Archinect - News

Call for Submissions now open for 'Ed', Archinect's upcoming hybrid print-digital publication!

2017-04-04T12:13:00-04:00

The deadline for submissions has been extended until May 9, 2017 at 11:59 pm (PST).

The meaning of architecture might appear as common sense, but it’s far from a given. Even the word itself is unfixed, denoting at once a profession, discipline, environment, and object. And, in turn, both signifier and signified are constructed, mutating over time and across geographies. There is an architecture of architecture—a set of political and economic forces, social and cultural configurations, as well as ecological and material conditions that delimit architectural practice and thought. The possibilities of architectural thinking and practice are thoroughly circumscribed.

Archinect is excited to announce the launch a new hybrid print-digital publication, Ed. For the inaugural issue, we’re considering this architecture of architecture—how architecture is constitutively enmeshed within ecologies, economies, socio-politics, technological regimes, and patriarchal structures. A series of texts will...

Open Call for Submissions: 'Faith'

2016-11-17T14:50:00-05:00

Religion and spirituality have always been a huge driver of architectural history, its institutions being some of the clearest realizations of ideology through structure, and belief through design. Architecture practice in itself, operating over years and through dense bureaucracies, also requires its practitioners to have faith—in themselves, the market, and their clients. So as the winter holiday season rolls around, we’re asking architects to consider the role faith, and its institutions, play in their practice.

Our open call for 'Faith' is interested in both places of worship, and the ‘commandments’ that make for good rules of practice.

》PROJECT SUBMISSIONS: House of Worship

Design a structure for worshiping anything you feel demands it. Whether a new Presbyterian Church for your suburb, a Mosque for Mars, a glass orb for feminism, a bunker for the Patron Saint of Climate Change, we want to see your imaginations for a new kind of spiritual architecture.

There is no set budget or re...

Open Call for Submissions: "XS"

2016-10-18T12:23:00-04:00

Last time, we went XXL. Now, we want the opposite—the tiny, the slight, the subtle and obscure: the XS. We're looking for the small but fierce interventions, tweaks, ideas and yes, even buildings that push architecture in a constructive direction by going small.

》PROJECT SUBMISSIONS: Small World

Working in architectural scale can be thought of along the same lines as eating an elephant—a big meal, one small bite at a time. But some bites can stand alone as their own project, operating on a smaller scale than usual, perhaps with a surprising new function. Send us the projects (built or not) you consider to be part of architecture's smaller working scales—the XS creations making an XXL impact.

》EDITORIAL SUBMISSIONS: Napkin Critic

Good criticism makes its points clearly and succinctly. Hooking readers also means establishing a perspective and communicating ideas economically. So, this editorial call challenges your critical editing skills to produce the most compelling pieces of architect...

Open Call for Submissions: "Games"

2016-07-28T12:25:00-04:00

Monopoly is an undeniable classic. Originating over a century ago in the U.S., in the era of Rockafellers and Carnegies, it was first known as “The Landlord’s Game”—a didactic tool protesting the power of, well, monopolies. Its current form of winner-takes-all buyouts has dominated since the 1930s, providing a place for family and friends the world over to fight tooth and nail for every last dollar and property on the board.

Monopoly’s structure is simple enough, and its sheer ubiquitousness places its ideas of property and ownership firmly within our globalized collective unconsciousness—that it is also almost entirely a game of chance is one significant vestige of its original anti-monopolist didacticism.

To architecture, Monopoly can be thought of as a frame of mind—a perspective through which to model the economic mechanisms (for good or evil) behind growth, and decline, of urban development, eventually leading to the infancy of a city. Games and simulations offer architects ferti...

Open Call for Submissions: "Domesticity"

2016-06-28T10:22:00-04:00

Your dream home is not your grandmother’s, and it certainly won’t be your granddaughter’s. As the modern family evolves in an increasingly unaffordable housing market, with populations pushing out of the suburbs towards downtown, current models of the single family home don’t seem so tenable, or desirable, anymore. ‘Smart’ devices and shared ownership options add invisible degrees of customization, while perhaps at the expense of domestic ownership as the key to financial stability.

With this shift in mind, architecture should undergo a Case Study 2.0 program. How can we define and design what “domesticity” can be for today’s modern family?

The Call for Submissions under our July editorial theme, "Domesticity", is open immediately. We're accepting both editorial and project submissions. Details below:

》Project Submissions: Case Study 2.0

The Case Study homes of the post-war era became icons of architectural idealism and pragmatism, while also setting the tone for what familial domestici...

Open Call for Submissions: "Privacy"

2016-05-30T10:53:00-04:00

Privacy: just the word is probably enough to elicit a cringe. Boundaries transgressed, information accessed, space trespassed—whether digitally or spatially, our private selves are vulnerable in more ways than ever, while simultaneously, our ability to connect and communicate with everything other than ourselves has expanded fantastically. The potential, and the paranoia, is immense.

How then might architecture respond and adapt to imposing structures of privacy? Effective immediately, we're accepting submissions to our editorial theme for June 2016: "Privacy".

》Editorial Submissions: Privacy Trespassed

Not too long ago, the notion of a glass home was scandalous. Within the last decade, commercialized cooperative models of living and working (i.e. “co-working” and “co-living” spaces) have removed many of the traditional arenas for privacy in homes and offices worldwide. In what other ways has our notion of privacy been rearranged by shifts in architecture? Send us your reflections, ana...

Open Call for Submissions: "Help"

2016-04-27T13:56:00-04:00

Inspired by recent conversations concerning architecture's engagement in social and humanitarian issues, as well as "Reporting from the Front", Alejandro Aravena's theme for this year's Venice Architecture Biennale, Archinect is adopting the special editorial theme of "Help" for the month of May. The theme will focus on how architects and designers are helping imagine and build a more equitable society.

"More and more people in the planet are in search for a decent place to live and the conditions to achieve it are becoming tougher and tougher by the hour," Aravena states in his introduction of the Biennale's theme. "Any attempt to go beyond business as usual encounters huge resistance in the inertia of reality and any effort to tackle relevant issues has to overcome the increasing complexity of the world."

The world of humanitarian work is complex and fraught, and architecture has no easy answers. But, at the very least, the profession has a unique vantage point to help create envir...