KTISMAjournal is proud to release its fifth issue, Lick Your Buildings.

KTISMAjournal is an annual, double blind peer-reviewed publication produced entirely by students at the University of Oregon's School of Architecture and Allied Arts.

KTISMA’s objective is to provoke: to awaken a community of peers, colleagues, advisers, administrators, architects, designers, artists, and the myriad thinkers, innovators, and dreamers who inhabit the tangible and metaphysical spaces of our profession.

Embracing a discourse that encourages the exchange of pragmatic and theoretical ideas, we endeavor to facilitate a larger rhetoric. KTISMA provides a focused forum about environments; how they are imagined, created, presented, interpreted and inhabited.

ktis’-mah: (n.) thing founded; thing created

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THE CALL

The tactile sense connects us with time and tradition: through impressions of touch we shake the hands of countless generations. A pebble polished by waves is pleasurable to the hand, not only because of its soothing shape, but because it expresses the slow process of its formation; a perfect pebble on the palm materializes duration, it is time turned into shape.
 – Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin

We experience the world through our bodies. Our seemingly independent sensory systems work in unison to facilitate our perception of time and space. An expanding array of technologies allows for the creation and experience of the physical realm, yet thus far has emphasized vision over the other senses. Decades before the Digital Age, Eileen Gray noted that “it seems as though the house were designed for the pleasure of the eye, rather than the well being of the individual.” In architecture, this fixation on superficiality limits the possibilities for an embodied experience through full sensory stimulation.

What implications does ocularcentrism have on our relationship with the constructed environment? How do we continue to innovate while maintaining
a connection to “materialize[d] duration”?

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Issue #5 Contributors

Nathan Smith
Philip Chang
Natalie Chow
Akshaya Lakshmi Narsimhan
Bryan Brooks
Nicholas Venezia
Justin Schwartzhoff
Matthias Neumann
Brendan Shea
Peter Olshavsky
Clara Lee
Mark Faulkner
Erin Moore
Ivan Kostic

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Issue #5 Editors

Editors-in-Chief: Stephen P Maher + Josie Baldner
Layout Editor: Zander Chanin
Outreach Coordinator: Veronika Jonsson
Finance Coordinator: Cara Mitchell
Managing Editor: Tom Moss
Editorial Board: Sam Ridge, Vincent Mai, Erik Larson, Danielle Pomeroy, Casey Williams
Faculty Adviser: Assistant Professor Philip Speranza