Half-Life
While the world tackles a myriad of calamities—a pandemic, floods, wildfires, hurricanes, famine, systemic racism, structural inequality, and police violence, among others—the possibility of nuclear disaster inexorably returns to arrest our attention.
Half-Life
September 2021: I find myself in a dusty corner of New Mexico to see one of the wonders of the American West: the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, New Mexico, the United States’ only deep geologic long-lived radioactive waste repository.
Half-Life
Idinthakarai is one of many fishing villages, hemmed in with coconut trees, which dot the Tamil Nadu coastline. Out here, the sea, the church, and other people’s lives are almost always within earshot. The village’s quaint appearance, however, belies Idinthakarai’s status as the epicenter of India’s longest anti-nuclear struggle.
Half-Life
When confronted with ambiguity, it is often hard to allow a specific identifier to take hold, as it can be difficult to find out what that is. The perception that many have of something they don’t know—like Rym’s identity and origins—has so often in her travels lifted to the surface as confusion, the need to name her, and then an odd type of fear in their unknowing. She feels this fear too, because in this country, she’s not safe. Few Indigenous women are.
Half-Life
On February 13, 1960, the French military detonated the first of seventeen atomic bombs in the Algerian Sahara. The site of the inaugural bomb was Reggane—a district with a town, villages, and an oasis—located in the Tanezrouft Plain of the colonized desert, approximately 1,000 kilometers south of Algiers.
Half-Life
In the days when the mail arrived in an envelope—franked by a stamp, delivered by a postman, and slid under the door—there used to be pen-pals. This was a friendship of strangers, for strangers, by strangers. The more distant, the stranger the proximity.
Half-Life
The ocean is our mat. Woven from dried pandanus leaves, like the currents of the ocean, our mat connects us to one another across our wansolwara, our sea of islands that stretches from West Papua to Mā’ohi Nui (French Polynesia). This mat is one where we come to talk story, share, feast, laugh, learn, and imagine with one another.
Half-Life
If you can harness plutonium, the element at the heart of the nuclear inferno, then you can magnify human power to a super-hero level. In tandem, plutonium has the power to re-map territories, produce new borders—not just between people, but between humans and the environment. By extension, plutonium spatializes power.
Half-Life
Half-Life is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Art Institute of Chicago within the context of its exhibition “Static Range” by Himali Singh Soin, featuring contributions by Kate Brown, Camille Georgeson-Usher, Samia Henni, Sabu Kohso, Talei Luscia Mangioni, Livia Krohn Miller, Radiowaves Collective, and Raqs Media Collective.
On Models
No one is quite sure who the Trickster is, where it came from, what it is, or what purpose it serves, but it tends to unexpectedly show up in cultural narratives, often exposing human flaws and reminding us of our collective interactions, including exposing our unscrupulous behaviors.
On Models
Model making has no clear point of origin or single intention but rather constitutes an action that is constantly remade by its execution. Model making has functioned not only as an operation characteristic of certain forms of production or professional institutions, but also as a significant cultural technique when, under delimited historical situations, it intersected with other epistemic, technological, and social systems.
Interdependence
The ecology of the artworld in South Africa today relies on support from public and private institutions. Yet there is a deficiency of state and municipal funding for maintaining public art institutions as well as supporting exhibition programming, acquisitions, and publishing.
Interdependence
The Center for Contemporary Art, Lagos (CCA) was founded as a not-for-profit art space, gallery, library and educational center in 2007, a year before my first visit. Its intention was to allow new voices to emerge along with new forms of artistic thought and expression. A space for Lagosians to find, interact, learn, and share from the wealth of creative knowledge and practice that has existed and exists in the city as well as from places far and wide.
Interdependence
Originally from this vast region, Bebson Elemba aka Bebson de la Rue is in the process of turning his Ngbwaka home into an autonomous space for collective participatory creation. Step by step, an informal avant-garde will begin to take shape around his artistic practice.
Interdependence
The history of the Drill Hall, of the 1956 Treason Trial, became fertile ground to expand our programming with the After School Programme. Some of the publications that we printed about the heritage of the Drill Hall and the history of South Africa were meant to become integrated in local school curricula, which doesn’t speak much about the 1956 Treason Trial.
Interdependence
Inventive forms of collaborative and critical practice are often born in cities where the infrastructure of cultural funding and subsidies is limited. In parallel to supporting artists and curators themselves, independent art initiatives often serve fundamental roles in their wider communities, too.
Horizons
In Dubai’s industrial district of Al Quoz is a museum of failed futures. More precisely, it’s a warehouse filled with 3D-printed architectural models.
Horizons
Faced with climate change and other interconnected existential crises in the twenty-first century, it is quickly becoming a cliché to say that there is a strong need to “imagine better futures.”
Horizons
In February 2016, the solar power station of Ouarzazate was inaugurated in Morocco, on the north-western edges of the Sahara.
Digestion
It must be said from the outset that Lila disagreed with the whole idea of Geffen’s father coming to live with them.
Digestion
The interface between land and water is nature’s metabolic process. In this messy, everchanging, and unpredictable zone, different kinds of porosities emerge and become the birthplace of many more-than-human livelihoods. Water channels are nature’s blood vessel network.
Digestion
What does it mean to be a skillful cook? Over the last several centuries, the skillful cook was arguably the one who most successfully healed the historical wounds of modernity by reconciling traditional dishes with modern techniques.
Digestion
The term “circularity” implies a kind of supreme intentionality, where the lifecycle of a material has been pre-ordained by wise planners, long in advance of its “birth,” in a series of cute diagrams.
Digestion
The challenges of repairing broken food systems in this time of dire climate crisis necessitates cross-scalar strategies.
Digestion
Embryologically-speaking, your living home is grown from a primitive architectural streak which is cultured by hand in our studio using the stem cells that you provide.
Horizons
For the last two years, a battle has gripped the southern rim of Atlanta. Much more than a local conflict or environmental defense activism, the battle for the South River Forest brings to the fore critical questions of urban life in the age of climate change.
Horizons
In a context of uncertainty about the political, economic, and environmental future of the Arabian Peninsula, marketing and promotional material for NEOM plays a vital role, demonstrating that Saudi Arabia will diversify its economy away from fossil fuels and overcome possible ecological, social, and financial crises with the help of new design solutions, business models, and technological innovations.
Horizons
“Before” and “after”: no expressions can be more commonplace, yet none, when you come to think about it, can be more perplexing.
Horizons
Architecture has long been one of the most powerful means of imagining, visualizing, and constructing futures. Like a projectile, the architectural project is thrown forward, reaching into and determining the conditions of what is to come. But where architecture ultimately lands— and what actually makes it to the end of the trajectory—can never be known fully in advance. Not to mention the multifarious costs and effects—the value—of bringing it down to earth.
On Models
Who can pick up the weight of Britain,
Who can move the German load
Or say to French, here is France again?
Imago. Imago. Imago.
—Wallace Stev...
On Models
Models are epistemic tools that assemble and disseminate knowledge, progressing a design incrementally while converging on a final object, form, or space. However, models are also physical and conceptual instruments of the cosmopoietic (world-making) act, capable of creating partial or entire worlds.
On Models
The pandemic condition of practice revealed the extent to which designers’ thinking depends on scale models.
On Models
On Models is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and The Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto within the context of its exhibition HOUSE OF CARD...
Digestion
Hot, moist air has long been a powerful, yet largely invisible, working fluid in the colonial and modern enterprise. Processes of air conditioning represent acts of metabolism, ensuring the adaptation of air to the project of human domestication.
Digestion
Urban mining is the process of recovering materials that are lodged inside an already standing anthropic mass. Seeing material forms as resources rather than landfill waste can prevent mineral matter from being inefficiently re-buried.
Digestion
Digestion turns the outside into an inside. Our organism is never simply in the world but an intricate folding of outside into an inside. More precisely still, it is a fold that produces the very sense of an outside by constructing an interior seemingly detached from it.
Digestion
Digestion is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale, curated by Lydia Kallipoliti and Areti Markopoulou, featuring contributions by Rachel Armstrong and Rolf Hughes; Montserrat Bonvehi-Rosich; Aude-Line Duliere, Juliet Haysom, and James Westcott; Reif Larsen; Mae-ling Lokko; Meredith TenHoor; Mark Wigley; Lindsey Wikstrom; and Feifei Zhou, Zahirah Suhaimi, and Jefree Salim.
Where is Here?
Located roughly thirty kilometers east from Amsterdam, the Oostvaardersplassen nature reserve stretches out over about 5,600 hectares, about 3,000 of ...
Where is Here?
In the 1970s, my parents were not allowed to live in the Van der Pekstraat in Amsterdam-North. Not around the corner in the Meeuwenlaan either. The ne...
Where is Here?
With its iconic archipelago of polders, clear-cut boundaries between rural and urban, straightened or purposely bent waterways, and highly efficient y...
Where is Here?
Introduction: Earth and the City
About three years ago, I started a presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers b...
Where is Here?
Where is Here? is a collaboration between Het Nieuwe Instituut and e-flux Architecture following Who is We?, the Dutch pavilion at the 2021 Venice Arc...
Sick Architecture
For all the scientific discovery and technological progress heralded by late modernity, its lasting legacy is also one of disenchantment and alienatio...
Sick Architecture
Resolution WHA67.8 was published as part of the World Health Organization’s 67th World Health Assembly in 2014, which offered a point of action for ...
Sick Architecture
Liberated from the exaggerated dreams of a healing environment, architectures of care can repair the old logic of separation for persons with mental a...
Sick Architecture
We do not see the woman as inferior, but rather as having a different mission, a different value, than that of the man. Therefore we believed that t...
Sick Architecture
In May 1919, the literary magazine Xin qingnian / La Jeunesse published a short story by Chinese writer Lu Xun called “Medicine,” in which Old Chu...
Sick Architecture
What would it mean to design buildings that exceed the economic accountings of liberal biopolitics, that instead offer an entirely different rationale...
Sick Architecture
In 1913, a year before the Panama Canal was completed, the journalist Frederic J. Haskin wrote that “the conquest of the Isthmian barrier was the co...
Sick Architecture
On October 1, 1998, subcontractors with the US Department of Energy set up a “situation room” in downtown Richland, Washington, to monitor a myste...
Sick Architecture
I am convinced that the trailer or an improved version of it is, for better or for worse, the low cost dwelling of the future—lacking in solidity,...
Sick Architecture
Take Nebraska Interstate 87 as far as you can North till it becomes South Dakota Interstate 407. Where these two highways meet, you’ll see a tipi on...
Sick Architecture
The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed that international borders pervade far beyond their physical sites in order to alienate from within. In the United ...
Sick Architecture
Every city, Vitruvius assumes in his first-century bce treatise On Architecture, needs walls.1 Deciding where to put them is the first thing to consid...
Sick Architecture
Questioning the Potemkin Metropolis
The interplay of rhythms—the rhythm of urban capitalism and the body’s rhythmic propensities—sometimes sy...
Sick Architecture
Of the many notorious origin myths of architecture, the story that directly relates to the insatiable, primordial human desire to eat remains one of t...
Sick Architecture
As far as Harriet Ann Brent Jacobs knew, life for an enslaved person was ghastly, and like many enslaved people she had learned to navigate the thin l...
Sick Architecture
Arrested in motion, Earth appears precariously imbalanced. Crowned with a turreted city model, the personification’s muscular body twists auspicious...
Sick Architecture
A Highly Controlled Visibility
Up until 1968, L’Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris treated women exclusively. During the time that Doc...
Sick Architecture
Discussions of architectural form demonstrate how disability is negatively imprinted into the field of architecture. In architectural theory and the h...
Sick Architecture
Le doy fuego a la Fortaleza como se supone
Y al otro día voy a la iglesia pa’ que me perdonen
Mejor no quieras probar de qué estamos hechos
A...
Sick Architecture
Plague Clouds
On August 27th, 1883, the volcano of Krakatoa in the Indonesian islands erupted. Ashes and rocks flew miles high. Barometers wobbled ...
Sick Architecture
At the inauguration of the First Brazilian Congress of Eugenics in July of 1929, the physician and anthropologist Edgar Roquette-Pinto addressed an au...
Positions
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...
Positions
Partitions of territory are often ascribed to historically specific moments of accountability. While colonial partitions set the terms for politics an...
Solicited: Proposals
The horizon is present in every exhibition. Most times it is simply an afterthought, a subliminal line that follows the viewer through the gallery, an...
Solicited: Proposals
For visitors, the audio guide is a crucial point of access to the ideas and imaginations behind an exhibition. It is a friendly voice, arriving somewh...
Solicited: Proposals
The neoliberalization of public services and austerity-led stripping of government finance towards the operation of museums across North America and...
Solicited: Proposals
Exhibitions are environments of rigid climatic control. The ideal interior weather for artworks and artefacts require temperature and humidity to be k...
Solicited: Proposals
Captioning is anything but a routine curatorial task. There are styles and tendencies, even existing criteria for excellence, with annual awards given...
Solicited: Proposals
The brief, a specific genre of architectural writing, constitutes one of the necessary starting points for any architectural project, defining its obj...
Workplace
Settlement
Many explicate that labor is constructed through settlement, and perhaps the most readily visible and visiblized histories of work, and ...
Accumulation
The ground is all memoranda and signatures
and many objects covered over with hints.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ghost: Mark me!
—William Shakesp...
Workplace
Interior, pizza arcade.
Sioux Falls, 1995 or thereabouts. Family groups and clusters of post-soccer-practice tweens sit around napkin-strewn table...
Workplace
In the context of contemporary forms of labor, “production” is often discussed and glamorized. But what is overlooked is the exhaustion that follo...
Workplace
“Oh, that’s definitely a post.” I didn’t agree, but I posted it anyways. Not because it was done (it wasn’t), but because I was finished.
*...
Workplace
Scene 1: Fantasy Cities
I have no idea where I am. The landscape for some time now has looked like a non-place; as unremarkable and replicable as a...
Workplace
Women, War, and Work
While housing has long been intimately connected with capitalism via speculative finance, mortgage debt, and property developm...
Workplace
During the strictest Covid-19 lockdowns in the UK, the continued labor of waste collection workers and supermarket delivery drivers allowed other part...
Workplace
And if the wreckage of this inheritance will not be complete; if notwithstanding the crimes committed during this “civilized” war, we may still b...
Workplace
From myriad sources, including the lived experience of our own lives, we know how deeply problematic practices of labor sourcing, organizing, and regu...
Workplace
Oppressed peoples are always asked to stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity.
—Audre Lorde1
On May 28, 2020 at a...
Workplace
Delivery Lines: Amazon’s Supply Chain
In 2019 Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos made a critical articulation about contemporary capitalism, akin to Vanderbil...
Workplace
Workplace is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Canadian Centre for Architecture within the context of its year-long research project...
Solicited: Proposals
The will to influence is at the core of any exhibition.
—Bruce W. Ferguson1
The making of culture relies on interpretation for its own validity. ...
Solicited: Proposals
Having served as director of two Los Angeles-based non-profit organizations dedicated to architectural exhibitions, I am often implicated in the makin...
Solicited: Proposals
Western cultural institutions like the museum often presuppose an orderly spacing of time. The queue, in this sense, is anticipatory, but almost alway...
Solicited: Proposals
Architects are often taught that everything is architecture. That they are educated in a discipline with no boundaries, which reaches all aspects of l...
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 present....
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 between a...
Solicited: Proposals
This contribution is intended to be listened to.
The exhibition is open only at specific hours, from dusk to midnight. During these periods, you ...
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 visua...
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 text ...
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 is a s...
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 for al...
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, toda...
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 more ...
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 Afric...
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 accommo...
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 great Za...
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 Omar ...
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 s...
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 m...
Coloniality of Infrastructure
Coloniality of Infrastructure is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture, Critical Urbanisms at the University of Basel, and the African Centre fo...
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 2009, th...
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 wi...
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 built ...
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 mis...
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, featuring co...
Survivance
Applications Invited: Transdisciplinary Scholar to Assist in Re-Designing Higher Education.
Project Tasks: Whose knowledge? What is knowledge? What...
Survivance
The movement that began from our fields
Has travelled well beyond our fields,
Your nefarious game stands exposed,
This people's movement will not...
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 that c...
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 Architecture...
Survivance
Lubumbashi, a market
Seforah is sent by her mother to Marche Kenya1 to purchase sombe2 and ngai ngai3 seeds along with bitoyo4 and kabambale.5 Tant...
Survivance
The word nostalgia derives from a sickness of home, from the trauma and longing one feels after being artificially and involuntarily ripped from your ...
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 that n...
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 inspired ...
Survivance
Unleashing Ecocide
The paradox of Western supremacy is that it begins with its own. Its practices of dispossession, barbarism, violence, and imperi...
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 told my...
Survivance
Axel Wieder You have recently participated in a series of online discussions on indigenous or more specifically Sámi art and architectural practice, ...
Positions
The COVID-19 pandemic has included mass social mobilization toward a mutually-accountable separation from one another. Its bioethics sees each of us a...
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 that ...
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 the a...
Survivance
Cultivate Christchurch, the Aotearoa New Zealand based urban farm and youth wellbeing project, has inspired people all over the world with its grounde...
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, peppered by...
Survivance
Within the last decade, fueled by global marketing campaigns and health trends, the coconut and its primary derivatives—oil, butter, milk, sugar, wa...
Survivance
Hearing the buzz
We humans evolved to survive in a world with specific types of matter and energy; our particular hominid ancestors thrived by favo...
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 Surviva...
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 coastli...
Survivance
They said with wonder and admiration, you are still alive, like hydrogen, like oxygen.
—Dionne Brand1
In Christina Sharpe’s book In the Wa...
Survivance
1. Pinch Points
I write from the watery, mountainous Pacific Northwest of North America. This is the bioregion that pulses between the tar sands, t...
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 discovere...
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 yea...
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 animal...
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 national ...
Survivance
Dig. Geology and its kin network of extraction, natural resources, architectures of geomorphic transformation (dams, river straightening, climate chan...
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 tests ...
Survivance
Survive. Exist. Strategize. Close. Endure. Hide. Reveal. Persist. Hope. Thrive. Plan. Create. Mobilize. Open. Propel. Writing and speaking about survi...
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 mentor to...
Survivance
Blackgirls young and old are memory keepers, cultural workers, love pillars, freedom mappers, and actors.1 Radical love is a regular praxis through wh...
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, I was ...
Survivance
Sigidm hanaa’na̱x, Smgyigyit, Łagyigyet, ada txa’nii gyeda galts’ap.
Sm Łoodm ‘Nüüsm di waayu. Mootgm Goot di nooyu.
La̱xsgyiik di p...
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 are ...
Survivance
Having spent most of my life between cultural dissonance and cultural isolation, double consciousness has always been a part of my daily reality. Stru...
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 interio...
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 people)...
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 locat...
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 tw...
Survivance
While generational resilience and resistance in the United States has been in my blood for four generations, like most immigrant families, my family n...
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 somethi...
Survivance
Survivance is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, with guest editors Natchee Blu Barnd, Black Quantum Fu...
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 ...
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 of t...
Cascades
Cascades is a collaboration between MAAT - Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology and e-flux Architecture within the context of the exhibition X i...
Exhausted
For almost all of human history, reproduction was inexorable, unimpeded, and imperative, as well as socially and medically dangerous. Reproduction ref...
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 s...
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 sea...
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 passing ...
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 and c...
Exhausted
For many Native American communities, understandings of family, fertility, and “collective continuance” are closely rooted to the protection, pres...
Exhausted
Exhausted is a collaboration between SALT and e-flux Architecture within the context of CLIMAVORE: Seasons Made to Drift, a new solo exhibition by Coo...
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 vis...
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 80121,...
Confinement
In her text about Afro-pessimism and its intellectual consequences, Catherine Malabou calls for a different understanding of life in prison than one n...
Accumulation
In 1963, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew (1959–1990) called Singapore a “society in transition,” pushing the country on an upwards trajectory toward...
Accumulation
In Yangon, Myanmar, displays of conspicuous wealth adorn high-end real estate developments located at strategic downtown intersections and clustered a...
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 history....
Confinement
Covered in vaseline, polycarbonate, and mylar tape, the circular compound eye of knowledge occupies spaces and dreams, zones and fields, areas and sea...
Confinement
Nathaniel Whitfield The university and the prison both exist as metaphors and metonyms. As part of the Underground Scholars Initiative and the UCLA Pr...
Confinement
This text takes form through a spatial and (ever)special dialect.1 Liminal spaces between letterforms and words are (re)inhabited to extend and (dis-)...
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? Dirt...
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 building in...
Critical Cooking Show
Kitchen tools offer a support structure that generates social, environmental, and spatial situations, due to the gestures they involve and relations t...
Confinement
Somewhere between the stereotomic stonework of classical architecture and the “service cavity” logic of the modern plenum wall lies a different co...
Critical Cooking Show
Olive trees hold the living knowledge of Mesopotamia. Since ancient times, they represent life, peace, and solidarity in the region. Soil composition ...
Confinement
The diffuse house is the archetypal form of domestic space under late capitalism. The diffuse house operates 24/7. The diffuse house is ubiquitous. ...
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 from th...
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 housing an...
Monument
Since the 1980s, a number of buildings have been reconstructed in Germany that are intended to contribute to the formation of German identity. While t...
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 ne...
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 deeply ...
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, respectively. T...
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, as wel...
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 (6DoF) is...
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 kitchens in ...
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 ora...
Confinement
Meghan Rolvien At first, every landscape presents itself as immensely chaotic. Your maps question territorial realities and present a certain geograph...
Confinement
The Homogenizing force of capitalism is incompatible with any inherent structure of differentiation: sacred-profane, carnival-workday, nature-cultur...
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 its time...
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 each...
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) seems...
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 prison...
Monument
Searching for forms and histories in the architectures of diaspora, migration, and the overlooked, we may find possibilities for forms of representati...
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, lying at...
Confinement
1
9:00–10:00 am
Reinsurance, call 115, distribution of exceptional travel certificates, medical appointments, contact tutor for budget managemen...
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 always b...
Monument
After the Maidan revolution and Russian military occupation of Ukraine in 2014, the realm of memory has been occupied by militarism and political reac...
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. In the...
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 cam...
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 ubiq...
Confinement
Sara Sherif How did your work against the violence of prisons with The Funambulist begin?
Léopold Lambert I think it started from an intuition tha...
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 obsessi...
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. We al...
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 with l...
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 on t...
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 documen...
Confinement
An illustration of loneliness, togetherness, sameness, selflessness, laziness, asceticism, libertinism, domestication, inhabitation, socialization, in...
Sick Architecture
In 1975, tired of its reputation for being a “soft state” blemished by charges of corruption, security threats, labor unrest, and uncontrolled pov...
Sick Architecture
California and its northern population center, San Francisco, owes much of its character and development to disease. “Gold Fever,” as it was calle...
Sick Architecture
On May 28, 1914, the Institut für Schiffs- und Tropenkrankheiten (Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases, ISTK) in Hamburg began operations in ...
Critical Cooking Show
An antidote to our relationship with the material world—generally framed by a rationalist apprehension of reality—object*oriented*magic creates ne...
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 blue part is ...
Sick Architecture
With the early twentieth century development of a series of immigration stations, quarantine facilities, and hospitals at the main ports of entry to t...
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 t...
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 would b...
Sick Architecture
Sick Architecture is a collaboration between Beatriz Colomina, e-flux Architecture, and the Princeton University Ph.D. Program in the History and Theo...
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 co...
Confinement
Nick Axel How has Forensic Architecture’s work with witnesses evolved over the years?
Eyal Weizman In our first experiments, we were inspired by ...
At The Border
The Tijuana-San Diego border region is a global laboratory for engaging the central challenges of urbanization today: deepening social and economic in...
Critical Cooking Show
Broadcasting from Crown Heights, Your Mouth Has Power is a collective message from Brooklyn about food sovereignty, resilience and culture during a pr...
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 typography ...
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 someth...
Are Friends Electric?
Networks and Society
Whether it is online or in our daily physical routines, we interact with others—close friends, acquaintances, familiar and u...
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. Foo...
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 togethe...
The 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 have d...
Monument
The Black Archives is an Amsterdam-based historical archive for conversations, activities, and literature from Black and other perspectives that are o...
The 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 their re...
The 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 seemi...
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 ex-worker at...
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, Empathy...
The Settler Colonial Present
The plantation is a persistent but ugly blueprint of our contemporary spatial troubles.
—Katherine McKittrick 1
Sustainability is the new ar...
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, comm...
The 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 school o...
The 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, 2020...
The Settler Colonial Present
The Settler Colonial Present is a collaboration between the Settler Colonial City Project and e-flux Architecture, featuring contributions by Anita Ba...
Confinement
As the destruction of the environment deepens and broadens, leaving no leaf unturned, we continue to perform what once took place inside architecture....
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 Barthes...
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 surface...
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 highway. T...
Confinement
Black desire
Enclosed
Clouded, shrouded, 10, 11, need
Chapter 6
Health
MY PRESENT STATE OF HEALTH
‘My monthly periods have just b...
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 Gilgamesh...
Confinement
Nikolaus Hirsch Your drawing is an axonometric representation of the Cape Coast Castle, a building outside of Accra, the city where you have lived and...
Confinement
Confinement is a collaborative exhibition taking place both online at e-flux Architecture and on site at ETH Zürich, curated by gta exhibitions (Fred...
Monument
And we, Spectators, always, everywhere,
looking at, never out of, everything!
It overfills us. We arrange it, It falls apart.
We rearrange it, an...
Monument
Sebastia, a small archaeological town, sits on top of a hill Northwest of Nablus, Palestine surrounded by Shavei Shomron, an illegal Israeli settlemen...
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 tow...
Monument
In October 2019, along a dusty stretch of a back road in northwestern Mississippi, workmen and activists installed a historical marker, the fourth one...
Monument
Monument is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and Het Nieuwe Instituut, featuring essays by Arna Mačkić, Wayne Modest, Philipp Oswalt, Jor...
Accumulation
Researchers, activists, and citizens are speaking more and more about “getting away from the system of production.” The goal is no longer simply t...
Accumulation
I. Moraine (Kangerlussuaq, Greenland)
Delayed in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, we stand at the moraine of the Greenland Ice Sheet. We are a short dista...
Accumulation
Buildings are primarily characterized in the discipline of architecture as objects. The composition of a building, for example, is what emphatically m...
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 Tsing1
...
Accumulation
Precarious Entanglement
In the Anthropocene—the current terminal period of neoliberal capitalism marked by climate change, environmental degradat...
Accumulation
The insurance industry is an influential consolidator of knowledge about risk. Accident after accident and plague following plague, insurers earn thei...
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 eroded by...
Oceans in Transformation
Singapore, 2030
A tropical storm is brewing. A group of anonymous hackers recently leaked confidential government documents showing that Singaporea...
Oceans in Transformation
Frequency Fishing
It’s only when we dive that we understand.
—Pak Harun Mohamad1
“[To] get a sense in air of [a dolphin echolocati...
Software as Infrastructure
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 not be...
Software as Infrastructure
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 cal...
Software as Infrastructure
Architects deal in imagined conditions, seeking to imbue their images with a mix of plausibility, desirability, and futurity so irresistible that the ...
Software as Infrastructure
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 machine...
Software as Infrastructure
The Communist bosses of Peiping dropped a bamboo curtain, cutting off Peiping from the world.
—Time magazine, March 14, 19491
After World Wa...
Software as Infrastructure
On the surface, the way we document buildings may still look the same. Modeling software, like any other tool in history, helps architects depict, des...
Software as Infrastructure
Software as Infrastructure is a project by e-flux Architecture as part of "Eyes of the City" at the 2019 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (Sh...
Oceans in Transformation
The Azores archipelago has long been considered a site of geostrategic relevance for geopolitical and resource exploitation due to its natural wealth ...
Housing
Staircases can be perspicaciously complex. The staircase is one place where architects visually and physically connect people within buildings, and wh...
Housing
Historically, the idea of home has mirrored a faithful image of society’s deeper social structures. Consequently, housing has often been used as an ...
Oceans in Transformation
The oceans throughout history provided seemingly inexhaustible fish for people brave and skillful enough to exploit them. Whenever fish catches declin...
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 the “...
Oceans in Transformation
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 g...
Housing
Most philosophers—in fact, most people—would agree that use presupposes property; that in order to use something legitimately, one needs the autho...
Housing
In the wake of World War II, decolonization and the Cold War reshaped urbanization processes around the planet.1 The untangling of Western European em...
Oceans in Transformation
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 well ...
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 201...
Housing
George Kafka Can you explain the genesis of FICA and, in simple terms, how the model works?
Renato Cymbalista (FICA) Around four years ago some peo...
Housing
Georg Vrachliotis What are the biggest issues facing housing today?
Nathalie de Vries We have to create livable cities while living together with e...
Housing
There is a contradiction at the core of contemporary urbanization. Cities and urban regions are expanding rapidly and exert a growing political and ec...
Oceans in Transformation
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 for ...
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.”
—Lu...
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 install l...
Housing
Rent control and anti-eviction measures in general have attracted enormous attention in recent years because they directly addresses the issue of disp...
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 shared...
Housing
"Apartment Buildings for New York" is a previously unpublished manifesto by Frei Otto written in 1959. It is a continuation of Otto’s longstanding...
Housing
Housing is a collaboration between e-flux architecture and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology Chair for Theory of Architecture featuring contributi...
Oceans in Transformation
monster
From monstrum, monere: to show, warn, or remind
by which gods give notice of calamity
Hence:
monstrous
premonition
demonstration
...
Architectures of Education
Remote education was originally invented to overcome distance, to make learning accessible to those who could not converge in centralized campuses. So...
Oceans in Transformation
The Weather
As an embodied experience and agentic force, weather moves, scars, imprints. Our armpits dampen in response to the heat; our jaws and t...
Oceans in Transformation
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: it is ...
Oceans in Transformation
Oceans in Transformation is a collaboration between TBA21–Academy and e-flux Architecture within the context of the eponymous exhibition at Ocean Sp...
At The Border
Unlike tracings which propagate redundancies, mappings discover new worlds within past and present ones; they inaugurate new grounds upon the hidden...
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 t...
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 conf...
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 So...
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 following...
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, conc...
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 addition...
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 composed...
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 of c...
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 Tre...
At The Border
1. The Beetle and the Seagrass Against the Port
If property depends on clearly defined boundaries … then coastal/marine property is complex and...
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 Committee on...
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 desert wi...
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 were...
At The Border
The US-Mexico borderlands can be defined by shifting and intensifying bands of ultraviolet radiation that impact bodies in asymmetrical ways, enact ne...
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 its...
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 Ardas, a ...
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 Bandung, an...
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 but ...
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 contributions b...
Architectures of 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 by th...
Architectures of 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 City and...
Architectures of Education
It is for the sake of the present and of the future that they are willing to die.
—Frantz Fanon1
But if we rediscover time beneath the subject...
Architectures of Education
The beginning of the twentieth century in England saw an increase in social welfare and educational reforms, the birth of the Garden City movement, an...
Architectures of Education
The other day, Matt Mullenweg (chief executive of Automatic, which owns the WorldPress blogging platform) stated: “This is not how I imagined envisi...
Architectures of Education
In the United Kingdom, the Education Act of 1944 introduced secondary schooling for all children in government funded education, with a system of gram...
Architectures of Education
The April 1968 issue of the American magazine Progressive Architecture and the May 1968 issue of the UK Architectural Design journal both featured a t...
Architectures of 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 semi...
Architectures of Education
Representation fails to capture the affirmed world of difference. Representation has only a single center, a unique and receding perspective, and in...
Architectures of Education
Architectures of Education is a collaboration between Nottingham Contemporary, Kingston University, and e-flux Architecture, and a cross-publication w...
New Silk Roads
This visual essay was assembled out of partly spontaneous and short, and other carefully planned and longer trips through Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. T...
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 Dangote In...
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 formerly un...
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 (SREB)...
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 China’s...
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 Science, ...
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 th...
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 channe...
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 produced in coop...
Positions
The Siren Call of Participation
Lingering in the dispersed and forgotten archives of the post-Sputnik crisis age is evidence of myriad attempts at ...
Intelligence
Learning is not a process of accumulation of representations of the environment; it is a continuous process of transformation of behavior through co...
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 neighboring...
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 follow analys...
Intelligence
I. A Catalog of Catalogs
We are so lucky… We are so lucky to have been raised amongst catalogs!
— Meg Swan, Best in Show1
Growing up in...
Intelligence
Intelligence is an Online ↔ Offline collaboration between e-flux Architecture and BIO 26| Common Knowledge, the 26th Biennial of Design Ljubljana, S...
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 the scul...
Collectivity
The Original Sin
When addressing contemporary housing crises, it is common for architects, planners, and the public to refer to a shortage of affo...
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 earli...
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 failures are...
Positions
“It had rained earlier, and the fragmented, light-filled clouds worked off each other.”
—Teju Cole1
rain
What makes one housing build...
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 in ...
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 is l...
Collectivity
Collectivity is a collaboration between the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2019 Thematic Exhibition and e-flux Architecture, featuring co...
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 early wo...
Liquid Utility
Mumbai’s water network has long distributed water, difference, and inequality through the city. Delivering over three billion liters of water daily ...
Positions
Nick Axel As a conceptual material designer, you’ve recently invented lithoplast. What is lithoplast?
Shahar Livne Lithoplast is an experimental ...
Overgrowth
Many conventional economists argue that a healthy economy needs to grow at between 2–3%. This conveniently overlooks the fact that, if all countries...
Overgrowth
Nikolaus Hirsch The notion of time seems to be very essential to Rotor's practice. Your work on material cyles provides a different understanding of w...
Positions
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...
Overgrowth
Nick Axel Your practice, Snøhetta, has for the past thirty years pioneered questions of sustainability and problematized ecological challenges facing...
Overgrowth
Architecture today is addicted to four basic products: steel, concrete, glass, and plastic. Each is a figure in the hyper-industrial world in which we...
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 product,...
Conditions
At the end of 1975, after Morocco invaded Western Sahara, the Saharawi resistance began to gather photographs belonging to Moroccan soldiers who were ...
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 buil...
Conditions
In Mumbai, the word “slum” carries not just a pejorative linguistic connotation, but also juridical weight. Since 1995, with passage of the Slum R...
Conditions
In Johannesburg, spaces are divided with walls of varying thicknesses, sizes, gradients, and varying degrees of opacity. Physical walls and dividing i...
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 a...