The Journal of Architecture

Shifting grounds | Deljana Iossifova & Doreen Bernath

Critical discourses depend as much on grounds of evidence and operation as that of building projects' intended ties to sites and contexts. Such grounding is contingent to variegated processes of investigation and construction that juxtapose material possibilities, forms of action, temporal situations, and environmental forces. In turn, the grounds shift, adapt, and reconfigure along with emergences and divergences in the production of knowledge and built realities, reflecting back not the assured certainty of established foundations, but the perpetual impulse and tension of altered bases. Examined in this assembly of studies are the shifting relations between land and construction, natural and artificial elements, social, spatial and structural foldings, the pastoral and the technical, tectonics and the vernacular, heritage and living systems, and renovation and evolution, all of which exposes and challenges given contextualities. In bringing these works into conversation, this issue resists the temptation to impose disciplinary coherence. Instead, it attends to the shifting grounds upon which architectural knowledge is produced and to the various temporalities that inflect its transformations. The articles converge in their concern with spatial entanglements between climate and governance, heritage and development, structure and symbol, ritual and erasure. Each contribution articulates a methodological proposition for how architectural inquiry might remain attuned to what is emergent or otherwise fugitive in the built environment. CONTINUE READING