Friends of The New York Review of Architecture,
We're proud to be sending out No. 17 this week. This special year-end issue on "the Future" was helmed by guest editor Matthew Allen and managing editor Phillip Denny, with design by Matthew Bohne and Lucy Liu of PROPS.SUPPLY.
Featuring seven original articles, four Skyline event write-ups, an exclusive interview with science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, and a special full-page print of Design Earth/Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy's visionary drawing "Below the Water Towers," it's one of our most ambitious issues to date. If you are a current subscriber, you can look forward to receiving your copy in the mail soon. If you're not a subscriber, subscribe today.
In this issue ...
David Theodore, "Against Resiliency" (on the Biennale)
What do we want architecture culture to do after the pandemic? Spring back to the status quo ante? We may have no choice. The status quo remains the status quo because it's resilient. Despite misfortune, it bounces back.
Ana Miljački, "Making Room for the Future" (on the University of Virginia's Memorial to Enslaved Laborers)
They say that the memorial has acoustic properties, literally amplifying the voices of the collective in its gentle embrace. I imagine hearing the testimonies carved into the stone propped up by the wordless guttural sighs of horror, breathed in response. There is room here for voices beyond our time as well, for stories that are yet to be written by a new collective.
Kahira Ngige, "Promised Land"
Harlem, New York. The artist—decked out as a news reporter—stands on a street corner on the lookout for subjects. She is unlike most reporters in that she is only interested in Black women and their well-being. Some of the women she encounters are in groups, others alone. Diversity here is in the women's ages and their origin stories. It is daytime, the winter light muted and warm. "Do you feel safe in your body?" she asks intimately, knowingly.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Interview
I’m reminded of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. There’s normal science, and then there’s paradigm-changing science. You might say that there’s the ordinary work of architecture that works with a normal set of standards, materials, and approaches–and then there will be something that destabilizes that and pushes somebody to come up with a new approach.
Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski, "Loudreading Anti-Racist Manifestos"
Before they were banned by the authorities, loudreaders (lectores) read aloud for workers who were often denied any other means of formal education. [Luisa] Capetillo read her own stories alongside the words of Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Together with the tobacco workers she turned the intellectual void opened up by repetitive work into an advantage, filling the shared communal space of capitalist exploitation with the subversive ideas of an underground anti-capitalist culture. Loudreading motivated networks of solidarity across the continent and fueled general strikes demanding access to a dignified life.
SKYLINE, ed. by Alex Klimoski
In "A Queer Query," a nine-hour long symposium convened by David Eskenazi of SCI-Arc, Andrés Jaque scrutinized the spatial consequences of Grindr with his characteristic gusto, while Andrew Holder posed a series of sharp questions from his iPhone as a Nor'easter hit Boston, knocking out power. Laida Aguirre & Patrick Staff discussed their collaboratively-produced screensaver-film "ACID PLUMBING," "an improvised collaboration building on a friendship." Staff's whispered commentary accompanied eerie tracking shots of reflective plumbing and empty rooms–architecture as liquid management. "I wanted to turn the building inside out," they said. –PD
Benjamin Bratton, "If One Were to Imagine the Blue Marble"
If one were to imagine the Blue Marble, not as an image but instead as a movie that fast forwards through the entire 4.5-billion-year history of the planet, we would see continents emerging, splitting, and consolidating, asteroids striking, and all the rest played out as the biggest "nature video" of all.
Joseph Bedford, "Postmodern Philosophy, Again?"
Architectural educators must now wade through a morass of misinformation that fills the digital semiosphere into which our students were born ...
and more from Review contributors Patrick Templeton, Zazu Swistel, Lauren Cawse, and Edward Palka! Subscribe today.
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