The problem of queer housing can never go away because it is a central component of queerness. Queer housing is a contradiction in terms: not even a queer architect can design a queer house. But where does this leave us, as queer people living in a straight hegemony? Where does it leave us as humans with bodies, craving shelter and safety and a place to live that is in accordance with our experience of self and of living in the world? In this article the author proposes eight architectural strategies for re-occupying the Levittown Cape Cod house from 1947 for queer bodies, minds and hearts. These strategies offer modes by which the key programmatic formal and material components of the Cape Cod House can be attacked, made invalid, or détourned for queer uses, to make of the Cape Cod House a site for our pain, our longing, our anger.

In the wake of the 2015 Paris attacks that claimed 130 lives, and in response to FBI warnings about threats by the Islamic State terrorist group, stringent security measures were pre-emptively imposed on St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City to deter possible attacks. The very nature of exclusion and control brought about by the securitisation corrodes the inherent nature of what the square previously symbolised: a sanctuary where all could enter and be welcome. Using the case of St. Peter’s Square, this work illuminates the three main contradictions between security and architecture apparent in practice today, as a way to understand the role of architecture in contributing to a convivial city under the conditions of terrorism.

This paper identifies a transformation in Israel's housing ethos from civilian shelter to national and neoliberal violence. Housing, once materializing the State of Israel’s raison d’etre as shelter from Jewish persecution has transformed to offense and retaliation in struggle over the West Bank, as declared by Prime Minister Netanyahu's noted 'they kill- we build' statement. Conducting close analysis of housing and settlement history since 1967 I challenge accepted historiography of the settlement movement and identify the pivotal moment of change by which the settlement project transformed its housing ethos from civilian shelter to 'civilian occupation' to Kudumim outpost in the early 1990s. This transformation parallels the neoliberalization of the housing market in Israel-proper since the 1990s, protested as neoliberal violence by the 2011 housing protest movement. This paper contributes to our understanding of spatial violence by identifying housing as the object of agonistic violence, invoking Chantalle Mouffe's concept of the object of agonism and pointing to housing as the object of contemporary negotiations over the very terms and values of the Israeli polity.

This paper scrutinises Benjamin’s interest in the urban fabric of nineteenth century Paris, and compares it to contemporary writings on Paris and on (more generally) new forms of urbanism in the journalistic work of Joseph Roth. It argues that both authors come to terms with the modern city through a shared set of observations and concepts, particularly the concepts of ‘expressionism’, ‘physiognomy’, and ‘phantasmagoria’. The paper clarifies how Roth and other writers in (or immediately before) the 1920s developed such concepts, and how Benjamin’s The Arcades Project builds on these writers. It shows that Benjamin’s specific contribution to this body of literature is the invention of a secular mythology, with a clear application to architecture in Benjamin’s focus on the ‘boundless interiorisation’ of glass and iron construction. The paper concludes that Benjamin’s contribution to architecture is considerable when compared to the materialist orientation of his main sources in The Arcades Project (especially Boetticher and Giedion), but that the purported improvements on Benjamin’s distinguished predecessors of architectural non-materialism are by comparison less impressive.

This review article probes a conceptual duality that can be recognized as central to two of Benjamin’s essays on cities: his essay ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century (Exposé of 1935),’ and his autobiographical text Berlin Childhood around 1900. On the one hand, Benjamin renders numerous analyses and descriptions of buildings and experiences that present themselves as absolute and internally unified, giving the impression of being autonomous and immutable. On the other hand, Benjamin interrogates objects and perceptions that present themselves as transient and in flux and are therefore experienced as contingent and incomplete. These latter objects and perceptions derive their significance from something that is inevitably external.

This paper takes a look at the relationship between informational space and territory. It questions the common dichotomy that positions virtual space in opposition to physical space. It focuses on the different roles modern urban actors play in defining a new understanding of space as an inseparable composition of both the virtual and the physical realm. On the individual level, it looks at the emergence of a new type of citizen whose ludic attitude dynamically adapts the course of his responses to the virtual, real-time inputs that influence his presence in the physical environment. On the collective level, it analyses unintended, swarm-like synchronisations, and the role new media play in redefining the urban commons.

Starting from the origins of the notion of management, this paper explores how commons governance is constituted by the earlier influential research of Elinor Ostrom, and pursues this with reference to scholars such as Saki Bailey, who emphasises that the choice of regulatory frame is ultimately a political one. We then argue that commons have to be ‘instituted’ in an open manner in order to remain accessible. This demands a set of scripts, rules or agreements that keep the process of commoning in place, and, simultaneously, keep commoning in a constant process of reproduction. We examine this tension and look at the shift in understanding about what ‘institutions of the commons’ have entailed in practice over the course of the last century and a half. Finally, we return to the political dimension to touch upon the question of whether, with the disappearance of the welfare state, a coherent concept of society can emerge from the current upsurge of commons initiatives.

Within contemporary architecture and urbanism there is marked interest in urban commons. This paper explores the creation of temporary urban commons, or, more specifically, what can be called ‘open-source urbanism’. Citing two practices – urban commons initiated by Atelier d’architecture autogérée in Paris, and Park(ing) Day initiated by San Francisco-based Rebar – I argue that these practices can be understood as open-source urbanism since their initiators act as open-source programmers, constructing practice manuals to be freely copied, used, developed and shared, thus producing self-managed commons. Although this tradition of ‘commoning’ is not new, it is currently being reinvented with the use of digital technologies. Combining Elinor Ostrom’s analysis of self-managed natural resource commons with Yochai Benkler’s assertion that commons-based peer production constitutes a ‘third mode of production’ that lies beyond capitalism, socialism and their blends, I argue that open-source urbanism critiques both government and privately-led urban development by advancing a form of postcapitalist urbanism.

We have recently witnessed a confession of a fellow architect with which we fully identify. We, too, belong to the generation educated under the semiotic regime, which – as we will argue in our introduction – has run its course. We also believe that the idea of ‘architecture as language’ might have been useful as an analytical tool but never as a design mechanism. After all, creativity comes first and routinisation follows. As the title of Footprint 14 suggests, this is a general plea to have done with the hegemony of the linguistic signifier. Signifying semiotics is but a fraction of a much broader asignifying semiotics. We propose to approach the issue qua Spinozist practice of ethology, defined as the study of capacities, or – as we would like to think of it – a proto-theory of singularity. This is as much an ethical or political problem as it is an aesthetic one. It concerns what the cultural critic Steven Shaviro recently qualified as a primordial form of sentience that is non-intentional, non-correlational, and anoetic. The Affective Turn will be measured against the unavoidable Digital Turn. We will conclude by reversing the famous Wittgensteinian dictum whereby what we cannot speak about we must not pass over in silence. A brief summary of contributions, which are by no means limited to architecture, is concluded with a politically charged epilogue. The very last paragraph of the epilogue reveals the pink-on-pink reference

The moiré effect and phenomena are natural occurring geometric formations that appear during the super-position of grid structures. Most widely recognisable in colour printing practices, generally viewed on screens (computer and TV) they are in most cases examples of interference within a signal or a code, unwanted visual mis-alignment. Especially in digital image capture, moiré patternings appear when a geometrically even pattern, like a fabric or close-up of fine texture, has an appearance of rippled water with blue or red hues of concentric circle formations. The intriguing pattern formation in this case points back not only to the mis-alignment of frequencies, but can be further seen as the intersection point of a speculative ontology for the index of the digital image. Moiré not only as a visually reproducible phenomenon or effect, but a field of vision that blurs the boundaries between analogue and digital, perception and affect, manifesting the photographic as a constant site of becoming, a site of immanence. The philosophy of Henri Bergson, Brian Massumi and Francois Laruelle will be explored alongside the moiré image and phenomenon, to see if there is such a speculative site underlining the becoming of the digital image and its repercussions in contemporary digital culture.