The Journal of Architecture

Architectural CoFuturisms: an introduction | Joel P. W. Letkemann & Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay

That architecture is a form of speculative futuring might easily be taken as a matter of fact; architects have a significant agency in the shape of the future as they produce the possibility for things that do not yet exist in the world. Yet, in recent architectural literature where ‘the future’ is an object of consideration, the future of architecture is often represented with technologically oriented developments in material, tectonics, or form. However, many other hopes and ambitions for the future might be at work in architectural practice, with consequences for the social, affective, and environmental dimensions of practice as much as for the technical. There is an increasing need to reclaim the ‘future’ as an object of consideration within architectural scholarship, affirming a multiplicity of futures imaginations — those already at work in contemporary practice, and those which might inspire a disciplinary commitment to futures which centre equitable community between humans and together with the more-than-human world. If architecture depends on the speculative imagination, this issue asks: what imaginations of the future inspire architectural practice and what are their consequences? CONTINUE READING