Issue 32

Without stable ground, building a foundation is pointless. But with too much stability, the ground calcifies ideas. When the ground beneath our feet shifts, its instability begs questioning. The contributors of this issue are on such ground, describing situated conditions of precarity.

It’s this view from the ground—this rejection of distance—that gathers many of the pieces in this issue. Moving on foot or by boat, looking in between or around a corner, staring at ceilings or across landscapes (or both), this issue’s contributors try to make sense of their worlds and how they came to be. Their interest in experience is not only phenomenological, but something more intimate, more affective, and more self-conscious. Proximity renders neutrality meaningless, and positionality emerges from our connections. Interweaving first-hand observations and speculative imaginings, the issue describes personal revelations while engaging with current debates in the field.

The unstable grounds and imbalances explored here are often intimate despite the vast networks they implicate. As Donna Haraway reminds us, our views are never objective. They are always a view from somewhere: situated perspectives made of past experiences, histories we know, and those we do not that have nonetheless brought us to a particular vantage point. Digging where we stand reveals the inequalities hidden by quantified variables as it cuts across the database itself. This disorienting assemblage echoes the daily strangeness of our hybrid digital and physical existences.

The world requires us to rethink the disciplinary, discursive, and epistemic conditions in which our tools have been developed and deployed, and reflect on all kinds of historical contingencies of the production of architectural knowledge. Our contributors encourage us to relate to our work in a more authentic and politically conscious way. They demonstrate through the second-person and three-dimensional scans, revealing everyday hyperobjects, a contorted quasi-object, and the immaterial.

Issue 32 features words, drawings, and images by Maysam Abdeljaber, Guillermo S. Arsuaga, Sarah Aziz, William Dolin, S.E. Eisterer, Ariane Fong, Andy Kim, Tekena Koko, Lindsey Krug, Ryan Tyler Martinez, Dhruv Mehta, Jonathan Russell, Steven Sculco, Shivani Shedde, Joshua Tan, Samarth Vachhrajani, Pavan Vadgama, and Zee Ruizi Zeng.