The unassuming title of the 2021 Australian book Design: Building on Countrypositions Aboriginal making as potentially cosmotechnical, since it restores the inter-dependence of what in the west would be categorised as nature, culture, technology. As the editor of the series to which the book belongs reminds us, ‘in the Aboriginal worldview, everything starts and ends with Country. ... Everything is part of a continuum, and endless flow of life and ideas emanating from Country’ which ‘includes the built environment and objects, which reflects both a conceptual and a physical process with ancestral and cultural dimensions’.And yet colonisation of the continent all but erad-icated Country as it had evolved over 65 000 years. So having carefully pieced together the objects, spiri-tuality, camps, shelters, materials and kinship of what Aboriginal design was (and is, in isolated ways), the book posits something more synthetic – an ‘offering’, as its conclusion graciously puts it, in which ‘this new Australian design will improve the wellbeing of people and create places that ultimately mean more to all of us. It will extend Country, not abrogate it, and it should be created with that in mind – because we are all con-nected to Country’.

This visual essay discusses an object-map of Paris basin soil and subsoil, commissioned for the Element Terre exhibition within the Architecture and Landscape Biennial 2022 (Versailles, France). To create this map, we contacted actors and researchers whose work is related to soil: earth scientists, materials specialists, and human habitat specialists. Using a model from the book Terra Forma: A Book of Speculative Maps, we designed a specific reference system, the ‘soil’ model, to map entities, movements and conflicts in the underground environment(s). The resulting map aims to reveal what is going on beneath our feet, what is hidden from view, to go beyond representations that are limited to the surface.

Walk Under the Midnight Sun is a large-scale carpet installation originally designed for the Hungarian Pavilion of the 2023 Venetian Architecture Biennale, part of an exhibition proposal by Fuzzy Earth design studio and BÜRO imaginaire curator collective. The project invites the public to explore the entangled historical, social and architectural relationships within greenhouse cultivation practices. The protagonist of the installation is a regionally unique capsicum cultivar, the Hungarian wax pepper, known in Hungary as the Cecei paprika. The themes of the exhibition were inspired by Fuzzy Earth’s ‘Not Quite a California Wonder’ research project.

This essay sets out to reflect on the prospective transformation of two Italian panoptical buildings that straddle the border between different places and times: the prison of Ventotene and the hospital of Gorizia. Local authorities have recently put forward a proposal to turn the former into a European school and the latter into a European prison. Both of these hermetic, unbending architectures have particular historical significance. Ventotene is the island where Altiero Spinelli was incarcerated by the Fascist regime and wrote the manifesto that paved the way for the process of European integration. Gorizia is the town where Franco Basaglia began his career, elaborating the theory of mental health that led to the closing of all Italian asylums. The proposed Europeanisation of these structures of confinement and isolation, which embody the exercise of disciplinary power in its most extreme form, speaks to the problem of opening the total institutions of modern statehood and repositioning them within the increasingly decentralised, indeterminate order of the European Union.

One of the many ways in which architecture is conceptually opened up is by adopting systems theory in building technology. In this context, open systems denote modular design and construction; a system of standardized, mass-produced parts that can be configured in various ways opens a field of possibilities. However, there is a significant gap between the high expectations for the implication of the open systems principle and its results. This essay explores the potentials and consequences of openness in architecture through a historical case study. The Packaged House project (1941–47), designed by Konrad Wachsmann (1901–1980) and Walter Gropius (1883–1969), is a prefabricated housing system devised to meet the housing shortage in the US during and soon after WWII. It was an open spatial design system, a modular construction system and a commercial enterprise all in one. Although it was cultivated in the most favourable political and economic landscape for prefabricated building systems, the Packaged House failed to be widely reproduced. Drawing from the conflicting histories of the Packaged House, the discursive formation of the post-war dwelling, changing definitions of openness, and varied representations, this essay dissects the fantasies of the open building systems as well as their practical and symbolic features.

Is there an architectural and urban planning agenda at work behind the politics of contemporary (neo-)fascists and populist, radical and extremist right-wing forces? The Right-Wing Spaces research project, which has been running since 2018 at the Institute for Principles of Modern Architecture (Design and Theory) (IGmA) at the University of Stuttgart, suggests that the answer to this question is fairly unequivocal, at least in the German context: ‘architecture … seems to have become a key tool of an authoritarian, populist right with a revisionist take on history.’[i] The interim findings of the project were presented in ‘Rechte Räume: Bericht einer Europareise’ (Right-wing spaces: report on a journey through Europe), ARCH+ 235 (2019), an issue that was guest-curated by IGmA, as well as in my 2020 essay collection Rechte Räume: Politische Essays und Gespräche (Right-wing spaces: political essays and conversations). [i] Stephan Trüby, Rechte Räume: Politische Essays und Gespräche (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2020), 138. The Right-Wing Spaces research project is headed by Philipp Krüpe (IGmA) and myself, https://www.igma.uni-stuttgart.de/en/research/research-projects/page_0002_0001/.

A "housing crisis" is often naively understood as a simple market imbalance between supply and demand, frequently occurring within cities in a capitalist mode of development. If that were the case, the solution would be to simply open the pipes and build more houses, a regulatory action delegated to technocrats. But as Reinhardt Koselleck reveals, crisis is a concept constructed by special interest groups with the aim of challenging absolute power, enlarging a sphere of popular criticism towards business-as-usual. This paper considers the operative nature of 'housing crisis' and related terms by investigating their use as a tool for urban reform in the 19th and 20th centuries in London. In newspaper articles, think tank publications and government reports, criticism often took on qualitative dimensions, leveraging change to housing practices. Crisis itself has had different meanings, from a moral apocalypse to a political risk to an historic opportunity. This is in contrast to how the term is used today, where it is no longer a climactic moment of decision and relief, but a perpetual and seemingly unsurmountable condition. While London's housing crisis is today universally accepted according to experts' statistics, it is rarely addressed on popular aesthetic grounds.

This article hypothesises that while drama is primarily a television genre, its operation also appears in the way Trump mediates his political activities. By observing some of the media objects and events staged by Trump, such as his escalator descents from Trump Tower, the popularisation of Trump’s Border Wall, the attempt to institutionalise the executive order entitled ‘Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again’, and the transgression of national symbolic spaces embodied by the 4 July 2019 show at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, it will be a matter of questioning the architectural politics conducted by Trump. Then to see in what way the Trumpian dramatisation participates in a populist architectural strategy.

Ars Daemones is a manifesto that responds, problematises and encounters conditions and implications of the practice of technologies of spirit as specified in the Ars Industrialis’ two manifesto written by B. Stiegler in 2005 and 2010. Most importantly, the present manifesto focuses on the question of possible conditions and material implications of practice that Stiegler framed within his word of mystagogy. Here, the mystagogy as a knowledge that escapes capture, that demands “contexts, milieus, practices, gestures, rituals, and technologies” is defined as demonology, following G. Deleuze, where both, mystagogy and demonology, call for condition of relationality, movement and an embodied experience. For Stiegler, the knowledge of mystagogy, because of its risky and excessive character, enables to learn and practice care, and it is through the work of art that we can experience of what degrees of care such an excess of another plane need. Through fables of three bodies as experienced through the work of three artists, Ars Daemones will braid material narratives of care. The selection of the three artists, is contaminated by each other by the common question of the risk of care looking for practices of knowledges that rather than survive, would enable to thrive. The manifesto is thus written through the experience of vegetariat present in the work of Špela Petrič, through transbodies and xenologies in space present in the work of Adriana Knouf and through the practice of virophilia in the work of Pei-Ying Lin. Ars Daemones fabulates while experiencing the practices of “I” that is already contaminated and contaminating.