Footprint 40: Conditions of Architecture

Issue 40 of Footprint explores the theoretical and practical implications of situating architecture within its conditions of production. ‘Architecture’ has traditionally been distinguished from ‘building’. Likewise, architectural theory has generally been more concerned with the product of architecture (the built form) than with the labour, culture, materials and organisation needed to realise it. Increasingly confronted with the reality of the climate crisis, however, it is no longer possible to disavow architecture’s entanglement with extraction, climate breakdown, and biodiversity loss: architecture is climate, as MOULD collective recently argued. Only through engaging with and transforming the conditions of the practice of architecture can a more ecological way of thinking and practising architecture take shape. Understanding architecture in relation to how it is produced shifts how we think of the architect as a subject, of architecture as a material practice, and of architecture theory as a field.

Examining the conditions that make up the architect as a subject invites reflection on architecture as work, the culture at architecture offices, and how design is organised. In recent years, and influenced by meme accounts like @dank.lloyd.wright, architecture students and employees around the world are proclaiming ‘death to the calling’, as Marisa Cortright phrased it. They organise as architectural workers, countering the idea that as designers ‘we don’t believe we do work’. The recognition that architecture is work, expressed by academics like Peggy Deamer, points to the insight that the multiple relations between the architect, the technologies for architecture production, and the architectural objects that result from them are co-constitutive. For example, the technical configuration of the drafting software that an architect uses will interfere with the characteristics of the final design, but it will also interfere with the architect themselves, from how their body moves while working to how they reimagine their design in relation to what they see in the software interface. This recognition also validates the cognitive dissonance architects feel between their personal, everyday experience of climate breakdown, ecological rupture, and declining planetary health, and the need to perform their work in a way that is unaffected by these conditions. Speaking of conditions reconciles these two experiences towards the demand for structural transformations in the field. One example of this is the work of The Architecture Lobby, who call for spatial designers to ‘Face It: We Are Fossil Fuel Workers’.

In professional practice, it is still commonplace to consider the built object as a lesser version of the true architectural object. This architectural hylomorphism treats conditions such as the availability of resources and materials, demands from developers and contractors, local regulatory bodies, neighbourhood, heritage and aesthetic commissions, building codes, fire regulations and other legislation, as impediments to realising the true design intentions. Sérgio Ferro and Pedro Fiori Arantes warn that the separation between building and architecture can turn into a full-blown antagonism: the more a building looks unencumbered by its conditions of production, the more work it takes to realise it. On the other hand, prompted by the urgency to build in a less extractive way, a recent ecological turn in architecture practice seems to cut through the distinction between building and architecture. Architects like Anupama Kundoo, Assemble, BC Architects/Materials, and Material Cultures, to name but a few examples, engage deeply with the material reality of building, revisiting practical knowledge and traditional craftsmanship to use natural and bio-based materials for contemporary construction. Such experiments do not take place on the drawing board, but often on site and in the mud, building up practical know-how in alliance with builders, farmers and traditional communities.

As the defining elements of the architect and their practice are reconceptualised through the lens of production, important consequences unfold for architecture theory. It is common practice to take the conditions for architecture into consideration in architecture history: there is a widely accepted understanding that the history of a building is also the history of the commissioning process, the existing laws at the time, of cultural and social norms, technological developments, geographical specificities, material availabilities, and cultures of professional practice and building (see Footprint 17). Although these fields are not always clearly distinct, architecture theory, on the other hand, has only recently started to truly contemplate architecture as a result of specific conditions of production. Footprint 40 will build upon the emerging field of Production Studies and the reappreciation of Sérgio Ferro's work in the United States and Europe, of which one of the central initiatives is the Translating Ferro / Transforming Knowledges project between Brazil and the United Kingdom, and connect further to studies of social production of architecture and space such as those conducted by Doina Petrescu, Kim Trogal and Peg Rawes, theories of material entanglement and responsibility such as those provided by Jane Mah Hutton and Kiel Moe, and (auto)ethnographies of architecture practice, such as those produced by Albena Yaneva, and more recently the design practice Material Cultures.

Architects are used to seeing themselves as the ones who set conditions, as the designers of spatial constraints within which certain activities will develop. Issue 40 of Footprint will explore what happens when we start to consider that architects are in turn also conditioned by social, cultural, economic and material constraints. We welcome contributions that analyse specific situated practices of architects and their work, as well as theoretical explorations. We are especially interested in texts and visual essays exploring:

 

• accounts of architecture work, both in its everyday and situated aspects and in relation to collective organising and structural change
• responses to gendered and racialised power dynamics at the architectural office, the academy and the building site
• the queering, misuse or subversion of specific tools, technologies and softwares used for architectural design
• the development of specific materials, both widely used and still experimental, and their impact on architectural practice and design
• relations between specific policies and economic conditions and the production of architecture
• the current ecological turn in relation to architecture production, and its democratising and aesthetic potentials
• histories of extraction and exploitation in relation to architecture production
• the theoretical implications of a focus on the conditions of architecture.

Proposals for full articles (6000–8000 words) and shorter contributions and visual essays (2000 words) will be evaluated by the editors in the form of abstracts (max. 600 words, with a sample image for visual essays). The editors welcome contributions that draw on personal experience, that use transdisciplinary methods, and that are authored by or in alliance with workers in the architecture, engineering and construction industry. Abstracts must be submitted by 15 December 2025.

Authors of selected abstracts will be invited to develop their contributions by 31 March 2026. Full articles will go through a double-blind peer review process, while review articles and visual essays will be evaluated by the editors.

All contributors are responsible for securing permission to use images and copyrighted materials. All authors should include a 100-word bio with their submissions.

For more information, please consult Footprint’s Author Guidelines and follow the article template that can be downloaded in the link below. Articles that do not follow the guidelines and the template will not be considered.

https://journals.open.tudelft.nl/footprint/about/submissions

For submissions and all other inquiries and correspondence, please contact Alina Paias and Catherine Koekoek at editors.footprint@gmail.com.

Footprint 40 will be published in the spring of 2027.