Recent Publications
Publications
In architecture, ethics are malleable. In theory, the terms are rigid, yet the reality is elastic. Although much of the built environment is ostensibly designed for an individual client’s needs, architecture’s effects reverberate politically, environmentally and culturally, often in unexpected ways and far beyond the limits of any parcel or project. This issue of Perspecta considers the ethical questions and moral tensions that arise during the ideation, development, completion and aftermath of the design process.
Architecture operates on a temporal scale largely disconnected from social shifts. While architectural projects are often funded by those who are most powerful, the practice still has implicit obligations to those most vulnerable. By making abstract concepts concrete, architecture’s manifest nature can work to either reinforce or disrupt political, environmental and social structures.
This issue delves into multi-faceted conversations around the idea of responsibility in architecture, grounded in the historic trajectory of the topic while recognizing more speculative positions. Contributors from a diverse span of geographies and practices offer insights, provocations and questions about the dilemmas that architects encounter at every stage of designing the built environment: Whose architectural ideas get to become reality? What ethical role does form play in design? What moral burdens must architects shoulder in the act of building? Lastly, what is the future cost of today’s actions?
Through arguments, essays and projects that examine the issue at a range of scales—from the intimacy of a single material to the reach of global typology—Perpsecta 53 explores the complex dynamics of architectural onus and the ways in which designers navigate conflicting agendas to pose new possibilities.
Notes on the Activist Tradition in Architecture
Lola Sheppard and Mason White
Re-Defining Landscape: Erbil’s Urban-Rural Greenbelt
Jala Makhzoumi
The Anacoluthic City: Urbs Oeconomica and the Dissolution of Urban Ground
Elisa Iturbe
Document as Form
Rosa McElheny and Nilas Andersen
A Common Occupation: John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, and the Aesthetics of Public Encounter
M. Surry Schlabs
The Unbearable Lightness of “Complexity”
Maroš Krivý
The Onus of Coherence
Nicholas de Monchaux
Oratory Bethlehem: Birdville Church & House Wonderful
Justin Duerr
Truths of Fraudacre City
Jae Shin and Damon Rich
In Conversation: Fernanda Canales and Loreta Castro Reguera with Jacqueline Hall
The Institutions Must be Designed before the Buildings
Susanne Schindler
No One Intends to Open an Airport
Julia Walker
In the Shadow of Information
Michael Young
Equivalent Interiors
Curtis Roth
Frontiers of Design
Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello
The Maker’s Mark
Kyle Dugdale
Violation City
Ann Lui and Craig Reschke
Soil, Walls, and their Funambulists
Sumayya Vally
Anticolonial Remedies: From Colonization to Globalization
Samia Henni
Grounded Bodies, Flying Plasma: The Origins of Homogeography
Ivan L. Munuera
Toxic Geographies
Meredith TenHoor
Heating the Bauhaus
Daniel A. Barber
Architects Draw the Anthropocene
Lili Carr, Feifei Zhou, and Anna Tsing
