The Journal of Architecture

Resisting solutionism | Deljana Iossifova & Doreen Bernath

This issue of The Journal of Architecture presents eight diverse papers, each contributing to the evolving discourse in architectural theory, pedagogy, and practice. Although these works are grounded in distinct contexts and methodologies, they share a deep interrogation of architectural solutionism, the socio-political entanglements of architecture, and an expanded understanding of architectural agency. They reveal the contradiction in how we work as architects, in relation to the society which we serve as professionals, with the core belief that we can, through the critical and productive processes of the project, bring a kind of promise of good intentions, improvement, greater values, and remedy to the wrongs of the past. As much as we cannot be separated from the problems by claiming a kind of authoritative detachment in order to prescribe solutions — since we are as much the problem as all others in the entangled situation — the deeming of problems and coupling with solutions has also become one of the best weapons of coloniality and modernity to reinforce hierarchy and power structure. The latter has no less justified the ‘giant bulldozer’, echoing Anna Tsing, that progress rides on, and subsequently fuelling capitalism's agenda ‘to flatten the earth to its specifications’. The resistance to solutionism, following Tsing's more hopeful turn, is to raise ‘the stakes for asking what else is going on — not in some protected enclave, but rather everywhere, both inside and out’. This is what we see to have been audaciously unfolded in these contributions. They answer to what Tsing calls the ‘ephemeral assemblages and multidirectional histories’ in a multitude of contexts to undo the culture of blames and corrections and to seek a deeper yet more humble recognition of inextricable bounds through architectural endeavours. CONTINUE READING