The Journal of Architecture

Lead: Debapriya Chakrabarti and Deljana Iossifova

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This collection seeks to problematise architecture’s disciplinary coherence and to foreground alternative modes of thinking and practising architecture in a world marked by instability, exclusion, and infrastructural complexity. In doing so, it contributes to wider efforts to provincialise dominant architectural epistemologies and to explore what forms of spatial intelligence are necessary and possible in the face of ecological, political, and ontological transformation.

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Architecture has traditionally defined itself through bounded domains: the building, the author, the object, the drawing. Yet these boundaries are increasingly questioned by architectural practices and research that refuse or cannot be contained by conventional disciplinary demarcations. From logistics infrastructures and networks to digital platforms, repair economies, and non-design spatial production, the field now confronts forms of architecture that do not conform to its canonical registers.

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This thematic collection explores what becomes visible when architecture is treated as a distributed, relational, and often ambiguous process, rather than a discrete domain of formal expertise. Drawing on emerging intersections with urban studies, feminist theory, political ecology, STS, media studies, and maintenance studies, it interrogates how architecture is constituted through infrastructural, ephemeral, and contested spatial practices. How is the discipline reshaped when it acknowledges its entanglements with temporality, informality, contingency, or care? What alternative epistemologies are required to study architectures that are provisional, residual, or oblique?

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Rather than positing a disciplinary crisis, this call approaches post-architecture as a generative site that enables new modes of spatial thought, practice, and pedagogy as they emerge from the very dissolution of conventional boundaries.

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Call for Papers: We invite contributions that interrogate the limits and reconfigurations of architectural knowledge, authorship, and form. Submissions may be theoretical, empirical, historical, or practice-led, and should reflect critically on what it means to engage architecture beyond its dominant framings. Themes might include, but are not limited to:

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• Architectural knowledge beyond design: infrastructures, protocols, platforms, maintenance, or everyday dwelling.

• Ephemeral, mobile, or residual architectures: from refugee shelters to protest spaces and informal urbanism.

• Rethinking authorship and expertise: collective, anonymous, or distributed practices of spatial production.

• The aesthetics and ethics of non-permanence: provisional, contingent, or unfinished architectures.

• Feminist, decolonial, and posthuman critiques of architectural boundary-making.

• Pedagogical or methodological approaches to architecture as process or relation rather than object or outcome.

• Interdisciplinary approaches that complicate architectural categories through media, performativity, or affect.