About the Journal

Footprint is an academic journal dedicated to publishing architecture and urban research. The journal promotes the creation and development – or revision - of conceptual frameworks and methods of inquiry. It is engaged in creating a body of critical and reflexive texts with a breadth and depth of thought which would enrich the architecture discipline and produce new knowledge, conceptual methodologies and original understandings.

Announcements

Footprint 41: Leaps and Bounds: Playful Practices and the Production of Architectural Knowledge

2026-01-30

Lena Galanopoulou and Yasin Dündar are editing Footprint 41, dedicated to ‘Leaps and Bounds: Playful Practices and the Production of Architectural Knowledge’.

Footprint 41 turns to the inventive deviation and exploratory excess of playful practices to ask how architecture ‘leaps and bounds’; Or, more precisely, how non-linear epistemic shifts emerge through the active negotiation of constraints. Moving beyond decorative fun, design gimmicks, or institutional amusements, issue 41 of Footprint repositions playfulness within the dynamic problem of how humans —and animals— manipulate their environments to exceed what already exists. Playfulness thus continuously reorganises actors, affordances and affects, in response to evolving desires. Reversing the dictum of ‘maximum result with minimum effort’, this issue is a plea for the provisional and the playful as epistemic practices for negotiating the improbabilities of our times, pushing architecture toward more-than-human, processual and imaginative registers. We welcome proposals from across architecture, art, design, theory, game studies, performance and beyond.

Full articles (6000–8000 words) should be submitted via Footprint’s online platform. Review articles and visual essays (2000–4000 words) will be selected by the editors on the basis of a 500-word summary sent to editors.footprint@gmail.com. The deadline for all submissions is 1 September 2026.

Footprint 41 will be published in autumn 2027.

Read more about Footprint 41: Leaps and Bounds: Playful Practices and the Production of Architectural Knowledge

Current Issue

Vol. 19 No. 2 (2025): Issue # 37 |Architectural Theories, their Performance, Quality and Effect: An Appraisal
View Vol. 19 No. 2 (2025): Issue # 37 |Architectural Theories, their Performance, Quality and Effect: An Appraisal

Footprint 37 asks if it is actually possible, useful, or even necessary to appraise theories of architecture. The articles and reviews included in the issue examine the potential purpose such appraisal might have, who should do it, and when should it take place. According to the issue contributors, appraisal can consist in analysing and classifying theories accordant with their epistemological and/or pragmatic orientation. Some theories will inevitably incorporate substantial portions of tacit knowledge, either because they are deliberately shielded from criticism or because they contain practical know-how that simply hasn’t found adequate means for systematic conceptualization. Consequently, the pragmatist assumption that the quality of a theory can be measured in relation to its practical effects should also account for unforeseeable effects and generative potential. Furthermore, we are reminded that every act of appraisal is often accompanied by feelings of apprehension, and that it is always possible to alleviate those feelings by diffusing, relativising, and thus relaxing judgment. 

Issue editors: Jorge Mejía Hernández and Jasper Cepl

Published: 2025-12-15

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