technology is how to have things in our environment that focus our...
Digital ×
Nick Axel You have a background in healthcare, and in particular, in designing joints for prosthetic limbs. But you're now heading the...
Digital ×
Nick Axel You founded the Architecture Machine Group (AMG) with Leon Grossier in 1967 at MIT to investigate and speculate upon the emerging...
Digital ×
Digital × is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Norman Foster Foundation within the context of its 2019 educational...
Liquid Utility
1. Where is Brussels?
Reflecting on W.E.B Du Bois’s inner state as he walked along Brussels’s great park and palace at Tervuren in 1936,...
Liquid Utility
In the shadows of Elmwood Cemetery on Detroit’s east side, Bloody Run Creek flows freely. Most of its waters have been buried by urban...
Curriculum
This syllabus frames the production, transmission, and understanding of architectural knowledge through theoretical discourse. Each session theory...
Curriculum
This syllabus responds to two current tendencies within the architectural profession: first, the increasing globalization of architectural...
Curriculum
What are the sites that architecture must navigate today? How can these sites speak not only about contemporary architectural production but also...
Curriculum
Whether one is born in Hyderabad, Tangiers, Volgograd, or Bogota, the most critical problems of life are increasingly universal in nature. This...
Curriculum
One basic way to challenge architectural theory to think globally is to challenge it to think beyond itself. Thus, this syllabus aims to connect...
Curriculum
Throughout history and across cultures, architects have engaged in intellectual debates about the built environment. They’ve grappled with the...
Curriculum
This syllabus sets canonical architectural histories and theories in dialog with non-canonical texts that challenge, renegotiate, and/or otherwise...
Curriculum
Theory’s Curriculum is a project by e-flux Architecture and Joseph Bedford, featuring the collaborative work of Matthew Allen, Joseph Bedford,...
Liquid Utility
Liquid Utility is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at...
Becoming Digital
Many contemporary videogames are inherently architectural, dealing with the depiction of constructed space and actions that take place within it....
Becoming Digital
The curb is a simple demarcation between two spaces: the roadway and the sidewalk. While their origin had little to do with transport, they became...
Becoming Digital
An End User Undertaking (EUU) is an agreement proffered by software manufacturers and signed by the representatives of software consumers that...
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Becoming Digital
Shapeshifting
In 2016, Joy Buolamwini, a researcher with the Civic Media group at the MIT Media Lab and founder of Code4Rights, developed the...
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Overgrowth
There is something provocative and at the same time revealing in the act of eliminating the kitchen from the house. The generalized social refusal...
Overgrowth
The Indians were many and would replenish every hour … they could not have been more than a stone’s throw away when more than four hundred...
Becoming Digital
A shining city on a hill
Cities of dreams have a long history. Utopia as a literary form dating from the reign of King Henry VIII is more...
Becoming Digital
Discussing who we are in the digital age is no easy task. Everyone and their grandmother, so to speak, has an opinion. But to call in data experts...
Becoming Digital
Becoming Digital is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and Ellie Abrons, McLain Clutter, and Adam Fure of the Taubman College of...
Overgrowth
In Mumbai, a city permanently under construction and repair, bamboo scaffolding is ubiquitous. The city, with its concrete and brick architecture,...
Overgrowth
The notion of “degrowth” can provoke a mixture of annoyance, confusion, and frustration. There is, of course, an ideological and theoretical...
Overgrowth
The good citizens of Oslo have high expectations of their city. And in the same way as cities all over the world, Oslo often fails to deliver....
Positions
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...
History/Theory
(or, histories and theories of the prearchitectonic condition )
During discussions of “history/theory,” the term “architecture” often...