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Call for Papers - Footprint 40: Conditions of Architecture

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Email: editors.footprint@gmail.com

Website: https://journals.open.tudelft.nl/footprint/announcement/view/454

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Issue 40 of Footprint explores the theoretical and practical implications of situating architecture within its conditions of production. ‘Architecture’ has traditionally been distinguished from ‘building’. Likewise, architectural theory has generally been more concerned with the product of architecture (the built form) than with the labour, culture, materials and organisation needed to realise it. Increasingly confronted with the reality of the climate crisis, however, it is no longer possible to disavow architecture’s entanglement with extraction, climate breakdown, and biodiversity loss: architecture is climate, as MOULD collective recently argued. Only through engaging with and transforming the conditions of the practice of architecture can a more ecological way of thinking and practising architecture take shape. Understanding architecture in relation to how it is produced shifts how we think of the architect as a subject, of architecture as a material practice, and of architecture theory as a field.

Architects are used to seeing themselves as the ones who set conditions, as the designers of spatial constraints within which certain activities will develop. Issue 40 of Footprint will explore what happens when we start to consider that architects are in turn also conditioned by social, cultural, economic and material constraints. We welcome contributions that analyse specific situated practices of architects and their work, as well as theoretical explorations. We are especially interested in texts and visual essays exploring:

  • accounts of architecture work, both in its everyday and situated aspects and in relation to collective organising and structural change
  • responses to gendered and racialised power dynamics at the architectural office, the academy and the building site
  • the queering, misuse or subversion of specific tools, technologies and softwares used for architectural design
  • the development of specific materials, both widely used and still experimental, and their impact on architectural practice and design
  • relations between specific policies and economic conditions and the production of architecture
  • the current ecological turn in relation to architecture production, and its democratising and aesthetic potentials
  • histories of extraction and exploitation in relation to architecture production
  • the theoretical implications of a focus on the conditions of architecture.

Proposals for full articles (6000–8000 words) and shorter contributions and visual essays (2000 words) will be evaluated by the editors in the form of abstracts (max. 600 words, with a sample image for visual essays). The editors welcome contributions that draw on personal experience, that use transdisciplinary methods, and that are authored by or in alliance with workers in the architecture, engineering and construction industry. Abstracts must be submitted by December 15, 2025.

For submissions and all other inquiries and correspondence, please contact Alina Paias and Catherine Koekoek at editors.footprint@gmail.com.

Footprint 40 will be published in the spring of 2027.

Visit the Footprint website for more information.